2000

Wake up.

The half asleep child rolled over on the couch. She had moved there from her bed after her mom went to bed, trying to stay awake so she could see her dad before he went to sleep. She almost never got to see her dad. He worked too much. Sometimes, if she was awake when he got home he would teach her card games at the kitchen table while he smoked.

Please wake up.

She mumbled in her sleep, rolling over again. She almost fell off the couch. She was dreaming about fire. She could smell smoke. In her dream, a building was on fire. She didn't know where the building was but it looked very old. There were children inside. Tears tracked down her small face and she curled into a little ball in the corner of the couch.

Wakeupwakeupwakeup.

WAKE UP.

The little girl sat straight up, her short brown hair sticking out wildly around her face. She looked around the dark room. She heard voices in the next room, too quiet to make out what they were saying. She could still smell smoke, but it smelled more like her dad's cigarettes than what the foul smoke in her dream had smelled like.

She got off the couch and followed the voices through the dark house. They were coming from the room she shared with her older brother. He had been sleeping when she snuck out of bed to go wait for her dad. She wondered who he was talking to. Baby Eli was too little to talk, and he slept in their mommy's room anyway.

She opened the curtain draped across the doorway. The voices stopped the second she looked in the room. She looked at the bunk bed push into the corner of the room and saw her brother fast asleep in the moonlight streaming from the window. He was on the bottom bunk, covered almost completely with his blanket. She could see his dark hair and heard him snoring quietly. She watched him for a minute to see if he was playing some kind of joke on her and then made her way back to the couch in the living room.

The four year old climbed back onto the couch and wrapped herself up in her big tweety bird blanket. Her dad wasn't home yet and she was determined to see him tonight. She decided that the voices were just a left over from her dream. Her mom always told her she had a big imagination. So maybe she had imagined them. That, or Johnie talked in his sleep. She giggled to herself at that thought. He would be so angry if she ever told him he talked at night.

Her eyes drooped. She would never admit it to herself, but she was very tired. She felt a strange sense of urgency earlier, when she was following the quiet voices, but now that was fading. She started to drift off to sleep, her eyes blinking slowly. As she struggled to open her eyes, she saw a boy standing in the corner of the living room. That isnt Johnie, she thought to herself.

She sat up a little and rubbed her eyes and then looked back to where she had seen the boy. He wasn't there. She looked around and saw he was now sitting at the other end of the couch. She stared at him. He had long black hair that had feathers braided into it. He was shirtless and barefoot, wearing pants that didn't look like any she had ever seen before. He was older than her, probably around six or seven. He stared back at her with sad brown eyes.

"Who are you?" She asked, confused about why this strange child was in her home so late at night.

"You need to leave." He whispered. He glanced around the room as though he wasn't supposed to be there and was afraid of being caught. She stared at the boy, slightly annoyed. This was her home, not his. Why did she need to leave?

"I live here." She told him. "And I don't know you. You can't make me go. I'll tell my mommy if you try."

His eyes pleaded with her. "You need to leave." He told her again.

"Why?" She demanded, crossing her small arms stubbornly. She was really beginning to get upset. She didn't like that he wouldn't tell her anything besides that he wanted her to leave her own house.

"She's coming back. It's not safe here. She'll hurt you. She hurt us." He waved his arm back toward the corner where she had first seen him and saw two more boys, similarly dressed. She was starting to feel uncomfortable. She didn't know these children nor how they'd gotten into her house, and now they were saying someone was coming to hurt her. They were scaring her.

"Who is she?" She asked, looking back at the first boy.

He stared over her shoulder in absolute terror. His eyes flicked back to hers and she could smell smoke again. Not the familiar smell of cigarettes but the more toxic smell that had accompanied her nightmare earlier.

"I warned you." He told her. He flickered out of existence.

She stared at the spot where the boy had been sitting and then looked over to where the other boys had been. They were gone too. She was beyond terrified now. All the hair on her arms and on the back of her neck was standing up and she realized the room had gotten so cold she could see her breath. She really wished her daddy was home. People didn't just disappear like that and it wasn't supposed to be this cold. It was midsummer.

She heard whispering start back up somewhere in the house. This time she didn't dare follow the sinister sounds, sure that whatever it was wouldn't be nearly as harmless as the three young boys that had shown themselves to her.

