~~She grabs the matches; the Devil’s tools,
sets him on fire and all is well,
she leaves him there to burn in Hell.~~




December 13, 2000 7:21am

A single ray of light slithered through the dusty, glass window inserted in the concrete door.The white walls, even whiter due to the light, camouflaged the bed and the room seemed to blend together with the color. The sunlight revealed floating dust particles that creeped between the crevices of the molded wall panels. Mary sat up abruptly in the bed. Her chestnut hair fell to her waistline as she scratched her burning scalp with unkempt fingernails. There was a knock at the door and she could make out the top of a woman’s head from the square window. A buzzer wailed somewhere in the building and the latches unclicked at once. A small, black woman stood in the doorway with clothes for Mary. Mary noticed the woman’s dried hands, clutching the clothing, her skin raw and scarred and ashy.


“Ms. Bell, I brought you your gown. Would you like anythin’ to eat this morning? You really should eat something Ms. Be---”

“No,” Mary interrupted in a low, raspy voice as she continued to scratch at her skin, flakes falling onto the white sheets.
“Please Ms. Bell, you are gonna have to eat some---”
“Leave. Now!”
“I’ll be back in two hours to see if you’ll be ready then,” The woman whispered as she hurried out of the room and another buzzer locked the door. Mary stumbled out of bed and quickly dressed her wrinkled body in the blue robe. She sat at a wooden desk set up in an empty corner. A photograph laid on top of it. She placed her pointer finger on its edge and dragged it down, feeling it keenly. When she drew her finger back she studied a tiny, red slice that appeared. Mary stuck out her tongue and tapped it against the stinging cut, warm saliva dripped down her lean finger. In another room down the hall a woman screamed, a loud, chilling scream. Mary turned her head around slowly with her finger in her mouth. The amber flecks in her eyes seemed to have lit like wildfire as goosebumps lifted the hairs on her right arm, her only arm. The corners of her lips lifted and she smiled.

June 25, 1960 3:27pm

“Mama I picked you something from the garden,”
“Goddamnit! Not my roses!”
“Mama I’m sorry,” the small girl whimpered, staring down at the withered rose in her pale-pink hand. She didn’t pay much attention to the open wounds that now dyed her hands a deep red color, thorns falling off the rose’s stem.

“Mary, you are bleeding, you stupid child,” she cursed her as she grabbed the child’s thin wrists and dragged her along to the kitchen sink, scrubbing her punctured fingers with a soiled dishrag. The child didn’t flinch.
Mary’s mother’s name was Nora Bell. She was an old mother, a single mother with a skeletal figure because she didn’t eat. She didn’t believe in eating man-made food so she had a garden. But she wasn’t always like this: when Mary’s father died Nora changed. She became a recluse in the town of Brisbin, Pennsylvania and the neighbors (a mile down the road) talked a lot. Mr. and Mrs. Wane told the others that she had died in that white house, the rotting wood hanging and the weeds consuming the front windows. And they weren’t wrong, Nora had died; she sold her soul to the Devil. She would go into her bedroom and kneel for hours and then she would paint. The paintings hung on the walls of her room until eventually each panel was covered. When Mary turned four, Nora became bitter. She locked her bedroom door and forbid Mary to enter; she told the child that there were spiders in there and they would suck out her blood and poison her organs if she opened it. There weren’t spiders in the room but there was poison; a black-poison curse.

August 3, 1999 8:35pm

Wyatt jumped down the foyer stairs and jogged into the kitchen holding loose-leaf and a pen. A roasted chicken laid on the countertop and Emma began to set the table.

“Mom, you gotta check this out. I didn’t think I could do it but, well, I was damn wrong. This poem is awesome, seriously, not being conceited or anything,” Wyatt said. He pulled off his glasses and ran his hand through his short hair, watching his mother place the forks strategically next to each plate.

“Yeah? I bet, let’s hear it Wy,” Emma smiled at her son but behind it she was choking. Guilt held her from the neck on a tight noose as she attempted to listen to the poem. She watched her son passionately recite each well-thought phrase but she couldn’t hear the words. She was drowning in guilt but this guilt had no origin. Emma was simply lost in her own mind just as it had been since she was eighteen. Wyatt looked up with a smirk.

