Years before I moved into my apartment, Walter Sullivan was born and abandoned in that same room. He grew up thinking (and being told by a cult that ran the orphanage he was raised in) that the room itself was his mother, and when he got out, he used a ritual they taught him to "wake mother up". He had to kill twenty-one people, but was caught after number ten. He killed himself as the eleventh, and it allowed him to continue the ritual as a ghost. When I moved in, he decided to make me the twenty-first victim, the "Receiver of Wisdom". Which, in his twisted mind, meant I had to watch all his remaining victims die.
At the same time, a part of him didn't want to do it, and after he died it sort of took physical form as a little kid. When Walter got up to number twenty, my neighbor Eileen, the kid interfered and kept her alive. The two of us eventually found Walter's body, and then he took Eileen over and almost killed her. I had to destroy his physical body to end the whole thing. ...I really don't know how his body got from the prison graveyard to my apartment. I don't think I really want to know.
The whole time, he'd trapped me in that room. Chains on the door, my TV and phone on the fritz, my windows stuck shut, no way to talk to anyone or get out... Until this tunnel opened up in my bathroom. That's how I got to each of these worlds. One of them took me to the hospital Eileen got sent to, and after that the ghosts of the other victims I'd seen were able to follow me back to my apartment. It was...horrible.
And the worst part? Even now, after all that...I can't even really feel angry at him. He was abandoned right at birth. Thrown away like a piece of trash and raised by a horrible cult with twisted ideals and a crazy religion. They kept him in a prison cell in that orphanage. Who keeps a kid in a grimy cell? I feel pity for him, sympathy, maybe even a little disgust...but not anger. How weird is that?
I'm from Ashfield originally. I don't know if it exists here, though. What about you?