I was up for adoption as soon as I was a baby. I don’t know who my mother and father are, but if there’s one thing I believe, it’s that they are pure evil. They have to die, they have to be killed, their bodies have to be burned, their throats have to be cut, they have to be displayed for the world to see. And I, who have their unholy blood, must die similarly.
Wilhelmina Dooley, whose name Wilhelmina means ‘protector’.
The meaning of the name is ‘protector.’
A woman with an iron fist, a vicious tongue, a belief in supremacy, a woman who hits, kicks, and throws us.
The woman who makes boys and girls bleed for the slightest mistake.
A woman smashes people’s heads with a vase, drops them downstairs, throws them into a field of thorns, and breaks their bones.
The meaning of the name is ‘protector.’
Hahaha.
Fuck you.
Koreans believe in “past lives” - that we are the reincarnation of a spirit being and that the essence of that spirit parasitizes another body, ours, to live a second life.
If karma exists, then my previous life was probably as a violent criminal.
The fact that she named the orphanage the ‘house of light’ was a salt poured into an open wound.
—
I don’t know when I started to feel that I was being ‘abused.’ Wilhelmina taught us math, English, and the basics, but when she taught us the concept of good and evil, she didn’t teach us anything about ‘evil.’ We learned that stealing is wrong, lying is bad, and that kind of morality, but we didn’t realize that our teacher was bad.
But it’s a different story when the orphans are the ones who came to the society in the first place, and they know, they know that our good saint is a very violent abuser. Then the children spread the rumors about us, and now everyone knows Miss Wilhelmina is evil.
She is a tyrant among tyrants, a fire-breathing dragon… No, why should I give such a human being such a fancy title, ‘whore’, ‘bitch’, ‘cunt’, ‘madwoman’ is suitable for her, and you know why? Because she tortures the hell out of people who say those things to her. Because of her, the people I admire most when I read biographies of great people are the leaders of resistance, like Gandhi. I admire Mahatma Gandhi, who fought and defeated the British with non-violence. Although I’m just a helpless pest.
All I can do in this orphanage now is wait. for me to escape the cages of this orphanage with my brother.
Did I tell you about my brother? He is a dim child, His Name’s Jason. He has been in hiding since the day he saw Wilhelmina. The only time I see him is at mealtime. In the classroom, on the playground, in the bedroom, everywhere her violent hand touches, he is invisible.
I want to hide in the crowd like him, I often do avoid punishment, but on the days of collective torture, I take it unconditionally, and I don’t know why I deserve it. And that causes me to curse my existence so much, but my brother doesn’t seem to. So I live.
I can take a knife and stab myself in the neck or hang myself if I wish, but I will live in the presence of a tyrant, for one day, my brother and I will escape to a place that shall not know the name of this place. I will flee to a place where I can forget hell.
Some of the people who had learned the nature of this place eventually sued the orphanage, alleging abuse. Still, Wilhelmina, who has a lot of money, won the case and kept the orphanage open, making all the money people had raised for the lawsuit irrelevant. To be exact, the entire lawsuit thing was basically a slap on the wrist if we compare it to Wilhelmina’s Wealth.
The residents gather to sue her once more, but the head of the civilian alliance takes the money and uses it for her own self-interest, never harming Wilhelmina. And because the civilians did not have enough information and people to gather money for the lawsuit, Wilhelmina kept control of the orphanage with an iron fist.
While cops sometimes came, their incompetence only added fuel to the fire we call Wilhelmina; her stress from encountering the cops made the rest of the way worse than we expected. Every day, we were heading towards hell, and every night, many of us prayed that tomorrow Wilhelmina would be gone, or in some cases, prayed to our own imaginary god of death to drag them out of this world as soon as possible.
One day, we saw multiple people joining Wilhelmina’s orphanage, which I believed at first meant more demons to face, but this was where I felt things would go uphill. Many new teachers were kind; some were strict but not outright abusive. Every day, they would treat us with kindness, so we could finally catch some breath.
