The Orphanage (II)

The Orphanage

An ABDL Horror story by Blake Rose

Chapter I. HERE

II.

The doors closed with a heavy thud. Inky darkness consumed them. The sound of a key ring being removed from a belt jingled in the darkness behind them. The selection of a particular key. The tumblers sliding. The turning of a heavy lock.

Then, silence.

The stillness stretched on for about a minute as they waited for their guide to speak, move, do anything, but he and his jingles seemed to have evaporated into the air. The silence lingered on. Confused and beginning to get antsy, some of the guests looked around trying to adjust, but the darkness was absolute.

Tyler was quickly becoming bored. In the darkness he let out a sigh and shuffled himself a bit. He felt Kelly’s arm squeeze around his a bit tighter, and he recognized it as a “what’s on your mind” kind of squeeze. Brushing Kelly with his arm to feel her space in the black void around them he leaned closer to her.

“What’s up?” Kelly asked in a whisper. Tyler’s aural radar located her and he pulled her close. He smelled her floral shampoo and felt the brush of her pigtails against his cheek as his lips clumsily bumped against her ear.

“They having technical issues? What are we supposed to be waiting for?”

“Don’t know,” responded Kelly. “I think they did something like this once before.”

Similar hushed tones were beginning to emanate from the crowd. In the silence even the quietest whisper could be heard.

“What’s going on?”

“Where’d that guy go?”

“How long are we supposed to wait before–”

“Welcome to Heartstead Orphanage’s first annual open house!”

The shock of the sudden noise caused several people to jump and yelp. The warm, cheerful voice seemed to echo on for a moment before, high up on the wall above them, a recorded film began to play. The room was bathed in cold blue light of the imagery.

“Health. Home. Heart. Striving to provide the most loving, nurturing care to the little ones among us who find themselves lacking a stable home and family to call their own. During your visit with us, you will meet and be paired with your respective children to see if you are a proper fit for our Adoption or Big Sibling programs.”

“Before we begin, please note that in order to make your stay the best it can be, there are some things that must be taken care of in order to maximize the potential matching nature…”

Tyler felt himself beginning to drift. Initially impressed by the apparent uptick in budget, he was already fighting the temptation to slip into expectation. The video was slightly scratchy, as though it had been recorded from an old VCR camera in the late 80’s. The voice, as it spoke, occasionally slipped into distortion and the picture would jump and stutter. Having seen enough horror movies to never trust old-time-ey video playback and sensing a jump-scare incoming, Tyler unfocused his eyes to dull any impact by a potential jump-scare. Instead let the noise take over, not really noticing what he was looking at. Hope this editor didn’t get a film degree. Tyler scoffed slightly as he noticed the novice nature of the film they were watching. Some of the pictures didn’t seem to have anything to do with the show or the facility, any text would appear and disappear a little too quickly to read everything offered, and ultimately Tyler started to feel the zygote of a headache quickly gestating behind his eyes. The video seemed to go on for a while, showing pictures and aerial shots of the location, the services provided, the events that take place there, the blah, blah, blah…

The sound of the narration seemed to be getting dim and hazy as well. The volume of the voice seemed to almost fade in and out slightly like a heartbeat and in the spaces of less volume there seemed to be a slight hum, swelling and deflating off-time from the words being spoken, if there even were words being spoken anymore. He didn’t quite know why but it made him uneasy, and Tyler soon found himself listening only halfheartedly. I guess this writer loves exposition, jeez. He didn’t care about this fake orphanage’s backstory, and just as he was beginning to wonder why he was wasting his Halloween night standing in a room watching an instructional video when, from what felt like a thousand miles away, he felt Kelly’s hand give his a small squeeze. He looked at her.

“You’re drooling,” she mouthed without a sound, giggling and pointing at his mouth and making a wiping motion.

With a blink he realized that she was right. His mouth was hanging open and a thin line of spittle was streaming down off his chin. A good portion of his red shirt was wet. With his free hand he quickly wiped his face and conceded an embarrassed smile at Kelly. She seemed to be enjoying how much more engaged Tyler was this time around. She held up her pacifier toward him, going taut as it tugged at her collar. “Need your paci, baby?” Kelly sneered quietly as Tyler suppressed an embarrassed grin. He rolled his eyes and gave a “yeah, yeah, laugh it up” sort of expression before swallowing and turning back to the video.

