Seven Deadly

Chapter 2: Questions with No Answers

My life up until this point has been a sort of frustrating mystery, even to myself - like a puzzle with half the pieces missing. Or a chess game made up only of clueless, directionless pawns, with no far-seeing Queen to lead the battle.

I’ve always known that Gabby isn’t my real mother, and she’s never tried to convince me that she is. How I came to be in her care though, and who my real mom and dad are, are questions I have no clear answers to. My earliest childhood memory is of being in a dark, gloomy place, surrounded by many people but also alone. Men and women wearing blood red masks and golden robes, kneeling in a circle and singing in a strange unfamiliar language, or speaking slowly, all at once - maybe chanting. 

Chanting at me.

I must have been just a toddler, no more than four years old. I remember feeling cold, and frightened, and confused. Most of all, I remember feeling loved - but not a good sort of love. A twisted, sick love. I was cherished and adored, idolised and worshipped and revered- and maybe even feared.

Then it all changed. Light came into the darkness, and Gabby and Michael (a close friend of Gabby’s, who I haven’t seen in years now) came for me. The memories are all a shadowy blur, thin and insubstantial as smoke that disappears whenever I try to hold on, to remember more. I vaguely remember a fight, and running or flying away in someone’s arms, way up high, the earth below growing smaller and smaller - maybe we escaped in a small plane. All I remember clearly from the escape is looking down and seeing the red-masked people far below, their golden robes glimmering against white snow, which was quickly turning crimson as they slit their throats one by one, their wails and shrieks piercing my heart as we fled. I still have nightmares about their blood splashing against the snow, those moans and cries - and a word they were calling out, garbled and distorted as they choked and gargled on their own lifeblood. It sounded like they were shouting my name, 'Lucy', and another word. Maybe 'fur' or 'four'. I have no clue why they'd be calling that out. Maybe they were saying my name, followed by my age - I was probably about four years old at the time - but still, I've never been sure what they were calling out to me as they slit their own throats, and why.

Since taking me from the dark place, Gabby has been my caretaker - at times like a mother, then a big sister, and more recently like a friend of sorts. A very secretive, enigmatic friend.

She won’t tell me anything about who I really am, or who she really is. 

I used to think that Gabby was just flighty and easily-distracted. I assumed that she got bored of places quickly, or maybe even that she's had some trouble with the law in the past - something she was running away from. But now I’ve realised the truth. If we stay in one place too long, people start noticing something peculiar about her. 

And now that I’m a senior in my final year of high school, I know for certain the thing that I’ve suspected for years - Gabby doesn’t age. The gap between us has been closing for years, and I’ve finally caught up. She could fit right in at any high school in the senior class, and no one would think twice. Her appearance is somewhere between the ages of eighteen and nineteen, and she’s been that way as far back as I can remember. Her real age though - that’s something I still don’t know.

I’ve tried to bring it up with her a few times - even asking her directly how old she is, or how it’s possible that her age appears to be frozen in time - and she just laughs every time, saying that she’s actually older than I think, and just looks young for her age.

She says she was eighteen years old when she found me (I was four years old), which would mean a fourteen year age gap between us. So now that I’m eighteen years old, she should be thirty two.

And that’s just not possible. If it was true, then she literally looks half her age. No amount of plastic surgery or botox could achieve that - not that Gabby’s the sort who would ever dabble with cosmetic procedures.

She likes everything natural, and has a weird phobia about doctors. Even with me - I don’t remember ever going to a doctor’s appointment, even once. On school health check days, she’d always make up some excuse to keep me home.

Maybe because I’ve never really been sick - not even a flu or a cold - a day in my life. I guess I’m just lucky.

Sometimes I wonder if maybe Gabby is some sort of psychopath (with very good genetics) who kidnapped me from my real family. Maybe the half-formed shadowy memories of the dark place, the people in red robes, are just a figment of my imagination.

But deep down I know that Gabby isn’t like that. There’s something so pure, and innately good about her. A sort of child-like innocence, that I’m beginning to see more clearly as I grow up and start to leave my own childhood behind me.

