Guardian Angel back up

   Why are you asking me anything? I thought you had all the answers; yes I am being sarcastic. Do you honestly think I can't overhear people talking about me from like ten feet away? I've overheard all their theories and questions, done asking each other now you want to ask me? After you've decided you don't know shit about her; I've heard you say you think "SHE" has come back or someone or something else; only to say it doesn't add up or the events don't work out on the when and where or whatever. So you want to know huh? Fine. But I'm telling you right now I don't KNOW anything, fine, fine.

   So then, her name is Maria. At least that's what I've always called her, she started out as my imaginary friend when I was 2 to 3 years old. I honestly didn't even remember this till my mother told me about a year ago. When I was 2 I had an imaginary friend like I said, like any kid my mother didn't think anything of it, mind you most of this is what my mother told me as I didn't remember it, not clearly anyway. I used to tell my mother my friend was invisible and had to live inside my dolls, not like one doll was my friend only talking, but like would move from doll to doll, like possessing different dolls at different times. My mother said I'd be insistent on taking certain ones with us because Maria was living in that one; and that I'd throw a fit at the store when I saw a doll I really liked or an outfit for the doll insisting Maria wanted that "body" or that outfit for "her other bodies"; my mother didn't like the way I said that. I barely remembered owning so many dolls.

   See, when I was 3 my mother had a boyfriend, I kind of remember him, always yelling, drunk, my mother yelling back. I don't really remember this but about a year ago my mother told me about this; it was the day her boyfriend died. I remember hearing about this from my aunt, but only about the man falling down some stairs drunk and how my mother doesn't like talking about it because the police believe she got fed up with his abuse and may have pushed him down the stairs. Well; anyway, my mother confided in me that it was "Maria" who did it. That one night her boyfriend was insanely drunk, and trying to force his way past her to me...keeping in mind I was only 3 and sleeping in my bed. He barged into the door, and my mother swore all my dolls' heads turned instantly in his direction with red glowing eyes and spoke in unison, "You will not harm the child" and an invisible force lifted him from the room and threw him down the stairs. My mother says she doesn't remember the next part very well but knows in a panic she scooped me up and ran from the house, driving us to a motel in the middle of the night, calling the police the next day claiming to have just found him, that she left with me to a motel the night before because of how drunk he was; her cover story; and that was the end of that. After that I vaguely remember we lived at my aunts house, and I didn't have another humanoid doll till I was seven, a barbie doll, a really fancy one. But what happened to the other dolls, Maria, and I kinda get why that scared my mother; but at the same time Maria was only protecting me,

   Thing is I never connected any dots till, well...last year, about things that happened when I was a kid. My mother though did, she paid attention. She paid attention when some psychic lady looked at me once and had a scared expression and told my mother I had a something dark following me; only to a second later tell her in a glazed over expression that I had a powerful guardian angel watching over me. When I was seven the neighborhood we lived in had a registered sex offender move in down the street, the man had raped a pre-teen girl; I never knew anything about this, but a week after he moved in...and as a note my mother kept the newspaper clipping; she showed me all this last year; the man was found in the cornfield near our house, his body torn to pieces, believed he had passed out in the field or killed himself with pills only for wildlife to rip his body apart before he could be found. It was after this my aunt bought me the barbie doll for my seventh birthday. I didn't name it, because its Barbie, Barbie's name is Barbie after all. I got a Ken doll for Christmas and a car and we got our own place sometime while I was eight.

   My mother's next newspaper clipping is from that house, another registered sex offender; this time like six blocks away, was found dead in his living room, presumably slipped and fell on a steak knife into his eye. We lived there for a few years, I don't remember much happening till I was 13, which would be the first thing I really remember. One day on the way home from school my friends and I walked past a yard sale; now this was like two towns south from where I was a kid and this lady chased after us holding a box shouting that I forgot something. She handed me the box; even though I told her I didn't buy anything from her; she insisted it was mine and peeled off this weird strip of paper that had like Japanese writing on it and inside was just this old cloth Betty Boop doll wearing a surprisingly short red dress and a white feather boa around her shoulders. She insisted the doll was mine, I just took it, I mean, hell, free fancy doll right. Around this same time I didn't know that my mother had a crawl space filled with packages mailed to our house, each one with a doll in it, the dolls from when I was 3 years old. Like I said I knew nothing about any of that till like a year ago; apparently each one had a letter with it, saying the dolls were haunted, the ghost kept insisting they mail the specific doll to our address....as in the ghost KNEW where we lived; in other words Maria never left us, but it wanted its "bodies" back. Come to think of it I would sometimes come home to find my expensive barbie doll in odd spots of the house, I just figured I had forgotten it or my mother was messing with me.

