Page 4

Kali

T he girl’s throat was raw from screaming, the sound scratching at my own in an echo of my last days alive. Her hair was plastered to her head with sweat, her skin covered in a sheen of perspiration that had her shivering on the lumpy mattress. She’d wriggled so much while trying to free her wrists and ankles that one of the springs had popped through, slicing up her flesh in a macabre foreshadowing of what was to come.

He wasn’t going to like that. He preferred to work with a blank canvas. Those knives hanging from the wall weren’t just for show. They were his creative muse. His paintbrush, if you will. The only genuine smile I had ever seen on his face was when he was pressing the sharp edge of one of those blades into the unmarred flesh of his victims.

When it was me at his mercy, he’d attempted to show remorse. At least up until I’d called him out on his bullshit and spat in his face. When I’d told him to just get it over with, he’d smiled cruelly, evil glinting in the black depths of his eyes. He’d taken his time, just to spite me.

I could still feel the cool bite of the blade as he made his first cut. The slow drag as it split open my skin. The stinging sensation. The blood that flowed over with every throb of my pulse. The drip, drip, drip of that very same blood as it puddled on the concrete floor beneath me whenever he would leave me alone. He spent so much time upstairs, the sounds of the TV, the radio, and the clanging of pots and pans as he cooked drifted down to me, muffled by the heavy-duty door.

Just as they would have done now, if only he didn’t have a wife to go home to again. I’d been that wife once, the one who had dragged him away from his ‘ fishing’ trips because I wanted to spend time with the man I’d loved.

I was such a fucking fool.

‘No one is going to hear you,’ I told the girl despite knowing she couldn’t hear me. ‘There’s no one around for miles. There are about twenty acres of land between us and the closest neighbour. Screaming is just going to make you more uncomfortable, and pulling on the chains will just waste energy and make you more dehydrated.’

I’d watched countless girls come to die here, all of whom went through the same process. First, there was the begging. The pleading was painful to witness because I knew just how useless it was. That hope of rescue or escape was still present, hence the screaming, but it would soon be extinguished.

Next came the anger. They would lash out, try to fight back, and only succeed in hurting themselves and turning him on. It was his favourite part, because that was where he got to break them. He got off on watching the fight leave their bodies, their will to live diminishing into nothing more than the barest whisper of hope. A dream. A nightmare.

Lastly, they would finally give up. Some became catatonic. Others begged for the sweet release of death’s embrace, unaware of the lack of peace coming their way.

And beyond that, when they finally took their last breaths, their souls would detach from their bodies as he buried their segmented bodies in the makeshift graveyard behind the cabin, hovering in the vicinity for all eternity. There was no moving on. No peace to be found. Simply a meaningless existence thrust upon us by the whims of a madman.

A clever madman, however. The holes he dug were significantly deeper than six feet, and he would only fill them up halfway before going hunting. Then, he’d bury the carcass of whatever animal was unfortunate to cross his path. Another measure taken to hide the bodies, just in case the police ever did discover his actions. A cunning means to trick whoever was digging into believing it was just an animal buried rather than a body.

He was the single most devious man I had ever had the misfortune of meeting.

I got bored of waiting for the girl to quiet down. They were the most interesting to me in that limbo state between their panic, realising they weren’t going anywhere, and before Blake returned. Their thoughts were a whirlwind behind their eyes, important moments of their lives flashing through their minds as they latched onto whatever good they could hold onto in their darkest hours. I liked to watch, to see their expressions play out on their faces. Perhaps it was invasive of me, but it made me feel just that little bit less alone. Just for a little while. I got to pretend that I knew them. Sometimes I would make up stories about them in my head, giving them a life and memories prompted by those expressions.

But it never lasted. Eventually, they would die, and then they would ignore me just like all the others. A few of the newer ones attempted to talk to me until they found out I had married the psycho. Then bets were off. Most of them stuck to themselves. A few of them clustered together. After a while, none of them talked. It was a miserable, lonely existence.

It made me hate him even more.

