The Unloved

A short story

“Taylor.”

How he cringed whenever he heard that voice. Alone in his dark bedroom with the curtains drawn in and the windows barred, he curled up into the darkest corner he could find, huddling himself up into a ball as the sound of his humming louder in the hopes that it would drown out the woman’s voice.

It didn’t. The woman shouted his name louder as the door open and the light poured into the room from the corridor outside, blinding him slightly. The light revealed the empty state of the bedroom save for the red carpet that covered the entire floor and the iron bed with the stained white mattress that had been bolted to the floor- to which he was chained to. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He remembered the bedroom at his old house, back when they still lived in Minnesota. It had been a lot better than this. The windows and curtains had always been open, and there had been books and toys and clothes that belonged to him-

And he hadn’t had to be chained or locked inside his own room, hidden away from the outside world.

Everything had gone wrong the moment they had moved here to New York City. Dad had died in a car accident, leaving him alone with Mother. He had started seeing things that no one else could see, hear things that no one else could hear- and the woman had been mad at him for it. Even when Dad had been alive, she had always been so angry, so hateful towards him. With Dad gone that hatred only seemed to intensify, and as the visions came, it gave her a reason to keep him locked inside.

She had told him that there was something wrong with him. And she punished him for it almost too eagerly.

As the door opened completely, anyone in the room might have been able to see him, even though he wasn’t sitting in the light. Just barely though. With his head down, they would have only seen his unruly long brown hair that hung down to his shoulders, the pale skin on his bare back in which red lines had been drawn into the flesh, some still leaking blood. The only piece of clothing on his body was his torn blue jeans. By the time his mother left the room, he would not even have that on him anymore.

“Taylor,” he heard his mother’s silky voice call up to him. As the figure of the woman entered the doorway, she closed the door behind her, and they were in the dark again. “When I call your name, you’re supposed to answer.”

By the time she was standing in front of him, he realized that she had been drinking by the stench of alcohol in her breath.

There was no way that he would be getting off easy tonight.

-

“Fox! Wake up!”

And he did, sitting upright from the fur carpet on the cement floor instantly, panting and sweating, the panicked look in his brown eyes slowly leaving as he took in his surroundings and realized that he wasn’t in that room anymore. He was in a different one now- where the white fluorescent lights on the ceiling were always turned on. The room was smaller than the one in his dream, and there were no windows due to the fact that it was a basement, but it was a lot more comfortable. He could leave anytime he pleased. There were no chains. Though he didn’t have a bed, the carpet was comfortable enough, and the brown, wool blanket was enough to keep him warm through the night. Scattered on the floor around him were some clothes that were his- that he’d stolen, really, but it didn’t matter now. There were old, dusty books on a wooden shelf propped on one end of the room- there was one in particular that he had been made to read. Still he was allowed to look through them as he pleased. They were as much his as the they were the house owner’s. There was however, an oak armoire beside the stairs which he had been told not to open. The thought hadn’t even crossed his mind to even try.

There was circle drawn on the floor with chalk not too far from the carpet between him and the stairs. It was about seven feet in diameter, and there was a pentagram drawn within it. He had drawn it himself, as he had been told to. Whenever he left the room, he was careful not to step over it- or else he’d have to draw it again.

“Did you have a bad dream?” the disembodied male voice asked him, sounding concerned.

Fox nodded slowly, then cast his blanket aside, standing up.

“It won’t be long now,” the voice promised him. “I’ll make the bad dreams end when I come back, Fox. I’ll heal you and make it all go away. But you know that we’re missing one more. Just one last one. Do you think you can get it tonight?”

Fox nodded again, bending down to pick up his brown leather jacket before putting it on, covering his sweat-soaked black t-shirt. “Where?” he asked simply, walking over to the sink beside the bookshelf where his sling bag was lying.

“The full moon will be up tonight, so I don’t think we have much time left to be picky about this. Just walk outside, and I’ll pick someone out quickly.”

Fox picked up the black bag and slung it over his right shoulder before marching towards the stairs. Disappointment was written all over his face- it was obvious that he preferred going further out into the city when it came to collecting. It gave him more opportunity to see things, and it always felt liberating somewhat. Either way it didn’t matter. Tonight was the last time he would have to do this.

Once tonight was over, he would finally have someone to look after him. He wouldn’t be alone. And facing the world would feel a lot better when he had someone to face it with him.

-

The room felt a lot colder without his clothes on, He resisted the urge too move too much on the carpet- the cuts at his back seemed to hurt every time he did. Standing above him now, she was putting her clothes back on, ready to leave him here for another day locked in the dark.

“Let me out,” he sobbed. Whether or not his mother could see him crying in the dark didn’t matter, really. She never did seem to care.

