It was past midnight and her remaining time was trickling away from her like sand pouring from a broken hourglass. She sprinted along the deserted path, lit dimly by yellow street lights, and towards her car. It was unlocked. It was a wonder it was still there, in this area and at this time of the night. She climbed in and slammed the door, fumbling inside her bag for the keys to the ignition.
The engine shuddered to life as she tried to still her pounding heart. I have to get back, I have to. She had allowed herself to get carried away by the night, a pleasure reserved for normal nineteen year old girls, those who didn’t have to worry about the things which haunted her every moment of every new day she faced.
She had reached home, but she could feel her consciousness slipping away already, trying to wriggle out of the confines of her mind. She held it there firmly, and left the car and ran towards her door with the keys still jingling in her hand.
She let them fall from her hands, her mind elsewhere. They were the least of her worries, lying strewn on the cold concrete. Three flights up to her flat, she had to get there, she couldn’t let herself slip away where anybody could see- they would catch her, imprison her. She was leaving muddy footprints on the carefully polished wooden floor, sprinting up each flight of stairs with what must have been all of her strength and determination.
She reached it; the flat. Weakly, she pushed the door shut and then collapsed, gasping, against her shabby sofa.
***
“It’s you. The golden ghost girl,” a whisper pierced her mind. She opened her eyes and was blinded by bright daylight. She stood on the one side of a deserted, pleasant street, the girl who had uttered those words the only person to be seen. She looked down, dismally, at her feet, bare, her loose dress billowing around her ankles.
“What’s your name?” came that voice again, sweet, innocent and naïve.
She stared at the girl opposite her. She opened her mouth but no sound would come out. “Miranda,” she tried to say, but her lips opened and closed hopelessly. She stood still, disoriented.
“I’m not what you think. You’re imagining me,” she tried to say to the girl. It didn’t work. Again she could make no sound. She caught the girl’s eyes and thought those words, very hard. If anything is possible, she thought to herself, why wouldn’t I be able to speak to her through my mind? But however hard she tried, she couldn’t say a word, telepathically or not.
Her name was Ester, and she must have only been about thirteen by the look of her, with wide, curious eyes and plump, rosy cheeks. She called Miranda the golden ghost girl, due to her faint appearance, only a silhouette in Ester’s eyes, and her long golden hair. Now her lips were slightly parted, her only sign of shock at having seen Miranda’s half-breathing, almost non-existent silhouette. The one thing she didn’t seem, Miranda noticed, was afraid.
Ester was still staring, wavering slightly where she stood on the other side of the street. “Who are you?” she said again. “I don’t understand why I keep seeing you. Why won’t you talk to me?”
Miranda could only shake her head. The ground was shaking underneath her, droplets of rain beginning to fall from the sky and splatter her face.
Ester gave her a wan smile. “You know what?” she said. “I think I'll call you Polly.”
***
Searing pain brought her back to the real world, to her dreary old flat, where she lay on the floor, gasping for breath. Some would have told her it had all been a dream, but she knew that they would have been wrong to say that. Ester was real, in another part of the world. She was the latest of so many people she had visited in the night ever since she had been a little girl. Only the time was different there, as it had been with the others. A different kind of pain erupted inside her at this thought. The others… She couldn’t bear to think of what had happened to the others.
But it wouldn’t happen this time- would it? For so long, it had seemed like she’d managed to get away…
The pain persisted, leaving her paralysed on the floor, unable even to sit up. She tried to speak, and this time sound left her lips. “What’s…going…on?” she gasped, tears and blood streaking down her face. She opened her eyes. All she could see was the shredded sofa in front of her, marred by the black spots dancing across her vision.
A scent overpowered her nostrils; a male stench of sweat and cigarettes, mixed in with the warm, sickly smell of her own blood. A low grunt accompanied it. “Miranda, Miranda,” It said, in an almost playful tone. “How long I’ve been looking for you.”
In horror, through her tears and pain, she writhed round to see his face. There it was, shaven with several long, deep scars marring his cheeks. His eyes were cold, a stunning emerald green. His lips were twitched upwards slightly in a sick smile.
