Plushies of Evil - Thunder

Heyo! This is a concept test, prologue chapter, for the current idea I've got going around my head for after finishing Technomancer (That will take a long while... But I can't write two separate stories while working full-time. I don't have the mental capacity for that xD.).

This is my current idea of what the start chapter would be. Even though it would probably change a lot by the time I write it if I ever do.

Anyway, hope you enjoy!

TW:

Graphic violence/gore (kinda the standard for me)

Mentions of child abuse

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POV: Katie Castle

I’ve always loved thunder.

The flood of sound: so strong it sends shivers down your spine. It’s therapeutic.

I think that’s what you’d call it? Daddy says that word a lot. He says going for long drives alone is therapeutic. And going to the shops alone. He even said work is? Now that I think about it, maybe that’s not the right word. Because work is like school, and school isn’t fun. So how could work be?

A loud crack of thunder shakes the house, followed by a bright flash of light through my bedroom window.

Lighting!

I spring out of bed and run to the window, drawing back the blinds enough to peek out. The garden outside is dark, the moon high above, half covered by dark rolling clouds holding crackling light.

Come on, strike again.

I beg the world, and it listens! It drops a bolt of light on the apple tree that stands alone in the centre of the garden.

Yay! Thanks clouds.

I love lightning too. Sometimes when there’s a storm I’ll sneak out and hide in the shed with Dogtanian. We watch the lightning and listen to the thunder and rain until we fall asleep. It’s nice. Maybe I’ll do that tonight.

Turning around, I run back to my bed, looking for Dogtanian on my pillow where I left him. He’s not there.

“Dogtanian? Where are you?” I call quietly, careful not to shout too loud and upset my parents. They never like it when I’m up this late.

I pull back my covers, throwing them to the floor as I hunt through my bed for my fluffy companion. But, I can’t find him.

“Did he go downstairs?”

I glance at the door, creeping closer and carefully avoiding the toys left on my floor. I should clean those up tomorrow, Mummy hates it when I leave things out. She says it’s childish and careless. I don’t want to make Mummy angry again.

I wrap my arms around myself as I press my ear to the door. It’s quiet. I reach up for the door handle but flinch and pause when I hear shouting downstairs.

“Dogtanian,” I whine and pull back.

Usually he’d keep me company when Mummy’s angry. Where is he? I crawl back into bed, pulling my covers off the floor and wrapping them around myself.

Thunder sounds again, drowning out my thoughts and the crashing sounds below. I love thunder.

***

POV: Dogtanian

I love thunder.

It always helps calm Katie down. I hate it when she’s scared: it makes me feel sick to my stomach. Though, I don’t really have a stomach. I’m not sure why her negative emotions are so gross to me. I’m sure we’re meant to be able to feed on them, but they’ve always tasted revolting to on my tongue. Don’t have one of those either.

“She’s a freak!”

I’m pulled out of my thoughts by Mrs Castle yelling again. I’ve never had much love for Katie’s mother, or her father for that matter. Mrs Castle is a mentally unstable abusive wretch, and Mr Castle is too weak to stand up to her. He prefers to run away and hide, pretending everything is okay and leaving his wife to her own devices with Katie.

“She’s not a freak, she’s your daughter!”

I’m not used to Mr Castle fighting back, I guess seeing the bruises was a wake up call for him.

It was for me too…

Mrs Castle wasn’t so bad at first. The occasional unjustified grounding, removing toys for eating too quickly, or too slowly. Even sometimes separating us just to drive home a point. It hurt how much Katie cried because of that. It hurt not being able to comfort her. However, a few months ago, she started getting worse.

She stopped taking her meds for some reason. Started getting violent. She seems to see something wrong with Katie, like she’s a scourge on this household that needs to be cleansed.

I think it’s the doing of my kind. I’ve felt someone else’s influence in the house, feeding off the Castles for a long while now. But I ignored it.

I thought it wasn’t my problem unless they harm Katie, not worth wasting my strength on. But I was wrong.

I assumed they just wanted to passively feed off of negativity, but I think they were actually causing it. And now they’ve grown violent.

“She’s a freak, David! She attacked a kid with scissors! What kind of eight-year-old does that?” Mrs Castle yells, her jaw so tight I can see the muscles strain.

