The Phantom School

It wasn"t working. That girl"s "cult" was something real.

"We don"t mean harm." Melis said.

"Whatever you are going to do to me... It is going to hurt a lot, isn"t it?" I wish I could say this loudly.

"You are free to do whatever you want. We are only asking for a favor." Melis" voice was getting calmer.

"What... do you want me to do?" I asked, without questioning my own actions. I was pushing the morals aside at this point. My desparate efforts to get everything right were proven to be useless. My only aim was to survive.

"Let me talk to him." this voice... This was the voice of that old woman I heard previously. I couldn"t see where the voice was coming from.

"Yes, mother." Melis looked down and stepped back.

"Mother?" That word slipped out of my mouth.

"We are sorry for... alarming you so unnecessarily." the woman said. "Alarming" me? She must have been joking... But of course, this was no time for me to point out this absolutely colossal understatement. Without knowing what to say, or do; I nodded in an awkward manner.

"Mr. Kenan, you are a good person." she continued. Coming from someone like her... What did this mean to me? "We are grateful for people like you who allow the society to enjoy many great things."

I was amazed, shocked, but mostly weirded out. The only missing thing was a gold medal around my neck.

"...and we need the help of such pure, clean blood." she finished her sentence. I looked at Melis. She noticed me watching her and nodded, showing that she was agreeing with her "mother".

"Yes." I said, and gulped.

"Although few in numbers, there are some other people like you around here." the woman continued talking. "We are in need of power they possess."
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"What kind of power?" I asked.

"The power that can allow us to manipulate the world around us, to make sure the mistakes we"ve done in our lives are not repeated." she replied. The answer was not as clear enough as I wished.

"What do I do?" I asked.

"We need you to bring some of your students to the cafeteria." she said. "But don"t worry, they will not be hurt. We have different plans for them."

I almost had a stroke just by hearing it. Doing this -whatever it is they want to do- to my own students... Perhaps I had to rearrange my priorities, putting my survival after theirs.

"Yes." I said that even though there was something completely different in my mind.

For a while, I didn"t move from my spot. I just wanted to listen to the silence and process everything in my mind.

I saw Melis standing in the distance, leaning against wall; watching me without moving or saying anything. I watched her with the corner of my eye for a while, then stared directly back at her. She didn"t get uncomfortable, and we kept staring at each other for a long time. Maybe we weren"t talking, but I could feel that we were communicating in some way.

Eventually, she broke the silence.

"Will you believe me from now on?"

"I... kind of... don"t want to." I said.

"Look, they know the best." Melis said. "Just go already."

"MURDER!" I said. "This is ma.s.s murder! What you are doing is killing people! Have you lost all your connection to the real world!?"

"Let me remind you, this is the real world." she said. "Besides, death is a very natural part of life, and there is nothing wrong with it."

"I will not a.s.sist you, I will not be a part of this ma.s.sacre!"

"They will not be killed." she replied, calmly as usual.

"THEN WHAT!?" I shouted. "Will you burn their faces? Will you cut their arms? Will you stick their legs together? WHAT!?"

"They will be put under mother"s protection." she said.

While we were talking, the woman was not interrupting us. I was wondering if she was "gone", or was merely giving me some time to understand everything.

"Why do you call her mother?" I asked Melis.

"She is my mother." she said.

"She... was your mother..." I said. "I see..."

"Is." Melis said. "She IS my mother."

"Oh..."

"Well, she may not be my biological mother, but she was the woman who was meant to be my mother." she continued.

"I"m... not sure I understand." I said.

"My... My biological mother... She was terrible." Melis sat down, putting her back against the wall, and kept talking. "She never cared about me. When I was little, she would often give me housework to do. Cleaning the floors, dishes, making the beds... But because I was too young, I could never do anything nearly as good as her; and... And she would use these as an excuse to yell at me, and sometimes... she would beat me."

She started crying. She was trying to hide it, but I could see the tears flowing down her face.

"Please tell more." I said.

"And my father... I don"t know which one was worse. He would outright ignore what my mother was doing to me. He was constantly drunk. He would completely ignore me unless I was standing in his way or playing with his stuff."

"I had no ide"

"But that"s not it." she said. "Same things have happened to my little sister as well. I tried to protect her, but I was incapable of doing so."

"How did you meet your... "Mother"?" I asked.

"One winter night, I woke up in the middle of the night. I went to my little sister and woke her up too. We"ve had that moment planned for weeks."

"Let me guess... you ran away from your house?"

"Yes. At least this was what I had in mind... Anyway, the apartment"s door was locked, so we had to think of something else. We went to the kitchen, and to the balcony. Our apartment was high enough for an uncontrolled fall to be fatal. So, we wanted to use an old curtain to drop down slowly to the ground."

"How did it go?"

"I had made sure that the fabric was strong enough to carry both of our weight, so everything was ready. We just had to tie the top part of the curtain to something st.u.r.dy, so it wouldn"t come out. I chose to tie it to a metal gas pipe at the bottom of the heater in the kitchen. I couldn"t trust the plastic water pipes."

"And you went down?"

"Everything was fine. I was going down. But when I was about to drop down, the lights of the kitchen turned on. My so-called mother and father had woken up."

"What did they do?"

"My sister panicked and jumped down from the balcony, holding the curtain. The curtain, or rather, the thin metal pipe couldn"t carry both of us at the same time. We both fell down, along with the curtain. Luckily, I was already low enough to survive the fall with minor injuries."

"Your sister?"

"...she..." Melis gulped. "She wasn"t that lucky."

I wanted to say lots of things, but I couldn"t. I didn"t want her to recall her emotions. So, I simply wanted to continue the story. "What happened afterwards?"

"A small explosion started a fire in the kitchen. Probably something ignited the leaking gas. My mother and father burned alive."

There was unbelievable tragedy in this girl"s short life.

"The fire woke the whole neighborhood up. My mother found me when I was running away from the apartment. She took me to a small hospital nearby, then to her own home. I have been living there since..."