Non-Explicit Implying of Past Child Abuse
Some Blood/Violence
I've put it under a cut. I don't think it's above a PG-13, but I also don't want to accidentally trigger anybody. Also the spacing is a little weird, but I can't comb through it right now, so try and ignore it. Thanks!
Spoiler
The news has been on a constant loop for the past seven hours. Jude has watched Ms. Jennifer Leek for the past seven hours as her voice cracks and she tries to keep her calm. Jude has sat quietly as she chokes back a noise, clears her throat, and repeats for the seventh time that officials have no idea what’s causing the chaos that’s sweeping through the country.
Jude has listened quietly as Ms. Leek looked straight into the camera and told the nation that hope was futile.
Jude glances to his right and takes in the dark look his father is wearing. He started yelling at the first broadcast, screaming and hollering until his face was red and sweating. His mother had stood there like usual, not even flinching when his father got too close to her face.
He quit yelling when the broadcast turned back on and showed the same footage for the third time in a row.
His parents have been quietly arguing for the past hour and a half and Jude had let his mind wonder. He waits for the eighth rendition of the same broadcast to come up on the tv, but instead of the chime of the nightly news report, the sound cuts off just as the power goes out, leaving them in almost complete darkness. There’s a battery powered lamp that stays lit in the kitchen, the light only barely reaching them in the front room.
“We’re not staying here, that’s for damn sure,” his father grumbles, huffing as he propels himself out of his lazy boy chair.
“And where do you propose we go, Frank?” his mother asks softly.
“Town hall,” his father snaps from in the kitchen. He comes back in and Jude can see enough of his profile to brace himself for the flashlight thrown his way. He catches it, fumbling only a little. “Go grab what you need, boy,” his father says sternly, already heading back into the kitchen.
His mother rises, her dress softly fluttering as she follows her husband into the kitchen.
Jude says nothing as he simply stands and heads down the hall to his bedroom. He flicks the flashlight on as he loses the soft glow from the kitchen. He finds his heart has started to beat faster, his nerves picking up as he goes farther into the darkness of the hall. There’s strange shadows being cast on the wall due to the flashlight and Jude tries his best to ignore them.
Jude takes a moment to take in the image his room represents. The clothes piled up in the corner are not even a foot away from his empty clothes basket. He flashes his light to the left and sees his out of date PlayStation left open, an array of open games scattered around it from where he’d left them when his father had called him into the front room earlier.
He steps into his room and is about to search for something to pack clothes into when he hears a screech and a crash come from the other side of the house. Jude immediately turns off his flashlight and stops breathing. He closes his eyes and tries not to let the sob he’s choking down escape him.
His mother is screaming and it feels distant, as if Jude isn’t in the same house. His father is cursing up a storm, getting louder and becoming more desperate as his mother’s screams cut off. There’s a loud thump and his father stops shouting.
There’s silence for only a moment before Jude hears a scuffling sound coming down the hallway. There’s a dragging sound and an almost constant wet thump, as if something is rhythmically hitting the wall. It stops half way up the hall and then Jude is left in a deafening silence.
Jude knows that he’s not thinking clearly. He knows that what he just heard is going to be something that will scar him for the rest of his life. But he has no window in his room, so it’s not like he can climb out and avoid whatever atrocity that’s been left in the hallway. He briefly wonders if he should still go about packing. He turns instead, heading back into the hallway.
He stands in that dark hallway for what seems like hours before he finally raises his arm and flicks his flashlight on.
The blood in the hallway is thick and sticky, and it paints the wall in a morbid scene of slashes that contrast nicely against the stark white walls.
Jude bends over and immediately pukes. He makes the mistake of glancing at the hall floor and he is met with a red lump curled against the wall. It looks like a skinned raccoon, only bigger, and Jude knows.
He pukes again, but there’s nothing left in his stomach and the bile burns as it comes up.
He starts to sob, the overwhelming choking sensation he’s been holding back finally breaking through. He’s gasping, his breath short, as he cries until his eyes sting.
He walks past the lump and he feels himself crack as he notices that it’s still seeping blood.
His flashlight reflects off the tv and startles him when he enters the front room. His breathing is still coming short, but his sobs have turned into silent tears, and he knows from old scars and a broken rib that eventually the tears will turn into a numb silence that leaves his brain almost catatonic.
