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Description
Chapter 1: Freaks
They came out of nowhere, those crazy boys.
          "Aaah!" Sophia let out a small squeal of surprise as two young boys – one who looked to be in his acne-infested midteen years and the other on his way to puberty – sprang up from behind a tombstone wearing deranged kabuki masks, wretched and crookedly done. The older one let out a wild series of laughs but the little one emitted no sound.
     The teensy little brat known as Sophia fell backwards into the gray snow, almost hitting her head on a nearby tombstone that stuck from the ground like some ugly natural rock. She quickly glanced up at the tall boy as he laughed down at her rudely. She yelled up at him in embarrassment and annoyance "Are you crazy? What was that for?"
     The older boy joyously responded, "One: I do happen to be crazy, thank you very much; and two: That just so happened to be my welcome to you, sweet thing. Then again, I bet that's why nobody stays around here long. Heheheheh, pretty sweet, don't you think so? In a sick way, s'what I mean."
Sophia glared at the masked boy while the little one just stood there.
          There was a dumb moment of silence until the tall kid slowly brought the mask off his face. His wide, goggle-like eyes looked down at her with curiosity and his thin smile crippled a little under the weight of mischief his natural expression carried.
   "Hey," he chuckled as he extended his hand towards her. "You hurt?"
Sophia slapped his hand away from her face with such disgust that you would have thought she was more like an old lady than a faint-hearted child.
   "Go away, weirdo! I don't even know you and your first impression stinks! It stinks bad!"
   "Oooh, touchy little pixie, aren't ya'?"
   "What did you just call me?" Sophia scrambled off the icy ground, ready to pick a fight with someone double her height.
     She just wanted to explore around her grandparents' estate, not die from a heart attack at a young age because some random kids felt like scaring her out of her mind; and just to welcome her to the boring old Canzingsvale Wood, a mere little neighborhood consisting of one tiny Renaissance house stuck in a bowl, the surroundings made of nothing but black woodland. The little love had only arrived a few hours beforehand, the concrete-colored clouds not changing for a moment as if they have been taunting her all the way there (which played a small add-in to her mood). It was only her second time visiting the meadow estate, yet strangers such as the gray loony standing before her was the last thing she ever thought of encountering in the mundane little villa.
     "Did you just call me a pixie?"
   "Yup. You know what a pixie is, right? They're small, puny, tiny, miniature—"
   "Stop it with the synonyms! I know what a pixie is! I read a lot of fantasy stuff!" she squealed out loud.
   "Syno-what? Is that what they're called? Wow, ya' learn something every day."
     The boy completely removed the mask to reveal a gray-skinned, pointy-nosed teen with dark, thin, squiggly hair that fell down behind his pointed ears. A strand of green hair streamed down the right side of his angular face and he wore a dark burgundy trench coat that seemed to hang off his shoulders like a long wet towel, showing off just how thin and lanky he truly was. As if his coat was too heavy for his own strength the boy was slouched forward in a way that resembled a crow with a broken spine. Then his teeth – oh god, his teeth – were blunt and with a few jagged, all stuck together like little gray children posing for a crowded school picture; they were displeasing to look at, pretty much.
          Sophia was just a small, plain little dear with flesh made of creamy peaches and large blue eyes to give her the Shirley Temple outward show. Her hair was only inches above her shoulders and shone a whitish blond, unsullied by any ash or tarnishing dirt that recycled through the air of the wood. If you could imagine the cliché shell of a bitter yellow-haired runt then she would be the image, so to speak.
She spoke up as the boy turned around, "Who are you anyways? I've never seen you here before."
   "Oh, yeah. The name's Slawamir Darktrend. Stupid name, right? So call me Darkslaw."
Sophia winced.
   "Darkslaw? That's weird. It sounds like coleslaw."
   "What's so wrong with coleslaw? I think it's pretty zesty. Who are you, pixie? Never seen you around here before. Come from Decembersville?"
   "I'm not a pixie! I'm Sophia Lilbette." There was no reply following after, so she simply mumbled in addition, "from Washington."
     Sophia averted her eyes from Darkslaw to the younger boy who stood afar, defecting from the nasty little intro. He looked nothing like Darkslaw besides his large front teeth and dark-rimmed eyes, but Canzingsvale Wood was infamous for the eyes due to the lack of proper sunlight (because the clouds never ever seemed to bother leaving). The boy was laying down flowers – roses, to be precise – on every grave he walked by.  The little girl went from a maddening leer to a curious glance.
