Ashcroft

A few years ago in the town of Ashcroft, Bram Hellsing made Sariel, a little girl with psychic powers. After Ashleigh Harker, one of the members of the project, became endeared to Sariel, she had the Sariel project was shut down, and then some scifi-y stuff was done to the girl's brain to make her forget. She became Sarah, a little orphan girl.
Sarah was adopted by Michael Carpenter, a devout member of the pseudoCatholic religion of the town. He adopted her after his wife died, and made sure that she had everything she could ever need, and so Sarah got to go to the fancy private school. There she met Andrew Cunningham, who tormented and teased her because he secretly loved her, but was too prideful to risk his social standing to associate with the poor little orphan girl, and teased her instead.
Sarah's life changed when she and Ashleigh, who stayed in contact with the young girl, were walking home from the park one day. They were kidnapped and held hostage by a man namedPaul Craven, a sexual deviant and rapist. They eventually got free, but Sarah was never the same.
Ashleigh up and ran away to Boston and tried her best to bury the memories, and Sarah became introverted and withdrawn.

Now, while normally this would just be a sad occurrence, there'd always been a malevolent presence in the town of Ashcroft. The natives were hostile and savage, and sacrificed to dark things, killing or enslaving other tribes. The people who came over from the Old World were quick to get swept up in the witch trials, and even in the modern age people would occassionally be killed gruesomely, or pets would go missing.
In fact, there was such a killer going around at the time. The papers called him the Ripper, though that was just the journalistic nature of comparing things to Jack the Ripper. He would hang his victims with chains, and slowly cut them to pieces.

But this was not a normal case. Michael could tell what had happened, and he took revenge on the one who did it. Or at least, who he thought had done it. Michael found Andrew, and he beat him. He beat him so bad that he died from it. It was something that he regretted, and he took his own life the next day. The sin of breaking not only his religious beliefs, but his ideals as an officer of the law was too much for him.

With Michael out of the picture, Bram Hellsing did what he had wanted to do for some time.
He took Sarah away, and he restarted the Sariel Project.

He took a scared, frightened, emotionally and physically abused little girl--who had just lost her best friend, the man she called her father, and the boy that she had a crush on--and turned her back into a weapon. All for the monetary gain and political clout that would be his if he was to perfect the project.

The first thing that happened was that Paul Krueger was found dead in the seedy California Hotel, hung by chains through his skin, long strips of flesh torn from his chest. This was two days after the Ashcroft Ripper hung himself.
The second, more overt change, was that the town become darker. Bram Hellsing became a representation of Greed, trapped beneath the hospital. Paul Krueger became Lust, burning in his own fire in room 1312 of the California Hotel.
Andrew was brought back to life as an embodiment of Pride, unable to express his feelings because of the effect it would have on his social standing. Overcome by grief and anger, enough to make him forget his social codes, Michael is Wrath.
Sarah, or Sariel, so full of power but so incapable of protecting herself when it mattered most, is Sloth.

And the serial killer who would hang his victims and torture them to find out what made them tick, who would dress up in their clothes and pretend to be them until the time came to move on, was given a second chance, and now wanders the darkened town as a man with no memories. He introduces himself as Jack, and he is unique in that he has the choice to break free of the town and start a new life, or he can give in to his nature and become Envy.

The last thing to happen was that in Boston, Ashleigh's perceptions continually shifted to the now hellish Ashcroft, as if it was reaching out to her, and calling her. She would walk into a room or a building, and find herself in the old ruins of her hometown, the monsters lurking about. The phone would ring, and she would hear the voice of an old friend, or someone from Ashcroft. Sometimes it would be static, sometimes it would be a quiet voice begging for help.

Either way, there's only one thing that she can do. She has to go back, she has to recover her lost memories, and she has to put an end to the dark nature of the town, once and for all.