by Mailin_Grey
Song: It’s Happening Again – Agnes Obel
I’ve been hearing her since I was little. At first, my parents told me she was an imaginary friend, but when this ‘’phase” as they called it, should have long passed, she still stayed. After some time, I thought it wise not to mention her again, afraid of the problems it might cause. Being the weird child, the one who isn’t normal, is not exactly what I wanted to be known for. So I kept her to myself. Most of the time she was wary of keeping my privacy, but other times she just appeared in the worst of moments, like the one time I snuck a boy in and just while we were making out, her face appeared in the mirror behind him, smiling. The boy, of course, noticed my hesitation, that something was off, and he just made up a poor excuse to leave. I never really knew why she was there, but I also never tried to find out until now. In the last week just before Halloween 1997, also my 17th Birthday, I really just got tired of her sneaking up on me all the time. She has grown more and more active nowadays, not leaving me alone often anymore. So I decided to start actually communicating with her. It was rather hard to talk to her, she seemed to have lost her voice and was only able to sigh or grunt every so often. She looked pale as any ghost must, I imagined, since she was the only dead person I ever saw, just slightly older than me, about 20-22 I think. One day, she visited me in a dream about the old oak tree near our house. She showed me a heavy stream of blood that came from the tree, a secret that must be found. The next day, I went there, across the muddy field, there she came to me and whispered in my ear to dig right at the roots. When I did, I felt stupid at first, but something in me kept me digging. Something told me that this must be important. So when I dug a little further I felt something. At first, I thought it was some sort of fabric that must have rotted into little strands of twine in time, but then I nearly threw up, seeing that these strands came out of a skull which my hands now touched. The corpse I was seeing wasn’t fully decayed, and I instantly recognised her, the ghost lady. Panic built up in my belly and instead of telling my parents, who wouldn’t believe me anyway, I called the police.
The story unravelled in a way I would have never imagined being possible in my wildest dreams, and which still keeps me up some nights, even though I have been living far away for over 20 years now. All this time, I was living next to my own mother being killed at 23 and buried under an oak tree, presumably by my ‘’parents” who were in fact a couple of serial killers, who had never been able to conceive a child of their own.
© Mailin_Grey 2022-10-31