To the Bone

Chapter one: The End of the Beginning

Authors note:
I'm rewriting a story that I came up with in the midst of my Creepypasta phase 😭, note that all the characters are completely fictional and I do not own any of the original creepypasta characters that you can find on the official website! This story is going to contain very dark themes and graphic violence so viewer discretion is advised. I'll also probably be really bad at updating but this will end up completed.

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         The first time I became acutely aware of danger, I was still a child.

My mom's client left my room as quietly as he had entered, seemingly satisfied with whatever I had provided that she had not. I had forgotten to lock my bedroom door that night - now my Sleeping Beauty blanket that I refused to give up was matted with quick drying blood due to my negligence. Starting at eight years old, sleepy and confused by the uncomfortable warm liquid dripping down my scrawny bare thighs, I became a sinner. After that night I tried to outdo the ache between my thighs by putting myself in harms way as much as possible. My whole childhood spent in casts and stitches, in and out of emergency rooms, raising my fists on the playground and spitting at Mr. Roger's just to get a reaction.

             My second figment of torture was when I lost him. He was the only living proof that I wasn't crazy, the boy who held my hand and cried on my shoulder and promised that he saw it too. He was my best friend, the one person I needed desperately to stay sane in this small town. I hoped in some way, that together, we could avoid It- for I felt the shift; the dark bane spreading within me. It, however, had gotten to him first, stealing him away in a cloud of choking black smoke.

It had taken him first.

              He has already burned, hurtling our intertwined fates into a lonesome graveyard with the utmost care. I know it's inevitable for the cursed to die, but can't help but wait for the day I'm lain beside him in Cragshire graveyard.

                  My third, is not long past, and still vastly real. It was a late July night, a sudden sting of metal on my cheekbone. When my curls were torn from my crown and the cloth was lifted from my eyes. We fought to protect each other. Moments with no thought; just fight. I wondered if they had found me weak, had accepted my begging and wailing as entertainment. Were they proud? Had they laughed even as I had cracked their skulls in? Even as their bodies skidded across the cracked potholes littered in the old dusty road? Did I bow my head? Did I weep? Had it been worth it?

                 Something is rotten inside of me, it's a strange feeling, knowing that it isn't anything I can control, whether I am under the watchful hand of an angry god, or because I am repaying a price greater than myself. I know now that there is nothing that can change how the rest of my life will unfold, and no way to counteract the terrible sequence of events that will take place over the next few months.

