kabbos
By : Amal Shanouha
By evening, Ellen’s family was waiting for her to come back from her school scout camp. However, they were surprised by the police telling them that the trip supervisor had to stop searching for Ellen after it got too late. Therefore, he put the police in charge to get the rest of the students back to their homes.
The news has gone viral among the inhabitants of her village in the rural areas, based in Europe. Immediately, some young men volunteered to climb that mountain with her scared parents and a private police squad to start searching for the missing ten-year girl.
At the mountainside, Ellen was wandering the jungle shaking with cold and fear. Nothing lightened her way but a small torch with its light getting dimmer by the minute. She saw a small wooden house surrounded by valley trees. She dried her tears and climbed down towards the abandoned hut.
After she reached the door, she kicked it forcibly and entered. Her first interest was to enter the bathroom as she refuses to pee out in the open. When she got there, she heard as if there were two persons entering the house .A woman was screaming in fear, and a man was insulting her violently and ordering her to shut up. Ellen freaked out, hurried to the bathtub and hid behind its curtain.
The poor woman kept screaming for help for a while, till her voice got weaker and weaker before it was finally gone!
Ellen expected the worst. She thought that the man had strangled the woman. Few moments later, she heard his foot-steps getting closer and closer to her. She turned her smalltorch off and peaked through the curtain’s hole only to see the killer dragging the woman’s body on the floor of the bathroom. Then, while trying to turn on the lights, he said angrily:
“Damn this house! Everything is broken down here?!”
The killer went out for a while then he came back soon holding a lantern which he put down on the sink. Ellen lay down silently in the bathtub so that he would not see her shadow behind the curtain.
In his other hand, he was holding a small iron saw with which he started to cut the body’s limbs.
While cutting the woman’s flesh, the sounds of the saw were so nauseating. With her little body shaking with fear, Ellen strongly shut her ears so as not to hear it.
Few minutes later, she heard the killer talking to himself:
“Oh! Stupid me, if I had cut her flesh inside the tub, this chaos would not have happened. Well, when I come back, I will clean up everything. Now!! I have to put the important parts in the refrigerator so as not to rot.”
After a while, he came back and said ironically:
“How beautiful your brown eyes are! I wish I could replace my ugly ones with them.”
He said that while throwing away one of the victim’s eyes towards the bathtub. The eyes rolled and stopped by Ellen’s foot.The little girl hardly could hold hear scream after seeing the woman’s uprooted eye.
After a short period of time, which Ellen felt as a decade, the killer finished cutting the body and put each piece in a small black plastic garbage bag. With the intention of throwing them in different places of the mountain, he then held all the bags one by one outside the house.He put them in the trunk of his car which he parked in front of the house.
After that the little girl heard the car engine as it was moving away. She held on to the end of the bathtub with her body which could hardly stand up. However, before leaving, she stepped on the uprooted eye of the victim by mistake and she poked it. It sounded like it was a water balloon explosion.
She screamed in fear and jumped outside the bathtub, but the sticky touch of the blood made her to trip and fall over a pond of blood. She rose in horror and rushed outside the hut. Her clothes had been dyed red. She kept running in the jungles in an insane speed.
After a while of continuous running, she glimpsed car lights coming from the mountainside. She immediately hid in the trees fearing that the killer would come back. She didn’t come out until she heard a voice calling her name:
“Ellen! Where are you? Your family is searching for you.”
By then the poor girl tried to put herself together and yelled with what is left of her power:
“I’m here.” She replied before she fainted.
While the ambulance was taking the fainted Ellen to the hospital; with everyone shocked at the sight of her soaked-in-blood clothes; the killer who had finished his job getting rid of the bags, was on his way back to the hut to clean the blood and remove all evidence of the crime scene.
Right after putting Ellen in bed, she woke up.
“Stop the killer!” she said.
“Ellen! Who did this to you? Where is he now?” The detective asked.
Meanwhile, the killer noticed the little footprints coming from the bathtub heading towards the outside door.