“Soooo, whaddya think?” his eyebrow raised and Emma couldn’t help but to smile and laugh at her son.
“It’s beautiful, it has a certain je ne sais quoi,” she replied with a french accent. Wyatt laughed and ripped a chicken leg off the chicken. His mother gasped and was about to stop him but decided to let it be.
After supper Emma washed the dishes alone. Her husband was going to be late tonight but she didn’t mind, she enjoyed being alone. It was late and she was mentally exhausted so she went upstairs and stood in Wyatt’s doorway for a moment, watching him on his desktop computer. He was typing up his poem and listening to music, his headphones secure to his head. Emma smiled warmly and walked to her bathroom to take a bath. Candles in her arms, she used her elbow to turn on the faucet and then walked to her bedroom to get a lighter.
She lit the candles peacefully and lined them up along the tile ledge. Then she slid into the clear water as her hair draped the porcelain perimeter of the tub. She closed her hazel eyes and began to picture what it would be like if she was happy. If she could only feel as she did laying under the water: warm and majestic. Emma imagined herself as a mermaid floating on the surface of the Mediterranean Sea; a blazing wonder, light years away, kissing every inch of her bare skin, diminishing the dark color in her locks of hair; making her beautiful. This was her way out of reality into a perfect world; but it was also a way into her mind’s hell. She would get so lost in her conjured ideas that she would become resistant to her real life--the real world. Suddenly, a loud, crashing sound came from downstairs and Emma’s eyes unlocked. Water droplets dripped from her inner thighs as she wrapped a towel around her curves and stepped out of the tub, listening intently to the sounds throughout the house. Now everything was silent except for the monotonous clicking noises coming from Wyatt’s keyboard. Then she heard something else: heavy breathing. This rise and fall of breaths was coming from somewhere inside the house but not from Wyatt’s bedroom, somewhere on the first floor. Emma began to get nervous as if someone was inside her home and her brain told her it was true.

