Ella stood and watched the fire explore her kitchen. Flames raced over the counter tops and up the cupboard walls, threatening to ignite the ceiling. Her eyes stung. The air was thick with smoke, and she erupted in another coughing fit. A few minutes later, she had herself under control again, and a numb sense of accomplishment fell over her as the flames met together in front of her last exit out of the kitchen. Her vision doubled, briefly, followed by another coughing fit that brought her to her knees. She sat down next to an empty gas container and allowed the coughing fit to run its course. When it tapered off, there were specks of blood covering her forearm. She stared at the blood, becoming dazed as the smoke began to eat away at her mind. She then began to wonder where it had all gone wrong. Her mind wandered lazily over the many misfortunes that had befallen her in the past three months, but she figured it all started when her mother got a new job, or perhaps it really all started when her Chocolate lab, Bumble, dug up an old record in backyard of their new home.
***
Ella was out in the large backyard of their new house that early September afternoon, soaking up sun on a lawn chair and texting with her best friend, Britney, back in Nevada. It had been two months since the big move from Nevada to Washington. Her mother had got a new job as head publicist for a small publishing house in Seattle. Being fourteen, Ella didn’t know, or really care, if that was a big step up from her previous job, but she hoped it better be if it meant taking her away from her best friend. She had been quite bitter over this and had given her parents about two months of hell to pay for it. However, on relaxing days like this, it was hard to be all mad with the sun on her skin along with the view of the forest bordering her backyard yard. Ella and grown up in Vegas; the sights and smells of a forest were not things she was accustomed to. This view was hindered, somewhat, by an ugly, crooked oak tree in the center of the yard. Ella hated this tree, as it looked like something out of a horror movie, and she knew her parents did too, as she had heard them talk about finding a service to come cut it down. She was just about to text Britney a picture of her view when Bumble came bounding up to her with a large black disc in his mouth. He placed it at the foot of her lawn chair and sat down with a small, impatient bark. “Found a frisbee, did you?” she said and picked it up, getting a hand full of dog slobber for her efforts. She wound up to throw the frisbee when she noticed the serrated, almost fuzzy texture the object had. She wiped it off on the grass, shielding the object from Bumble with her body, and poked a dried clump of dirt out of the center. She held it up to the light and, upon closer inspection, realized it was an old record. “Where did you find this, boy?” She asked, and as she only got another impatient bark for a response, she began searching the yard
After some searching, all the while being constantly bombarded by Bumble who was still begging her to throw the record, she finally found a hole at the base of the old oak. She dug around a little more in the hole bumble had started just to see if anything else was buried there, but she only turned up more dirt. She praised Bumble for a good discovery, ran the record into her room, and resumed her texting session on the lawn chair.
Over the next couple of weeks, the record sitting on her desk drew more and more of her attention and interest despite her parents wishing her to throw “the piece of junk” away. Sometimes after school, she would just lay on her bed running her fingers over the strange texture it had wondering what musical secrets they held. She, like almost every other modern, fourteen-year-old girl, did not have a record player. In fact, this was the first record she had ever seen in person, and the secrets of what were on it were in her parents’ finical hands, but they flatly refused to pay money to hear a record that had visible scratches. So, when October finally came around Ella decided she would use her birthday money to purchase a record player of her own.
Ella’s fifteenth birthday came and went just as she had hoped. She woke up that Saturday morning, October 2nd, and upon going downstairs and into the kitchen, she saw- with great delight- that her parents had made her a massive, pizza-sized pancake covered in strawberries and topped with frosting that read “Happy fifteenth birthday, Ella.” Her father allowed her to call in sick from school, and they spent the majority of the day shopping at the town mall while her mother was at her new job. At fifteen, she would have preferred to be shopping with friends of her own, but she had yet to call any of her classmates at her new school by such a title. They went out to fast-food for lunch, and Ella spent the remainder of the day watching TV on her laptop. As the day came to a close, her father told her he had one more present for her. She waited on the living room couch anxiously, knowing exactly what was coming but also equally terrified that he would come back with something that didn’t resemble an envelope. Of course, that was exactly what he came back with, and she went to bed two hundred dollars richer that night. She was so excited to purchase a record player the following day that she failed to notice that Britney had not given her a birthday call or text.
Saturday could not have come soon enough. She woke up at six in the morning and was riding her bike to the music store by eight. By eight-thirty she had coughed up her birthday cash, and by eight forty-five she was walking down the sidewalk wheeling a bike with one hand and a brand-new record player tucked under the other. Her heart pumped in excitement, and the walk home felt like it stretched on for an eternity as she watched cars zip past, mocking her slow progress down the sidewalk. Her father was still asleep when she got home, and she booked it up to her bedroom ignoring Bumble’s greetings for perhaps the first time in her life. She tore up the box, too excited to deal with packaging tape, and within fifteen minutes, she had plugged it in, put the old record into the turntable, adjusted the needle, and had hit play.
