Adeline

By: Holly A. Eilander

“Adeline?”

The creak of the door opening was as slow as it was old. Tiresome and weary and filled with the scent of rotting wood, it would never be unhinged. That fate had prior been given to the intruder, the one disrupting nighttime’s slumber.

“Hush, hush, my dear. No need to be restless,” the old woman’s whispers were too wild to be comforting. She’d loved that rawness about her, but never her at all.

“It’s just Lael,” the old one continued, moving the candle in her hand around the door and lighting up the bedroom. The eerie light cast strange shadows around her eyes, creating a look of far-gone insanity that bulged fading, ice blue and released a maniacal spark. It was almost magical – an evil beauty that cared for what it loved, while not really loving anything at all, for as she learned, evil cannot love, but covets. It covets with a corrupted passion that it uses for its own gain and refuses to meet midway with another heart. Adeline was always to be a prisoner within her grandmother’s evil and so would the many others. All of them. All of the others that had come… and gone, that will come and go, that will disappear in a rush of flames. Like Adeline.

“I-” the scratched voice came out so loudly in the silence. “I’ve come to confess… again. Like many nights, my dear,” and her crooked self sort of fell onto the bed with a ‘thwump.’ Lael tucked her in tightly giving a twisting, gnarly smile and began her habit of rocking back and forth while twiddling her thumbs. She’d done it again.

“I burned the cat,” she started. She breathed in harshly. “I know you loved it, but

I couldn’t find anything else… you know I’m doing this for you, Adeline,” and the witch picked up the picture from the nightstand.

But I’m not Adeline, came a thought.

That picture is of Adeline, not I.

It is of her, the one that burned in ‘accident.’

It wasn’t until hours passed that Lael left the room, the fearful eyes of a child’s doll never closing in the night.

This is actually part of an original novel I was planning on writing; only here the old woman is extremely evil. The real one still talks to the doll though and thinks that it’s her daughter, while a bunch of kids are the ones who enjoy committing arson. Fun twisted fun. Hope you like it!

Luna