No Faith in Whispers

by Katie Perez

  Of course, she hated her father. She'd prefer her mother's maiden name.

  Mother: Waltraud St. John (born Waltraud Klusman), deceased.

  15. Blood

  The next morning Molly was allowed back into the dormitory, not that she particularly minded. Life as she knew it had stopped making sense a long time ago. She was now just going through the motions, doing whatever people told her to do, too overwhelmed and hopeless to do anything else.

  Returning to the dormitory Molly had a hard time finding a familiar face. Miriam was gone; so was Steadfast; in fact a lot of the old girls appeared to missing. Dead, Molly thought, and she was right. New girls had arrived, filling in the gaps seamlessly. It was as if the old girls had never been there. Some of these girls had never heard of Molly, and those who had had been told she was dead. She attracted some level of curiosity: many of them had never met anyone who had been to the hospital and survived.

  Molly didn't reply to their questions, didn't respond to their attempts at friendship, and before long they gave up. It wasn't that Molly was especially malicious; at the moment she just was having trouble talking, eating, sleeping, breathing... and soon enough the new girls heard all the old stories about Molly, those months she went without speaking, the screams at night, the way she cut herself, all exaggerated, but still fairly believable, considering Molly's current state.

  Molly was quite numb. She accepted things more easily than she ever had. When the cholera mysteriously left as suddenly as it had arrived she didn't stop to wonder why, as she might have done before. When Charlotte Percival's boyfriend was killed in action over in Maine somewhere, she didn't pause what she was doing and think what a waste his life had been.

  And the days, weeks, just rolled on by. Eat, sleep, go to school, repeat.

  And in between, people died. It was normal. Before long, Molly was the oldest person in the orphanage, giving her more responsibility. It was all too often her job to clean up the mess. And the deaths seemed to be getting messier. People were still getting stabbed, and no-one knew who was doing it. No-one seemed to particularly care much longer, either.

  Molly lived in dread of Mrs. Levitski's scratchy voice, screeching that another orphan was dead. It came one night just as Molly was preparing to go to bed.

  "Klusman!" Mrs. Levitski stormed into the dormitory. "In the basement, now!"

  "Yes, ma'am," Molly murmured. The basement. That was a new one. She went downstairs and into the open door of the basement.

  Molly stared at the corpse of the six-year-old boy in front of her, the third one this week. She sighed. She hated it when there was so much blood. She wrinkled her nose and took a closer look. Unfortunately, the corpse appeared to be fairly old, and the blood was dried to the stone floor. She sighed again. That would be hard to remove. She bent down and examined the body further. Curiously, his arms and legs were tied tightly behind him, and there was the small fact that he was completely naked. There were several deep wounds all over his body, especially in... a certain place. Looking in between the crimson bloodstains on the ground Molly was disturbed to see an intricate star shape, drawn on the stone floor in white chalk.

  She stood up abruptly, stood away from the body. The stench of death and blood was too strong, and the star frightened her. Yet she could not take her eyes of the boy. His head was lolled back, his eyes glazed a greyish white, his mouth slightly open. He was already wasting away down here; his cheekbones and the shape of his skull protruded horribly against his yellowish-grey skin. His ribs looked like they could snap in two. There was a large opening mid-torso, possibly made by a knife, the skin around the edges decayed worse than the rest of his body, a very definite shade of green. Molly could see pinkish red entrails pouring out of this hole, the sharp white of his lower ribs. Something black moved inside and Molly almost screamed before she saw it was just a rat. The blood soaked his body completely. His throat was almost cut right through to the other side.

  Molly felt nauseous. It had been a long time since she'd seen one like that. She wasn't sure how long she was standing there for, but when the door to the basement opened she jumped. It was the dead man and his new assistant; his old one having been killed by fever.

  The new assistant was a burly boy of about Molly's age, pale and forever silent.

  "Holy shit," the dead man said when he saw the corpse. Then he noticed Molly. "Pardon the language." He returned his gaze to the body. "You- you get rightly through them, don't you?"

  Molly said nothing.

