by Boris Bacic
Don’t run off too far away, Cheryl. Don’t chase that squirrel, Cheryl. Cheryl, if you walk inside the house dirty like that, Mom’s gonna kill us.
“I know, I know,” Cheryl dismissively waved at her from the door—just as she always did when they were kids.
***
Sorting through the items just in her own room was going to be a pain, Jill thought. She didn’t even know where to start. She also felt uncomfortable spending too much time in the dust-layered room, so she walked over to one of the boxes on the floor and opened it, eager to get this over with.
The contents of the box were useless, although they did have a sentimental value. Jill found all sorts of toys and dolls from her childhood. They were somewhat protected from deterioration in the box, but some of the plushies had years-old dark splotches on them. Jill rummaged through the box, but she took her time grabbing and examining each toy, because they each had a memory tied to it.
She picked up a doll, and a smile stretched across her face. It was a simple, gray, hand-stitched doll with black hair jutting out of the doll’s head, and a crude face drawn on it. The eyes were two black dots, and the mouth was a combination of a black line in the shape of a smile, and red lips. The threads were coming loose on some parts of the doll, the wool stuffing inside it protruding out of the tiny holes.
“Lola,” Jill whispered to herself with a rictus.
She had fond memories with this doll. It was given to her by a boy who she used to hang out with. What was his name, though? Jill stared off into space as she tried to remember the boy’s name. It was at the tip of her tongue, but she just couldn’t recall it.
However, she remembered the boy’s appearance clearly. He had neatly combed hair and was really shy. He one day showed up and presented Lola to Jill. Said it was a token of their friendship. Strangely enough, Jill couldn’t remember when or why she stopped hanging out with the boy. He must have moved away or something.
Jill put Lola on the bed. She would take her home after all this was done.
She closed the box and pushed it back to the corner of the room. She thought about giving some of the toys to Charlie, but all of the toys were for girls. He wouldn’t like them.
As she looked around the room, she sighed in exasperation. There was a lot of work to do, and probably just as much in the other rooms. She decided to check Mom’s office. They referred to it as an office, even though it wasn’t actually an office. It was just a room where Mom used to store her things, like clothes, shoes, and—
Actually, Cheryl and Jill were never allowed in the room, so Jill had no idea what exactly was in there.
With her curiosity suddenly piqued beyond words, Jill walked out of her room and across the hallway. Mom’s office was just across from Cheryl’s room. As Jill stopped in front of the office, she heard muffled scraping noises behind her. Cheryl must have already started sorting through her things.
Jill stared at the door disdainfully. She suddenly felt like she was a kid again who had to be careful not to get caught trespassing into the office. If she did, she’d be in a lot of trouble.
How many times do I need to tell you that this room is off limits?! There are expensive things inside, do you understand, you little brat?!
But her mother was in a coma. There was nothing that could stop Jill from sneaking a peek. And besides, she was an adult now.
She grabbed the knob firmly and twisted it. She expected the room to be locked, but surprisingly the door pushed inward. You’d think that someone who treasured their possessions so much would do a better job keeping the room locked. But maybe Annette let her guard down since she lived alone.
As the door opened, it revealed a dark interior, pungent with a musty smell. Jill saw only shapes of objects in the dark. She fumbled for the switch next to the door, and when she felt it under her fingertips, she flipped it upward.
It took the ceiling light a moment to illuminate the room, and when it did, Jill gasped loudly.
Chapter 10
“Come on, you piece of shit!” Cheryl cursed as she slowly and carefully unstuck the two pages of her diary.
She had to be careful about it, otherwise she would damage the pages. She had gotten a little distracted and had been reading the diary that she wrote when she was nine years old. It was full of cringe, and she often winced at some of the things she had written. She wanted nothing more than to toss that diary in the trash bin and burn it until it was all but gone. She wouldn’t do it, of course, because this was a gem from her childhood, no matter how cringy it was.
She looked at her phone clock and realized that she had spent the last thirty minutes reading the diary. Her room, although still pretty clean, had some items brought out from under the bed and from the wardrobes. She would spend a little more time reading the diary and then—
“Cheryl?” she heard Jill’s voice faintly.
“Yeah?” Cheryl called back.
There was no response.
“What is it?” Cheryl demanded.
When Jill didn’t respond again, Cheryl started to get a little frustrated. She clambered up to her feet with a groan and strode over to the door.
“Jill, did you call m—” she didn’t finish the sentence because she was greeted by an unfamiliar sight when she looked left.
The door of Mom’s office was widely open.
At first, Cheryl couldn’t move. But then the excitement began surging through her. The office was open! She strode over to it and peeked inside from a safe distance. It was badly illuminated by the hanging ceiling lightbulb, and Jill stood in the middle of the room, frozen and staring at something in front of her. Cheryl wanted to call out to her sister, but suddenly she got a bad feeling. Instead, she tip-toed to the threshold of the office, not daring to cross it.
Going inside felt wrong. Growing up, she never once got to step inside. She managed to peer in a few times when Mom entered or exited the room, but she always had the key in her pocket. And she always kept the room locked.
