Grimmstead Academy: A Villainous Introduction

by Candace Wondrak

  Some people might say it made me a monster, what I did, but I didn’t view it quite like that. It wasn’t so much that I enjoyed splitting things open; I did it in a more scientific way. My curiosity was not of a morbid nature, but a scientific one.

  Without blood, none of us would be alive, and yet…yet sometimes when it was spilled here, it was as if it was never lost to begin with. Time was screwy in this place, as was everything else. You could die here, and you’d never know, unless Grimmstead wanted you to find out.

  And sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes this place sent your mind awhirl. Sometimes it sent you tumbling down the rabbit hole like Alice herself, and no matter where you looked or what you did, you could never find your way out.

  Did I feel bad for Felice? Yes and no. I was not completely psychotic; I could have empathy for a lost little lamb wandering into a den of wolves. However, did I? That much I didn’t know. I hadn’t spent much time with her yet, but that would soon change.

  Lucien had met with us all. We would each have time with her; she was to be our tutor of sorts. It made me wonder exactly why she was here; the way Lucien spoke about her, he hadn’t sent that letter, which meant either someone else did…or this place did. And if it was this place who lured her here, it obviously had a plan.

  At one point in time, I had many theories about the nature of this place. It felt like years ago, even though my face hadn’t changed a bit. The world had transformed around me, but I remained the same, almost like Grimmstead was mocking me, wordlessly saying I would never figure the mystery out.

  And I didn’t. I had theories, but I never tested them. My scientific brain had moved on to focus solely on blood.

  Sometimes it was all I could think about. It was all that took over my mind as I sat there in the study, sitting at a desk with a lamp on above me. Bookcases hugged each wall around me, save for where the window was. A cushioned seat sat before it, pillows and old tapestries. Everything in this place was old, and yet it hardly looked worn.

  I had no idea what I would be going over with Felice, but I knew it would be something I didn’t want to discuss. Any topic of conversation was something I tried my best to avoid. I didn’t like speaking with the others, and I knew she’d be no different. I’d merely want to watch her, to feel her veins and see how good they were. I’d want to prick that tanned skin and see how her blood pooled…

  I must’ve been lost in my own mind for quite a while, because before I knew what was happening, a gentle knock bounced on the study’s door, and I jerked to attention, watching as Felice herself walked in. She must’ve been finished with Lucien already.

  My gaze darted to the window, and I saw that the sun was already past noon in the sky. Most of the morning I’d dreamt away, daydreaming about blood.

  It was often how my days went, but you would be surprised how strangely the days blurred into each other here. I could only imagine what the days would be like now that Felice was here. Would she make time go by faster? Would she share in my fascination, or would she find me disgusting and vile?

  It was a question I would never ask her.

  Felice wore the same grey dress she’d worn yesterday to dinner. I was certain it was not the very same dress, but I knew it was the clothing we’d all see her in usually. The drab grey fabric went along with the color of our pants. If Grimmstead had a color, it would be that. Her brown hair was straight, falling off her shoulders as she moved to sit in the wooden chair beside me…though she did drag it a foot away, not wanting to sit too close to me.

  Couldn’t blame her, because I did tend to put people on edge.

  “Good morning, Payne,” she spoke, her voice sounding like I imagined flowers would, if they could speak. Delicate, soft, innocent and naive to the ways of the world, unknowing of the true dangers about simply existing. Her dark eyes moved to the window, noting the position of the sun. “Or maybe I should say good afternoon. I’m sorry. Lucien kept me for longer than I thought he would.”

  I could’ve told her many things right then, but I decided to go with what I hoped was the simplest answer: “It’s fine.” And it was; she needn’t apologize to me. This was not my schedule. This was merely the house’s schedule, and we had to follow it. I knew enough by now to realize that if we went against what the house said, there would be consequences. Consequences of which none of us would like.

