The Parade Of Broken Soldiers

Chapter One

     I'm Avril. Avril Brandy Blythe. This is your first and only warning before you read this story. It isn't normal or happy or light-hearted. There are things found in here that will haunt you for the rest of your life if let out, so if you don't take to dark, evil stories, then please, just go away for your own safety. However, if you think you can handle it, then keep reading, but don't say I didn't warn you.

    If you would have asked me what I thought I would be doing my junior year of high school, I would have probably said one of the usual, expected responses: get good grades, make some cool friends, maybe get a boyfriend; normal, average things that everyone and their sister would have said without blinking or second-guessing to make sure his or her reply was the correct one in the judgemental eyes of society. What actually happened was definitely not something ANYONE would have ever said, no matter how wasted the person you asked was. What actually happened was so obscure not even the smartest psychological weirdo could've predicted it. And it rocked my world like nothing I've ever experienced.

     It started out when, under mysterious circumstances, my mother died. Look, I know that's a blunt way to put it, but honest to God that's how random it was to my dad and I. One minute she was alive, and the next she just... wasn't. Like she just stepped out of her body and left for Heaven. We found her the morning of March 23 lying still as a statue in her floral print bed, just like she was last night when she climbed in at around ten, like she always did. Her grass-green eyes were closed calmly, and it looked like she was still sleeping. Except that no matter how loud we yelled or screamed for her to just, for God's sake, wake up, damn it all, she didn't. After about an hour of shouting at her, we realized her full chest wasn't rising and falling like it was supposed to. There was no pulse, no heartbeat, no nothing. She was just... gone. Just like that.

     The funeral was the twenty-fifth (my dad wasted no time in getting her under the ground, the crazy bastard), and he announced right then and there that we were selling our house and moving to a large, century-old, Victorian-style house in upstate Montana, which was approximately two-thousand miles from our old little cottage in east Maine. Needless to say, I was a little distressed at both the news and his awful sense of timing. On the way back from the church, I pulled out every card in the deck to get him to change his mind, the only-two-more-years-of-school one, the but-no-one-lives-in-Montana one, even the lie-and-say-you're-engaged-to-a-made-up-boy-who-lives-here one. Unfortunately, my father was resolute in his executive decision, and three days later, at the exact same time, I was in our stuffy SUV, surrounded by boxes of stuff, with only the moving trucks in front and behind us to look at, and trust me, it did not make for good scenery.

     Twenty-one hours and two, unnamed stoner motels later, we reached the steep, monotoned gravel driveway of our new house. The house couldn't be seen from the street, if that term could be used to describe the rutt-filled, dirt road we had to drive on for miles to reach this place. We barely escaped that death trap with our lives, and this thing might have looked more modern than that, but the sharpness from the rocks creating the driveway combined with the dark, short-cut, forest green grass littered with prickly, dead-looking patches of spiked thistles did absolutely nothing to calm my already-rattled nerves, but my dad didn't seem fazed. The beaten-up, silver Hyundai ascended up the mountainous slope, the stones sounding extremely similar to knashing teeth as they crunched under our rubber wheels. I took in a breath quietly and rested my chin on the back of my hand on the dusty car window's ledge, letting my thick, freshly-dyed, pastel purple hair fall in front of my face and over my square-framed glasses.
     After what felt like hours, we finally reached the top of the hill, and my icy green eyes landed on the our new house for the first time, and I felt like dying or running at full-speed back down that driveway. In all fairness, the house was practically a mansion by today's standards; it easily could've cost half a million dollars to build only the exterior of the thing, and I'm sure it in its entirety was state-of-the-art a century ago. (The key words there were "a century ago".) The wooden panels siding the majority of the outside were a deep, eggplant purple that could definitely be mistaken for black, and the paint coloring them was chipping and cracking in some places. The black shingles were clinging as best they could to the severely slanting roof, and they matched the wrought iron trimming and large gate surrounding the property. Just like on the hill, the lawn's grass was a dark, shadowed green and absolutely teeming with thistles. A garden lined the front and left of the house, although I'm not sure a massive strip of briars, climbing brambles, and dead hawthorne bushes could be called a garden. Behind the gigantic house was a forest that looked like something from a Grimm fairytale; thin trickles of light barely broke through the thick canopy above, creating the illusion of nighttime in the middle of the day.

     Gulping, I stepped out of the cramped car, my camera around my neck and my cardboard box of stuff in my arms. I took in the picture around me: the house, the yard, the woods, the gate, the ominous, bruising, sky...

     My dad interrupted my thoughts. "Well, here we are!!!! Home sweet home, am I right?" he commented cheerfully, his hazel eyes lovingly gazing upon the house of horrors in front of us. "Isn't she gorgeous, Avril? They called it the Tenebris Manor back in the day. Interesting little fun fact about the place, I know." He looked up, seeming to finally notice the sky. I was hoping, PRAYING, that he would notice how inhospitable it looked and decide to turn us around, sell this God-forsaken piece of crap, and buy our old house back, but instead he just grinned his normal, stupid grin and hoisted his own box higher under his arm, pulling out a large, brass key ring from his jacket pocket. "It looks like it's going to rain. Let's go inside!!!"
  
     I mustered my courage as my father walked happily up to the rusting door and inputted an antique skeleton from the full ring. As the door clicked open, I closed my eyes, exhaled, and stepped into the house that I only then realized was called the Darkness House in Greek.