• Byooooo….
    That wind was going to drive me insane.
    Byoooyooooo….
    Seriously, we’ve only been in our new house for a day and already it was driving up the wall. Freaky wind, squeaky floorboards, rusty door hinges, leaky roof, and faulty locks. Wow, Mom, great deal, wasn’t it?
    Excuse me, I forgot to introduce myself. My name is ________ and I’m fourteen years old. I live with my mom and her boyfriend, Bobbie. We just moved from our old apartment in the city (upscale two bedroom, two bathrooms, full kitchen, and a 400 square foot living room), to a piece-of-crap “mansion” on the river. What had she said? “It has history!” Ah yes, history! My least favorite subject has taken over my living space. Great, just great.
    I sigh and continue doing my math homework on a cardboard box because my desk is in storage. Someone knocks on my door then my mom comes in.
    “Are you doing alright? Do you need any help?”
    “I’m fine, Mom.”
    “Are you sure? I know it must be hard to concentrate on homework when we’re in the middle of a move…” Amazing. She actually sounds concerned!
    “Yes, I’m sure.” She sits next to me on the floor and puts her arm around my shoulders. It makes it kind of hard to write.
    “Look, I know you’re not happy about this, but think of how much history is in this house! And you’ll make new friends, I promise!” Was that supposed to help? Well, here’s a news flash Mom:
    “I don’t care. I hate history! You know that! And I liked my old friends.”
    “Maybe we can get them over after we finish unpacking.”
    “You know Bobbie wouldn’t go for it.” I hope she could hear the hate in voice when I said his name.
    “I’ll find a way to get him out of town.” She says with a sigh.
    “You do that.” I don’t even look at her as she stands up and walks out, leaving me alone in my dank new room. I hope she’s a least right about my friends. I mean, a new house was bad enough, but a new dad, a new school, and new friends on top of it? My life was going to be miserable! How did she expect me to survive something like this? I glance over at the box of books I had yet to open. All my books (Horror novels from Sylvia, Fiction novels from Jodie, Science Fiction from Jordan, Vampire novels from Iris, one of the original copies of Dracula from my dad, and even the Twilight Saga from my mom) are in that box, but I’ve read every one of them. I’m really bored, but I have nothing to read and we don’t have the internet set up yet. I decide to give up on my homework and go to sleep. I put everything in my backpack and try to find the box with my pajamas in it. After searching through five boxes I find them, along with my Diary. I’m about to open it up to write down today’s excitements when another gust of wind comes in through the open window. Wait a second, when did I open the window?!
    I run across the room and slam it shut, but it just flies open again, and that when I hear her voice.
    Run my child, there are beings here that wish to inflict pain upon your soul…
    I look through the window and catch a glimpse of a spectral white figure in a flowing dress before I pass out.
    *****
    Why is it so bright? There is a bright white light stabbing through my closed eyelids, and I think I hear voices in the background, but the one thing I realize immediately is that it’s cold. And not the cold of where I lived before with an all-time low of 56 degrees, it was cold, as in I couldn’t feel my extremities and my brain felt as though it was slowing, like even moving-water-was-been-frozen-into-stillness cold. Like...
    I don’t let myself finish the sentence. My eyes fly open, and I try to sit up but I don’t seem to be in control of my body. All I can move are my eyes. I look around myself, but I can’t see very much because of the bright light. Such a bright light… I try to look to my left, seeing as it appears to be coming from my right, and that’s when I see her.
    Everything about her, from her hair, to her eyes, to her clothes, to her lips, to her fingernails, is black. Everything, that is, except her skin. Her skin is such a pale, chalky white that she almost looks dead. She is emanating a dark aura-like cloud that I think she is, except that she is also giving such a strong feeling of pain, of recovery, of love, of hatred, of boredom, of excitement, of… well, life.
    I glance to my right and catch a glimpse of the same woman I saw outside my window before I woke up. She is the opposite from the first woman, long, flowing white hair, white clothing, she even has white pupils, which would normally look very creepy, but somehow although her hair is white and it looks as though she has no pupils, she looks timeless. She, too, is giving off an aura-like cloud, but hers is white. BRIGHT white. And though I would expect her to symbolize all-things-living, it’s obvious that it’s just the opposite. I look back at the beautifully dark woman, and suppress a scream as I watch her face morph into something hideous and revolting, something halfway between alive and thriving, and dead and decomposing.
    I’m about to puke, so give up and scream like my life is coming to an end. The dark woman jerks back and suddenly she’s my mom and I’m on my bedroom floor. Pajamas in one hand, my mom’s hand in the other, with the sunlight streaming in through my open window practically blinding me.
    “Woah, there girl! No more math before bad for you!”
    And then the world comes to an end.
    The window explodes outward, dragging all the oxygen in the room with it, and I feel the floor fall away from underneath us. We are falling.
    I’m… falling… away…
    Falling away from… what, exactly?
    Away from… reality… from… life…
    And then I hit the bottom.
    *****
    When I wake up, the first thing I realize is that it’s cold. Like, really cold. And I have a sense of Déjà vu strong enough that could give anyone a headache. I sit up and realize I’m sitting in a slow moving, gray river. A river so wide that I can’t see either shore, the sky is so gray that I can barely see the horizon and somehow I feel that no matter how far I walk to the left or right, I’ll never find the shore. I hear the sound of a distant waterfall, and when the roar of the water suddenly gets louder then quieter, I know that someone has passed through the gates of death. I try to walk back to life, but trip on a rock and get dragged downstream instead.
    This is the end…
    I’m halfway to the gate when I get snagged on a rock.
    … of my life. What a sad ending… it definitely left a lot to be desired.
    I move myself over the rock and slowly, slowly, fall over the edge of the precipice of death.