   I remember coming home one day when I was somewhere around 14 or 15 years old and my mother was shouting, I had rushed upstairs and she was just standing in my room, she had heard me come or coming up the steps and stopped. She was standing there in the middle of the room, at the time she tried to tell me she just had a frustrating day at work and was venting; but then asked me where I got the Betty Boop from; I told her about the garage sale; she said something about not taking things from strangers but didn't press the subject when I said it was a garage sale and the lady was old and probably mistook me for someone else. Of course last year my mother cleared that up and was actually shouting at the doll, and wanting to be left alone, why couldn't "Maria" just be a normal guardian angel and just protect me from afar; apparently it had been doing stuff around the house when I wasn't home, like leaving answering machine messages that just whispered, "Maria," on them, or mutiliating mice and other pests. Apparently Maria had a tendency to kill mosquitos, large flies, mice, and rats, and leave them in a pile in my mother's room. She also described seeing a pale woman wearing a long white dress with long black hair and black alien eyes staring back at her from a mirror if the lights were off. I did wander why she would turn the mirror away on the medicine cabinet before turning the light on. Now to be clear I don't mean a girl like in those Ring movies, American or Japanese. My mother described her more like a Victorian Bride only very regal looking wearing a very expensive looking dress.

   One night when I was 14 we were watching a ghost hunting show and my mother just looked at me for a minute when I commented how cool it would be to have haunting stuff happening around the house; she asked me when I caught her staring if I've ever seen or heard anything weird or remembered anything spooky in this or our past houses. That was when I first found out about the first house, but not about the boyfriend till I asked my aunt some time later; weeks, months; when ever; not like I have a photographic memory here. Funny thing is for my birthday my mother gave me like three old dolls; I didn't know these were ones I had already owned. Now according to my mother this was part of a deal with "Maria" to stop leaving dead things in her room and just leave the bodies of disease carrying pests outside.

    I would just skip to the big thing I remember from when I was 16, but according to my mother there was something from when I was 15 I didn't know about. They had found the body of a man with his arms and legs torn off, the stumps burned, and the actual cause of death drowning in the river with a chain tied around him and to a rock under the bridge I walked over every day to and from school. The man was a rapist who had fled from one state over and was living under the bridge, he had raped a teenage girl, scary to think someone like that was hanging out on my route to and from school. Not sure why I hadn't heard about this, but my mom even had video from the news reports; the police were searching for a woman. The video was a street camera and showed the man lurking under the bridge, scary thing was he looked about to come out at the time my friends and I were crossing the bridge but backed down due to some cars or there being four of us. The news station labeled it a "close call" for four unidentified local girls; but only three hours later as the sun is setting it shows a woman swimming over into view, like in the river at night in September...she climbs out, wearing all black, and pale as can be with jet black hair. The man jumps her but right on video it shows her grabbing him by the throat with one hand and slamming him into the wall, pinning him there as she pulls a really long knife or machete from under her hair on her back, like a strap was there or something and dragging him under the bridge with a fire suddenly bursting into view like someone dumped gasoline on hot coals; and the video cuts out after blurring saying it was too graphic to show. She had apparently without anyone hearing at only like 7pm strangling the guy silent while she cut off his arms and legs and burned the stumps somehow so he didn't bleed out, tied a chain around him and to a rock and dumped him right there in a river to drown while completly helpless. How the hell this wasn't the talk of the town at the time I don't know, I remember lots of political and celebrity stuff in the news back then...so gruesome local murder of a rapist on the run only got one tv spot and no one talked about it; if the internet had been a big thing back then I bet more of us kids would have heard about it. The long short, my mother believed that was Maria, hunting the guy down and killing him. I mean I can see it, but at the same time, feels like if she was going to be caught on camera protecting me it would have been something crazy big.

   Thinking back maybe all those times I'd hear a "stop", or "don't walk here," and such in my head maybe that was Maria. I had heard that crossing the bridge that day I think, but had to ignore it given my friends were there and the only other way to our houses was like twenty minutes out of the way.

