Something's wrong with Alice

Something's wrong with Alice :: Prologue

When I consider the Question, Whether there are such Persons in the World as those we call Witches? my Mind is divided between the two opposite Opinions; or rather (to speak my Thoughts freely) I believe in general that there is, and has been such a thing as Witchcraft; but at the same time can give no Credit to any Particular Instance of it.

JOSEPH ADDISON, The Spectator, No. 117

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Prologue

Something is not right with Alice

My love Robert,

Something is not right with Alice. The terror in my heart is not to be mistaken for delusion, as you have had me believe for the past few months. Alice, is not human. She is something of the Devil's hand.

Even as I write this, I know she is watching. I can feel her eyes peering through the wood of my closed door. And that is why I do not imagine you coming home and telling me that the stress is getting to me.

I do not intend to live through this week, not in the slightest.

Alice, I can not even stand to call her our daughter, for she is nothing of our blood. Not of God's blood. I have reason to believe she is a Witch. Or a demon. They both are the same thing, are they not? My evidence to assume our daughter is the child of the Devil? For the past several days, while you have been away on business, she has shown me things. I do not have time to explain.

I love you Robert, and when you find this, and me, I want you to burn her. Do not take pity ont that evil monstrosity who sits outside my bedroom door at this very second carving the Devil's prayers into the wood. I can hear her.

She is calling me now. But her voice is not her own.

I love you Robert.

Burn our daughter until there is nothing left to burn.

Goodbye Robert, 

Elizabeth.

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December Seventh, 1840

I, Jonathan Teller, have been assigned to the report on the body of Elizabeth Gray. Who was found yesterday evening. The report is as followed,

It seems as if the only person in the home with the thirty two year old woman was their eight year old daughter. The girl was found playing in the drawing room of the house, unaware of what has happened. She is not being suspected of the murder.

The body was found in her bedroom. The windows had been smashed out. As her room was only on the second floor, it has been stated that the murder climbed in through the window.

The body itself was anything but pleasant. Symbols, apparently from rumors I have heard about them being from the book of Satan, Symbols of the witch, were carved into her flesh. Her throat had been slit as well.

Alice Gray was sent to an orphanage, or so I had been told, after her father mysteriously disappeared and no one in her family were fit for caring for the child. Poor girl.

Unusually, she did not seem at all troubled when told her mother had been killed. Infact, she had the opposite reaction. A smile, the smallest one, has crept across the girls face, as if it was amusing.

The funeral will be held tomorrow. Until then, I am in charge of the will of Elizabeth Gray. And will deal with her family when the time comes.