Dolores

ST CLAIRE'S MENTAL INSTITUTION, VERMONT [1942]

Dolores sat at the corner playing with her hair as she watched them struggle to sedate the violent and rambling Harry who had  been using his body for the last hour as a projectile in the bid to destroy the padded walls of his room. And even with the restrictions the straight jacket he was wearing posed, Harry still tried everything within his power to ward off the orderlies but when the effect of the sedative began to take effect, his struggles slowly abated as he continued to repeat on and on in a slurred voice that “It was the game”.

As usual, Doctor Hammond misunderstood, shook his head in pity and told the orderlies that Harry still thought his heinous actions that led to him being remanded here was a game. Then he told them that the hospital board had already authorized them to perform a Lobotomy procedure on Harry in two weeks time since he hadn’t responded well to past and present treatments.

But as Harry tried desperately to explain to Doctor Hammond that he meant “It was the game” not “It was a game” his body succumbed to the potent effects of the sedatives and he crashed in to a darkness filled with the sound of crashing waves, haunting memories and a cacophony of destruction.

 

NINE YEARS AGO

It all began in the summer of 1933 in Vermont, New England where five young college sophomores spent their holiday in an old house that had been willed over to one of them by his Grandma. The house which was situated in the mountains was a brownish wood paneled Spanish architecture from the 19th century with two chimneys, a ginger bread mill work, blue and grey ornamentation with a judicious use of black in a single detail along the cornice and on the window pediments.  

They were having the fun of their lives especially as they had with them a substantial stash of marijuana and liqueur which they smoked and drank to oblivion. They had picnics, played hide and seek like they did as kids, took strolls along the mountain paths, skinny dipped in the nearby lake and even camped outside a couple of nights. But after about two weeks, all those activities lost their allure and they became bored. So in a bid to create some form of entertainment, they decided to explore some of the locked rooms in the old house in the hopes of finding something “To spike up the excitement” as Harry put it. And by a stroke of ill fate, they found just that in a locked box, under the floor board in the locked and barred attic. At this point common sense should have prevailed and questions like "why was the attic the only place not just locked but barred?" And "why was the content in the box locked and hidden?" But like they always say, “Only fools rush into where angels fear to tread”.

 They opened the box and it revealed a strange flat board marked with alphabets, numbers, the words "yes", "no", "hello", "goodbye and some other graphics none of them had seen before except for Chloe who claimed she recognized it because her folks owned one back when she was a kid. She said it was called an Ouija board and it was used to communicate with the dead.

Communicating with the dead sounded cool so that night they all gathered around a table and with Chloe’s guidance, they attempted making contact by asking the board if anybody was there and after a few minute the planchette moved towards “yes”. Everyone got excited but also concluded that the movement of the planchette wasn’t enough for them to believe that they were communicating with an actual spirit, so they asked more questions till they were convinced. 

 Her name was Nancy, she was 8 years old and she drowned 37 years ago in a well not to faraway from their present location. She also answered their questions eagerly because she claimed she was always bored, but the meetings with Nancy were always cut short because of Nancy’s abject terror for “her”. She warned them to never communicate with “her” and when they asked her who “her” was and why they should avoid “her”, she would became frantic and leave quickly without a word and on other times she would abruptly leave them whenever she said that the “her” was around until finally Nancy stopped coming.

On the third night of their futile attempt to establish contact with Nancy, the repugnant smell of sulfur suddenly blanketed the room before they then felt the presence of something malevolent amongst them. Scared out of their wits, they all started casting furtive glances around the room until Chloe screamed and pointed at the mirror. When they all turned to see what had gotten Chloe spooked, a look of disbelief and terror crossed their faces as they saw the reflection of a horrifying woman with a pair of socket less eyes grinning at them.

 Terrified out of their mind, they all ran scrambling for the door in an attempt to leave the house but everything became different. Their perception seemed to have been altered because as they opened the front door leading out of the house, it led them straight back into the room they had just escaped from and when they made for the door again the same thing happened again and again until they realized that the entire house had become one big fucking loop where escape was impossible and untimely death inevitable.

In their panic and desperation to survive, they all dispersed and forgot the number one cardinal rule whenever a group of people found themselves in a shitty situation, “Together we stand, divided we fall”, and Dolores gleefully hunted them all down in the most gruesome ways unimaginable. First of her victim was the Blondie Cindy who bolted out of the upstairs cupboard she stupidly went to hide in the hopes of evading whatever was after them. She came out shouting at something to get off her shoulder before she ran and took a nosedive through the window directly on top of the flower garden outside but instead her body mysteriously plummeted down into the kitchen where Tim was hiding. Tim on the other hand who had opened the door to spring out of the kitchen immediately a fire started because Cindy’s mangled body had crashed on the stove, found himself looking at a brick wall. Yep! talk of being caught “In between a stone and a fire place”.  

