Chapter Six

The Birth of Liliana Watson

1924

 

Seventy-One Years Later…

 

The year was 1924 in the small town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Stockbridge was famously known as the quiet town of Massachusetts, where crime and chaos usually remained nonexistent, unlike its neighboring cities of Boston and Cambridge.

It was a place where families came to raise their children and where the elderly came to relax and retire. The children played on the streets safely at night, with the parents never having to worry about kidnappers or serial killers.

The only unfortunate event that ever happened in this peaceful town was the incident of a German Shepherd chasing after a frightened child for over three blocks, all because he wanted the cracker that was in the young boy’s pocket. It was so unusual and terrifying for the residents that it became branded as the most disruptive incident to have happened in the past seventy-one years.

Other than that, Stockbridge remained a sleepy town that many people simply drove through for gas or refreshments on their way to Boston or Cambridge.

During the chilling winter morning of April 23, 1924, a woman stared out her bedroom window, observing the sprinkling of beautiful snow on the ground while holding a steaming hot cup of coffee. She gently placed her hand on her abdomen, feeling the kick of a baby that was due any minute. Her contractions had grown closer and closer together while her tolerance for pain had gone slimmer and slimmer.

Unbearable agony continued to shoot up her back, causing her to lie down on her bed. This was her seventh pregnancy, and though she knew what to expect, she never imagined the lengths of excruciating discomfort that came with it.

After several minutes, the pain increased, encircling her body as if a venomous snake was grappling her. Tears pooled under her eyes as her voice strained while calling out to her husband. Upon hearing her cries, he instantly ran into their bedroom, just to find his wife lying on top of bloody sheets.

“She’s coming, William. She’s coming. Call the midwife!” Esmeralda cried out as she continued to scream in agony.

William hurriedly made his way out the door and bustled out into the cold air of the April morning. It didn’t take him long to arrive with the midwife beside him. Esmeralda continued to pant and struggle through the pain. Her screams of distress were so piercing that her cries could be heard through the walls of the old Victorian home.

“Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Watson. Meet your healthy baby girl. What shall you call her?” The old midwife placed the baby in Esmeralda’s arms.

“She’s beautiful.” Esmeralda looked over at William as he sat down by her side. “Her face is so lovely and pure. We shall call her Liliana, or Lily, for short.”

However, Liliana Watson was no ordinary child. There was something unique in her that no other children in the surrounding neighborhoods possessed.

She was born with a very rare genetic disorder that caused her pupils to become red as blood. Her eyes never closed, even when she was sound asleep. Her pupils would just continue to dart from side to side, left to right. In fact, this disorder was so rare that Lily was the first known case of this kind in decades. They called her condition, “Remphelia.”

However, William and Esmeralda didn’t notice this fine detail until several days after she was born. Commonality in this town reigned supreme as those born with genetic defects were immediately branded as outcasts and derelicts. Because of her condition and their fear of being rejected by the town they loved, her parents were forced to reject their daughter and cast her aside. They had to sacrifice their own daughter in order to save themselves and their reputations.

So, one dark, cold night, William and Esmeralda Watson bundled up their little girl, placed her inside a woven basket, and left her on the doorsteps of the infamous Baylor Orphanage.

Baylor Orphanage was known for the horrors that lurked behind its metal doors. It had been rumored that those who entered through the doors would never be seen again. Seventy-one years ago, the orphanage faced horrors of its own, horrors no one really understood.

It had burned into debris and ashes before being rebuilt again by the humanitarian society of Stockbridge. The volunteers found the bones of those who once resided there crushed beneath. Because of this unknown phenomenon, rumors had spread all over town that the orphanage was cursed, with children having nightmares whenever they walked past the building and parents experiencing chills down their spines.

Headmaster Walden finished her last rounds of the night when she heard a faint cry on the other side of the wooden doors.

“Those damn hooligans! If I find them one more time tarnishing the walls of this place, I swear I’ll…” Headmaster Walden stopped in her words as she swung open the front door to find a woven basket sitting peacefully on her doorstep.

She picked it up, unsure of what she would find, until she saw the most adorable baby sleeping inside. The child was wrapped in a velvet blanket; a piece of paper with the name “Liliana Watson” was tucked into a corner beside her, along with a check for a thousand dollars.

Unbeknownst to the headmaster, she took Liliana in as just another unwanted child who was left abandoned. A lot of people moved into this town to start their own families, but many who lived there did not desire children of their own, leaving their unwanted newborns at the orphanage instead.

As Liliana became older, it grew more noticeable that she was a special and unique child, with a large set of eyes that perfectly enhanced her structured cheekbones. She was a child with unexplainable and divine beauty. However, it didn’t take long before she started to stand out among the other orphan children.

At the age of five, several unexplainable events began to occur inside the orphanage. One night, while being tormented by the other children, little Lily began to experience tingling sensations throughout her body as she stared back at the children. Suddenly, the orphans began to float right before the eyes of everyone. As they levitated in the air, Lily felt her body becoming more and more powerful, a feeling she wanted to experience forever.

As Headmaster Walden rounded the rooms for her nightly checks, she noticed a commotion coming from the room Liliana shared with several other children. Upon entering, she was bewildered to see the children floating above their beds. Her knees felt weak as she held onto the sturdy post of a bed beside her for support and balance.

