Elsie

Elsie Fitzgerald didn't cry when her parents died in a car accident. Everyone agreed it would have been better if she had, but Elsie had never been a crier and she didn't shed a single tear.

Elsie watched her parents' caskets being lowered into the ground with a cold, dry-eyed detachment, shielding her black eyes from the sun's glare. The accident that had left Helen and Eric Fitzgerald's car wrapped around a tree with only their mangled remains inside it occurred on a frosty winter's night on a lonely country back road. Elsie alone had walked away from the crash, humming. The police claimed black ice and taking the corner too fast. Elsie claimed otherwise.

It was the shock, people agreed. That was why she hadn't cried, it was too sudden for Elsie too take in. What people didn't realise was that Elsie had never cried in her life and she wasn't going to start just because Helen and Eric were dead. Had the Fitzgeralds not been relatively new in town, perhaps someone would have chanced upon the truth. As it was, the Fitzgeralds had only recently relocated to the unsuspecting town two years ago. The move was because of Elsie.

At the tender age of four, Elsie Fitzgerald forgot herself for the first time. Helen was called to pick her child up from the kindergarten. There'd been an incident on the playground and three other children were sporting scratches and bruises all over their bodies. No one could say for sure how it had happened, but the finger was pointed at Elsie. On arrival, a teacher bearing scratches up her arms told Helen that Elsie had been locked in a room by herself to protect the others from her savagery. Helen found only her daughter humming contentedly to herself in a room that had been torn apart.

"What happened today, honey?" Helen asked on the drive home.

Elsie turned her delicate, cherub's face to her mother, her brown eyes widened innocently. "I wasn't allowed on the swing."

"I meant with the other children, sweetheart," Helen pressed.

"I don't remember." Elsie said simply and turned back to look out the window.

Helen frowned, Elsie wouldn't lie to her about something like that.

Elsie was seven, with a gap-toothed grin and yellow ribbons in her dark hair. Eric watched as Elsie built an elaborate castle in the sand pit with only a broken bucket to help her. A boy not much older than Elsie ran through the sand pit and demolished every child's sand creation. The other children cried. Elsie flattened what remained of her castle, stood up and followed the boy back to the playground. She was playing a game of Naughts & Crosses with another girl nearby, spinning the blocks around when the boy fell from the railing around the top of the slide. A fall plenty long enough for the boy to be seriously injured and require hospitalisation.

Elsie hummed in satisfaction as she spun her 'X' into place and won. Eric shook his head, it was the distance that made his daughter's eyes look black. Elsie didn't remember the boy's fall when Eric questioned her about it later, she only remembered seeing him taken away in the ambulance.

On the day of her death, Felicity Jones had hidden all of Elsie's shoes. Felicity drowned on a school camp when Elsie was nine. She'd been in Elsie's canoe. Elsie was hauled from the lake by the instructor, blinking water from her black eyes. The instructor could have sworn the little girl was humming as she was placed on the shore. Elsie didn't even remember getting in the canoe. Something else did. That was the first death that occurred around Elsie Fitzgerald.

Michael Foster died the year Elsie Fitzgerald started high school. He and his friends had been trying to see who could climb a tree the fastest as Elsie and her friends watched. Michael fell from the top and hit his head on the way down. Michael had tripped Elsie in the school yard earlier that day. Elsie didn't remember the accident. Helen and Eric decided that now was a good time to have their daughter checked out.

The doctor claimed Elsie's memory lapses were a coping mechanism, a way for her to deal with the awful things she'd witnessed. Helen and Eric were relieved to find that there was a logical explanation for Elsie's black outs. Neither saw Elsie's eyes flash black when the doctor mentioned that Elsie had seen a lot of awful things. She was humming when she left the office. The doctor died of a heart attack twelve hours later.

Elsie had her first and only boyfriend at the age of fifteen. Her family agreed that Jeremy Porter was a perfectly nice boy. The relationship lasted nine weeks and ended when Jeremy was hit by a car and pronounced dead at the scene. He'd been hit on his way over to Elsie's house to apologise for standing her up. Proximity was no longer strictly necessary. Elsie was humming along to a song on her iPod when Helen came in to tell her the news. And it was only the lighting in Elsie's room that caused Helen to think that Elsie's brown eyes were darker than usual.

The Fitzgeralds went to pay their respects to the dead boy's family and Elsie attracted a lot of sympathetic glances. Nearly every fatal accident that had occurred in the town had a link to Elsie Fitzgerald. Helen and Eric thought it would be best if they started fresh in a new town. So the Fitzgeralds moved and the deaths around Elsie picked up as she adjusted.

A teacher who'd wrongfully accused Elsie of cheating was cleaning his roof's gutters when a sixteen year old Elsie turned onto an adjoining street. He fell from the ladder and caught his head on the edge of the front step. The whole school was invited to attend the funeral.

When Elsie was seventeen, two girls who'd become Elsie's personal tormentors fell down three flights of stairs outside Elsie's classroom. Both died later in the hospital. Elsie didn't remember going to class that day.

Not long after Elsie's eighteenth birthday, Eric was unable to dismiss the accidents that always seemed to happen around his daughter as merely accidents. Eric had looked into the 'accidents' more closely and found that every child who'd died or been injured had wronged Elsie not long before their 'accident'. The amnesia, the humming and Elsie's eyes changing colour were all investigated. All pointed to demonic possession.

"That's ridiculous!" Helen exclaimed. "There's no such thing as demons."

Eric pulled at the threads of his wife's certainty until she was forced to conclude that he was right. Just because Elsie didn't remember didn't mean that nothing else did. They agreed, and decided an exorcism was the next logical step. Eric had contacted a local priest who was happy to help out. No, we won't tell Elsie what we're doing, we'll only scare her, was their next agreement.

Elsie Fitzgerald sat in the room next door, hearing her parents call her 'demon' and discuss the best way to remove it. No.

Helen put her head around Elsie's door. "We're heading out, for about an hour. You want to come?"

Elsie nodded. Perfect. She climbed into the backseat of her parents car. Elsie blinked and her eyes went black. Helen and Eric didn't notice.

The Fitzgeralds never reached their destination, the house of the priest who would have performed the exorcism. Elsie determined that, or at least the thing possessing her did. Elsie's eyes stayed black after that, her once brown irises nothing but a distant memory. In fact, Elsie herself had ceased to exist the moment her parents decided she wasn't fully human.

In the end, no one ever exorcised Elsie Fitzgerald. The demon possessing her made sure of that.