Hate didn’t even cover it. I loathed the man. Alive, I had never wanted to see him or anyone else hurt. My bleeding heart was one of the things he’d claimed to love about me the most. He’d taken that from me, too, to a degree. I didn’t care about the girls beyond adding another reason to the already extensive list for why I wanted him to suffer.

More than that, I wanted him to beg the way his victims did, only to find no mercy from me. We were far past mercy. Now, there was only Hell, and I would drag him there with me if I had to.

Blake likely wasn’t coming back for a while, so I decided to find something else to do in the meantime. I floated through the ceiling up into the main living space of the cabin, leaving the girl in favour of my other favourite pastime. My only other pastime, really. Practicing.

I’d been a big fan of horror stories when I was alive, my bookshelves filled with Stephen King, Richard Matheson, and Ramsey Campbell. I had a few of the classics, such as Poe and Stoker, but I much preferred the modern take.

As much as Blake had supported my interests by supplying my collection, he’d never shown an interest himself. Until I realised he was living a horror story as the antagonist, and then his disregard for it made more sense. Wouldn’t want people to think he was anything but the sweet, innocent, life-saving surgeon he portrayed himself to be. No, it wasn’t Blake who went to see the latest scary blockbuster with me, but his brother, Chance.

The ghost hunter.

Sometimes I wished he were here, until I remembered that he was related to my killer. I couldn’t help but wonder just how close they really were, and how much Chance actually knew about Blake’s… extracurricular activities. If he was in on it somehow, using his ghost-hunting business to distract and draw the attention away from Blake, or worse, he was somehow involved in a more hands-on capacity, I didn’t know what I would do.

Chance had been my friend long before I’d ever even met Blake. We’d met in middle school and became fast friends, up until Blake and I started dating and he found a closer friendship with Ashe. Still, the love for one another was there and never went away. Besides Blake, he had been my favourite of all the Dodds, even if his last name was Weiss after his biological father. His friendship meant so fucking much to me for so much of my life…

And then there were their parents. Mallory and Calvin. They’d treated me like one of their own from day one. Mallory had been especially excited to induct me into the family. Her desire for a daughter when she’d been saddled with two sons prompted her to treat me like the daughter she’d never had. When my mother had been diagnosed with cancer when I was a teenager, she’d been right there with me the whole time, supporting us all in any way she could. And right behind her had been her doting husband, Calvin, my father-in-law. He’d been as much of a father to me as my own.

If that entire family had duped me, they were all going to pay.

Whereas my fury when I was alive pumped through me with a fiery vengeance, drumming inside of me with each pulse of my heart, I no longer had a pulse to push it through. Now, it was like an ember sparking in my core, catching on the kindling of each and every one of my grievances, and consuming me whole. Most days, I imagined I felt like a witch burning at the stake. Some days I wished I had been, because then I would have been killed for a reason. This nonsensical bullshit, the purposeless way my last breath had been stolen, the inconsequential pain and suffering that no one knew I had experienced because no one had saved me . No one even knew that I’d needed saving in the first place. That’s what got me.

Luckily, my anger helped with my ghost girl practice sessions. The heightened emotions gave me something to focus on, a goal, a purpose . That fiery fury filled me with energy, like I was the flame and I was feeding off of all the negative emotions my death and betrayal had dredged up.

I wanted them. I wanted to consume them. I wanted to use them to learn all that I could, to get as strong as I could. I wanted to weaponise them.

I wanted my face, my rage , to be the last thing Blake ever saw, and I wanted him to realise just how much he’d fucked up.

But to do that, I needed to learn to control it. This power that built within me, this supernatural energy that flowed through my very being, that kept me grounded on this earth even if I was displaced into an overlying realm, was wild and feral. I knew innately that taming it wasn’t an option, but it needed direction. It needed to be coaxed. Fuck, it needed to be romanced .

And dammit if I wasn’t going to do just that.

If death had taught me one thing, it was that power was the only lover I needed. Power didn’t betray me like a man. Power didn’t destroy me just for the sake of it. It didn’t do what I wanted whenever I wanted it to, but that was because I hadn’t earned it yet. I needed to prove to it that I was worth listening to, worth its loyalty, and then we could exist together in perfect harmony.

