“Stop killing yourself Lucy, stop killing yourself Lucy…”

-

I was ten years old when Lucy Rogers took her own life at the age of thirteen. She slit her wrists in the bathtub and her mother had to break down the door to get to her. She was an only child.

Lucy may have done that to herself, but my older sister Sarah and two of her friends helped drive her to it. Sarah had gone to school with Lucy since they were both five.

My parents had told me that Lucy was “slow”. She didn’t understand that a little teasing was all in good fun.

My parents had an extreme dislike for people with little to no means, and Lucy’s mom was no exception. It was their view that you made your own way in this world and if your life didn’t work out, you had no one to blame but yourself.

“They made their bed, now they get to lie in it.”

I guess that attitude transferred over to my sister. If Lucy hadn’t been “slow” I have a feeling she still would have been picked on because she was dirt poor. I remember Lucy coming to school on Halloween one year, and her costume was a rectangular laundry basket that she wore on her head. She told everyone she was an alien. That was a bad day for her.

When she was in kindergarten, Lucy had lost her father in a car crash that was apparently his fault. Everything she and her mother had was gone because of what he had done and they moved into the worst block of apartments in town. Lucy’s mother worked all the time to try and pull herself out of the hole that her husband had left her in.

Although she worked all the time, Lucy was the center of her universe. Lucy loved her mother. For as much shit as she got at school, she got just as much sugar at home. Unfortunately, no amount of sugar takes away all the shit, and one caring voice is always lost in the middle of a cacophony of torment.

-

Three days after Lucy was put in the ground, my sister and her friends had a sleepover at our house. They camped out in the backyard.

It was nice outside, so all the windows in the house were open. I could hear them laughing about Lucy from my bedroom. If I was hearing them, my parents must have heard them, but they said nothing. It made me sick to my stomach.

It was Friday the thirteenth and they all had the idea of trying to contact Lucy from beyond the grave. They wanted to ask her if she was happy, now that she was wherever suicides ended up.

Angela Carrey had brought a ouija board and CiCi Lawrence had raided her mother’s stash of Bath & Body Works candles and filled a duffle bag with them. They set up a card table in our backyard and as soon as it got dark, they lit all the candles. Within a few minutes, our backyard smelled like lemongrass and chocolate chip cookies. They put four chairs around the card table. My sister brought out a few things from our basement and I watched the three of them from my window on the second floor. I watched them make a life sized dummy.

They used an old ratty nightgown from my mother and some newspapers for stuffing the body. My sister placed a laceless pair of workboots under the nightgown to look like feet and a pair of black leather driving gloves for her hands. They used a paper grocery bag topped with some red yarn for hair as a head. Finally, my sister had copied off a picture of Lucy’s face onto a sheet of paper and taped it to the bag. Lucy was smiling.

They started a seance. I watched them from my bedroom window. They joined hands and fiddled with the ouija board and asked Lucy’s spirit to come into the dummy. They acted as if the whole thing had worked and then they began to taunt the dummy. It was disgusting.

“Stop killing yourself Lucy, stop killing yourself Lucy.”

They made the dummy motion as if it was slitting its own wrists.

“Do you guys think she went to hell?”

“Anybody can go to hell.”

“You’re so bad!”

It went on and on. They held hands again and asked Lucy to say something.

They were quiet for a moment, and then again, they asked her to say something.

There was nothing.

“Come on you moron, say something!”

The doorbell rang.

The girls heard it from outside, and I watched them slowly get to their feet. Their mouths hung open and their eyes were full of fear.

I walked downstairs to the front room and Lucy’s mother was talking to my parents asking them for my sister to apologize. She was drunk. My parents were as kind as people like them knew how to be.

“Lizzy, I think you need to go and sleep it off.”

“No please. I’m giving them a chance, don’t you see?”

“What?”

“They know what they did and I’m giving them a chance to own up to it. I’m giving them a chance to apologize.”

“My daughter has nothing to apologize for.” There was venom in my mother’s voice.

“You saw what they did, didn’t you? Everyone knows exactly what they did to her. They’ve done it for years!”

“I think you’re drunk and you need to get the fuck off of our porch, right now, or we’re calling the police.”

As my father shut the door in the crying woman’s face, my mother told her to go get hammered somewhere else.

My sister and her friends had seen some of it, and after Lucy’s mom left, they ran to the window and stared after her while they smiled. My parents asked them to quit staring and go back outside.

They didn’t listen.

They just stared as the sobbing woman wobbled down the street.

“We conjured the wrong bitch, ladies.”, my sister said. All her friends laughed, and I watched them get up and go back outside, whispering to each other the whole way.

-

I heard my parents later that night complaining about how Lucy’s mother had no one to blame but her own daughter. I heard them say that a woman who drank like that was probably just going to raise another drunk anyway. It’s a hard thing for a ten year old girl, knowing your family are horrible people.