   So anyway, when I was 16. Now had my mother never said anything to me, or brought any of this up a year ago and showed me her box of news paper clippings and video tapes and showed me all the boxes she hadn't given me I'd have thought THIS was where it all started and said as such. So October when I was 16 years old, one of my friends; whose name I am withholding because honestly fuck you people abducting my friends, I know you have my mother somewhere and she probably already told you guys all the stuff she told me plus some. But whatever, so my friend bought a Ouija Board, like from the Halloween Store, it wasn't a serious thing, hell she had a Ouija Board pillow and blanket too. So there we were at a sleepover, we were getting a bit old, so this was going to be a "final" sleepover, although we'd never had one before; and it being the season decided to mess with a Ouija Board. So my friends and I were messing with the thing and long story short my friend who bought the thing fancied herself a psychic or whatever, she would buy sage, shells, crystals, all that junk so we were messing with the thing around 2am (witching hour) and we asked if any spirits were present, I could feel it being dragged out of our fingers, barely touching it, to the (YES), we asked who was present and it spelled out I. A.M.; so my friend asked, "who are you, I declare in the name of Jesus Christ you tell us your name", it spelled out, "I. A.M. S.A.T.A.N." before we could freak out the power started to blink and there was a horrifying growl shaking the room and a flapping sound; a loud female voice declared, "She is mine!" followed by another roar, and a second something hissing, a gut wrenching crunching noise accompanied by a very loud flapping sound and the second something whimpering...you could even hear it going away. One of my friends freaking out turned on the light; now I know I didn't set this scene up; if I had time to write this out like a story to share online I might have; but we were in an attic, and the light cast our shadows against the wall, my shadow was blacker than it should have been, didn't move with me, and stretched up the wall; I could tell there was something feminine about it, but also had these huge wings to the side which spread out like bird wings followed by a very hot breeze and the lights going out as everyone screamed.

   The messed up part is the very next instance I calling my friends' names as they all went silent and fumbled for the light, only to trip on the couch and thunder and lightning light up the room. We were in the living room somehow, I woke my friend up and they didn't remember anything about what just happened. The freaky thing was by this time it was still only 2:30am. My friends claimed they remembered nothing; they remembered talking about messing with the Ouija Board but all claimed we all fell asleep while watching the movie...I don't remember what movie, some slasher flick I think, the tv not being on when I woke up was attributed to the power outage from the lightning. The problem with me just declaring the whole thing a dream is, everything leading up to that moment. The movie was over my 11pm, we did other things in that time, watched some tv, talked, ate pizza, and got into the attic and set everything up, the board, reading the rules, this was no dream. The next night at home while I was sitting in my room I was looking at my dolls and thinking about the incident, how real it felt. I shined a flash light on the wall and was messing around with my shadow, the whole duck/snake shadow hand thing asking myself questions, "Was that real," and I'd say "No," and I asked "who are you" and suddenly there was the flapping and light was like partially blacked out on the wall like it was shining through glass and I could barely make out a ripple in the air where the light was hitting between me and the wall and a woman's voice spoke, "I am Maria" followed by giggling and suddenly the light going back to normal like she moved out of the way, but so fast I couldn't percieve motion.

   Now like I said I don't have a photographic memory, this happend so long ago, that to be honest to say this and that happened immediatly afterwords or something with my friends, I don't know. The friend who bought the Ouija board though did not long after throw that stuff out or give it away to our other friends, she said she was over all that and was into boy bands now or something. To be honest after this nothing really freaky happened for awhile, I mean the voice on staying safe was louder, more like someone actually speaking or whispering right in my ear, but it was comforting. On cold nights I even felt like aside from my blankets I was wrapped in big soft wings, being held in the arms of some woman, at least for winter, I don't think that came back the next winter though, like Maria was being extra cautious with me after the Ouija Board incident.

    So pretty much that, like I said I can't remember every little thing, I am sure a few more dolls in odd places, lying on the bed when I swore it was on the cabinet stuff happened to me, my mother though recounts things like the tv on late at night. The sound of someone walking through the house late at night, and odd shadows that would flitter across the light like someone quickly moving a crystal glass cup in front of the bulbs; which yeah that stuck out to me to remember the flash light thing more clearly; instead of uh, something was sort of blocking the light but not completly. Like trying to shine a light through crystal glass. But yeah, I can't remember anything major until after I left for college. My mother oddly had asked if I was taking the dolls with me and gave me a fearful look when I said I was leaving them behind to watch after the house. Personally I was thinking by this time I was like some low level schizophrenic, hearing voices and seeing mild hallucinations when I played with low lights.