  “I’m supposed to go over certain things with you,” she said. “I don’t know what you’ve gone over with anyone else before, but I’m going to do my best. This is all new to me.” Felice spoke like she was taking this seriously. As if she thought it was a real job, that she would get paid and be able to leave these grounds whenever her heart pleased.

  She was a fool.

  She didn’t realize the truth of this place. Not yet. In time she would. Sooner or later her innocent mind would not remain so unknowing. This place would reveal her true darkness, her fears and her anxieties. This place would make her see that the truth was never a simple creature.

  “You and I are supposed to focus on ethics,” Felice went on, glancing at the desk before us. “I don’t want to get into anything deep since we started this so late, but I do want to know what you think it is.”

  Ethics.

  Of course, we would discuss the one thing I found trivial and useless.

  Ethics was what stopped scientists from being great. Ethics was what halted progress, all in the guise of morality. Where science was concerned, morality should not be in the picture.

  Ethics, and those people who believed in it, were things I looked down on.

  “I’d prefer to write my thoughts down,” I told her, resisting my urge to say anything else. Oftentimes I simply remained quiet, figuring any word spoken must mean a lot to be said aloud. Most of the time speaking wasn’t worth the trouble, but still.

  This one…once Felice got to know me, she wouldn’t want to hear me speak either. Hell, she probably wouldn’t want to stay in the same room as me for any extended period of time.

  “Okay,” Felice quickly said, “that’s fine.” As she spoke, her lips puckered, and my eyes fell to her mouth.

  She was…she was pretty. I didn’t often view beauty in things other than the maroon life force that flowed through us all, but her? She was beautiful. Anyone with eyes could see it. Anyone who fancied women would agree. Not a flaw on her.

  And, even though the dress covered most of her chest and neck, I was still able to see the vein throbbing on its side.

  I almost would say I could hear her blood pumping, but that was more of Dagen’s thing than mine.

  I reached for the pen resting on the desk and began to write on the blank page before me. Felice did not leave, but she did watch. I sought to be as fluid as I could possibly be, swirling my letters like I used to when I kept notes of all of my experiments and daily logs. In this house, there was an endless supply of what you needed. If you needed a hundred journals to log your daily experiences in, it gave it to you.

  But everything here did not come without a price. Each and every thing this house gave you came with a quid pro quo attached to it, and oftentimes by the time you realized what that price was, it was too late. You’d already signed your soul away to the devil himself, so to speak.

  The funny thing was in Grimmstead, even the devil himself would cower in fear. Everyone was afraid of something. Everyone had a weakness. This place brought out those weaknesses, those fears, using them to its advantage.

  But again, that was not my concern anymore. Right now my fascination was that warm, red liquid pumping through Felice’s veins.

  As I wrote down my views on ethics, being genuine in my words, unlike most of the lost souls here, I couldn’t help but imagine what the paper under my hand would look like if the ink was red. If the pen wrote in blood instead of black ink.

  It would be beautiful, wouldn’t it?

  The world did not need ethics. The world needed men and women who would do anything to succeed where others had
failed. Technological advancement and medical breakthroughs did not happen in a nicely-controlled environment where the experiments would stop if lines were crossed. Sometimes to cure a disease, you had to expose your subjects to a worse disease. At the end of the day, did it really matter? Ethics was just human judgment, after all, certifiably useless.

  Once I was done, I handed her the paper. Felice gave me a smile as she read it, and I could tell, just by the initial downward quirk of her mouth, that my opinion on it was not what she’d been expecting.

  “Oh, dear,” she whispered, amber eyes rising off the paper to meet me. “The way you talk…uh, I mean, write, it’s almost like you think ethics don’t exist.” Her tone of voice told me she thought I was crazy.

  It would, in all honesty, be her usual tone of voice here, I believed. We were all a bit mad here.

  “Nothing exists,” I told her, eyeing up the smooth curve of her neck. I couldn’t see any scarring on her, no wrinkles or anything. I bet her blood was smoother than most.

