For safety reasons, I won’t disclose any names, all the people you’ll read about will be using pseudonyms. I feel propelled to write down what I’ve seen happen at my school in the past semester, because I want to see if any of you can make sense of it. This event has caused significant turbulence in my school, and as far as I know, it started in my school’s literary magazine afternoon activity.
Like any other prestige private high schools in America, our school has a lot of unnecessary activities that we’re forced to attend, afternoon activities being one of them. It works quite similar to public schools’ clubs except you’d have to stay there from 3:30 to 5. And since I was known to be the “lit nerd”, I thought I’d do good joining Patches, the literary magazine activity.
For the past two years, Patches has always been my winter semester activity, I had made myself comfortable being an editor there, judging works submitted by other students, sometimes even staffs’ writings as well. And in my second year, Stella joined us.
I didn’t know Stella personally before she joined as an editor, I recognized her, but I’ve never had a single class with her. However, I did have a few of my friends tell me that she was a weirdo, so you could say that her first impression on me was not the best.
Just like me, she quickly got used to our daily routine. We didn’t have a huge workload, submissions would come in occasionally, I’d usually make jokes on how bad they are, and she and the others would laugh along with me, sometimes even adding their own jokes.
This gig of us went on for a few weeks, until we entered November. One day Mr. Rogers broke to us that we our magazine was thinner than planned and was concerned that we might not have enough stories to make Patches thick enough to join state-level contests.
“If other students aren’t motivated enough to write, at least the staffs should submit their works.” He sighed.
“I want to submit something.” Stella said in a hurried manner while glancing at us nervously. “But I’m just scared that none of my work is good enough. Like every time I think something is good and I submit it, it turns out to be trash.”
I have submitted my works multiple times now and have received positive feedbacks on most of them, so I thought this would be a great time to encourage the others to participate more.
“Well, if you never submit anything you wouldn’t know, at least there will be a debate on its quality. It will be constructive criticism, so you can always learn from it.”
She smiled a little hearing that, and I patted myself on the back.
It seemed like my encouragement was successful as after a few days Stella submitted her first horror story. It was about a high school girl developing a long-term crush on a popular guy but was eventually rejected by him. So she chose to hang herself and became a ghost that haunts the school.
All authors submit their works anonymously, but I immediately knew the author was Stella when I skimped through first page, since for the past few months she kept talking about how hot this Steve guy at our school is.
“This is such a thing Stella would write!” I turned to see her reaction.
“I don’t know, maybe I did… Maybe I didn’t.” She gave me a playful smile and shrugged.
“You totally did!” I stared into her eyes as I laughed. “Aww, you got rejected by Steve, aww. How sad.” She seemed to tense up slightly, her eyes began to shift in all directions, refusing to make contact with me.
“I didn’t write it.”
“Aww, poor Stella, awwww.”
She didn’t respond, going quiet and looking down instead to avoid my gaze. I thought I pushed a little too far, so I broke the conversation and began judging the work. “Anyway, Mr. Rogers. I’m ready to share my thoughts on it… I don’t like it, it’s just a very lengthy rant on her getting rejected by that dude, and I hates the ending as well, it’s so cliché, oh you turned into a ghost, great job, bravo.”
“Also,” I continued, flipping the pages rapidly, “I don’t like how the ending just cuts off, like it doe—–”
“I’ll do better next time. I’ll make something you’d enjoy.”
I jumped a little when Stella suddenly entered my peripheral vision, cutting me off, staring at me dead in the eyes with a toothy grin on her face. It spooked me a little to see that her eyes weren’t smiling.
“Okay… Show me.” I shrugged. Then she rose and left the room. Mr. Rogers chased after her, asking if she’s alright, but she said nothing and continued walking. I didn’t want to admit it, but at that moment I felt a little guilty, because usually Stella was someone loud and obnoxious, and would rather engage in a fight than walking away from it, and I blamed myself slightly for maybe teasing her too much.
The next day when I entered the classroom, Stella was already there alongside a few other editors, but unlike them, she kept to herself, only looking at the floor. I pretended that nothing had happened and asked her how’s it going. She didn’t respond. I asked again. She didn’t even look at me. I knew she was still mad, so I also ignored her as well. We all sat in silence for the better part of twenty minutes, until Mr. Rogers came in.
He told us there was a new submission, and I immediately knew it was Stella’s because it was another horror story. This one was much different than her previous one though. It was much shorter, no more than 200 words. It described a girl getting disfigured. No background, no dialogue, no story, just a general description on a girl being chopped to pieces.
I wanted to amend the awkward situation a little, especially considering she was still upset. So I complimented the piece.
“I like it, it’s pretty cool. I like the style.”
Still no response.