   "And who's he?"
   "You're talking about the kid way over there?" Darkslaw looked over at the small boy who completely ignored them both with his head in the clouds and his kabuki mask thrown into the snow below. "That's my foster brother Lynus. Well, actually, more like I am the foster bro since I'm the pick-up from an alley back in 1990." Darkslaw came in closer to Sophia and whispered, "He's autistic."
     The little girl didn't know how to respond to that but only because she had no idea what autistic meant in the least. The boy in front of her made a gesture with his hand that slid from the top of his head to the bottom of his face, smile huge and murky.
     "He's got a brain scar. Makes him see and feel things. I bet he has his own little world to play around in. As do I, but I highly doubt you care."
   "What?" Sophia immediately snapped out of her loss of thought, wondering what autistic meant in the meantime of the stranger's explanation. "Look, who are you? Some cousin I haven't been told about for a good reason?"
Darkslaw laughed cutely.
   "Sorry to break your heart, but my dad and I were renting the room the owners of this estate put up. We leave tomorrow for LA to make another film; this time on Sin City. Y'know the owners?"
   "They are my grandparents, so yeah."
    "Ah, so you are a rich one. Rich girls from the U.S are totally hard to come by nowadays."
    "Where were you half of your life? Have you ever even been to America? Everybody is very rich and have a lot of money over there," said the girl, placing her hands on her hips with the suspicious look her mother would make if she was ever caught running off too hastily.
    Darkslaw whistled loudly and tossed his kabuki mask aside into the snow, twiddling with his fingers next to give Sophia the impression that he was about to dupe her somehow someway about something or other.
     "Can't say I've spent too much time in the states, pixie. I've spent half my childhood with freaks and cockroach people, not with the red white and blue."
     It was so obvious just by that phrase that the boy's mind was damaged, so the little girl made this known by giving him her classic mordant head tilt, followed by, "'Cockroach people'?"
    "Cockroach people in top hats and hippie specs," said the boy bluntly. "You have got to watch out for them, though. My brother and I got ourselves conned once and we forever feared roaches and Italians after that shocker."
     Just what Sophia needed: something else to add to her list of horrid fears; the new addition being cockroaches (not that she was not scared of them before) and Italians (which never crossed her mind).
     She growled in irritation, "Okay, weirdo—"
     "Darkslaw."
     "I don't care. Where are you from anyway?" she asked candidly. "You don't sound Italian and you are not from here."
     "I didn't say I was Italian but I didn't say I'm Alaskan either. I, my midget pixie darling of die-hard inquisitiveness, am from nowhere."
     Not this again, thought Sophia.
     "Nowhere," she simply repeated after him, annoyed to the point that her voice expressed sheer monotony for the boy's idiocy. "Nowhere."
     "Yeah, nowhere."
     "Nowhere. You are from nowhere."
     "You asked me where I'm from and I am delivering. I am from nowhere."
     "That makes no sense!" the kid barked at the odd teen who was unable to erase his frown no matter how maddened Sophia got. Actually, he looked to be enjoying her riled-up whines. "You can't be from nowhere if you came from somewhere! So where are you from? And don't just say 'nowhere'!"
      Darkslaw nodded his head and giggled with his eyes almost closing, "I'm from a city."
     "There are a hundred cities in the entire world."
     "Okay, you are right. I am sorry. You are correct, Madame Pixie. Accept my humble apologies for I, being the villager I am, am not worthy. But I do happen to be from somewhere and that somewhere is a big, pretty city full of snow; it is kind of like here except the snow is white and clean while we have this stuff. And it has a clock tower, too." Then his smoggy eyes opened just a tad and he leaned in close to the girl (who tried to back away while maintaining her ground). A whisper emerged from between his lips, "Sometimes I think the clock tower talks to me." He giggled with a slight wheeze. "We have our own sun also."
     "Whatever. So where is this?" Sophia interjected meanly, arms crossed.
     "It is nowhere."
     "If it exists then it is somewhere!" There was nothing the girl disliked more at the moment than seeing Darkslaw laugh at her distress. It was like a mind game that he was playing with her and one that she was not appreciating at all.
But then the snap back from sweet-and-sour rambling reality emerged.
