Yes, an entity. Maybe the word ‘monster’ is a bit more appropriate, but I don’t think calling her a monster would be fair.
Because if anything, I’m the monster for kidnapping her in the first place. But to be fair, I really didn’t know she was like this. I really thought she was human.
I’m going to keep it simple and straight-forward. I kidnapped Lettie because I used to run a…filthy trafficking business that involves teen girls. Supposedly, human teen girls. Lettie definitely isn’t human, but I didn’t know that when I took her to my car and knocked her out cold with chloroform.
Call me the real monster, call me a bastard, call me a mistake. Whatever it is, I know what I am. I deserve to rot in prison for everything I’ve ever done, and I shouldn’t even be alive and here to type this out. But well, here I am. And Lettie’s sleeping peacefully with her head on my lap right now, as if she hadn’t just killed thirty grown men in one go without so much of a trace. Just some blood splatters on her that I bathed her out of.
Now I realise I sound like I’m trying my best to keep Lettie’s identity a vague secret, but I’m not. I just don’t know how to describe her. I promise my vocabulary’s not limited, but some things just can’t be explained, and Lettie’s one of those things. It’s best if I start from the very beginning, so that’s what I’ll do.
It was way back in November of last year when I was admitted to the hospital after receiving several gunshot wounds, one of them in quite a vital spot. It was because a ‘client’ of mine wasn’t satisfied with the girl I presented him with, and the rest is history. I had to be hospitalised for several months, and in one of those months was when I met Lettie.
To be honest, I don’t know how old she is. She doesn’t even know, either. I’m not saying this to justify my actions, but it’s the truth. She’s pale-skinned, has chest-length black hair and brown eyes, and looks like an overall average teen girl. Not a hair out of place, and she looks perfectly human with perfectly human mannerisms.
It was dinner time when she walked up to my hospital bed, and apparently she was looking for her dad. Said she got lost, and needed help getting back to his office. She was wearing a plain white shirt, an oversized corduroy jacket, and short-shorts. Barefoot, too. It was weird considering it was damn near freezing outside, but I just waved her off and told her I didn’t know jackshit about her dad. I just assumed she was the daughter of a doctor or something.
But then she came back the following day. Not to ask for where her dad was or to tell me off for being rude, but to tease me for getting shot. This girl was laughing at me for almost getting shot in the balls.
And I don’t know how it happened, but we started talking from there. Surprisingly, I didn’t lash out or call her a bitch, but I think I was way too tired to pick a fight with the very thing that got me shot in the first place. I was considering quitting being the scum of society after the whole ‘nearly shot in the balls’ fiasco, so I just played along with whatever.
And from there, she visited me daily. Always at dinner time, and always with the weirdest outfits ever. Not that I was to judge since I was always in a hospital gown, but she was an oddball. Still is.
I didn’t tell her about my line of work of course, and Lettie didn’t tell me too much about herself, either. She said she lived in the hospital and that her dad “isn’t even really her dad.” I still don’t know what to make of everything she’s told me, but her company was nice. Not because she was the only one who ever visited me, but because she’s genuinely nice to talk to.
She’s got a deathly fear of dark chocolate, and her music taste is kind of shitty, but aside from that, I couldn’t find any other flaws. And with me looking forward to her daily visits, time flew by quickly. It was Christmas before I knew it, then New Year’s, then Valentine’s. I was discharged the day after Valentine’s, and despite me promising myself that I would quit being a horrible person…
I didn’t.
Was my bond with Lettie all for nothing when I suddenly decided to kidnap her and use her as a bargaining chip in case the fucker who shot me decided to come for me again? No.
I liked Lettie. I still do. But not in the way people would probably expect.
I only sell these girls. I don’t touch them. I don’t feel anything for them. Hell, I normally don’t even speak more than a few words to them. Lettie was an exception. She was the first teen girl I actually got to talk to, and that’s not counting the times when I myself was a teenager.
But I separated logic from emotions. Feeling sympathy never does a monster like me any good, so I sucked it up and kidnapped her. To make things a bit ‘better,’ I even promised to give her the best room and feed her the best food. I’d even let her blast whatever emo songs she wanted to, so long as she cooperated.
Look, her dad didn’t give a shit about her. She was practically neglected, and she didn’t even have a mum. No friends, either. Girls like her are the easiest to kidnap, so that’s why I did it.
