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  The Glass Mask

  Monsters Lurk Beneath

  E.L. DuBois

  THE GLASS MASK: Monsters Lurk Beneath

  Copyright © 2018 E.L. DuBois

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  www.eldubois.com

  Copy Editing, Cover Design and Formatting

  by The Book Khaleesi

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  Once Upon A Time...

  Pride, greed, envy, vanity

  Chapter One

  Lust, diligence, patience, kindness, humility

  Chapter Two

  A Slip

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  A prison with no bars...

  Chapter 5

  There is no Camelot…

  Chapter 6

  Something wicked this way comes…

  Chapter 7

  My, what big teeth you have…

  Chapter 8

  Not your Mamma’s fairy-tale...

  Chapter 9

  Along came a spider who sat down beside her…

  Chapter 10

  Huff and puff and blow the house down…

  Chapter 11

  All the King’s horses, and all the King’s men, couldn’t put Beauty back together again…

  Chapter 12

  Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast…

  Chapter 13

  Lift your head, Beauty. If not, the crown falls…

  Chapter 14

  A dream is a wish the heart makes... A nightmare is the remnant of a broken soul…

  Chapter 15

  I knew who I was this morning... But I have changed a few times since then

  Chapter 16

  When you can’t look on the bright side, I will sit with you in the dark…

  Chapter 17

  It would be so nice if something would make sense for a change...

  Chapter 18

  Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it...

  Chapter 19

  Take Snow White out into the woods and kill her. As proof that she is dead, bring me her heart...

  Chapter 20

  There are far better things ahead than any we leave behind...

  Chapter 21

  Would you like an adventure now or shall we have our tea first?

  Chapter 22

  You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream...

  Chapter 23

  Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end?

  Chapter 24

  She dreamed impossible dreams, followed her heart and created her own little fairy-tale…

  Chapter 25

  If you keep on believing, the dreams that you wish will come true... NOT!

  Chapter 26

  I’m going to write myself into a fairy-tale. I desperately need a happy ending.

  Chapter 27

  There’s no place like home…

  Chapter 28

  Make a fairy-tale and go live in it...

  Chapter 29

  And just like, her heart began to beat...

  Chapter 30

  Down, down, down the Rabbit Hole. Princesses, passion, and more issues than Vogue…

  Chapter 31

  If you want a fairy-tale life, you have to make it yourself...

  Chapter 32

  She looked so good In Love...

  Chapter 33

  It’s not all smooth sailing from here...

  Chapter 34

  She had it coming…

  Chapter 35

  No peace for the wicked…

  Chapter 36

  A Knight’s Tale…

  Chapter 37

  HELL…

  Chapter 39

  There is no fairy-tale life…

  Chapter 39

  A New House of Horrors

  Chapter 40

  Can I get a witness?

  Chapter 41

  Home is where the heart is…

  Chapter 42

  Divorcing a Monster, Custody, and Stalking 101…

  Epilogue

  Happily Ever After…

  About the Author

  For Skylar

  ~ * ~

  To all those who have endured, may you never be silenced.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to my amazing husband, beautiful daughter, and wonderful parents. Without your love and support, this would not have been possible. Thank you for never giving up on this lost soul.

  To my little brother, the true writer, and my first partner in crime. I love you. You have been there encouraging me from the very beginning. I will always believe in your dreams and be your number one fan. Never give up. Your talent is a gift to this world.

  Author’s Note

  Sins, sins, sins

  she says with a grin

  Vanity, adultery, lust, and greed

  Lies, beautiful lies are all she may need

  A fast track to Hell on path of her making

  It will take every ounce of will to survive without breaking

  By society’s standards, I have sinned more than my fair share. But has my suffering and penance been enough to redeem myself? If there is indeed something more beyond this life, where will I end up? These are the thoughts that resonate through my mind. Morbid thoughts, thoughts laced with an anxiety that ways upon my chest. Thoughts that should not be plaguing me anymore... but they do. As I sit at the second-hand, round, antique wooden table, snuggled in a corner of the modest home where I find solace, my mind retreats to darker times. It is during mornings like this, when the house is quiet, that I cannot stop my thoughts from drifting to the path I have taken.

  My hands are wrapped tightly around my favorite coffee mug. The one that says, Worlds Greatest Mom in bold, pink lettering. The briefest of smiles play across the naturally turned down corners of my lips, as I fondly remember the day my truest joy gave me the cup. I watch as the creamy, latte-colored liquid swirls and goes cold.

  My thoughts turn even darker to the days before and after my truest joy came into my life. A sigh escapes my lips as I run one finger around the rim, down the side of the cup, bringing it to rest along the wood grain of the table. I know that like me, this table has seen too much. Felt too much. Survived too much.

