No one ever thinks it will happen to them. Trust me; no one is ever prepared for their rude awakening. You’re going along as an invincible kid one minute; the next you’re staring at the ruins of your old life wondering how you could have been so ignorant. It happens that fast. No one ever expects it. After all how can one ever predict the ending of their childish foolishness? 
Everyone thinks they have a shield around them as a kid, like nothing bad can ever penetrate it. A cloak of immortality, you might say. Kids believe that the world is just another Disney movie where everything turns out alright in the end, kindness prevails, blah blah blah, other sentimental crap. They live in a delusional storybook of their own invention, just waiting for their “happily ever after”. And once their shield goes down, and they realize that life is everything they wish it wasn’t and then some; that’s when they have to start living in the real world. It’s like everyone’s “awakening” is their initiation ceremony into the hellish politics of society, whether they be rich or poor, crass or cordial; damned to hell or with a halo above their innocent head. After the big reveal of the world, they go along living their quaint little lives, trying to block out the sinister intentions and blatant evil that they now know surrounds them. Some people ignore it more than they should in order to continue on their happy, little pathways to whatever degree of success they believe is possible. Other people realize that everything goes to hell eventually and there’s no point in denying or delaying the inevitable anguish that we all will have to go through at some point. I’m one of those people; a realist who sees the world for what it really is. Or as my mother calls it, “a storm cloud of a person”. I don’t think I have to tell you that she’s an optimist. But regardless of how you look at the world when you grow up, before your transition into the real world, no one really takes you all that seriously.
My “awakening” wasn’t like most people’s. I didn’t get in a car crash, or fail a class. I neither owned a car nor had the determination for failure. I certainly didn’t run away or wage war on my parents. If I were to run, I would have no place to go and my mom remains my most faithful ally. I was kidnapped. Not in the way you might expect though. I didn’t just up and disappear and was never heard from again; I had to pretend that I had killed myself. It sounds like a tall tale straight out of Sherlock Holmes and I don’t blame you if you don’t believe me. Most people didn’t and still don’t. But those are the type of people who don’t matter in my eyes and I like to think of them as ignorant masses of human beings who haven’t been properly introduced to the real world. They’re the type of people who have never been faced with true evil and therefore believe I must be making my story up for “attention” or whatever shallow prize they think I’m after. I do hope they’ll learn eventually, but it’s not my job to show people what the world is really like.
The reason I was kidnapped was quite simple actually. A man with more enemies than I have hairs on my head, stole me from my bed in the middle of the night simply for the joy of music, or something like that. Even cold-hearted gremlins who run blackmail empires need background music. Singing was, and remains, my one passion in life and at some point he decided that he didn’t want to let me keep it to myself. Don’t ask me how he found out about my talent; he knew everything about everybody that he wanted to know about and I’ve never questioned the lengths he went to steal me away simply to be his personal songbird. I was held at his private estate as a hostage. This is usually where I stop telling my story to people as most can’t handle anything after that, but as I’ve been asked to write this memoir for the good of the public, I’ll press on. Do try not to faint or scream.
My kidnapper was as exceptionally unusual as the rest of my story is. The Man, that’s what I called him because he never told me his name and I never cared to learn it anyways, was ruthless and cruel, although you’d be hard-pressed to find a more cordial man on the public streets anywhere. He hid his misguided intentions behind a facade of impeccable manners and carefully guarded secrets, hidden in the depths of his unhinged but well organized mind. Most kidnappers of young girls such as myself, are perverted, deranged lunatics who need to be shut up in a psych ward, which The Man was, but he hid it so well he had the whole of society wrapped around his little finger; the world was a lost child and he was the “friendly” stranger leading them back to their waiting mothers. He read people like books, watched them like television, and used them up like pens; when they ran out of useful information, he tossed them in the trash without a second thought. We are not unalike in some respects; I too prefer to observe humanity rather than be a part of it, but unlike him, I do not use people for my own benefits purely because I can. The most useful thing in his arsenal, though, were his spies that he collected like playing cards. He knew that if he bent their edges just the right way, he’d get the winning hand he was after. He had “connections” (spies, blackmailers, and others he simply employed to do his dirty work, that he tricked, tortured, threatened etc, into helping him), everywhere and could ruin your life with a few well-placed tip-offs to the right people at the right time. Sometimes, the “right time” didn’t come until you were begging for death in the palm of his aristocratic hand and at that point he was all too happy to oblige. No one ever escaped his clutches once he decided it was their time to go. The deaths were always well-covered up, with “freak accidents” and “suicides” as the main excuses he used for his grotesque slaughterings to keep the press at bay. The victims who were lucky enough to be allowed, for whatever reason, to continue breathing were condemned to a lifetime of silence and fear; he made it very clear if they spoke out, it would be the last thing they would ever do.
Looking back, I now realize that The Man wasn’t really a man at all; he was a spider. A great, glittering, jet-black spider sitting in the middle of a colossal web of lies that took decades, a few geniuses, and the deaths of thousands of measly flies to unravel. He feasted on his victims as he drank in their cries for help like fine wine, relishing in their slow, painful, demises. He took great pleasure in ridding the world of all who dared to defy his arachnoidal ways; his only hobby was reorganizing the world into an extension of his estate, with all the right people kept well away. Although, of course, a spider with as many enemies as he didn’t have time to personally assassinate all of his victims and if you were his enemy, you were more likely to meet your end in a dark alley or an abandoned hotel, miles from anyone who had the intentions to save you, that you were all too foolish to stay away from, caught in another binding web that had a hold of your life, as you realized your last sight would be the glittering pincers and unfeeling, black eyes of one of his millions of drones. Life was but a book that he knew by heart and death was an old friend. A friend who owed him an endless amount of favors he was all too happy to ask for as he saw fit. He was the puppet master and the world was his stage. That’s why it was so hard to catch him; he had thousands at his command and it was damn near impossible to get a straight testimony until after he was killed. After his death the stories came flooding in as if a dam broke. The code of silence was finally broken and the world came to know the monster that had been hiding behind those neatly pressed suits and clever diversions for so many years.
No one really knows exactly why The Man chose me out of millions of other talented singers to be his little puppet. He had the brains, the eyes, and the audacity to take anyone he wanted home with him as easily as if he were choosing a flavor of ice cream at a parlor. It came as a surprise to everyone, including myself, that out of every man, woman, and child that could hold a tune in the world, he chose an invisible fifteen year old girl who lived in the middle of nowhere and chose her fate rather than took before he came along and fixed her view of the world. I could not have stayed under the radar anymore if I tried. I’m a people watcher, not an avid member of the human race, which I guess made it only too easy to kidnap me. The less friends you have, the less people you have noticing you’re gone. It’s the truth and though it’s kind of sad, the truth is always preferable to lies. Lies are like sugar-coating a poison; it’ll work for a little while, but in the end everyone feels the sting. I’m a lot of things, but I never have been, and I never will be, a liar.
You probably ought to know who is writing to you by now and why. I’ll try to keep it short. This is the introduction I gave when I gave a speech on live television broadcast of a press conference I was asked to attend, in order to shed a light on The Man, or rather, the monster behind The Man.
I was kidnapped by a man I never cared to learn the name of. I was held at his private estate where he made me his personal singer, while my family believed that I had killed myself. My name is Nellie Jenkins, I am fifteen years old, and this is my story.