“I’ll take you to the mall” was what I said to her on the day I kidnapped her. She squealed and quickly followed me out of the hospital, though her feet started to hurt when she stepped on the asphalt and I had to carry her on my back.
“What’s the mall like? Are there people? Can I have some food?” she rambled on and on with her questions, and I did my best to answer her as I buckled her in and put the chloroform on her nose.
Hours later, Lettie woke up and…was pretty frightened.
I knew it was coming. I knew the screaming, crying, fighting against the restraints would come. I didn’t undress her because I felt like I owed her that much, but I still let her sob and shout until she almost lost her voice and had red welts forming on her wrists and ankles.
It was cruel, I know. It hurt me just a tiny bit to see her like that, but I promised her that I would move her to a better room if everything went well.
AKA, if that gun-wielding fucker wasn’t going to come back and bother me again.
And as much as I hoped he wouldn’t, he did. He fucking showed up, fully expectant of a new girl.
“Lettie, listen to me. Listen to me, okay? Shh, don’t cry. Don’t cry. I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry, I really am, but you have to listen to me. Can you do that?” I tried my best to console her before she would bite the gun-loving bastard’s dick off, but she was hysterical.
“I want to go home! I want to go home, let me go home! I hate you, I hate you, I hate you! Why are you doing this to me?” she cried and cried, and she was shaking so badly I was almost scared she’d break.
“Lettie, this is your home now. I’ll take good care of you, okay? Just do this one thing for me, and everything’s going to be okay.”
She didn’t calm down, of course. She kept hissing and fighting against the ropes. I asked the bastard if he was okay with me drugging Lettie up or sedating her before use, but he liked his girls fully conscious.
So I apologised to Lettie as best as I could. I never did this with all the other girls, but I just had to do it for her. I wouldn’t exactly say we formed a bond in the time I was in the hospital, but I saw her as…
What did I see her as? I think that, maybe, if things weren’t the way they are, maybe I’d see her as a daughter figure. Maybe in another life, I’d kidnap her for a different reason. I’d kidnap her because she was being mistreated at the hospital, and I’d kidnap her to give her a good life, a good education, and I’d take her to the mall like she wanted.
But that’s not how things went in this lifetime. In reality, what I did was something that still haunts me to this day. I gagged Lettie while I kept apologising, and I let the bastard into the room in hopes that he’d finally leave me alone.
It was the first time I genuinely felt sick to my stomach. I didn’t even want to hear what was going on inside, so I went outside and waited for him to finish. The only condition was that he wasn’t allowed to maim or kill Lettie, so I hoped to god that he kept his word.
And he did.
Lettie, however, turned the tables and broke that rule towards the bastard.
“Thanks for the meal,” was what she said when she stepped outside onto the porch, a smile on her face and her naked body drenched in blood. Tatters of her clothes hung to her skin with the dried blood as glue, and she hummed some shitty song as she took a seat on the wooden chair, slumping down before standing back up again.
“I don’t like this chair. I don’t like wooden furniture. You should put a pillow over the seat, or maybe get a new chair altogether. What do you think?” she asked nonchalantly.
As if she didn’t have a loose optical nerve dangling off her earlobe like some weird earring.
“Hellooooo? Earth to ******?” Lettie waved her hand in front of my face, and all I could do was just stand and stare.
What the fuck just happened? Was all that was running through my mind.
“Lettie,” I started, surprised I even found my voice, “what happened?”
She tilted her head to the side, and shrugged. “What do you mean? You literally kidnapped me and kinda pissed me off, but you gave me some food, so it’s a-okay now. What, did you think I’m still mad at you?” she giggled.
I shook my head slowly. “What did you do?”
She frowned. “I…ate? You gave me food, and I guess maybe I shouldn’t have told you that I’m easily bribed with food, but yeah, I just had a nice meal. Why are you so confused?”
“Did you just eat that man?”
“You…gave him to me. When my dad feeds me, he does exactly what you did. Puts the food in the same room as me, and lets me eat. What’s wrong, ******?”
At that moment, I didn’t know what the fuck to do. The more I stared at Lettie with her bloody face and even bloodier lips, I felt like I was going mad. I felt like I was in hell and finally repenting for all my sins. I didn’t understand what was going on, but also started to piece things together at the same time.
