The Girl

The night when the girl came to him was like any other. He had gotten home from work late, cooked a frozen dinner, watched a few cooking shows, and eventually went off to bed. His brother Mark hadn’t returned his call, or the ones before that. He went into his bathroom to get ready for bed, and as he walked down the hallway stopped when he saw the picture. He had seen it so many times before, but it always had the same effect. She was standing on the couch, dressed in her Halloween costume. Maybe if he hadn’t been passed out drunk, he would have been able to help. He looked away from the picture and went into the bathroom. He wet his toothbrush in the sink and brushed his teeth, put on his pajamas, and looked at the bottle of anti-depressant and sleeping pills his doctor had prescribed him the month before. He popped two pills out of the container and swallowed them. He looked at the jar of pills, and after a few seconds popped two more, and two more after that.

With that, he got into bed. He turned out the light. As he lay, he dreamt about normal things, like his job, his mortgage, a nice person he had met at the coffee shop that morning. He dreamt normal things until in the back of his mind he heard a small voice whisper,

“Daddy, can you hear me”

He sat up straight in my bed. A girl sat at the edge of his bed. He only saw her through flashes of lightning illuminating her pale face. Her hair was black and parted in the middle, down straight. She wore a tattered dress. She was soaking wet.

“Daddy, why aren’t you listening to me”

The words echoed in his brain, and repeated themselves as if there were many voices overlapping. He blinked to make sure what he was seeing had been real. The girl had vanished, with the only trace of her visit being the wind excitedly blowing the curtains about through the open window, with a wet trail of water leading to the sill. In a panic, he fumbled around for his lamp switch. He sat alone in his bedroom, so very awake now after having been asleep only a few seconds earlier. His heart beat against his chest, hitting with such a force like it was trying to break out. He did not have a daughter. Did he? Which lead to the question of who that girl was and, if she was real, what had she been doing here? Why would she have been real, he asked himself. No, it wasn’t real. He had taken the sleep medicine to help him drift off, that must have had hallucinogenic side effects he hadn’t known about. He felt his sweaty forehead, and he realized he was burning up.

He decided to take a shower to clear his mind and try to think about something else. He went into his bathroom, undressed, and stepped into the shower. As he turned on the water, he was hit with the cold, sharp water as it slammed his spine and travelled down his body. He brushed his wet hair back from his face and looked into the little mirror on the side of the wall, watching his face. Water dripped down his nose. Was this the face of an insane person? Was he crazy? Had it been real? It couldn’t have been. As the water became hotter, the mirror fogged up until he couldn’t see himself. For the better, he thought. He was about to reach for the razor on the shelf so he could shave, when suddenly he saw something on the corner of the foggy mirror. The corner was wet, much wetter than the rest of the mirror, and condensation was appearing where the fog had been. They formed into a circle of little droplets of water, until that spot was completely clear. Then, the circle of condensation started moving down and to the right in a straight line. The line was completely clear, and he could see his reflection in the opaque line that was moving down the mirror. It was as if someone was dragging their finger across the mirror, making a drawing. But no one was there. At least as far as he knew. The line suddenly stopped and moved upward, and he realized that letters were being formed. What was trying to do this? As he watched in scared awe, the line continued across the mirror, making swirls and lines and crosses. As the lines were made, little drops of condensation dripped from them, creating little stains of clarity from the lines. The swirls and lines continued, until he began to make out two words. Suddenly the line drawing stopped. He stopped, and stared in shock at the two words written in the mirror.

“WAKE UP”

He shook with fear. What did this fucking mean? He was awake. He was awake and staring right at this mirror. As he stared at the phrase in the mirror, the lights went out, and the water suddenly turned ice cold. He stood there in the dark, cold and alone, as the water hit his bare body and carved sharp wounds into his back. A faint sound could be heard. It was a woman, but she was crying. He slipped on the tub and fell to the floor, his head hitting the wall and his bottom landing on the floor with a thud. He sat there, body in pain, shuddering as the ice cold water hit his body, listening to this ghostly woman crying, and started to cry himself. The woman’s crying got louder and louder, until it was as if she was right next to him. He didn’t know what to do, but suddenly the lights came back on and he was alone in the bathroom again. He wiped the tears from his eyes and slowly stood back up, but stopped when he noticed the razor on the floor, down from the shelf, with a trail of blood leading from the razor to the drain. He looked around his body for a cut, and suddenly felt a welt on his hip next to his glutes. As he touched it, he winced in pain, and when he brought his fingers back they were stained with blood. He put the pieces together in his mind, and realized when he slipped he must have knocked the razor from the shelf and it had cut his hip on the way down. Great. He stood up, shaking, and turned around to face the wall with the mirror. The mirror was now completely clear, and he saw his own scared reflection. His face was paler than he had ever seen it, and there was a look of true fear in his eyes he hadn’t seen in some time. But the fear only grew even more intense as he glanced below the mirror and looked at the smearing of blood across the wall, seemingly done by a hand. It was sloppy and unfinished, but he could clearly see the words “JOHN, WAKE UP” smeared across the tiled wall. Who was John? Was that him? No, his name was… Was… With a sudden feeling of confusion, he realized he didn’t remember his name. Whenever he tried to recall it, the clearly defined box in his mind where his name usually lied was a murky cloud of which he did not know the contents. But who had written the words on the bathroom wall? As weirder and weirder things began to happen, he had less and less of a reaction. His mind was numbing, losing sensation.

He decided it would be good to go back to bed. He stumbled up out of the bath, although the curtain was no longer there. As he got up, he looked at his bathroom sink, which the more he looked, the clearer it was becoming, until he could no longer see it at all. He stumbled out the bathroom door and down the hall, toward his bedroom. As he walked, the pictures on the wall slowly disappeared one by one, replaced by white. Pictures of him with other people, some older, and some younger. He didn’t know who these people were anyway, so he didn’t have much of a reaction. Had they been family? He was pretty sure he’d remember them if they were. The carpet he was walking on was slowly decomposing, too. As he finally stepped off the hallway carpet and turned the doorknob to enter his room, the last of the carpet disappeared and drifted away. He looked behind him at what used to be his hallway. Nothing was there. He was surrounded by a wall of white, with his bedroom door being the only apparent thing. He pushed the door open, and looked in his bedroom. The same thing was happening in here too. Things were disappearing more rapidly, but somehow it all felt calmer than it had. The lamp on his night table next to his bed slowly faded into nonexistence. Next his closet. The wallpaper began to curl up from the foundation, breaking into little pieces as they broke off and drifted upwards into the white sky. Soon all that was left was his bed, and white. Nothing. As his vision became groggier, he decided sleeping was the best option. He crawled onto his bed and collapsed, not fearing the darkness anymore, but welcoming it. As his eyes closed down for the last time, he could make out one figure; the girl in the tattered dress. She was sitting on the white floor. As his vision became fuzzier and fuzzier, the girl whispered one phrase:

“I forgive you.”

The paramedics didn’t find John’s body for four hours. They traced the cause of the fire to a knocked over lamp next to his bed. It had taken about thirty minutes for the bulb to heat up the carpet enough to set the first flame, but by that time he was already dead. They sprayed his body with a hose for five minutes trying to get the flames out, but even if they had done it in time it wouldn’t have mattered. Overdose was the official cause of death. The funeral was quick. Some family members came, some didn’t. Those who did came and cried. He was buried next to his daughter at the local cemetery.