Internally he was piecing together the fact that he had just been drooling, and drooling long enough to have made a three-inch long patch of wetness down his shirt and not notice it until Kelly pointed it out to him.

The droning of the sound and video caused him to lose focus. His mind again slid back to comparing this with previous years when Kelly would beg him to come along. He was beginning to wish he hadn’t listened this year. He never hated these shows but he still preferred to be at the bar or a house party for Halloween. There was never a moment that really scared him the way he liked to be scared in haunted houses when he was younger. This year Halloween fell on a Sunday so the town shut down early and there was less of a chance of people partying late due to needing to be at work first thing in the morning, so he figured there could be worse things to do. Like giving out candy to snot-nosed brats all night, he scoffed. He hoped at least Kelly was enjoying it. His less-than-enthusiastic approach to these shows was never outweighed by the happiness they gave her. Her tendency to talk about them for the entire rest of the night afterwards got annoying, sure, but he loved seeing his girl enjoying her passions. That was a large part of why he loved her. Her happiness made her glow with a light that Tyler was incapable of resisting.

Still, he thought, I do wish I could be at the bar… checking out some slutty outfits, getting trashed with Marcus and the boys, maybe even try to steal some candy from any porches that have any –

BANG!

– candy left… to… to take…

Something loud and heavy had caused a crash which snapped Tyler out of his internal monologue. He blinked slowly, and when he opened his eyes again to look around Tyler had to suppress a gasp of shock. Slightly disoriented and shaking his head slightly, he looked around.

He was standing with the group, still hand in hand with Kelly, but they were no longer in the dark room.

They were standing near the end of a long hallway of sorts. Black velvet curtains covered the wall to the left, while the wall on the right was instead a line of windows looking out over the expansive lawn that stretched out toward the ocean-side cliff. Tyler heard the sound of a door closing behind them and several people turned to look. Tyler noticed by some of their expressions that he wasn’t the only one who was a bit confused. The sandy-haired man who had permitted them entry, released his hand from the ornate doorknob, smiled at the group with a bow, and walked off through a nearby archway without a word, his keys jangling and echoing off the stone walls.

The sudden jolt and change snapped concern into Tyler like a rubber band to the eye. What the hell? What happened? Where’s the video thing? His mind was racing. One moment he was standing in the dark with the others, all looking up at the video. Everyone in his peripheral stood, their fronts bathed in the cold light, their backs somehow still melded with the darkness. Then, one moment later, he was standing in this hallway confused and bewildered.

“You ok?” Kelly whispered, his concern evidently showing on his face.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” He whispered back. This wasn’t true, but looking around he didn’t see anyone with an expression of shock to match what he felt. Nobody else seemed to find this sudden change of location strange so, for fear of being called crazy, Tyler bit back the urge to ask his girlfriend if she had just blacked out as well.

“Darn it! Clumsy me! All thumbs, dropping things all over the place. Well, come on now, come in! Don’t be shy!”

The crowd creeped closer. In front of them was a paunchy man with short buzzed hair and eyes so bugged they almost seemed to protrude from his head. His sockets were sallow and bloodshot, and he walked back and forth across the cold tile floor to drive push pins through paper to secure them onto an enormous cork board hanging against the velvet on their left. Crayon, marker, and fingerpaint creations covered it completely, overlapping and butting up next to one another and sticking out beyond the frame on all sides. It was as discordant as any wall of children’s art would be. The man pressed the last pin, and with a slight POP! The last crayon drawing of a house was affixed in place.

The man then scanned the crowd without blinking, looking directly at everyone in turn, forcing them to lock eyes with his own. When it was his turn, Tyler saw that this man looked nothing short of exhausted. Heavy dark bags drooped down toward his cheekbones and his eyes seemed almost too large to be allowed. If this dude says the words “my precious” at any point, I’m going to lose my shit.

The man smiled as warmly as he could. Unfortunately none of that warmth seemed to reach the man’s eyes.

“Looks like you are the next group of lovelies to be joining us! Twenty seven of you all signed in? Wonderful, wonderful. We’re so pleased to have you all here with us tonight. My name is Marko.” He then opened a drawer of the desk and slipped out a clipboard. “Ah, yes so it seems you will be given a tour of our facilities and if you take a liking to any of the children we can set you up with our adoption program!”