She remained quiet for that entire session; her head lowered looking at the floor. But we thought she just needed space, so we left her alone. However, we soon became much more concerned because her quietness continued after that day. She was never seen talking to anyone again. For two months, no one has ever saw her make any noises on any occasion. At first it was interesting to watch, as I’ve had other classmates tell me that she walked out of the classroom after the teacher scolded her for having a bad attitude by refusing to answer questions. But similar situations quickly got old, and we sort of forgot about her. She soon discovered a way to avoid publicly humiliating herself though, by simply not going to classes. From attending 4 classes per day to just attending 1 in the morning to skipping them all together. Her attendance rate plummeted. Teachers have tried to give her detentions, but she skipped those too. And when they reached out to her parents, they either didn’t answer their calls, or made up some half-hearted excuses and hang them up.
Of course, she skipped Patches’s afternoon activity too. However, the perplexing thing is, her works continued to come in. We never asked her about their contents, but we all knew she wrote them, because it was always the same story, the girl getting mutilated and butchered into pieces. Though I have to admit, she was indeed improving. Each time her story came in, either through email, or simply left on Mr. Roger’s table, it would get more elaborated, and much grimmer.
The first time, when none of us suspected anything, the piece was just a general description of a girl’s body found in the woods with her limbs missing, blood gushing out of the cut wounds.
The second time, the wounds have already started to rot, and maggots have begun feasting on the dead meat. Her stomach was now cut opened, someone has removed part of her organs, but left her intestines intact. There was still blood dripping from the open gash, and the foul smell has attracted more flies, which were buzzing in anticipation next to the corpse, some landing on her unfocused, cloudy eyes.
The third time, it was clear that a few days must’ve passed since she died, as the maggots have grown into swarms, squirming and surging through her stomach, a large chunk of them fallen onto the ground, twitching manically in search of food. Around her flies circled, looking for un-intruded areas to lay their eggs. Her large intestines, which were a sickly purple and heavily bloated, have now been pulled out, serving as a knock tying her thighs together.
The fourth time, she was scalped, her hairs were shaved off and carelessly shoved into her stomach, a sharp contrast of blackness against the white wave of maggots. One of her eyes was carved out, dangling from the empty, blackened socket, its veins hanging helplessly across her left cheek. Her body was then skewered onto a large wooden spike, standing on the ground below, with its long tip piercing out of her mouth. The most disgusting part is, in her own words, she described, “The way her body contorts, with her pale skin and her stuffed belly, makes her the perfect turkey, carved and shaved and ripe for the oven.”
The fifth time — she actually delivered the piece in person this time — we didn’t even read it. It was deemed too gruesome by Mr. Rogers for any student to handle. So instead, we burned it with a lighter and threw the blackened paper pieces into the trash. We stopped judging her works a long time ago.
The following day, Mr. Rogers presented the passable parts of Stella’s writings to the school heads, and soon enough I heard that they were considering expelling her. Reflecting upon her clearly unstable mental states however, they eventually decided to chat with her first. But when the supervisor went searching for her in her dorm room, she was nowhere to be found.
She has taken none of her belongings with her, and no one has seen her that day. The objects in her rooms were all left untouched after previous night’s check-in, almost as if she disappeared out of thin air. No one knew where she went… for five days that is.
At first, all dorm supervisors went out in search for her, I could see their flashlights in the woods through the night. No one was allowed to leave the campus and the principal arranged an assembly reassuring us not to worry and to continue on with our daily routine.
On the second day, a missing person report was filed, and polices were called to join the search. Volunteer groups had gathered up to glue posters on streetlamps, and messages were sent to the nearby towns, attempting to find anyone who might’ve seen her. No one had.
On the fifth day, the police department was searching desperately for anyone who might’ve had close connections with her, but to no avail. Parents were furious, and school was forced to shut down, so everyone, including me, went home.
That night, I was sitting in bed, getting ready to sleep when one of the faculty children called me. In the phone, he told me that his dad has found Stella’s body in a hidden spot in the woods near the campus, and that she was dismembered. His dad was working as a forensic before becoming the school’s biology teacher, and apparently has buckled under the pressure and told his family everything.
“He said that her entire stomach was cut opened, and someone has tied her up with her own intestines and pierced her on a stick! Her limbs must’ve been cut off on the first day, since the meat on the leg bones were almost clean. Some other people found her other organs with her hands and feet on the other side of the campus. It was so awful that he threw up when he saw the body and threw up again after we served him some of the leftover turkey from thanksgiving. Dude, it’s scary, who would’ve done this to her?”
I hang up after that, I didn’t know what to tell him.
The reason I am writing this whole experience down right now is because I am deeply disturbed. I think I’m haunted somehow. Because that night after the call, someone rang my doorbell, but when I opened the door, there was only a letter on the ground. Inside the letter was a photo of a girl, whose body was mutilated beyond recognition. And on the back of the photo, a sentenced was scribbled, blurry but readable, it says,
How do you like my new piece? I made it just for you.