August 3, 1965 11:01pm

Mary lay awake in the dusk of her hot bedroom. It was a stifling August night and her two windows were held open with branches she had found in the woods surrounding the house. It was the final hour of her tenth birthday and she hadn’t received anything which wasn’t different than any of the other birthdays she had. As she lay in silence she thought about school. She hated that she was so different from all the other kids who knew so much about the way the world works. Mary began to cry softly underneath her sheets. These tears were from loneliness and confusion and she couldn’t make them stop; it was as if there was another voice inside her head screaming criticism and telling her she was useless to the world. Mary tried to shut out the voice but sometimes it took over her entire brain until she forgot about reality and the vicious voice amplified through her, taking control. Then in seconds it would disappear as if she was possessed by an inhuman force that swallowed her memory and spit out an entirely different Mary who wasn’t Mary at all but was far worse. It was as if this new person was destructive and bloodthirsty; ready to make the world suffer for her despair. On this particular night the controlling voice was unusually loud. Mary got up from under the covers and began to search for her mom. Anger inflamed her entire body as she walked slowly through the pitch-black hallway, eyes peeled and blood-shot. Nora was in her bedroom performing a ritual which was part of her self-developed belief- a belief involving Satan. Of course, Mary had no knowledge that her mother was devoted to Satan and believed that he could set her free. She had not the slightest clue that Nora was painting images recollected from her dreams that she believed were messages from the Devil. But it worked both ways because Nora didn’t know one thing about her daughter. That was why it was so easy for Mary to murder her mother: her mother was ignorant and Mary was sick.
It was 11:30pm and Mary descended the staircase, slowly feeling for each step while allowing the devilish voice to consume her. She reached the kitchen and turned on the single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. She wanted a knife sharp enough to tear through bone. She came across a long, black-handled kitchen knife with a smooth, silver blade. Then she held her cold arm in front of her body and sliced the knife through her own flesh. She winced in shock of the cut but was energized by the pain and that made the voice even more powerful. Warm blood slid down her pale flesh onto her nightgown and the wood floor. She studied the blade and began to contemplate it’s durability. Not satisfied, she walked out the back door into the suffocating night and around the side of the house to where a pile of wood lay. Then she saw it. A perfectly beautiful hatchet laying among the pile, waiting to be played with. Come on Mary it’s time to play. Life is a game, you know you want to play. Just for the fun of it. Life is but a dream! Life is but a dream! She picked up the hatchet, Oh Mary isn’t it beautiful. Mary make it work for us. Let’s see it work. She laid her raw, bloodied arm on a worn down tree stump and raised the hatchet above her head. She looked up at it and could then see its detail in the moon’s glare; the thick blade was recently sharpened and didn’t need much force to fulfill her desires. But she hacked off her forearm hard anyway, straight through the bone. Mary screamed in agony and stared at the bloody mess and remains of her arm that lay on the tree stump. She smiled--it was a clean break.
With her good arm she picked up the hatchet and made her way back to the house. She was completely numb even as pools of burgundy stained the ground with every step she took. Mary where is Mommy? Where is the b****? Go get her Mary she wants to play too. After turning off the kitchen light she began to ascend the stairs in complete darkness, gripping the hatchet harshly and dragging what was left of her arm behind her back.
“Mama, where are you?” she asked. When she reached the top of the stairs she noticed a flickering light through the crack underneath the door of Nora’s bedroom. A hushed voice mumbled words behind the door as Mary leaned her ear against it. “Mama, can I please come in, I can’t sleep,” There was no answer and this made Mary infuriated. She could hear the brush strokes against the canvas behind the door, along with her mother’s quiet voice. “Mother would you please open the door? Mother I need to talk, please,”
“Go away child,” Nora replied quickly.
“No, mother let me in,” Mary insisted but Nora did not respond. Open the fucking door you stupid slut. Break down the fucking door. Mary twisted the doorknob and slammed open the door to a room she had never, in the past, dared to enter. Her immediate reaction was to the smell; it was disturbingly foul and made her sick. It was as if burnt flesh was rotting away somewhere inside. There were tiny candles covering the circumference of the room and paint soaked canvases sprawled around them. Then there was Nora, kneeling over a half-finished painting, hands covered in black paint. Her eyes widened as she looked up at her daughter and that frightened Mary, not because of the largeness of her eyeballs but because of the largeness of her pupils. It was like the slate color was drained and then refilled with black ink. Nora’s long, straggly hair hovered the floor and her bony fingers dropped the paint brush. “Mother that is a beautiful painting,” Mary lied through grinding teeth, the hatchet hidden behind her back. She felt her mothers eyes burn through her non-existent arm and at the immense amount of blood. Nora did not speak or move as her daughter slowly approached her. Kill her, kill her. Break her skull, Mary.
Within seconds Nora was massacred. Five blows to the head followed by six slices to the chest and abdomen. A mixture of blood and paint settled around the motionless body and Mary just stared. An eerie glow from the candles lit up Noras open eyes and something about that made Mary feel like she was going to vomit. So, she did. And then she began to cry violently, each breath not only a desperation for air but for something more fulfilling. The voice was silenced now but Mary had changed. She picked up the candles and threw them at the body, sending flames into the room and increasing the smell of burnt flesh. Mary turned and shut the door.