  I am only thirty-seven, that is nothing in age... but I feel seventy-three as I think about the past ten years of my life. I am so tired, more tired than I should be for my age. A bone-deep tiredness resonates to my very soul.

  The kind of tired that makes a person want to give up.

  The kind of tired that makes me doubt the happiness I now have and worry of losing every day... because I’m not worthy.

  The kind of tired rooted in despair and insecurity.

  The kind of tired only the truly broken would understand.

  The kind that makes a person want to crawl into a hole somewhere – curl into a ball and disappear forever.

  I cannot, however, give in to this tiredness.

  I have a family that depends on me. Loved ones that need my strength and support.

  S
o... I carry on. Always ready to cater to the ones that need me. Care for the sick, be the strength, and smile always, even when it feels like I’m dying inside.

  Smile always. That is the motto of this sinner.

  When I think of the person I was, it’s like I am telling someone else’s story. Confessing someone else’s sins.

  The most common and belittling questions a person can be asked when it becomes known that they were a victim of domestic abuse is:

  “Why didn’t you just leave?”

  “How could you stay?”

  or “Why didn’t you say something?”

  The answer, much like life, is both simple and complex.

  Simple version: “Because I couldn’t leave, nor could I go. And the silence... it was and still is, deafening.” The complex version is one even I myself don’t understand.

  I live with the guilt every day, that my silence and inability to speak out has allowed a monster to walk freely among us. That is a heavy burden to bear, one that I will never be able to escape. What exactly do I say to the next victim? “Oh, so sorry I was a coward and kept quiet. I hope my apology heals all the damage he has done.”

  I know I am not responsible for his actions, but the guilt, damn it, can be all-consuming. Most days, I walk around feeling like I opened Pandora’s Box. Satan slithered out and after the proverbial, “Oh Shit!” I was like, “My Bad,” right before I ran for the hills, praying no one noticed it was I who had unleashed the beast.

  Seriously, folks, I am that dramatic, and this is how I feel. My cowardice could cost someone else their life. This is the shit that plagues me. FYI, I didn’t always have a foul mouth. One acquires these traits in dire situations. So... I earned it.

  Also, I have the attention span of a squirrel. Again, I was not always this way, but I am going to assume it is due to actual brain damage.

  With that said, back to the topic. Complex answer... right. I don’t have a definite one. All I have is personal insight to years of abuse, and a will to survive. Which I managed to do, just barely.

  I am trying to understand it all, and honestly, maybe my brain will never make sense of it, but part of the conclusion I am coming to is this: to understand where I ended up, one must first get a glimpse of who I was, and the sins I had committed. Now, I am not an overly religious person. I do not sway toward one religion or another. I do pray, I do thank God whoever he/she/it may be, and I do hope that there is something great beyond this life. But, I do believe in Karma. I believe that if you do bad things to hurt someone, the universe will repay you, sometimes tenfold, one way or the other.

  So, at some point in my life, I let my believed sins against others fester at the heart of who I was. I demonized myself to the point that by the time I realized I was in the midst of a full-blown living hell, I rationalized it by believing that I somehow deserved everything that was done to me. Because let’s face it…Karma is a nasty bitch.

  On a very important note, I know now that I deserved none of it. My rationalizations were the desperate attempts of a barely sane woman just trying to survive. No one deserves what I went through, well... almost no one. I am really banking on this Karma thing, because it has a lot of catching up to do with my Monster.

  Bitterness, oh thine is my middle name.

  It should also be noted that no real names had been used in my story. This is of course to protect certain people from the vile monster that lives behind his glass mask, who has yet to pay for the sins he has committed.

  Are you listening, Karma?

  It was Hell. Let me reiterate… a living Hell. Nothing was sure then, except fear. Life was uncertain, death always loomed, and instability was the norm.

  I believe I became the embodiment of the Mad Hatter. I was once Beauty. She was me. I was her. But she died somewhere along the way, and I took her place. Madness breeds madness and some traumas not even a heroine can come back from. Sometimes, one becomes so broken that the only course of action is the death of one’s former self.

  Beauty’s life spawned the creature I have become today. I crawled from the bowels of darkness created by the unforgivable acts of a monstrous Beast. I will never again be the Beauty I once was, but I can take the pieces of her and mold them into a stronger, more beautiful version. That is who I am becoming.

  So, here is my tale of woe. All about how Beauty met the Beast, and how he broke her and murdered her soul. He delighted in remolding her into a truly mad hatter... but she prevailed.

  Beauty may have died, but the creature that arose from the ashes in her image is a heroine.

