Page 170 of Once Upon a Fable

Wes was sick.

I was not.

They would do the right thing and leave.

By the time I returned to the mansion, I couldn’t fucking stand up.

It was empty.

Silent.

Too silent.

My guts were a mess. My heart howled for their disappearance. My loneliness was a crushing, pulverizing madness.

Things that were already fractured inside me splintered a little more.

I could feel it happening.

A fissure in my psyche. A crack in my memories.

For three days, I swam in insurmountable pain.

I channeled that pain into energy that enabled me to dig a mass grave on the boundary of the forest. I’d wanted it to be farther away from the house. I’d tossed around the idea of a mass cremation.

Neither were viable for multiple reasons.

Whenever my heart howled for my family, I’d grab a pair of decaying ankles and drag a Fable guest down the stairs, out of the house, through the gardens, and into the communal grave.

By night, I didn’t sleep.

Their ghosts haunted me until my throat choked with blood from my screams.

By day, I existed in a repetitive cycle of dragging bodies, burying cadavers, and dealing with the stench of death in the noonday sun.

And by the time Storymaker and his guests were jumbled together and covered in mountains of earth, I was close to death myself.

My body was nearing critical, yet I couldn’t rest. My mind was creeping closer to a complete shutdown, but I had too many things still to do.

I had to burn Storymaker’s paperwork, but first I had to read them, hoping to find the homes of my family, so I could return them to their true loved ones.

I had to undo all the evil he’d done, so I could somehow, someway,deserve my own salvation.

Unfortunately, the longer I lived at Fables on my own, the more my thoughts twisted and churned. The evil in the house was repugnant, spread by blood, flies, and the unmistakable scent of rot.

Fables had become a crypt.

Because of me.

I was a murderer.

I had their blackened souls on my hands, and that blackness seeped inside me. Molecule by molecule, drop by drop, their filth spread frommy fingers to my wrists and my wrists to my arms. Inching through my bloodstream, coating my lungs, my heart, my bones until it reached my mind.

Until it slipped into my skull and claimed me.

You’re as bad as them.

You’re evil.