Double, Double, Toil and Trouble Who: Lamia [Narrative] What: The aftermath of funtime. When: Halloween night Where: Her apartment Warnings: Graphic(ish) descriptions. This is Lamia.
Darkness.
An absence of light, save for a lonely stream of moonlight through the window.
It permeated the empty space of her poor excuse for an apartment, raking over the dirty walls and casting long shadows along the floor. She lay still, entranced by motes of dust speckling the moonlit rays. With dry lips, she made the motions of words, through which no sound was created, but every once in a while, a lyric would surface, quiet and soft.
"... mama's gonna buy... a looking glass..." The thin mattress barely shifted with her weight, what little of it, and dazedly, she reached out to grasp a tattered item. In her hands, it creaked. Dead eyes gazed back at her, forever caught in a heartless stare. Encircling the stiff doll with her arms, she whispered the next lyric into its straggly hair. "If that looking glass gets broke... mama's gonna..."
Upon moving her leg, she kicked something off the bed, the metal clanging against the sooty floor. Even as she moved to retrieve it, the doll continued to stare, as if seeing past her soul. Into her. Spidery fingers slipped around the plastic hilt, and breathlessly, she laughed. Knife to dead lips, and glossy eyes to tangles -- "Hush little baby don't you cry..."
Wetness was smeared over the doll's mouth.
"Daddy loves you..."
Then, the cheek.
"... and so do I."
She thrust the kitchen knife into the plush body of the doll, listening to the rip, the tear, the satisfaction. A pause as she remembered Spiderman's mouth curling into a silent scream. A pause as she remembered Snow White's tearless face. The cheerleader's curly ringlets. How their blood spilled across her knife, bright and vivid and creamy. How the red looked on the inside of her cape, flashing only when she passed beneath city streetlamps.
Her spotlights. Her searchlights.
"Icky, sticky, icky, sticky..." A lick to cast away the copper. "Sticky... drippy. Sorry... so sorry if it hurts," she whispered into the battered toy's hair as she removed the knife, soon moving to squeeze the doll against her chest in a vice-grip. "Sorry... make it better. All better. Shhh. Don't cry. Mama's gonna... buy you a bark. If that bark don't dog... gonna turn brass."
Cast upon the floor no less than three feet away was her abandoned costume, the white of the mask gleaming in the moonlight, turned up smile and mustache frozen in place. Next to it was a Halloween candy bag, detailed with a black cat, the contents bulky and wet. In and out her voice filtered, like bad reception on a damaged television as she carried on in intelligible, fractured nonsense. Once in a while, her words would spike in volume, then return to shattered whispers.
Somewhere, tossed out like the trash, three children went missing in New York City, and two mothers cried.