“Damn! Who was here?” the killer said anxiously. He hurried towards the bathroom to notice that the curtain’s position had shifted. Once he got closer to it, he saw the poked eye!
“Damn! He was hiding here!! He must have seen all what I did!!”
As he was getting angrily out of the bathroom, he stepped on a hard thing under his feet. He picked the lantern to check what that thing is.
While Ellen was telling the detective all what she had seen in the hut, the killer was reading her scout ID card that had fallen from her.
“Ellen Felix. The New Generation School.” Looks like I’m not done yet”. He said angrily.
One month after that accident
Ellen got back to her life, but she is not as she used to be anymore. She stays at her room most of the time. She speaks to no one. She behaves violently with her parents and schoolmates. The police was still wandering around the mountain searching for that hut which Ellen described. However, they only found the bags containing the body’s limbs without finding most of its internal organs. They found out later that the limbs belonged to a waitress who used to work in a restaurant next to a gas station.
The problem was that Ellen’s parents completely refused that their daughter would go with the police to tell them where the hut is. According to them this would negatively affecther already deteriorated psychological status. On the other hand, what they don’t know is that the killer is watching Ellen’s school every day. He is waiting for the right moment to kidnap her and get rid of the only witness before she describes him to the police. This is as far as he knows, wasn’t done yet.
One day, Ellen was in the drawing class. The teacher asked the students to draw a heart for Valentine’s Day. Ellen sat away painting her drawing. Then all the students gathered around the teacher’s table to show her their paintings. Ellen got closer and put her painting on theirs; the teacher asked her:
“Ellen! Why did you choose the dark red color?”
She showed off her arm which was bleeding after she cut it with a scissors. The students freaked out, and the horrified teacher screamed :
“Why did you cut yourself?!”
“Because blood is the real color of the heart, I saw it in the killer’s hand after he ribbed it off her chest” answered Ellen and she added:
“What?? Don’t you like my drawing?”
“Didn’t I tell you that she’s crazy?! You should go to the hospital, you are crazy!!” nervously and in a mean way said her friend Diana.
Ellen angrily looked at her friend…
“Enough Diana! Come on Ellen, let’s cleanse your wounds.” The teacher said. She then took her to the nursing room to bandage her wounds.
The school principal called Ellen’s mom to take her home after she freaked out her classmates.
An hour later, Ellen’s mother came and asked her to wait at the corridor until she finishes talking with the school principal. But Ellen eavesdrop on them and she heard this conversation:
“I realize that she has experienced a hard situation, but her behaviors are getting worse every day. The parents are worried for their children. Yesterday, she threw her books at her classmates in a tantrum and we hardly could calm her down. Days before, she threw a stone at her physical education teacher. All this apart from the dirty insults which I do not know from where she got them.”
“I know that Ma’am. We are trying to treat her tantrums. We take her to a psychiatrist twice weekly. We also…” said Ellen’s mom.
“Let me be honest with you, if your daughter continues like this, I have to dismiss her from school.” the Principal interrupted.
Ellen got upset at the principal’s words. She quickly ran out of school before the principal could see her. Unfortunately, she didn’t know that the killer was waiting for her outside the school; He hurried after her, stepped out of his car holding a piece of cloth soaked in anesthetic and in seconds, Ellen vanished again.
That night, Ellen woke up to find herself in a hole at the basement of a house; she raised her head up to see the killer staring back at her; she screamed loudly! He said with a mean smile:
“Finally, you woke up.”
-“Help! Help me!” screamed Ellen.
“Don’t bother yourself screaming! We are in a very far place.”
Then he continued talkingfrom a distant while loading the anesthetic shot:
“You know, because of your over curiosity, I could no longer go back to my mountain hut; as the police is still searching for me out there.” Said the killer and added:
However, I cleaned up everything in the crime scene, but one should act with due diligence, I will not let a petty girl like you get me executed.”