                                                                               ****

                 I sighed and slammed the car door shut, looking up at the dingy one story flat that I now was supposed to call home. It wasn't my first choice to move from dads
rustic, crumbling, albeit well-loved farmhouse in sunny Arizona to this tiny, depressing shack in the middle of small town, Vilmoure, Colorado, the very town I had fled a year and a half prior in an attempt to escape the inescapable bad luck that seemed to follow my every move. The night of my seventeenth birthday had proven that no matter where I was, or how protected I felt, I was never going to be normal, and I was never going to be safe.
A cool breeze whipped across my face and I involuntarily shivered. Even though it was only late August the air felt crisp, reminding me of my past falls here. Me, Toby and Lyra running from house to house trick or treating, Toby slicing his hand open carving pumpkins; the blood dripping down the soft flesh of his palms as we watched fascinated at how nothing seemed to hurt him, camping in our backyards, the three of us bundled up in the same cheap, cramped tent. Sometimes mom forced me to include Ashley and she'd be in there with us. Flashlights under our chins as we told ghost stories and me and Toby traded secret glances, knowing that the true monsters out there in the woods were far scarier than the Boogeyman.
Vilmoure, the place I had lived in for the relatively peaceful first fifteen years of my life, was nestled in the dead center of Colorado and surrounded by dense forests. The sun rarely breaks through the perpetual gloom and the chill of the air cuts through you like a knife. Its tired buildings, weathered by years of neglect, stand as a testament to the towns slow descent into decay. Every boarded up storefront, every crumbling facade, speaks to a town abandoned by progress and left to whither away in obscurity. Christianity hangs over Vilmoure like a heavy fog, its presence suffocating and always present. The church, located in the dead center of the towns square, steeple reaching towards the grey sky like a skeletal finger, casts a long shadow over the town. One that had long ago tricked me into thinking that Its shadow was standing over me, constantly forcing me to spin on my heels, expecting to catch a glimpse of the pale skeletal being.
                 The devotion of the townsfolk in Vilmoure feels more like a desperate grasp for salvation in a world devoid of hope. I still remember being dragged from my bed every Sunday morning, dressed in my Sunday best and still half asleep as my mother led me to our car, dad never went, Ms. Rodgers, or as we knew her, Connie, would take his place in the passenger seat and Toby and Lyra would sit in the back, squished between me and Ashley. At the time I was too young to notice how tightly my mom gripped the steering wheel, her knuckles taut, or how Connie would dab pasty concealer on the new purple and blue explosions scouring her delicate pale skin.
Talk spread fast in Vilmoure, the older residents would go as far to publicly scorn those who they considered impure, sinners were always a favorite topic among the adults. Brekkie Wilkers, a pretty brunette girl I had known for most of my life had gotten pregnant my freshmen year of highschool, months before I left for Arizona. While riding through town this morning, our car passed her face plastered across dozens of  storefront windows, the words underneath bold, unmistakable.
HAVE YOU SEEN ME?
She wasn't the only one, every lamppost, every window and milk carton and crumbling brick wall had countless faces, all missing, some for weeks, most for longer, all under twenty.
That was another unspoken rule of Vilmoure, nestled right in between  never skipping Sunday mass and always respecting the elders. When your child, your brother, your sister, your best friend disappeared, you couldn't question it, you could hang the posters, you could mourn, you could devout yourself to the church, but you couldn't search for them, and you could never, under any circumstances, tread to deeply into the woods.
My mom, Sidney Springs, with her farmers tan, despite living in this town that only has ten decently sunny days a year, her whole life, heat damaged platinum blonde curls, and tall lithe frame, gave me her famous tight lipped smile, the same one that she had been giving everyone since the divorce.
"Do you have everything, baby?"
