Post by hydra on Jun 30, 2015 6:58:21 GMT
Here is my first Paul story for skeleton chat! (:
GINGER -
When Jessica had agreed to meet “ChivalryLives85” at the address he had provided, she had not expected to find herself wandering through the small, intricately crafted headstones of Freeman county’s only pet cemetery. Regardless of this odd fact, she had to count herself lucky for being out on a date for the first time in two years.
Life had not been easy for Jessica since her former fiance, Allen, had left. Most of her time was spent knitting these days, and watching reruns of ‘Law and Order: Special Victims Unit’, while her bills piled up in lofty stacks that threatened to spill over from the ornately woven, decorative basket that she placed her mail in on the table by the door. Allen had given her that basket, full of fresh cut wild flowers, on their first anniversary. The sight of a basket, Jessica often thought, had never caused anyone so much pain.
Well, at least the place had lovely landscaping. A smattering of tiny blue and white flowers poked their heads up through a perfectly manicured lawn, while animal shaped topiaries stood guard on either side of the two wrought iron gates that led in and out of the place. And standing elegantly at the center of it all, Jessica could see an old weeping willow, under the low-hanging branches of which a soft glow was being emitted.
“Hello?” Jessica called. But it was too late. The next thing she knew a sharp pain blossomed at the back of her head and the world around her slipped away into darkness.
~~~
When Jessica woke she was keenly aware of a smell that was familiar to her, though at first she could not place it. Was it… Something from childhood? Was it some distant memory, some nostalgic scent that brought to mind visions of family camping trips and summers spent at a cabin by the lake?
“Is that… Citronella?” She found herself asking aloud.
“Just… Just a few of them are. Because you know, there’s a pond over the hill up there… Mosquitos are attracted to water. But it’s only like… Two of them. I’m allergic to the bites so they swell up really big and they itch really bad. Worse than normal,” a voice answered. It was a male voice, but Jessica was sure it was one she had never heard before.
“Oh,” she replied.
Now that she was beginning to come back to her senses she could feel the rough bark that was digging at the skin of her back through the thin fabric of her new sundress. And there was something around her chest too, and her upper arms and wrists. She twisted a bit, uncomfortable, and realized that she had been bound to the willow tree with some kind of nylon rope, the remainder of which held her wrists tightly together.
“Um… I was meeting someone… Are you… Are you going to kill me?” Jessica knew she should be scared, and she was, but her head was still spinning a bit and her eyes were trying to adjust in the dark so that she could make out more details attached to the vague shape of a man who was currently only illuminated by the low, flickering light of five neatly arranged, but otherwise mismatched candles.
“Yes. That was me you were supposed to be meeting. Hi. I’m Paul. And yes, I am going to kill you. I’m really sorry, but I have to kill you. I mean,... God… This is so embarrassing. I’m just… Hold on.”
As the strange man fidgeted with what appeared to be his smartphone, Jessica noted that he had a very nice head of thick, dark hair. She also admired his choice of sweater, which looked light enough to wear on a spring night out, but was a nice maroon color as opposed to a typically spring seasonal pastel. He seemed like, when standing up straight, he might actually be kind of tall as well. That was nice, she thought. The man who was about to kill her was more handsome than most men she imagined meeting online.
“My head still hurts a little but I think you said you were going to kill me. Can you please let me go? I don’t know if this is some kind of joke, but I am scared and I really don’t think it’s funny. I just want to go home. I won’t call the police or anything. Please. I just… I just want to go home.”
Jessica’s voice was starting to shake. Oh god. This was real. This was really happening and she was going to be murdered by someone she had met online. Benson and Stabler had warned her about this. But it was just one of those things, you know… No one ever thought it would really happen to them. This was the sort of thing that happened on television shows, or that you heard about happening to a friend of a friend of a friend’s great nephew’s goddaughter.
The man, now seeming to have found what he wanted, looked up at Jessica with an expression that pulled his brows together and wrinkled his forehead, at first making him look confused, but soon melting into sincerely apologetic.
“Hm? Oh, sorry… I can’t do that,” he said. He advanced on her, briefly stumbling a bit and almost trampling his own candle altar, then took a knee beside her and drew what appeared to be a child’s swiss army knife from his pocket. “Just… Um… Hold still?” he flipped the knife up out of the mechanism, and before Jessica could even protest, he flicked the blade against the skin of her forearm and drew a little blood. She winced, sucking in a terrified breath, but otherwise tried to remain silent and show no fear.
