Rein remembered like it was yesterday. Sharp smell of piss, defecate, and rotting flesh that suffocated his throat. Dusty air, web-covered ceiling, dark room, and the squeaking of hundreds of rats and their horrible footsteps knocking on the wooden floor.

He couldn’t move or breathe. The air was hot and dry and he hadn’t eaten or drunk anything in days. All around him, from babies to teens, all bound to bed with nothing but bones and maggot-ridden rotten skin that turned char black.

Everything started with him. Because of him. His fault.

Cursed child.

The nannies called him that behind his back. They did a good job hiding their contempt and fear from him, but he was a smart and curious kid. He hated them for it and wanted to prove them wrong. But he was proven wrong instead. The nannies lay on the floor, dead. Their bodies paradise for rats and flies. And the other children were all waiting their turn, half-dead and half-conscious, groaning day and night in pain unimaginable.

But he won’t die. Not the first one to die at least. Because that ‘thing’, ‘she’ was there, watching and waiting and making sure he suffered for long. She ‘stood’ next to him by his bed. Her tentacles gripping each of his limbs. At least that what he thought when he was a kid. But now, maybe ‘she’ was tending him, sending the flies and mosquitoes and rats away from him. Keeping him warm when other freezes to death, keeping him cool as the other turned into a dried corpse. She could not interact with anyone other than him and did her best to save the only one she could. Keeping him alive until someone came to help.

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But no one came for days.

The windows were clear. Closed and dusty but still see-through, yet no one ever came to help. Dozens of people walked by every single day, walking in a distance that should allow them to see inside. But for some reason, they could not see or notice what transpired inside. Even the garbagemen or vegetable-selling lady that came every morning didn’t seem bothered that no one came out for days.

One by one, kids around him stopped groaning. Until only one other was left. A young boy of ten with red-hooded jacket, Lee. Rein never knew him to be the toughest or healthiest, but fate willed him to survive all this time to suffer. They were good friends. When the other kids avoided him, Lee was the first to approach Rein when he arrived at the orphanage.

When Rein’s hope finally withered like most of the kid’s corpse, then and only just then did help came. A local priest realized something was terribly wrong and broke down the locked front door by himself after police and firefighter refused to help for no reason. What he saw terrified him, but he braced himself and searched for someone still alive. If father Constantine hadn’t fought his own fear, Rein wouldn’t be able to dream about it now.

He found Rein so thin, severely dehydrated, and barely clinging to life that doctor said it was a miracle he recovered. But the miracle didn’t grace itself to Lee. He was alive when Constantine brought him to the hospital, but it was too late. The image of his dying body, with only skin and bones, was forever etched to Rein’s brain.