   The woods, large and black in pine cities of timberland, surrounded the estate like a circular fence that was shaped like a bowl and the small cemetary just so happened to be settled near them. The forest gave out a short sequence of cracking noises as if something was out there ready to emerge. It was not just a small little noise that a squirrel or a raccoon or a deer would have made on their journey through the woodlands but that noise was something peculiar. It sounded almost like a vibrating collage of wooden crunches; as if a terrifyingly gigantic creature was making its way across the wilderness while trying to be quiet and subtle about it. The noise was almost chilling, no different than the echo of a giant bookshelf that collapsed and crashed into another on the way down. The woods became a dark land of subtle dominos for a temporary amount of time. Of course the cemetary was close to the forest but at a reasonable distance that did not exactly assure whatever was in the woods was going to be heard.
Yet, a band of snapping branches and ruffling bushes was heard clearly.
      Sophia's heart skipped a beat and she spun around to look behind her, almost slipping on the ice under her feet. She instantly let out a small cry, "What was that?"
      Darkslaw was unimpressed by the girl's mild cowardice, but he said a word – or perhaps even a name  -- in a light manner.
     "Chimabell."
        "Chima—?" Sophia couldn't finish her question for Darkslaw pushed her down into the fluffy snow, trying to hide behind a tall tombstone like two soldiers ducking in cover before an assault. They both cowered there but Sophia, as fearful as she felt a mere second back, yelled loudly, "Hey! Get off of me, you psycho!"
          The teen silenced her in a harsh gruff. Silent as the graves with the ignorance of Lynus (who just kept on doing what he was doing), the duo stared attentively at the black woods that lied ahead. Was something going to come out? Was a monster going to burst out of the forest and gobble them all up?
     Wrong. Two big birds, most likely black vultures, left the woods and called out weakly "Skraw! Skraw!" That was it.
   "Aw, they are just dumb birds! Get off!" Sophia budged away from the strange boy with much bother. She came up out of the snow, rubbed the flakes off her coat, and glared down at Darkslaw who was still dumbfounded, on his stomach, and staring into nothingness with an expression of either complete confusion or, surprisingly, unexpected terror.
   "I thought it was something scary like a wolf or something," the girl said, infuriated. "I have only known you for, like, three seconds and you are already making me crazy, do you know that? I don't care if you live with my grandma and grandpa, I don't care if you are from nowhere, I don't—" "Blah, blah, blah…" was all Darkslaw heard.
     He just lied there, drowning out Sophia's rants with his solid, cold nerves; boy, did his nerves have fun hammering something quite unpleasant into his brain.
The two vultures cawed again, hauntingly. They circled and then retreated into the darkness of the woods.
    "Uh, hello?" Sophia whirled her head at him. He did not respond. "Hello—"
BOOM—shaaaw… shaw…. went the gray sky, a few rumbles of thunder finally knocking on the scene's door like an expected but late guest, getting the little girl to flinch instantly and look upward. You could have sworn something was planning to spiral down and snatch her up or something. In a second-long calm down, she looked back at Darkslaw and her pout returned.
    "Hi? Over here, dummy."
   "Wolf?" The boy snapped out of his little reverie, adding a reply to Sophia's whines. "WOLF? Hah! It's freaks you gotta watch out for, 'cause those are the ones that get you!"
   "Yeah," she responded sarcastically; too sarcastic for her age. "I noticed."
She turned around and began to walk towards the exit of the cemetary, on her way to the mansion down the snowy cliff. She had better things to do than hang around with the village idiot. Like watch paint dry.
     She heard the crunching of snow from behind her, so she span around with an air of supreme irritation. Lynus was far away and facing the woods dumbly. His brother was not where he was but his footprints were right behind Sophia. A ghost? Yeah, right. Right?
      Sophia shook her head and turned back towards the exit again only to find Darkslaw in her face. She flinched violently and shoved him aside, "Get away from me, Slawamir!"
   "It's Darkslaw. And hey! Wait! Waitwaitwaitwaitwait!"
   "WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME? JEEZ!"
   "You don't know about the freaks?"
   "The only freak around here is you! Now go away! I'm going home! Goodbye! Jeez!"
Sophia marched down the hillside, out of the little private cemetery.
     "See you inside, pixie!" the boy whistled after her happily, a tad disheartened that she did not bother shouting back. So he watched her leave, a few minutes passing until she was just a little pink dot far away down the meadow.
Lightning covered the sky and a small vibration of thunder sounded.
Darkslaw smiled wide and thin, looking down and hands locking themselves behind his back.
    "'Only freak is you', she says." Another wave of thunder said hello. "Oh, you are quite wrong about that one, pixie."