“Thanks,” he said, moving back over to the other side of the candles and kneeling again. He held the blade of the knife, now stained with her blood, over the flame of each candle and began chanting words he appeared to be reading from his phone as he did so. The glow of the screen cast a villainous shadow over his otherwise rather pleasant looking face.
So this was it. Jessica’s life was going to end in some kind of bizarre, Satanic ritual in a pet cemetery. All because she didn’t know how to say hello to someone in a bar. She could blame the times, or her generation. She could blame her own damn naitivity. But what use was there in assigning blame now? She’d be dead soon, assuming a pocket knife wasn’t the best that “Paul” could do.
She was interrupted from her thoughts by a frustrated sigh. When Jessica refocused her attention on Paul she noticed that he was running his thumb quickly up his touch screen over and over again, obviously frantically scrolling through whatever he had been reading before. She remained quiet, not wanting to make him angry, or to draw attention to the fact that she was doing her best to work the nylon rope from her wrists without much success.
“Can you read this? Did I pronounce this right?”
She stopped moving entirely, tensing up as he came to her side once again. Was he serious? He held his phone up so she could look at the words displayed on it.
“Um… I think so… It was… ‘E sepulchro surgere’?” Jessica strained her eyes. She’d never liked reading from a screen, especially in the dark. Wait, why was she helping him read this at all? This was part of his sick ritual. He was going to kill her when he figured out how to pronounce these words. “I don’t know Latin really well,” she added quickly.
Paul’s shoulders sank a bit and a thick cloud of defeated settled over his person. His demeanor hadn’t been terribly commanding to begin with, but now he seemed really put out.
“It’s not working… I don’t know what I’ve done wrong. Maybe it’s the book. Does Amazon do refunds on kindle items? I mean, I don’t even have a kindle, I just downloaded a kindle reader on my phone. I’m not a kindle person or anything like that. They didn’t have the book on prime and I just really needed it quick. Do you know if they do refunds for kindle stuff?”
Jessica chewed on her lip for a moment, a nervous habit she’d picked up during college and never really been able to kick. “I don’t know… Was it fulfilled by Amazon? I guess it would have to be. You could… Contact customer service I guess?”
Paul sighed heavily. “I got the book, I got the virgin, I just… I needed this to work,” he said. Jessica could see that he was close to tears now, truly moved by his own plight and unable to console himself. But… Wait… What had he just said?
“I’m not… I mean… I’m not a virgin. Not to say that I’m loose or anything, I just… I was with my last boyfriend for a while. And the one before that… And there was this one time when a friend introduced me to someone and we went on one date that ended kind of well. But he never called again,” Jessica explained.
Paul stopped, looking up at her with a strange mixture of betrayal and hope reflected in his rather nice, hint-of-honey-brown eyes. “You’re… Not a virgin?” he asked.
Jessica felt heat rising in her face and knew it was coloring her skin that vibrant, rosy shade that she always wore when she was particularly embarrassed. “No,” she confirmed, “I am not.”
“Well, what the hell were you doing on a Christian dating site? I went on SpiritualMatch.com looking for a virigin, that’s what Christian girls are.” Paul stressed.
“I was looking for a man who didn’t want to just have sex right away and not call me back ever again. I wanted to meet someone who would talk to me, who would go on nice dates with me and watch movies and maybe stick around. I’m twenty-six years old, Paul. I’m looking to settle down sooner or later,” Jessica snapped. How rude! What was it with men and virgins anyway? Who in this day and age saved themselves for marriage? Did Christian girls even still do that?
When Paul turned away from her Jessica suddenly realized she may have sealed her own fate. Oh no. He was angry. She had snapped at him and he was angry. “I… I was dishonest. It was dishonest of me to go on that website and I am very sorry, Paul. Please… I mean, if you needed a virgin, you can’t use me anyway, so can’t we just forget all of this? Let me go and I promise not to tell anyone. Paul… Paul… Are you… Are you crying?”
Paul’s sobs had started soft, but they had grown louder as Jessica had begun to plead with him. He was shaking lightly now and Jessica could see it in the small bobbing motion his head and shoulders were making.