“She just needs help, Gem. You both do!” Mr Castle screams back, unable to control his own anger.

Mrs Castle isn’t lying. It did look like Katie attacked a kid today. But that wasn’t her fault!

It’s not her fault she’s special.

My kind won’t stop messing with her. Normally, I can keep them under control, but I turned my back on them for five seconds and they acted. She thought she was defending herself, but of course no one else could see the truth.

“Help? Help!? You think I need help? I need to kill that thing, not get help. I’ve seen it, David, the darkness that follows it. It’s there, it always has been. Listening. Watching. It’s coming for us you know. One day she’ll make sure we don’t wake up,” Mrs Castle raves, grasping her head and doubling over, startling her husband.

“Kill her? Gem, when did you last take your meds?” Mr Castle asks with concern, laying a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “Do I need to call Dr Johnson again?”

“You need. To get out of my way,” she growls viscerally, looking up at him with hatred in her eyes, the shadows around the room stretching towards her.

Oh no.

“Gem?” Mr Castle asks, backing away in fear.

Mrs Castle looks up, the sclera of her eyes dyed pitch black.

They’re a possession type.

Of course, they just had to be a possession type! Do I stop it? It looks like it’s after Katie, but I’d be breaking the rules if I harmed Mrs Castle.

Fucking possession!

Mrs Castle takes an unstable step forward, the sound of her footfall echoing through the house and eliciting dread. I can feel Katie’s distress growing upstairs: it tastes disgusting. I need to do something. I can’t let this thing get near Katie.

Mr Castle appears to have the same idea, stepping between his wife and the hallway.

“Darling, what’s wrong?” he asks cautiously, slowly backing away from the unsettling phenomenon dimming the lights and stretching the tendrils of darkness towards his wife.

“Move,” Mrs Castle growls again, her voice morphing into something inhuman, scratching at my mind.

Mrs Castle, or whatever’s controlling her, reaches out sideways and pulls a knife from a holder on the counter. The blade seems to bubble, gaining a roiling black hue that sets my instincts off.

Shit.

She leaps at Mr Castle before he can react, driving the knife through his skull in a vicious downwards stab. The blade plunges into him, meeting barely any resistance. Mr Castle stumbles back, his face frozen in an expression of shock as he reaches up to touch the object protruding from his head.

The knife pulses power, black veins quickly spreading from the point of impact. Mr Castle sways for a second before his eyes roll back and he falls to the ground. Dead.

“Daddy?” I hear a quiet, fearful voice call from the doorway.

Shit!

Standing a few metres behind her father’s corpse, in direct sight of the monster that was her mother, is Katie.

I was too focused to notice her coming down! I have to do something.

But I can’t break the rules!

Mrs Castle looks up from the dead man before her, an unsettling smile stretching so unnaturally wide it slowly tears open her cheeks to keep spreading. Blood and saliva slide down her chin as she looks at Katie hungrily.

“Hello, little monster,” she purrs, the shadows all around echoing her abyssal voice.

A stream of pure, unadulterated fear flows into me from Katie as the creature takes an unsteady step towards her. I’m glad I don’t have a stomach. If I did, I wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to vomit right now.

I have to protect Katie.

Without another thought, I narrow my focus on Mrs Castle. I feel for the space she inhabits, using a sense I’ve always has but can’t quite explain, and pull. I pull with all my might. And it hurts. It hurts so much.

I don’t know how to fight. I can even feel that this poorly designed attack will set me back a few years of growth, but I don’t care. I can feel Katie crying in distress, and see the monster getting closer.

I let out a scream, bearing through the pain trying to split my head open, and force through my attack.

Mrs Castle freezes. Only a step away from Katie: who falls to the ground, crying in fear and panic. Mrs Castle’s expression shifts from hunger to panic and understanding. She looks around frantically, making eye contact with me as I finally succeed.

Space finally gives way, straight through the centre of Mrs Castles body. The world contorts and Mrs Castle is brutally torn asunder as a crack momentarily appears where her sternum should be.

I feel a sudden, strong influx of negativity. However, unlike with Katie’s that disgusts me, this negativity tastes sweet and alluring, like a well earned treat.

