Red ribbons, p.1
Red Ribbons, page 1
RED RIBBONS
Vanessa K. Eccles
Bound & Brewed Books
P.O. Box 4717
Columbus, GA 31914
vanessakeccles.com
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Copyright © 2017 by Vanessa K. Eccles, LLC
All rights reserved.
Cover Design by Carrie Butler at Forward Authority.
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No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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This book is fiction. All events, characters, names, and places are a product of the author’s imagination.
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ISBN (ebook): 978-0-9861345-4-8
ISBN (paperback): 978-0-9861345-5-5
ISBN (harback): 978-0-9861345-6-2
ISBN (audio): 978-0-9861345-7-9
To the curious ones
Contents
Introduction
1. The Curious Orphan
2. Impossible Thing #1
3. Red Ribbons
4. Not So Sweet Sleep
5. There’s a Dragon in My Bed
6. First Day Woes
7. Hide and Go Sneak
8. Da-Da-dA-Da-Doom-Doom
9. House of Gloom
10. Doll Dreaming
11. The Gift
12. Mystery Revealed
13. Garden Secrets
14. Somewhere Dark
15. Nervous Chatter
16. Nightmare #3
17. Epic Journey
18. SOS Lilliana
19. The Reaping
20. Stars at Midnight
21. Row Your Boat Azure
22. Decisions
23. The Witch’s Lair
24. The Bodies Underneath
25. Cuckoo
26. Broken
27. Reunited
And then…
Dearest Reader
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Vanessa K. Eccles
The author has prepared a short video for readers. Watch to find out what inspired RED RIBBONS.
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Watch Video
1
The Curious Orphan
Claribel was an odd girl by all accounts; one whom dreamed dreams and found even the most common of things curious. It was this curiosity that landed her in the most bizarre of places, facing the most terrifying monsters even her vivid imagination couldn't conjure.
And it all began on a night like this.
A night like any other.
She dreamed in her tiny bed, under a mountain of cartoon covers. Of course, she was too old for blankets with cartoons, but telling that to her foster parents didn't go over so well. They weren't about to buy new bedding every time another child came into their home. Instead, they went for something altogether kiddy and hoped for young children to be placed with them, ones with softer, more malleable minds.
Claribel was anything but easily persuaded. She had an iron will, completely unmovable at times. When she awoke from another of her bad dreams, she threw off the cartoons and fled to the window where a dreamcatcher hung. She slung it off its hook and across the room. Then she opened the window and let the early morning air spill into the room. Her blonde hair danced in the wind.
"I hate dreams," she mumbled to herself.
After recovering from her nightmare, she dressed, brushed the moss off her teeth, and went into the kitchen. Her foster mother had already found the television and had glued herself to the morning news. Coffee dripped into a stained pot.
Drip. Drop.
Claribel proceeded to pour herself fruity loops. She sniffed the carton of milk before pouring it into the bowl and turned her nose up. It wasn't unlike her foster mother to let the milk expire, but from experience, Claribel realized that the carton had at least two more days before it needed to be thrown out.
"What's for breakfast?" her foster father called out from the hall. Her foster mother laughed to herself.
"What she's having," she answered, motioning to Claribel.
"Busy day today, Flower?" he asked while pouring his own cereal and sniffing the carton as she had.
"Not particularly," she said.
Flower was his favorite pet name for her. He started it the first day Claribel came to her new parents' tiny city apartment. He saw her pick a dandelion from the crevice of the sidewalk outside the building and place it into a blue box she had of keepsakes. He assumed she liked flowers, but she didn't. In fact, Claribel didn't like most things other little girls liked. She did, however, like stubborn weeds that grew wherever they could plant themselves.
"Good. Busy days are for the birds. Life is about lazy moments, rocking back and forth in peaceful scenes. Letting the wind blow you from left to right. Flowing with the flow," he said with a wide smile.
Claribel shrugged, not knowing exactly what he meant. She rarely understood him. His words were like jigsaw puzzles, and Claribel didn't like puzzles at all.
"Gotta run. Don't want to miss the bus." Claribel snatched her backpack and headed out the door. She took the stairs down, tripping in her too big Converses. They were half price, or so was her foster mother's excuse for not buying the right size.
"Fussyfoot," she called out in frustration. She examined her knee. A tiny bit of blood oozed from beneath her jeans. "Perfect."
By the time she made it to the bus stop, she was out of breath and patience. It wasn't even 8 am and she was already dreading the day. She had just a brief second to catch her breath before the bus came to a stop.
She sat in her usual spot—the very first seat behind the driver—aka the uncool zone.
"What happened to you?" a pretty girl—library type—asked while pointing to Claribel’s knee.
"I beat up a monster on the way down the stairs," she retorted.