Through a bit of sniffling, and in an uneasy tone, Paul began to speak again.
“I just… I needed her back. She was everything to me. When I saw your photo on the site, the one where you’re posing with that statue of Bigfoot, and I saw the sun reflected on your fiery, red hair, I could see her in you. And I just knew. I knew I had found the one. But you’re… Not even… You’re not even pure.”
“Oh, the photo from last summer? I really liked that one. My face gets lines in it when I smile though, so I was afrai-… Wait. Pure? I mean, well… That’s such an antiquated… I… You could have said in your profile you were only looking for virgins.” Jessica huffed, an agitated noise she often made when she couldn’t accurately emote her level of disappointment.
“That seems really rude. What kind of person would say something like that on a dating profile? No one would go on a date with that guy. Besides, women do tend to lie about stuff like that,” Paul replied, almost casually.
“EXCUSE ME? Please tell me more about when ‘women tend to do’.”
Paul’s expression grew darker. Well, she had done it again. Jessica quickly attempted to back pedal, not wanting to have her life ended over the fact that she happened to be sick of a certain kind of male bullshit.
“Who? … I mean who did I remind you of? Tell me about her.”
It seemed to work. Paul’s dark expression turned briefly fond, then slipped into a melancholy one as what seemed to be sadness began to creep in to meet the fondness there.
“She died a month back. We knew it was coming. We’d run all of the tests, tried to find every alternative cure. We even tried Chinese medicine, but nothing helped. In the end she died in my arms, but somehow I couldn’t feel comforted, even knowing I had been there for her and that she was no longer in pain. She was rare, you know? Like you. Pretty, ginger hair… That’s what I called her, ‘Ginger’. There aren’t many females who come with that coloring. She was really special, and she just didn’t get enough time. Nine years just… It just isn’t enough time.”
“Are you trying to sacrifice a virgin to resurrect your dead cat?”
“Um… Yes.”
A brief silence passed between them.
“Well, I will let you free of those ropes then I suppose. Do you… Uh… Want to catch a movie or something? I mean, since we’re both out and single and all of that?” Paul’s demeanor was still heavy with sorrow, but his expression was alight with just a small spark of hope. Could this be the beginning of a beautiful new romance?
“No,” Jessica responded.
GINGER -
When Jessica had agreed to meet “ChivalryLives85” at the address he had provided, she had not expected to find herself wandering through the small, intricately crafted headstones of Freeman county’s only pet cemetery. Regardless of this odd fact, she had to count herself lucky for being out on a date for the first time in two years.
Life had not been easy for Jessica since her former fiance, Allen, had left. Most of her time was spent knitting these days, and watching reruns of ‘Law and Order: Special Victims Unit’, while her bills piled up in lofty stacks that threatened to spill over from the ornately woven, decorative basket that she placed her mail in on the table by the door. Allen had given her that basket, full of fresh cut wild flowers, on their first anniversary. The sight of a basket, Jessica often thought, had never caused anyone so much pain.
Well, at least the place had lovely landscaping. A smattering of tiny blue and white flowers poked their heads up through a perfectly manicured lawn, while animal shaped topiaries stood guard on either side of the two wrought iron gates that led in and out of the place. And standing elegantly at the center of it all, Jessica could see an old weeping willow, under the low-hanging branches of which a soft glow was being emitted.
“Hello?” Jessica called. But it was too late. The next thing she knew a sharp pain blossomed at the back of her head and the world around her slipped away into darkness.
~~~
When Jessica woke she was keenly aware of a smell that was familiar to her, though at first she could not place it. Was it… Something from childhood? Was it some distant memory, some nostalgic scent that brought to mind visions of family camping trips and summers spent at a cabin by the lake?
“Is that… Citronella?” She found herself asking aloud.
“Just… Just a few of them are. Because you know, there’s a pond over the hill up there… Mosquitos are attracted to water. But it’s only like… Two of them. I’m allergic to the bites so they swell up really big and they itch really bad. Worse than normal,” a voice answered. It was a male voice, but Jessica was sure it was one she had never heard before.
“Oh,” she replied.
Now that she was beginning to come back to her senses she could feel the rough bark that was digging at the skin of her back through the thin fabric of her new sundress. And there was something around her chest too, and her upper arms and wrists. She twisted a bit, uncomfortable, and realized that she had been bound to the willow tree with some kind of nylon rope, the remainder of which held her wrists tightly together.
