Chapter 3
Sunrise
I told myself I wouldn’t turn into a monster. I told myself I wouldn’t think how I regretted myself for hurting someone. I told myself I wouldn’t be one the heartbreaking sob stories of Cecil, filled with vengeance and regret and loss of friends. I told myself, that in my heart I couldn’t harm another human in that manner; after all, I was not a barbarian. No, I thought, I am better than that. I am better than all of the sob stories combined. I am me.
Days escaped my grasp. They started to blend together, I had realized school wasn’t as important as the big picture in the world; it wasn’t as important as life itself. I remember I smiled a lot that year; I miss the welcoming glow it made me feel. But then again, I do not feel much at all. Except one thing: agony.
The faint memories of my past tend to blend together. I recall one distinct memory as clearly as if it happened today. I was walking through the woods with only the trees for company.
I look at my bare feet in the reflective surface of the water, and although it was nearing February, I am in breezy kaki shorts and the ground not twenty feet away from me was blanketed over in ice; although where I stand stayed fair and warm, like the dog days of summer. I sing a strange sort of lullaby that was beyond my level of comprehension.
“The trees and I will live today
Hand in hand, together
Love and lust, they shall not reign
Down, down, down
The trees and I will die today
Although it may be melancholy
For mother and father
I will be happy with him
I will be happy to leave this place
I will be happy for death today
The trees and I reign today
Above the hill and mountain
Beyond the dunes and mother’s grave
We are royalty together.”
This memory haunts me. My voice echoes throughout the taverns that line the forest, but what happens next, reader, is more gruesome than the scene before.
My hands graze the surface of the water and then caress its gentle currents. I hear a whisper in my ear in a language not my own. My hand scoops up the purest of the water, and I cleanse my face with it. This moment moves me, and the mysterious voice whispers to me again. I hear one word in my own language: death. I realize he is singing my lullaby.
I start to cry, and then to sob, and tears start to blend into the pure water dripping through my hands. I am polluting the water, I think, You must stop! Stop, you fool!
I through up my hands in the air desperately. My tears do not seize to stop; they dance down my face like ballerina’s. I think how this must be some sort of cruel, sick joke. But I know in my heart it is not.
My tears take a new form; they form a reddish tint: blood. I am crying blood. It is pouring down my face into the pure water, the water I deem so important. This only makes my tears come faster, and there is no sign of stopping.
As the water becomes more and more red with the blood from my eyes, the voice says something to me. No, I realize, it is laughing. I ask myself why I am not running. Why am I not running? I can run away from this cruel beast, and stay away for the rest of my life. Yes, I think, Right now, I will run. As I flee the scene, the last sound my ears hear is the cackle of the beast. I think how I will never go back there, how I will never see the cruel beast again. Never. Again.
