Merci was suffocating. She and her newly baked husband Hawthorne were hovering under the ceiling in a strangulation attack. Anne Hale was in control of the process. The redheaded witch wasn't going to let anyone live.
- How romantic. You will die in one day. - Anne was telling me to hold two people in the air with her hands and clench her fists harder and harder. - Don't worry. Reunite together in Hell. No one will separate you there anymore.
- Ann... Let go... There's nothing to breathe..." Mercy Lewis, who recently became the mistress of a new brothel, said. - I'm suffocating...
- That's the way it's supposed to be," Anne told me, and she sneezed. - Do you want me to let you go? Okay. I'll let you go.
The red witch shook her hands and two bodies fell to the floor of the room. Now they won't talk anymore. They are dead. Anne Hale killed them. Now Mercy Lewis was lying there with her white and gray face and her eyes open forever, just like her husband Hawthorne. Anne Hale leaned over their corpses and slowly closed their eyes, and then disappeared into the void of the bedroom as if it wasn't there. Mercy didn't plan on dying, but she did. She was cute before she died. She was the only daughter of her father, the Reverend Lewis, who, like Cotton Meather, was also a shepherd.
He was retired, but he attended church regularly. He loved Merci with real fatherly love. After her mother was gone, he took on all the worries and hardships of her daughter's life. Mercy had a calm and peaceful character, at least until the day when strange things began to happen to her.
* * *
The Reverend Mr. Lewis returned from a church mass conducted by Cotton Meather and headed to his daughter's room to check on her current condition. Something strange has happened to Mercy in recent days. She was acting strangely, twitching nervously, screaming at night, and even jumping on the walls. This behavior was unusual for Lewis' daughter.
The Reverend wanted to figure it out.
Her friends came to see her, asking him when Mercy would come out, and Mr. Lewis answered that his daughter was ill and in quarantine.
Mr. Lewis opened the door to Mercy's room a little bit: her bed was empty, but a little dented.
- Merci? - Dad called in the frightened that the daughter had left the house and might hurt someone in her current state of obsession with evil spirits. - Merci?
He walked into the middle of the room, looked around, and heard a predatory beast growling over his head.
As soon as he turned around, Mercy hit him from the ceiling and knocked him down. The reverend wrapped himself under the body of his obsessed daughter, trying to free himself.
- Merci, stop it! Stop it! - He cried out.
He barely managed to get his daughter off his back, get up and put her on the bed. Merci cried hysterically, wriggled on the bed, knocking down sheets, and tried to escape from her father's capture.
- Let go of me! - She wasn't growling with her voice. - Let go of me!
Wrinkling painfully, because he couldn't see his daughter like that anymore, Mr. Lewis held his daughter with one hand and pulled the rope from the bedside table he held there just in case. Ronya tears of powerlessness, he tied Mercy's hands to the headboard of the bed and then tied her legs as well.
- I'm sorry, honey! - He was sniffing his nose. - Forgive me! God knows I don't want to!
Mercy was aggressively trying to release her hands from her chains, but it didn't work.
Washed her head on a pillow in a wild madness, she asked:
- Why did you tie me up? What did I do wrong?
- It's so you don't hurt yourself, sweetheart," Dad stroked her on her tangled hair, a little uneven. - I'm doing this for you, Mercy. For your sake.
He remembered how a couple of days ago when he came home, he found out that his daughter had cut her own hair. She was pampered with scissors and could have cut off something else if Lewis hadn't gotten there in time. He took her scissors carefully, and when her daughter was quiet, he tidied her hair to the same length. Now Mercy was a short cut, which made her look like a boy. Mercy's face was a little fat, puffy. On her oval face were large, expressive eyes that were in perfect harmony with her nose shape, and puffy lips completed her appearance. Now, in her big, expressive eyes, there was an obsession. Mr. Lewis could not leave everything as it was. His daughter's antics were no longer able to bear with him. He prayed for her soul every day, but it didn't work out. Mercy's behavior was getting worse. Sometimes she behaved normally, without an outburst of emotion, but then suddenly she started acting obsessed as if something was making her do it. Once she told her father about some old woman who came to her at night and forced her to obey herself. Lewis doubted his daughter's words. But how else could he explain it? He wanted it to be over soon.
To be continued...