Now that Cheryl stood in front of the open room, the forbidden fruit within her grasp, and no one in sight to punish her, she still felt uneasy about stepping in. She looked around the room and saw various objects covered in old, tattered sheets, she saw books and notebooks scattered on the floor, and she saw something in front of Jill.
Something on the wall that she was staring at this entire time.
“Jill?” Cheryl asked with a cracking voice.
The entire time, as her sister faced away from her, Cheryl couldn’t help but think how this was exactly what went down in horror movies. Jill would turn around now, and instead of her sister, she would see some monstrosity staring back at her.
“Come take a look at this,” Jill abruptly turned around and called out, motioning Cheryl to come closer.
Cheryl still hesitated. This was Mom’s private room. They shouldn’t be in here.
You’re being childish, Cheryl. You’re a grown ass adult. Nothing bad is gonna happen to you if you step inside, she reprimanded herself.
A part of her also worried about what Jill would think of her for being such a scaredy-cat, so she suppressed all of her brain’s warnings and stepped across the threshold.
She expected something—what exactly?—to happen as she tentatively stopped next to Jill. She immediately noticed what she was staring at. On the wall in front of them, painted in crude, black paint, was a symbol of some kind.
“What the hell is that?” Cheryl asked, squinting.
The symbol had two long lines horizontally and vertically crossing each other in the middle. On the horizontal line were leaf-like symbols, with stars on each end. The vertical lines had circles that had their own inner lines crossing each other. On the right-hand line was a stick-like shape.
This didn’t look like the random drawings of a bored or crazy person. The details were too meticulous, too carefully streaked. In some of the spots, the black paint trickled down where it dried, making the symbol look like it had
melted in places. It was also evident from the lack of fading on the black paint against the old wall that it had been painted just recently.
“What in the hell is this?” Cheryl repeated in a perplexed manner.
“I… have no idea,” Jill said.
She was transfixed on the symbol, examining each corner of it. It was big and easily took up almost the entire wall. Cheryl saw that the wall paint had faded in rectangular shapes in places, which was evidence that some of the objects or furniture were moved to make way specifically for this symbol.
“Was this Mom’s doing?” Cheryl asked quizzically.
“It sure looks like it, but… why would she do it? If this is her way of being artistic, then she’s got terrible taste.”
Jill took a step forward and ran her hand across the middle of the symbol. The paint had long since dried up and fused with the wall. It made the whole pancake on the ceiling incident seem like nothing in comparison.
Suddenly, Cheryl felt sad for Mom. She knew that Mom had been getting more forgetful as time went on, despite not being what one would call an old person. But was she completely losing her mind, too?
Jill looked somewhere to the left before muttering a quiet ‘What the fuck?’.
Cheryl followed her gaze and immediately saw it, too.
A shriveled, dry chicken leg was splayed on the floor next to an open can of black paint. The talons of the chicken leg were coated in black paint, and it too had long since dried. There were black droplets messily covering the floor, and Cheryl just then noticed the trail going from the bucket of paint to the wall where the symbol was.
“Do you think all of this has a meaning?” Cheryl tried rationalizing.
Jill shook her head absent-mindedly.
“I don’t think so. I mean, maybe the symbol itself does have a meaning, but I doubt Mom was doing anything with it. Unless she practiced witchcraft without telling us about it.”
“I mean, she kept this room secretive all this time. So, it would explain that.”
Jill jerked her head towards her sister.
“You really think she practiced black magic here, or something of the like?”
Cheryl shrugged.
“I mean. I don’t think she actually cast curses and spells. But maybe she practiced something and, I don’t know, thought it worked?”
“Hm,” Jill turned back to the symbol. “I think she was just crazy.”
Cheryl felt anger forming within her.
“Why are you always so hostile towards her?” she asked.
Jill looked back at Cheryl, this time with alacrity on her face.
“Because, Cheryl,” Jill raised her tone slightly. “You weren’t old enough to see the shit she put us through. Dad used to say it all the time, too.”
“You always bring that up! When are you going to let it go?! And Dad used to say what?!” Now Cheryl raised her tone.
“That she was crazy. That’s why he left her and took me with him. Remember? Because he couldn’t stand her antics anymore.”
“That doesn’t mean she’s crazy, Jill!”
Jill pressed her lips together. She looked like she was about to say something that she would regret, something hurtful about Mom, perhaps. A moment later, that expression on her face disappeared, and she glanced at the symbol once more.
“You can defend her all you want, Cheryl, but this…” she pointed to the crude symbol in front of them. “This does not really ring normal to me.”
She ironically chuckled at that last remark. Cheryl realized that talking about Mom struck a nerve with Jill, so she sighed heavily and decided to drop the subject.
“She lives alone here. Maybe she was scared.”
“And then decided to paint this monstrosity?” Jill questioned.
Cheryl shrugged.
“Maybe this is some sort of, I dunno, protection charm, or something like that?”
