• I last heard the story of- her, while I was staying in a small inn out of town. The man telling it may have been drunk to his boots, but the way he told it made you feel like you do when you’re alone; Like someone is watching, waiting to strike. That sickly feeling that tickles your neck and makes you jump at shadows.

    Alice, Alice was her name. Like the girl that fell down the rabbit hole, I hope that this girl did find her way out. The story tells that Alice was a simple one, the type you wouldn't see doing something out of the ordinary. You would walk past her while in town and want to shout out to her, just a blissful greeting that would always get an answer.

    Then one day she stopped coming to town. At first they all thought that she had surely just caught a cold, she did love gardening, perhaps the winter winds caused her to get ill?

    A week.

    A month.

    No more cheerful smile, no more morning greeting. Some say when she disappeared people stopped talking to one another. She had to be back soon, maybe she had moved away?

    Poor Alice, she had never told anyone where she lived.

    Years passed and soon they forgot about the tale of poor Alice. New families, People coming from all over, all of them smiling, smiling like- her. More people came, and the town grew in size. People started to fell the trees of the forest that surrounded the town.

    They say when they found her hut, the dogs the choppers had with them; they began to howl.

    The small hut, wooden and rotting, a musty smell like that of a wet rodent. It could make you sick just looking. The door, I hear, was off its hinge; the food basket she had dropped still lying on the floor. The floor, was crimson red, pray a small, strange mark on the ground.

    Now, this is where the story varies, some would say she was the one that drew the sign of the "Devil" on her floor; others, that it appeared when she was murdered by the man, the very same man who smiled and greeted her every day.

    I say, that if indeed she did draw that sign, she was drawing it for the man who killed her. I believe that was why a great smile was fitted onto her corpse; the smile she gave to him every day, the same smile that told him that he would not follow her to peace in death.