“Mommy can’t do that, Fox,” she replied simply. “You’re still sick, Fox. If mommy lets you out, people will come and take you away and kill you. You’re safe here, Fox. Safe.”

Was it, really? He was beginning to wonder how much more of her beatings he could take. And what followed after…

“Why do you hate me?” he asked.

She was already heading for the door. “I just do,” she answered. “You’re sick, and you’re filthy, and you’re evil. And you deserve to be punished.”

He got one last glimpse at the light from outside the room, shot directly into his face before the door closed again, leaving him in total darkness.

-

It was cold out, but at least it wasn’t raining. The sun had already set, and the moon was up. A cold, white, round eye looking down at the city. Standing at the courtyard in front of the large bungalow that belonged to the voice, he looked out towards the street and the house across. The lights were off- there was no one home. He’d already been there, anyway. With their mother dead, the children and the father had moved out, paranoid that the ‘killer’ would come back and strike again.

He walked straight up to the black gate at the end of the courtyard, phasing through it before he started walking up the dark street seemingly alone. Behind him, he hadn’t had to bother locking the house doors since he hadn’t used them to begin with, due to the fact that the voice was urging him on, telling him to hurry. Under normal conditions, he didn’t phase much unless he had to. Even though he was already used to doing it quickly by now, the act still drained him if he did it too much.

The neighborhood he lived in was rather quiet compared to other places neighborhoods on Staten Island he’d been to. He didn’t mind it so much- too much noise reminded him of the city apartment in Manhattan where he’d been kept a prisoner. It was a problem now, though, as he looked up and down the street, with no one in sight.

“Should I go into one of the other houses?” he asked out loud.

‘No. Another direct murder inside of the houses in this street will draw the police here. If you get someone walking outside, you can make it look like an accident, or a mugging.’

And so he walked up the dark street, seemingly alone with his hands stuffed in his pockets and his sling bag hanging by his side. The wind blew in his direction as he walked, carrying dead leaves with it and blowing up his unbuttoned jacket slightly.

He walked faster.

‘Hurry, Fox,’ the voice urged him on. ‘The faster you help me, the faster I can help fix you. Don’t you want to be free of her voice?’

“Yes,” he replied quickly, with a determined tone. It was one of the only other things he wanted now, apart from wanting to have someone close to talk to. He hated her. He hated her so much sometimes that he felt like he could die. He’d killed her, cut her up into pieces and still she plagued his dreams, which was why he rarely slept. The dark circles under his eyes were testament to this fact.

She’d called him sick when he wasn’t. He’d been healthy all along. ‘Sick’ had been the wrong word to describe him. ‘Special’ was more accurate.

-

‘Boy.’

He opened his eyes, realizing that for once, the voice talking to him was not the woman’s. It was completely different. Deeper, but warmer somehow. Was it Dad? Had he come home to save him? Or was he finally dying? He remembered being told that he’d never go to Heaven, that he didn’t deserve it. So was his father here now to take him to hell?

He cringed at the thought as he sat up slowly, the pain in his back coming back sharply.

‘Can you hear me?’

There was no one in the room. Even without the lights, his eyes had grown accustomed enough to the darkness to be able to see if anyone was there. As his eyes searched the room anxiously for the source of the voice, he saw nothing, and he realized that for the first time since he’d been locked in here, one of those people that mother couldn’t see had actually come to him.

“You’re not here,” he muttered, even though he really didn’t believe that. Was this a test from mother? To see if he was cured or not?

‘But I am, Fox.,’ the voice insisted. ‘I’m here to save you.’

He didn’t believe him. He didn’t believe, but he wanted to.

‘Your mother is a bad person, Fox. She is the one who is really sick,’ the voice told him. ‘She’s afraid of you.’

“But why?” he asked desperately. “I never did anything wrong.”

‘She’s afraid because you’re different, Fox. But that doesn’t make you sick like she says, Fox. You’re special.’

He hadn’t understood what the voice had meant then, but he soon did.

-

‘There!’

He saw the girl in the distance instantly, a teenager who was probably 17 at most. She had a lean and slender figure, with slightly tan skin and long black hair which she kept braided at the back of her head. She had emerald green eyes which seemed to be drenched in sorrow, the image strengthened by the tears rolling down her cheeks. She was wearing a pink sweater and brown cargo pants, with a black backpack over her back. She wasn’t going anywhere, really sitting at the sidewalk under a lamppost, though judging by the books she was hugging to her chest, she looked like she was supposed to be on her way back from school.

He watched her from where he stood with a kind of cold calculative sort of way, his eyes straying to the other surrounding houses and up the street in both directions to make sure that no one was around.