          Sophia didn't really like Canzingsvale Wood because it was so lonesome what with the dark, scary forests, the grimy weather and loss of contact with the outer world. Her parents just had to leave her alone with her stick-in-the-mud grandparents for her first weeks of vacation. The mansion was huge but it was always so dim and old; nearly everything she touched got a dent on the surface. Her grandfather even called her "Supergirl" just for the heck of it all but it was just due to how unbelievable crappy the ancient house was.
          Indeed her grandparents had hearts of gold but they were a bit too boring for her. They did nothing but pay the bills, set up boring parties where a bunch of old people come around to pinch your cheek and say "Remember me?" over a thousand times, and drink their tea. There was no internet or television in their estate. How Sophia was going to stay alive, I can't really say right now.
As the storm began to brew, Sophia finally made it into the home.
The second the door closed her grandmother looked down at her from the stairway. She had a kind yet curious look upon her.
   "How is the weather outside? I thought I heard thunder," she asked.
   "Yeah," Sophia simply answered. "It's going to rain or whatever."
The girl unzipped her puffy pink jacket and placed it at the bottom of the coat hangar for she couldn't reach the top. She ran up the stairs to where her grandmother stood. They had a small embrace and then Sophia ran past her to her room.
   "How are you feeling, Sophia?" her grandma tried to spark conversation at the last minute.
   "Freaked out."
She closed the door behind her.
          It felt a little cold to shut the door on her grandmother like that, but she didn't like the numbness in her head, so it was too late to turn around and say "Love you."
          She threw herself on her bed and sighed exhaustingly. Rain began to pitter-patter on her large pane. She brought her head up to look upon the window. Thunder sounded again, what a shock.
Sophia let out an inside whimper. God, everything scared her. Everything.
Bugs, dolls, thunder, monsters, the dark; everything scared her. She hated it but it was one of those things you just couldn't control.
There was silence in her room; all silence besides the rain on the windowpane.
Then she sighed even louder.
"There's nothing here," she closed her eyes. "Nothing here."
BOOM!! the sky blasted, and with a shriek the girl snatched the little flashlight right off her bedside desk and flew beneath her covers, switching the light on.

Description
Chapter 1: Freaks
They came out of nowhere, those crazy boys.
          "Aaah!" Sophia let out a small squeal of surprise as two young boys – one who looked to be in his acne-infested midteen years and the other on his way to puberty – sprang up from behind a tombstone wearing deranged kabuki masks, wretched and crookedly done. The older one let out a wild series of laughs but the little one emitted no sound.
     The teensy little brat known as Sophia fell backwards into the gray snow, almost hitting her head on a nearby tombstone that stuck from the ground like some ugly natural rock. She quickly glanced up at the tall boy as he laughed down at her rudely. She yelled up at him in embarrassment and annoyance "Are you crazy? What was that for?"
     The older boy joyously responded, "One: I do happen to be crazy, thank you very much; and two: That just so happened to be my welcome to you, sweet thing. Then again, I bet that's why nobody stays around here long. Heheheheh, pretty sweet, don't you think so? In a sick way, s'what I mean."
Sophia glared at the masked boy while the little one just stood there.
          There was a dumb moment of silence until the tall kid slowly brought the mask off his face. His wide, goggle-like eyes looked down at her with curiosity and his thin smile crippled a little under the weight of mischief his natural expression carried.
   "Hey," he chuckled as he extended his hand towards her. "You hurt?"
Sophia slapped his hand away from her face with such disgust that you would have thought she was more like an old lady than a faint-hearted child.
   "Go away, weirdo! I don't even know you and your first impression stinks! It stinks bad!"
   "Oooh, touchy little pixie, aren't ya'?"
   "What did you just call me?" Sophia scrambled off the icy ground, ready to pick a fight with someone double her height.
     She just wanted to explore around her grandparents' estate, not die from a heart attack at a young age because some random kids felt like scaring her out of her mind; and just to welcome her to the boring old Canzingsvale Wood, a mere little neighborhood consisting of one tiny Renaissance house stuck in a bowl, the surroundings made of nothing but black woodland. The little love had only arrived a few hours beforehand, the concrete-colored clouds not changing for a moment as if they have been taunting her all the way there (which played a small add-in to her mood). It was only her second time visiting the meadow estate, yet strangers such as the gray loony standing before her was the last thing she ever thought of encountering in the mundane little villa.
