Kaleigh Rae Rosamund

[TW: NSFW TEXT, BODY HORROR, DEATH]

Kaleigh Rae was a perfectly "normal" girl. She had loving parents, a cute boyfriend, and- something that most other normal girls lacked- an extremely comfortable life due to her father's wise investments in the stock market coupled with her mother's job as a successful attorney. Kaleigh was also relatively well-adjusted, nice, and caring. Although she wasn't the prettiest girl in the world with her small, stubby hands and her knobby, knobby knees that jutted out awkwardly from underneath the fabric her tights, she still held her head up high in confidence. She and her family were practically perfect in every way; a spotless, all-American family.

But then something began to call out to her in her sleep.

"Help me," it begged.

"But how?", Kaleigh asked. "Who are you? Where are you?"

The dreams would always end there without answers, and it always unnerved the girl to no end. However, the dreams only grew more and more cryptic as time went on.

She began dreaming of trees, rain, a dominating fog-

A village of monsters.

When she learnt that her family was suddenly moving to a town called 'Ville Monstre', she nearly threw up. Not only from the prospect of leaving her childhood home and friends behind, but because she had been dreaming about the place for weeks.

She knew better, but she choked down her bile and tried her best to chalk it up to a simple coincidence.

After many tearful goodbyes from her friends and her boyfriend on her last day of school in Peachtree City, her family left to the small town of Ville Monstre.

From there, to her surprise, things were beginning to look up.

The kids at school were nice, the town was charming enough, and the strange dreams seemed to have vanished. She still even had her friends from home contacting her on social media, and she was still with her boyfriend, albeit in a now long-distance relationship. Sure, Kaleigh had grown a little more introverted with the move, but her parents figured that she just needed time to readjust.

And Kaleigh was readjusting. She was readjusting very well, actually.

That is, until an eerily familiar rainy day with a certain oppressive fog.

Kaleigh was walking to school that day when something caught her eye on the ground- In the gutter to be more exact.

It was a beautiful necklace with a pale green gem. It was somewhat dull with age and it had mud sloshed all over it, but what else would one expect from a necklace found in a gutter?

The teen was immediately drawn to it, and without thinking about it, stuffed it into her backpack.

"Thank you," something echoed in the back of her mind, sending a shiver down her spine. She soon ducked away to the girls' bathroom and cleaned the necklace, taking care to rub out even the dirt around the edges with her fingers. It was strangely soothing, and it felt as if the necklace was silently praising her for cleaning it so well. She liked being praised. She liked being called a 'good girl'. She was a good girl! Wait...

She held her head for a moment, looking down at the necklace on the edge of the sink. She blinked once, twice, and then carefully lifted it up by the chain.

Kaleigh put the necklace on.

Things went downhill after that.

Kaleigh began to isolate herself from the world. She stopped talking to her friends back in her hometown, going as far as completely ignoring her boyfriend of 2 years. Her caring disposition also began to slowly fade, replaced by apathy towards anything but the necklace. She didn't even care when her boyfriend broke up with her over text instead of facetiming her. He said she had changed too much for him, that something was wrong and she was scaring him. Oh well.

At least she still had that necklace, that omen, that jinx- Though she'd never call it any of those things. She'd call it precious, beautiful- anything but those things.

She soon started to hear things during the day when she had it around her neck. It started out as unintelligible whispers. Occasionally, she'd catch a word here and there, but it was always gibberish. Over time, though, she started to make out more and more from the whispering.

It was during a test at school when she heard the first complete sentence.

"Who would want those man hands on them?"

Kaleigh looked up from her paper and around the room in shock. Everyone else had their head down and either writing, doodling in boredom, sleeping, or just staring at the paper in restrained panic. When the teacher shot her a stern look, she quickly put pencil back to paper.

"Shh, not too loud, or she'll cut us with her knees," someone laughed in her ear.

As much as she tried to keep herself from looking back up from her paper, she glanced upwards for a moment. After looking back down, she kept an ear out for any other jeers.

"Didn't her boyfriend just break up with her?"

The tip of her pencil broke against the paper.

"Yeah, but at least she doesn't have to do a balancing act whenever she sucks his-"

Despite her initial apathy to the situation with her ex, Kaleigh couldn't help herself from slamming her desk and bolting up out of her seat.

"SHUT UP!" she yelled. "SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP-" 

When she finally realized she was practically screaming, everyone was staring at her in surprise at the very least, and in horror at the most.

Kaleigh was sent home early that day.

Voices plagued her from the car ride home to the rest of her evening, right up until she took the necklace off to shower. They seemed to hush as soon as the metal chain left her fingertips, but, little did she know, things were about to get much worse.