She asked with her clear as bells country twang as she opened the rusty latch on the trunk of our 1989 Volkswagen with a viable struggle. That car was ancient. Older than me and Ashley combined, I'm pretty sure she had gotten it when she was in her teens, a gift from her own mother. I could grumble about her as much as I wanted but it didn't change the fact that she had driven all twelve and a half hours down to that police station in Arizona to bring me back home herself. I think she knew that I would be too paranoid to take a bus, or fly by myself, not after what happened. She had always understood me a bit more than dad had, not for his lack of trying. It made me feel sick, that I had left her here, in this shithole, despite my protests, despite wanting to stay. Dad couldn't send any child support payment to help her with taxes if the child in question wasn't there. That was why instead of living in our childhood house next door to the Rodgers, we were here, just a ways down the street yet it felt so much farther. On the bright side, every time I looked out my bedroom window now I wouldn't have to stare at the charred husk of the structure I had played in for a majority of my childhood. "Coop hon, help me bring this stuff in." She chirped, gesturing vaguely to the insane amount of cardboard boxes we had managed to stuff in the car, her voice a weak attempt at positivity solely for my benefit. She had lost her youngest daughter and ex husband barely two weeks ago, she might as well have already lost me.
I internally groaned but begrudgingly lugged a heavy cardboard box from the open trunk and hauled it up the creaking wooden steps to the worn front door, which looked as if it was barely hanging on by its rust covered hinges. I paused and took a moment to catch my breath, looking up at the weather beaten house that stood before me with both distaste and curiosity. It was painted what must have once been a tasteful white, but after being out in the near constant rain of Vilmoure it now resembled more of a brackish grey. All of its windows water damaged, the glass warped, and the base boards termite ridden. Shifting the box over to my hip, I pushed the front door open with my hip. It swung open with the hinges screeching in protest, I figured the movers must've left it unlocked for us when they had dropped off my bed frame and dresser.
The place looked like it had seen better days, the dusty faded pink wallpaper peeling off and creasing and there were cracks spreading like spiderwebs in its corners. The carpet was probably older than the house itself, yellowing floral patterns that were so faded they were nearly indecipherable. There was a thick layer of dust on everything, the couch, the floor, the windowsills, you name it. How mom had been living here for months alone was beyond me. The electricity wasn't working fully yet so the air hung thick and hot despite outsides chill and the whole place smelled of musk and mildew, which I assumed came from plumbing and heating fixtures that most likely were long due for a replacement, which seemed appropriate considering the whole place was barely inhabitable. On the bright side, I'd probably die of some weird mold inhalation poisoning before anything else happened to me. My new home, which is a generous choice of words, was comprised of five cramped rooms: two bedrooms, a joint bathroom, a kitchen, and living room, all crammed onto the ground level. My new bedroom had a ladder and ceiling latch that opened up to a small attic which was somehow freezing despite the rest of the house's muggy temperature.
With the help of mom, all of the boxes containing my stuff were stacked into my new room. Four walls, painted a faded pink, my empty wire bed frame and antique dresser that were already there courtesy of the movers. I couldn't look at my dresser for too long, the corner of it was still chipped and the dark stain embedded on the chipping white paint had barely faded. I placed the heavy box I had been carrying down beside the bed and headed back to the car to grab more of my belongings, pausing to give my mom a quick peck on her cheek.
I had brought almost everything I owned with me from Arizona but here in this run down quiet room it all seemed so out of place, like they were props for the wrong play. This set wasn't my childhood room, full of artificial colors and saccharine laughter, nor was it my room at dad's, bathed in sunlight and smelling of baking bread. I had too much history here, too many skeletons in the closet, but it wasn't as if Arizona was much better, not anymore. No where would be different, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, so might as well come back to where everything started.
After my boxes were mostly unpacked, with posters of old rock bands Lyra had shown me hanging on the walls alongside the dozens of antique metal crosses, my new dresser already messy with half burnt candles, broken makeup and cracked glass trinkets, white lacy curtains billowing from where I had cracked the window open in an attempt to filter out the thick stagnant air, I finally got my slightly battered MacBook out and sat on the edge of the bed, clicking around the web, cursing the shitty WiFi, to find something to do.