  “I exist, and so do you,” she said, unaware of how completely wrong she was.

  “We exist because we are here.” I hated talking so much, hated it above all else. I’d much rather prefer to simply do my work in peace.

  “You’re saying that if you weren’t here, you wouldn’t exist? Do you mean on earth, being alive, or here in Grimmstead?” I gave her a look, refusing to answer. Lucien had warned us all; she was an outsider. We couldn’t overload her too fast. Felice took my silence to be my answer, saying, “You don’t have to be a spiritual or religious person to believe in ethics. There is right and there is wrong.”

  Not everything was so simple. Not everything was black and white. In this world, there were a thousand shades of grey, and I would argue that white and black did not exist in and of themselves. Some might try to uphold the law, but that didn’t make them right. Everyone had ill thoughts once in a while, some more than others.

  And those who were the utter dredges of society…they were not all black, either. They cared about themselves at the very least.

  There was no right and no wrong when there was no black and white. This world was far from perfect.

  This girl was supposed to be an authority figure to me, teach me, but I couldn’t help but wonder right then and there if it was actually the opposite. She’d come here under the guise of a job, but in reality, we would be the ones to teach her. We would show her just how wrong she was.

  Ethics? Such lies had no place here at Grimmstead.

  I gave Felice a smile, stopping myself from arguing with her. I wanted to, oh how I wanted to—but I didn’t, which I thought should give me some credit. What else should give me credit? The fact that I didn’t drag her to my room and empty those veins, bottle up her blood and save it for later.

  Not because I wanted to kill her, mind you, but because I simply knew she was special. Color me curious and intrigued. I’d have to watch over her extra carefully from now on.

  Chapter Six – Felice

  My time with Payne was…uh, enlightening, to say the least. My first session with one of these guys, and it ended strangely. I kept his paper with me and went back to my room. Lucien said I didn’t have to worry about keeping the place clean for a while, that I should focus on researching what I had to teach these men—and when I got back to my room, I saw why he’d said it.

  Books. I had a mountain of old-looking books piled on top of my bed.

  I set the paper down beside them, my eyes lingering on it for far longer than it should. A sense of dread filled me when I’d read what he wrote. Payne might be the quiet one of the group, but he clearly didn’t believe in the lines of right and wrong. Ethics might as well be an unknown word to him.

  I just…how could a person not believe in ethics? How could someone not believe in right and wrong? Sure, everything was a social construct when you looked at it from an outsider’s point of view, but that’s what separated us from animals. We had communities. We had shared laws. Without them, without most humans getting together and saying murder and torture was wrong, where would we be?

  Barbarians. We would be barbarians. Animals walking on two legs.

  I ran my fingers through my hair, breathing out a shaky breath. First the tour with Lucien this morning, and then my session with Payne. Really, what did I expect? My welcome had been strange yesterday, and it looked like the strangeness was just going to continue.

  There were places in Grimmstead that were off-limits. Lucien warned me against going to them. It was kind of stupid, because just like a kid who was told not to touch the hot stove, I found myself curious anyway. You never really knew how hot the stove was unless you touched it. You never knew how hot fire was until you burned yourself.

  I’d burned myself before. You couldn’t tell just by looking at me, but I had. The problem was…the problem was I hadn’t learned my lesson, which I thought was why my father always tried to be in my business, helicoptering himself around, making sure I never made any more mistakes.

  The problem? I liked being burned.

  If you just looked at me, if you listened to me talk, you’d never know. You’d never know how twisted my inner thoughts could get, how I craved certain things I knew I shouldn’t. Being burned, getting hurt…it made me feel alive, and I was never one to shirk away and listen to orders like a good little girl.

  The basement was off-limits, as were quite a few rooms. I was also not allowed in the kitchen, in spite of asking about who did the cooking and cleaning up of all of the meals we shared in the dining hall.