She hadn't noticed the apparent bruising on her knuckles until she was squeezing out shampoo onto her palm. She figured it was from her slamming her hands on the desk earlier that day, but when the bruises began to grow and change before her eyes, she knew better. They spread down her hands, to her arms, all the way up to her shoulders and neck-

Her parents soon found her on the floor of the still-running shower screaming and crying about bruises they couldn't see. She was desperately trying to show her parents the shifting bruises, but no matter what she did, they couldn't see them.

Once her mother helped her get dressed, her father brought in her necklace.

"You forgot this, sweetie," he said in his best comforting voice, laying it down on her dresser. Kaleigh cringed at how careless he was with the piece of jewelry, but said nothing other than a small "thank you".

Only when Kaleigh put the necklace back on after her parents left her did the bruises vanish from her sight. Once more she was soothed and 'praised' by the necklace. She lovingly stroked her finger against the diopside wedged into the metal frame to thank it. She then silently promised it that she'd never let anyone handle it as carelessly as her father did ever again.

This led to a steadily-growing paranoia. It grew so intense in such a short time (a period of weeks, even) that a simple compliment on the necklace would earn someone the cold shoulder.

Her classmates grew scared of her, and her teachers uneasy. There was just something off about this girl and her necklace, now. The only ones that weren't unnerved by her were her own parents, who were more worried about their daughter than anything as she withered away in front of them.

It wasn't long until the stress of being hypervigilant about the necklace began to take its toll on her.

Her hair began falling out in clumps, reducing her once thick and luxurious locks into a thin mass. She even began to lose weight rapidly, too sick from stress to eat properly. She was bordering on a stay at the hospital before her parents finally asked her what was the matter.

First, they thought it was drugs, as there are always drugs in small towns like these, but she wasn't losing teeth or acting overly strange or wild other than her apparent obsession with having the necklace on her person and her new heightened stress. Their second thought was some kind of eating disorder. Sure, she wasn't being overly particular with her food, but she wasn't eating properly anymore. Maybe it was even the beginnings of paranoid schizophrenia?

She soon grew tired of overhearing their assumptions.

All she needed was her necklace, her most cherished possession now, and to be left alone. 

Kaleigh was thinking over exactly that one night after dinner, curled up in her bed with her hand on the necklace.

"I can help you get what you want," a voice startled her.

She paused for a moment before replying quietly to the air:

"You can?"

"Of course, my child," the voice said. Kaleigh felt a warmth in the gem as the voice continued speaking, "Just go to the dining room and we'll show you how."

"...Okay."

With that, she slowly got out of bed and crept out through the hallway, out to the living room, and peeked through the entrance to the dining room. Mr. and Mrs. Rosamund were talking in hushed tones at the table, presumably about their ailing daughter. The ceiling fan above their heads was running on high. The Rosamund family did like their house cold, after all.

They didn't notice her at all.

"Look up, my child, and you will find your answer."

Confused, Kaleigh looked up at the dining room ceiling from her spot in the entryway. What was she supposed to do now?

As if listening to her thoughts, the voice chuckled, "What you need to do now to get what you desire is to simply imagine something happening to that ceiling fan up there. Anything, child."

Almost immediately, the thought of the screws loosening entered Kaleigh's head.

"Concentrate."

Mr. and Mrs. Rosamund soon looked up when they heard the squeaking of the screws that once held the fan in place.

The screws fell first, one by one.

Mr. Rosamund looked at his wife in horror, and Mrs. Rosamund looked at her husband in terror.

The fan fell onto the small table, taking the wiring and part of the ceiling with it.

And thus, Kaleigh had her wish of loneliness granted.

She cried, yes, but only for a short while. The voice soothed her, told her that she could do so much more without those miserable people in her life. Didn't she see how careless they were? How they only started worrying about her when it was too late? Ingrates.

It also told her how she could do this to others, those who were ungrateful for their lot in life.

Together, it and Kaleigh would clean up this world.

"Do we have a deal?", it asked.

"Yes," Kaleigh replied.

"When do we start?"

Kaleigh Rae Rosamund used to be a charming, outgoing, and high spirited young lady. Nowadays, she's apathetic, cold, and paranoid to the point where her body has began to wither away. She now only uses what's left of her looks to make people feel bad enough for her to let her in to stay so she can observe them. She is still confident in herself, but her ego has gotten so inflated from her new "power" from the cursed necklace that, if she deems someone "ungrateful" or "impure", she is the judge, jury, and executioner.

When not tending to her necklace and its needs, she enjoys playing with children, buying new clothes with what's left of her parents' money, and spending time by herself to think.