He doesn’t see another body, only more pools of blood, and he wonders what happened to it. Wonders which of his parents was laying skinned in the hallway and which has disappeared to an unknown, but certainly bloody fate.
When he enters the kitchen, he takes note of the broken glass on the floor and the screen door thats hanging on its hinges. He heads towards the sink and goes about moving chemicals from underneath to rest them on the linoleum floor. He finds what he’s looking for and carefully extracts the hatchet from where it was against the back of the wall.
He leaves through the open door and chooses not to look back.
Jude walks out into his yard and shivers slightly in the morning fog. The dew on the ground is seeping into his sneakers, but he chooses to pay it no mind as he turns left and heads towards the road behind his house. The air is deceptively quiet as he treks his way there, no birds are singing as the sun rises and no cars are driving on the bumpy roads.
He stays on the sidewalk, years of remembered lectures inclining him not to walk in the middle of such a dangerous place. He gives brief thoughts to his father’s last lecture and is proud of himself for not flinching.
Jude looks both ways before crossing the street and he wonders at the fact that this measure is so ingrained, that even as he’s leaving the scene of a gruesome crime, he still finds it in himself to practice road safety. A flash of the lump he left in the hallway returns to the front of his mind and he swallows down whatever is trying to come up.
Town hall isn’t even two minutes away by car, so Jude makes it easily in five minutes at a brisk walk. He sees no one on his way, but he swears he might’ve seen that old pervert Mr. Brown peeking out of his upstairs window. Jude takes in the irony that he feels some type of relief that there might be others out there, even if they are convicted felons.
Jude knows he needs to stay vigilant, needs to stop focusing on trivial things and instead never stop looking for danger, but the weight in his arm is pulling at his side and he feels the usually ache in his ribs that always comes when he’s being too active. He tries to stay focused, tries to keep watching on everything around him, but his side burns. He switches the hatchet to his other hand and closes his eyes, willing this pain, just like the rest of it, to go to the back of his mind, where it’s not in the spotlight.
He hears the bush to his right rustle and he almost pees himself. He stays still, not even turning his head. He does let his eyes wonder, however, toward the full bush beside him. He doesn’t see anything, not even a stray cat, so he slowly lifts his foot and let’s his panic slowly consume him as he tries his best to calmly walk away.
He makes it to the steps of town hall and allows himself to let out a large sigh of breath. He regrets it when he breathes in and smells the copper rich air around him. He knows he was emotionally compromised in his house and he suspects that if he hadn’t been so shocked and disgusted, he would’ve picked up on the copper smell of blood while he was home. Now that he’s seen what he has, the sight of a blood drenched staircase doesn’t shock his nose into not working.
It makes his eyes water.
He doesn’t see anybody, alive or dead, and wonders if they perhaps met the same fate as one of his parents had. He decides he isn’t going to go into the building, not with the risk that there is more than just blood on the inside and turns back toward the main drag.
He drops that hatchet and feels pee trickle down his leg, wetting his pants, as he stares in horror at the thing watching him from the middle of the road.
The face that stares at him is ghastly. Jude chokes back a noise as he realizes that the reason the face is so smooshed and ugly looking is because it’s multiple faces put together. The thing’s arms hang loose at the side of its body, reaching all the way to its bent, dog like legs. Its entire being was covered in different sized strips of skin, some hanging off. Jude wonders what’s keeping them attached in the first place.
The thing tilts its head, much like a confused dog would. “Help,” it softly screeches. Jude winces, he can’t help it, and he stares in fear at the creature. It can talk. It’s wearing other people’s faces and it can talk.
“Help me,” the creature croons softly. “Help me be beautiful.”
Jude runs. He gasps and tries to get his brain working again as he springs up the steps and around to the other side of the building. He doesn’t hear the creature, but seeing as he never noticed the creature approach him in the first place, he doesn’t have much hope of hearing it now that he can hear the blood rushing in his ears.
He doesn’t plan his route, just runs on instinct, and that’s what ultimately screws him over. There’s been construction going on down on Washington Ave. for over three years now and Jude doesn’t even think to look at the street sign. He turns onto the street and immediately crashes into a road closed sign.
He skids across the asphalt and cries out as he feels his skin tear. His head bounces off the road with a sickening smack and he loses his sight for a few seconds. When he finally blinks himself back into sight, the creature is not even five feet away from him.
