It was a night that began with the death of innocence and the birth of sinister life. Bodies mutilated. A soul trapped in a place where it no longer belongs, stuck forever in a state of nothingness. A small body becomes a marionette doll controlled by an inhumane force. Evil comes to bring the downfall of man.

The young girl slept under the dim glow of the stars her night light projected. If she imagined herself dancing among those stars — making constellations with the drag of her toes, stars where her heels landed — the monsters would never touch her, never harm her. That’s what Mommy and Daddy always said. They’re always right, in the girl’s mind. Her eyes fluttered with her dreams, following the colours that swirled behind her eyelids. It seemed as if van Gogh was using her dreamscape as a canvas. Soft sighs and mumbles came from her lips.

Down the hall mommy choked on her own blood. Her throat cut from ear to ear in a wicked smile. Blood covering the pearls she always wore. They’re the bleeding teeth that accompany her new grin. Rivers formed, moving down her throat and pooling in the dips of her collar bones before spilling over onto her chest. Daddy lay on the ground a few feet away from the bed, twitching on the floor. His legs kicked as his muscles coiled and loosened. Fluttering fingers curled in a weak attempt to make a fist, his head split wide open. Two pairs of dead eyes stared at the ceiling.

Daddy never had a chance to fight. Mommy never had a chance to scream.

They made sure of that.

The man who bashed in daddy’s head in noticed a faint light coming from an open door in the hallway. The woman who slit mommy’s throat was collecting her blood in a jar, lip pressed against her neck as the river of blood flowed steadily into it.

“Go,” she said, twisting the lid onto the filled jar, “get the girl.”

She grabbed another jar from her duffle bag as the man walked to the softly illuminated room. They need to collect enough blood for the ritual. The girl needs to drown in her parent’s blood for it to work. It needs to cover her skin and flood her lungs.

The man stepped into the room to see a small, peaceful body wrapped in baby blue sheets. She’s perfect. The cult watched the family for months, waited for the right time, waited for her sixth birthday. At 1 am, on June 6th, the man and woman walked into her home, slipping through the back door Daddy never locked. The ritual would be performed a few miles away, in an abandoned mine shaft deep in the forest.

Her large eyes open to the swirling stars on her ceiling. Something wraps around her throat and she can’t catch a breath. Small squeaks escape her lips, like a mouse finally caught by the cat. Her legs kick as she tries to run out of her bed and into the ceiling, into the stars. Her hands latch onto something warm, covered in cloth. The stars get darker and terror takes over. A monster came for her; a dark, featureless face with shiny eyes staring down at her. Her eyes roll into the back of her head as she loses consciousness. Her legs fall limp onto the bed as her tiny hand lets go of the arm holding her down. Nothing but darkness.

No more stars.

She’s lifted gingerly off the bed by the man in black as the woman passes the door, bag heavy with jars of blood. They walk downstairs and she goes to bring their car around to the front of the house. The little girl is laid down in the backseat, the bag on the floor. Their precious cargo. The hands that grip the steering wheel are stained with blood.

Then the girl is in pain. Fire devours her lungs until all at once, the flames lick at her chest and throat dissipates. There are stars again. They look different than the ones in her room, they look like people.

Tears fill her eyes. She calls for mommy and daddy as her tears create wet roads down her cheeks, inviting more to come. She doesn’t know where she is, she doesn’t know if they can hear her. The thought of being alone scares her. If she knew what was really happening she would have run as fast as her small legs would take her, but that’s the problem. She doesn’t know what happened, what is happening, what is about to happen to her. She’s in the Void.

Not that running would have made any difference. The ceremony was complete.

The girl’s mommy and daddy are there too, they hear her, but millions of others wander through the Void, trying to find a new path to follow. The stars surrounding her are the souls of the lost, the dead, the broken. They are souls who were torn from their bodies and dragged into the abyss, the unknown, the inbetween. Souls that do not know what is coming next. Some are old, some young. Children drowned, victims of hateful violence, addicts who took a little too much this time around. Together they create a small universe, balancing on the thin line that separates the land of the living from whatever comes next.

They are millions of souls, flickering in and out of existence. A soft glow surrounds their silhouettes in the dark space; they are aware of each other, but not many care for interaction. They are just trying to put together where they are, and every person is a stranger to one another.

From afar it is like looking into the night sky on a clear summer day, in the depths of the forest where light pollution can’t reach, a beauty that makes your breath catch in your throat. Some souls, the lucky ones, are pulled back to their bodies, ripped violently out of this new world and back into the one they were forced to abandon. Others make their way through the constellations to find what lies beyond. Rarely, one unlucky soul returns to their world with another to occupy their body. This little girl is unlucky. The first in a long time. This little girl is the beginning of the end.

Sniffling and wiping at her face, the girl sees some of the glowing things dissolve into millions of flakes of light. Others form empty space like a match being struck in the dark. In another world, the one she belongs in, paramedics are trying to revive her. Her pulse blips in and out on the monitor in an unsteady rhythm that stalled for too long. She feels a pressure on her chest like she is the rope in a game of tug-of-war, being pulled between two worlds.

A guttural scream in the distance pierces her ears and she covers them, desperate to make it stop. It is the nails-against-the-chalkboard type of scream that makes bones rattle and muscles clench. A dark form darts between illuminated figures, massive to the child, even at a distance. Tall with sharp edges sticking out of its body as if its skeleton were trying to rip free from the skin that trapped it. Seven feet in height, a mass of muscle with wet-looking skin so red it is almost black. Sharp nails that looked like talons, the size of her hands. It is impossible to make sense of the thing’s face. It keeps shifting, mixing and swirling in dark shades of red and grey. It is a monster with a face crafted by a sadistic artist along the likes of Edvard Munch. The stars are supposed to protect her from the monsters. She wails louder than she ever has before, louder than when she broke her wrist last fall.

“MOMMY,” tears come faster, spilling like waterfalls. “Mommy ple-ease don’t let the monster get me!” Her voice shakes and cracks.

A burning starts inside her chest. She sees that a hole is forming over her heart, as if she’s burning from the inside, out. Her cries fall heavily on deaf ears. The monster dashes to her, reaching for that burning light, digging its claws into her shoulder like the straps of a heavy backpack.

In the ambulance the paramedics manage to restore her heartbeat to a steady pace, growing stronger by the minute. More powerful. They refused to let her die, a child whose life had barely begun. The bruises on her neck testify how hard her life was about to become. Both paramedics breathe in a sigh of relief as her chest rises and falls on its own, her tiny lungs finally filling on their own. The paramedics take no notice of her twitching fingers, her eyeballs moving so rapidly under their lids that her lashes shook. Her chest jolts up and off the stretcher as if she’d been electrocuted.

One paramedic holds her shoulders down while the other puts a hand on her face and tries to open her eyes, but they jar open before the paramedic can. The sweet eyes that had been large and full of life, the ones that had always been filled with stars, are now completely red. An unnatural smile stretches across her face and she grabs the neck of one of the paramedics and snaps it like a twig.

This is the beginning of the end.

This is not what should have happened in the Void.