“Um… I was meeting someone… Are you… Are you going to kill me?” Jessica knew she should be scared, and she was, but her head was still spinning a bit and her eyes were trying to adjust in the dark so that she could make out more details attached to the vague shape of a man who was currently only illuminated by the low, flickering light of five neatly arranged, but otherwise mismatched candles.
“Yes. That was me you were supposed to be meeting. Hi. I’m Paul. And yes, I am going to kill you. I’m really sorry, but I have to kill you. I mean,... God… This is so embarrassing. I’m just… Hold on.”
As the strange man fidgeted with what appeared to be his smartphone, Jessica noted that he had a very nice head of thick, dark hair. She also admired his choice of sweater, which looked light enough to wear on a spring night out, but was a nice maroon color as opposed to a typically spring seasonal pastel. He seemed like, when standing up straight, he might actually be kind of tall as well. That was nice, she thought. The man who was about to kill her was more handsome than most men she imagined meeting online.
“My head still hurts a little but I think you said you were going to kill me. Can you please let me go? I don’t know if this is some kind of joke, but I am scared and I really don’t think it’s funny. I just want to go home. I won’t call the police or anything. Please. I just… I just want to go home.”
Jessica’s voice was starting to shake. Oh god. This was real. This was really happening and she was going to be murdered by someone she had met online. Benson and Stabler had warned her about this. But it was just one of those things, you know… No one ever thought it would really happen to them. This was the sort of thing that happened on television shows, or that you heard about happening to a friend of a friend of a friend’s great nephew’s goddaughter.
The man, now seeming to have found what he wanted, looked up at Jessica with an expression that pulled his brows together and wrinkled his forehead, at first making him look confused, but soon melting into sincerely apologetic.
“Hm? Oh, sorry… I can’t do that,” he said. He advanced on her, briefly stumbling a bit and almost trampling his own candle altar, then took a knee beside her and drew what appeared to be a child’s swiss army knife from his pocket. “Just… Um… Hold still?” he flipped the knife up out of the mechanism, and before Jessica could even protest, he flicked the blade against the skin of her forearm and drew a little blood. She winced, sucking in a terrified breath, but otherwise tried to remain silent and show no fear.
“Thanks,” he said, moving back over to the other side of the candles and kneeling again. He held the blade of the knife, now stained with her blood, over the flame of each candle and began chanting words he appeared to be reading from his phone as he did so. The glow of the screen cast a villainous shadow over his otherwise rather pleasant looking face.
So this was it. Jessica’s life was going to end in some kind of bizarre, Satanic ritual in a pet cemetery. All because she didn’t know how to say hello to someone in a bar. She could blame the times, or her generation. She could blame her own damn naitivity. But what use was there in assigning blame now? She’d be dead soon, assuming a pocket knife wasn’t the best that “Paul” could do.
She was interrupted from her thoughts by a frustrated sigh. When Jessica refocused her attention on Paul she noticed that he was running his thumb quickly up his touch screen over and over again, obviously frantically scrolling through whatever he had been reading before. She remained quiet, not wanting to make him angry, or to draw attention to the fact that she was doing her best to work the nylon rope from her wrists without much success.
“Can you read this? Did I pronounce this right?”
She stopped moving entirely, tensing up as he came to her side once again. Was he serious? He held his phone up so she could look at the words displayed on it.
“Um… I think so… It was… ‘E sepulchro surgere’?” Jessica strained her eyes. She’d never liked reading from a screen, especially in the dark. Wait, why was she helping him read this at all? This was part of his sick ritual. He was going to kill her when he figured out how to pronounce these words. “I don’t know Latin really well,” she added quickly.
Paul’s shoulders sank a bit and a thick cloud of defeated settled over his person. His demeanor hadn’t been terribly commanding to begin with, but now he seemed really put out.
“It’s not working… I don’t know what I’ve done wrong. Maybe it’s the book. Does Amazon do refunds on kindle items? I mean, I don’t even have a kindle, I just downloaded a kindle reader on my phone. I’m not a kindle person or anything like that. They didn’t have the book on prime and I just really needed it quick. Do you know if they do refunds for kindle stuff?”