My vision starts to spin, and I don’t see when the crack heals, or when Mrs Castle falls in a pool of blood and guts. Instead, I trudge forward, relying on my other senses to guide myself. I slowly reach Katie, covered in her mother’s blood, curled up into a ball in the doorway staring at her parents’ corpses with a shell-shocked expression.

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper against my better judgement, I’m too tired to care about the rules, as I clamber up and push my way into her arms.

“It’s not real. It’s just a dream. Wake up. Wake up,” Katie mutters frantically, her stream of denial mixing with the thunder outside.

I don’t think I’ll like thunder anymore after tonight.

***

POV: Alice Wright

I hate thunder.

It seems to make people antsy, and we get more useless calls. Like this one.

“A fucking noise complaint,” my partner, Jack, grumbles as I pull up in front of the reported house. “In the middle of a thunderstorm.”

I roll my eyes at him, starting to think I should make a complaint about his noise.

“Yeah yeah. Stop complaining and let’s just get this over with,” I tell him before stepping out of the car, frowning at the rain soaking my uniform.

Why couldn’t we just stay at the station today?

With a sigh, I approach the door of the large, semi-detached home before me. Jack follows me closely, complaining under his breath about the rain. I reach the door and slam my hand against it three times.

I wait for a few moments, expecting some reaction from inside, but get nothing. I don’t hear anything either. So much for a noise complaint.

I slam my hand on the door again before yelling in.

“Police, open the door.”

I don’t see any movement through the glazed glass beside the door, but there is a small click, and the front door creeks open.

“Hello?” I ask, pushing the door open wider and seeing an empty hallway. “Weird, how did it open.”

“Maybe a remote lock?” Jack asks, looking at the clearly mechanical lock with a key still sat in the hole inside.

“Does that look remote to you?”

“No. Should we go in?”

I pause for a few seconds. No one’s invited us in, and we don’t have a warrant... But this situation is freaky and I’d be lying if I said wasn’t intrigued.

“Sure. If anyone asks though, it was your idea,” I say before stepping over the threshold and shouting: “We’re coming in!”

Jack scoffs and follows me.

The lights in the hallway are on, so we cautiously walk forwards while looking around. There are a few paintings hanging on the walls, some weird modern art shit that I’ll never understand, and a couple of open doors to an empty sitting room and coat closet.

I start to smell something foul, a mix of iron and sulphur, as we approach the end of the hallway, passing the stairs. I turn the corner at the end of the hallway to look deeper into the home, but the sight I see stops me dead in my tracks.

“What the fuck.”

Sitting in the middle of the hallway, a few metres in front of me, is a small girl. She looks to be around seven or eight years old, but I can’t exactly tell through the thick coating of blood covering her.

She’s curled into a ball, rocking back and forth muttering something while clutching a strangely clean, cuddly toy dog. In front of her, one almost touching her foot, are two bodies.

The first, is the most grotesque thing I’ve ever seen: a woman, presumably the child’s mother, ripped in half from the groin to the throat. Her innards are dumped on the floor beneath her, and the two halves of her body are only held together by a few strips of bloody flesh that used to be her neck. To make things worse, the face above that neck is horribly disfigured, split open from lip to ear.

The man behind her is lying on his face, making it hard to see him properly, but looks to have a knife stuck in his head. Jack steps into sight of the corpses and keels over next to me, dumping his dinner on the floor the moment he sees them. I manage to keep mine, but not by much.

I only manage to hold my stomach because I’m unable to tear my eyes away from the small girl. Watching her rock back and forth, muttering something in distress, my heart aches. Poor thing, what the fuck have you seen?

Could we have stopped it if we got here earlier? Do I even want to know what it was?

I slowly approach the small girl, ignoring my still retching partner.

“Hello there,” I begin, trying to draw her attention away from the horror scene before her. “What’s your name honey?”

She doesn’t seem to hear me, her eyes remaining wide, fixed on the corpses. I place a hand on her shoulder, but she doesn’t react at all still. She’s in shock. Will I make it worse if I try to move her? God damn it! I’m not trained for this shit!

Thunder shakes the house and, as if on cue, the small girl finally looks away from the bodies.

This is gonna be a long night. But maybe thunder isn’t so bad after all.