She swore under her breath.
“Now, there’s no need to get upset,” he said. “Come with me and I won’t need to hurt you.”
“No,” she cried. “You’ve killed people…you deserve to be in jail…”
His smile intensified, his stunning eyes staring into her eyes so hard that she began to feel as if they were burning. “I wouldn’t put it like that,” he said. “I’m an innocent man, Miranda. You’re the one who did the killing.”
She tried again, her resolve wearing down now. “Please,” she moaned. “Please don’t do this.”
His fist met her with a dull thud and all was black.
***
The Colleens were the perfect married couple. The parents of only one teenage girl, Ester Colleen, they attended church every Sunday and drank one glass of wine only on Thursday evenings. Mr Colleen, a carpenter, worked at the local charity shop on a Saturday and frequently replaced swearwords with softer alternatives such as “Whoops!” and “Oh dear.” He proceeded to glare at anybody who didn’t quite follow his example.
Mrs Colleen spent much of her time making very sure that her teenage daughter Ester would not be able to have a real boyfriend until well into her twenties. She forbid her daughter to wear make-up or skirts any shorter than knee length, and insisted that she should come to church with them.
Unfortunately Ester, herself an atheist, didn’t quite see the same way as her religious mother, and refused to come along. Her blunt refusal to attend church and save her soul was seen by her mother as nothing short of a horrifying betrayal. Their conflicting views led to one of their worse arguments, resulting in Mrs Colleen slapping her daughter sharply across the cheek before leaving for church.
By now, walking home with Mr Colleen, she had calmed down, and was animatedly discussing the best methods of forcing her daughter to attend church with her husband, who looked as if he would rather have been anywhere but with his wife, forced to mumble vague replies to her ever-persistent questions.
With Mr Colleen hanging back, Mrs Colleen reached their front door and pulled out her keys from behind the pot plant by the porch. With them jingling in her hand, she walked forward and unlocked the door. “Ester!” she called as they entered the house. “We’re home!”
Ester didn’t reply. Mrs Colleen frowned at her husband. “She can’t be still upset about earlier- surely?” she said, looking at him quizzically.
“Actually,” Mr Colleen said, clearing his throat, “It looks like she might be-“
“Ridiculous,” said Mrs Colleen. “Teenagers these days…” she raised her voice again. “ESTER! Get down here or we’ll have to ground you!”
Still there was no reply. Muttering about her daughter’s rude manners, “I never brought her up to behave like this,” she hurried up the stairs, hanging the keys on their designated hook. “Honestly, Ester!”
She reached Ester’s bedroom door, tightly shut and bolted. She rapped on it swiftly and then flung it open.
Images she had thought it was only possible to see in hell were captured in her irises, gruesome snapshots which would stick with her for the rest of her years. Frozen to the spot and shocked to the bone, she could only open her mouth in a silent scream.
***
Ester sat in her bedroom, rock music blaring through the walls. “Where Time Divides,” was the particular name of this song, but she was barely listening to it. She was more preoccupied by the argument she’d had earlier with her mother. She raised a hand to her cheek, still stinging from her mother’s sharp slap.
But at the forefront of her mind, even before the pressing issue of her mother’s controlling ways, was the thought which had been haunting her for weeks now, even months.
The golden ghost girl, with her wide, wild eyes and her golden flowing hair.
There was a rap on the window. She stood up to answer it before stepping back in disbelief. Wait… the window? That couldn’t be right. It was the front door she was thinking about, surely, she thought to herself. Leaving the song to play, she threw open her bedroom door and ran down the stairs. The music faded as she climbed down the steps, until she could only hear a distant voice singing out woeful lyrics.
It was there that she heard the crash, before she had even managed to reach the front door. “Bad dog, Bennie!” she shouted, thinking of the family puppy, who they had only just taken in and who was constantly breaking things. She heard a distant whimper. Rolling her eyes, she turned back to the door.