     "Did you just call me a pixie?"
   "Yup. You know what a pixie is, right? They're small, puny, tiny, miniature—"
   "Stop it with the synonyms! I know what a pixie is! I read a lot of fantasy stuff!" she squealed out loud.
   "Syno-what? Is that what they're called? Wow, ya' learn something every day."
     The boy completely removed the mask to reveal a gray-skinned, pointy-nosed teen with dark, thin, squiggly hair that fell down behind his pointed ears. A strand of green hair streamed down the right side of his angular face and he wore a dark burgundy trench coat that seemed to hang off his shoulders like a long wet towel, showing off just how thin and lanky he truly was. As if his coat was too heavy for his own strength the boy was slouched forward in a way that resembled a crow with a broken spine. Then his teeth – oh god, his teeth – were blunt and with a few jagged, all stuck together like little gray children posing for a crowded school picture; they were displeasing to look at, pretty much.
          Sophia was just a small, plain little dear with flesh made of creamy peaches and large blue eyes to give her the Shirley Temple outward show. Her hair was only inches above her shoulders and shone a whitish blond, unsullied by any ash or tarnishing dirt that recycled through the air of the wood. If you could imagine the cliché shell of a bitter yellow-haired runt then she would be the image, so to speak.
She spoke up as the boy turned around, "Who are you anyways? I've never seen you here before."
   "Oh, yeah. The name's Slawamir Darktrend. Stupid name, right? So call me Darkslaw."
Sophia winced.
   "Darkslaw? That's weird. It sounds like coleslaw."
   "What's so wrong with coleslaw? I think it's pretty zesty. Who are you, pixie? Never seen you around here before. Come from Decembersville?"
   "I'm not a pixie! I'm Sophia Lilbette." There was no reply following after, so she simply mumbled in addition, "from Washington."
     Sophia averted her eyes from Darkslaw to the younger boy who stood afar, defecting from the nasty little intro. He looked nothing like Darkslaw besides his large front teeth and dark-rimmed eyes, but Canzingsvale Wood was infamous for the eyes due to the lack of proper sunlight (because the clouds never ever seemed to bother leaving). The boy was laying down flowers – roses, to be precise – on every grave he walked by.  The little girl went from a maddening leer to a curious glance.
   "And who's he?"
   "You're talking about the kid way over there?" Darkslaw looked over at the small boy who completely ignored them both with his head in the clouds and his kabuki mask thrown into the snow below. "That's my foster brother Lynus. Well, actually, more like I am the foster bro since I'm the pick-up from an alley back in 1990." Darkslaw came in closer to Sophia and whispered, "He's autistic."
     The little girl didn't know how to respond to that but only because she had no idea what autistic meant in the least. The boy in front of her made a gesture with his hand that slid from the top of his head to the bottom of his face, smile huge and murky.
     "He's got a brain scar. Makes him see and feel things. I bet he has his own little world to play around in. As do I, but I highly doubt you care."
   "What?" Sophia immediately snapped out of her loss of thought, wondering what autistic meant in the meantime of the stranger's explanation. "Look, who are you? Some cousin I haven't been told about for a good reason?"
Darkslaw laughed cutely.
   "Sorry to break your heart, but my dad and I were renting the room the owners of this estate put up. We leave tomorrow for LA to make another film; this time on Sin City. Y'know the owners?"
   "They are my grandparents, so yeah."
    "Ah, so you are a rich one. Rich girls from the U.S are totally hard to come by nowadays."
    "Where were you half of your life? Have you ever even been to America? Everybody is very rich and have a lot of money over there," said the girl, placing her hands on her hips with the suspicious look her mother would make if she was ever caught running off too hastily.
    Darkslaw whistled loudly and tossed his kabuki mask aside into the snow, twiddling with his fingers next to give Sophia the impression that he was about to dupe her somehow someway about something or other.
     "Can't say I've spent too much time in the states, pixie. I've spent half my childhood with freaks and cockroach people, not with the red white and blue."
     It was so obvious just by that phrase that the boy's mind was damaged, so the little girl made this known by giving him her classic mordant head tilt, followed by, "'Cockroach people'?"
    "Cockroach people in top hats and hippie specs," said the boy bluntly. "You have got to watch out for them, though. My brother and I got ourselves conned once and we forever feared roaches and Italians after that shocker."
     Just what Sophia needed: something else to add to her list of horrid fears; the new addition being cockroaches (not that she was not scared of them before) and Italians (which never crossed her mind).
