...part two...
I removed my hands from my ears, and slowly, ever so slightly, opened my eyes. Standing before me was a little girl, perhaps eight years of age.
Long curly brown hair, deep brown eyes. She just stood there, looking at me looking at her. She turned her head toward her left shoulder and
pointed. A simple motion, but one which unnerved me just the same.
I drew up my courage, and shuffled my feet to face me in the proper direction, and I saw. My eyes began to bulge and a ringing filled my ears as my
heart beat inside, threatening to burst free. I dropped to my knees, slumped forward, my hands clawing at the blood soaked dirt which covered the
landscape. Above it all I could make out the girl moving closer to me, leaning forward, her head coming closer to mine.
I could feel her hair brushing against my cheek as she whispered one simple word. “Why.” The slightest of whispers, one that is so subtle that
it drowns out all other noises. I turned to her, to look at her. I awoke with a start, my bed soaked through with a mixture of sweat and urine.
I grabbed my face and cried, ignoring the blood tinged dirt on my hands. I cried out of fright and helplessness and remorse. I cried because I
remembered everything about the dream, everything.
Even how her face erupted into a mass of tentacles and hooked claws, each fleshy appendage reaching for me as the girl continued to cry “why why
why.” But I could not remember what it was that the girl had pointed to.
April 24. Saint Mark’s Eve. The ghosts of all those who shall pass in the coming year can be seen at midnight. I looked at the clock, already
knowing what it would say, but doing it anyway.
I rose from my bed and stumbled into the sitting room, where I collapsed onto the couch, pulling the quilt my mother insisted I keep upon it over my
night shivered body. I closed... no; I tightened my eyes shut and willed sleep to take me. Hours, perhaps only minutes, passed before I felt myself
being sucked deeper into the cushions I now rested, and only one thought I allowed to penetrate my mind: The dead made their presence known to me.
The girl came to me for an answer. They wanted me to know something, to see something.
The next morning I awoke more tired then I could have imagined, as if I had been drained of both body and spirit. Little surprise, really, when one
considers the night I had. I turned my attentions to the bedroom, to remove all signs of the dream and of my weakness in handling the situation. I
entered the room slowly, carefully, some deep inner portion of my soul believing that the girl was there waiting for me.
She was.
She just sat there at the foot of the bed, staring at me. No expression could I read written across her face. Her eyes were equally passive, neither
moving nor blinking. Staring blankly ahead, not a movement to be seen.
“Go away,” I exclaimed to the vision, the apparition, as I blinked the sleep from my eyes and rubbed my temples. “I am awake, let me be.”
“You’re naked,” she stated matter-of-factly.
I returned my gaze toward her. “What?”
“It isn’t polite, you know, being naked in front of a girl. Even an incorporeal one.” She cocked her head a bit sideways and smirked.
“Although, in your condition, I really wouldn’t feel too ashamed.”
My sense of reasoning left me. I entered the room, facing off against this, this... ghost. I was being tormented and insulted by a ghost!
I commanded, “I commend you, dear sister, to almighty God, and entrust you to Him whose creature you are. Having paid the debt of human nature in
surrendering your soul, may you return to your Maker who formed you out of the dust of the earth!”
...end part two...

