"The Mind's Eye"

“The Mind’s Eye”
March 16th, 2007

By: Josie Brashears (A.K.A. Shadie Bogart)

The Journals of: William Gannon Sr.

15 March, 1867
Today was bleak; chilly, damp, gray. If I wasn’t accustomed to the climate in this area, I wouldn’t believe for a second that winter was over.
For days now, my dreams have been haunted ones. My waking hours have been no less troubled by the memories of these dreams. Sometimes I don’t even think they’re dreams at all, but, as I’ve convinced myself, perhaps warnings or messages. Their details are always vague, and become even more-so upon awakening.
For days now, I have been wondering through darkness, through shadows of dreams as tall as trees, as deep as oceans. Shadows as menacing, as threatening, as those creatures you cannot see but who thrive on the souls of the lost. Those unreal creatures who come from unreal places only to stalk you through your entire life and devour all that you once were when you reach the end of your path.
For days now, I’ve lived in fear of something I cannot name, cannot define. In my time here on Earth, I’ve learned in the hardest of ways that irrational fear is the most destructive, the most deadly.
I’ve decided, though, that if I am to live in fear, I must at least know what it is that scares me so. So now, I must sleep. Perhaps I will have more details to record when I awake.


16 March, 1867

I awoke in the evening, just as the sun was setting. The only thing I remember from my dreams is laying in darkness, surrounded by, for lack of a better word, a presence. It was a terrifyingly suffocating feeling. I awoke shaking, panting…disoriented.
I sit before this journal a haunted man. As I lay in my bed hours before, my thoughts drifted back to my wife and unborn child the day she left. That child would be two years old, now. I wondered if it were a boy or girl, what it would look like…I wondered what my wife looks like now. I also wondered if I loved her at all the day I married her, but I know that, now, I loved her dearly, and missed her. Perhaps these dreams are a product of my sorrow. Perhaps I am destined to live the rest of my days as a lonely man for what I did to her. Perhaps these haunting dreams are my punishment.





~~Beginning with Persephone~~


The journal was leather-bound and closed with a thick leather strap. For six months she’d been searching for something, anything, that would give her a better idea of where she came from in terms of her bloodline and family tree. So far, all she has found out was that her great-great grandfather did something bad enough to make his wife, her great-great grandmother, leave him which was practically unheard of in that day in age.
All she really knows about her father is that he was institutionalized when she was five, suffering from the same disease that his father and his father’s father had suffered. Paranoid schizophrenia, they called it. She believed that her father was just plain mean. Her most vivid memory of her father, the one that led to his institutionalization and her adoption by her grandmother, was the look in his eyes as he held her down on the floor and strangled her almost to death. As quickly as he had attacked, he let her go, looking bewildered and confused. The best thing he’d ever done for her was, that night, he left the house and never came back. Instead, Child and Family Services came for her. She never saw her father again. She’d learned later on that when he left that night, he had walked to a convenience store and called the police on himself. After extensive psychoanalysis the judge sentenced him to a lifetime of drugs and straight-jackets in the nearest mental hospital. Seventeen years later, on her twenty-second birthday, she received a call from the hospital. Her father’s doctor informed her that her father had died. He said that he was discovered in a bathroom on a floor dedicated to the hospital’s milder cases. His neck was broken.
“The best we can figure,” the doctor had said to her, “is that he’d fallen off the top of a stall wall trying to escape through a window.” She absorbed this as they both waited in silence on their separate ends of the phone line.
“Miss Gannon,” the doctor stuttered, “he left a message, and we believe it’s for you.”
The doctor hesitated.
“Well? What’s the message?” she asked him.
The doctor asked her if she could come to the hospital, that the message was written on the inside cover of a book, and that he believed that her father intended for her to have the book as well. He included that funeral arrangements would have to be made, and since she was his only remaining family to speak of, they would either have to be made by her or she could sign papers turning the responsibility over to the state if she preferred. Needless to say, she preferred.
That was two days ago. This morning, she would make the hour-and-a-half trip to the mental hospital. She had a ten-o’clock meeting with Dr. Harold Young, her father’s doctor, to sign paperwork and receive the message left by her father.
She had watched the six o’clock news this morning and learned that the meteorologists called for severe weather for the better part of the day. Thunderstorms and high winds would make her trip slower and more difficult. She wished the doctor would have agreed to meet her half-way, although she understood that he could not leave the hospital until seven p.m. By then, she would be at work until midnight. Over the past couple of days, her curiosity had grown, and she now not only had to go north to meet with Dr. Young, but she wanted to. She wanted to find out what her father had felt was important enough to leave as his last words to his daughter whom he’d nearly killed almost two decades ago.
She left the desk and made her way into the kitchen for a second cup of coffee. The kitchen was large, and had been recently renovated to accommodate a household for two. She wondered what her father would think, if he were alive, of her choice of lifestyle. For almost eight years now, she’d strayed away from the more accepted heterosexuality and found herself to be happier with other women. Her partner, Alisha, was almost five years younger but possibly more mature than a lot of the women her own age. Alisha would not be making the trip north with her, though, because she worked mid-day shifts at the local nursing home and had to be at work at eleven.
After pouring her second cup of coffee, she sat down at the kitchen table with a cold bagel and barely touched it. She was nervous, maybe leaning more towards frightened, at the thought of revisiting her horrifying past.
She looked around her, and a thought came to her: This is where it all happened. This house and the property it stood on had been in the family since her great-great-great-grandfather, William Gannon, had purchased it in 1865. The house sat on fifty acres, which, back then would’ve cost about two hundred dollars. Now, in present-day America, her home and property would easily bring in $150,000.
She looked at the wall clock that hung above the kitchen doorway. Quarter past eight. Time to go. She grabbed her keys and her backpack, locked the door behind her, and drove off.