  He walked around the corpse and gave a low whistle. "Some sort of sacrifice for the Devil?" Molly shrugged.

  "Need to watch yourself, if there's people like that about." Molly shrugged again.

  The dead man turned to his assistant. "Edgar. Help me lift this thing."

  Edgar wordlessly threw a white sheet over the mess and lifted the boy effortlessly. A part of the boy's intestine rolled out of his stomach and slapped to the ground. Molly shuddered.

  The pair left the basement, leaving Molly alone beside the puddle of blood. It took her a few minutes to realize what she was supposed to be doing. She'd need water. A brush.

  She started up the stairs when suddenly she heard a loud bang, like a gunshot, and a blood-curdling scream.

  16. Massacre

  Molly could only think one thing- what now?

  She waited, straining to hear more of what was going on out in the orphanage. The silence was deafening. The candle in the basement burnt out, leaving Molly alone in the dark with a pentagram and a rather large puddle of blood beside her. And possibly a gun-toting maniac outside.

  Another loud bang, this time almost unmistakably a gunshot, and a scream. The scream was so desperate, so awful, that Molly was unsure whether it was a male voice or a female voice.

  Molly dizzily fell to floor. The room was spinning… but how was that possible when she couldn’t see a thing? She felt her skirts soak up something on the ground. Blood, probably. She leant back so she was lying on the ground, her head hitting the concrete with a little more force than she’d intended, and waited for the spinning to stop.

  But it didn’t. The world had suddenly become a baffling place. It had always been confusing, but now nothing made sense. She just seemed to be living from one violent event to the next… praying that someday it would be her turn. And it had all started with that diary, that god-awful diary. Telling her all these things, all the things she’d ever wondered about. Molly had been warned in church about being possessed by the Devil. Maybe that’s what was happening. It was her, it was the diary, the diary, sent from Satan. She was the reason everything was going wrong. The reason everyone was dying, everything was falling apart. How else was it possible that she, of all people, had found that diary when it had so much to do with her? Wasn’t it all too convenient, all too sinister? As if someone, something, the Devil, had set it up. She’d never found out where her old coat had vanished to. Usually the other girls would steal things, but eventually give them back. They wouldn’t want to keep a shabby old coat from her. Her old coat had vanished, it had been taken… taken by Satan, taken back to Hell… back to? Yes, back to, she was from Hell, it was the only explanation for it all… And Jean-Pierre’s coat, that was sent from Hell too. Makes sense. Makes perfect sense. Jean-Pierre was from Hell, and she was his daughter, Molly was Satan’s daughter… and Beulah, Beulah St. John, trying to kill her unborn child with a piece of barbed wire, she was evil too, she was Satan’s minion…

  Molly’s thoughts went on like this, only occasionally interrupted by the shouts and screams and gunshots and chaos outside. She lay there through the shootings and death of a grand total of fifty-nine people being shot, including Mrs. Levitski. She lay there through the suicides of Marc Branson, Delphine Robinson, Lionel Victoire and little Carole Hill, bringing the number of people shot to sixty-three. She did not hear the police arrive, did not hear them, many hours after their arrival at the orphanage, open the basement door and say,

&
nbsp; “Jesus, that’s another one.”

  “What’s she lying on? Is that a star? Is that- a pentagram? Mary, mother of God, this place is- these kids are-”

  “Hey, I don’t think she’s dead, I think she’s breathing here. Miss? Miss? Can you hear me?”

  Molly opened her eyes suddenly and sat up.

  “It all makes sense now,” she said calmly. “I’m the Devil.”

  The police officers put it down to the shock of being trapped in an enclosed space while such violence was going on outside. Only four of those shot survived, including Mrs. Levitski, who was still in hospital two weeks after the massacre. The orphanage population, in the past few months had been decimated from two hundred, give or take, to fifty-four. The bad side to this was that many entire families had been completely wiped out. The good side to this was that there was no longer an overcrowding problem at Villemonte City Orphanage.

