Masquerade My Ellie

"Okay, Mr. Webstar, why don't we start from the beginning?"

"Yes doctor...

A few years ago, I was a happy man. I had everything, I had a great job, a nice house, good car and the most beautiful wife I could ever ask for. And she was pregnant. But, my wife had many health problems which could have interfered with the pregnancy, the doctors told her it would be the better idea to abort the child as chances are the child would be born with spina bifida or some other life changing defect. But, my wife was so persistent that our child would make it. I never questioned her for a second, most of the time whatever she said was right. She said this baby would survive. Well, she didn't say anything about herself surviving.

After the child was born, my wife passed away. The illness had finally caught up with her. She was right, though. She gave birth to a healthy baby girl, I named her Ellie, after her mother. For the most part, Ellie was a healthy child, she rarely got sick and she hardly ever complained of her illness. She was born with a blood disease, but she never seemed affect by it. She took her medication daily and went on with her life.

She developed a little talent in art, she loved drawing. She constantly drew, there was so much paper in my house, if there had been a fire, we'd have no chance. Well, I decided on her 7th Birthday that she should have her own room just for drawing and painting. Her own little art studio. The house we were living in at the time only had two bedrooms and there was hardly any room anywhere for anything. I had the money, so we packed up and moved to nice, quiet part of Canada a few miles from where we lived previously.

The house we moved into was really nice, spacious and comfortable. It was a three bedroom house, so the third unused bedroom could be used for Ellie's art studio. The room was weird, though. It was the only room that still had anything in it, apart from the kitchen and bathroom. In the corning of the room, sitting untouched on a small desk, was an old computer. It looked so ancient, like nothing anyone would use in this day and age. But everything was there, the monitor, the tower, the mouse and keyboard, even two speakers and a printer. I had no idea what to make of it. I mean, there'd be no way this thing would work, right?

I switched the thing on and waited to proven right. I was proven wrong, the start-up went faster than my laptop. It ran unbelievably well for how old it must have been. My daughter begged me to keep it in her art studio so she could use paint on it and print out her drawings. Well, no shock that she won, she was so much like her mother. Persistent and down right stubborn at times.

I was helping her get the computer started up and began my search for MS Paint. Unfortunately, it didn't look like this computer had it. The only thing I could find was something called Masquerade Picaso Paint Studio... I opened the file up and it looked almost identical to MS Paint... I tried to click on something but before I had a chance a small character popped up, like the annoying paper clip thing on Microsoft Office. It was quite cute, though, to be fair. The character wore a white dress splattered with different colored paint, her hair was blue and hang in messy pigtails and she wore red tear shaped glasses. Her eyes were almost glowing blue, certainly whoever made this must've put more work into the character than anything else.

It wasn't long until she started to speak. Her voice was like a child's, light and soft. She spoke with a thick Italian accent. And in her digital voice she said “Welcome To Masquerade Picaso Paint Studio! I am your host, call me Alina!”

My daughter instantly fell in love with it, and I saw why, the character was indeed really cute and charming. Unlike the rude paper clip, it would give hints to her like how to quickly color things in and how to mix the paints to make the color she wanted, she was a really nice character.

Well, I saw no issues with it, so I left my daughter to play around with it for a few hours. I called her down for dinner but she seemed to completely ignore me, so I called again and this time she heard me and came downstairs. But, she looked...off... She looked paler, thinner. I thought she was seriously sick, I panicked. I had her eat her food and take her medication quickly before anything bad happened to her, but luckily after her medicine kicked in she looked perfectly fine. It didn't stop there. My Ellie had always been good for remembering to take her medicine, but since that day she always forgot. I started to worry about her. She spent more time playing with the computer programme than she did actually drawing.

Her drawings became a problem, also. Whereas before she'd draw things a regular young girl would draw, princesses and princes, butterflies, flowers...now she would draw distorted things, her art became dark and horrible to see. She drew realistic gore, ritualistic sacrifices, horrible things. She locked the doors, too. She'd never let me in after I saw her pictures. She shut me off completely.

One night, I don't even know what had happened to me, I just became so controlled by my worry and fear that I broke her door down with great force, splinters falling everywhere. And what I saw would crush my spirit forever.

My Ellie, my daughter... laid dead on the floor by her computer. The paint studio still open. The pixel girl, Alina, staring at me, her eyes turned black with her blue pupils staring daggers at me. She smiled from ear to ear with a horrid grin, her pixelled giggle echoing in my ear. The final thing my baby drew before that monster killed her, was a note to me. My daughter stopped taking her medication because the pixel girl told her to. She slowly killed herself because the pixel girl told her too.

To think, I thought it was cute, that was all a façade. A masquerade. She fooled me until the very end. I cursed it, cursed it hard. Weeping over my baby's body.

It was all a trap, from the very beginning. And I allowed it to happen. It was me...

I'm so sorry, Ellie.

I'm so sorry."