I’ve finished revising another chunk of my WIP In Sound Mind fic, so here it is! It might change a little by the time I actually post the fic, so there’s that. Big might though. Criticism is welcome, but be warned that I am baby. Hi, Virginia!
The room with the large television was lit up, so he went in. The smaller T.V’s on the shelves around it were on, all of them showing that same eye.
Walking a little further, the big screen suddenly clicked on with a burst of static. Desmond jolted back, but froze when he saw the figure on it. Virginia, as he remembered her from his flashbacks and spontaneous visions. She was distorted, and hiding her face from view, but it was her.
Hm. The mirror in the room behind him, the monster only noticing him when he looked. Maybe if he managed to turn all the screens to the woman on the television, it’ll show up and he could run it into the mirror. The other mirrors had had important items behind the otherwise indestructible glass, so hopefully this one was the same. Besides, it could get him one step closer to defeating the ghost.
Desmond got to work turning all the eyes to the girl. Every other one had her crumpling into herself, and Desmond felt bad, even though it wasn’t truly her.
With the last eye turned to the image of Virginia, the smaller screens began to flicker. A scream echoed through the room as the image jolted, hair falling upwards as she wailed. Then, the glass exploded, and the monster rose from the sparks and smoke in all its smoky, sharp, very angry glory.
With a shill cry the thing lunged, and Desmond made a mad dash for the mirror. Her gnarled claws grazed his back, lightly grazing his skin, and he just barely made it to the mirror before it could catch him. He ducked past it, and when it got close enough the glass surface shattered, sending it back into the floor as it shrieked.
The wooden frame spun a few times from the force, and on it, where the glass was, was another note from the Man, a sketch of the monsters tearful mask under the words.
“The world is better off without the broken.
They bring pain and they inflict their pain onto others.
That wasn’t true. Virginia wasn’t broken. She was hurting from something that happened to her in the past. Something had made her so scared and angry, she lashed out at everyone. She was healing though, he knew that much. But, what had changed? To turn her into that thing?
While there was nothing of actual value revealed by breaking the mirror, there was a room behind the T.V, blocked off by sparking electrical wires. Luckily, taking the fuse from its box solved that.
On the other side was a dollhouse, of all things. He left the door out to the store blocked by the plank; no point in exposing himself. There was a note from the manager about a crash leading them to use the toys department as storage, and a note written in pink crayon by the dollhouse.
A puzzle it seemed. Mother in the freezer, father in the loading bay, brother in storage, and the writer in the trash. Desmond has a feeling he knew just who said writer was, especially after seeing the tiny broken mirror on an upper level, the plastic floor stained with blood.
There was a blocked door across from the glass ones, and beside it was an old claw machine. Inside was a single stuffed bear, and getting closer he could see a key hung on the claw. Obviously the key was for something, even though he couldn’t quite see what kind of key it is through the glass. If only he had a coin….
Sighing, he resigned himself to dying here, in this twisted version of a poorly managed, haunted supermarket, and decided to go get a coin from the registers in the meantime.