She swore under her breath, a particularly bad phrase she would never have dared to use in front of her mother. The hook from which the key usually hung was empty- her parents had taken the keys with them, of course. “What am I meant to do now?” she said to herself, under her breath.
It came to her in a flash of inspiration. She lifted open the letterbox and peered through it. She could only see the bushes outside, and so she put her mouth to the letterbox and shouted, “Who is this?”
There was only silence. Taking another deep breath, she shouted “I’m sorry, but my parents are out and we don’t have any spare keys so I can’t open the door!”
“That will be quite alright, dear,” said a voice from behind her.
It was a soft, feminine voice. Her eyes half closed, she slowly spun around on her heel to see the source of it, almost rooted to the ground with shock. She was dreaming… she could only be dreaming… this was a nightmare…
She opened her eyes completely and her jaw dropped open in shock.
“I- I thought you couldn’t speak! Are you even real?” she stuttered.
The golden ghost girl stood there, the corners of her lips turned upwards in a sarcastic smile. “Oh, I’m more real than you would think,” she said, her voice cold. The iciness of her words created an astounding contrast against her sweet, vulnerable looks. Ester noticed, with a jump of her heart that her golden hair was wrapped tightly in a perfect bun, and there was blood smeared on her face.
Ester took a step back. “It was you, wasn’t it?” she whispered. “You broke in through my window upstairs. I thought ghosts could walk through walls- and windows,” she gave a small laugh, her voice weak.
“You were wrong.”
Ester cracked then. “Please don’t hurt me,” she said in a small voice. “Please, Polly-“
The golden ghost girl’s eyes flashed.
***
Upon hearing his wife’s distressed screams, Mr Colleens rushed upstairs. “Amanda? AMANDA! What’s the matter? What’s going on?”
His heart was pounding. “Oh, SUGAR!” he hissed under his breath, pinching his skin to keep the swearwords from escaping past the barrier of his lips, the only barrier that kept his soul safe.
His wife was sobbing at their daughter’s door. A feeling of dread spreading through his every bone, he stepped forward, and taking a deep breath, looked in.
She hung from her lampshade, her eyes wide, open and glazed, her mouth open in a silent scream.
There was a pool of deep red blood seeping into the perfect white carpet, spread over the bed sheets, splattered over the frame of the open window. It hit him then that it wasn’t his daughter’s whole body hanging from the lampshade- parts of limbs were scattered all around the room.
On the floor sat the puppy, gnawing on what looked sickeningly like a part of his daughter’s leg.
He was unable to keep his head up long enough from retching to notice any of the other details of his daughter’s death. He stood there until the police arrived, his wife having finally called them through her hysterical sobs.
Even the policemen were barely able to enter the room without a sudden, immense nausea filling every fibre of their body when they saw the mess that awaited them. Through taking it in turns and trying to pretend that everything they were seeing was anything but real, they managed to note down everything about the room before sending for a clean-up team. The Colleens, in shock, had decided to rent a hotel room for the night, a police car marking the hotel they were staying at.
Parts of the police report were released and reported in the local newspaper.
“Yesterday afternoon a young girl of only thirteen years of age was discovered, her body torn apart, in her house. It was the last thing that her average parents, regular church-goers who describe their relationship with their daughter as “without a flaw” expected.
The horrors Mr and Mrs Colleen were faced with that night were unimaginable. Their daughter’s head hung from a lamp, they explained, her limbs strewn across the room and the entire room covered with blood.
“She looked terrified,” explained Mrs Colleen through sobs at the interview shortly following the incident. “My sweet little daughter, torn to pieces- it hurts so much.”
The possibility was considered that young Ester Colleen was a seriously disturbed child and had done this to herself- but this theory was swiftly dismissed when the doctors deemed it impossible. It looks like we’re facing the possibility of a murderer on the loose here- but as yet, there has been no sign of him (or her.)
Perhaps most disturbing and confusing of all was the message scrawled in bloody, childish letters across young Ester’s wall-
“My Name Is Miranda."
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