Murderous Seraphina

So, everyone has that one socially awkward outcast at school, right? It’s sort of given thing. I had one like that. She wasn’t bad by any stretch of the definition, but she was an odd type. Sort of “fuck society” to an extreme. Dressed like a nun, covered head to toe, but mostly with pants and wore freaking cat ears. If we were younger, sure, but wearing those at 17 – 18 years old? She Never talked to anyone, well besides a lucky few; myself included. She was incredibly asocial and somewhat antisocial, I dare say. Not only she was a bona fide smartass, but she was also really condescending and saw the majority of people as morons. On top of that, she was scarily violent occasionally. One thing this girl was fantastic at was art, drawing, sketching, coloring, painting, even some digital art. She could do it all. Heck, even her name is an oddity. Seraphina Tillet.

I only bring her up because I hung out with her a few days ago. Seraphina brought so bad memories with her. Not her fault, I should say. It’s just something’s wrong with her. More specifically, something was wrong with her.

No…

Something is still wrong, I guess, something is wrong with her in photos… or in certain photos… Something is wrong for sure, I’m not sure how to describe it. Maybe it’s something with me. Imagine seeing a person’s face plastered on a blood-soaked fur suit every time you see a picture of said person making a peace sign next to another person. That’s what is.

Definitely something is wrong with me, but I guess something's wrong with her too.

It’s like my brain reverts to that… I’m getting ahead of myself.

Allow me to start from the beginning.

About a week ago, my Facebook messenger beeped, signaling I had received a message from someone. Nobody ever talks to me through that thing. A rare occurrence. I open the thing to find out that a certain Seraphina Tillet is requesting to message me. A ghost from the past, you could say. I didn’t expect much, knowing who was on the other side of the screen. Much to my surprise, she was pretty sociable and pleasant to chat with. It’s like I was talking to a completely different person from the girl that went to school with me. We ended up chatting for two hours before concluding we should meet up for a dinner date. Nothing romantic, just two school “friends” catching up.

I say friends in quotes because we weren’t awfully close, merely a conversational fling here and there.

One thing seemed a little odd, Seraphina’s fashion sense. She dyed half of her hair pink while keeping the other half her natural brunette. She made herself look like Neapolitan ice cream. Looks great on her, though. I’ll admit, it piqued my interest when I saw her profile picture and I ended up having a looksie of her gallery. I didn’t expect that sort of angelic presence there. The woman is literally not what I knew years ago. She’s confident, she looks great, and she’s radiant as fuck. A ball of positive energies and raw happiness.

Maybe her name does fit her, Seraphs being burning angels.

The photos of her grinding in the gym are almost heart warming in a nostalgic sense. It reminded me of the time she almost tore Matt Haskins’ arm off. That’s a funny story. He kept on nagging her for being some fetish weirdo for her cat ears. She ignored him for the most part, even when he’d get physical – she’d just take his shoving and light smacking. Nobody knew why, now I do; it was probably nothing for her. She looks like a machine in the gym. Anyway, one time, she must’ve been in a foul mood, and Haskins shoved her pretty hard. She landed on her ass and immediately got back up to her feet before following her tormentor and kicking his leg from underneath him. A second later, she’s on top of the guy; twisting his arm in all sorts of impossible angles calling him her bitch.

Admittedly, I wasn’t sure if I should really meet up with this person; she seemed too different from the Seraphina I used to know. Eventually, I reasoned that I had given her my word and that I have nothing to worry about. After all, we’ve arranged to meet at a café in a busy part of town in broad daylight.

And unsurprisingly, the dinner date went pretty swell. I had a lot of fun. It seems like she did too.

Turns out a lot has happened since the last time we’ve seen each other. Seraphina is now a clinical psychologist, and she’s doing pretty great for herself. It turns out she took psychology after recovering from the accident she was involved in during our high school graduation.

You see, the poor girl was badly burned when a keg of firework gunpowder accidentally blew up next to her. Not only was she burned, but she also suffered an awful concussion. She apparently remembers nothing between the ages of 18 – 20. So, she opted to study psychology to help herself remember her lost years. She knows that she had spent those two years in and out of various medical institutions. Re-learning how to function and recovering from her injuries.

She wears a glove on her left hand at basically all times, apparently because she doesn’t like anyone sees the scars she has.

I remember little from those two years either, 2005 – 2007 were incredibly stressful years for me too. I think, for all of us. Oh yeah, in the span of eighteen months, seven people from my class had died. Nobody knows why or how. It’s assumed they all took something that caused systemic failure. No foreign materials were found in their bodies, but eventually, the forensics concluded that they all had some syringe wound on their forearms. That made all the more sense considering they were all good friends.

They did find something odd; all of them had feathers in their throats, but they concluded it that those were placed in the corpses post mortem. So they suspected the mortician of doing that. He got fired and fined for that schtick. The guy protested he didn’t do that.

Honestly, no one knows anything for sure about these deaths.

Seraphina had no clue about that. I’ll be honest, I didn’t remember much about it either. It was definitely fucked up, but it was sort of blurry, so I didn’t press the issue. She seemed pretty empathetic towards her deceased classmates, even though she was never close to any of them. Hell, she probably hated all of them at one point or another. They’ve all bullied her at some point. One of them is the aforementioned Matt Haskins, another guy, TJ Lawrence. She broke his face once, after he spilled her coffee over her head.

She told me she dislocated her knee doing that, by repeatedly kicking him in the head. There was some glee in her voice when she disclosed that fact, glee mixed with childlike excitement. It’s like she didn’t know whether or not she liked doing that; as if she wasn’t sure if it’s wrong or not.