And I knew from the moment that Lettie let me see her finished meal, with not even a bone left on the floor, that she just wasn’t right. She wasn’t human.
I was scared of Lettie after that. I threw up right on the spot, and she cleaned the vomit and blood off of the walls and floors. I taught her how to use the showers as quickly as possible so that the horrible stench of human flesh and blood would be gone, and after she was clean, I gave her one of my shirts to wear.
I didn’t know what to do with her after that. I went on the internet and started poking around to try and grab a sense of what had just happened. I guess it’s normal human nature to want to make the unknown less unknown and more known, because I spent the next several hours sifting through sketchy sites all in desperation for answers.
Lettie wasn’t very happy about that.
“I’m sorry if I wasn’t supposed to eat that food…you didn’t tell me I couldn’t, though,” she frowned as she sat on the edge of my bed, timidly looking at my computer screen and quickly looking away whenever I turned around.
“That wasn’t supposed to be food,” I said.
“Then…what?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t tell her the truth, and I just didn’t know what to say. It was so unnerving to have her drill holes into the back of my head with her eyes, but she didn’t seem angry at me, and neither did she have an idea of what had almost happened to her. What could have happened to her.
What would have happened if she wasn’t what she was.
And I didn’t hear her move, but eventually, Lettie stood up and wrapped her arms around me.
“I’m sorry,” she sniffled into my shoulder. “I’m sorry, I was just really hungry. I thought…I thought you knew, but I don’t think dad told you. I’m sorry, ******.”
I put my hand on top of hers, and sighed. “No, Lettie, I’m the one who should be sorry.”
She lifted her face up, and snorted as she nudged me. “Pfft, of course you should. You put that weird smelling thing on me to make me sleep! It smelled really bad, you lifetime jerk.”
It was a relief to know she was still her eccentric self. But still, I had to ask…
“Lettie, what are you?”
She stilled, and blinked a few times. She furrowed her brows and frowned deeply, the gears turning in her mind before she eventually shook her head. “Dad says I’m a girl. I’m a little different, yeah, but I’m just a girl. I know my diet’s kinda weird, but maybe it’s not that big of a deal since you’re not mad at me,” she smiled as she walked around the chair and planted herself on my lap. “What do you think I am, ******?”
I didn’t know. I still don’t know. She looked and talked and acted like a girl, yes, but she wasn’t a girl. No girl could eat an entire human as well as its bones in less than ten minutes, and no girl lived in hospitals with a mysterious father.
But Lettie…all I could do was pat her head and say, “you’re a perfect girl, Lettie.”
And I didn’t know it at the time, but she turned out to be the perfect girl in just a few months.
To make a long story short, I released all the other girls under my ownership and fired all those who worked for me. Those who did the kidnapping, evidence erasing, money management, etc. I turned the business into a two-man army, and it was just Lettie and I.
I did the bare minimum and made sure the girls made it safely to help centres, but I couldn’t stick around after that for my own safety, and soon, I went from trafficker to a hitman’s manager.
Like the word ‘monster’, ‘hitman’ is probably the wrong word to use when referring to Lettie, but I really don’t know what else to call her job. And honestly, it’s not even a job for her.
Maybe she sounds demonic, but just think of her as a really high-maintenance pet. Her food’s really expensive, and I can’t just dump her back where I found her. She’s still human. Well, she has human emotions, as far as I can tell. I’m still unsure if she even has a human conscience or morals of her own, but she seems perfectly content with her daily tasks of gobbling away her targets.
Or rather, my targets.
I still have connections with my ‘clients’ in my previous job, and if they want anyone dead, they can simply give me some info, pay me half the promised amount, and pay me in full once I’ve fed Lettie some food.
Now, the reason why I know she’s not human but I’m not entirely sure how to describe her is because she never allows me to see her eat.
Once I guide her to where the target is and tell her she’s allowed to eat it, she always, always insists on looking away.
“It’s for your own good, ******,” she smiled as she petted my head in the very same way I usually do. “It’s kind of rude to stare when a girl’s having her meal, you know? So don’t think too much about it, just let me grab my snack!”
