A Winter’s Haunting

”To Nell!”  The clinking of their raised glasses only snags the attention of a few lunch-goers.  The place is middle management nice, Nell flinching at the idea that it will soon be considered beneath her.

“You finally made it.” Sam’s smile seems genuine enough despite it having been a fifty-fifty shot this lunch would have been for him.  “How does it feel?”

And she smiles and maybe says something funny— it’s like she’s not even there.

“You finally made it.”

Made it.  If someone had said that to her years ago, they wouldn’t have been talking about a promotion.

A chill runs over her then, the hairs at her neck bristling to attention.  Her head snaps over her shoulder.  Her eyes lock with a man’s, who— she’s out of her chair, her hip against the table sending glasses rolling.

“Woah, you okay?”

But she doesn’t answer.  His eyes— a visceral familiarity has her pushing past the tables between them.  A mother seeing her lost child.  Her focus drives her right into a server, knocking the tray from his hands.  The crash of shattered glass and ceramic breaks her trance.

“I’m so sorry.”  She ducks down distractedly, trying to keep at least one eye on him.  She knows it’s too late.  All it took was a single moment and he’s gone.

Even with her blinds drawn, her lights off, Nell spends most of the night searching for where those eyes belong in her memory.  It isn’t until she’s drifted to the doorway of a dream that the words flash into her mind, backlit by blue light. 

The figure’s stone blue eyes held to her like rigor mortis, skin stretched over peeking bone. 

She launches upright like waking from a hard fall.  Throwing her feet over the side of the bed, she pulls her laptop off the floor.  She knows exactly the file she’s looking for.

A Winter’s Haunting

It’s not there.  She types it into the search bar, watching the Percentage Complete slowly rise until— No Items Match Your Search.  

Maybe…

With only the light of her phone, she rifles through her drawers until she finds her stack of flash drives.  One after the other they come up empty.  Not only missing A Winter’s Haunting, but her other stories as well.  All of her work-- she stops her tears at the back of her throat.  But there isn’t time to sit with her loss. Movement catches the corner of her eye.  Whipping her head up, she slams a hand over her mouth to keep from screaming.  There’s a man outside her window.   Flattening herself to the floor, her hand claws furiously under her bed, desperately searching for any kind of weapon.  She passes over something solid. Locking her fingers around it, she feels the unmistakable give of flesh.

Her scream rips through the seams of the surrounding silence.  Scrambling up from the floor, the lamp she reaches for clatters to the ground in her desperation to turn it on.

Light shines its mercy across her room.  The space beneath her bed is as empty as her parents had always promised.  The shadow outside her window gone with the light.

“Are you okay?”  

Nell jumps, grabbing at her chest.  Sam steps back from her office door.

“Didn’t mean to scare you.”  It’s almost a question.  

“No, it’s—”  When did she get to the office? 

Behind Sam, someone passes by her doorway.  Even the way he moves— quiet as snowfall, quick as a snake bite.

She doesn’t realize she’s out of her chair until she’s faced with the concerned stares of a about a dozen coworkers— employees.  None of their eyes are the color she’s hoping for.

An hour later, the ping of her computer has her clutching at her desk.  An email— “Concerned”.  It’s from Nancy.  Did she miss another meeting today?  She deletes it.  Her focus had already drifted from the doorway for too long.

“You going to be okay walking out alone?”  

They typically went to the garage in groups. 

“Yeah, just wrapping this up.”  Nell reassures him from behind her computer’s empty screen.

He wants her alone.  This much she’s realized.  What she should have known from the beginning.  That’s how she’d written him.

It’s still a surprise. The hand over her mouth.  The knife at her back.  Hard steel in a cracked black hilt. She didn't need to see it to know.

“Take us home.”  His whisper is a cold front in her ear.  

She bypasses the exit back to her house.   That’s not what he had meant.  The old key slides thick and unwelcome into the basement door of her old apartment building. 

She's shoved aside. The door pushes right open for him, revealing to her what’s inside. Nell feels the dread pool in her muscles. A hundred pairs of eyes beg to her from the decaying dark.

Empty. All so empty. 

"Please." A woman comes forward, her frost-bite fingers scraping at Nell's hands.  “We cannot wait for you here in this purgatory.”

Nell jerks away from her, stumbling back into a small boy.  He looks up at her, lifting something in his arms,

“Please.  Finish her.”  And Nell barely chokes back her bile as she comprehends the twitching mass he offers her: the amorphous, half-realized body of his little sister.

“Finish us.” It comes from every corner of the room, surrounding her. 

Fingerless hands grope at her arms.  Her legs. Everywhere the cloying touch of her abandoned inceptions. Together, they drag her to the only piece of furniture in the room.  A desk covered in all the pages she'd never printed. And one pen.

His warm blade makes a home at the bend of her neck, a thick line of blood sliding over her collar bone, down her chest.  It seems her time is up. Her trembling hand writes the only two words that have ever truly belonged to her,

I can’t.