Jessica chewed on her lip for a moment, a nervous habit she’d picked up during college and never really been able to kick. “I don’t know… Was it fulfilled by Amazon? I guess it would have to be. You could… Contact customer service I guess?”
Paul sighed heavily. “I got the book, I got the virgin, I just… I needed this to work,” he said. Jessica could see that he was close to tears now, truly moved by his own plight and unable to console himself. But… Wait… What had he just said?
“I’m not… I mean… I’m not a virgin. Not to say that I’m loose or anything, I just… I was with my last boyfriend for a while. And the one before that… And there was this one time when a friend introduced me to someone and we went on one date that ended kind of well. But he never called again,” Jessica explained.
Paul stopped, looking up at her with a strange mixture of betrayal and hope reflected in his rather nice, hint-of-honey-brown eyes. “You’re… Not a virgin?” he asked.
Jessica felt heat rising in her face and knew it was coloring her skin that vibrant, rosy shade that she always wore when she was particularly embarrassed. “No,” she confirmed, “I am not.”
“Well, what the hell were you doing on a Christian dating site? I went on SpiritualMatch.com looking for a virigin, that’s what Christian girls are.” Paul stressed.
“I was looking for a man who didn’t want to just have sex right away and not call me back ever again. I wanted to meet someone who would talk to me, who would go on nice dates with me and watch movies and maybe stick around. I’m twenty-six years old, Paul. I’m looking to settle down sooner or later,” Jessica snapped. How rude! What was it with men and virgins anyway? Who in this day and age saved themselves for marriage? Did Christian girls even still do that?
When Paul turned away from her Jessica suddenly realized she may have sealed her own fate. Oh no. He was angry. She had snapped at him and he was angry. “I… I was dishonest. It was dishonest of me to go on that website and I am very sorry, Paul. Please… I mean, if you needed a virgin, you can’t use me anyway, so can’t we just forget all of this? Let me go and I promise not to tell anyone. Paul… Paul… Are you… Are you crying?”
Paul’s sobs had started soft, but they had grown louder as Jessica had begun to plead with him. He was shaking lightly now and Jessica could see it in the small bobbing motion his head and shoulders were making.
Through a bit of sniffling, and in an uneasy tone, Paul began to speak again.
“I just… I needed her back. She was everything to me. When I saw your photo on the site, the one where you’re posing with that statue of Bigfoot, and I saw the sun reflected on your fiery, red hair, I could see her in you. And I just knew. I knew I had found the one. But you’re… Not even… You’re not even pure.”
“Oh, the photo from last summer? I really liked that one. My face gets lines in it when I smile though, so I was afrai-… Wait. Pure? I mean, well… That’s such an antiquated… I… You could have said in your profile you were only looking for virgins.” Jessica huffed, an agitated noise she often made when she couldn’t accurately emote her level of disappointment.
“That seems really rude. What kind of person would say something like that on a dating profile? No one would go on a date with that guy. Besides, women do tend to lie about stuff like that,” Paul replied, almost casually.
“EXCUSE ME? Please tell me more about when ‘women tend to do’.”
Paul’s expression grew darker. Well, she had done it again. Jessica quickly attempted to back pedal, not wanting to have her life ended over the fact that she happened to be sick of a certain kind of male bullshit.
“Who? … I mean who did I remind you of? Tell me about her.”
It seemed to work. Paul’s dark expression turned briefly fond, then slipped into a melancholy one as what seemed to be sadness began to creep in to meet the fondness there.
“She died a month back. We knew it was coming. We’d run all of the tests, tried to find every alternative cure. We even tried Chinese medicine, but nothing helped. In the end she died in my arms, but somehow I couldn’t feel comforted, even knowing I had been there for her and that she was no longer in pain. She was rare, you know? Like you. Pretty, ginger hair… That’s what I called her, ‘Ginger’. There aren’t many females who come with that coloring. She was really special, and she just didn’t get enough time. Nine years just… It just isn’t enough time.”
“Are you trying to sacrifice a virgin to resurrect your dead cat?”
“Um… Yes.”
A brief silence passed between them.
“Well, I will let you free of those ropes then I suppose. Do you… Uh… Want to catch a movie or something? I mean, since we’re both out and single and all of that?” Paul’s demeanor was still heavy with sorrow, but his expression was alight with just a small spark of hope. Could this be the beginning of a beautiful new romance?
“No,” Jessica responded.