‘You might have to lure her into a darker spot to do it,’ the voice said.

The thought didn’t really appeal to him. He’d had to do something like this once before, and he didn’t like it. Not that talking to them made him sympathize with them- he just found talking to them a waste of time. He wasn’t so good with making sentences quickly, especially when talking about a world from which he had been isolated from.

And God, how he hated them. He never found specific reason to, really. There was just always something that would remind him of his mother, about that dark room, and the things that she’d done to him.

He walked up to her cautiously, clearing his throat as he approached her.

She looked up at him, a surprised look on her face. She probably hadn’t expected to run into anyone out here at this time of day.

“Wh…who are you?” she asked, speaking first. That made things easier somewhat.

“F..Fox,” he stammered for no apparent reason. “Fox Taylor.”

She raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t mean it like that,” she said, suddenly calming down. “I meant that I’ve lived in this neighborhood all my life. I’ve never seen you here before.”

“No,” he said simply, repeating what the voice was telling him to say now. “I just m…moved here. Why are you…out here? At this time?”

She was staring at him in a peculiar manner now. He hated it. He wanted to tear her eyeballs out of their sockets.

“I don’t think I want to talk about it,” she sighed, standing up. “But thanks for asking anyway.”

“Wh…where do you live?” he asked.

She pointed in the direction up the street. “You seem to be going in that direction,” she said. “And I don’t like walking alone, really. Would you…?”

He nodded in response, his fingers in his left pocket curling around the hilt of his knife.

-

He was leg was free of the chains.

His eyes wide with surprise, he stood up and took a few steps back as though to make sure that he wasn’t seeing things. Slowly, he reached down and grabbed the empty manacle that had held his leg for longer than he could remember anymore. He took another step back, and stumbled, falling onto the carpet with a dull thud.

‘You’re going to have to get used to walking and running again,’ the voice told him. ‘Things that should not have been denied of you, Fox.’

He stood up again, slowly before making another attempt at walking. He stumbled another few times before getting things right. Every time he fell, the voice would encourage him to get up, the same way he had kept on encouraging him to try moving his feet through the manacle. He hadn’t believed it possible at first, and yet here he was, free of the chains, and getting used to walking again. It had taken days for it to happen, the point was that he could do it, as the voice had promised.

‘Do you think you could phase your way out of here, Fox?’ the voice asked.

Fox shook his head. Getting his leg through the manacle had been hard enough.

‘Its alright then,’ the voice said. ‘You’ll learn in time. The important thing now is for you to get out of here before the bitch gets back from work. The room door is unlocked, and you might be able to find a key to the front door somewhere in the living room.’

“W…who are you?” Fox asked finally. “Why are you helping me?”

‘Because you deserve to be loved, Fox,’ the voice told him. ‘Regardless of what your mother tells you.’

Blinking back tears, Fox made his way for the door.

-

He didn’t touch the body, watching it lying in the grass by the sidewalk as though for conformation that she was truly dead. Screwing the lid of the glass jar where he’d put her heart in tightly, he then tucked it safely into his black sling bag. He wiped the blood off his knife using his shirt, then tucked that back into the bag as well. Finally satisfied that she wasn’t getting up, he looked away and started walking back home. When the police found her, they wouldn’t find any cuts on the outside of her body- but her heart would still be missing, as though severed with a knife.

He could have just as easily phased his fingers through and ripped it out using his bare hands. Indeed, phasing the knife required some effort, but it was something he had gotten used to. It felt cleaner, anyway, and his fingers wouldn’t hurt as much.

‘Good work, Fox,’ the voice praised him. It never failed to make the young shaman smile. ‘Now it’s finally time. Everything we have prepared for has come to this. Run home, Fox, and I’ll guide you through the ritual.’

“Okay,” Fox replied simply. He turned around and started running up the street from which he had come as fast as his feet would carry him, feeling anxious and excited but worried at the same time. If he succeeded, the voice would finally have a body, a face, a name, and would always be there for him whenever he felt alone. But what would happen if he failed?

He couldn’t. After everything that the person had done for him, he could not afford to fail.

He phased through the front gate and the front door as he reached the house, running quickly past the living room and back down towards the basement. He picked the remaining 20 jars he kept stored in the cabinet under the sink, and placed them at the center of the circle, along with the newly acquired one. Twenty one in all. For each one, he lit a black candle which he arranged around the circle as neatly as he could manage. He turned off the lights before moving back to the candle-lit circle.

Finally, he stepped into the circle and removed the human hearts from the glass jars, arranging them as he had been commanded to before making a shallow cut at the palm of his right hand, letting the blood drip at every point of the pentagram. As he moved from one point to another, he repeated the words that were being spoken to him by the voice. He had memorized them by heart, really, after months and months of preparation, but the voice kept him steady, kept him in line. He could not afford to screw this up.