It was then that she saw Liliana sitting calmly on the edge of her own bed, her eyes glowing crimson red. It took all the courage the headmaster had to creep closer toward Lily, her long, skeletal fingers grappling the shoulders of the little girl.

“Lily, Lily, please stop. Whatever you’re doing, please stop,” she spoke with an authoritative voice, the surprise causing Lily to break her trance.

Unfortunately, upon removing her gaze from the other orphans, they each fell, one by one, colliding with the posts upon landing. The sounds of their spines cracking and skulls crushing were heard upon impact. Several children screamed in terror as they walked by and witnessed the murder, huddling in the hallway away from Lily.

However, it wasn’t the death of the children that made Headmaster Walden decide to grab Lily by the wrist and drag her down into the basement of the penitentiary-style orphanage. It was her fear of Lily’s untrained power, and the shame that it would cast on the institution. She had to ensure that any news of this incident would never leave the premise of the building; the safety of the world depended on it.

The headmaster didn’t want to admit it, but she had heard of this horror of a nightmare before; the distant memory she tried so hard to push out of her mind still burned into her skull. She couldn’t tear her mind from what she had seen in the bedroom, still lingering onto the fact that the young child was able to make several human bodies float effortlessly.

Soon, she stopped, opened the glass door of an isolated and solitary room, and pushed the child inside before clicking the lock tightly shut from the outside. The room looked like nothing more than a prison cell, completely barren of all substance other than metal chains and a white marble floor, completely surrounded by glass walls. Liliana Watson was all alone.

Suspecting that Liliana’s ability was caused by Remphelia, a condition similar to what the orphanage had reported in another child nearly a century ago, Walden immediately contacted a lab at Elyson University that specialized in rare neurological diseases. They had been aware of this condition for decades now, spending years designing the pill that could finally suppress it. The pill was made with Naphazoline and designed to turn the crimson eyes of Liliana into midnight black, leaving her absolutely powerless.

However, the exact cause of Remphelia and its mechanism were not yet fully researched as it was too rare to study. The pill they created only acted as a suppressant rather than a cure. Trial and error it may have been, but once scientists found a remedy that worked, they decided to mass produce it. Lily was given these pills every morning since that terrifying incident, her psychokinesis never witnessed again. As for the children who saw what happened, Headmaster Walden made sure none of them ever repeated that night to anyone else, convincing them that it was all a horrible nightmare.

***

So, for the next fifteen years, Liliana Watson remained trapped inside her isolated cell, never able to walk through those chained doors. She was fed through a small slit that was barely wide enough to fit a thin plate. Since Lily was a young child when the incident occurred, she had no recollection of what happened that night, as if the memory was completely pushed out of her mind.

Still, she never questioned why she had to live and sleep in the basement of the orphanage while the other children roamed free; she just thought that was the way it was. The darkest moment of her life started to unveil as she continued to experience the feelings of guilt and shame with no ways of repenting, the agony piercing deep inside her mind with each passing day.

***

Day after day, the other children and adolescents would come by her room, sneaking out of the headmaster’s observing eyes. They taunted and teased her for being locked up inside that lonely room while the rest of them were able to socialize and go outside to play on the grounds. They continued to bully her for being different.

Soon, the rumors began to spread outside the walls of the orphanage. Waves of reporters snuck their way inside just to take pictures of the poor girl, tarnishing the reputation of the orphanage even more. They wanted proof for themselves, the dark and opaque tears that flowed from her pale face, as they wouldn’t believe it otherwise. It didn’t take long before Liliana became branded as “Creepy Orphan Lily.”

More and more tragedy continued to happen to Lily that made her life miserable. She began to feel insecure for being different from the other kids. The frustration from being trapped in confinement was eating her up from the inside out, the longing for socialization creeping inside her. She wanted to feel the grass tickle against her feet, the air breeze brush against her skin. But most of all, she wanted to laugh with the other children. Lily missed the feeling of human touch and human connection.

The thoughts of being swaddled and held by Headmaster Walden when she was younger lingered inside her head even though many of those moments were as simple as moving Lily from one crib to another as more influxes of abandoned babies came pouring into the orphanage like a swarm of bees. Despite being minimal, those were the moments she cherished most and longed to experience once again.

For the past fifteen years, the only human touch she had been able to receive was the touch she felt from herself. Even then, those always felt cold and distant. Having been trapped inside that dungeon for so long, with no one to socialize or communicate with, her ability to speak eventually vanished. Her vocals had not been used for so long that they completely shut down, Liliana never hearing the sound of her own voice again.

With no voice and no efficient means of interacting with the rest of the orphanage beyond her glass cell, she had to find alternative ways of communicating. She was forced to cut deep into her skin to access the blood coursing inside her to use as ink on the walls. Often times, she would bleed out more than she had intended, the medics rushing in to resuscitate her while dosing her with more pills.

But even as all the other orphans grimaced in pain while witnessing her lying on the ground, Lily remained emotionless, her emotions so detached that she never expressed any pain, anguish, or sadness.

Damaging her body soon became her only hobby, so much that several guards were brought in to chain her hands together to prevent Lily from further hurting herself.

During those times, with nothing else to do, she would stare out her small window with her forehead pressed against it, imagining her life out on the grounds with the others. They seemed so happy enjoying life, a feeling that she couldn’t remember experiencing. She longed to play outside rather than stare at nothingness, spending her days counting the number of stitches and scars on her pale skin, accepting the fact that her life would remain in solitary confinement forever.