Chapter 1

I’m running out of options, the same way I’m running out of rope, as I tried to hang my niece for the fifth time. Now, before you go saying that I should be checked into a loony bin, you’ve got to understand. I’ve tried almost everything, but she just wouldn’t stay dead! It’s to the point now that I’m starting to wonder if I’m the one who’s dead, because she just brushes it off and keeps coming back.

You’re probably wondering: if she’s alive after the several hangings, burnings, and other miscellaneous attempts, why haven’t I seen it on the news? Why haven’t there been reports of an undying girl and her aunt who just keeps trying to kill her?

Because I’m the only one who seems to see her or is able to physically interact with her!

At first, I thought that I was having a mental breakdown, that I had finally gone over the cuckoo’s nest and straight into the pits of insanity. But that wasn’t the case. The pills didn’t make her go away, neither did the therapy. Beyond the therapist telling me that I was coping with grief, I’d been cleared of insanity.

Then I tried vacations, moving out of the apartment and into another. But nothing made her go away. It was as if she had become a permanent fixture in my life, the same way one might keep a pet.

She didn’t talk, just stood around or sat, depending on what I was doing. If I went for a morning run, I’d see her periodically throughout my route.

And before you ask: Did you change your route?

Each and every time I ran, I went a different way, but she was still there. Always smiling as she watched me. I’ve stopped thinking about it being a vivid hallucination and accepted that it was something otherworldly. Now I’m trying to figure out how to stop seeing her!

My niece and I were always close. I didn’t have any children of my own. Truth be told, I hadn’t had a stable relationship in a few years. It worked out perfectly that my sister was an overzealous career woman. Most of the time, she left my niece in my care in some capacity.

Whether it was getting her to school on time, taking her to a doctor’s appointment, or even getting her nails done. Other times, it was for a couple of days, and then weeks, and slowly it had turned into months at a time.

Maybe that was why I was seeing her everywhere. Our bond was strong, and it was possible she had some leftover business that she wanted me to take care of for her. I had told her that I would live for her and do everything that she couldn’t do for herself. Really take my life and live it to the fullest.

Perhaps those words, whispered into the world, had bound myself to her, keeping her trapped as an undying creature caught between the living and death. It felt like I was the chain that was keeping her tethered here. The more I thought about it, the more it made me sick to my stomach. If that was the case, then it was a stroke of misfortune that I had entrapped her soul.

But why was I repeatedly trying to kill her?

You see, my niece’s body had never been truly found. They had only found parts of her.

What I mean by found is that they had been mailed parts of her to my sister’s house. They had wrapped her body parts up neatly, as if it was some grand gesture! There hadn’t been any note, no demands. All it was was her hand in a box with the ring that I had gotten her for her sixteenth birthday.

For months, her mother worked with anyone she could to try and find her. All they had were parts of her body that had arrived there mysteriously.

That was another piece of the puzzle that had stumped the investigators.

How exactly had the packages arrived there?

No one could answer it. They were just there.

Even after rewinding the footage from the security cameras, there was just no one. The box wasn’t there, and then it was. Only a few more of those packages had arrived. They had contained more bits of her: a tongue, an ear, and finally an eye.

Then even that stopped. It had all stopped competely. Any news, any leads—nothing. It dried up like a river in a drought. After a long six months, they had to shut the case down. They had no leads. There wasn’t anything that had brought new light to the case, and that meant the case had gone dry.

My sister, I think, was probably so traumatized from the whole experience that she just wanted to wrap it up. Her daughter was lost, and lost is always worse than dead.

When you have a dead loved one, you can visit their grave or hold their urn if your desire was to be cremated. But with being lost, there was no visiting, no nice ending, no sad send-off, and no finality, when you don't have a body to mourn. In the end, we had buried and empty coffin, sealing the parts of her into it. Closed casket of course.

It was a desperate grasp at feeling connected to her one last time. After that my sister had bottled everything up. Similarly, I also felt like I was grieving a child in my own right. Although I didn’t give birth to her, I had become a mother to her in another sense. She came to me when she had boy problems or needed a shoulder to cry on. Now, at the tender age of twenty-three, she was dead. Her mother would never see her again, and I was left with having to see her everywhere.