As the last drop of blood fell, there was the sudden sound of thunder as the room started to shake as though there were an earthquake. He could a hear a deep, dark voice screaming in his head, speaking to him in a language he didn’t understand. His head spinning, he fell to his knees in front of the circle as he was supposed to, keeping both of his hands on the line. The pain in his head grew more and more intense, so much that it felt like his head was going to explode. Still he didn’t budge from his position. He had to hold it until the spell was done.

He coughed blood as the pain spread throughout every fiber of his being. It felt like there were things crawling inside him, devouring him from the inside out. It was when he realized that there were eyes opening all over his hands in his flesh that he started screaming. The eyes were all pitch black, like endless black voids. They seemed to appear on every part of his body that he could see, staring back at him.

‘It’s not real,’ the voice reminded him. ‘The Gatekeeper is testing you. You’re strong, Fox. Hold on to the line.’

And he did. He held on to the line even when it burned his fingers, spreading fire all over his body. He kept on screaming, but his hands stayed.

After what felt like an eternity, it all went away. The pain left his body entirely, leaving him with a sudden, biting numbness as he fell down to the floor in front of him, breathing heavily.

He wasn’t the only one breathing in the dark.

“Fox,” he heard the voice speak. For the first time it was talking from a particular direction. It was coming from the center of the circle, directly in front of him. “Fox, you did it.”

The lights in the room suddenly turned on again as the voice said something in Latin, and Fox saw the witch for the first time, lying on his back in the center of the circle.

He looked like he was in his mid-twenties, with thick, curly black hair and fair skin. His eyes were dark brown, and they burned with a kind of power and wisdom that made him seem wiser beyond his years. Perhaps he was older, he thought to himself. Maybe he just didn’t look it.

As the man stood up, he realized that the man wasn’t wearing any clothes. It didn’t matter- this was his house after all. There was sure to be something for him to wear upstairs. The man had a well built body- lean yet somewhat muscular. There were runes painted all over his body, drawn in what appeared to be blood.

The man helped him up.

“Thank you, Fox,” the man said. And before he could say anything, the man had embraced him tightly. The young boy didn’t know why, but he realized that he was crying.

When the man finally let go, he led Fox into the center of the circle.

“Sit down, Fox,” he said. “It’s time I kept my end of the deal.”

-

As the boy lay down on his back in the center of the circle, Carl began the spell. Considering the boy was exhausted from his ordeal with the Gatekeeper, it didn’t take long for his eyes to glaze over as he fell into a trance. The witch had to marvel at how easy it had all been. The fact that he had met the boy when he did, right when he had been teetering at the edge of insanity, desperately looking for a savior, had made him all the more easy to manipulate. His shaman blood had also helped him in performing the spell itself- a witch attempting resurrection would probably had been charbroiled by whichever gatekeeper the boy had been dealing with. He had to admit though, that when Fox had started screaming, Carl had almost lost hope in him.

Still here he was, alive again, thanks to this boy. And as he had promised, he would relieve him of his childhood nightmares, and fix him. The ordeals that the boy had been through had affected his mind in more ways then one, still it wasn’t the kind of damage that was irreparable.

The fact remained that Amon was still out there, and Carl wasn’t going to rest easy until he got back at the bastard who had killed him. He had been lucky that his spirit had endured, and had managed to stay in the physical world where he’d met Fox.

And if it happened again, it wouldn’t hurt to have a safety measure.

“Fox,” he said softly. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” the boy replied, though he sounded blank, like he was just muttering it in his sleep.

Carl doubted that the spell would be as strong as the one he’d seen the sorcerer use on his coven members. The sorcerer had been capable of rewriting memories completely in addition to warping their personalities. Carl only needed to make a few minor adjustments to the boy, considering the fact that the boy was already quite loyal to him to begin with.

He released the boy from the trance after he was done. He would not have nightmares ever again, though his memories of how he hated his mother would remain intact. The scars on his mind were gone now, though he still had a lot to learn. Carl didn’t mind, really. He had a lot to teach.

-

Fox opened his eyes next morning to find himself lying on the carpet beside the man who had, over the course of last night introduced himself as Carl Mortimer, a witch from a coven out in Anchorage, Alaska. The man’s arms were around him, and he could feel the man breathing on his hair, could feel the man’s warm skin pressed against his bare back. The boy looked at his clothes, lying on the floor not too far from him, and memories of last night’s events continued flashing back in his head.

Everything was going to change now. He was no longer alone.

He smiled contentedly and drifted back to sleep.