Its eyes are brown, Jude notes as he tries to keep his vomit at bay.
“You need to help me be beautiful,” is that last sentence Jude hears before the creature stalks up to him and proceeds to rip his flesh from his muscles.
It’s excruciating, Jude knows it is, and he watches in fascination as the creature meticulously peels the skin from his forearm and applies it to itself.
Blood is what keep it attached, Jude realizes. The blood dries to the mess already there, and it sticks to the creature.
Jude gets to wonder for a brief moment why the creature doesn’t kill its victims before it skins them and then the pain finally registers and Jude screams.
He screams and screams and soon his screaming stops sounding like a human’s and soon starts to sound like a dying feral animal. He screeches and wonders why he can’t move, can’t even attempt to get his limbs to work and escape. But then he’s distracted from that line of thinking and he screams again.
His face is gone by the time the creature is done with him. Blood is trickling everywhere and Jude wonders how he isn’t dead yet. There’s no way someone can be skinned and still live, Jude thinks. It’s not possible for a human to be able to live through this hell.
The creature is looking down at him with its big doe eyes, like he’s something important. Like Jude has just given the damn thing a gift.
“Thank you,” the creature giggles. “I’m very pretty.”
The creature hunches over and walks on all fours as it goes toward another part of the construction site. Jude resigns himself to being left there to bleed out, when suddenly the creature is back. It drops a broken piece of glass in front of him and it takes Jude a second to realize it’s a piece of broken mirror. The creature finagles with it until it’s resting against the knocked over road closed sign. When the creature moved, Jude is confronted with the sight of his own gory face.
“So ugly,” the creature mourns, taking steps away from Jude.
Jude stares at his reflection, shock and dismay seeping into his being. He no longer has a face. He has no identity.
“Need help,” the creature says softly. “Need help?”
“I…” Jude gurgles out, his gaze not leaving his reflection’s. He stares into his brown eyes and the last independent thought he has is that he thought his eyes were green.
“I’m so ugly,” he sobs out, his body finally twitching from its previously paralyzed state.
“Need help,” the creature says firmly.
“Yeah,” he chokes out. “Yeah, I need help.”
The creature doesn’t move from its place a few feet away, just sits on its haunches and continues to let the boy mourn his lost beauty.
“Need help,” the boy whispers to the creature. Its eyes transfer from the mirror to its companion.
“Need help,” it croons, its voice sliding into a deep, smooth tone.
The companion nods in understanding.
They all just want to be beautiful.
Jude has listened quietly as Ms. Leek looked straight into the camera and told the nation that hope was futile.
Jude glances to his right and takes in the dark look his father is wearing. He started yelling at the first broadcast, screaming and hollering until his face was red and sweating. His mother had stood there like usual, not even flinching when his father got too close to her face.
He quit yelling when the broadcast turned back on and showed the same footage for the third time in a row.
His parents have been quietly arguing for the past hour and a half and Jude had let his mind wonder. He waits for the eighth rendition of the same broadcast to come up on the tv, but instead of the chime of the nightly news report, the sound cuts off just as the power goes out, leaving them in almost complete darkness. There’s a battery powered lamp that stays lit in the kitchen, the light only barely reaching them in the front room.
“We’re not staying here, that’s for damn sure,” his father grumbles, huffing as he propels himself out of his lazy boy chair.
“And where do you propose we go, Frank?” his mother asks softly.
“Town hall,” his father snaps from in the kitchen. He comes back in and Jude can see enough of his profile to brace himself for the flashlight thrown his way. He catches it, fumbling only a little. “Go grab what you need, boy,” his father says sternly, already heading back into the kitchen.
His mother rises, her dress softly fluttering as she follows her husband into the kitchen.
Jude says nothing as he simply stands and heads down the hall to his bedroom. He flicks the flashlight on as he loses the soft glow from the kitchen. He finds his heart has started to beat faster, his nerves picking up as he goes farther into the darkness of the hall. There’s strange shadows being cast on the wall due to the flashlight and Jude tries his best to ignore them.
Jude takes a moment to take in the image his room represents. The clothes piled up in the corner are not even a foot away from his empty clothes basket. He flashes his light to the left and sees his out of date PlayStation left open, an array of open games scattered around it from where he’d left them when his father had called him into the front room earlier.
