User:The Reading Proxy

As Helen Mathews walked home she couldn't help but feel as though something was off. As hard as it was, she resisted the urge to run home as fast as her feet would carry her, that was until she heard a scream. Knowing it was her younger sister Amy, Helen sped home, overcome with the need to protect her sister from whatever or whoever sought to do her harm.

Unfortunatly, as fate would have it Helen arrived just in time to see the corpses of her mother, father, and sister splattered about the kitchen with no killer to be seen. Helen was taken into police custody for questioning.

Hours later, Helen was removed from police custody by her aunt and uncle. While their doughter, Claire, was kind and sympathetic, her parents did not share her atitude and could be mean and even down right cruel at times. While Claire wanted Helen to have the guest room, or even to share her room, Helen's aunt and uncle dissagreed. They forced her to sleep on a moldy army cot in the storage room of their cold, dark and slightly damp basement.

A few weeks later, Helen was signed up for therapy after showing signs of depression. After one meeting with her therapist, Helen took a walk through the woods in an attempt to clear her head. It wasn't long before she felt as though she was being watched. Turining around, she saw no one.

"Hello? Who's there?" She asked, looking around for any signs of another human being.

Helen waited for what seemed like hours, but what really was only a minute or two before turning to walk home. However when she turned, she came face to face with what appeared to be an exteremly tall, pale, slender man in a suit. Upon closer inspection, Helen could see that the man -no thing, had no face.

She wanted to run, hide, anything to get away from that thing, but she couldn't move. Then suddenly, the creature dissapered. Just like that. With him gone, Helen found she could once again move freely. Not wasting any time, she turned and ran to her aunt and uncle's home as she could.

Feeling paranoid and sick to her stomach, Helen decided she would skip dinner and go straight to bed. While walking down the stairs to the basement, Helen thought she saw the figure from the woods at the door to the storage room she slept in. Panicing, she pulled the string that hung from the celing to turn on the light.

However convinced she had been that he was there, he was gone by the time the dull light flickered on. Shaking her head, Helen decided she had simply not gotten enough sleep and was seeing things. As paranoid as Helen was she did manage to find sleep that night, though it wasn't sound and didn't last. Helen found herself waking suddenly in the ungodly hours of the morning from a strange and frankly, disterbing nightmare.

In her nightmare, Helen found herself surounded by hundreds of children of both genders, and several periods in history, all ranging from ages four to ten. They looked both dead and alive at the same time. Before Helen's very eyes, the children's eyes began to leak an errie black goo, vegly resembeling blood. Screaming, Helen turned to flee, only to bump into someone and fall backwards onto the ground. Looking up, she saw that she had run into the figure from the woods. To her horror, black, tentacle like appendages began to grow from his back stretching towards her. Helen awoke before the tentacles could reach her. She couldn't fall back to sleep after that.

The dream and random appearances of the suit-clad, tentacled monstrosisty continued to plauge Helen over the next few days. The next week when Helen told her therapist about these occurances, she had been told it was just her anxiety about her familes killer possibly coming after her manifesting itself, and that the children in her dream where apperitions of the killers possible past victims. As much as Helen wanted to agree with this explanation, she couldn't shake the feeling that there was more to it than that, but she didn't say anything.

Over the next few weeks, Helen began to show signs of developing anxiety disiorders such as; Insomnia, sudden but intense panic attacks, and flashbacks of hearing her sister's scream or seeing her family's mangled bodies. These symptoms only intensified after waking from her recuring nightmare or seeing the terrifying figure. Not long after, Helen began suffering from seemingly random coughing fits (ussualy ending in vomiting up puddles of blood), migranes, and mild amnisia.

Upon the discovery that she was coughing up blood, Helen was driven straight to the emergency room. They could find nothing wrong, and so simply explained her symptoms by saying her anxiety had her to worked up. They gave her anxiety medication and sent her home.

Over the next few weeks, Helen began to have amnesia so severe that she would find herself unable to remember weeks at a time. What she could remember was hazy at best, and even then they didn't feel like those were her memories. She felt as though she couldn't control her own actions, it was as if she was merely observing someone elses life.

One morning, Helen awoke feeling normal for the first time in months. She got up to have breakfast and saw her aunt and uncle sitting at the kitchen table, chatting over a morning coffee. Their conversation came to a crashing hult when they saw Helen, it always did. They stopped to watch as she poured herself a bowl of cereal and began to eat. When she finnished eating, Helen got up to put her dishes into the dishwasher under the unwavering stare of her relatives.

As Helen began to rinse out her bowl, she once again felt like she was being controled. Except this time it was different, this time it was more of a trance, as if she was being hypnotized. Suddenly, that feeling dissapeared and was replaced with bloodlust and the intent to kill those who had mistreated her.

Gripping a knife from the bottom of the sink, she turned and grabbed her aunt by the hair and yanking her hair up, slitting her throat.

Quickly getting over his shock, Helen's uncle flung himself at his neice, fueled by rage and greif. Helen being a slightly underweight teen, was much quicker than her overweight middle-aged uncle, and was able to dodge his attack easily. As she side stepped one of his flying fists, Helen plundged the knife deep into his arm enjoying his cry of pain.

The man fell to the floor, the grief of losing his wife before his eyes becoming to much to bare when coupled with his wounded arm. Grinnig from ear to ear, Helen stepped up to her uncle, on his knees before her. Giving a small chuckle, she trust the knife into the top of his skull, taking pleasure in the sickening crack of breaking bone.

Upon hearing the comotion, Claire had rushed into the kitchen just in time to see a blood stained, grinning Helen drop her father's body onto the bloody tiled floor. Claire was frozen with fear, unable to do anything but watch as Helen ran out the back door, stopping only to grab a machette from the shed. Claire was hardly able to pull herself together long enough to call the police before bursting into uncontrolable sobs.

Meanwhile, Helen had gotten halfway to the park down the street before she heard the police cars coming her way. She rushed into a nearby alleyway before continuing on her course, cutting through yards to avoid being seen.

Finnaly, she reached the park, only to see police cars come whipping into the parking lot, nearly taking out several bushes and trees in an effort to stop after racing aound at such high speeds. Before any of them could exit the cars and pull their guns, Helen had joined hands with the faceless man outside the woods, disapearing instantly.

~*~

No matter how many men they sent or how many times they searched, no one was able to find Helen Mathews. After several weeks of no crime and no reported sightings she was pronounced dead, having likley starved in the woods or been attacked by animals. However less than a week after Helen has been pronounced dead, a sighting was reported. Witnesses claimed to have seen a teenage couple walking just outside the woods be brutaly murdered by a girl matching Helen's discription perfectly. When asked why they had not intervened or called for help at the time of the murder, they reported that as they had been about to call for help Helen looked straight at them, as if sensing their thoughts. The witnesses claimed that they felt as if Helen had looked into their very souls. They felt as though they were in some sort of hypnotic trance forcing them to stay put, unmoving, without a sound as the teens were slaughtered before their eyes.