Trejean awoke drenched in sweat and felt his heart working overtime. He sat up in his bed; the burning in his chest made him belch. Proceeding to look around his dingy studio apartment, he looked at his collection of empty alcohol bottles on the nightstand, accumulated last night prior to sleeping. He couldn’t tell whether he got up this early from the reoccurring nightmares or the acid reflux this time. Was this rock bottom? One thing was for sure: his survival from that horrible night placed him on a path that instantly crumbled away beneath him, and he’s been falling since.
As the only survivor of the Merchant House, he was held in custody just for questioning, until the authorities decided to charge him with all the murders of his friends. None of the criminal charges stuck, but that didn’t stop the families from taking him to civil court, since by this time he turned eighteen years of age. They weren’t the only ones, since many people in Unity would rather have wanted to believe he was a highly efficient and effective mass murderer who could cheat the justice system, than the other more uncomfortable alternative. In the streets they gave him dirty looks, the police harassed him, no one wanted to hire him, and not many were willing to let him rent. Even worse, the colleges he wanted to go to didn’t want to risk accepting someone enveloped in so much controversy and stigma. He had to stay with his parents, but they would be harassed too, and their property vandalized. It got to the point where his family had to move to a different city, but not before the relationship between Trejean and them were left in shambles, making him part ways so that he was left to stay in Unity. He used what money he still had left to rent a studio apartment and worked two share economy jobs with long hours to make ends meet.
During this whole ordeal, something else was still antagonizing him to make matters even worse than it was already. Hannah, Joel, Tammy, Enrique, Ava, and Bruce. Their faces still haunted Trejean as much as everything else that happened in the Merchant House. He still remembered the horror he encountered and witnessed. He remembered how powerless he felt not being able to save his friends. He remembered how even after he jumped through that window and sped away in the minivan, he still felt those hands reaching out to grab him. He still felt it all, and he couldn’t afford the insurance to get the proper help he needed, so the next best thing he thought was to self-medicate. Alcohol seemed to work the best in quieting the spirits shrieking at him from the recesses of his mind, but he became the town drunkard, which made him an even bigger target for the cops and even less of a potential candidate for good employment.
Late one afternoon after a particularly rough round of deliveries, Trejean parked his bicycle and sat on the grass on Unity’s largest hill overlooking the town, nursing a forty ounce. He looked off into the distance where on another hill was the Merchant House, somehow looking darker and more ominous with the setting sun shining its last rays of the day on it. He thought of how he just had to learn to live with it like everyone else in town, since it was always there as far back as he could remember. That was just the way things were.
No, why did it have to be that way? There were other things in existence previous to it; they were better and more beloved things and yet they went away, while a cursed place like that gets to continue existing? Who says it had to be this way? For the first time, Trejean began seething with anger and hatred against what ruined his life and snatched away many others. He decided to do something that night. That night, it will be its turn to meet the reaper. How to do it he wondered.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
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He could hear the sirens closing in from a distance behind him. Those two gas truck drivers will thank him later once he does what he’s got to do. Trejean floored the acceleration pedal and rammed through the rusted, wrought iron gate, speeding down the overgrown road towards the Merchant House. He looked to the canvas bag full of oily rags that covered a canister of siphoned gasoline sticking out from the center. He then looked up at the fast-approaching manor before taking out a grill lighter. Trejean unbuckled his seatbelt, then lit the rags with the lighter, opened the driver’s door, and jumped out of the moving vehicle. He heard something pop accompanied with pain as he rolled on the ground to a stop, but he endured through it to watch the truck barrel through the front entrance of the manor and have the cab go up in flames.
Trejean stood up with a mix of relief and joy at the sight of the front of the Merchant House get demolished, not noticing the approaching police cars behind him, or the officers exit their vehicles. Two shots rang out, dropping him to the ground. He heard the officers yell at each other to stay back, moments prior to watching the truck explode, blowing apart much of the building and turning what was left into an inferno. He was in such pain that he couldn’t move, but he felt like letting out a jubilant and full-spirited laugh despite it. As he overheard the police calling in extra units and firefighters, he bragged to himself in triumph about what he did and mocked the now destroyed manor.
A police officer called out to the others in shock that there were people in the fire. Trejean’s heart stopped for a split second, not from the bullets embedded in him, but from the thought that he may have accidentally killed innocent people who might have been inside the manor at the time without his prior knowledge. Upon looking into the fires, he saw figures obscured among the flames, but they weren’t screaming, running, or flailing around in agony. They were just standing there, and then they began moving calmly towards their audience.
One of the first to fully step out of the fires seemed somewhat familiar to Trejean. They were at a distance, so it wasn’t too clear who it was, but it looked like it was Tammy. She was not only strangely untouched by the roaring flames, but she was also still as young as he remembered seeing her last alive, with one thing that really stood out: she had a massive, bloody knife wound in her chest where she was stabbed. Then another familiar face stepped out untouched by the flames. It was Bruce, or it was something that looked like him, but his neck was angled all funny, with his face still twisted and baring a creepy smile. Another stepped out looking like Hannah covered in bleeding welts, another appeared like Joel as if he had been stuffed in a meat grinder, another like Ava, and Enrique.
More stepped out of the fires. Some weren’t even human in nature, but most were and most wore clothing as disparate in styles as their wearers’ various gory disfigurements and tortured looks. A few Trejean recognized from that terrible night, yet there were two he had never seen, who were literally standing out from the crowd. One was a gaunt, sickly woman in an Eighteenth-Century nightgown with copious amounts of blood drenching the abdominal and pelvic area. The other was mostly charred black, but he could tell that it wore what used to be a powered wig, with Eighteenth-Century leggings, shoes, and coat. When it stepped to the front of the throng of phantoms, it opened its eyes. Despite the distance and angle, Trejean could see what looked like runny egg whites glistening in the night. The being made a large grin, revealing burned and broken dentures made of wood and what may have been actual bone. As his vision began to fade to black, Trejean could hear the thing somehow growing in volume as it gave off a sinister drawn-out chortle. When all went black, the final things he heard were the shooting of guns, screaming, tearing of sinew, splashing of blood, and lastly silence.