An excerpt… Photo CTTO

Shhh… 

Silent Night. Holy night. Cursed night.

A gust of wind, howling like a banshee, shook the dried leaves around the corner of Casper and Nicholas. The building fronting it  isn’t imposing, it is just a nondescript fulcrum of business persuasion on the first floor and a small abode of life up the second. The empty laundromat that fronts it slept in as quiet as the grave, yet there is something wanting. There’s no fussy baby in the wee hours of the morning, nor was it the last trading hour on the last Friday of a month. It was something borne from the middle ages, where superstitious monks thought three am was a gap between prayers that leaves devotees vulnerable to evil. The grey pavement gleamed like a wavy apparition around a tall cement electrical pole where the lights flickered unceremoniously. Then the wind hummed in varying degrees of voices, bringing with it cold air that traipsed on human skin. It was time— a moment when the veil lifts between two worlds, when the natural world is visited by mystery, mischief and mayhem. A haunting is about to commence.

Specks of light suddenly bolted out of the dark, soulless park across the street from the corner and then slowly glided towards the two storey building. They are the ones you see floating in the air at cemeteries and at times, funeral homes. They pottered over the black and white checkered floor once inside the laundromat when the largest orb of light stopped suspended on top of the only broken machine turned into a short, heavy-set, red frizzy-haired girl. With sunken eyes clad in a white pinafore soaked with blood trailing from the front neck down to the frilly hem, she exhaled loudly, and stood upright to her bearings. She looked around then curled her lips.

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