He steps into his room and is about to search for something to pack clothes into when he hears a screech and a crash come from the other side of the house. Jude immediately turns off his flashlight and stops breathing. He closes his eyes and tries not to let the sob he’s choking down escape him.
His mother is screaming and it feels distant, as if Jude isn’t in the same house. His father is cursing up a storm, getting louder and becoming more desperate as his mother’s screams cut off. There’s a loud thump and his father stops shouting.
There’s silence for only a moment before Jude hears a scuffling sound coming down the hallway. There’s a dragging sound and an almost constant wet thump, as if something is rhythmically hitting the wall. It stops half way up the hall and then Jude is left in a deafening silence.
Jude knows that he’s not thinking clearly. He knows that what he just heard is going to be something that will scar him for the rest of his life. But he has no window in his room, so it’s not like he can climb out and avoid whatever atrocity that’s been left in the hallway. He briefly wonders if he should still go about packing. He turns instead, heading back into the hallway.
He stands in that dark hallway for what seems like hours before he finally raises his arm and flicks his flashlight on.
The blood in the hallway is thick and sticky, and it paints the wall in a morbid scene of slashes that contrast nicely against the stark white walls.
Jude bends over and immediately pukes. He makes the mistake of glancing at the hall floor and he is met with a red lump curled against the wall. It looks like a skinned raccoon, only bigger, and Jude knows.
He pukes again, but there’s nothing left in his stomach and the bile burns as it comes up.
He starts to sob, the overwhelming choking sensation he’s been holding back finally breaking through. He’s gasping, his breath short, as he cries until his eyes sting.
He walks past the lump and he feels himself crack as he notices that it’s still seeping blood.
His flashlight reflects off the tv and startles him when he enters the front room. His breathing is still coming short, but his sobs have turned into silent tears, and he knows from old scars and a broken rib that eventually the tears will turn into a numb silence that leaves his brain almost catatonic.
He doesn’t see another body, only more pools of blood, and he wonders what happened to it. Wonders which of his parents was laying skinned in the hallway and which has disappeared to an unknown, but certainly bloody fate.
When he enters the kitchen, he takes note of the broken glass on the floor and the screen door thats hanging on its hinges. He heads towards the sink and goes about moving chemicals from underneath to rest them on the linoleum floor. He finds what he’s looking for and carefully extracts the hatchet from where it was against the back of the wall.
He leaves through the open door and chooses not to look back.
Jude walks out into his yard and shivers slightly in the morning fog. The dew on the ground is seeping into his sneakers, but he chooses to pay it no mind as he turns left and heads towards the road behind his house. The air is deceptively quiet as he treks his way there, no birds are singing as the sun rises and no cars are driving on the bumpy roads.
He stays on the sidewalk, years of remembered lectures inclining him not to walk in the middle of such a dangerous place. He gives brief thoughts to his father’s last lecture and is proud of himself for not flinching.
Jude looks both ways before crossing the street and he wonders at the fact that this measure is so ingrained, that even as he’s leaving the scene of a gruesome crime, he still finds it in himself to practice road safety. A flash of the lump he left in the hallway returns to the front of his mind and he swallows down whatever is trying to come up.
Town hall isn’t even two minutes away by car, so Jude makes it easily in five minutes at a brisk walk. He sees no one on his way, but he swears he might’ve seen that old pervert Mr. Brown peeking out of his upstairs window. Jude takes in the irony that he feels some type of relief that there might be others out there, even if they are convicted felons.
Jude knows he needs to stay vigilant, needs to stop focusing on trivial things and instead never stop looking for danger, but the weight in his arm is pulling at his side and he feels the usually ache in his ribs that always comes when he’s being too active. He tries to stay focused, tries to keep watching on everything around him, but his side burns. He switches the hatchet to his other hand and closes his eyes, willing this pain, just like the rest of it, to go to the back of his mind, where it’s not in the spotlight.
He hears the bush to his right rustle and he almost pees himself. He stays still, not even turning his head. He does let his eyes wonder, however, toward the full bush beside him. He doesn’t see anything, not even a stray cat, so he slowly lifts his foot and let’s his panic slowly consume him as he tries his best to calmly walk away.
He makes it to the steps of town hall and allows himself to let out a large sigh of breath. He regrets it when he breathes in and smells the copper rich air around him. He knows he was emotionally compromised in his house and he suspects that if he hadn’t been so shocked and disgusted, he would’ve picked up on the copper smell of blood while he was home. Now that he’s seen what he has, the sight of a blood drenched staircase doesn’t shock his nose into not working.
