Purgatory Pt. 01

June 14, 1987

A six year old girl sits alone at a small oak table; toys stretched out in front of her. She has constructed a castle out of her alphabet blocks, with a pink dragon atop it, and a cowboy astride a black horse sits in front. A small, tattered rag doll smiles blankly up at the girl, a paper crown perched lopsidedly on its stained head, its black button eyes shining brightly in the light. The room she is in is large, white walls decorated with oak wainscotting yield to three large arched windows, letting in the midday light. A large bed, an overstuffed floral print chair, a rickety wooden toy box, and an old oak rocking chair are set up in a dull attempt to fill the ample space. The girl plays quietly, her bare feet swinging as she sits in the rickety wooden chair.

Children's laughter drifts in from somewhere outside, and the girl stands, adjusts the straps of her red corduroy overalls, and races to the window, her pale yellow pigtails bouncing as she runs. Outside, in the large neatly trimmed yard, other children are playing. It is the middle of summer, the children excused from Sister Mary's classrooms until fall. Those who didn't get adopted that is. She rushes back to the table and grabs the doll, then runs back to the window, and climbs up onto the rough wood toy box so she can get a better view of the outside world.

"One day, Jeanie," Sarah says as she watches the other children, "we'll be out there too. You wait and see." She absently strokes the doll's head and smiles down at it.

Jeanie smiles blankly up at Sarah, unspeaking. The doll had been a gift, purchased by her mother two years ago before she had fallen ill. It was Christmas morning, the family couldn't afford much, but Jeanie, that small rag doll made from grey-green cloth, with her lopsided smile and gleaming button eyes, had been everything Sarah could have hope for.

Her mother had fallen ill two days later. Before the spring, the doctors came - so many of them that it seemed, at least to Sarah, to be a constant parade of doctors and nurses, and then nuns and priests, enough to keep Sarah quite entertained while her mother was bedridden. It was midsummer when her father had told her the news - her mother had gone to a place far away, she was better at last. Sarah didn't understand but nodded anyway. Slowly, she became accustomed to her mother's absence and came to realize that it would be a while, if ever before she would see her again. When her father died the next winter, there was no one to tell her what happened.

Life had been much the same as before - he had become paler, seemed thinner, but there was no real change, at least that Sarah could tell. Two weeks before Christmas, an old woman had just appeared out of nowhere, and had taken her away, brought her here, to this place. Sometimes, she overheard the nuns talking - she was different, shouldn't be adopted.

Not that any of the interviews with her potential families ever ended well, anyway. Nobody was interested in Sarah, and if they were, they weren't interested when they found out about Jeanie. She had overheard her potential adopters telling the Sisters that the doll had to go, that it was cursed, but she didn't believe them.

She didn't want to let go of Jeanie. After all, Jeanie was her friend. So, she was here, to stay. She sighed and gazed longingly out the window, dreaming of the day she too would be allowed to play with the other children.

July 27, 1999

Her chores for the evening done, Sarah ruched back into her bedroom. Today was her eighteenth birthday, and she had decided tonight was the night - the night she would finally escape. So, she quickly changed from her usual uniform into some street clothes she had managed to smuggle in during one of the few days she was allowed to leave the orphanage. She tucked Jeanie into her jacket pocket for good luck before turning off the lights and quietly slid open the window, slipping through into the damp quiet evening. She hid for a moment in the bushes beneath her window, holding her breath as she listened for footsteps. Finally, hearing nothing, she slid as quietly as she could away from them, and raced toward the street. The carnival was in town, and tonight was the last night. It was late enough that she should practically have the place to herself. She ran down the street, cutting across it and into a field, following the lights and sounds coming from the carnival.

She raced through the dark field, the knee-high grass already covered in dew soaking her pant legs and shoes. Eventually, the carnival's music grew louder, the lights brighter, and she crested a hill, pausing to catch her breath as she gazed down into the small valley at the carnival. She started to turn back but stopped. 'Come on,' she thought to herself, 'We didn't come all this way just to turn back now.' Finally, she started forward, moving down the grassy slope and stepping fully into the carnival lights. The tents and stands were set up, covered in red and white stripes, and from each one a different voice called out, announcing the games or wares they had to offer. She wandered through the mostly empty pathways; the grass trampled flat by so many footsteps over the week the carnival had been here. Finally, a game caught her eye. It didn't seem particularly difficult, all she had to do was toss a baseball and hit a glass jar, and she would win a prize. The man standing inside the booth was smiling at her, his salt and pepper hair a disheveled mess atop his head. He gestured to the wall of glass jars behind him as she approached.

"Wanna give it a try, Miss?"

She shook her head. "No, I'd better not." She laughed nervously, glancing around to see if someone was watching her.

"The first game's free," he said, his smile faltering slightly. "Come on, one game. You could win a prize." He gestured to the stuffed animals hanging above his head.

Reluctantly, Sarah nodded. "Okay, one game." 'How hard can it be?'