‘Be a positive influence,’ they said.
It was because of their excellent influences that Wilhelmina suddenly seemed human, and so she was, and so she was good to us, and so we began to see the orphans living with happy days.
The best thing was the “fun day,” the days when there was no studying, when the teachers prepared food and gave us free time from nine o’clock until ten o’clock at night, when it was time to go to bed, usually on Fridays,
After three weeks of living like that, one night, one of the orphans came to the bedroom, sweating bullets. After seeing her grab water in a hurry, I approached her to ask what made her panic like this. I thought maybe Wilhelmina had done something to frighten her, but it was the other way around. What the orphan said scared us all.
She was walking right in the back garden, and as she was picking roses, she saw something white buried in the dirt. Believing it to be manure, she ignored it, but as soon as she grabbed the rose, the soil movement revealed the object: it was not manure.
But white, crusty, and decaying human bone.
The rumor spread quickly, sowing the seeds of doubt in our minds, and when the eyewitness gave us one more piece of information, we plunged into deeper terror: the bones still had fingers on them, for obvious reasons, because they had flesh attached to them.
In short, if the owner of the finger was dead, he had been killed recently, hours, perhaps minutes, before she found it.
Now, the question was not how the finger’s owner died but who did it. And to find out, we each asked each other who we suspected, and there was only one conclusion: one of the teachers.
In an atmosphere of fear, we were having a ‘fun day,’ and my brother asked me to make a bet with his friends while we were eating. A bet to go straight to the basement.
The basement… I knew it; it was one of the forbidden areas. I don’t know why, but it’s rumored a lot. The common myth is that it’s where they stuff garbage; the horrible version is that there’s a body buried there; either way, it’s a terrible answer, but it just so happened that my curious and imaginative younger brother heard it.
In keeping with this mood, there were many scary stories associated with the basement, such as an orphan who disappeared while exploring it, or that there was a place where people fell to their deaths, and the icing on the cake of this insanity we call theories was that the basement was inhabited by man-eating demons.
Oh god, why did it have to be ‘man-eating’ demons? Everyone was convinced that the owner of the finger that was found in the garden had probably been eaten by the monster, or whatever clown was hiding in the shadows of the basement, and probably have been eating more children if it was immortal, so if those rumors were true, we were probably living with a monster or possibly an eldritch abomination.
Curiosity is tempting, and curiosity has brought the four orphans together, and tonight, we will travel to that cellar. Two of the four were Jason, who suddenly changed from being a timid, dim boy to a man with great enthusiasm, and I, who went to protect him as an older brother.
That afternoon, we packed as many supplies as we could; canned goods and clothes were taken from the kitchen and closet, respectively, and there was enough to fill a backpack, which I, the strongest of the group, decided to lift the bag. The sun was setting by the time we were ready to get to the basement, and as we had our supper, we were planning the things we might do in an emergency.
If the demon was actually in the orphanage, we should first signal each other to get out; one abnormality meant danger and a sign for us to leave; safety comes first, we all agreed.
We began our journey that evening, sneaking out after everyone had gone to bed and heading to the basement with the supplies we hid behind our lockers. Seeing no teacher patrolling outside, I gestured for the group to come over. Running down the hallway, all that was left was the stairs to the basement, and as we approached them, we were surprised to see the door to the basement open.
Someone had gotten in, there’s no doubt.
We got into formation to enter the basement, Jasoninn in the front, three boys in the middle, and Meinn at the back. Jason quietly walked down and immediately gestured for us to get behind the basement door as silently as possible.
We started to hear something, we didn’t know what, but after a while, we heard it clearly, the screams of a person, the devil had probably already gotten his victim. I must not have been the only one who had that thought because, without a moment’s hesitation, Jason went into the basement.
When we opened the door, we were surprised to find a vast space behind a small door. Big doesn’t begin to describe it; the basement was probably several times bigger than the orphanage where we live. When I shone my flashlight into the basement, I saw blood on the ground and a large amount of orphanage clothes lying around.