Ahh... There it is, thought Tyler bemusedly. That’s the gimmick this time: We’re prospective parents and we’re here to see if we like any of the children enough to “adopt them”, but the children are all fucked up and weird? Got it. With the belief that he now knew which direction this would be going, he mentally dug himself in and tried to prepare for the next hour and a half of cringe.

“Now then,” continued Marko, stepping directly under a spotlight in front of the group, and speaking softly “I would like all of you to close your eyes…”

They did.

“Good. Now take a deep breath in through your nose… and out through your mouth… good… again. In… and out… One more time. Innnnnn…”

Tyler inhaled deeply through his nose. The cold air carried a bizarre combination of smells through his olfactory system and he was reminded all at once of burning wood, floor polish, talc, birthday cake, foliage, and rubberized plastic. His mind loosely constructed the scene of a child’s birthday party held outside in mid Autumn by a bonfire.

“Aaaannnnddd… out…”

With his last exhale, Tyler felt his heart rate beginning to slow. In contrast to his somewhat off-putting appearance, Marko’s voice was smooth and measured and coated with a thin layer of the relaxing, sticky, tar-like bubbling that Tyler often heard in voice-over artists who had a history of smoking. “Good. Keep breathing nice and steady. Now as you breathe I would like you to imagine yourself floating. With every breath in, feel yourself inflating like a balloon, getting lighter and drifting away. With every exhale feel yourself sink back down to the earth. In and out… up and down… Feel the stress of the day just leave your body. No tension. Relax. Keep breathing. Just let your mind drift and follow my voice. Follow my voice and I will guide you.”

“I want you to think back to an earlier time in your life. Think back to when you were ten–”

The snap of a finger cracked the air

“–years old. Imagine yourself standing in front of a mirror. What did you look like? Did you have freckles back then? How long was your hair? How did you get it cut?”

I looked like me, but younger, Tyler thought lazily. No freckles. Hair was… I dunno. Medium? Short-medium? Those were the years when Mom would just give me bowl cuts.

“Look in the mirror and see yourself. Where are you? Feel yourself back there.”

The bathroom. Henderson Road.

“What did the walls look like?”

Off-white with aquamarine and gold.

“What color was your hair when you were nine–,” another snap “, –and living life was so much easier? Where did you go to school? That might have been a long time ago for some of you, so it may be hard to remember. Just let your mind float and carry you back to that time. Breathe in and out. Let those memories return and leave the here and now. Do you remember what your classroom looked like? Do you remember your teacher’s name? You were only eight.”

Snap!

The sound seemed to trace the word as it fell upon the crowd.

Marko continued on, his voice now shifting and moving around the space, anchor-less in the darkness of everyone’s closed eyes. With every step his bare feet carried him across the stone cold floor with a faint, ghostly whisper. The group listened as he swam around and through the crowd. “What were you learning at the time? Did you start to learn writing in cursive or was that earlier?”

Tyler answered the questions to himself in his mind, starting to dig deeper into his own memories for the answers. Third grade. Six Bridges Elementary school. Teacher’s name was… was… don’t remember. Learned cursive, yeah–no, wait. That was first grade. Third grade is when we started learning computers…

“It was such an easier time back then. When you could leave your worries on a shelf back in your bedroom at home.”

Tyler’s mind suddenly flooded with memories of his old bedroom.

“You must have had some really cool toys back when you were seven– ” Snap!

“Did you leave your worries on the shelf with your toys or did you keep your toys in a big toy box instead? It’s amazing how such a simple box can mean so much to a seven year old. This wonderful box that holds so many memories and stories. What stories did you create and store away in your toy chest?”

It was dark brown, Tyler recalled. A rectangular box. I used to stand on it to look out of the bedroom window. My action figures… Spider-man, Batman, Steve Austin. Ray Mysterio-Oh yeah! Me and Antonio would fight wrestlers VS superheroes and he’d always kick my ass. The happy memory made the glimmer of a smile curl the side of Tyler’s mouth.

“It was so easy to leave–”

Tyler thought he felt something touch his back just beneath his right shoulder blade. He had been standing so still and breathing so gently that he had forgotten where his body ended. Just a gentle poke on his back sent ripples through him, echo-mapping the rest of his body briefly back to his awareness. Dimly he still felt his hand interlocked with Kelly’s, though they were both so limp the only thing holding their hands together was the friction between their finger joints. Marko’s voice continued to swirl around them and Tyler was beginning to lose track of what direction the voice might be coming from.