Grief was a strange thing.

I had tested plenty of theories. I’d gone and relived my spring break as a forty-year-old woman, which is no easy feat on the body. I went and tried to find love, which hadn’t shaken out the best. I’d done all the normal things that a twenty-year-old who didn’t see it all the way through life might be hung up on.

Then I had consulted everyone and their brother about trying to talk to her and ask what she wanted. That had been a long two months of appointments with spirit mediums and the like. They all said the same bullshit. In a way, it was thinly veiled grief counseling. Finally, after nearly giving up, I stumbled onto a medium who gave me the strangest advice.

To be frank with you all, I had been so exhausted after going through so many that I can’t completely remember her entire explanation.

“Why don’t you try recreating your niece’s death? Then you’ll start to understand why she’s here,” the medium with one enchanting green eye and an eyepatch over the other had said.

Her words were what sparked the killing.

Perhaps it was the fact that it was the most outlandish suggestion, or that I had long since lost my mind. But I thought maybe it would bring her solace, or at least that’s what I hoped. If I undestood her death, or knew how she died, then maybe she could pass on?

To be honest, I just wanted her to be gone. Her haunting me felt like a slap in the face, like she was saying, You didn’t help me!

The medium had also said one other thing that day. I hadn’t thought about it until what happened this morning. It was the catalyst that lead me to posting here to explain my sistuation in hopes of an answer.

I woke up late one morning. In a daze, I hadn’t seen my niece.

That made me think I was still dreaming. Her presence had become a constant that let me know when I was awake and when I was dreaming.

Dragging myself to the shower, I let the warm, nearly burning water tumble over me. Its glorious bite was a delight to my skin. I don’t know how long I was in there. It could have been minutes, even though it felt like hours.

Water trickled down my flesh like a tangible river of time. Soon I felt the pruning skin of my fingers and the tightness of my own skin.

Drawing the curtain back, I nearly screamed, but it died inside my throat before I could. It shriveled like a flower that had been scorched beneath the sun. Instead, all I could muster were panting gasps.

My niece stood with her hand pointing toward the mirror, ribbons of blood flowing down from her finger. They dripped from her outstretched hand as a steady stream began to fall.

It was all-encompassing. The floor was slick with a puddle of the sanguine pool.

Jerking my eyes from the floor, I looked toward the mirror, a sinking feeling of dread bubbling up in my stomach.

Even now, those words are burned into my eyelids. I can still see them.

They’re Coming

Leave NOW

The words dripped and twisted as the steam smeared the blood across the mirror. But I could see enough to understand that it was a warning. This was the real first communication that we had shared.

But as I turned to face my niece, I nearly fell. Her face was contorted into a wretched frown. Bleeding, long, terrible gashes ran down from her eye, all the way across her cheeks and down into her throat. She had never looked like this before!

It was a mess of gore, muscles, and tendons that were completely exposed to my eyes. I wanted to close them, but I couldn’t control my body. She was looking at me, her one good eye bore into my body. It begged me to act, and before I knew it I was in motion.

It could have been fear that propelled me, or her warning. It’s hard to say which. Which ever it was it was a powerful motivator.

Now I’m in a shitty motel, with my niece standing at the door, still looking horrific, watching the news about the fire that engulfed my apartment building.

Thankfully, no one was hurt.

But I felt like a rock was sitting in my stomach. I turned to look at my neice, she was standing dead still as if she was frozen. Her long curly hair floated around her, blood was still dripping from her, but the gashes along her face and neck had closed. In their place were inflame red scars, but she wouldn't look at me.

The medium’s words echo like a tolling bell.

“What might seem malicious at first could be a blessing in disguise. Consider why your niece would be stuck to you. Perhaps she is protecting you.”

Her warning had been clear as day.

I looked at her, and a new feeling began to consume me.

What is she trying to protect me from?