Devil's Child.

One

“In the darkness of the night, a baby cries.

In the darkness of the night, a man laughs.”

A girl sings in a dream.

***

Peter was an innocent little boy with an angel-like face. His blonde, curly hair dropped over his blue eyes, so pale it seemed to camouflage into his pale face. His laugh made one smile, but his cry was like getting a knife screwed into the heart. He was polite and good natured, just as the orphanage taught him. For his size, he had great courage to head into the city when he had enough of the house of abandoned children. Maybe not getting a job at the circus would save him from his “destiny.”

***

“So you want a job here, eh?” asks the older man, rotating his huge round eyes from a piece of paper on his desk up towards the small creature in front of him.

“Yes sir,” Answers a blonde boy. He was fascinated by the old man’s balding head; it reminded him of something, perhaps a memory lost in the darkness of the past. A moment of mutual muteness followed.

“All right, I’ll give you a try,” the man broke the silence and rolled his eyes, lively this time. Peter gasped: did the man’s eye color change for a slight moment? “Let’s see what you will be good at, special charm, eh,” the man chuckled.

“Thank you so much, sir!” Peter exclaimed. “I will try my very best in every work you’ll give me”, the boy bowed.

The old man laughed “Stop that my boy! Now, go to your new bedroom, all right? It is very late indeed! You should get some good night’s sleep – so you’ll be fit for your first day at work eh?” He chuckled again.

Two

            The church bells sang their lullaby in the silence of the night, the sound echoing through the rusty holes of the circus’s cheap water-proof fabric walls. Peter woke up and looked around the room he was in; to find nothing. It was cold, and so he covered his tiny body under the thin, woolen blanket. He was scared and lonely; always was in a way, but never as much as now.

            As Peter lay down to sleep, he suddenly got a strange sensation of ice running over his back. Time seemed to stop when the closed door creaked, then slightly opened and let the chilling autumn breeze again blow into Peter’s wide opened eyes. There was enough space for somebody to enter the room… the pressure augmented.  

            He was staring at the door, not even winking in case it would give any possible intruder chance to enter the room. Peter’s wide eyes were watering, hands shivering both from cold and fear. There was no light, it were the early morning hours, soon after midnight. He stared at the full moon through one of the windows, the source of faint light that was glued into the sky between all the stars. It seemed surreal that there was a Sun hidden somewhere beneath the night’s dark cover.

***

The long, empty halls of the circus seemed to be never ending, the grass buried beneath the tent rustled as his feet stepped on its blades, exploring the room. Suddenly, Peter heard it; a chuckle. He immediately rushed to and walked through the grinning door, straight into the halls he had little knowledge of. Strangely, there was a burning candle, which he hadn’t seen from his bed. With his bare feet, the tiny boy walked on, doors of unknown rooms were passed by the heavily-breathing Peter, who was on full alert for any other sounds.

            Peter’s shadow danced along his side on the charcoal-like walls surrounding him. The candle he discovered and now held as his own was the only source of light in the lonely hallway. There was unusual silence and he began to wonder if he maybe actually is alone in the whole circus. Is it possible that he was left alone; perhaps the old man was playing tricks on him? The man’s words “special charm…so you’re fit for your first day at work…what you’ll be good at”, they were repeating themselves in Peter’s head, frustrating him to push his nails into his sweaty hands. Harder and harder, pushing the nails deep, deep down…He yelped out in pain and looked at his palms: fresh red blood was being breathed out of his pale white skin.

***

            The burning candle increasingly decreased in size, its hot wax was falling onto the creaking floor. With every single noise Peter heard, he jumped as if thrown by some invisible force. The boy was scared: desperate for a way out of the maze he was brought into.

The small boy’s body enters a new room: and gasps. A girl sat there, staring out from beside an open window. She wore a clean, white dress and her brown, wavy hair danced on her shoulder, playing with the cold wind. Her alabaster skin was matching the pearl necklace she had around her skinny neck. The absurd fact was that Peter knew her from before; he was sure about that…

When he was lost in his thoughts, the girl started singing in a high, calm voice:

“This gift is what you need
you will be alright

The scars will stay forever
beside death you shall be

Eyes closed – and you will fall…”

With the last word, she suddenly turned her head towards Peter: her ice-cold blue eyes staring into his pale, frightened face. The laughing wind blew her locks behind her back: revealing a light purple bruise on her neck, retracing … a shape of a hand, as if it were strangling her a while earlier! He felt uncomfortable when he noticed it: the girl felt this emotion, just like a vulture feels fresh blood. She laughed: a high-pitched yet cold laugh. Peter took the chance and ran away, away from that room. He dropped the remainder of the burning candle, leaving it to go out as he ran through the long hallway. He kept on looking behind him, making sure nobody was following him. Nobody was, but Peter kept on running. He turned the corner, and slowed down to catch his breath.

