Hey weirdos. It's Iris. Things have been getting Weird lately, in a bad way. These last couple days...
The day before it happened seemed entirely normal, at least at the time. Me and my friends had finished our shifts at the mall (we lined them all up perfectly) and hung out for a bit. As we were walking to the food court, I noticed more eyes. As in eye symbols, drawn as graffitti. I've been seeing these for a little while. They make me paranoid. I keep a marker on me now, and a knife, and I blind any of the eyes I see, just crossing them out.
I told Sarah, "I swear, something bad's going down, or gonna go down. I see these eyes everywhere I go."
She said to me, "You've always been jumpy like that. Remember a few summers ago when you swore you heard werewolves in the woods on the outskirts of town? And it was just coyotes? It's just some kids drawing on walls." Sarah wasn't a big believer in anything Weird or spooky. Never had been.
Florence isn't really either, but he never denied it as much as Sarah did. He said, "Now, maybe it is something strange, but that might be better than if not. Could be we've got some kind of gang or cult or something around here." He always tries to find the middle path. Kinda an "enlightened centrist" type.
Anyway, we walked a bit further, I blinded a couple more eyes, before we sat down for some burgers at the food court. We chatted a bit about work, but then the discussion shifted when Sarah brought up something that happened at the local New Age shop, which she, of course, only visits to buy incense from. My mom, Primrose, works at the shop. I don't really get along with her. She's into a lot of manifestation stuff and I just never really felt like that stuff was good. I think good things, or bad things, and bad things still seem to happen no matter which. Anyway, she'd said her coworker's a really nice woman, but I don't trust her judgement.
"I mean, Dahlia, the other one who works there than Iris's mom, she's real creepy. She's just... so pale. She's always reading vampire romance novels and licking her lips. And she only takes the real late shifts, so I see her a lot, since, y'know, I wanna avoid the customers and guest psychics and crap. Her teeth are real sharp, too."
Florence decided to defend someone he didn't even meet: "Now, you can't just be saying she's a creep cause she looks weird and likes a quite popular genre of romance. I think you're just hating on her cuz you don't agree with her views. People do that a lot, can't we just get along?" I rolled my eyes. He's such a douche sometimes.
I asked, half earnest and half sarcastic, "Maybe she's a vampire... maybe she's gonna bite you! then you can't be all rational anymore, cuz you'll be an immortal bloodsucker that burns in the light." It would have been nice to see her forced to acknowledge the supernatural for once. When we were kids camping in the woods, I know for sure I heard the Red Witch singing her mad songs. If only she ever believed me.
Sarah said, "Now, there's no way she's a vampire. First off, vampires aren't real, second off, what kind of vampire reads novels with a protagonist designed to be relatable to a human reader? It was a really out-there one, too, not a mainstream, glittery vampire one. The human girl was entangled with an actual ancient, monstrous vampire! It's only perverse fiction." I didn't give a damn what kind of stuff this clerk was into, but she was sounding suspiciously vampiric.
"Sarah, my mom's said Dahlia's a 'nice lady.'" I didn't have much reason to doubt her, at the time.
"Well, your mom's a dumbass. She always hmm hmms at me when I don't wanna buy a tarot reading or whatever. And she says she knows how to summon demons that'll go after stingy customers. She straight up told me I was going to hell."
Florence butted in, "Hey now, maybe she's just creepy to skeptics and nice to believers."
I asked, "Well Iris, did you give her any reason to think you were such a 'rational thinker?'" She was pretty open about it, in general. Told people off for believing in things like horoscopes and ghosts and communism and angels and the Mothman.
"No! I keep my head down around quacks like that. She just knew somehow!" I never believed in ESP or anything, but some people, mostly wicked, bad people, have a knack for knowing things about you, or maybe just choosing to know for their own benefit, things that give them a reason to be mad at you. Call them witches if you want, I just call them prejudiced.
"How can you be so sure vampires aren't real? I mean, cannibals exist, rabies exists! Makes people photosensitive, fear water, bite-y. Could be an extremely rare strain of rabies that makes people more... cold and psychopathic than rabid. And doesn't kill them, but makes them live longer! And makes their teeth sharper, and makes them pale, and—"
Sarah cut me off: "No, no, no! That's ridiculous! It's actually more likely that if vampires existed, they'd be like..." her eyes lit up "...big bat people... or mosquito people. Evolved from a common ancestor of bats or mosquitos? No, that's unlikely. Maybe... convergent evolution? They only resemble that creature? Maybe they're just slightly off from it. A surviving version of humans that learned to hunt in the night! And they just have sex to make more of themselves. Humans just get horrible blood diseases from them. Only science fiction, though." Despite her beliefs, she had a knack for horror and speculative fiction. Maybe she could've written a book.
After we finished eating we left the mall, into the sunset of the evening. There was someone dragging out a whole couple bags full of clothes. I looked to see why they were being thrown out. "Somethings been eating them. Moth larvae, probably. We're gonna get some mothballs, because it's never been this bad." I noticed, on the lights of the exit of the mall, swarms of moths, fluttering with their silent wings, attracted to the light. If you take pictures of smaller moths flying, they create "sky fish," looking like flying rod-like mini cryptids. Something Sarah told me. It's really soothing, how much of the supernatural is explainable. Not all of it, God knows, I know, not all of it.