There was only a quiet whine at first as the needle worked its way into the groves and then sounds of a forest filled her room. Before she could even process that, an angelic woman’s voice began. It took her a few seconds before she realized the woman on the record was speaking a language she could not understand or make out to be Spanish from her school class. Oh, but how it was a pretty voice that filled her heart with warmth and made her feel at ease. The record ended an hour later, and she sprang out of bed and re-adjusted the needle. She listened again and again and well into the night wishing she could never turn it off.
And she never did turn it off until the end of her life three months later.
The record played at home when Britney stopped returning her calls and text. It played when her parents divorced after her mother had been caught having an affair with somebody from her new job. It played when her mother moved out of the house and when her father started drinking. It played when her father developed a horrible temper that could be set off with the smallest mistakes such as shutting the front door to hard or walking too loudly. It played when she started going to bed directly after dinner simply to get away from her father’s wrath, and it played when she began locking her bedroom door at night after awakening late one night to find her father standing in her doorframe. The record played when she started using her art supplies to cut herself, and it played when she sat up late one night in a panic after cutting herself a little too deeply.
When she was not at home, the record played in her mind. It played when the popular girls stopped ignoring her and started tormenting her. It played when she read the notes stuffed in the vents of her locker that told her to kill herself, and it played when she started to fail her tests and homework assignments. The record played when the popular girls almost drowned her in a toilet, and it played on the lonely bus rides to and from school where she wondered how much it would hurt if she simply lied in front of one of the big tires instead of crossing the street. The record played loudest of all perhaps when during a homecoming football game, where she had gone alone in hopes to find a friend, she was raped in the women’s bathroom underneath the stands by a football player from her school named Hunter Baret who was already attracting attention from colleges despite only being a sophomore.
It was not until the start of November that she began to notice things in her house were different. Bumble now flatly refused to enter her bedroom which was suddenly almost always colder than the rest of the house. She would also get the strange sensation that her father was standing outside bedroom door at night despite being able to hear his obnoxious snoring coming from his bedroom. There were also footsteps all around the house at night. Some nights she could pass this off as her father wandering in a drunken shamble, but other times, she could hear the footsteps all over the house over her father’s snoring. It was also around this time that she realized she could not stop listening to the record. In silence, without it, her mind, already so bent and strained under the weight of her assault, the bullying from her classmates, and the divorce of her parents, snapped. This left her in a state of debilitating emptiness, so like an addict to hard drugs, it became her obsession, her purpose, and a part of her identity. Resetting the record became just another thing she had to do like going to the bathroom or eating. The record is what got her out of bed in the morning, and it was what got her through the tournament she educed from her classmates. It is what got her through the unfortunate times she passed her attacker in the halls at school, and what got her through the crippling panic attacks she had in the bathroom stalls afterwords.
By the start of December, her mind started to go. At night, the phantom footsteps around the house or her father’s drunken night strolls were no longer things she was worried about. The thing she was worried about was the dark, shadowy figure that appeared in the same corner of her bedroom every night at exactly midnight and didn’t go away until she either fell asleep or until the clock struck 4am. This figure was human shaped, but way, way too tall. It was so tall in fact that it had to hunch over in unnatural angles that would break a human spine and limbs just to fit inside her bedroom. It never spoke or moved, just stood there hunched over in terrifying silence watching her with its glowing, red eyes. She also began to hear the record play through the school’s intercom, and it was around mid-December that the record began to talk to her in English over the original music it still played. It told her and told her to do things, horrible things that she could, for the most part, not resist doing. She put tiny pieces of glass in Bumbles food bowl, painfully killing him, and she put ground up peanuts in one of her teacher’s lunches, who she knew had a bad allergy to, which nearly killed her. Early on Christmas morning the record told Ella to burn down her house in order to save her soul from damnation.
She obeyed.
She fetched a gas can from the garage and poured it over the kitchen appliances. She removed the batteries from all the smoke detectors in the house. She had to sneak into her father’s room to get the smoke detector in his room, but that turned out to be easy as he was passed out drunk. She then went back into the kitchen and turned on all four burners on the stove and lit a match
***
A large chunk of scolding hot metal about the size of a half-dollar landed on Ella’s leg and the pain made her mind became clear for the first time in three months. What had she done, my God what had she done? She stood up in a panic, but realized there was nowhere to go now. There were loud ticking sounds coming from the counter tops, and Ella realized that they were the cabinet fixtures falling as the cupboard doors burned away. Oh, God, Bumble! I’m so sorry! The entire downstairs was alive with the roar of fire and the sound of her father screaming from upstairs. “Daddy!” She screamed, looking desperately around for an exit, but she was trapped. The flames were closing in on her. Her five feet of space became three and then two, and then she was running helplessly into the heart of the fire in the direction of her front door. She made it five steps out of the kitchen before she was completely ablaze. She staggered another three-and-a half-steps before she collapsed and died in the living room.