So, she stepped up to the booth, smiled at the man and tossed the ball. Miss. So she tried again. Miss. She sighed and tried the third free ball. Again, miss.

Feeling a little embarrassed, she reached into her pocket, pulled out a dollar, and handed it to the man. With a smile and a flourish of his hands, three more balls appeared on the counter in front of her. On the third try, she won.

Grinning triumphantly, she turned to the man. "I got one!"

"Which would you like, Miss?" He gestured to a stuffed gorilla and a smiling doll.

"The doll, please." She grinned as he pulled the doll down from its perch and handed it to her. Their hands touched, but only for a moment, and then it was in her hands. She smiled down at it and brushed its red yarn hair back out of its face.

"Thank you so much," she glanced at him, and her face paled as she watched him.

His smile faded as he blinked at her in confusion. He staggered for a moment, and she watched in horror as he began to sweat profusely, his face draining of color, taking on a waxy appearance. He sneezed as blood began to trickle from his nose.

"Are you okay?"

"Do... Do you think it's too bright out here?" The man blinked hard, raising his hand to his forehead to shield his eyes from the light. "I could swear it feels like it's midday..." He coughed and sneezed again before catching himself and moving around to stand outside the booth.

"N... no... It's after dark. Are you feeling alright?" She shook her head, confused.

"I gotta... sit down..." He staggered again, almost falling before she caught him, grabbing his arm and hand. She pulled away when he cried out in pain, and watched, horrified, as blood filled blisters appeared where her hands had been. He stumbled again, as bloody tears began to leak from his eyes.

"Oh, no..." She dropped the doll, covering her eyes as the blisters continued to grow, the bloody ones now mingling with pus-filled sores. He uttered a groan that turned into a wheezing cough before he collapsed to the ground, bloody foam escaping his mouth as he seized on the ground.

Sarah shrieked, staring down at her hands in horror. Suddenly someone was beside her, grabbing at her.

"Come on, let's get you away from here. This isn't something a young lady should be seeing." The man who tried to guide her away was older, grandfatherly in appearance.

'Probably someone's grandfather,' Sarah thought to herself as she pushed herself away from him.

"Please, I don't know what's going on. I... I need to get going, get back..."

The man groaned as sores began to appear on the old man's arms and chest. Their eyes locked, and Sarah could see confusion and horror on the old man's face as he staggered for a moment before collapsing to the ground.

Mortified, Sarah fled into the night, back to her bedroom. She paced the floor, shaking violently in the darkness.

"Come on, Sarah, get it together!" She clenched her hands into fists as she paced. "That wasn't you, couldn't have been you! People can't do that to each other; they just can't! It was something else; it had to be!"

A child's voice rang out in the dark room. "It's okay, Sarah, it was just a bad dream."

Sarah jumped and glanced around the room, peering nervously into the darkness. "Who's there?"

"It's me, Sarah." The voice was closer this time.

Sarah stiffened. Ever so slowly, she reached her hand into her jacket pocket. She felt Jeanie, and slowly pulled the tattered doll out to examine it more closely. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

In the darkness, she could have sworn the doll's stitched mouth twitched. "It's not your fault, Sarah. They were going to do bad things to you. They were going to take me away from you, replace me with that new doll they gave you."

"You made them sick?" Sarah asked, incredulous.

"No," the doll giggled. "We did, the two of us. Together. The way it's always been, the way it always will be. It would have been better if you listened to me, Sarah. You should have stayed here. You were safe here. Nothing in this world could harm you, not even me. But you went outside. You really shouldn't have done that, Sarah."

"Why not?" Sarah shook the doll, then glared down at it before throwing it across the room. "And what could you do to me, anyway? You're a useless little poppet, nothing more."

Sarah flopped down on her bed, then sighed. She was asleep moments later, exhaustion overtaking her.

Movement stirred in the dark corner of the room. Slowly, Jeanie rose to her feet and crossed the floor. It was time, and she had work to do. Quietly, carefully, she whispered in Sarah's ear, what to do and where to go. The hypnosis had taken effect quite well. She commanded Sarah to rise, to go to the bathroom in the boy's dorm, to take the straight razor from where Father Ted kept it stored in his medicine cabinet, then to creep back to the girls' dorm, up to the third-floor bathroom. It wasn't the best place for this, Sarah could be discovered and saved, but Jeanie couldn't afford to wait. Her master had waited long enough, and if Sarah couldn't take her place, Jeanie would have to return to that place between worlds, where ash rained down constantly, and not even sunlight could penetrate the thick fog that covered everything. She didn't wake Sarah until the girl was back in the white tiled room, and Jeanie's plan could be set fully into motion.

Sarah's body was discovered the next morning by Sister Margaret. In an attempt to save Sarah, the Sister had grabbed her and pulled her out of the water, soaking herself in the process. She had fallen to the same fate as the two from the carnival before one of the other Sisters found her later that morning. The newspapers didn't have much to say, the nuns at Sister Mary's placed a simple obituary for Sarah and Sister Margaret, and the world went on. There were no other sightings of the disease - the police eventually concluded that someone had received a bad batch of drugs, and it had spread, causing the death of three carney workers, a carnival-goer and one nun who had been a drug user in her younger days.

