1 Looking Within

The lightning cracked across the sky as the rain pelted her maroon jacket, soaking her to the bone. Her brown hair stuck to her pale face as she ran through the dark forest. Her long legs, dressed in black ripped jeans, carried her to the place of her dreams.

Or should I say nightmares?

As lightning lit up the midnight sky once again, the young woman finally reached the massive oak doors of her past.

Thunder could be heard from miles away from the old, deserted town. The mysterious lady knocked on a dark-with-water door and it fell with a rumbling sound throughout the tall building. Bats that inhabited the abandoned structure flew out of the pitch-black entryway, though the woman did not seem bothered by their presence.

She walked through the shadowy doorway, welcoming the darkness within the school.

She wandered the dusty halls of her old academy until she was met with her old enemy.

Her classroom.

Horrid memories flooded through her ominous mind, filling it of her foreboding youth.

A little girl, possessing brown hair and hazel eyes, suddenly appeared before her, in the same dusty desk in the far corner the woman always sat at. All the other desks were taken by older children and talking with their friends, some even pointing at the poor child in the corner.

Then, they all disappeared as the woman continued down her old hallway. She stopped again, this time in front of an old auditorium, the children, older this time, appeared again.

They wore Alice in Wonderland costumes, but the girl could not be found. But the woman knew where the girl was; behind the curtain with a black eye and a busted lip, quietly sobbing.

As the woman moved, instead of vanishing, the little girl materialized beside the woman. She reached up from her short height and gripped her older self's hand. They moved their way to the lunchroom, where many, many lunches were spent without food and a table, friends were quite sparse as well.

The little girl pulled her older form into the library, the only sanctuary of the two. Books laid on the ground, dirty and tore up from all the ungrateful teenagers. The soft, plush couches that were once used as a teleport between the book world and real life, was now covered in a filthy white tarp.

This time, the woman pulled the children away from the sacred place, tears in her own hazel eyes. The girl, distracted, rushed out into the playground. The slides were wet with dirty water, the swings were swinging with the wind, and the old see-saw was now broken in two, pieces of wood that were once a whole board were spewed out onto the mulch. The little girl ran through the pouring rain and to the swing. She jumped on it and swung herself.

The woman left the child, but saw her at her next location. The bathroom. The most terrifying place for both females. So much pain and agony came from that place. Blood was still splattered on the dirt infested walls, flies swarmed the toilets, and the sinks spewed blood instead of water.

The once energetic little girl, laid on the bathroom floor, blood seeping through her maroon jacket, her legs, covered in black ripped jeans, were bent in unnatural directions, and her eyes were red with tears and puffed up. One was black and bruised and the other was bloodied. Her jaw had bruises along the edge of it.

Remembering that awful day that held her hospitalized for a month, the woman started uncontrollably sobbing, falling to the floor and covering her mouth to softer her shouts, though it did nothing. She crawled to herself on the used-to-be white tiled floor, still sobbing.

The hours past and the woman dried her fountain of tears. She stood, now emotionless, and looked toward the smudged mirror. The reflective glass fogged up, steam filling the bathroom.

The woman placed her bloody finger on the mirror and drew out her name.

'I am Marlow Griffin.'

Then, she vanished into thin air, the body of the little girl the only thing left behind.