It was already getting dark out, the sunset casting the forest that stood menacingly behind my 'new' house in deep shadow. The forest surrounded the whole of Vilmoure. Those who were smart speak of the forest in hushed tones, distancing themselves. As young children, me and Toby had always been warned to not go in too far, of course that rule had been broken countless times, both of us too immersed in games of make believe to listen to the uptight adults who always breathed down our necks. We never got lost, every time the forest looked unfamiliar, we would just follow the messily drawn papers nailed to the trees back to civilization. Many of the people who decided to venture into the forest however, were never seen again, or if they were, they would be disfigured and mauled to the point of no resemblance. The townspeople's, especially the older grownups, shopkeepers and elderly citizens who had resided in the town for years would narrow their eyes in suspicion at the mere mention of venturing into the darkness beyond the towns edge. They spoke rumors of portals and hidden pathways that crisscrossed the wilderness, connecting the forests of Colorado in mysterious ways. When I was younger I believed this in a heartbeat, how else would the bodies, bodies of people I knew, turn up hundreds of miles away, on the border of some other small town? What else would explain how me and Toby could walk for hours in one direction and turn back at dusk and make it home within ten minutes? The message in the whispers between locals is always the same, this forest is not ours, it belongs to something more sinister, more powerful, and we cannot stop It.
As I stare out my window, watching the sky go from bright orange and pink to a deep inky blue while the trees sway in the early fall breeze, I swear for just a second I see something, a flash of white and orange out of the corner of my eye, deeper in the woods behind the thick branches of a towering pine tree, a man maybe? But as soon as I blinked it was gone, as if someone had flicked a switch, the illusion disappeared. Leaving me feeling sick. I knew that orange jacket, I knew that white mask. I clapped a hand over my mouth but I could already feel the bile rising in my throat, flooding my esophagus, I push myself away from the window and barrel to the bathroom down the hall, not even fully shutting the door before hunching over the toilet and vomiting up the lucky charms I had eaten in the car earlier. The burning in my throat and the buzzing in my ears distracted me enough from the hot tears streaming down my cheeks, and now that I was in this tiny bathroom, gripping the porcelain rim of the toilet with my shoulders heaving, I felt a feeling I knew all too well, fear. I kick the door shut from my position on the floor, hating how there is no lock to secure my false sense of safety, three decaying walls and a rickety door my only protection as I curl my arms around my legs, making myself as small as possible.
It's not real Cooper.
He's here, he's come to finish the job, to finish me off.
You're safe they don't know where you are.
What if they followed me? What if they're not dead?
You're just seeing things again.
After what felt like hours shaking on the cool dirty tiles of the bathroom floor my limbs slowly unlocked one by one and I pulled myself up on unsteady feet, the room immediately spinning and a rush of nausea overcame me again as I choked back a second wave of vomit. You're safe. I remind myself, wiping the back of my hand across my sweaty brow, and with adrenaline fueling my system, I yank open the bathroom door, ready to be attacked, ready to fight. It was a very anticlimactic experience when I was greeted with nothing except the peeling wallpaper and a wooden cross on the wall across from the bathrooms entrance, I exhale slowly and turn to head down the hall to my own room when something catches my eye. A small symbol etched into the old wood boards behind the pink wallpaper. Shakily taking a step forward, I peel back the faded pink paper to examine it. A jagged circle, with two lines slashing through it, forming an X, it looked like it had been carved there with a knife. Staring at it, an odd prickling sensation ran up my spine, goosebumps prickling my arms. I had seen that symbol before. I knew it with absolute certainty, I just couldn't remember where it came from. Turning abruptly on my heel I rushed back to my bedroom, feeling as if there was a ghost at my heels, and when I got to the safety of my rooms threshold, the door was slammed shut, locking myself up within these four pink walls, oddly nostalgic but all too terrifying. Crossing the room, I yanked my billowing lacy curtains closed, letting the pale moonlight shine through dimly so I could see far enough ahead of me to avoid crashing into anything as I spun slowly, my limbs stiff from the bathroom floor, my head spinning as I fumbled with the light switch on the wall and flicked it on, my nightlight sitting on my bedside table flickered once before blinking out with a faint popping sound, the bulb dying immediately. With a huff of frustration I flop down onto my bed in defeat, ignoring the way the rickety bed frame squeaks. I could always go find one of the spare lightbulbs that are probably tucked away somewhere in the endless boxes that were piled in the corners even before my unexpected arrival but I don't know this new house well enough yet, and a stubborn part of me felt weak thinking of asking my mom for help.