The girl rolled her eyes, batted thick eyelashes, and turned away. Claribel almost felt bad for being sarcastic. Maybe the girl was just trying to be nice, but she didn't think so. Very few people were nice to Claribel, so she watched enviously as the girl’s perfect curls bounced at every bump.
Claribel twisted her own hair and knotted it into a ponytail.
School went on like school does. Mostly uneventful, with the occasional obnoxious boy making farting noises or the rarely tolerated popping of bras. That is, until lunch. She sat alone at the tail end of the nerd table. Claribel wasn’t exceptionally smart, so the nerds wouldn't accept her. Most would say there was nothing particularly beautiful about her either, so the pretty people rejected her too.
And in middle school, if you don't fit, you don't exist.
"Hello," a sweet voice said from behind. She almost didn't turn to see who it was, convinced that surely no one would be speaking to her. But the voice was so close, and no one else was sitting near her.
She turned to see a woman wearing a feather hat approaching her. The slender woman then took a seat at the table, folded her arms across her chest, and smiled a strange smile at Claribel, who had just taken a bite out of her apple.
"Hi," Claribel said, trying to pull a wayward apple skin from her teeth.
"Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Helen Thomas. Pleased to meet you." The woman held out a gloved hand to shake.
"Umm... you too?" Claribel said as more of a question than anything else and gave the lady’s hand a quick jerk.
Claribel had never seen anyone dressed like this woman before. Her hair hung in big pinned curls under a black hat with a wide white feather sticking out. She wore a straight dress down to her knees, complete with white stockings and heeled black shoes. She could have stepped out of an old movie, Claribel thought.
"I have a proposition for you," the woman said in a smooth, soft voice that made Claribel want to listen. "We've been watching you, my sister and I, and think that you'd be a perfect fit for a school across town. We run it, you see, and it's perfect for girls like you."
"What do you mean girls like me?"
"Girls who..." she hesitated, "Girls who are having trouble adjusting with other children." She smiled.
Claribel chewed on that thought and the core of her apple for a minute. Had she really been having trouble adjusting? She looked around and noticed the distance between her and the other kids and remembered her snarky conversation with the one person who actually talked to her that day. She put the spent apple back on her tray and met the woman's piercing green eyes.
"What's it like?"
"It's a beautiful place where we teach children how to embrace their differences and their own unique gifts."
"What do I need to do to get in?" Claribel asked, her interest now piqued.
"Oh." The woman shooed the question with her hand. "It's nothing, really. There's just a tiny little test. That's all."
"What kind of a test? I'm really bad at math," Claribel admitted.
"Oh, nothing like that. It's simple, really. If you're truly interested, I'll set it up with the school."
Claribel nodded. The woman stood up, clapped her gloved hands, as if excited by the potential of another student, and walked away. Her heels click-clacking all the way out of the lunchroom.
Claribel's name was called over the intercom while the class was in the middle of dissecting a frog. A happy excuse to miss this, Claribel thought.
She made her way to the office, as instructed, and was greeted by the school's p rincipal.
"Afternoon, Claribel." His voice shook like he was nervous.
The woman, Helen, rested her hand on his shoulder as if the two were long-time friends. This made Claribel feel better. She may look like a crazy lady, but the school must be legitimate if Principal Barnes knew about it.
"Ms. Thomas would like to administer a test to you. It's for a gifted program. She feels..." Ms. Thomas, or Helen, squeezed his shoulder a little tighter and looked at him with pursed lips. "Er... we feel that you would be a perfect candidate."
Gifted? Claribel pondered on the word. She had never been considered gifted at anything. She didn't have any talents she was aware of, but Helen had said that she and her sister had been watching her. What had they seen in her that made them think she was gifted?
Claribel, naturally curious, began to feel giddy about the test.
"Let's get on with it, shall we?" she said, ready to face this challenge with hope and determination. After all, this could be the turning of a new leaf, a phrase her social worker used every time she was sent to live with a new family. Claribel never believed her, of course, but now, in this moment, she had hope like she hadn't felt in a long time.
Principal Barnes' protruding belly led the way to a small room attached to the library. He sat her in a sturdy wooden chair at a small table. Then he turned to Ms. Thomas, who placed a black skeleton key on the table in front of her.
"What do I do with this?" Claribel asked after a few minutes since the adults hadn't given her any instructions.
"That, my dear girl, is the test. You show us what is to be done with it." Ms. Thomas smiled.
Principal Barnes wiped sweat from his brow, glanced at her nervously, and left the room.
"You can do it, Claribel. Just think on it." Ms. Thomas then shut the heavy oak door with a thud.
Claribel held the key in the palm of her hand. Her heart and hopes sank.
2
Impossible Thing #1
Keys are good for only one thing—unlocking. But what? Claribel thought. She tried to force the key through the room's door to no avail.