Florence started to freak a bit, so he ran ahead of me and Sarah to his car and got in. He's always been scared of bugs. I don't have a phobia like that, something that can really be pinned down. I'm most afraid of being watched. Stalked. Like I'm trapped in somebody's sights, confined to their own vision of me. A vision they'll do anything to make come true. Me and Sarah went back to her car. On the drive over we talked about hanging out the next day to watch a movie. We decided on Nosferatu, the silent film based on Dracula. She dropped me off, then drove away.
The next day, my mother called me. She was a bit shaken. She said she felt like something bad was about to happen. I don't buy all the stuff she believes, and she's a little too keen on "mastering the paranormal," but she knows when there's something Weird afoot. She told me she had a nightmare about a dagger in the dark and blood being drawn. I couldn't make any sense of it. I didn't know whether "blood being drawn" meant being drawn by a doctor or by a blade. I said goodbye pretty quick, before taking a walk, listening to music at home, and heading off to visit Sarah that afternoon.
When I got to Sarah's, everything seemed like it was going to be fine for once. Not an eye in sight, her apartment building was fenced and secure, the sun was shining bright, and we were ready to watch movie in a rather unfitting atmosphere. We weren't really feeling like getting scared anyway. Before we started up the movie, though, Sarah told me some things.
"I didn't go straight home after you dropped me off. I went to the occult shop to... to snoop. I knew Dahlia would be there, and she was. I passed it off as browsing, and I hung around for a while. She stared at me the whole time. Then, once it got close to closing time and I was about to buy a scented candle, she told me to finish up."
I said, "Well, of course you got a candle! It doesn't smell like you hotboxed the place this time." She hit me with a pillow. I still dunno how she ever got away with burning incense in an apartment.
"As I was saying," she continued, "She told me to finish up, I bought the candle, but then she bought herself... a sort of... ritual dagger. It wasn't sharp, but she was rubbing the blade like she was planning on sharpening it. It still had a point, anyhow."
"Well, of course it wasn't sharp, it's not used for cutting or stabbing, it's used for making marks." Presumably, she was talking about an athame, mostly used by Wiccans but also by satanists and general occult types. It wasn't all that suspicious for Dahlia to buy it, but I wasn't gonna pull a Florence and defend her against my friend.
"Right. Anyway, after I left, I stayed in my car for a bit, and I waited for her to finish up. She carried... something... to her trunk. It was something in a trash bag. I dunno what... but it looked suspicious enough for me to check out. It looked way lighter than its size and shape, though, like it was almost hollow. I made a reckless decision. I followed her home. Please, believe what I saw." I affirmed I would believe her. "Good, good. She took it to her trash and emptied it out. It was some kind of... life-sized doll. It had a bunch of stabs in it, like she had fake-murdered somebody, like as a sick prank. It was insane. I swear she didn't see me, but she had to know I was watching, or could've been watching. Who else would there have been to see her pull that stunt?"
I nodded, but I told her Dahlia was probably just playing a sick prank. She was probably just a bit kooky, like a lot of people of her sort and age. Like my mom, who used to put fake spiders in Florence's milk, because she was more pissed off by him being an unholy combination of centrist and contrarian than by Sarah's disbelief. Sarah didn't believe me. She said that woman was sick. She said she was out to get her.
"The world must be turning backwards," I told her, "if you're the one scared like this, and I'm the one saying it's probably just an odd person." This came as cold comfort. Thankfully, the pizza came and broke the silence. We got to watching the movie. Count Orlok doesn't actually turn people into vampires. Instead, he spreads the plague and brings rats. Orlok is defeated when the Mina-Murray-stand-in, Ellen, baits him into drinking her blood until the sun kills him. Apparently being "pure of heart" (i.e. hot and pretty) allowed her to distract him from the dawn. Sarah talked about how the movie has fascist undertones, and I had to agree, though I didn't fully understand everything she was talking about.
After the movie ended, I had to head home. Sarah, you asked me if I wanted to stay over. I said no, because, "I didn't bring any pajamas and I don't wanna sleep in my clothes." It was an excuse. I just felt scared by what you had said and felt like I had to hide from the truth. Sarah, I'm sorry. I should've done something. I will do something.
The next day... I can barely handle typing this out, but I need to tell people before the funeral. The next day, I woke up late, and had several texts from Sarah.
"Please come back." "I think I hear something outside." "There are moths all over my window." "I'm scared."
And I had one from Florence. "Check the news. Something happened to Sarah. Sit down first." And so I did. And I found out that my friend, since middle school, had been murdered in her own room. On her bed, lying there, not like she had been sleeping, but struggling as somebody held her down by the throat and stabbed her thrice in the chest with a knife. And there were eyes, not painted, but carved, all over her bedroom. And in her blood was a message, written for her loved ones to ruminate on the rest of their lives like some megalomaniacal serial killer shit: "The Blood Angel will descend."
I went to the police station immediately. I knew it had to be Dahlia. She had to be the killer. When I told them, they said they wrote off anybody who wasn't sleeping in the complex that night. The killer had broken in through the window, probably taking the fire escape up. The security around the building had a blind spot at the back, and with the high fence, "there's no way anybody would've gotten in without being seen on camera, unless they took their own fire escape down. Except if they could fly," they said. I asked, what if she really could fly, and they laughed at me, and I cried on the way home. I didn't do anything all day, except grieve. And that was yesterday.
I spent all of today writing this post. The funeral is tomorrow. I don't know how I can look at her. Sarah, I hope you can see me, before you get put in the ground. And after you do, me and Florence, we're gonna make that vampire bitch pay. Goodbye.