Anyway, before we went our separate ways, we’ve exchanged phone numbers. As I was about to leave, she wrapped her hand around me before making a peace sign with her other hand and taking a selfie of us both.

I didn’t think of it much; I just hugged her, and we’ve said our goodbyes.

I didn’t even ask her to send me the photo. I’m not the biggest fan of photography, and I’m pretty sure I know why.

Yesterday Seraphina sent me the photo.

I opened the file and for a moment it seemed fine, just the two of us, smiling. A café in the background.

The longer I looked, the worse that image had become.

It became perverted.

Dark.

Painful to look at.

It was all wrong.

It is all wrong.

My… My memories corrupted it.

My fucking memories. They corrupted the selfie… That was it.

Seraphina was there, in a dark; poorly lit warehouse room.

Same blue eyes, same adult facial features, same Neapolitan hair coloring…

She was wearing someone’s skin as an onesie.

Her armed wrapped around a bloodied man whose face seemed burned.

His ribs cracked open behind his back…

Like wings…

Her hand making a peace sign…

A bloody hand print at the bottom left corner of the selfie.

A red heart outlining both figures…

I froze, and my heart started beating violently, I could feel the anxiety swimming through my veins. I could feel each and every hair on my body stand up. I knew I was probably just seeing things. I considered the possibility that Seraphina, being the artist, she is fucked with the selfie to mess with me, but that was way too radical. Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes, and when I opened them the selfie was normal.

I was seeing things.

I was losing it.

Just to be sure, I texted her; “Seraph, the photo’s kind of glitchy, did you do anything to it?”

She responded immediately, “No. But what kind of glitching is it?”

She didn’t do it. Something in my head practically screamed at me that she didn’t do it. So, I lied to her, “It’s flickering for some reason.”

“Ur phone’s screen is dyin, buddy :P” was her response.

I looked at the selfie again; it seemed normal.

I guessed I was just… I don’t know… losing it… I put my phone down and closed my eyes, breathing deeply, trying to reassure myself I wasn’t going nuts just yet.

The awful image popped up in my head again.

My heart sank.

It was one of those moments when one of your thoughts freaks you out; I felt myself shiver.

Then came the eureka moment. But it wasn’t a good one. I felt another wave of cortisol laced blood running through my arteries. That and the urge to check old emails. You see, shortly after Ken Manning mysteriously died of systemic failure, everyone in the school received an email from archaurieldefsme@gmail.com. It was simple mail; a jpeg file.

Memories of me opening that file on my old computer flooded me as I scrambled through masses and masses of emails accumulated through the years.

A blood-stained photograph of Seraphina...

It was so painfully clear, as if I had just seen it.

She was dressed in a bloodied cat fur suit smiling and making a peace sign next to a mutilated corpse of a young man. The corpse's arms were clenched in a prayer, tied together by a wire. His head was clearly decapitated by crudely placed on some shaft sticking out of his neck and his rib cage inverted outwards sticking out of his back. A red heart barely visibly outlining both figures.

The mental image only increased my irritating anxiety. I could feel myself shaking as I inched closer to the time frame during which we all received those emails.

I tear escaped my eye when I saw that accursed email address archaurieldefsme@gmail.com. I took a deep breath and opened the email. A lone JPEG file was there. Titled simply “Untitled #7”. They were all titled like that. Untitled and chronological number. This one was dated August 2nd, 2007. I took a deep breath and clicked on the image.

Then I pressed “Open”

An abomination constructed itself in front of me; the same warehouse background, the same oddly dressed girl. Still fucking smiling and making the fucking peace sign. Another mutilated corpse. This one had some internal organs arranged like a macabre mock-halo. Rib cage cracked into the shape of fucking wings. A bloody hand print in the corner. Bloody fucking heart outline.

I closed the file before throwing the mouse away with a violent, frustrated F-bomb.

It came back. It all came back.

We all got these emails, and we were all shocked. It was way too much. Way too fucking much. Legal adults or not, at the time this was insane. First, someone we know, a friend just drops dead on us, and then this. This was way too fucked up.

Nobody could do anything to Seraphina! You couldn’t even reach her. She was indeed in treatment for the whole fucking time. Her parents took her to a hospital out of town, knowing her social situation at school. Some parents tried sending cops her way, but she was clean – she had an alibi. Nothing could be done to her, hell, nothing could be traced back to her.

But the fucking images… This makes no sense.

Nothing of this makes fucking sense.

It’s like… It’s like someone was using photos of her for this.

My phone pinged again, another message from Seraphina. An image, how ironic.

It was a digitally designed Gothic depiction of a fallen angel of sorts; blackened skin, seated on top a pile of skulls holding a crooked flaming knife in each hand. The figure had four butterfly-like wings and its body was covered in piercing eyes. It had four faces; one of a man, another of a lion, the third of a bull and the fourth was what I could only imagine being a bird, because of the angle.

A Cherub.

The image was followed by the question, “What do you think of my version of Archangel Uriel?”

My heart skipped a beat.

I answered, “That looks really awesome…” all the while thinking to myself, “What if she did do it all those years ago? After all, she’s a talented artist and bright mind.”

If it’s really her, it just goes to show how bad bullying can affect a person. It can lead to a bunch of terrible things; some people kill themselves; others might kill others. We’ve seen this happen repeatedly. Nothing can convince me anymore that bullying or shunning a kid cause they’re weird could do anyone any good. That only brings out the monsters lurking underneath their skin. If it’s not Seraphina, then whoever did this is still out there… That’s a scary thought.

Thinking about it now though, it’s almost funny in a twisted way. She was nicknamed Murderous Seraphina at some point, for a reason, we just didn’t know the extent of it.