     She growled in irritation, "Okay, weirdo—"
     "Darkslaw."
     "I don't care. Where are you from anyway?" she asked candidly. "You don't sound Italian and you are not from here."
     "I didn't say I was Italian but I didn't say I'm Alaskan either. I, my midget pixie darling of die-hard inquisitiveness, am from nowhere."
     Not this again, thought Sophia.
     "Nowhere," she simply repeated after him, annoyed to the point that her voice expressed sheer monotony for the boy's idiocy. "Nowhere."
     "Yeah, nowhere."
     "Nowhere. You are from nowhere."
     "You asked me where I'm from and I am delivering. I am from nowhere."
     "That makes no sense!" the kid barked at the odd teen who was unable to erase his frown no matter how maddened Sophia got. Actually, he looked to be enjoying her riled-up whines. "You can't be from nowhere if you came from somewhere! So where are you from? And don't just say 'nowhere'!"
      Darkslaw nodded his head and giggled with his eyes almost closing, "I'm from a city."
     "There are a hundred cities in the entire world."
     "Okay, you are right. I am sorry. You are correct, Madame Pixie. Accept my humble apologies for I, being the villager I am, am not worthy. But I do happen to be from somewhere and that somewhere is a big, pretty city full of snow; it is kind of like here except the snow is white and clean while we have this stuff. And it has a clock tower, too." Then his smoggy eyes opened just a tad and he leaned in close to the girl (who tried to back away while maintaining her ground). A whisper emerged from between his lips, "Sometimes I think the clock tower talks to me." He giggled with a slight wheeze. "We have our own sun also."
     "Whatever. So where is this?" Sophia interjected meanly, arms crossed.
     "It is nowhere."
     "If it exists then it is somewhere!" There was nothing the girl disliked more at the moment than seeing Darkslaw laugh at her distress. It was like a mind game that he was playing with her and one that she was not appreciating at all.
But then the snap back from sweet-and-sour rambling reality emerged.
   The woods, large and black in pine cities of timberland, surrounded the estate like a circular fence that was shaped like a bowl and the small cemetary just so happened to be settled near them. The forest gave out a short sequence of cracking noises as if something was out there ready to emerge. It was not just a small little noise that a squirrel or a raccoon or a deer would have made on their journey through the woodlands but that noise was something peculiar. It sounded almost like a vibrating collage of wooden crunches; as if a terrifyingly gigantic creature was making its way across the wilderness while trying to be quiet and subtle about it. The noise was almost chilling, no different than the echo of a giant bookshelf that collapsed and crashed into another on the way down. The woods became a dark land of subtle dominos for a temporary amount of time. Of course the cemetary was close to the forest but at a reasonable distance that did not exactly assure whatever was in the woods was going to be heard.
Yet, a band of snapping branches and ruffling bushes was heard clearly.
      Sophia's heart skipped a beat and she spun around to look behind her, almost slipping on the ice under her feet. She instantly let out a small cry, "What was that?"
      Darkslaw was unimpressed by the girl's mild cowardice, but he said a word – or perhaps even a name  -- in a light manner.
     "Chimabell."
        "Chima—?" Sophia couldn't finish her question for Darkslaw pushed her down into the fluffy snow, trying to hide behind a tall tombstone like two soldiers ducking in cover before an assault. They both cowered there but Sophia, as fearful as she felt a mere second back, yelled loudly, "Hey! Get off of me, you psycho!"
          The teen silenced her in a harsh gruff. Silent as the graves with the ignorance of Lynus (who just kept on doing what he was doing), the duo stared attentively at the black woods that lied ahead. Was something going to come out? Was a monster going to burst out of the forest and gobble them all up?
     Wrong. Two big birds, most likely black vultures, left the woods and called out weakly "Skraw! Skraw!" That was it.
   "Aw, they are just dumb birds! Get off!" Sophia budged away from the strange boy with much bother. She came up out of the snow, rubbed the flakes off her coat, and glared down at Darkslaw who was still dumbfounded, on his stomach, and staring into nothingness with an expression of either complete confusion or, surprisingly, unexpected terror.
   "I thought it was something scary like a wolf or something," the girl said, infuriated. "I have only known you for, like, three seconds and you are already making me crazy, do you know that? I don't care if you live with my grandma and grandpa, I don't care if you are from nowhere, I don't—" "Blah, blah, blah…" was all Darkslaw heard.