October 22, 1987 10:00am

The forest of Brisbin was an uproar of shades of red and brown as October began to surrender to November and the air developed a chill. The farther the distance into the woods the thicker it got; the lines of light between the trees became thinner until only specks of light peeked through, along with the light from the sky above. In the deepest area of the forest a cabin existed. It’s decaying structure contrasted with the liveliness of the October wood like a droplet of ebony ink in the center of white paper. Twenty-two years had gone by since the August night when Mary had changed and since then she had been living in the old cabin where she claimed the woods were hers and wandered through them at night searching for the Devil. Mary’s sickness had fully developed and had taken over not only her interior, but exterior too. Her pasty skin was thin and wrinkled and her face had developed a bird-like structure where two beady eyes stuck out. Her coarse hair was long past her waist and collected pieces of twigs. After the night she murdered Nora, Mary had found a book laying in a hole on the side of the house. This was the book that began her horrifying interest in sacrifice. The book had belonged to Nora and was an anthology of the most evil ideas and sacrilegious curses that could ever be written about. Far worse than witchcraft, this book was purely satanic. Mary drew the book’s symbols all around the cabin with paint she stole from the house before it was burned down. She also carved them into her body with a rusted razor. Inverted crosses scarred her flesh; she was delighted by the sight of them and so was the inhuman voice in her head that taunted her to kill again. So, she did.
A year after Nora’s murder, Mary had been well into studying her book and began to subconsciously create her own ideas of sacrifice involving the sacrifice of the human soul to the Devil and his demon captives. On August 3, 1966, the anniversary of her first killing, Mary murdered a family of five a few miles down the road from the forest. This was not a random murder because she had spied on the family for months before and first learned about them through Brisbin’s newspaper. The family was heavily devoted to God and the father was a minister that would lead church every Sunday. These were the kinds of qualities that enraged Mary and tempted her to allow the Devil to have these souls. By 11:30pm Mary had stabbed the minister’s three beautiful daughters fifty times each and dragged their bodies to the center of their home. The minister was tied to his desk chair where Mary taunted him to curse God. When he refused and began to pray she screamed, spit spraying from her scabbed lips onto the minister’s face. She had taken the knife and slit his throat in one quick swoop. Then she also dragged his body to the foyer where his three daughters laid in a bloody pool. The minister’s wife was the most difficult for Mary because she had hid inside the house when she saw her husband being dragged down the stairs. Mary found her in a closet and pulled her by her short, blonde hair to the kitchen where she beat her with a fire iron and then skewered it through her chest. She too was brought to the the pile of dead bodies in the middle of an immaculate white foyer. Mary carved inverted crosses into the lips of her victims and then chanted disturbingly to her master. Mary, you are so beautiful. When she finished her ritual she lit the family on fire and escaped back to her cabin where she peacefully rested for the night.
Mary committed a similar massacre exactly a year later to another family who tried to sell her a bible in town and another one a year after that to an old couple. The police of Brisbin were set on finding the ritualistic murderist and Mary knew this quite well so for a couple of years she stopped her human sacrifice and stayed quiet. Soon Brisbin was at peace again and tried to forget about the terrible curse that lurked through. However, the curse in Mary was only just beginning. For years she planned out her next attacks, secretly keeping a collection of items she stole from the houses of families: babydolls, neckties, bracelets, towels, and so on. She christened each item with the blood of deer and promised the Devil that one day she would give him each one of the human souls that owned the items. And when August 3, 1995 came, Mary restarted her rituals; each one more repulsive than the previous.

August 3, 1999 9:17pm

Walking quietly to the top of the stairs, Emma listened to the sounds coming from the bottom floor. She shivered from the cool house and her arm hairs rose above her freckled skin. It was silent again for five minutes so she went back to her bedroom and put on pajamas. While brushing her teeth she heard something again.
“Chase, is that you?” she called for her husband and walked to the hallway where she noticed that Wyatt’s door was completely shut. She immediately walked up to the door and opened it slowly to find her son asleep in his bed. Emma kissed his cheek and went over to the computer screen that showed her son’s poem. She drew her hand to her mouth as she read it in horror and took a step backward. It was not her son’s poem, it was a disgusting combination of words she could not believe were in front of her eyes. Behind her the bedroom door slammed shut and the only light came from the monitor screen. Emma screamed and Wyatt woke up to his mother being dragged out of his bedroom by a woman with one arm in dirty clothing and blackened eyes. The woman noticed the boy and let go of Emma who got up and ran to her son. She stood in the doorway and smiled at them until Wyatt was completely sickened. His adrenaline pumped and he knew he could easily defend his mother from this woman who was in horrible condition. So he jumped up, grabbed his desk chair and swung it at the woman who didn’t move out of the way. He hit her hard and she fell to the floor unconscious.
“Wyatt, call the police!” Emma screamed at her son who locked the bedroom door and pulled his dresser in front of it. Then he dialed 911 and waited for the familiar sound of the ringback but it never came. The wires had been cut.

