If you ever find yourself driving down an old deserted road, where there’s more dust than civilization and you come across a Welcome Sign that reads :
Welcome to Heretic, Population 6584.
Than do not enter it at any cost. This is my small town and I’m the Mayor here. For the most part life is simple in Heretic, we’re a farming community that grows everything we eat. We’ve done away with electricity and cars (not because we wanted to but because we had too) and instead we’ve built playgrounds on every street.
Heretic was established in the 1920s, when a few people decided that they wanted to make a new life for themselves. Those people are irrelevant, However what is relevant is that they found a piece of land that could be farmed and built four farms that all grew different vegetables or farmed different animals. Each farmer had a trade agreement with the other, which means that they almost never had to leave their farms and would get whatever they wanted from their neighbors. All the rest were sold to nearby towns and communities.
Soon a gas station, a hotel and a bunch of other amenities popped up around the farms, because of the large amounts of people who would come to buy things, and over time Heretic was populated.
By the 1950s, the Town had reached a population of over six thousand and that was when the welcome sign was put up. That was the last sign of real development that ever touched Heretic, from their every thing went down hill and its all because of what one man did.
James Steeden had moved to Heretic a year before six year old Kayla Lamsley died, to work as a delivery driver for one of the farms. While there is no written history about the events that followed her death, people do talk about it quite loudly in the streets.
They say that their parents always knew that James was a bad man or that when they were younger their parents had asked them to stay away from him because he would do bad things to them. Daily you would hear more than a few people remark that James should be ashamed of himself for what he did to little Kayla Lamsley and that that poor little Child was completely innocent in everything that happened.
There was a time when I used to believe these stories, However as I grew up I realized it was mostly bullshit. James wasn’t some kind of monster, in fact he was completely innocent, as innocent as Kayla had been on that day. No one could have predicted what would happen. However that’s not something you can say out loud.
On December 24th 1951, the day before Christmas, a snow storm had hit Heretic. As far as we know (but don’t speak about) Kayla had been excited to open presents the next day, so excited that she begged her parents to let her open one early. Even though they protested at first they eventually relented and let her do so.
Kayla immediately went for the largest present and tore it open to reveal a new sled. Dressing up in her warmest clothes she took the sled up a hill beside her house and climbed all the way up. Their she mounted it and than slid down, sadly she underestimated how powerful it was and couldn’t stop herself as she made her way into the middle of the street.
At around the same time, James had picked up a delivery and was driving down that very street. Because of how the chain of events occured, I assume that when he saw Kayla in the middle of the street he tried to swerve and stop. Unfortunately because of the snow, the tar was sleet, and the van slid sideways hitting Kayla.
Barely awake, both James and Kayla’s parents loaded the little girl in the van and rushed her to the local hospital. When she arrived doctors remarked that she was in bad condition and even though they did everything they could, she wouldn’t make it through the night.
That night Kayla’s parents sat by her side and begged her to stay with them, however a few minutes passed midnight, she died.
Kayla was an innocent child and James was an innocent man, she never intended to put herself in that situation and he never intended to hurt her. That was made clear when the police questioned him and than let him go, Kayla’s death was a tragic accident and it should have been forever remembered that she went too soon.
Sadly for us, she never left.
The next morning James was found dead in his small apartment, the word “Bad” was found written in crayon on his walls. Naturally the police questioned Kayla’s parents about the situation, they kept them at the police station for a few hours, fully intending to let them go as soon as they had all the information they needed. However they wouldn’t get the chance.
Kayla’s parents were found traumatized in the middle of the station, with the bodies of dead officers all around them. Amongst the free flowing blood and massacre, words in crayon were once again found.
“Leave mommy and daddy alone”
After the massacre, anyone who tried to flee our town also suffered the same fate and it became common knowledge that Kayla was still around, doing things to people.
People had started reporting seeing the child at night playing in the streets. She wasn’t injured or covered in blood, she wasn’t even angry or malicious, instead she smiled and waved at people and laughed with joy.
At the time I was a young child and during one of my first days of School I had an encounter with the true power that Kayla had.
Seemingly out of nowhere, in the middle of class, our teacher had started convulsing. She screamed and was thrown around the room, before lying on the floor and jerking once before she stopped moving forever.
On the wall of the classroom, and every other classroom with a dead teacher lying on the floor, were words written in crayon.
“No School”.
The messages were received, Kayla made the rules. However those rules weren’t malicious in anyway (except obviously for the dead People) instead those rules were the deepest desires of a child.
So whenever the words “More toys” were written on the streets in crayon, people had started to leave toys outside their homes as an offering to the child. Whenever the words “ice cream” was found written on the streets, people had left ice cream outside their homes and whenever the words “more playgrounds” were on the streets, we built a playground on every street.
Our town remained isolated from the outside world and we couldn’t leave, being in such a deserted place not a lot of people tried to enter. Thank God for that because the people who tried to enter were found broken and dead with the words “Stranger Danger” written in crayon on the roads.
Kayla is a just a child, even now decades later she’s just a child. However she’s a spoilt child, who may throw a tantrum if she doesn’t get what she wants.