  Two weeks after the massacre. All the bodies taken away, all the blood stains cleaned up, life was as back to normal as it was going to get, under such circumstances. Many of the survivors were somewhat traumatized, after witnessing brothers, sisters, best friends horribly murdered. Molly Klusman had not witnessed anyone’s death, but was perhaps somehow the most affected.

  It was during prayers one night in a somewhat empty hall that Molly kicked off. She couldn’t explain it; nor could anyone else. One second she was standing calmly in the neat rows, head bowed along with the rest, the next she was screeching things about being possessed by the Devil, hitting people, scratching people, biting people, unable to control herself. It took five of the strongest remaining boys to hold her down. Then suddenly she stopped and became calm again.

  She was called to Mr. Levitski’s office after prayers.

  “Klusman, you no longer have a place in this asylum. You are violent to other people, to yourself, and in light of recent events, I cannot let you stay here one second longer.”

  Molly stared at her boots. The lunatic asylum. That’s where she was bound now, for sure. She found to her surprise that she didn’t particularly care. She probably belonged there now anyway.

  “As much as I would like to send you away to the lunatic asylum,” Mr. Levitski began, “I can’t say it would do much good to you, or indeed to myself. But perhaps I do have a use for you after all, Molly.” Molly. He called her Molly. For the first time in her life, he’d called her Molly.

  “Mrs. Levitski, being, as you know, in hospital… I could certainly find some use for you.” Mr Levitski stood up and walked around his desk to Molly. He grabbed her by the arm and began to steer her into the Levitskies’ private quarters.

  17. Nightmare

  Molly wasn't completely sure what was happening, but her instincts told her it was not good. Mr Levitski had her by the collar of her dress, pulling her into the Levitskies' private quarters, where she was usually forbidden to go. Molly caught a fleeting glimpse of a small, musty sitting room before she was dragged into another smaller room. The bedroom.

  Mr. Levitski bolted the door behind them, and Molly suddenly felt horribly trapped and scared.

  "Now, Molly," Mr Levitski sneered. Molly flinched at the sound of her name. And to think she once encouraged people to call her that. "We can do this the easy way, or the hard way. The easy way is you do everything I say, and don't you even try to scream, or we'll do things the hard way. You understand?"

  Molly nodded, finding she couldn't breathe. She had a vague idea now of what was going to happen.

  "Now. Take off your dress."

  Molly didn't dare disobey him, and tried to undo the buttons but found her hands were shaking far too much. As she struggled frantically, Mr Levitski lost his patience and practically ripped the dress from her body. Then Molly was standing there, aware of the cold on her bare skin, how vulnerable she was. Mr Levitski looked at her for an agonizingly long time, and threw her onto the bed.

  His touch- Molly could never forget it. How horribly wrong this was- she didn't want this to happen- she wished she was anywhere- oh God, please, I know I'm evil, but just, please...save me... The pain, the pain was the worst. She wished she was anywhere, anywhere other than here... she prayed that she was dead.

  It was a space of time later. How long exactly, Molly wasn't entirely sure. A week, a month; it didn't matter anymore. It was the nightmare. One of those dreadful, horrible nightmares; the ones you wake up from screaming and sweating and sobbing, but you never remember its contents exactly. As if your mind has deleted it, for being too horrible, too distressing. When Molly regained her senses, one thought sprung to her head. She wasn't completely sure where it had come from but she knew it was true.

  There was no way Jean-Pierre was the father of Beulah's baby.

  Molly pondered this, staring into the darkness of the practically empty dormitory. Jean-Pierre- he was nothing but a friend. And even if he wasn't just a friend- he would never have done that. Never have left her. But then... why did he...?

  Molly abruptly sprung to life and leapt out of bed, grabbing her old knife from its hiding place. She pounced on Charlotte Percival's figure and held the knife to her throat. Charlotte Percival woke instantly, and even in the darkness, Molly could see the terror in her face, the silent tears running down her face. For once, Molly was the one in control.

  "Where is it?"

  "Wh-wha-"

  "The diary! The diary you stole from me! Where is it?" Molly was speaking rapidly. Charlotte could have sworn there was something not quite right about her eyes.

