The Beginning: Love is Hell-Chapter One

   Today, I get to post something I've been working on for the past few weeks, so I'll be putting up the first chapter of my new story Love is Hell: A Retelling of Beauty and the Beast. I tweaked a few things, but tell me what you think. PLEASE.

Love is Hell: A Retelling of Beauty and the Beast

Author’s Note

This story is entirely fiction. The town of Atwood California is an actual town in Orange County, although in this novel it is used entirely for fictional purposes. The people, religious beliefs, demographics, and dynamics of Atwood are used with little or no factual basis.

LOVE IS HELL

Chapter One

The sun set in Atwood California, the shadows slowly falling on a house on the edge of town. Although the house wasn’t particularly sizable compared to other large houses in the States, it was one of the biggest in town. Eventually the sun came down past the horizon, and the normal business of the day was ended. Main street fell silent, and the nearby homes fell silent soon after. The hour of midnight came, and the silence was broken by the creaking of a front door, barely audible to the human ear. Two figures moved quietly through the streets, whispering as they walked. One was taller than the other, with a backpack on, the other following to the other’s side, slightly behind it.

    “What if someone finds us?” whispered the smaller figure.

    “They won’t, Eva. Just relax. This is already going to be freaky; don’t make it worse with all your worrying.” said the second.

The two fell silent again as they came up to a battered road. The asphalt was very old, and had crumbled quite a bit through lack of use or maintenance. At the end of the road there was a massive house, even larger than the one the two teenagers had just snuck out of. Even at night it was obvious that the house hadn’t been lived in for at least fifty years. Several of the shutters were missing, and several of the windows were broken. The grounds of the house were overrun by weeds, and the small home that once would have housed a groundskeeper was covered in graffiti.

Bored teenagers vandalized the shack every once and awhile, but no one touched the house itself. Things happened at this house; unnatural things. As the two kids approached the house, Eva’s nervousness reached a peak, and she paused in the middle of the road just outside the grounds. Her brother kept walking, unaware that she had stopped. She continued to stand motionless, breathing hard. Mike noticed that she wasn’t by his side anymore, and whirled around, running toward her.

“Eva, come on! We don’t have all night to do this.” he said.

“I’m really scared, Mike. This place doesn’t feel right.” Eva said.

“You think I’m not nervous about this too, Eva? We came to get a thrill, remember? Think of it like a ride at the amusement park we used to go to. It’ll be fine.”

“People have died here, Mike.”

“That was forty years ago, Eva. Nothing’s happened since then. It’ll be fine. Let’s go.”

She complied reluctantly, following closely behind him as they entered the mansion’s grounds. They came through an iron gate, walking on the paved driveway that came up to the front of the house. The two walked with fearful curiosity, taking a close look at the house and the surrounding lawn. Daring kids like them came sometimes, but something bad had always happened. Johnny Edwards had been bitten by a snake after running away from the house, Sierra Calvin had fallen down the stairs in the inside of the house and broken her collarbone in three places after breaking in.

    The two came up to that same window Sierra had broken to get into the house, looking inside. Mike concealed his fear well, but Eva was visibly trembling as she peered inside cautiously from behind her brother. The window was very large, the bottom being at knee level and going up about five feet. The furniture, once beautiful and glamorous, was overturned and destroyed. The table that once had sat in the middle of the room was on its side, two of the legs broken. Eva’s attention turned back to Mike as he inhaled loudly and stepped over the window’s edge and entered the house. He turned back to her and held out his hand.

    “Come in, Eva! You can’t come all this way just to get scared before you even come in.”

    “I don’t want to go in, Mike. I’ll see you when you get back.” She turned to walk back, but Mike grabbed her by the arm and pulled her hard. She hit the edge of the window and tripped, falling into the house and onto the remnants of the broken glass on the floor. She let out a short shriek of pain as Mike pulled her up and dusted her off. She had several small cuts on her arms, but on her knee there was a cut about two inches long.

    “We’ll take care of that when we get back,” said Mike. “we’ve got to finish this first though.” he took off the backpack and unzipped it, pulling out a small wooden ouija board. Eva cried for a couple of minutes as he propped up the fallen table, balancing it precariously using the broken legs. He put the ouija board on the table and turned to Eva, who was using her pants to stop the blood flow.

    “You ready?” he asked. “We don’t have a lot of time, and we’ll have even less if you keep whining about that little cut you got.”

    Eva stopped crying and looked up at him angrily. “You @$$hole! You think I still want to do this? I didn’t really want to do it in the first place!”

    “Fine then. I’ll just do it myself.” he said as he took a deep breath and turned toward the board. Eva got up and dusted herself off, turning back to step over the broken window. She didn’t look back as she walked toward the grounds entrance. Just before she reached the gate, she heard screaming coming from the house. It was Mike’s voice.

    Eva ran back to the house as fast as she could, but when she came in, Mike was laughing. Realizing what he’d done, her face turned red with anger.

    “You think that’s funny?” She yelled. He kept laughing, ignoring her words. She walked up to him and slapped him in the face. “It’s not funny, Mike!”

    “You totally fell for that! You think I’d ever actually---”

Mike’s reply was cut short as a loud crashing noise came from upstairs, and someone laughed. Eva turned to see what it was, but she looked back as she heard a loud thump next to her. Mike was on the ground, convulsing violently. Although he was almost completely immobilized, he managed to get two words out: “Run, Eva!” Eva ignored him and picked him up by his feet, dragging him toward the window. “RUN!” he screamed. She dragged him several feet until she heard laughing again and fell to the ground.

    She tried to move, but she had no control of any of her limbs. As she convulsed, she saw Mike get up and run out of the house. She tried to call out his name, but she didn’t have control over her own body. She’d tried to help him; why didn’t he do the same? She said a prayer in her head, hoping that it would do something to get whatever was controlling her out, but it didn’t help. After a few minutes of convulsing, her legs started to move without her telling them to. She started to get up, but she heard noises outside and the door burst open. Several people walked in, including Mike.

    The force inside of her kept trying to move for a minute, but one of the people who had entered the house lifted a wooden cross into the air, praying to the Lord to cast out the devil inside her. She felt what seemed like contempt coming from the force for a minute before it obliged her father’s request and left. Eva had control of her own body again, but she was overtaken by a sudden rush of exhaustion, and fell to the ground before blacking out.