***
As ten years came and went, the house sat in disrepair, slowly hiding behind the overgrowing lot until only the charred roof was visible through the trees. It also became a sort of community dare devil spot among the towns youth who would dare each other to enter the skeletal remains of the house. Not many did, but those who were brave enough to have entered all had one similar detail in their grossly embellish stories. They all told of having heard enchanting music sung by a female in a foreign language coming from somewhere upstairs.
One day, a local town celebrity and famous football player, Hunter Baret, came home for the first time in ten years since graduating high school for a thanksgiving dinner. However, he quickly got turned around upon entering the town as it was quite a bit different and larger from the one he had left at the age of eighteen. He ended up driving by the overgrown lot, and memories of the girl he assaulted resurfaced like memories of a pleasant date. He felt a cold chill pass through him and was struck with the sudden fear that somewhere in that house there was a diary that contained a written record of what he had done that night. With a career and a massive amount of wealth to protect, Hunter pulled into the overgrown, crumbling driveway and entered the charred home. He began rummaging around the wreckage when he was soon distracted by the soft voice of a woman singing in a strange language from upstairs. Hunter quickly became aroused as he ascended the stairs the woman’s voice reminded him so much of the first women he assaulted. His old instincts, instincts he had been able to ignore with the regular access to women he had as a famous athlete awoke inside him. Alone in this house, this woman would be his if she wanted to be or not. Upon stepping on the second to last step, the staircase gave, and he fell through the first floor and into the basement where he was impaled and killed by an exposed support beam in much the same way he assaulted Ella all those years ago.
Hunter’s accident put the house back in the spotlight again and attracted a lot of out of outsiders, and it seemed that every Green Bay fan wanted to see where their charming, handsome rookie fell to his death. That incident would be the house’s last rise to fame before it was quickly forgotten by the town and by the football fans as Green Bay replaced Hunter with another charming newbie. Two years after Hunter’s death, the house collapse upon itself after a record-breaking snowstorm on Christmas Day. The town was then pressured to finally clean up the lot as a big wave of protest came from parents from the surrounding area who were worried their curious kids would get themselves killed exploring the wreckage. The lot was cleared up, reluctantly, and a new house was built on the lot.
Watching a family move into a brand-new home just built earlier that year, was an ancient, malevolent entity in the form of an ugly old oak tree. This entity was most pleased with what it had done this time around. It found itself clever in producing a record and using a foreign language to get the girl to say the words necessary for it to have permission to infest her life. At first, it was not sure it would work as the record lay on girl’s desk, but once she came home with that record player, the entity knew her fate was sealed. Oh, and how sweet it was when she began trying to sing along to the record and how even sweeter it was when she finally pronounced all the lyrics correctly, giving the entity permission to enter her life and begin tearing it apart. Oh, and how tempting it was to just take total control and walk her out onto a freeway in a trance, but this time around, the entity wanted a real challenge as killing had gotten quite boring as it had been doing it since the first humans walked on earth. Yes, it could produce another poem with invocation to its name and then force the recipient to kill as it had with a Native chief and his entire settlement, but it wanted to do something different, something more twisted and tragic. So, it wondered if it could somehow make the girl take her own life without being under his direct influence. So, instead of hurting her directly, he used others to inflict trauma and anguish upon her in an attempt to drive her mad with sorrow.
Oh, and how sweetly it had worked.
Manipulating the record into English to issue requests was not something the entity had originally planned but was an idea it had when it realized just how broken the girl was after her assault. Not every suggestion it gave her through the record worked, but the ones that did were a victory to the entity all the same. It also enjoyed taking from in her bedroom, knowing its presence was scaring her silly. However, its greatest victory came years after her death when he watched Ella’s spirit lure and kill her attacker one night. The entity loved watching this as it had taken a pure and kind energy and turned it into a dark, life taking force, a force exactly like itself. To the entity, there was no greater victory.
“Master, have you decided what you will make next?” A voice came from beside him. The entity projected sight and saw the spirit of the young girl, Ella, standing beside him.
“No, dear. Perhaps you could give me a suggestion as you seem to have a talent for revenge and violence. As I may say again the way you took out that young man really impressed me. It was ingenuous I must say, and I wonder what other ideas you may have.”
‘Well, they have two boys…” Ella muttered looking at the house and the family which had just entered the house with arms full of boxes. She thought for a minute and gave her suggestion.
“Perfect! Now, let me rest, and when I awake, I will allow you to partake in the ritual of placement.”
“Yes master,” Ella said and dissipated into thin air.
Yes, good idea Ella, the entity thought as it lost self-awareness, I will make one of those television games.