“What the f***! This sick piece of s***. Mom, she knew what she was doing ,”
“Wy, do you think you killed her? She was bleeding pretty bad, right?”
“I don’t know but we can’t stay here to find out, we gotta leave,” Wyatt threw his dresser off of the door and swung it open. A circular blood spot was left in the carpet but the woman had disappeared and he then needed to find his breath. Emma got up and saw what her son saw and she began to whimper nervously. They slowly stepped over the blood and remained alert to their surroundings as they quickly descended the stairs. A trail of blood led to a small guest room downstairs that was completely dark but the door was wide open. They squinted their eyes and leaned forward to attempt to see if the woman was hiding inside behind something.
It was completely quiet for two minutes as the two stood in the doorway and searched for the woman they would never find. Then Wyatt was smacked in the back of the head with a hammer and he fell in a heap to the floor at Emma’s feet. She screamed so loud that the woman holding the hammer gritted her teeth and breathed heavily in annoyance. Emma grabbed the woman by her throat and pushed her down to the tile floor. She dropped the hammer and began to cackle savagely at Emma’s attempt to defend herself. Emma backed away in terror and felt electrifying fear torment her and make her body shake violently. The woman stopped laughing and got on her hands and knees. Her spine arched as she started to vomit and gasp for breath. Emma was repulsed by the sight and closed her eyes tightly, her kneecaps weakening even more as she prayed them to move but knew she would fall if she tried to walk. The woman looked up at Emma and smiled with her rotted teeth and vomit covered lips. She then began to crawl towards Emma on all fours like a rabies-ridden animal that was about to die. Emma breathed heavily and started to cry while asking for God to help her, but she should not have done that.
“Shut up you dirty whore! Shut up!” the old woman, now closer to Emma, stopped smiling and began to yell viciously at her in a low, wicked voice. She crawled faster towards her and Emma backed up slowly, continuing to pray to God. Mary silence her now. Make her suffer. Silence her! Suddenly, she pounced towards Emma and embedded her teeth into her ankle. Emma winced in pain and dropped to the ground, unable to escape the woman’s wrath.
With the back of the hammer, the woman beat Emma’s head continuously. On the last hit she left the hammer stuck in the skull and turned around to see the unconscious boy lying on the ground. Then she dragged him next to his mother and sketched inverted crosses into their already bleeding lips. Just like the rest of the families, Wyatt and Emma were swallowed by flames that Mary believed to be the Devil’s portal to Hell. But this was Mary’s last kill because minutes after the mother and son were set on fire, police arrived at the home. The neighbors had complained about screams and called. Mary was taken to the station where she did not answer one question the interrogator asked her; she simply laughed.

August 3, 2005

The mental institution Mary was brought to was for the most demented people. Most of the patients in Randall Hospital made slight progress within a few months and by a year they started to improve quicker. But the horror behind this was that the doctors could never be fully sure whether or not the patient was pretending. They would send patients home who they truly believed made a turn around and most of the time they were right.
Mary Bell was released from Randall Hospital on a sunny August morning in 2005. She was sent to an apartment with one suitcase and given enough money to survive. The hospital set up a few volunteer jobs for her where she could make $5.00 an hour and get back to a normal lifestyle. That night Mary sat up in bed and began to doze, thinking about where life would take her next. Mary do you hear me? I’m still here. She tightened her eyelids. Mary, Mary, Mary. She opened them and turned on the television, searching for anything positive. She rested her head on her pillow and moved her eyes around the room, becoming familiar with the new apartment. Her eyes landed on something that made her hand ice-cold. A crucifix hung on the pale-yellow wall in the corner of the room and seemed to mock her as she lay there. Her cheeks burned red and the place where her left arm used to be, stung. She swallowed and an acidic spot behind her chest pulsed with black poison like it once did a long time ago when she was ten years old. Hello Mary.