This place wasn't my childhood home, the one that I had been raised in till I was fourteen, nestled snuggly to the right of the Rodger's house. It wasn't my mom's ex boyfriend's house that I had visited just once while living in Florida with my dad. Both of those had been nicer, better kept. Warmer. My dad's house in Florida had been nice too, but I could barely think of it without seeing Ashley's brains splattered across the worn wooden floorboards and feeling my stomach turn.
My childhood home smelled like Lyra's strawberry bath wash and smoke. Dad's house smelled like fresh cut grass and the iron tang of blood. And here smelled like dust and damp wood. All in all, nowhere was different, as long as I was there there would be fires and open wounds and hopelessness dripping like an ever leaking garden hose. As long as I was there the place would be cursed.
Back in elementary school I had been a pariah, boys had said I was an alien, girls had said I was a witch, so I had been left with myself for company, letting butterflies land on my fingertips and making flower crowns on the grassy field banking the woods rather than playing tag or kickball. I liked school, I enjoyed learning, and got decent enough grades, an average B student, I never excelled nor failed, what I really liked was the distraction. It gave me something to do, both during week days and at nighttime after my parents divorce, when I knew I'd be forced to lock myself in either my bedroom or the bathroom till Mom's clients left in the early hours. At school I could stare straight ahead, don't look out the windows. Don't look for it. I sat and stared and didn't speak to anyone, that was until Lyra Rodgers approached me. I had been in the second grade, and she, a fifth grader with thick golden blonde bangs and huge doe brown eyes had approached me, sitting down next to me on the grass without a word. I had glanced at her out of the corner of my eye, she was older and therefore I immediately suspected her to be capable of cruelty. Was this a joke? A mean prank? But then she turned and grinned at me, she had a gap between her two front teeth and a constellation of freckles across her nose and with her voice lowered to a conspirical whisper,
"I have leopard spots too!"
Showing me her arms, spotted with bruises in an array of shades from sickly yellow to brilliant blue. Glancing down from her arms to my bony knees, scraped red and raw and shadowed with purple from the hours I had been forced to kneel last night. Repenting for sins I hadn't known I committed. The angry red mounds on my pale, twiggy arms, burnt from the cigarettes I stashed in the crack of my windowsill. She became my best friend instantly. Living right next door to me meant she was prone to showing up at odd hours, sometimes in the middle of the night, clambering through my window with tear tracks fresh on her face, new bruises littering her body. We never spoke of them, just sat there and held each other and tried to ignore the uncensored sounds coming from my moms room down the hall,
Toby, who was my age and Lyra's little brother, was introduced to my life in a different way. He was an outcast, even I, who had no social graces among my peers knew this. He was too small, too weak, covered in bruises, too fragile, too quiet, too shy, too everything. It didn't help that he had a whole slew of disorders, Tourette's and a stutter made him the poster child for the meaner kids on the playground to follow him around, imitating him and throwing rocks at his back, nevermind if they cut his sickly pale, almost grayish skin, he couldn't feel it anyways. But Toby was a sweet kid, despite his oddities. I don't remember how exactly we met, it could've been that I had saved him from his bullies, wiping the blood from his face and shaking with the weird pent up energy that always seemed to be in endless store in my body, it could've been him approaching me and nodding wordlessly at the woods, cocking his head to the side as if to ask, "Do you see him too?". Or it could've been as simple as him opening the door instead of Lyra when I wanted her to come out to play. However I had met Toby didn't seem to matter, because I don't think there was a time before my knowing of his existence that I had been truly alive. Where Lyra became my best friend, my protector, the older sister I had never had, Toby became everything else. I was constantly trying to explain something incommunicable, and Toby was the only person who ever understood it.
Tomorrow would be the first day of a new school year at Dalton Academy that I wouldn't be starting with him. He had been with me for all of middle school and the beginning of our freshmen year, together we had braved the sneers and snide comments of our peers. The girls shrieking with laughter and mimicking his stutter and writing crude things on my locker. The boys beating Toby's face to a bloody pulp and sneaking pictures under my skirt. The rest of my freshmen year and my sophomore year had been spent at Bayview Public School, back in Arizona. There I had been almost normal. I had friends, lots of them, I went to parties, I got drunk and I made believe that I was whole. I now knew that I would never contact anyone from Bayview ever again, they belonged there, with the sun and the sky, and I belonged here, in the mist and rain. The dead and the living. That's one of the weirder things about coming back to Dalton, back to Vilmoure. You will spend your whole life in one place and then you will inevitably leave, just as you will inevitably return. You will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore.