Jason was at the edge of the room, looking through a small door and frozen in place. We approached Jason to see what was inside the door. What we saw was evil.
There were rooms with multiple hooks, blood on the walls, bones strewn across the floor, and more as I opened the door. There were more hooks, and on one of them hung the girl who found the bones in the garden, her stomach split open.
On the floor was a cage; condiments like sugar and salt were on top. Next to it were frying pans and tongs, a fridge with a rotten smell, and inside the trash can was meat… There was flesh, the same flesh we found on the bones.
The devil was based here, probably luring orphans to eat them, and I was disgusted at the thought of such a vile creature.
As I turned to leave, I saw a demon standing at the door, a demon in human form, in the form of a teacher, in the form of a master, the one whose name was written before the name of the building, ‘House of Light,’ the name of the one who made it impossible for this house to be a house of light.
“You humans seek only destruction and pain.”
A beautiful yet haunting voice spoke to us. We stood still in horror under her charm.
“What hope is there for humanity? They are impulsive… They have no idea on what is right and wrong and would continue to go on with their lives.”
The woman grabbed the cleaver that was hung on the doorknob. We were staring at her still with dreadfulness.
“Then why should you, the offspring of such fools, the offspring of men, remain in this world, when you are destructive?”
I was terrified, horrified, and appalled. The woman with the big knife was coming at us, and only I, the one with the weaker sense of fear, was walking backward.
“You humans are cursed, worse than beasts, and if you call me a beast… for that you should be grateful. The beast feeds on that which is less than itself.”
I was thinking, what the hell is going on? Do the other kids know, do they know, are we going to die here?
What is this thing I see in front of me?
What is this?
My thoughts stopped as soon as the blood splashed on me. One of the orphans had been stabbed to death. Then someone shouted at us to ‘run,’ and we started running outside, in the basement; the door to get out of this hell was right in front of us. One of the terrified orphans pushed me and threw the door open hard, and suddenly, fire burst out of it, and the flames engulfed him.
Outside, the orphanage is burning.
The paintings in the orphanage were blackened darkly without a trace, the heat of the flames left marks on the windows, and, most frighteningly, there was no sound. Not a scream, not a whimper, not a single cry. The orphans were gone with the flames. Wilhelmina brought her true home, hell, to the orphanage. The orphans of our house of light had been dragged there. Not a single cry could be heard in this hell before me.
I heard a sound right behind me, a groan. I turned around, and there stood Wilhelmina, a fraction of a second before she struck my brother with the knife. Her face looked at me with pure madness, anger, joy, all kinds of things.
For some reason, I finally realized where Wilhelmina’s Wealth came from and why she started this orphanage. There was no good intention of cleaning the filthy people from this world. Her skill and experience showed everything. Wilhelmina was an orphanage owner. This may not be the first time, but with an unstoppable reputation only by money, all she needed was enough money to continue on her endless rampage for power.
Insurance.
As soon as my brother was stabbed, the light that was flashing in the flames vanished with it.
—
I don’t know what happened after that day.
A man saw me walking on the highway, bleeding from my hands, and immediately realized that I was a child who had escaped from an orphanage, and he pulled me into his car.
After living in his house for a few days, my consciousness became apparent, and I went to the orphanage the day I became fully conscious.
The orphanage was reduced to ashes. Only a bunch of bouquets of flowers lay in front of it.
A few weeks later, I read about an incident at Wilhelmina’s orphanage in the newspaper. I was the only one who had survived.
Two hundred were missing, and seventy were dead. Wilhelmina was found on a nearby creek with her head decapitated, and My brother’s name was part of the list of missing people.
After the incident, I, the last survivor, am living a quiet life, and the only thing that has changed in my life is that I am a younger brother, I have a new name, and my family, no, adults, are friendly to me.
I have yet to find out if Jason is alive or dead.
But I believe it is the latter.