It wasn’t good or bad. There was no hero or villain. Power simply was, and there was a peace in that. A release.

I wasn’t human anymore, but something other. Something that now had the ability to tap into the deep well of energy that coursed through everything in every realm. I was a motherfucking ghost, and I was going to be the best there ever was.

As the rage took hold, the heat consuming me, I reached deep inside of myself as I chased it, desperate to grab hold. It wasn’t something I could hold in my hands, however. The power was even less tangible than I was, and I floated through walls, for fuck’s sake. When I first started attempting to reach it, I grew frustrated very quickly. So many attempts, all of which failed.

Capturing it was a no-go.

Trapping it never worked.

Trying to force it to obey my commands was ridiculously stupid, because its bite was just as bad as its bark.

I had it figured out, now, though. It required gentleness. A soft touch, just barely brushing against it, teasing it until it wanted more. I needed to get its attention and convince it to channel itself through me the way I imagined.

The only remaining question was how?

As I reached out with my mind, imagining my fingers extending in invitation, I managed the barest graze against it. It paused, curious, and prodded me back, then darted around me in a taunting dance before disappearing entirely.

If I’d had working lungs, I would have been panting from the exertion. As it stood, I was depleted of enough energy that I needed to rest. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t have a body that needed to shut down to mend itself every night after a day spent exerting energy, but I did still need to recharge after spending so much of myself in my attempts.

Today was a good day. The power had acknowledged me, even interacted with me, before disappearing again. That was a good sign.

It gave me hope.

I smiled to myself as I returned to where the pieces of my remains were buried, eager to sit and be still as I drew more energy from them, but my smile immediately fell from my face as I caught sight of a shadowy figure watching me from inside the treeline. I couldn’t see any features. There was no height, no face, no eyes. It was just a shadow, like tendrils of black smoke writhing in a mass that vaguely resembled a humanoid shape. Yet, despite the lack of eyes for me to latch onto, I could sense they were watching me.

They had witnessed my attempt at harnessing the power I had conjured, and something about it must have intrigued them. But was that intrigue innocent or malicious?

‘Who are you?’ I called out, my voice both loud like a sonic boom through the stillness, yet quiet like a whisper on the wind. Eerie. Supernatural.

Haunting.

Ha. I cracked myself up.

When I got no response, I wasn’t surprised, but there was something unsettling about watching the writhing mass of pure darkness as it stared at me, especially considering I was unable to pinpoint its facial features. Did it even have a face anymore, or had it become something so dark and twisted that it no longer resembled a human being?

Objectively, I knew that I shouldn’t have been afraid. There wasn’t anything that could hurt me anymore, at least physically, because I wasn’t a physical being. Yet, there was something so incredibly chilling about the shadow creature, like it was an abomination against nature.

Or perhaps it wasn’t so much an abomination, but a being that had been changed by death into something more than just a simple ghost. Something that thrived off death. A hunter of the dead.

The epiphany settled into my being like a lead weight. I hadn’t encountered anything on this side of death that posed a threat to me. I was supposed to be the only threat around here. Yet, I could tell that whatever that thing was, whoever they were now, was bigger and badder than me.

I didn’t like that. Not one bit.

Fear tried to take hold, but I refused to let it. I had been the prey in life; I blatantly refused to be anything but the predator in death.

And still, as we continued to take stock of one another, neither one of us made any move to close the distance. We were both simply watching, waiting, allowing the silence to stretch into something else entirely. I got the sense that it hadn’t decided yet if I was prey, or if I was something more, but I had already decided long ago that I would be that something more.

‘I won’t make it easy on you,’ I told it, knowing it could hear me despite the distance. Sound here travelled differently than it did in the realm of the living. Everything was simultaneously too quiet and too loud, a boom and a sigh.

The shadows dissolved in response, leaving behind nothing more than a deep, male chuckle that was far more amused than it should have been. The sound reverberated throughout the space, rattling the bound energy that made up my phantasmic form until I felt like I would vibrate apart.

So, it was a game then. Fine. I’d already let one man destroy me, I wasn’t about to let some strange, incorporeal bastard do it again.

Game on, shadow man. Let’s see which one of us was the bigger monster.