Dalton Private School, unalike Bayview, is highly prestigious, a basic guarantee that you'll get into an Ivy League. The kind of school my mom could never dream of affording with our shaky income. That's where we got lucky. You could attend Dalton freely with no tuition costs if you lived within five miles of the campus, and our neighborhood is only a two mile walk away. Which meant that after mom had scoured the couch cushions and the glove compartment of the truck, finally scrambling together enough money for uniform and textbook fees, that I was going to be a private school kid for the last two years of my high school experience, starting tomorrow. I couldn't care less where I went to school anymore, at the rate my life was going, I was bound to end up in a mental institution, or prison, before my twenty first birthday.
Rolling off my bed with little to no grace, I began to get ready for bed. My sleep was always unpredictable, sometimes I'd spend days awake at a time, eyes wide and fists clenched till my nails tore through the flesh of my palms, willing the figures outside my window to go away. Sometimes I would sleep through the night, though it was never restful. I brushed my teeth quickly in the dark bathroom, stubbing my toe on the rough porcelain sink and cursing quietly under my breath before heading back down the hall and stripping off the baggy worn jeans and soft faded pink tank that I had worn for the entirety of the car drive. Finally settling into my bed, ignoring the creaking of the box spring as I pulled my sheets and blankets around myself.
Staring listlessly at the ceiling, listening to the rustling of tree limbs coming from the forest, the soft chirping of crickets outside my window which I had cracked open earlier in an attempt to filter out the mold smell. I thought about death. Everyday, I think about dying, about disease, starvation, violence, terrorism, war, the end of the world. It helps keep my mind off of things. On this particular night, my thoughts turned to the act of rotting away. How our bodies are just really sacks of meat and sinew and calcified bone. How when they stop working, they slowly fade away and melt into the earth, becoming creeping vines and flowers and trees. When I die, I thought to myself, as my thoughts slowed along with my breathing, I want to be remembered. I want to be important.
My dream started out simple enough, I was at my 6th birthday party, hosted in the neighborhood I had grown up in. My childhood home planted snuggly next to the Rodgers house. I was wearing a navy blue dress with a dainty lace collar, black Mary Jane's and a glittery plastic princess tiara, all my friends are with me, my parents, the neighborhood kids and some extended family. I was happy, I run around, darting in between peoples legs and giggling when suddenly I stop in my tracks, frozen by some instinct that resided deep in my bones, I was being watched. I looked up, my big eyes widening, because there, standing among the thicket of trees residing beyond the property of my backyard, is what six year old me could only describe as a monster, though that word doesn't really fit what was staring at me. Evil. Evil was the only word possible to describe It. Impossibly tall, as tall as some of the younger trees, with stark white skin. It was wearing a pristine black suit. It had no face. Just indents of sockets where its eyes should be, as if a tarp had been stretched tight over a human skull, though nothing about this thing seemed remotely human. Even in my dream I can feel the vibrations of the excruciating static noise that had rocked through my ears that day. I had been frozen, almost by force, as if It wouldn't let me move. I stared intently with a mixture of instinctual fear and childlike curiosity, because of course I had questions. My parents had always told me monsters weren't real, they had checked my closet and under my bed with rolled eyes and mockery, they had assured me that the real monsters were already here, not in the dark. They were wrong. As if something had snapped, like a rubber band stretched too thin, I stumbled back with a shriek of fear, immediately alerting my always watchful parents, who run to me with looks of concern on their faces, their arms outstretched. I reach my own arms out, desperate for their warmth, their comfort, when the dream suddenly switches like a record being flipped, now I'm nine years old, sitting in the corner of my childhood room, Dreams by Fleetwood Mac baring over the headphones I have secured to my ears in an attempt to block out the furious shouts of my parents downstairs as they yell back in forth in tandem. I flinch as I hear glass shatter.