  You might find this a truly horrific fairy-tale, indeed.

  No worries... there is a happy ending. Even if the Beast still lives.

  Once Upon A Time...

  Pride, greed, envy, vanity

  TEN YEARS AGO, Beauty was a stunning twenty-seven-year-old ex-beauty queen, with long raven hair, bold hazel eyes that twinkled mischievously, and a natural sweetness that attracted the opposite sex like bees to honey. So, why wouldn’t she believe that the world was at her fingertips? Shouldn’t she be handed everything she desired effortlessly? She was an over achiever with no fear, no regrets, and the idiotic idealism that she could do anything... have anything... be whatever she wanted. And why wouldn’t she feel that way? She was exceptionally smart and excelled at everything she tried.

  By twenty-three she had a husband that adored her, a great job where she was well-liked and constantly praised. She had even built and owned a beautiful home in a middle-to-upper class subdivision; a part of the affluent community she had grown up in.

  In her spare time, she furthered her education and expressed herself through art. She and her husband had decided they didn’t want children. They just wanted to focus on themselves, their dogs, and their careers. She had the perfect little life and considered herself luckier than any of the “friends” she had graduated with.

  Her husband took care of everything. She had all the comforts a woman would wish for, but instead of appreciating his efforts to shield her from monetary stress, she resented him and felt like he treated her like a child.

  She had no idea that she was basically a spoiled brat, an absolute idiot, and a completely deluded, self-proclaimed princess that had a very long fall from grace awaiting her in the near future.

  Her perfectly constructed fairy-tale would be no happily ever after at all. She was the dim-witted unsuspecting victim in a real-life horror story. She was that moron girl that runs back into the house when she should be running for help.

  Essentially, she was a stunningly wrapped hot mess. A screw-up that would turn everything she touched into crap and hurt anyone who loved her. What no one around her knew was that to her, perception was everything and her “perfect life” was really all a sham. Starting with herself and the mask she wore.

  She was insecure, had body image issues, spent years with an eating disorder bouncing between diet pills and bulimia. She had always had this niggling little voice in the back of her mind that said, “You will never be good enough, never be thin enough, pretty enough, smart enough, talented enough,” and that voice filled her with self-loathing. A feeling so destructive she would deliberately sabotage all that was good in her life.

  When she met her husband, she played games with him. Treating him like a king one minute, then pushing him away just to see if he would go and stay gone. But he never did. He always stayed. He truly loved her, and it secretly ate away at her because she felt undeserving.

  Eventually, he asked her to marry him and she said yes. Even though she was too materialistic and screwed up to love him back. She would not allow herself to love her husband the way he deserved to be love. Even going as far as to convince herself she wasn’t even attracted to him. She was the pretty one, and he was lucky to have snagged her. She had this idealistic notion of the perfect man, created at a very young age. He would love her unconditionally, be tall, have blue eyes, dark hair and a well-built physique. Most importantly though,
because of a strange obsession she had with all things French, he had to be of French descent. It was absurd, but it was the husband she wanted.

  Her husband wasn’t unattractive. He was of average height, had blonde hair, blue eyes, Irish and a little husky. Physically far from her ideal man. She would tell herself that when they were ninety-eight years old, it wouldn’t matter what they looked like because they would both be ugly. She was stupid and focused on his outside appearance, she never noticed that inside, the man she had married was more beautiful than her outward appearance would ever be. He had loved her unconditionally and in return... she broke his heart.

  She was so vain that she loved to walk into a room, scan it slyly and know she was the most beautiful girl in it. She loved knowing that when she was on her husband’s arm, he was considered the “him” in the phrase “why is she with him?” She was narcissistic and had this preconceived notion that in every relationship there is a power dynamic that goes like this: the more attractive partner has control. This person must always be with someone who loves them more. If the relationship fails, you cannot suffer from a broken heart.

  In her mind, she had settled, because she knew her husband loved her more and that brought her moderate comfort. But eventually, that would not be enough.

  After her first adolescent heartbreak, which in the bigger scheme of things was nothing, she concluded that she would never give herself completely to anyone again. No one would have the power to break her heart.

  At the time, she thought that heartbroken was the only kind of broken a person could become. She had been a fool.

  So, at twenty-six, perched upon her self-built monument, she decided to commit sins to sabotage her kingdom. Creating a snowball effect in her life which would teach her to learn the true meaning of broken.

  * * *

  Lust and Adultery

  That is right, the beautiful southern princess with the great job, exquisite home, adoring husband and simple drama-free life committed adultery. She didn’t just cheat... she went overboard, because you know, if she was going to do something she was going to do it big.