“This is stupid,” she thought aloud. This isn't a test. It's torture. She looked down at her watch. The minute hand crept ever so slowly around, testing her patience with every tick.
She squeezed it, wiggled it, smelled it, and finally threw the key across the room in frustration.
"Ow," she thought she heard someone say.
She dismissed the thought, as no one was in the room with her, and she certainly didn't say it.
Then a low huff followed.
Slowly, Claribel walked to the corner, where the key lay, wiped away an empty spider's web, and picked up the key. She examined it closely again. That's when she noticed that the key had tiny, almost microscopic hinges at its joints. She tried to move them, but they just wouldn't go.
“Come on,” she whispered.
She thought about how much she'd like to go to a special school, escape this one with its bullies, and she knew she had to figure this out.
She'd seen on Wizard of Oz the tin man get oiled. The key was metal, and so was he, so maybe all it needed was a little oil. But where would she get oil? She wasn't allowed to leave the room, she didn't think. She pondered for a second and reached deep into her pocket and pulled out a small tube of chapstick. She wiped the paste ever so methodically on all the tiny joints.
She held her breath and pushed fairly hard on the first one.
Before long, she was moving them all, watching the key take shape into something else. It was like a small, weird little Rubik’s cube. Inside each joint, there was a letter. At first, the key turned into something unrecognizable. She had a feeling she must have gotten the order wrong, so she tried again, following the letters in an attempt to spell some unknown word. It took her a while of experimenting, but finally, she moved the hinges in an order that spelled G-O-D-M-O-T-H-E-R.
But nothing happened. She placed it on the table, seeing that it now resembled a tiny person with wings. She wondered if this was the test. Had she passed? When were they coming back? Should she peek outside and grab them? She thought about it, but decided against it since that meant she'd have to return to class sooner. Who wants that?
So she stared at the object for another minute or so.
Until.
It spoke.
"Well, it sure took you long enough," the tiny key-person said. It snapped its itty-bitty fingers and suddenly became animated. Its face grew round and pink. Its wings began to flutter, and its now plump body moved more fluid and less stiff.
"Umm." Claribel was speechless.
"I thought they'd never find you. Let me have a look at you." The little woman flew around Claribel, almost in slow motion. She held her hand to her chin and looked somewhat displeased. "You're not what I imagined."
"Neither are you," Claribel whispered, still amazed by what she saw.
"I suppose you'll have to do, though. We don't get to choose our family, now do we?" The woman landed back on the table and smiled.
"What are you?"
"Why—I’m your fairy godmother. Name's Vedette, but you can call me Veddie."
"That's an unusual name. Fairy godmother? There's no such thing," Claribel said as everything began to settle into the crevices of her mind.
"And there's no such thing as sassy little girls with big almost black eyes, blonde knotted hair, and magic fingers that bring skeleton keys to life, and yet I'm staring at one," the fairy godmother, or Veddie as she liked to be called, said sarcastically.
"Humph." Claribel chewed on her bottom lip, trying to make sense of what she saw. Then Veddie did something else to confuse her further.
"I feel plumb naked." She wiggled her hips from side to side. Claribel almost laughed at the tiny godmother's dance but held it in. A little wand then appeared in thin air and floated into Veddie's hands. "Yes, this simply will not do." She snapped the wand with her wrist, and a big, flowing gown engulfed the tiny woman. "Now I look like a proper woman. Well, almost." She then collapsed the wand into an even smaller object, twisted its tip, and smeared pink lipstick across her thin lips. "There." She smiled, finally satisfied.
"Wow." Claribel stared amazingly.
"I see you've passed the test," Ms. Helen said reentering the room. “Keys are just keys until their child unlocks them.”
"Now what?" Principal Barnes asked with a shakiness in his voice.
"Now she joins us and the other dear ones at Waywardly Hall."
Claribel cringed at the sound of that. It didn't sound like a very pleasant place.
"I'm not so sure..." she started to say.
"You will love it!" Helen interrupted.
"Yes! You've never seen anything like it. You'll fit in perfectly," Veddie chimed in.
She glanced down at her fairy godmother, then to Helen's soft smile, and back again to Veddie. She realized she was staring at something impossible. The first impossible thing she had ever seen. Maybe, just maybe, Veddie was right. What if Claribel had finally found a place where she could fit in with the other kids? What if Waywardly Hall was merely an opportunity to experience more impossible things?
"What about my foster parents?" Claribel asked, still somewhat holding onto her practical nature.
"Don't you worry about that. We'll take care of everything. Won't we, Principal Barnes?" Ms. Helen said with a grin. Principal Barnes nodded his head and left the room.
Claribel was then sent back to finish the rest of the day and was to meet Ms. Helen in the carpool line. She said she'd be driving a big black car. When Claribel asked what kind of car, she was told that she couldn't miss it.
