SEE ALL EVIL
Academy for the Wicked
Book One
Majanka Verstraete
SEE ALL EVIL
Copyright: Majanka Verstraete
Published: 1st of July 2020
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Chapter One
In the nightmare, I was in the red room again. I called it the ‘red room’ because its walls were drenched in the color from top to bottom. A canvas of blood, some of it still dripping from the ceiling. In the middle of the blood-engulfed room stood a throne made entirely of human body parts: torsos, legs, arms, heads. It was so grotesque that the first time I’d had this nightmare, I’d promptly woken up and threw up all over my bedsheets. But now, after suffering from the same nightmare for years, I’d gotten used to that horrible sight of something so mismatched it shouldn’t even exist. I barely felt nauseated anymore during the nightmare, or afterward.
On the throne sat ‘the woman’. I didn’t know her name, and it probably didn’t matter either. She was a woman, but at the same time, she wasn’t. Her body appeared female, but her face was horrible: her mouth was gigantic, easily taking up half her face, and opened wide to show off sharp, shark-like teeth. She didn’t have a nose, and her eyes were two empty sockets gauging blood.
Like this blood-soaked room, she was a creature of nightmares, a being that shouldn’t exist. And the worst part about her, even more discomforting than her appearance, was her voice. Every word she uttered sounded like nails on a chalkboard.
“It’sssss coming,” she said, slurring the ‘s’. “You’re not ready for thsssss.”
“What’s coming?” I asked. Even though she scared me to death, I tried not to show it, tried to keep my cool. If I pretended not to be afraid, then I felt more in control. Besides, no matter how horrific the woman looked, she was just a figment of my imagination. Whatever she could do to me here in the red room, in the real world, she didn’t even exist.
“The invitaaaaation,” the woman said while a maggot crawled out of one of her empty eyesockets. Sometimes, I called her ‘the queen of maggots’ because of this—like Frankenstein’s monster, she was a maggot-infested corpse brought to life. Unlike the monster Mary Shelley invented, mine wasn’t created by a doctor toying with the boundaries of death, but by an overactive imagination.
“The invitation to what?” This was the first time the woman had mentioned something about an invitation, and it took me aback a little. For years, she hadn’t uttered a word, just started at me from atop her throne of limbs. Only in the last few months, had she started to speak, but she’d never made it beyond repeating that ‘it was coming’, whatever ‘it’ was. Maybe tonight, this nightmare would start to make sense after all.
“The invitation to your dessssstiny,” the qeen of maggots slurred. “But you’re not ready.” She shook her head, which somehow made her look even more frightening. “You’re not ready, and you’ll get hurt.” A dry, humorless laugh escaped from her throat.
In response, goosebumps erputed all over my arms. “What do you—”
I couldn’t even finish my sentence because the alarm blared, disrupting the nightmare.
Seconds later, I opened my eyes in the real world, where rooms made of blood and thrones of body parts did not exist, except perhaps in a serial killer’s fantasy. The walls of my room were blue, the only chair in my room was made of wood rather than flesh.
I sighed and rubbed the sleep from my eyes. Despite having gone to bed at nine, I felt as if I’d barely slept at all. That was usually the case whenever I had the nightmare, when I woke up, I felt absolutely drained.
The nightmare had followed me for years now. At first, I woke up at the sight of the red room alone. Then, as my senses grew accustomed to that sight, I saw the second monstrosity in the red room: the throne of flesh. A few more versions of the nightmare later, and I’d gotten used of that monstrosity and moved on to the next: the woman.
But she’d never said as much to me as she had tonight. An invitation was coming. An invitation to destiny, whatever that meant.
She had also warned me that I wasn’t ready. Maybe she was just playing games, taunting me… Or maybe she was telling the truth.
She could be, as my mother always tried to convince me, a part of my subconscious, a manifestation of my own doubts, insecurities and fears.
If Mom is right, is her message even real then, or just a figment of my imagination too?
I pondered the question while I got up and wobbled to my closet to grab some clothes. It wasn’t like I had much planned for today. Although it was my eighteenth birthday party, I didn’t have many plans; it was just a weekday and my friends and I had already decided to go out and celebrate over the weekend. My plans could be summed up in
