Manhattan, NY
2022
Chapter One

“My allergies are all about to kick in.” Mercy Blagden fanned away dust motes and traces of cobwebs before her face and was thankful, at least, for the daylight streaming in through the cracks of the boarded up windows. Still, she needed the light from her phone to help her see her way around the abandoned orphanage in Bloomingburg, NY, where she had grown up.
For a moment Mercy let the memories of her childhood in this place wash over her. They were neither good, nor bad memories. They simply were. Just like her. In the columned light she could see Sister Joseph Ann sitting in a chair reading from a book to the twelve children who lived there. Smells that were no longer real filled Mercy’s nostrils; fresh bread, old books, Sister Dominique’s special mac and cheese, the scent of fresh roses coming from Sister Tess’s habit when she returned from one of her visits to her family in England. Mercy could hear the sound of children’s laughter running around the spacious old Victorian house as if they were there now.

“I wish I had known some of them better,” she told the echoes around her. She didn’t imagine anyone could hear her. She was alone, after all. She wasn’t daft. “What do the doctors know about me?” she asked. “Nothing is right.”

She wasn’t sure sometimes if she was speaking to herself or someone who wasn't there, but should be. Like a twin who tragically died at birth, someone she should be sharing her life with. It was a habit that had made her life very difficult since she was four. But, as she told countless therapists over the years, she’d rather talk to herself than to anyone else.

She remembered herself going up these same stairs to her room to be alone. She didn’t like most of the other children. They teased her about the ugly scar marring her face from her temple to under her lower lip, given to her by the thief who had broken into their NYC apartment when she was three and killed her mother and stabbed Mercy in her big-girl bed. Later, she became quiet and secretive around others, untrusting and detached. She became her own best friend, pointing things out out loud, audibly answering questions she’d asked herself in her mind, even giggling on a few occasions as if she heard jokes privy to her ears alone. Her “personality disorder” kept her from getting adopted.

Sister Tess seemed to take a special interest in Mercy’s well-being. When she wasn’t off visiting other orphanages, she was extra kind to Mercy giving her extra helpings of food–though Mercy didn’t eat it most of the time, and chocolate–when it was forbidden except for one’s birthday. When Mercy was twelve, Sister Tess mentioned that she had changed from being an extraverted toddler, even after she lost her mother and was stabbed, to a child who barely spoke and rarely smiled when she was around others. The doctors all blamed the trauma of violence for her disorder. But even though she didn’t know about what happened to Mercy in the attic, Sister Tess believed something else had caused the change in her.

Mercy believed it too. Her light had all but died a year after the trauma of getting stabbed in the face. Oddly, her first memory was from the age of four, when, after going to the attic alone and discovering a dusty chest of drawers, she’d reached into the third drawer and was bitten hard enough to make her bleed. She’d never investigated what had put a little hole in her. She had never told anyone, and she’d never gone back up to the attic.

Now, twenty years later, she found herself climbing the stairs to that same place, to the same chest of drawers still intact and covered in cobwebs. She was drawn to the third drawer the same way she’d been drawn to it long ago.
She knew that she’d changed when she was four. Why? She’d spent years in therapy trying to figure it out. Did it have to do with a bug? What had drawn her back here.

Cautiously, she opened the drawer and shined her light inside. There was a pile of folded white fabric, silk maybe. “No dead bug.” Slowly, she pinched a bit of the silk and gave it a soft shake. Something slipped out.

In the light of her phone, Mercy saw a red shard of glass. Upon closer inspection, she realized it was a jagged dagger. This must be what had cut her finger and maybe did something to her heart or mind. How long had it been here, hidden away, untouched for years but for a curious four-year-old finger? The dagger looked ritualistic. She giggled at her mad thought that it had stolen her soul, then stopped smiling when something moved along its surface. “Is that blood? How creepy is this?” She took it closer to a window and held it up to the sunlight. There were facets of crimson and fire that made her blood want to answer some forbidden call. She saw it again. A shadow stained upon the ruby moved, as if it was still made of liquid, from the tip down to the blade. It dripped down onto her fingers as they held the dagger and seeped into her skin. Mercy let out a little gasp and then her eyes rolled up and she disappeared, taking the dagger with her, before she sank to the floor.