Chapter Text
Prologue
Felicia walked carefully down the hallway. It was dark, darker than she had expected; the darkness was so intense that even the flashlight she was carrying seemed useless. She complained inwardly and tried shaking the device to get it to shine brighter; however, it didn't work.
"Cheap crap, this is the last time I listen to Wiked. ".
She moved forward without thinking about how much time had passed; her head would hurt if she did, since she'd been walking through the hallways for... How long? Ten minutes? Half an hour? Two, three, four, five days, weeks, months. Years.
IN THERE, TIME LOST ALL MEANING. THE SAME HALLWAY OVER AND OVER AND OVER; SHE MEMORIZED THE PATTERN OF THE STRIPES' TINT. LEARNED THE KIND OF WOOD IT WAS. THE BRAND OF PAINT ON THE WALLS. THE GENETIC SEQUENCE OF THE TREE FROM WHICH THE ENTIRE HOUSE WAS BUILT, AND...
"There you are," exclaimed Wiked, her assistant, seeing Felicia on the floor.
"Wiked! You showed up. You have no idea how happy I am to see you! I thought I'd never get out of this infernal hallway again. I'm afraid to tell you that we're both trapped in an infinite loop..."
"Ten minutes?" said Felicia in disbelief.
"Yes, were you licking frog toxins again? ".
Felicia was astonished.
"But I felt time stretch, the years pass, and my senses merge into the mouth of madness of time itself..."
"Frogs?" asked Wiked, with a judging but not surprised look.
Felicia thought for a moment.
"Oh, yes, frogs... Well, don't look at me like that! I'm also a herpetologist; it's part of my field."
"Yes, I was hoping you would notice. If it were as you say, your flashlight would have gone out a while ago."
"Oh, yes, good point... Why have we come here?"
Sudden and fleeting, a demonic hand burst through the wall and grabbed Wiked. This very entity dragged her to another part of the house.
"Oh, for that very reason." Felicia jumped up from the ground. She took her anti-demonic book from her belt, along with her magic branch, and ran after the entity...
"Luz! No te pases toda la mañana on your fanfic and come have breakfast," interrupted Camila from the kitchen, the mother of the aforementioned.
"Oh, cierto! "said Luz Noceda with a Dominican accent, stopping being lost in her story: a fanfiction of 'The Weirder Cases of Felicia Ester' called 'Felicia Ester in: The Darkest House'. The 15-year-old girl shut her laptop and went to eat the breakfast her mother had prepared, as well as get ready and leave for her school.
Already ready, the two of them drove to Gravesfield High School.
"Goodbye, Mom," Luz said before proceeding to get out of the car.
"Goodbye, cariño, and remember not to get into trouble."
"I don't get into trouble. "She chuckles.
"Oh, really?"
"So often," she continued.
"Aja, cualquier cosa, llámame. Besos."
Luz walked through the hallways until she found her locker, which, unsurprisingly, was scribbled on and written with a marker. With such pleasant messages as 'Goth,' 'Weirdo,' and 'Dork.' She grunted but just wiped it off with her arm, not caring about getting her black clothes dirty. Barely a second had passed when she felt a paper ball hit her on the head. Even though it didn't hurt, she decided to keep the feeling to herself, inhaling and exhaling. Then, she proceeded to go to her literature class.
"The next assignment will be an interesting one for you," said Luz's professor. He began to explain a project in which they would study the history of a literary genre of each person's choice. An idea that loved Luz... At least until hearing the last part, "Of course, this will be a job for two people, so you can do it with your classmate, your friend."
That had lowered Luz's spirits. But she wouldn't give up; she turned to one side to talk and invite a classmate to her group... They already had someone; she turned again, and it was the same. It was the same result going back and forth; everyone at first glance had partners. Her anxiety got the better of her, and she decided to tell her teacher at the end of the class.
"Can I do it myself?" She had it all scripted at this point.
Her teacher started looking at the student sheet.
"Let me see if... Ah, yes, you can; the class is odd, so you're lucky."
"Yes... lucky."
Of course, that didn't stop her from doing her assignment, as she already had the perfect theme for her research.
Horror.
Or Terror too; she liked both.
During that week, she worked until her hands hurt from drawing so much, her head hurt from reading on her phone, fell asleep from watching so many video essays, and she got a bit intoxicated with paint from painting so much for cosplay. So she kept it simple, with simpler character designs, and she knew exactly which one to use first.
The following Monday, the day of the presentation, excited, she was the fifth to be called due to her place on the list, but she didn't mind, and she stepped in front of her classmates. With her cosplay inspired by Bram Stoker's Dracula (the novel, not the movie), her timeline predating Edgar Allan Poe, and a fifteen-page draft solely dedicated to cosmic horror, she introduced herself:
"Allow me to introduce myself, my classmates. I am Luz Noceda, vampire messenger of Count Orlok and faithful servant of the darkness. Today, I will present the most important genre, the one that has most affected our culture, the one that the western envies or from which science fiction owes so much. That's right, I'm talking about nothing more and nothing less than 'Horror.' The purest and most human feeling we have; I will speak from Edgar Allan Poe to Stephen King, from Lovecraft to Daiana Terrance. And I warn you that this will not be for everyone, for this is a report built with sweat, tears, and... Blood!" With 'blood,' she splattered all over her chest and part of her mouth. Although a drop of that blood fell on the arm of one of her classmates.
Which caused her to react with a loud scream and subsequent fainting.
"That's not my fault, is it?"
"So... Did you want to do your literature report about horror, and did you dress up for that? " asked the school principal to Luz, still dressed as a vampire messenger of Count Orlok, and she was sitting next to her mother, who had rushed out of the hospital.
"To clarify, it was cosplay, and I had several prepared, like Bride of Frankenstein, the mummy, and the thing from the..." She stopped upon seeing the angry look on her mom's face. "But yes, that was the theme of my report."
"The project only required a written report; why the fake blood?"
"In my defense, I didn't expect anyone in my class to have blood phobia... well, I didn't consider it, but it's a very rare phobia."
"It's one of the most common phobias, Luz, especially among young people your age," clarified her principal. Luz preferred not to say anything. "Anyway, there were also things about Satanism and religion. Is it something I should be worried about?"
Luz laughed nervously.
"Well, it looks bad, yes, but it's clear that it's something very influential in horror literature, just as it was in cinema. Besides, only someone super Christian would be offended by that part, and I doubt there's anyone like that in our class."
"I'm evangelical."
"And that's great! I support free belief," she replied nervously.
"That's not the point, but it's appreciated. Luz, your mother and I have been discussing the latest... incidents that have caused you to be called here."
Those incidents, referring to when Luz:
She brought her act as Juliet to a more visceral end than the original tale.
Arriving dressed as Carrie at a Halloween party and replicating the pig-blood-prank scene with paint in front of her classroom, an act that not everyone understood.
Or another Halloween when she came dressed as an animatronic from Five Nights at Fonzy's, so realistic that it scared half the school.
"And we think that," Camila said, "you should go to this place." After finishing that sentence, she took a brochure for the 'Think Inside The Box' camp out of her bag.
"Alright, enough with this weirdness in me. Mom, from now on, I swear I will control my impulses, or my name isn't the Vampire Countess Luz Noceda!" She splattered fake blood on her principal; Luz still had the capsules in her arms. "That was The Vampire Countess; Luz Noceda will stop causing trouble... Blood pact?" She offered her hand splattered with fake blood.
The End
