Room 42

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     Johannes didn't like the little girl who lived in room 42 of Mr. Montebury's house.
    He did not know what the actual title of the room was, or if it even had one at all. With as strange an occupant as it held, it must have. But within his own mind he called it Room 42, because it was the forty-secondth room he had counted when he had counted every single room in the great deep house that was Mr. Montebury's estate. 
    At first the closed door of Room 42 hadn't bothered him at all. It was just one more closed door with a bed and a wardrobe and a small chest of drawers behind it, just like every other door on that hallway. 
    But one day, on his way to the library and from there to the garden, he had passed by Room 42 at the worst possible moment fate could have decreed. 
    The door to Room 42 had been open, and four nursemaids were in the midst of escorting a little girl out of it. 
    He didn't remember if he had recognized any of the nursemaids from among the house staff; he had been concentrating on the little girl. He hadn't known that there was one living on Mr. Montebury's estate.     He could see plump cheeks, a narrow chin, and almost-black brown hair done up in a little bun on top of her head with a red bow for a hairband as he walked past, and then, as he was almost far enough past them for him to turn away despite his curiosity and concentrate on his own walking, she turned and met his eyes. 
    The eyes in the head of that little girl made Johannes' stomach clench itself strangely and twist itself slowly into a rope. 
    Those eyes did not belong in the head of a little girl. 
    Their shape was round with sharp corners, but their shape did not signify. It was the color that made him hurt. The pupils in that little girls' eyes glowed a bright crimson, and her irises reflected sleek navy, black opal, and a deep, velvety black that made them seem horribly shallow and terribly deep at the same time. 
    She continued on. 
    He could not get those eyes out of his head for the rest of the night, and he did not move from his room. 
    He crossed paths with the little girl twice more, and every time he met the same depthless malevolent eyes and innocent young face. He noted an upturned nose, plump little mouth, and a black ribbon that wrapped all the way up from the high collar of her white blouse to her jaw, not showing one square inch of young neck. 
    The little girl from Room 42 made him wish to be home. 
    She made his skin crawl and his bed feel unsafe. 
    By the end of the second week from his first sight of her he had discerned what the expression in those horrible eyes was. 
    It was hatred, pure and strange. 
    It was not a personal, raging hatred, but a deep, unsated hatred of everything that made his heart quake. People with hatred like that were hard to come by, and Johannes did not want to know what they could do, why they would have eyes like that or why these eyes were in the head of a little girl on Mr. Montebury's estate. 
    Johannes did not want to know. 

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