   So I was 20 when this happened, and as you can guess we are getting closer to now. This was the night of a college party; I had been drinking when these guys were trying to lead me outside, however just before the door a tall woman intervened and insisted I was her girlfriend and wouldn't be leaving with them. My memory is fuzzy about what happened right after that other than hearing the next day how a woman had beaten the shit out of four students at the college party. What I do remember from that night is finding myself in the middle of the night waking up in a strange bed feeling a woman on all four staddling me, she kissed me and whispered, "I missed the feel of your lips," the voice was Maria's and I waved my arm and it went right through the image in the dark I shook myself awake and she was gone. I thought I saw the outline of a woman in the corner of the room so turned on the light but no one was there. It was a hotel, I wasn't even in my dorm; I found out as I checked out the room was paid for I had come in the night before with a very tall woman who had told them I had gotten too drunk to drive home so was sleeping it off here till morning. I never found out who those four guys were but my mother once again had been keeping tabs on weird happenings. There was a dozen different dissapperances while I was there, I doubt ALL of them can be attributed to Maria, but at least six of the deaths were disturbingly like what my mother had shown me in the other newspaper clippings; three found in the woods; believed killed by a bear; another was crammed inside a trunk of a car that was driven into a nearby lake, and two others which were reported as drownings with their bodies found in only a foot of water, pinned under boulders too big and heavy for anyone to have lifted and put ontop of them, both crushing their arms and legs and drowning them with the surface just out of reach of their lips and noses by mere inches.

   Of course I didn't know about those killings then, I mean I heard about campus about the bear attack; I figured out the scam on my debt and got out; no way the job I was likely going to get even with a degree was ever going to pay this off. Not long after I got a job at the local Val-Mart. So around my 21st birthday as I was leaving for the night a white van with no windows in the back was parked out in the middle of the parkinglot a little too close to my car. I stopped inside the store and watched them, I could see a man, maybe middle aged, bulky build, sitting in the driver side. A few moments later the van was shaking like crazy, I could hear men screaming and the van drove off, nearly hitting my car and a nearby lamp post and swerved onto the highway and drove off. I found out the next day there had been an accident not far down the road, that van had crashed off the road, hitting a telephone pole, it looked like it had been torn to pieces; the paper described it as worse than it should have been, with no less than three men in the back plus the driver being mangled in the crash, and the van looked like it had gone through a blender, even without suspecting anything it was hard to imagine crashing off the road into a telephone pole could do that to a van.

   Well to make a long story short, not long after while I was working another late shift we had a customer, a tall beautiful woman with long black hair and her voice; was exactly like Maria's; a voice I hadn't heard since I woke up in that hotel room; the voice in the back of the head thing had gone away a few years prior. Now she was looking for craft supplies and I was helping her out, we got to talking, and somehow I got invited to a bar. Well, we saw each other a few times, and started to date. I will spare the details because fuck you. But we became close. I hadn't come out to my mother about being gay yet; I mean I was sure of it by the time I was 20 and thinking back on my life. I thought being honest with myself was why the voices stopped, that I had tripped some mental defensive uncertainty block; yeah. I decided when I was 22 years old and I had been seeing her for about a year...her name...Mary, yeah, duh right? Anyway, so I had come out to my mother, told her I had a girlfriend; my mother was surprisingly...I was surprised, supportive. So I took Mary to visit my mother, my mother had this look like she had seen a ghost when she looked at Mary and Mary had this freaky grin on her face that she dropped the instant she realized I noticed. My mother brushed it off when I introduced her; dinner was pleasent; but after dinner my mother asked me to come back the next day because she had something to show me. Yeah, that was when she showed me the boxes, the letters, newspaper clippings; her ghostly encounters and insisted (Mary) was actually (Maria) the ghost she saw in the mirrors. I had thought how her voice sounded the same, but I honestly just thought my mother was going crazy; but she did raise a question that hadn't occured to me. I had never seen Mary's house. We had been going out for a year and we always met after work, at work, and I drove. Which in that instant occured to me why I never questioned that; that Mary had no car. I always picked her up or we'd meet someplace, but she never drove...but she'd leave the next day or sometimes at night because she had to be up the next day she'd say...and I swore I heard a car; but I'd also never met any friends she had to give her a ride, or seen any car.