Ellen screamed loudly from inside the hole:
“I did not tell them about you, and they do not know how you look like.”
“It doesn’t matter; you are going to die anyway.”
Just before he wanted to bend down to dose her, his mobile, which was in the hall, rang.
“Shit, bad timing. Listen girl, don’t do anything or I swear to God I’ll kill you without dosing.” He leaned his head over the hole holding the lantern.
“Do you know what this means?” “You will feel severe pain, exactly like what happened to that woman. I think you remember her screaming, don’t you?” then he left her and went upstairs to the ground floor to answer his phone call.
Meanwhile, Ellen realized that she has one last chance to survive. She started searching the sand in the hole where she was trapped for anything to protect her from the killer.
The dim light from the lantern over the hole allowed her to find a long rusty nail thrown at the corner of the hole. She hid it in her strongly shaking fist.
After a while, the killer came back saying:
” Excellent, now that you didn’t cry, I’ll reward you with dying painlessly, but don’t worry, you won’t vanish completely from the face of the earth; as I intend to sell your precious organs to my friend (a doctor) as I had done to that woman. You know, that body of yours, contains lots of treasures for me.”
He held a wooden ladder and lowered it into the hole. He went down into the ladder holding the anesthetic injection.
Before he turned around to her, Ellen jumped on him and drove the nail deep inside his neck. The killer cried loudly. The injection fell from his hand.
Right away Ellen took it and injected it in his leg. The killer fell to the ground as she ran to climb the ladder. He tried hardly to stand up on his dope leg while pressing on his neck to stop the bleeding. He was cursing Ellen angrily.
The little girl knew that he could catch her. At once, she took the lantern that he had left at the top of the hole and threw it at his body. In seconds he turned in seconds into a ball of fire struggling with severe pain. He tried to stop the fire by squatting in the sand on the ground.
Before the fire went out completely, he surprised Ellen that he could stand up. He then started going up the ladder towards Ellen. She left him behind and went upstairs towards the ground floor. She locked the basement door behind her by the bolt leaving the killer stuck in the basement hole.
Afterward, she ran away from the house and she was still hearing the echo of his swear words and cries for help.
While she was running in the streets like a crazy person, she heard a massive explosion behind her. It seemed as if the fire burning the killer’s body had reached one of the gas jars negligently left in the basement causing it to explode!
After an hour of walking, lost in dark streets, a fire brigade found her; it was on its way to the killer’s house to put the fire out after they received news of it. They immediately took Ellen back to her house. Her emotionally exhausted parents who were miserable since her sudden disappearance earlier that day, rushed to her crying and weeping with joy.
One month after the death the killer
Her mother was sitting in the living room talking to her friend:
“Hasn’t she spoken yet?”
“No, looks like what my daughter went through had made her deaf.”
“Please, do not cry. The medicine will definitely make her better, she just needs some time.”
“Oh, God!! Until then, we have to get her into a school for deaf children. Her school principal handed us her file two days ago.”
“How cruel this principal is! Instead of considering Ellen’s psychological status and what she had gone through, she dismissed her.”
“She is afraid that she would have a negative impact on the other students; as Ellen has tantrums every now and then. Even earlier today, she suffered hysteria from the barking of our neighbor’s dog, and her father and I could hardly calm her down.”
At this moment, the doorbell rang.
“Oh, one moment. I will be right back.”
Her neighbor was by the door asking her anxiously:
“Excuse me, my dear, have you seen my dog? I’ve looked for it everywhere.”
Meanwhile, at the house backyard, Ellen was embedding the soil over the neighbor’s killed dog while viciously talking to herself:
“Finally I’ll rest from your disturbing bark”.
After she had buried it, she took a small notebook and a pen out of her pocket with the following names written in it: the killer, neighbor’s dog, my friend Diana, the school principal, mom and dad.
The killer’s name was deleted; so she held the pen and scratched the neighbor’s dog.
Then she said to herself: “Next mission, stupid Diana.” and smiled viciously.
The End