Before I went to bed, I looked back out of my window. My sister and her friends were in sleeping bags positioned around my parents' firepit. The fire was burning bright and I could see their smiles as they laughed and joked. Just a few feet away from them was the card table and four chairs. All the candles were still burning. The dummy was still sitting there, facing toward the fire pit.

They kept me up for a while with all of their chattering until I finally fell asleep in spite of it.

-

In the middle of the night, I woke up to the sound of a thump and then another. I got up to pee and when I walked back into my room, I took a look out of my window. The fire was almost gone but the candles were still burning. The three girls were still lying around the fire, finally silent.

I layed back down and closed my eyes. The wind had picked up outside and it was bringing the smell of the dying fire into my room along with the smell of chocolate chip cookies and something else, something rotten. There was also a sound being carried on the wind. The sound of scratching.

I tilted my head on my pillow and listened. Something was scratching on the side of our house. I thought that maybe a bird was out there, or maybe a cat was stretching itself upward, raking its claws along the siding, but then the sound got closer and closer.

It sounded like it was right outside of my window. There was another sound that accompanied the scratching. It sounded like labored breathing. I was scared. I slowly lowered myself over the side of my bed and crawled underneath it. I couldn’t see my window from under the bed, only the wall just beneath it. The horrible breathing got louder until it sounded like it was about to come into my room. And then there was silence.

I pushed my lips together and stared at the wall just underneath my window. For a moment, there was nothing. I had thought about waking up my parents and telling them I was having a bad dream, but then I noticed a shadow on the floor.

Something was looking into my room from outside.

I held my breath, even though I wanted to scream. I watched the shadow move back and forth on the floor until it finally disappeared. I waited for just a moment and then I quietly moved out from underneath my bed. I was going to go to my parents' room.

I heard a thump and two of my pictures fell from a shelf on my wall, and before I could take another step, there was another thump. It sounded like someone dropping a large rock into a bucket of jello. The whole shelf fell off the wall and it made a loud crash against the floor.

I ran out into the hall and into my parents room, which was right next to mine.I froze in their doorway and I saw it standing there over my mother; the dummy that my sister and her friends had made. The bag with the picture of Lucy turned toward me. Lucy’s eyes had been poked out, but she was still smiling.

It stared at me for a moment and then it started shuffling around my parent’s bed toward me, its laceless work boots leaving muddy prints on my mother’s perfect white carpet. It was dragging a bloody sledgehammer along the floor behind it. My mothers old nightgown was spattered and streaked with red and black.

Both of my parent’s faces were pulp and their bodies were twitching. My mother gurgled.

I screamed and ran back into my room and locked the door. I picked up my phone and dialed 9-1-1. There was a loud crash against my door, and then I heard a cracking voice.

“Stop killing yourself Lucy…”

Another loud crash, and the head of the sledgehammer busted through my door. As the dummy tried to pull it back out, blood trickled off of the sledgehammer and spattered down on the carpet.

“Stop killing yourself Lucy…”

I ran to my window and lowered myself down outside from the windowsill while I heard the door finally give way with one more hit. I could hear the ragged breathing getting closer. I took a breath and let go, and I hit the lawn and heard something pop in one of my ankles.

I got to my feet and looked up. The dummy was looking down at me and then it began to lower itself out of the window. I started screaming and limped my way to the side gate.

As I went by, I could see in the fading light of the fire that my sister and all of her friends were in their sleeping bags with their faces caved in.

I ran as fast as my ankle would let me, screaming all the way. I made it around to the side gate and let myself out. I could hear the sledgehammer dragging along the brick patio.

“Stop killing yourself Lucy…”

I ran two houses down to a neighbor and they let me inside. They said they were going to check on my parents, but I begged them to stay with me and just call the police.

The police were at the home within ten minutes, and my screaming had woken up the entire neighborhood. Everyone was out in the street wondering what was going on, but no one wanted to go anywhere near my house.

Of course the police found the bodies, but they hadn’t found the killer. The dummy was still sitting in the chair. There was nothing alive about it at all. The sledgehammer was never found.

When they asked me to tell them what I had seen, I told them everything. I told them about the dummy, but they didn’t believe me.

I told them that maybe it was Lucy’s mom dressed up as the dummy. I told them that she had been at our house earlier. I told them how my parents had treated her. I told them that my sister and her friends had made Lucy do the bad thing to herself. It had to have been Lucy’s mom.

The detective told me that was not possible. I found out later that Lucy’s mother had been drunk and stumbled into traffic six hours before, just after she had left our home. She had been struck by a car and died at the scene.

-

It’s been twenty years since then. I never got any answers about who killed my family. Some nights, I swear I can still hear that voice and the sounds of scratching on the side of my house.