   So on our next date, I brought it up that I'd never seen her place; now trying to be rational I figured either she lived at home and didn't want to tell me, shared a house, or at the other end of the spectrum was maybe homeless but managed to stay looking good; but that made no sense as she bought stuff from Val-Mart all the time; art supplies. She offered to pick me up from work, she showed up at Val-Mart and took me to a very new; like right off the lot looking mini-van, drove us out of town to a huge brick house; like five bedrooms, three baths, two car garage. Inside it was empty, I mean no furniture, nothing in the kitchen, but upstairs the rooms were occupied with plushies, dolls, action figures, and mannequins dressed up and in some cases even modified. I refuse to go into detail but let's say between the huge bed she had in one room and her um...talents, she distracted me enough not to ask questions. However in the middle of the night I did have a dream where I woke up from hearing what sounded like Mary talking to herself...but at the same time, like more than one of her, walked slowly down the hall and peeked in through the antique keyhole of the door to see her sitting in the middle of the room; white as milk, eyes solid black, sitting on her knees facing the window and a massive pair of black feathered wings on her back, there were red dots in the wings, which when I creaked the door all opened up like red eyes inside the shadows of her wings; and I woke up in the bed with Mary next to me.

   Of course you and I both know Mary WAS Maria, because you are assholes. So should I skip to THAT or should I go over how we moved into together, her whole excuse of inhereting the house and money she didn't know what to do with, how I got her hooked on some television series, our christmases together, decorating the big house for Halloween that year. It was the best year of my life, my mother's little freak out not with standing. Life was going great, I was expecting to then you people had to show up, so where should I go next huh? Intimate details about realizing she was more than human when you barged into our house and she shielded me with those crystal like invisible wings, how she swooped into the air manifesting her black wings while you fired those flash bangs; my confusion, and feeling you people while I groped around blinded by the lights and noise into a padded vehicle; this room, this cell; hearing you assholes go on and on about this and that; and yes I overheard you talk about grabbing my mother so...

  *KAKOOM*

   -The last sounds on the interview recording was the sound of a gunshot and a man's voice, "There now that monster should leave" followed by an unearthly feminine scream, the men screaming, and a sound like an explosion.

   *It was Christmas when it happened; when the world learned monsters do exist. Out of no where a nightmare creature had appeared in the middle of a small mid-western American city. A squirming mass of spiny black tendrils held aloft by four massive crab shaped legs covered in overlayored black knife like feathers with eerie red glowing eyes floating about like Will O' Wisps just below the surface. Each of these four massive appendages having three short reptilian toes and a thumb claw, the pad of the foot home to a massive fang filled mouth and bit into the very earth with every step. The creature let out a hellish wail as it stomped a path across the country side. No weapon even phased the beast, for months it rampaged until one day; another joined it.

  *July of the following year, she had been held for months, even her mother had been secretly abducted and taken to another location. The men were not real police, or government agents. She eventually told her story; and was shot in the back of the head...they didn't have time to react as a brilliant white light filled with holy flames escaped her and consumed the entire building she was held in.

  *In that July the rampaging beast stopped, its path had been to follow one person who was constantly being moved from place to place. But now it stopped and a surreal cyclone of white and black it twists into its self and from this cyclone appears a giant lithe womanly figure made of white light, long hair flows from the back of her head in thick tendril like bunches with black tips. Her eyes open revealing a disturbingly deep black within the white glow of the body. From her back appears like a massive cape of shadow four great shapes like distorted wings, they rufffle and take on the vague apperance of being feathered, with teeth like clawes on the crook and tips of the wings, red eye like spheres floating about them. Not far from her another womanly figure manifests in thin air, clear as crystal and upon her back a pair of demon like wings as crytal like as herself, the light distorted around her save for the eyes which emit white flames and reveal her body is not clear, merely bending the light around it; her hair comes into view as white flame tendrils draping the strange crystal like body. The one that had been a beast extends her right arm as the two get as close to side by side facing the direction of the destroyed building, the crystaline one extends her left hand; their fingers are like needles as a white glow slowly forms in their palms.