  "I-It's in my coat pocket. Th-there, on th-the bedpost... oh please, d-don't k-kill m-me, please..."

  But Molly had already lost all interest in Charlotte Percival. She grabbed the coat and ripped out the diary. Hands trembling with excitement, Molly lit a match in the darkness, attempting to read the last entry. She only caught snippets here and there before the match burned out. Rumors are true... Beulah... Mr Levitski... pregnant... But it was enough.

  Dropping both the match and the diary to the ground Molly ran out of the dorm.

  Of course Jean-Pierre hadn't... she knew she hadn't been Mr Levitski's first victim... but he'd let them blame it on Jean-Pierre, and, and then...

  He hadn't really run away. He had...

  Molly ran out the front door of the orphanage. Not entirely sure where she was going, but she kept running, until she reached that piece of ground near the back of the orphanage, the land the government had wanted to build on. There were spades, spades from the builders who were determined to build there anyway. Molly grabbed the nearest one and began to dig. The ground was soft and sloppy from the pouring rain. If anyone had looked out the window, they would have seen a peculiar sight of a small girl with tears running down her face, digging relentlessly with a spade much too big and heavy for her at one in the morning in a storm.

  Molly soon became weary from the weight of the spade and the seeming hopelessness of her work, but suddenly the spade struck something hard. Molly continued digging as though her life depended on it as the white shapes began to appear. Finally, when Molly's legs could not support her any longer, she fell to the ground and sobbed.

  Others, and eventually the police came to the scene having heard her screams and stared in amazement at the little girl as she knelt and sobbed at the almost-decayed body of Jean-Pierre Richard, who had been murdered for trying to tell the truth. By her father.

  18. Interrogation

  "Klusman!" A voice called in the darkness somewhere in Villemonte City Police Station. The next thing she knew, a hand grabbed Molly by the collar and steered her into a small, dark, cold room. The room consisted of a steel table with two police officers seated behind it, and a vacant chair facing it.

  "Molly Marie Klusman?" one of the officers said without looking up. He had an unusual accent.

  "Y-yes." Molly replied.

  "Sit." Molly sat down on the chair. She could see the officers slightly clearer now. One looked to be in his late twenties, and had white-blond ha
ir and harsh grey eyes. The other looked to be bit older, and had dark hair cut unfashionably short. It had been shaved badly and unevenly, giving him the alarming look of a madman or one who had been sick for a long time.

  "I am Constable van der Bellen and this is Constable Greys. We need to ask you some questions about the body found in the grounds of Villemonte City Orphanage tonight. We need the full story so please speak truthfully," The latter officer said in a bored tone, as though he had said this many times.

  A dead silence followed. Molly found she was terribly nervous.

  "How did you find the body?" Constable Greys asked.

  "I was... digging."

  "And why, exactly, were you digging?"

  "Because I knew there was a body there."

  "And how did you know that?"

  Over the next hour or so, the officers asked Molly question upon question about what had happened, why she had been digging, and all about the diary and the orphanage folklore about Beulah and Jean-Pierre. Thankfully, the officers seemed to have heard of Jean-Pierre's disappearance, which made that part of her story, at least, credible.

  "But Miss Klusman, there are a few things that don't quite add up. Why would Mr. Levitski, as you say, have killed him?"

  "Because Mr. Levitski..." Molly's voice cracked slightly on the name. "He... raped Beulah and when she got pregnant he blamed it on Jean-Pierre. And then... Beulah told Jean-Pierre the truth, so Mr Levitski killed him. So he wouldn't tell anyone. And made it out as if he'd run away."

  van der Bellen looked fairly unphased, whilst Greys shook his head and muttered something that sounded like 'preposterous', which made the older officer give him an almost unearthly glare that even frightened Molly.

  "And... what makes you think that Mr. Levitski did this? That he raped her, as you say?" van der Bellen continued.

  "Because..." It was now or never. "He did it to me, too."

  van der Bellen merely sighed, while Greys became agitated.