Clearlake by Stanislava Buevich - Upper Middle Grade/Teen Mystery Horror - Don’t go into Room 214
Excerpt
There will come a time when you wonder, how did a girl like me end up in a place like Clearlake and mortal danger? Well, it all started with a terrible cold. At first, it was just a blocked nose. Then a sore throat, nothing major. About a week later, I got a temperature. And the blocked nose got worse. Much worse. I lost all sense of smell and the ability to breathe. Snot kept trickling down from my nostril to my top lip, and I had to persistently wipe it off with my sleeve or taste the said snot. I had a headache. A constant, nagging, relentless headache as if a woodpecker was incessantly pecking above the bridge of my nose.I was thirteen at the time and missed so many days of school that my mother got fined by the government. Now, I know what you’re thinking - any responsible parent would have taken their offspring to a GP if the wretched illness hadn’t gone away within a week. Well, not my mother.
My mother didn’t trust Western Medicine, you see, particularly vaccines and antibiotics. As far as she was concerned, those two were the source of all evil. I count myself incredibly lucky that, so far, I have managed to avoid catching something particularly nasty like Rubella, Mumps, or Measles. I’ve never had anything more severe than a cold, in fact. And while most colds went away without intervention, other than a honey, lemon and gin concoction (which was surprisingly effective, never mind that I was far too young to take it), this cold proved to be something else entirely.
About a week in, my mother marched into my room early in the morning. Loud, insistent stomps woke me up from a hazy, feverish dream. She touched my forehead with the tips of her fingers and raised her eyebrow, nodding as if everything was going according to plan.
“Well, I think I know what will finally do the trick,” she said.
I rolled my eyes. Well, not actually. Not on the outside. The outside she could see. I rolled my eyes on the inside, imagining them going so far inside their sockets that all that was left were the white bits.
“Beetroot!” she exclaimed, her voice chiming like a Christmas bell.
“Beetroot?” I yawned, and a few tears seeped out of the corners of my eyes. I wasn’t sure if the yawn caused it or the ever-escalating feeling of utter desperation.
“A few drops of beetroot juice inside your nose three times a day, and you will be good as new. I promise.”
She made similar promises a lot.
“If you stick a clove of garlic in each nostril overnight, in the morning… Poof. Cured. Gone. I promise.”
“Breathing over a pot with hot potatoes and a duvet over your head will open up the sinuses and unleash the phlegm. All of the gunk will stream out. You’ll see. I promise.”
“If you do a wee in a little pot and then take some of that wee with a little pipette that I’ve got here for you and…”
“NO!”
I drew the line at urotherapy, as it was apparently called, and it did take quite a bit of courage to stand up to my mother. She fussed and fretted but couldn’t get me to administer urine into my nose.
Guest Post
What inspired you to write this story?
Believe it or not, a lot of this creepy, mysterious, and strange
story is inspired by my childhood. My mother, just like Moon’s, used to be weary of antibiotics
when I was growing up. This irrational fear came from her mother and her mother’s mother,
as it often does. Natural remedies were always favoured, and while I think they
are fantastic to an extent, some illnesses require something more potent.
I was sick with a cold for weeks. The cold got worse. Much worse.
In my mother’s
defence, the absolutely regular doctor that she took me to also tried her
hardest to avoid prescribing antibiotics after diagnosing me with sinusitis. At
the fall of the Soviet Union, such was the general belief that if you can avoid
antibiotics, you definitely should. So she tried alternative therapies, many of
which I describe in the book. Yes, they are real, and it happened to me (and
more).
Unfortunately, my sinusitis spread to my brain. I had to be
hospitalised immediately, and they ended up injecting me with antibiotics
anyway. On top of that, they’d performed horrifically unpleasant sinus-draining
procedures, which I also describe in the book. Totally real!
Most of the nurses and doctors are based on real people, plucked
from the depths of my childhood memories. Most of Moon’s friends, too.
I couldn’t leave the hospital for weeks, and I was only allowed
visitors on Thursdays.
While there wasn’t a supernatural/sci-fi element in real life, Moon’s growth
throughout the story closely mirrors my own. Luckily, I was never trapped
inside a tomb, and I wasn’t made to sort the brown rice from the white, and nobody
was harmed in the process, not physically anyway.
Still, Clearlake holds a special place in my heart because it is and will always be part of my real world.
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