It makes his eyes water.
He doesn’t see anybody, alive or dead, and wonders if they perhaps met the same fate as one of his parents had. He decides he isn’t going to go into the building, not with the risk that there is more than just blood on the inside and turns back toward the main drag.
He drops that hatchet and feels pee trickle down his leg, wetting his pants, as he stares in horror at the thing watching him from the middle of the road.
The face that stares at him is ghastly. Jude chokes back a noise as he realizes that the reason the face is so smooshed and ugly looking is because it’s multiple faces put together. The thing’s arms hang loose at the side of its body, reaching all the way to its bent, dog like legs. Its entire being was covered in different sized strips of skin, some hanging off. Jude wonders what’s keeping them attached in the first place.
The thing tilts its head, much like a confused dog would. “Help,” it softly screeches. Jude winces, he can’t help it, and he stares in fear at the creature. It can talk. It’s wearing other people’s faces and it can talk.
“Help me,” the creature croons softly. “Help me be beautiful.”
Jude runs. He gasps and tries to get his brain working again as he springs up the steps and around to the other side of the building. He doesn’t hear the creature, but seeing as he never noticed the creature approach him in the first place, he doesn’t have much hope of hearing it now that he can hear the blood rushing in his ears.
He doesn’t plan his route, just runs on instinct, and that’s what ultimately screws him over. There’s been construction going on down on Washington Ave. for over three years now and Jude doesn’t even think to look at the street sign. He turns onto the street and immediately crashes into a road closed sign.
He skids across the asphalt and cries out as he feels his skin tear. His head bounces off the road with a sickening smack and he loses his sight for a few seconds. When he finally blinks himself back into sight, the creature is not even five feet away from him.
Its eyes are brown, Jude notes as he tries to keep his vomit at bay.
“You need to help me be beautiful,” is that last sentence Jude hears before the creature stalks up to him and proceeds to rip his flesh from his muscles.
It’s excruciating, Jude knows it is, and he watches in fascination as the creature meticulously peels the skin from his forearm and applies it to itself.
Blood is what keep it attached, Jude realizes. The blood dries to the mess already there, and it sticks to the creature.
Jude gets to wonder for a brief moment why the creature doesn’t kill its victims before it skins them and then the pain finally registers and Jude screams.
He screams and screams and soon his screaming stops sounding like a human’s and soon starts to sound like a dying feral animal. He screeches and wonders why he can’t move, can’t even attempt to get his limbs to work and escape. But then he’s distracted from that line of thinking and he screams again.
His face is gone by the time the creature is done with him. Blood is trickling everywhere and Jude wonders how he isn’t dead yet. There’s no way someone can be skinned and still live, Jude thinks. It’s not possible for a human to be able to live through this hell.
The creature is looking down at him with its big doe eyes, like he’s something important. Like Jude has just given the damn thing a gift.
“Thank you,” the creature giggles. “I’m very pretty.”
The creature hunches over and walks on all fours as it goes toward another part of the construction site. Jude resigns himself to being left there to bleed out, when suddenly the creature is back. It drops a broken piece of glass in front of him and it takes Jude a second to realize it’s a piece of broken mirror. The creature finagles with it until it’s resting against the knocked over road closed sign. When the creature moved, Jude is confronted with the sight of his own gory face.
“So ugly,” the creature mourns, taking steps away from Jude.
Jude stares at his reflection, shock and dismay seeping into his being. He no longer has a face. He has no identity.
“Need help,” the creature says softly. “Need help?”
“I…” Jude gurgles out, his gaze not leaving his reflection’s. He stares into his brown eyes and the last independent thought he has is that he thought his eyes were green.
“I’m so ugly,” he sobs out, his body finally twitching from its previously paralyzed state.
“Need help,” the creature says firmly.
“Yeah,” he chokes out. “Yeah, I need help.”
The creature doesn’t move from its place a few feet away, just sits on its haunches and continues to let the boy mourn his lost beauty.
“Need help,” the boy whispers to the creature. Its eyes transfer from the mirror to its companion.
“Need help,” it croons, its voice sliding into a deep, smooth tone.
The companion nods in understanding.
They all just want to be beautiful.