Alex opened his eyes to silence. He didn't know how long he had been there, or how he had managed to stumble into this place. One minute, he was a successful geneticist, working to develop a new bio weapon for the U.S. Government, the next, he was just, there, in that post-apocalyptic world He had searched in vain for any other signs of life, anything to hint that he wasn't the last living being on Earth. He wiped a hand down his soot stained face and sighed before standing and examining his surroundings.

The sun has risen, or so he believed. It was so hard to tell in this place. The fog here was thick, so thick he could barely see what lay three paces ahead of him. The only way he could tell it was daylight was by the grey sky overhead and the whirls of fog he could now barely make out against the colder smoke and charcoal of the denser fog farther away. The scorched ground here was flat, thankfully, but it seemed wrong, somehow.

There was no sound - no echoing footsteps when he walked, no birds chirping, nothing. Just, emptiness. Emptiness, and the thick layer of oily, gritty ash that covered everything. From the ground to his clothing, hands, and face, the ash was everywhere. Alex blended perfectly into his surroundings.

He quickly gathered his things and tried to hide proof of his campsite as best he could. He scooped handfuls of the oily ash onto the remnants of his camp before he set off - another day of walking, searching for... Alex couldn't remember what, anymore. Neither could he remember why he was here, nor what he was before... Hadn't the world always been like this?

Something howled in the distance. The sound sent shivers up his spine, and the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. For a moment, he wondered what it could be, what could make its home in this world, but after a brief pause, he began to move more quickly, setting into a slow jog in what he hoped was the opposite direction of whatever made that noise.

He jogged until his breathing became labored before he stopped and listened again. Nothing. He raised his water skin to take a long drink of water, but it was empty.

He sighed, glanced around, then start walking again. The air around him heated up as the day progressed, and he could no longer tell if it was sweat that has his clothing sticking to his body or the still thick fog. After what felt like an eternity, he dared glance up. The sun, although so obscured by the fog that it appeared only as a small whiteish-grey ball, was riding high in the sky. Midday, Alex realized, and stopped again, just long enough to pull a piece of dried meat from his pack. The sound of water gurgling nearby drew his attention. He froze for a moment, listening to discern its direction. He jerked to his left, turning to follow the sound as the meat tumbled from his hand, forgotten. His movements were almost mechanical, stiff and disjointed as he stumbled through the fog toward the sound. The whorls of fog seemed to be telling him to turn around, to go back. His senses as well were screaming at him to turn around, but he was so damn thirsty. He stumbled forward, almost running into the woman before he saw her. She was old, her back bowed, her long blonde hair was fading to grey, stringy and wet. She was wearing a tattered grey-green cloak. Alex started, surprised to see anyone out here in this desolate wasteland. He moved to go around her, but she held out a gnarled hand.

"I wouldn't go that way if I were you," she said. Her voice was grating, rough. It reminded him of a porch swing - perhaps from another life.

Alex ignored her, her hand brushing his stomach as he moved around her, continuing toward the sound of the bubbling brook.

"It isn't safe," she cautioned.

He continued to ignore her, moving forward, stumbling faster as the sound of the water grew closer.

There, in the fog, Alex made out a shape - a tree, and beneath it, rocks and a gurgling stream. He broke into a run, falling to his knees at the water's edge, scooping up handfuls of the water and drinking it down greedily.

He drank his fill, then sat back on his knees and groaned, contentedly.

He had only sat there for a moment, relieved, before pain exploded from his gut, and he gasped, clutching at his abdomen as sharp, searing pain welled inside him.

The woman appeared beside him, kneeling with some effort. "I tried to warn you."

A scream escaped him as a fresh wave of pain seized him, causing him to double over. His eyes burned, and he lifted his free hand to wipe at them. It came away bloody. Through watering, stinging eyes, he beheld the reality before him: a bog stretched out, touching a rocky bank a few yards away. Green slime coated the surface, and it roiled as bubbles exploded, giving it the appearance of boiling. A fresh wave of nausea hit him, and his head began to pound.

The old woman chuckled dryly. "They never listen, do they, Jeanie?"

The faint sound of a child's laughter is the only response.

Through the waves of pain and nausea, Alex managed to ask the woman one question. "Who are you?"

"I am Sarah," the old woman whispered, her voice hoarse, "and my only crime was going to a carnival. Now, I am Plague, and I wait here to be unleashed again upon the mortal realm." With that, she gently patted his arm. Blisters appeared where she touched him, and spread quickly throughout his body. The pain was terrible; at once as though his flesh were burning away and being ripped off. He screamed, a wail of agony as his vision faded. He drew his last breaths as his body convulsed violently on the ground.

Sarah stood slowly, shaking her head as the corpse at her feet disappears. "One more off to the afterlife," she murmured to herself, then sighed and turned to walk away.