It was your average foyer, with wooden floors and stairs; it would’ve been an empty foyer if not for the front desk, complete with a lowly desk lamp and a wireless telephone.

Elisabeth crept down the last remaining steps. Her eyes darted left and right for any adult. Those girls must have gotten to her, after all. Elisabeth became very aware of the dark corners in the hallways... The black behind the windowpanes. A couple times she double-took at a corner and strained her eyes to find a pair staring back. Of course, nothing was there. Or so she told herself. She perked her ears for any noise of late-night workers… Or of the dancing footsteps of the Boogeyman…

Thunder growled. Elisabeth jumped. She sucked her teeth and released a sigh, trying her best not to use the inhaler in her hand again. It's just a thunderstorm, nothing special about it, she thought. Just grab some water and run back to bed. That’s all.

She stepped off the stairs and crept along the foyer.

Yep, just an old-fashioned storm. Just a bunch of shadows and my wild imagination.

She crept to the point between the desk and the front door.

Nothing to it, just an old, un-fashionable, un-special, uneventful, completely logical thunderstorm. I mean, come on. I’m too old to fall for childish ghost stories. There’s no such thing as a boogeyman—

The front doors burst open.

Elisabeth fell back against the paper-covered desk, failing to scream.

A black, slender figure with a mushroom top stood in the doorway. White flashes formed its silhouette. Thunder clapped from behind.

Terror sucked the breath from Elisabeth’s lungs. All she could do was gape at the figure that, that, that emitted such horror and grief! She fell back onto the desk, unable to scream, overwhelmed from it all!

The boogeyman! The boogeyman’s real!

The figure stepped into the foyer, tracking water as it clacked onto the hardwood flooring. Then, after standing for what felt like hours, the figure drooped. It fell onto its hands and knees, coughing and gasping for air. The mushroom object it held rolled onto the ground, trailing a bend of water.

In a rush, Elisabeth reached for the desk lamp and flicked it on. The light poured onto the surface of the desk, flowed off its sides, and rolled feebly against the weak figure.

It was a slightly emaciated woman, dressed in a black trench coat and red slacks dotted with raindrops. Her frizzled, long, platinum-blonde hair drooped over her face as she held her chest and gasped for air, and that mushroom item was no more than a wet, black umbrella.

Shocked, Elisabeth knelt beside the woman.

“Mein Gott!” the teen desperately said. "Frau, are you okay?” The woman suddenly peered up, her face hidden underneath a veil of hair. She wiped her locks back behind her head.

Elisabeth gasped—only slightly. Why? She couldn’t tell you. Maybe it was because of that face; that pale, make-up-less, baggy-eyed face. Something about that woman’s countenance was... unsettling. Was it unsettling? Maybe perhaps... No, no, unsettling could be the right word.

The woman (who seemed to be in her late forties) stared at Elisabeth with awe. Suddenly, the woman held the girl’s face with both ring-less hands, squishing together Elisabeth's cheeks, as if making sure that whatever apparition was sitting in front of her was indeed in the flesh.

Elisabeth wanted to say in her human tongue “Hey! Let go of me, you—you—you drenched, strange loony!” through her puckered lips, she really wanted to. But as she tried to free her head, the woman spoke—not in German, mind you—but something so bizarre, so unearthly, that Elisabeth suddenly became sick with worry over the woman’s physical and mental stability. The woman snarled, clicked, ticked, growled—was she having a stroke?

The woman “said” only one statement but was interrupted with another torrent of coughs and freed the girl. Elisabeth jumped back and stood, clenching her rosary and twisting the beads.