Gary missed the imaginary friends he used to have as a child in stately old Victorian home, with whom he would spend the nights making up scary stories and whispering beneath the plush blankets until the morning rustling of his parents banished his friends to silence.

When he later learned the police pulled no fewer than a dozen bodies from the crawlspaces in between the walls of the old house, Gary wept with unfathomable grief, partly out of guilt for his complicity in the crimes, however unwittingly, and partly because even now, he missed the voices still.

Voice a monotone whisper she says, I was hugging Hannah close, rocking, murmuring, crooning, crying hard right along with her..seemed like hours. Staring at endless nothing, she continues, When she finally stopped, I was so happy she had finally fallen asleep...so happy.

The large albino wolf pounced on me quickly, his large maw opened wide, his sharp carnassial teeth ripped through my chest like a hot knife to butter. I stared in deathly horror watching him chew my heart before he changed into a man and said, "Now, you will roam the land in search of prey."

The first disoriented, distorted, and deformed moments following my reluctant emergence from the ignorant refuge of mindlessness brought the disjointed consciousness of ears steadily filling with warm, viscous fluid; while the stench of death and decay burning at my nostrils competed with the nauseatingly gritty, metallic sensation of earth mixed with blood upon my palette, and the bite of winter on my exposed, naked body. Gone was my soft, warm bed, and any desperate hope of returning to the refuge of dreams, as I forced a rasping breath into the remains of my twisted body and emerged fully into the taste and fragrance of my own decay, and the eternal discomfort of a shallow grave.