Abruptly the whispers turned to singing. It was a female voice, very soft and pretty. But it was also cold. Menacing. Evil. It was the voice of nightmares, hidden behind a sweet lullaby.

".....Hush little baby, don't say a word...."

The little girl didn't sleep anymore that night. She wished she had listened to the disappearing boy's warning.

....

2015

Bellamy finished pouring water into a cup and sat it down in front of a wheelchair bound old woman. The woman smiled at her and went back to talking to the other occupants of the table. Bellamy poured the rest of the drinks and made her way back to the serving window, struggling not to yawn. She was halfway thru her shift and beginning to feel the effects of yet another nearly sleepless night.

What sleep she had gotten was plagued with nightmares. All she could remember was the harsh smell of something burning and someone, maybe more than one person, crying. She hated when she had these dreams. She felt like they were important somehow but she could never figure out what they could mean and they made her feel worse than she would if she hadn't slept at all. She readjusted the hair net that covered her long mouse brown hair as she reached the kitchen. She ducked inside and replaced her gloves.

This was her last day working in the dietary department of the nursing home. She felt a little sad. She liked this job a lot and didn't really want to leave. But it didn't pay enough to justify driving back and forth from Lucas's apartment.

Lucas was excited, at least. He was in the best mood she had ever seen him in. She found herself more on edge as the day she was supposed to move drew closer. She always walked on eggshells around him, but lately it had been worse. She didn't want anything to ruin his mood. Even if it wasn't her fault, he'd find a way to blame her. Everything was always her fault somehow.

The cook had started plating food and was passing trays thru the service window to the other dietary aide. Bellamy went back out into the dining room and grabbed some of the trays. She then made her way back around the small dining room to pass the meals out to the residents, lost in thought.

She really didn't want to move. She felt like she had just gotten her life stabilized and now things were changing again. She had moved out of her parents' house at seventeen, just before she graduated high school. She couldn't remember exactly what the fight that had led to her leaving was about, only that no one who lived in that house had been happy in a long time. The little old house was so full of negative energy it felt like it was going to implode. She hadn't been back since the day she moved out, almost exactly two years ago.

She then moved in with her paternal grandmother, Alice. She had only stayed there for a few months and then had attempted to live on her own. It hadn't gone well and Bellamy had ended up homeless off and on over the last year and a half, staying with different friends around town, before moving back into Alice's house.

Alice was a nice enough woman but Bellamy hadn't known her well at all before she moved in with her. Her immediate family really only saw Alice once or twice a year before the big fight and had stopped all together the moment Bellamy moved out.

And now, Bellamy was moving again. And this time she wouldn't be able to keep her job. But at very least this time she wasn't going to be completely on her own. Lucas worked and would be able to help with bills, and as long as she wasn't too stupid or irritating he wouldn't be angry at her all the time.

A loud yell interrupted her thoughts. The other aide had mixed some trays up and one of the nursing home residents was screaming at her. The old woman threw the tray on the ground at the aide's feet. Bellamy quickly made her way over to the table.

"Its okay, Leona. I'll get you a different tray." She smiled at the little old lady scowling at her coworker.

"At least one of you is capable of doing your job." The woman at the table growled.

Bellamy's coworker rolled her eyes as they cleaned the mess on the floor and took the tray back to the serving window, where the cook was waiting.

"Lee says we gave her the wrong thing." Bellamy informed the cook.

"Oh, I heard, Bell." The cook laughed as she made up another tray for the woman. "She probably can't remember what she ordered this morning."

As the cook made the replacement meal, Bellamy's coworker looked over at her.

"I can't believe you're leaving." The girl sighed. "I don't know if I can handle this place without you."

Bellamy had worked there since she was fifteen. She had been at this job for four years now. She really would miss this place.

"You'll be fine, Amy." Bellamy smiled. "Lee is mean, but almost everyone else here is really nice."

Out of the corner of her eye she saw movement. She turned her head towards the large windows that lined one wall of the dining room and caught a glimpse of long black hair and feathers. She suddenly felt cold and very, very afraid.

A tray, too far away from either of the girls for one of them to have bumped it, fell from the ledge of the serving window with a loud bang.

The air smelled faintly of something burning.

...