And I comply. All I can imagine is that she probably undergoes some kind of transformation of some sort whenever she eats, because when she’s done with her meal, she’s always stark naked and for this reason, I always have to have three spare shirts on my person at all times.
I didn’t want to think about the sounds of sharp canines digging into flesh whenever she bites down. I didn’t want to think about the sounds of crushed bones and kneaded brains whenever something heavy stomps on them. It’s not a human foot, and I know it. I still didn’t know what it was, and I thought that perhaps I’d never know, because I promised Lettie that I’d never look.
But as much as I’d like to say that I was satisfied with the life I was having with her and with the easy illegal cash that was flowing from all directions, a part of me always knew that life wasn’t always going to be like this.
Because one day, I noticed a strange man loitering around the house. At first it was just for an hour at most, but then he started standing around almost every day, and even walking around in circles. Around the backyard, and trying to peer through the windows.
I had a suspicion of who it was.
“Who’s your dad?” I asked her one time.
“I don’t know, but he always uses a boring old white coat. It’s like he even sleeps in that thing!”
I was about to ask her more, but then the doorbell rang. Lettie knew the rules, so she hid herself in the basement as I answered the door. It was the man, or rather, her dad.
“Good evening, Mr. ******. I’m one of the doctors from the ********* hospital, and on Dr. Jeremy’s request, I’ve come here to check on how your wounds are doing. It seems you were discharged several months ago, but you haven’t come by for another checkup. Is everything alright?”
Now, I really had never seen Lettie’s dad up until now. He looked nothing like her, but I guess that was expected. This was also obviously not normal hospital procedure, so I tried to get him off my property.
“Good evening, doctor. I’m doing well, and I really appreciate your concern. Everything’s alright, and Dr. Jeremy’s done a stellar job at aiding me to health. Is there anything you need, though?”
He raised a brow. “Need? Oh, no. I’m simply here to check on you is all. Maybe some small talk, too. Life at the hospital is quite boring, as you can see,” he laughed dryly.
“I see.” Lettie would know how dreadfully boring it was to the point she even talked to me everyday.
“But aside from that, Mr. ******, how have you been? Met a special girl yet?”
Yes, I did.
“No, not really. Why the strange question?”
The look he gave me was clear as day that he didn’t believe me.
“Ah, don’t bother with it. Now, I truly hope that I don’t come off as rude, but something’s been stolen from the hospital around the time you were discharged,” he quickly put his hands up as if trying to show he was friendly, “that’s not to say I’m accusing you of anything, Mr. ******, but do you happen to know anything about said events?”
I’ll admit I was scared. It was summer, and I was sweating bullets. If Lettie’s dad was a psychologist who studied microexpressions, he might have easily been able to tell I was lying. I knew he wasn’t a normal doctor at all, and I still don’t think he’s a doctor. Like Lettie, maybe I’ll never know who he truly is, but that’s not the point. At that moment, I simply let out a chuckle and shook my head.
“What? Take something from the hospital? Aside from some free pudding, no, I’m sure I didn’t accidentally take anything of importance,” I pat him on the shoulder. “Sorry I can’t help you with this, but if there’s anything else you need, you can just tell Dr. Jeremy to shoot me an e-mail.”
He grabbed my arm, and hard. His previously friendly expression turned to a cold stare, almost soulless, and his grip was iron and unmoving as my eyes widened and I tried to pull away in panic.
“Mr. ******, I’m afraid to say that CCTV footage has been found of you taking said ‘thing of importance’ out of the hospital. I’d really like for you to comply, because everything you say or do can now be used against you. Kidnapping and trafficking is a serious crime, isn’t it?”
And so is murdering. I’m a man of many sins, and one day I promise to repent. On that day, I promised to repent, too. In my mind I saw myself going to church and asking God for forgiveness. As a child I always went to church, and for old time’s sake, while mixed with the underwhelming fear bubbling up inside me, I told myself that before I died, I would make Lettie happy and pray for forgiveness to whatever god would be willing to listen to the pleas of a monstrous sinner.
But to make all that happen, I knew I had to survive the current ordeal first.
And that’s why I used all the strength I had in my vacant hand to strike Lettie’s dad in the face. His grip slackened, and once it did, I grabbed the goddamned gun that once belonged to the fucker who shot me and tried to shoot him. I forgot I had emptied its bullets out, and for a moment, it cost me when Lettie’s dad shot right up and striked me on my cheek, too. A tooth fell out and I began coughing up some blood, but I got on my feet and used the gun’s handle as a weapon to bludgeon him right in the face.
