Stand Your Ground - Part Five (Patreon)

It feels like we're entering the home stretch now, lovelies. Tons of thanks to RogueDragon for inspiring this series and making it possible with his support. Please enjoy. Links to the other parts are at the bottom.

*****

 Meghan never called us like this. She was quiet, self-sufficient--never got into trouble or had an issue with anyone. That’s why we were both in the car so quickly. She wasn’t picking up her phone when we called back. She’d just said “I need help,” and then the call cut off, but I got a text with an address. A little house on the edge of town.

The door was open when we got there, and I wanted to go in together, but Mike made me promise to stay in the car. He walked through the doorway, bold and confident, calling out for our little girl.

I waited.

I left the engine running, and that low hum was the only sound filling each moment. Every minute that passed, each changing digit on the stereo’s digital clock compounded the growing dread in the pit of my stomach.

I was so startled by my phone buzzing in my lap that I bashed my knee on the bottom of the steering wheel. It was Mike. It’s okay, come in. Just that and nothing more.

I tried texting him back, asking what the hell was happening and what he needed me for, but he wouldn’t respond. Everything felt off, disturbing and wrong, but my girl and my husband were both in that house.

I was nervous and sick, but I got out of the car and marched right through that door.

The house was deeply dark. I could barely see anything past the moonlight following me through the doorway, and that vanished almost instantly as the door swiftly slammed shut behind me.

“Meghan!” My voice shook a little as I called out my daughter’s name. “Meghan, let’s go! Mike? Mike!”

Still nothing but silence for a long moment, and then came weird, soft laughter along with a low, faint light.

A single candle was flickering to life on the floor in the distance, and a second later another, then another and another and another. Each revealed more of the unfathomable scene, leaving me covering my gaping mouth and shaking my head.

Blood was everywhere. I saw it and I smelled it, but it wasn’t splattered throughout the room. Each of the seven candles sat on a different point of a circle drawn in blood on the carpet, and various senseless symbols filled and surrounded the ring.

Behind it, seated in what could only be described as a throne, sat a hauntingly immaculate woman clad in black leather from her head to her boots. She watched in silence, staring at me with a twisted grin. 

Meghan was beside her, down on the floor on her hands and knees, stripped naked and just as covered in blood as the ground. Dried streaks covered her bare chest and ran from wounds at her wrists all the way to her elbows.

She didn’t look at me, didn’t even turn her eyes. She was low, bowed down and right up against the side of that woman’s foot. I couldn’t see her face for a moment, but I could see her head slightly shifting and bobbing from the side.

I just barely caught sight of her tongue. My daughter was covered in blood, on her knees, licking this woman’s boot.

“What did you do to her?” I finally found my voice. I didn’t know if I was going to have to fight her. As horrid and bizarre as things looked, Meghan had asked us to come. I was going to get her out.

The woman turned her head, glancing at my daughter on the ground. The bootlicking stopped and Meghan pulled back just enough to look at me.

“Mom, I did all this. Goddess has been kind to me.”

I wasn’t prepared for that. I wasn’t prepared for any of this, but hearing her voice, hearing her call this blonde psychopath “Goddess” took me to another level of hysteria.

“Meghan, what the hell is happening here? Where’s your father?” I clutched my chest. My own wheezing filled my ears in the otherwise silent room. Her blood. All I could smell was my daughter’s own blood.

“He’s here.” That’s all she said for a long moment, and the woman in her chair seemed to grin at me just the faintest bit more. This was too insane. What was happening to my little girl?

“He wasn’t nice, so Goddess made him little, like she did with me and my friends.” She didn’t sound like herself. Her voice was so smooth and giddy and strange.

I spoke slowly, keeping my tone steady and even to try and get through to her, but also to keep some measure of control over myself. “Meghan, where are your friends?”

She laughed, a dark and twisted laugh that faded into a long, contented sigh. “She smashed them like insects under her beautiful boots.” She turned back and kissed the woman’s foot again, nuzzling her cheek against her ankle while she looked at me. “She ripped them apart in her perfect hands.”

I’d seen the kinds of pictures she’d saved on her phone, and I’d been through her search history, too. I wanted to talk to her about it, but she was a good kid, and starting that conversation was just too hard. I couldn’t believe it had become something so crazy and so deep. “Meghan, is this--is this a roleplaying thing? Is this some--some kind of fantasy sex thing?”

My daughter laughed--a long, light, beautiful laugh that I’d loved for her entire life, but when it was over I was still staring at the crazed, blood-smeared girl I hardly recognized.

“It is, Mom. It is, but it’s real. It’s so real. Look.” She moved towards me, shifting forward on her hands and knees and crawling like a cat, pausing at the edge of the bloody circle on the ground.

“Look.” She beckoned me closer with a jerk of her chin and lowered her face towards the floor, closely examining the circle’s center. I hesitated, and glanced at the other woman for a moment. I wanted to scream at her, to pull her up out of that chair and shake her for what she’d done--whatever it was that she’d done, but Meghan was talking to me and I needed to get through to her first.

I took a step towards her, and I looked where she was looking. There wasn’t anything that stood out at first in the flickering candlelight, but after a second I did notice something tiny, about the size of an ant.

“Closer, Mom.” She peeked up at me and then turned back, leaning down until her chin almost grazed the carpet.

I slowly crouched down along with her, still focused more on her than whatever it is she wanted me to be looking at. When I glanced back, though, I could see the arms and the legs, the tiny human shape lying motionless, spread-eagled on the floor.

I thought I would scream, but when I opened my mouth only a guttural heaving came out. Through the gasping, shuddering hyperventilation I finally managed to make a few shrieking words. “Oh my God, Mike!”

Meghan’s soft chuckle followed my shrill cry. “Hi there, Daddy.”

*****

Part 1 

Part 2 

Part 3 

Part 4