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Mary Worthington the Bloody
Topic Started: Jul 10 2008, 01:39 AM (21 Views)
calliope
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{ approx. 1am | unnamed NPCs | house in Cedonia }

Three girls giggled in the moonlight that streamed in through the window to their right. It was late, but being a summer night and one of the few nights a year they were all permitted to sleep over at one house, they were indulged and no adult came to knock on their door and whisper about the need for quiet.

The eldest girl tucked a stray strand of blonde hair behind her ear and demanded in a whisper, “Let’s play a game,” once the giggles had died away.

“Like what?” asked the youngest, though she was not much younger than the other girls. All three were in the seventh grade. The eldest wore a fuzzy pajama suit with unicorn-print fabric, whilst the youngest wore an over-large tee shirt with Mickey Mouse emblazoned across its front. The middle girl, a quiet, brown-haired girl with bright green eyes, wore a lace-hemmed, pink silk nightgown, and said nothing.

“We should call Bloody Mary.”

The brunette’s bright green eyes went wide, but still she remained silent. She was by nature shy, and only because this was her cousin’s house had she come at all – at the vehement urgings of her parents, who feared their child’s reclusive neighbor.

The youngest girl shuddered in frightened delight. “How?” she asked.

The elder child had certainly noticed the wide green eyes of her friend’s older cousin, and took a certain delight in it – the kind of heartlessly cruel delight that children too young to understand such nuances of ethics but fully aware of the perks of power and the importance that dominance plays in relationships. “We need a mirror,” she said decisively, looking around the room. “The bathroom!” she exclaimed in a strangled whisper, trying to keep her voice down but too excited to fully succeed.

She leapt up from the bed, swiftly followed by her young friend, and turned to tug at the arm of the middle girl, urging, “Come on!”

“Isn’t this a bit childish?” she protested, trying to hide her unease under a façade of maturity. “I mean, come on.”

“Come on,” echoed her cousin, heedless of the undertones. “Who cares? It’ll be fun.”

“Fun,” said the nervous brunette. “Yeah.”

But they were already at the bathroom.

“You first,” the eldest nudged her.

“Why me?” she protested.

“Because you’re scared.”

Well that didn’t seem very fair at all. Like many youths, however, she didn’t want to seem like a coward in front of others, and even more, she didn’t want to give the other girls fodder for ridicule. “I don’t know how.”

That earned her a sneer. “Oh, come on.”

“Why don’t you show me?”

There! She’d turned that around rather neatly, hadn’t she?

“Fine,” said the eldest, who turned to face the mirror. Lit by the faint nightlight that was plugged into the wall socket, it gave her reflection a ghostly appearance. Her blonde hair formed a sort of faded halo around her face, and the darker-haired brunette seemed to disappear into a shadowed pool. “Okay.”

The brunette smirked, but the expression was lost in the darkness.

“Bloody Mary,” she began, her tone beginning strong. She began to repeat the name, three times before a pause, until she’d recovered her nerve and finished off the mantra in a dramatic whisper.

When, after a pregnant pause, nothing had happened, the blonde grinned. “Your turn!”

“Just like that?”

“Sure,” said the eldest. “Unless you’ve thought of a better way.”

Emboldened by the older girl’s failure, the middle child stepped up to the basin and faced the mirror. “Okay,” she whispered, but, perhaps angry at the straits her shy nature had gotten her into, or determined to show that she wasn’t a coward, or maybe just to indulge a hidden streak toward the theatrical, she said, instead of the usual litany of naming, “Mary Agnes Worthington, you didn’t deserve your sons. Mary Agnes Worthington, I am not afraid. Mary Agnes Worthington, you’re nothing to me. Mary Ag-”

She didn’t finish the fourth naming before her shadowy reflection disappeared entirely from the mirror, along with the image of the darkened room, to be replaced with the blood-soaked visage of a woman in white. The apparition bared its teeth. “Maybe you should have been afraid, little mortal,” it whispered, before stretching, emerging from the mirror as though the glassy surface were a portal to a ghostly realm.

All three girls screamed, precisely like little girls tend to do when confronted with terror made manifest.

Reaching forward with its claws, the creature who answered to Mary Worthington’s Name proceeded to scratch out the eyes of the girl who had named it Bloody Mary before grasping the throat of the more inventive, far more terrified of the two, and pulling her back into the mirror.

The youngest girl it left unscathed, physically at least, giving her a bloody-lipped smile before pulling her cousin through the portal that the mirror had become.

By the time adults arrived, it was gone.

The paramedics didn’t know what to make of any of it, but it had been a long night for most of them. They tried not to think about it too hard, focusing instead on the blonde’s injuries, and most of them succeeded.
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