Full of adrenaline, I kept hitting him until his nose was crooked and his left eyeball was almost popping out of its socket. He didn’t give up, though, because he managed to knock the gun out of my hand to grab me by my collar and hit my head against the doorframe. The world began to spin as blood was running down my face and I knew I needed stitches, but I didn’t give up. I kept trying to fight him with all I had.
That’s not to say the match was entertaining in the least. We were both men who probably never exercised after the last PE class we had in high school, and both of us were struggling to win against the other in a talentless, messy fight. He was aiming to kill me, while I was aiming to disfigure his face. That was all I had to do. Just make him look unrecognisable. I didn’t have to kill him, I just had to do this the easy way.
Because…
“Lettie, food’s here!”
The alien sounds of something stomping and rumbling through the basement stairs was enough to make me feel safe, and as soon as I heard the door burst open, I rolled into a corner and closed my eyes as tightly as I could, all while I heard Lettie ravage her meal in full. I was shaking in both fear and pain, and adrenaline was still pounding through my veins as I was close to hyperventilating.
Because for a split-second, I saw Lettie. I truly saw her. I saw Lettie.
And I still don’t know what she is.
“******?”
Her soft voice startled me, and I recoiled when I felt her touch me. She gasped, and when I opened my eyes out of instinct and saw her pained expression, I quickly relaxed.
She was human. She looked human.
“Lettie,” I reached out to her, pulling her in for a hug. She didn’t hug me back.
“You saw,” she said.
“…I did.”
She pushed me away, and I felt her hands tremble in mine.
“Do you…”
“I don’t hate you,” I laughed. “Fuck, Lettie, you just…you just saved me.”
“I think you’re hurt…”
No shit. I was bleeding everywhere.
“I’m fine, Lettie. Look, let’s…let’s go somewhere, okay? We can even go to a mall. I’ll go pack my bags now. You just go shower, okay?” I went to pat her head, but she slapped my hand away.
“*****,” she said my name, a serious expression on her face. “You know you should have called me earlier, right? Look what you did, you big bumbling fool. You’re hurt and now I have to take care of you.”
“Look, I appreciate the concern, but we have to get moving now. There are bad people looking for you, and you just ate one of them–”
“I know I ate dad.”
I froze. I waited for her reaction. Was she secretly angry? Was she going to kill me now? I think that I felt strangely at peace at the notion of being eaten by her, now that I think about it. I wanted salvation, but I think I would also find it by having Lettie end my life. After all, I nearly ‘killed’ her.
But she didn’t hate me, and I didn’t hate her.
“Cat got your tongue? Pfft, you insufferable sea slug. I don’t care that I ate him. He hurt you, so it’s fine,” she smiled. “And besides, you saved me from the hospital. You’re a good man, *****.”
It’s still ironic how Lettie saw me as a good man, because I wasn’t, and even if I try to be one now, it still won’t erase every bad thing I’ve ever done.
But she was the first person– first soul(?) to ever call me good. I knew I could make some changes. Maybe I’d still go to hell. Maybe there was no escaping my past, but even if I’m still doomed to punishment, I still had Lettie to think about. The first thing that ever saw me as good.
I broke down for the first time in years, all because of her words. I cried and cried, and Lettie hugged me. She didn’t understand why I was crying, but she held me through it all. She didn’t and still doesn’t know how she was hurt by a bad man, only to be saved by another bad man.
But she’s the perfect girl, after all.
I packed as many things as I could, and fled town with Lettie posing as my daughter. It was a little difficult considering how different she looks from me, but there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her. I’ve even found myself a normal job to support the two of us. I take her to the mall every Saturday, and every Sunday I bring her to church with me. She falls asleep sometimes, but I think there’s nothing she wouldn’t do for me, either.
And now, she’s even asleep on my lap. Thirty treats in one go is a little too much for her, so she’s a little too full right now.
But I wouldn’t have it any other way. When she wakes up I’ll take her to the mall, and I’ll let her buy that band shirt she likes so much.
I, a monster, might have kidnapped another monster, but Lettie’s still a perfect girl.