* * * *
"My name is Jasper Harding."
His voice broke the numbness. She flinched, holding her knees tighter, not moving. Sweat ran in rivulets down her body, despite the dense chill gripping the room. Every heartbeat was a shudder of fear. The darkness writhed and danced with horrors unimaginable. They filled her with their madness, twisted her soul with their evil. She'd long ago given up telling herself it was only the drug. It was more than that now. He was back.
"Repeat it. Say my name."
She bit her tongue and ignored the urge to do as he asked. The darkness ran across her skin as lightly as a spider, scalding her.
"Repeat it, and the fear will go. Everything will go."
"NO!” She dropped her head to her knees and tried to deny the growing need to do as he asked. She'd rather face insanity.
Pain flared in her thigh. More drugs. She moaned and held her trembling legs tightly. She wouldn't give in. She wouldn't...
* * * *
Her parents’ death replayed itself, over and over and over in the darkness. The look on their faces as they'd waved good-bye to her. The scream of metal as a runaway truck crushed them. Images of the twisted remains of the car entwined with blood and mangled body parts, none really distinguishable from the other.
Again and again she felt the caress of her mother's soul, her kiss of love, as she passed on. She screamed and cried and denied the night's insistence they died because of her. Begged and pleaded for forgiveness, only to be mocked with vicious laughter.
And still the nightmare danced on.
* * * *
Over and over she watched Tommy being beaten, her gaze hazy with the blood from a wound on her forehead. Unable to help him, her gifts useless with the pain pounding through her brain, she could only watch the three kids kick him.
Words mocked her. Her words, spoken the night before his death. A wish for his soul to be sent to hell. She cried a denial to the darkness. The words had been spoken in anger and fear, and never meant. The night would not listen, and the madness danced on.