He wanted to open his eyes, but something told him not to.

“–your worries behind back then. A simpler time. No troubles. No obligations. Just free to play…”

“… Learn…”

“… Grow…”

Snap! “… Six…”

Snap! “… Five years old was a great time wasn’t it? Just going into first grade! Do you remember that classroom too? What were you good at? What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Pizza. I wanted to work in a pizza place. First job I ever wanted.

“Is that what you became?”

Tyler felt the pluck of a single heart string as the answer arrived. No, In spite of himself he felt something like longing or regret glance him. Shame. Younger me had the right idea I guess. If I could make pizza for a living instead of being stuck in an office all day doesn’t sound that–

“Did you have a job back then?”

No, he answered silently. Of course not. That would be silly.

“Of course not! That would be silly,” echoed Marko, “Four–”snap“–year olds don’t have jobs. No responsibilities of any kind. No worries. Feel that innocence resurfacing inside you. Awaken it. Reconnect with it. Reach back inside your box of toys and pull out something special.”

Tyler knelt down on the forest green carpet in front of his toy chest. A plush wolf was sitting on the lid and when he opened the lid, it fell down and out of sight. The hinge in the back always squeaked. He leaned over the side and looked in. He saw strange shapes and colors in front of him but nothing that looked like… anything. Just a jumble of broken images. Confused, he closed the lid again, and the wolf plush fell back into view, looking at him. Of course, he thought, duh! Moony’s my favorite. He reached out for the stuffed animal of his youth, remembering every detail and stitch. He felt the shaggy softness of the fur against his fingertips.

“All you had to worry about was playing and having fun. Free to run around with your friends. Free to be imperfect. You were three”-Snap-“to be yourself without fear of judgment. Breathe in… and out… Three years old. What did your room look like? What color were the walls?”

Tyler sat on his heels with Moony in his arms and looked around the room. Baby blue with navy blue trim along the ceiling. Sesame Street characters along the walls. Tan carpet. Dark brown ceiling fan.

“You must have had lots of stuffed animals in your crib, lots of soft cuddly friends to snuggle up with. How many did you have?”

He was laying on his back in the powder blue crib looking up at Elmo and Big Bird and Miss Piggy gently circling above him. He turned his head to the side and saw the plush friends of his childhood standing guard over him. Protecting him from all the bad stuff outside of the crib. Snuffles, Bo-Bo, Max, Rupert, Mr. and Mrs. Paws, Trunkie….

He looked around at these sentinels of his barred kingdom. He saw each one of them and, like Moony, remembered each of them perfectly. The stuffed guardians that kept him safe and secure while he slept. Kept him company when he felt alone. Never turned down a hug when he needed one. He looked around at all of them and felt something overwhelming begin to swell inside him, something he never would have imagined he’d be feeling tonight.

Guilt.

It pressed against his insides like a poison. His heart tightened as he reflected on abandoning them so many years ago. How could I let them go? Tyler wondered in spite of himself. They were there for me whenever I needed them. They were my friends. I loved them, and they loved me. What happened to them? When… Why would I let them go? Where are they now? He felt like he had betrayed them, and the sudden impossible desire of doing whatever he could, going wherever he needed to go in order to find all of them and hug them tightly one more time. He wanted to apologize for leaving them alone and for all these years. The intensity of this urge concerned him.

“Something so pure contained within something so simple. A teddy bear will love you forever. No matter what. Whatever dusty attic they’ve been sitting in for however long, if you pulled them out right now they would love you just as much as the day you left them, ready to accept your love with open arms and without any grudges. They’re soft and warm and pure, and you are too–” Snap.

“Because your teddy knows. They know that deep down inside you there’s a memory of the warmth and peace and comfortable bliss of childhood. We all have an innocent child locked inside us, buried beneath the burdens of maturity. We may leave it untouched but it’s something we all share. A time when the world was bigger. The sun was brighter. The sky was blue-er. The air was sweeter. When the world and you are one.”

The last word crashed against Tyler’s mind with an echo that rattled inside his skull. Something was wrong. It didn’t sound right. Something was wrong. He heard the man say the last word, but it was incomplete. Something else was supposed to happen. It was missing something… He yearned for the sound to be complete, for the voice to say it again, but properly. He knew he should open his eyes but he didn’t want to. He couldn’t. Not until… not until he heard…

In the expectant silence, the last three words seemed to resonate and echo so totally that they grew in strength until they enveloped his body like a blanket.

