The Girl In The Attic

• Mackenzie Cook
• Short Story
• 2019

Locked away in the attic of a two-storey house, in the richer part of town, that’s where the young girl named Christella could be found 365 days a year, and 366 in a leap year.
Every day the young blonde girl sat in the corner of the dusty attic awaiting her father’s arrival, waiting for her father, by name, to come to her as he always did. Eleven years the girl had lived in the dim attic, accustomed to the smell of mould and damp wood.
The girl couldn’t remember far back to a time when she had lived in the actual house itself, for she was only two years of age. After her mother had disappeared when she was two her father could find no reason to keep the young girl on as his daughter.
Instead he locked her away in the attic with only old blankets and Christmas ornaments as company. The small cracked circular window allowed a small amount of light through, enough light for Christella to read the words in the old books that she had found amongst boxes of her mother’s old trinkets.
All the thirteen-year-old girl could remember of her mother were her vivid green eyes in which she had inherited. The girl, however, didn’t exactly know what she herself looked like, as her father said it was vain to care about the likes, even after he spent so much time in front of the mirror flattening his greying hair and shaving his moustache to perfection.
However, that day was unlike no other. Christella’s father climbed the wooden ladder to the attic and fumbled to unlock the rusting lock. He entered the small room that was the attic stinking of alcohol, his hazel eyes darted around before they landed upon his only daughter sitting in the far corner hidden in the shadows.
Behind her father’s large form came another man, he seemed less drunk, but the scent of booze lingered on him just as it did on her father. The two men both had matching beady hazel eyes and a matching smirk strung upon their faces.
Christella looked at the two middle aged men curiously, yet cautiously. Her father had never bought another person up with himself before, it had always just been him once a day with some food and water for the girl, enough to keep her alive. The two greying men shared a look, her father nodded towards her as he muttered something in a slur to the other.
The strange man, who was taller and bigger than her father, approached the small vulnerable girl with an odd look upon his face, a look that she was unfamiliar to. The thirteen-year-old wanted to run- or scream, fear was etched clearly on her small face.
Pain surged through her body almost instantly, before she could even process what had happened, his clenched fist had collided with her face with a sickening crack, her jaw broken. She bit down on her bottom blip, refusing the man the satisfaction of making her scream, which only caused her to pierce the skin on her lip and draw blood.
The pain was immeasurable, she has fallen to the floor, her legs had seemed to become jelly and unable to support her light weight. Her long blonde hair, that had never been cut, fell across her tear-stricken face.
A hard-strong kick was aimed at her ribs, followed by another, which had to have broken her ribs. The pain didn’t end, it wouldn’t and felt as if it couldn’t. Yet she had still refused the urge to scream; no, she wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of that.
The man called out many names aimed towards the innocuous young girl; the pain and torture dragged on for what could’ve been hours, before her father did her the kindest thing he had ever done for her and ended her pain.
A loud bang echoed through the attic of the large house, a small pool of blood wept out of the girl’s head and stained her light-coloured hair an almost black coloured red as her soul left her body. Years of lonesomeness and dejection faded away as she was finally freed of this world to go and be in another where she could finally be loved and wanted.
Her, smaller than what was healthy, body laid in the attic of the house, that had never quite been a home, until her father passed on from old age and a boy of five found her body in an old blood stain, while playing pirates in the attic of his new house.
Not only was young Christella found that day but another body was also recovered, a body that had been there, unknowingly to Christella, since the day the young girl was forced up there kicking and screaming.
The unsolved mystery of young Christella and her mother was finally solved that day. Both had met their ends at her father’s fault, as he drunkenly got them murdered, and watched on emotionless.