     He just lied there, drowning out Sophia's rants with his solid, cold nerves; boy, did his nerves have fun hammering something quite unpleasant into his brain.
The two vultures cawed again, hauntingly. They circled and then retreated into the darkness of the woods.
    "Uh, hello?" Sophia whirled her head at him. He did not respond. "Hello—"
BOOM—shaaaw… shaw…. went the gray sky, a few rumbles of thunder finally knocking on the scene's door like an expected but late guest, getting the little girl to flinch instantly and look upward. You could have sworn something was planning to spiral down and snatch her up or something. In a second-long calm down, she looked back at Darkslaw and her pout returned.
    "Hi? Over here, dummy."
   "Wolf?" The boy snapped out of his little reverie, adding a reply to Sophia's whines. "WOLF? Hah! It's freaks you gotta watch out for, 'cause those are the ones that get you!"
   "Yeah," she responded sarcastically; too sarcastic for her age. "I noticed."
She turned around and began to walk towards the exit of the cemetary, on her way to the mansion down the snowy cliff. She had better things to do than hang around with the village idiot. Like watch paint dry.
     She heard the crunching of snow from behind her, so she span around with an air of supreme irritation. Lynus was far away and facing the woods dumbly. His brother was not where he was but his footprints were right behind Sophia. A ghost? Yeah, right. Right?
      Sophia shook her head and turned back towards the exit again only to find Darkslaw in her face. She flinched violently and shoved him aside, "Get away from me, Slawamir!"
   "It's Darkslaw. And hey! Wait! Waitwaitwaitwaitwait!"
   "WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME? JEEZ!"
   "You don't know about the freaks?"
   "The only freak around here is you! Now go away! I'm going home! Goodbye! Jeez!"
Sophia marched down the hillside, out of the little private cemetery.
     "See you inside, pixie!" the boy whistled after her happily, a tad disheartened that she did not bother shouting back. So he watched her leave, a few minutes passing until she was just a little pink dot far away down the meadow.
Lightning covered the sky and a small vibration of thunder sounded.
Darkslaw smiled wide and thin, looking down and hands locking themselves behind his back.
    "'Only freak is you', she says." Another wave of thunder said hello. "Oh, you are quite wrong about that one, pixie."


          Sophia didn't really like Canzingsvale Wood because it was so lonesome what with the dark, scary forests, the grimy weather and loss of contact with the outer world. Her parents just had to leave her alone with her stick-in-the-mud grandparents for her first weeks of vacation. The mansion was huge but it was always so dim and old; nearly everything she touched got a dent on the surface. Her grandfather even called her "Supergirl" just for the heck of it all but it was just due to how unbelievable crappy the ancient house was.
          Indeed her grandparents had hearts of gold but they were a bit too boring for her. They did nothing but pay the bills, set up boring parties where a bunch of old people come around to pinch your cheek and say "Remember me?" over a thousand times, and drink their tea. There was no internet or television in their estate. How Sophia was going to stay alive, I can't really say right now.
As the storm began to brew, Sophia finally made it into the home.
The second the door closed her grandmother looked down at her from the stairway. She had a kind yet curious look upon her.
   "How is the weather outside? I thought I heard thunder," she asked.
   "Yeah," Sophia simply answered. "It's going to rain or whatever."
The girl unzipped her puffy pink jacket and placed it at the bottom of the coat hangar for she couldn't reach the top. She ran up the stairs to where her grandmother stood. They had a small embrace and then Sophia ran past her to her room.
   "How are you feeling, Sophia?" her grandma tried to spark conversation at the last minute.
   "Freaked out."
She closed the door behind her.
          It felt a little cold to shut the door on her grandmother like that, but she didn't like the numbness in her head, so it was too late to turn around and say "Love you."
          She threw herself on her bed and sighed exhaustingly. Rain began to pitter-patter on her large pane. She brought her head up to look upon the window. Thunder sounded again, what a shock.
Sophia let out an inside whimper. God, everything scared her. Everything.
Bugs, dolls, thunder, monsters, the dark; everything scared her. She hated it but it was one of those things you just couldn't control.
There was silence in her room; all silence besides the rain on the windowpane.
Then she sighed even louder.
"There's nothing here," she closed her eyes. "Nothing here."
BOOM!! the sky blasted, and with a shriek the girl snatched the little flashlight right off her bedside desk and flew beneath her covers, switching the light on.