You are one…

You are one…

You are one…

.

He was warm and comfortable and content. Peace washed over him in deep waves as he breathed in and out slowly. His mouth was working on something soft and rubbery and his limbs were jerking slightly as if his brain hadn’t wired his muscles properly.

The gentle tinkling of the mobile above his head… The softness of the mattress and blankets beneath him… The vibrancy of the colors he seemed to be experiencing with new eyes… The security provided by the wooden bars stretching up toward the ceiling above him… The ceiling and its dim glow in the dark stars and moons… His feet contained within booties of incomprehensible softness… The refreshing chill of the overhead fan against his bare legs to balance out the warmth… The soft caress of his cotton onesie gently squeezing the diaper against his body as a reminder…

For the first time in a very, very long while, Tyler lost all sense of worry. All memory of work and the office and his suit and tie and his boss’s nagging and taxes and student loans and medical bills and car payments all vanished. He couldn’t think of where he worked or who he worked with if he even wanted to. He didn’t even know what a job was. If a job was something you were supposed to do, then his job was to lay in the softness of his crib and be soothed into a pleasant sleep by the gently tinkling and turning figures above him.

“Now…”

SNAP

“...Open your eyes.”

.

Tyler felt the sound vibrate and shatter across every inch of his skin and down to his bones, His eyes opened, and as they did, the intensity of his relaxation melted smoothly away and he was back in the hallway with Kelly and Marcus and Christine and the other audience members. Marko was standing in front of them in the exact same place before them, smiling a wide smile. Except this time, his smile did extend up into his eyes…

…and Tyler did not like the look of it in the slightest.

Marko looked nothing less than deranged. The bags under his eyes seemed to have darkened. His bloodshot eyes now showed a bit too much white. His mouth seemed just a bit too wide now, showing far too many teeth than should be allowed.

“Welcome to our wonderful home.” said Marko gently, gesturing to the door behind him half shrouded in shadow. His tone hadn’t changed, but Tyler reflected on what he had just experienced. He thought of how the voice seemed to take him away and carry him relaxed and free to another time and place.

With his eyes open, the fact that every calming word Tyler just heard had slithered out of that mouth made Tyler almost want to dry-heave. The contrast of going directly from lying comfortably in his mental crib to looking at Marko’s ghoulish, wide-eyed grin and wide, unblinking eyes was so jarring he felt his spine shiver. With a grimace the tingle in his spine caused him to stir up a childhood memory of being in elementary school and turning the wrong page in Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark. That feeling never went away, and the look in Marko’s eye seemed to strike directly to that feeling.

Behind Marko, the handle of the next door turned on its own accord, and with a tiny creak the door opened by no more than a few inches. A solid vertical strip of warm light peeked out, and sensing the end of the scene the group started to move to the door. Tyler realized he and Kelly’s hands had dropped away from each other, and promptly moved to amend that. He looked at Kelly. Her eyes were wide. He figured she must be thinking the same thing he was. Holy shit… they stepped their game up this year, for sure. Tyler’s eyes rested on Kelly for a moment. By the ease with which her mouth was rhythmically working, she seemed to have forgotten that she was still sucking the pacifier.

For a flash of an instant, Tyler felt jealousy strike him. He wanted the feeling that his memories had just given back to him. At the very least maybe holding onto that sensation might help drive Marko’s eerie affect from his mind a little. Then, realizing he was an adult who had just genuinely desired a pacifier to help him calm down, he shook his head in self-disgust. You don’t want a fucking pacifier. That’s ridiculous. And he shooed the thought away as best he could.

As Tyler turned to look back at the hallway one more time to appreciate the scene which just occurred, he paused for a fraction of a second. He thought he saw something in the reflection on the glass against the black sky outside. In the jumble of crayon scribbles, mirrored inside the drawings under the light of the hallway, two words. The words were messy and almost illegible but before he could register what he had seen, he was being poked in the back by Marcus and the group moved on. No. It must have been his imagination.

Still, the image remained burned into his retinas as he continued on. Two words hiding in the reflection of the loosely arranged drawings and scribbles:

“Help us.”