The first thing I saw was an immaculate bedroom that I happened to have passed through earlier. Only then, it had been a decaying room that looked nothing like what I was seeing now.
Morning sunlight streamed through the bedroom window, indicating that it was still very early.
I was standing in a corner as a young girl brushed a doll's hair, not even noticing my presence.
My mental hamster was working overtime as I came to a conclusion... I was seeing a vision or memory of the past.
And the little girl was undoubtedly the one named Lucy, the same disturbed person whose ghost I had telekinetically interacted with.
I stayed silent and still as I observed the scene. What caught my attention wasn't the girl or the doll she was holding. Instead, my eyes landed on an open journal on her nightstand.
The text on the pages wasn't English.
It looked eerily similar to something I remembered, but it wasn't an exact match. I was referring to Daedric sigils from the Elder Scrolls universe.
But none of what was written in it matched what I remembered.
The question I had now was whether there was something like a Daedra involved here, or if this script or code was simply the product of a disturbed child's imagination.
A few moments passed, and the sound of uneven footsteps, accompanied by the distinctive tapping of a cane, echoed outside the bedroom door.
The door burst open, and an elderly man, presumably the mansion's owner and the girl's father, stormed into the room.
"I've had enough of this! Your pranks have gone too far!" the man bellowed as he approached the girl on her bed with his cane raised.
He struck her on the shoulder, causing her to yelp in pain and curl up before receiving several more blows across her body.
However, in the heat of the moment, the old man lost his balance. With his cane being used as a weapon, he wasn't quick enough to position it beneath him for support, and he stumbled to the floor.
The girl reacted in a remarkably decisive fashion, completely at odds with the image of a helpless child.
With the blows momentarily stopped, she was able to take advantage of his vulnerability. She reached under her pillow, produced a sharp pair of scissors, and jumped on top of him, driving one of the points into his eye socket.
The old man convulsed briefly before his body went still.
I kept watching the scene with morbid fascination. The girl began chuckling as she pulled the scissors from his eye.
"No more. You'll never hit me again!" the girl said ominously as she grabbed one of his hands and began cutting off his fingers.
The cuts weren't clean or elegant at all. It was visceral and gut-wrenching as I could hear her cutting through the hard joints and chipping away at the bones with the scissors.
When she was finished, she stood up, covered in blood, with a delighted smile on her face.
She walked back over to her bed and pulled out a rope.
"Come to think of it... Didn't Mommy refuse to give me a kiss goodnight last night? That makes you mad too, right, Belladonna?"
*Dead silence.*
"Okay! Let's go teach her a lesson too!"
The girl, holding her doll and the rope, turned and headed toward the door.
The world around me suddenly dissolved into smoke, and the scene changed, leaving me feeling disoriented for a moment.
What I saw next was a blonde woman still wearing sleepwear, her hands bound to the bedposts with rope.
"Lucy! Let me go right now! I'm your mother!" the woman, Lucy's mother, Morticia, demanded.
Lucy straddled her mother while holding her doll and giggled before responding.
"Belladonna is very angry with you for not kissing me goodnight last night. She says you need to be punished!"
Morticia began to protest, but Lucy jammed the doll into her mouth, causing the woman to thrash about in an attempt to push her away. However, the little girl was persistent as she held the woman's head and forced the doll farther down her throat.
Once the doll was fully lodged inside, Lucy clamped her hands over her mother's mouth and nose.
Morticia's movements gradually slowed until there was only silence.
Lucy sat up and looked down at her mother. There was no guilt or panic on her face. She wore the expression of a child staring down at a broken toy she no longer valued.
Then she turned and walked out without even looking behind her, blood coating her dress and matting her hair.
The world around me dissolved once again, and a new scene began playing out before me.
I was standing in the corner of a padded room, with a flickering ceiling light serving as the only source of illumination.
In the corner opposite the door was a huddled figure sitting on the floor next to her bed. No longer a child but now in her late teens, Lucy had long brown hair, dark, sunken eyes, and wore a hospital gown that looked rather dirty.
She was rocking back and forth and mumbling to herself, an eerie smile occasionally spreading across her face between bouts of incoherent babbling.
I stayed still and watched. So far, I had only been an observer. I hadn't yet attempted to interact with anything.
As I continued to observe the girl and the room, the door opened, and a man wearing scrubs walked in.
"Hey, crazy bird. I've got your daily meds here," the orderly said in a sleazy tone as he carried a tray into the room. Several pills were divided among small plastic cups on the tray.
Something about the man felt wrong to me. I had a feeling something was about to happen.
And I was right.
"You turned eighteen today..." the man suddenly said as he set the tray down on the bed. "You know that means you'll be joining the roster with the other girls."
'Meow the fuck? It got seriously rapey in here out of nowhere.'
My brow furrowed, and my eyes narrowed in scrutiny as the show continued.
"Remember how I showed you how we play?" the man asked, but Lucy didn't even react to his words. "Well... tonight, you get to play too, just like I promised years ago when you got here..."
He approached her, grabbed her wrist, and yanked her to her feet.
But something changed in Lucy as she was pulled up.
She used the momentum to drive her body into his, knocking him backward. What happened next was almost like fate.
The orderly slammed against the bed, sending the pill tray flying onto the floor.
He recovered from his stagger, anger clearly visible in his eyes, blinding him to his surroundings.
He stepped onto a pill bottle, and his foot rolled forward, causing his large body to topple backward. His head struck the floor with a sickening crack.
The incident happened so fast that I hardly had time to analyze what had happened.
One second, the man was alive, and the next, he was a heap on the floor with a busted head and blood pooling around him.
Lucy reached out, grabbed the keys from his belt, and bolted for the door. She looked left and right before briskly walking down the empty hallway to make her escape.
Once again, the scene changed, but now something was different.
The world around me had become the dark attic of the mansion.
Moonlight streamed through the boarded-up windows, and Lucy was just standing there, staring at a rope hanging from the rafters.
I took a step forward to try to hear what she was muttering to herself, but she suddenly spoke up.
"Belladonna... So I can go back to being a kid? I can play every day here in my house, and no one can ever take me away again?"
The girl's voice sounded desperate to believe this, but the fact that she was addressing no one but herself... was just creepy.
"Okay, I'll do it. I'll hang from this rope and stay here forever with you."
Lucy stepped onto a chair and placed the rope around her own neck.
The rope tightened snugly around her neck, and just when it looked like she was about to kick the chair out from beneath her, her face turned toward me for the first time.
"Do you want to play?" the girl asked flatly, her face completely devoid of emotion.
I blinked, looked around me, then pointed at myself and asked, "Are you talking to me?"
The girl's dark eyes stared at me as though she were looking straight through me at something behind me, almost as if she were speaking to another person.
She didn't say anything else.
The chair suddenly shifted beneath her, and her body dropped, causing her neck to snap as the force bent it at an unnatural angle.
Her dark, lifeless eyes stared at me as her body swung from the rope.
Something was wrong.
The scene didn't end like the others.
I was still standing there in the attic, looking at a swinging corpse in complete silence.
I looked around to see if there was anything that stood out, but when I turned back, the swinging body was gone.
It was nowhere in sight.
"Uh... Where the fuck did you go?"