***

At the end of the hallway now, there was a slightly opened door. Bright light was coming out from the room, hurting Peter’s eyes which got used to the dark. As if controlled by some strange force, Peter’s legs started moving towards the bright room. Closer and closer he came to it, pushing the creaking door wide open; and saw the same brown-haired girl with the clean, white dress standing there and singing the same song as before. It sounded like a death lullaby, like a song for a funeral. Tears were rolling down her rosy cheeks; Peter could see her reflection in the mirrors that covered the ceiling and walls. 

Peter was looking around the room, turning round and round, listening to the sorrowful voice of the girl. He kept on turning, his head started hurting but he still did not stop. He closed his eyes and lifted his beautiful face towards the ceiling. For a while he was indulging himself in the wonderful sensation of bright light, warm and comforting against his skin, remembering that warm summer that has just ended…

Until the moment when suddenly the girl screamed. She screamed in a high-pitched voice, making Peter pressing his hands tightly over his ears. This did not help, Peter fell to the floor – and the glass on the ceiling cracked, falling down on him with all its weight. The comforting illumination the poor boy has been enjoying changed to pure darkness.

Three

(Five Years Later)

 “Tickets for sail, tickets for sail!” A young boy shouts in the city center on a cold, autumn day. “To all the citizens of London city, here is an opportunity for you to see the most bizarre, eerie but yet also, -” here he paused and raised his eyebrows to increase the suspense, “-the most amusing thing you have ever seen in your life! Tonight is the only chance for you to see the most unusual sight which will change your life - forever!”

***

PETER

            “Good future was awaiting me,” they all said. Bloody liars, all of them! Is this, this what they call a good future? I will never forget that last look in the mirror, somehow attached to the ceiling when I was young. A young, innocent boy and why I had to come to this… “Destiny”, they call it? Don’t know. Some things are better left unsaid.

Pathetic people, really. You never realize, until you become the outcast, the reject. People are selfish, easy minded. They judge your soul by simply looking at you. They look through you with their cold, careless eyes and judge you. For them, I am not even a person – just a piece of entertainment, a toy they can look at, play with, until they are sick of it and then throw it away. Like that! Ha. Pathetic! I hear them, crowding outside, pushing others to get in. Yes, they push into and backstab their own kind. I belong to my own special world, I don’t even speak. I get lost in my thoughts as I live in this cruel world of hatred, pride and repulsion. They, people, also think that I have no soul or mind. I don’t speak – why? I’m worried it will be as destroyed, ruined as my face. My face now is … not there. The face I have now isn’t even me – my face is somewhere beneath it all.

            I don’t wash my face. I wash the thick layer which creates all the hatred around me. It’s like a wall, separating the person everybody sees and the true me. When I wash my face, it burns. Even today, five years later, I can still find pieces of broken glass. I pull it out, each and every one of them. I am used to the pain – having a whole mirror in my face was a lot more painful than just pulling out little pieces of glass.

            How more unfair the world can possibly be? Nothing is perfect, people say. Another saying to make people later on disappointed. Ha! I laugh. No, I don’t really laugh, I laugh inside my head, inside my own world where nobody can interrupt me with what is right, nor wrong.

            Have I forgotten to mention that people find me cold? Yes, I am supposed to be cold because I can’t smile. Actually, I can’t move any part of my face. The glass in that mirror which fell on me when I was a boy had damaged the basic nerves which allow me to move my face. I can’t smile, laugh, grin, anything. I have the still, silent face and that is what you can see. And then you, they judge.

            Amazing thing is, people actually pay to see me. Business, it’s called. Make up a story, a catchy name – after that, people come, as if blind-folded, tricked. And what is my story, you ask? Find out for yourself, look outside those curtains at the gathering-up crowds. They want to see my face, the one they find so amusing. They gave me a name, but I don’t believe it is for me. It’s for them, the vile-tongued. I’m not cold, just honest. But I will never forget that last look in the mirror, the brightness reflected from all sides. Never. And when have I said never, I mean it.

***

                        … And the drum rolls start;

“Get up there, Devil’s Child!” the crowd roars, excited to see what they have paid for, expecting to get the sight for their money’s worth. The curtains open and Peter walks into the spotlight while the crowd hides in the security of the darkness. They awe at the sight and applaud a poor boy’s misfortune.

THE END