Gabby is kind and gentle, a ray of sunlight in the darkness of the world - and she’s not the sort of person that would kidnap a child.

Another theory I have is that Gabby and I are somehow related. Maybe she’s my aunt, or a cousin, and something happened to my mom. Something horrible - like maybe my mom was a drug addict, or a criminal, a p********e, in a gang - something so bad that Gabby had to rescue me, and is now keeping the truth from me to protect me.

The idea of us being related does check out. We both have skin as pale as alabaster, curly blonde hair (although her hair is down to her waist and a few shades lighter than my own dark golden blonde - her’s is more of a pale gold, like a river of champagne, silken sunlight and moonlight tumbling in loose waves) - and her eyes are the palest light blueish purple, the colour of the morning sky at twilight - fringed by dark golden lashes. She’s also a lot taller than me - where I stand at just five foot two, she’s around five foot eight. Simply put, she's gorgeous. Super-model gorgeous, which attracts a lot of attention - not the best thing when you're trying to stay under the radar, which might be another reason we move so frequently. She's had a lot of male admirers/pursuers over the years, some more ardent and persistent than others, although I don't remember her ever dating. 

Anyway, despite the differences in our appearance, our faces are similar enough that people have always easily assumed that we are mother and daughter (ten years ago) and now, that we are sisters. So it's totally possible that we're related...but Gabby is so secretive about my past, and her own, that it’s impossible for me to really know how or why we came to be together. 

I don’t even know for sure that she’s even American. While my own accent is a patchwork mix made up of the many places we’ve lived in over the years on our neverending trek across the United States - California, New York, New England, Boston, Oregon, the Deep South, the Midwest - her way of speaking is even more unique. She has a strange accent - or rather, no accent at all. It’s like if you took all the accents in the entire world, placed them into a big pot, stirred them up really well, and spoke with the resulting dialect. Gabby says it’s because of all the traveling she's done, living in so many different countries before she found me, and so no one particular accent stuck.  

There’s also the matter of money - Gabby seems to have an endless supply of it, despite having never worked a day in her life for it. She’s not flashy or pretentious - we live pretty much under the radar, and every town or city we move to, we live in a good neighbourhood (not ever in the wealthiest area, which would be too conspicuous - but we always live in one of the nicer areas in any town). And I usually go to sheltered, out-of-the-way private schools if possible, depending on what’s in the area.

I’ve asked Gabby on numerous occasions what she does all day when I’m away at school, and she always tells me the same thing. She tells me that she paints all day (I can believe that - every place we go, she sets up an art studio in a sunny room with her paints and easel, and it becomes her sanctuary) - and she also says that she visits art galleries, parks, concerts, libraries, tours historic houses and explores every nook and cranny of every city we live in. 

I can’t help but wonder though, if she wouldn’t get bored after a while of all that art and culture. There’s something she’s not telling me, and with every passing year, the itch to know the truth grows stronger and stronger. After I graduate high school next year, I’ll be free to choose my own path, whether that’s travelling the world solo on a gap year, or attending university (my grades are excellent, and getting into any college I choose shouldn’t be a problem).

Gabby and I haven’t spoken about what will happen when I finish school next year. We never speak about the future, and I’m not sure what it is I really want from life exactly. All I know is that I’m not happy, and can’t carry on like this much longer. 

I try as hard as I can to be like her, and to embody everything she's tried to teach me over the years - kindness, patience, diligence, humility - to be faultless. To be... perfect. 

But there’s this seed of something in my heart, a dark secret hidden away, waiting to emerge… and when it does, who knows what chaos it’ll leave in its wake. It’s like a tiny lick of flame, a fiery spark of malcontent, anger, repressed rage - ready to burst out and blaze into a full-blown inferno.

There’s a monster locked up inside me, waiting to get out - and I worry what will happen when it finally wakes up.

For now, I just need to focus on getting through my final year of high school in one piece.

That shouldn’t be too hard, right?

Right.