  It was only after my session with Payne that I thought: screw it. I needed to meet other normal people here. I needed to know I wasn’t going to be alone during my time here. If that meant I had to make friends with the old kitchen ladies? So be it.

  Okay, that was a stereotype, but it was true. I needed some peace of mind here.

  Payne had been…almost unnerving, and I could’ve sworn that I’d caught him staring at my neck a few times. His stares had made me itch, made me just a hair uncomfortable—which was only intensified after I read what he wrote.

  I mean, who thought ethics was a sham? Psychopaths. People who didn’t want to be restrained by them. What did that say about him?

  And what did it say about me if I was both nervous and intrigued?

  I’d start going over things later. Right now, I needed a distraction, and as far as I was concerned, meeting the workers in the kitchen would be enough of one.

  I brought myself down the hall, down the stairs. So far, I hadn’t gotten lost, which was a miracle in and of itself, and if I steered clear of all of the places that were off-limits to me, I’d probably be fine. Would I, though? We’d have to wait and find out.

  There was a door at the end of the dining hall, and I assumed that was also the door that led to the kitchen. It wasn’t like Lucien had brought me to the dining hall during the tour, but I had eaten here, and I did eat breakfast here—pancakes, which were already laid out for me and buttered exactly how I liked them, oddly enough.

  If I didn’t know any better, I’d say someone here had been stalking me before I’d come. How else would they know my clothing sizes?

  Yes, unfortunately, I’d had to change my underwear. Every article of clothing I wore now belonged to Grimmstead. Felt a bit weird, but the only saving grace here was that all of the undergarments still had tags on, so it wasn’t like I was wearing something some other woman had. They were new and fresh, at least.

  My hand went to push open the door, and I walked into what should be a busy kitchen. I would assume dinner would have to be started ahead of time, but oddly enough, the lights were off and not a soul could be seen amongst the stainless-steel kitchen.

  I looked all around, half expecting to see the cook walking in behind me or something, but I was alone. All alone.

  Huh.

  Guess I wouldn’t be making friends with the kitchen staff today.

  It wasn’t so far-fetched that ther
e was a staff. If I didn’t clean up, surely someone had to. There were no dishes piled in the deep sink that I saw as I moved through the kitchen. No food particles dried and hardened on the top of the stove. Everything looked clean.

  Hold on a moment.

  I moved to the counter near the stove, running a finger along it. My finger came back dusty, almost like…well, almost like no one had stepped foot in the kitchen for a long time. Weeks. But that couldn’t be right. Unless there was another kitchen somewhere where the food was made. Food didn’t just magically appear, and plates couldn’t clean themselves and put themselves away.

  There had to be explanations for everything weird that was happening, right?

  I left the kitchen, an uneasy feeling resting within my gut. Something was going on here. Had to be. I was never one to let my anxieties take over, but it was almost impossible for me to do here, to keep myself calm and steady. The more and more bizarre things that happened to me here only made me wonder if maybe I’d made a mistake after all.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have come here. Maybe I should’ve stayed home and let my father dictate what I did with the rest of my life.

  He still wouldn’t have been happy with me—my father was never happy with me or the choices I made—but at least I wouldn’t have to worry about these stupid things.

  There was literally no logical reason for that kitchen to be dusty. None whatsoever.

  My feet took me to the hall where Lucien’s office was. I didn’t know why I went straight there, but I did. Whatever guided me caused me to see Lucien sitting in his chair, bending to get something out of some drawer. The moment he saw me, however, he froze. He was slow to sit back in his chair, his jaw setting as his hazel eyes met mine.

  “Miss Fairday, what can I do for you? Did Payne miss his session with you?” Lucien asked, his voice hedged with traces of something I couldn’t name. Still the same rough voice I’d listened to all morning, warning me where not to go in Grimmstead.

  “No, no,” I said, reaching for the door and closing it behind me. Strange thoughts raced through my head: closing myself in his office, we were alone. There were a lot of things I’d do with that man alone…a lot of things I’d let him do to me.