 

While trying to escape, Jeff fell of the stairs, hit his head at the edge and split his skull before disposing all his bodily waste. And as he painfully lay alive in his putrid feces he witnessed the madness that overcame Sally as she used a shard of a broken glass to pluck out her eyes in her attempt to stop herself from seeing the horrible images that threatened her sanity. It was such a beautifully evil sight and further made perfect by the fact that they both lay facing each other on the floor and expired at exactly the same time.  

Harry was trapped in the house for days and by the time he escaped into the mountains forever to be haunted by the ghosts of a woman, he had already witnessed enough horrors to last hundred men in a lifetime. What he didn’t know was that he was spared the gruesome death his mates experienced because he was a latent psychic and spirits tend to be attracted to his kind, furthermore Dolores was like a spiritual parasite only this time feeding off the psychic energy of her host which was him. She couldn't exist without him but she living off him was a win, lose situation because in the end he lost all.

Weeks later, the story of how a young man butchered his friends in cold blood made the newspapers for weeks and the court cases that ensued were far worse. At the end, the verdict was “Mentally unfit to stand trial”.

ST CLAIRE'S: [TWO WEEKS LATER]

Dolores which ironically means "Sorrow" in Spanish seemed to be looking more human as the day passed by. Today she gently stroked Harry's hair and told him all would be well and that she would never let anything happen to him. She promised never to let anyone come in between them and when she said with so much conviction that they were going to live happily ever after like in the fairy tales, the feeling of terror overcame Harry’s lobotomized brain but his only responses were the rise in his pulse, the twitching of his finger and the unusual discharge of spittle from his mouth as he sadly stared straight ahead.

The Labyrinth

   So know that like a baby learning to walk, the first step is the most important, so watch your first step it’s the most important, the key to understanding what am trying to say is at the beginning. Only the first step you take at the inception of this adventure is strong and bold because as you go deeper you get weaker and face a lot of tribulation, there are short cuts you can take but they are sometimes high and treacherous. Remarkably, eyes that look are common but those that see are rare, so the path you must take would be looking at you in the face and you wouldn’t still see it, always watch your first step, because all these bold steps would lead you to the ultimate truth. Remember failure is acceptable because everyone has to fail at one point but not trying again is what isn’t acceptable, so when you get to the end of this text and you still haven’t found your way, go back to the beginning. Your time for rest on this journey should always be at a junction where you make a complete stop or when you ask yourself a question to know your next move, know that when you eventually continue, you do so with renewed vigor and bold strides but unfortunately not like your very first step. Your problem would be this: you would be working on other peoples track that you may never make footprints of your own. Organize your steps accordingly because a man is only as high as the measure of his thinking, if you ramble around aimlessly you would definitely be forever lost in this maze you have woven for yourself. Understand that enthusiasm is a good engine but it needs intelligence for a driver, so apply good reasoning in your actions because no matter how enthusiastic you may be, if you don’t apply intelligence to it then you are a like a donkey. Although a wise man lives to die another day and a man isn’t finished when he is defeated but only when he quits, know when to say enough is enough because when you think you have found the way to the truth, your glimmer of hope is shattered by another obstacle. Remember life is often understood backwards but must be lived forward, so forward ever backwards never on this path to achieve immeasurable wisdom because it is better to die trying than running back with your tail in between your legs defeated. Eventually no one is ever defeated until defeat has been accepted by you as a reality, so no matter how many times you go down know that all it takes for you is to rise up again and continue because once you give up the will to fight, you would be consumed by your weakness.
    Only those that knows what he or she wants or knows where they want to go should  make that first step, like I said earlier it’s the first step,  like the first letter, because life is like an alphabet, from one stop to another and from one question to another, all you have to do is recite properly. Never merely go through your days, get from your days because the difference between a determined person and a lazy prick is this: a lazy prick can’t wait for the day to end while the other wishes darkness wouldn’t come too quickly. Allowing me to make you go through all these is probably a mistake, but you will never know until we get to the end. Whether this journey you take is worth your time or not is yours to decide, but don’t you think it’s a little too late to ask now?  Idiots won’t figure this out [no puns intended], trust me I know because I have been there and done it, so I can sympathize with them. Listen to your guts they are almost always right, get off this path now. Don’t be like a gander in the wild chasing after  

its female counterparts without preamble, it’s aimless because you will never catch them. Gentle coercion works better but not all men have that patience to apply it. Open your mind to all possibilities because all this might just be a gimmick and that would suck. Owning up to being bested by others is your first step in your apprenticeship of which after you can go on to being the master of what you wish to be. So at the end when all has been revealed accept it with a little laughter. Energy you have wasted here can never be given back to you; it can never be so just accept it. Change your approach to how you view things; it is all sometimes plain and simple. However lame and stupid you try to make it look at the end, remember you blundered along too and if it was so stupid, why didn’t you figure the truth out since? Analytical approach to solving problems is paramount to any other approach you try to take or use, and if you think you have gotten to the end of this maze and found the truth, what is your proof? So know that failure is an opportunity to start again more intelligently, look back at the beginning, redirect your steps and if you think you have gotten the right way ask yourself this question, is entering this maze again to rediscover the truth worth it? Escaping it is almost impossible so what should I do?