Jill glanced at her with pursed lips. She didn’t look like she was buying it. A moment later, she spun on her heel and exited the room with long strides.
“I don’t wanna be inside this room anymore,” she said brusquely.
“Jill?” Cheryl called out when her sister crossed the threshold.
“What?” Jill turned to face her.
Jill was leaning on the doorframe, staring at her sister with a raised eyebrow. A moment later, Cheryl shrugged and said.
“We should probably take pictures of this thing.”
“Why? It’s just something Mom painted in her demented state,” Jill squinted.
“So we can find out what it means. We might be able to understand more about the person we call our mother. Learn what caused her antics,” Cheryl said as she whipped out her phone.
Chapter 11
Jill wanted to go back to sorting through the items in her room, but she couldn’t focus after seeing Mom’s office. What in the hell was that? Had she completely lost it?
That would be the only viable explanation. But it wasn’t just dementia. A person with dementia would forget things and sometimes not make sense, but Mom was higher up on the looney scale. Back when Jill lived there, Annette often spent hours locked up in the office, sometimes even at night. Jill would wake up to go to the bathroom, and she’d hear soft speaking coming from the office.
She once peeked through the keyhole and saw dim, flickering light coming from the room, like a meager candle flame in the wind. Jill heard her mother chanting something softly, almost in a whisper, and she saw her turned away from the door as she fiddled with something that Jill couldn’t see.
At one moment, Mom jerked around, seemingly becoming aware of Jill’s presence. Jill clasped a hand over her mouth and tip-toed back to bed. She heard her bedroom door opening a minute later, followed by soft footsteps, but she pretended to be asleep, praying that Mom wouldn’t suspect anything.
She didn’t, and within seconds, she left the room. Jill had no idea if she returned to do whatever she was doing in her office, and Jill was too petrified to get out of bed again.
It wasn’t just the office, either. Mom would often speak gibberish, words that made no sense at all. And at other times, she’d flip out at Jill for the smallest things, like going in the woods without telling her, walking too close to the office, being too loud or too quiet when she played in her own room…
Yeah, living with Annette was a nightmare. As a child, Jill constantly felt like she was walking on eggshells, and she never knew what her mother’s mood would be like each morning.
With Cheryl, however, it was an entirely different story.
Mom would always talk to her in a soft tone, buy her things that she liked, allowed her to do anything she wanted, and whenever she and Jill got into a fight, it was Jill who got grounded. There were even times when Annette took Cheryl out for ice cream or to the Medford fairs, while Jill had to stay at home.
That was okay, though. At those times, she’d hang out with the boy who came to play with her. She’d often complain and cry to him about Mom when she wasn’t there. He would listen, but wouldn’t say anything, and for some reason, that was oddly comforting for Jill.
And then one day, Jill’s parents decided to get divorced. Dad moved out before that, and he took Jill with him. It was supposed to be a sad day in her life, at least according to what Jill had learned about divorce and parents living apart, but in truth, Jill couldn’t have been happier about not having to live with her mom again. The only sad part of it was her separation from Cheryl.
All those memories angered Jill, but now that she was in the house where she grew up, all the painful, long-forgotten secrets started resurfacing. She would look at one object or spot, and she’d remember something from her past tied to it. She remembered some good things, too, but the bad ones were much more potent.
Jill went outside for some fresh air.
The morning was relatively warm, with a soft breeze that gently caressed her face. She glanced at her parked car. It would be so easy to just start the engine,
drive off and go back to her family. Her family. But she couldn’t do it.
Not to Cheryl.
Jill sat on the steps of the porch and stared out front at the thicket of trees far ahead. For some reason, she couldn’t seem to get that awful symbol painted on the office wall out of her head whenever she closed her eyes. One part of her kept telling herself that it was just a nonsensical drawing her crazy mother made. But the other half was intrigued and wanted to find out if there was a hidden meaning behind it.
She pulled out her phone and opened the gallery. Back in the office, she took three pictures of the symbol along with Cheryl. As she stared at the pictures, the ugly symbol looked less threatening and obtrusive than in reality, even though it took up an entire wall.
Jill knew just the place to find out what this symbol meant. She opened Reddit and looked for one of the sub-forums where people gave answers about mysterious objects. She posted the clearest picture of it with the caption Just found this in the house where my mom with dementia lives. Anyone know what it means?
It would probably be a while until anyone answered her, so she decided to take matters into her own hands and investigate online. She typed into her search engine magical symbols. That was too broad, so she tried magical symbols for protection, and then magical symbols for house protection.
She saw all sorts of symbols in the images section, but nothing that looked remotely close to what she saw in the office. She tried black magic symbols, and that was even more off. All of the symbols that she saw were too symmetrical and geometrically aesthetic. The symbol in her mom’s room was much cruder than that.
Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be crude, and her mom’s hand was just too unsteady?
Before she could gain enough momentum for research and input all the words she had in mind, she got a notification from Reddit. Someone had commented on her post. She clicked the notification to open it, and there were already two comments under the symbol’s picture.
Looks like some Satanic shit, the first comment said.