The hospital was huge. The building, in its immensity with six floors and uncountable rooms and offices, loomed before her as she stood on the sidewalk in front of the large, French-style double doors that were the front entrance. She hesitated, standing outside for at least five minutes, trying to capture the nerve and will power to actually go through with this.
At the age of five, she couldn’t even begin to imagine why her father would want to hurt her. Now, at twenty-two, she understood that her father was a sick man, but at the same time she couldn’t help but fear and despise him. Her mind was made up to sign over funeral arrangements to the state, so that was one less frustration she would have to deal with. The only thing that bothered her at this moment was receiving the parting gift left by this man that she’d barely known and had rarely thought of apart from nightmares every once in a while. For some reason, unknown to her at the time, as she stood there looking at the front doors, she felt a deep sense of foreboding, as if her whole world and comfortable little existence would all go spinning out of control upon her entrance to the hospital.
She regained logical thought with a shake of her head to snap her back to reality and, one step at a time, she closed the distance between her and the double doors. One step at a time up the thirteen brick stairs and through the doors, and she was in. No turning back now.

“Hello! How may I help you today?” asked a pretty little petite blonde in white scrubs at the front desk.
“My name’s Persephone Gannon and I have a ten o’clock appointment with Dr. Young.”
“Oh yes, Miss Gannon, okay. Hold on one sec’ while I page him.”
“Alright.”
“Um, you can have a seat over there if you’d like, it’ll only be a few minutes.” the nurse said, pointing to a row of waiting-room chairs on the wall opposite the desk.
Persephone turned and walked over to the chair in the middle and sat down with her hands folded in her lap. She was suddenly very nervous about this whole thing and couldn’t figure out why she should be so disturbed by this little meeting. Her father was dead, and even if he wanted to, he couldn’t hurt her. She was amazed at how much his death did not affect her. It was most likely easier on her because, aside from the fact that he’d tried to kill her, he had not been around, she hadn’t even seen him in seventeen years. Her father was a stranger to her. The man that had comforted her after her mother’s death when she was two was a ghost, having died that night, almost two decades ago, in the very kitchen she’d had breakfast in this morning.
Her mind trailed off to before that night, and what kind of man her father had been up until then. He’d been caring, and gentle, and was less strict and tough than most fathers, even than his own.
“He’s on his way, hon. It’ll be just a few more minutes.”
“Oh, thank you.”
In less than two minutes, Dr. Harold Young presented himself and his right hand to her. She shook, and he led the way to his office on the third floor.
His office was big, and lined with windows on two sides that reached from floor to ceiling. The shades were drawn apart by a pulley system, allowing late morning sunlight in to gleam off the polished red oak desk and bookshelves. The Doctor seated her in a comfortable cushioned chair in front of the desk, and took his own seat behind it in a red oak office chair with black leather padding on the seat, back, and arms.
He looked at her for a moment, grinning politely, and proceeded to extract a manila folder bulging with paperwork from the top drawer of his desk. He placed it on the desktop in front of him, and slowly let his smile fade.
“I’m going to be honest with you, Miss Gannon…”
“Please, call me Percy.” she obliged, stating the nickname she’d lovingly been given by her grandmother, Susana, shortly after her father died.
The doctor hesitated, but only briefly, then continued.
“Percy, then. As you know, your father was found with a broken neck, which we’d assumed was a direct result of falling off of a bathroom stall wall. After further inspection by the coroner’s office, we’re having trouble holding on to that assumption. The manner in which his neck was broken indicates, as presented in the autopsy report, that his neck was broken intentionally by another person.”
She absorbed this information calmly. “How do you figure?” she inquired.
“Well, Miss…Percy, sorry, the report states that the vertebrae in his neck showed signs of hyperextension of the head. Meaning, of course, that his head was twisted in such a way as to sever the brainstem.”
“So you’re saying my father was murdered.”
“Unfortunately, that’s the way it would seem.”
She sat in silence for a moment, turning this new information over and over in her mind. After she’d absorbed and stored this new turn of events in the back of her mind, she said, “And this message…?”
“Oh, yes.” Dr. Young said, and opened the same top drawer. He placed a book in front of her on the desk, a leather-bound journal almost identical to the one she’d found of her great-great-great grandfather months ago. She reached for it, picked it up, and only stared at it in wonder. She’d apparently become oblivious to her surroundings, because the doctor cleared his throat and began to speak again.
“The message is written on the inside cover. Perhaps you can figure out it’s meaning. I’ve puzzled over it for days, unable to come to any logical conclusion.”
She slowly opened the front cover and read: THE FEAR TOOK ME OVER, BUT I OVERCAME IT ONLY FOR A LITTLE WHILE. TRUST THE COVEN. I’M SORRY BABY.
She was naturally deeply troubled by this seemingly psychobabble, but also strangely mesmerized by it. It meant something, something important, her instincts told her that. But exactly what it meant, she couldn’t figure out at the moment, or possibly ever. All she really understood was the last line. I’m sorry baby. Her father’s words seemed sincere, and she sensed a deep loneliness in them. She was suddenly overcome by emotions, and tears welled up in her eyes, but she held them back determinedly.
“Probably just the illness. I can’t make anything of it, really.” she said to the doctor.
“Well, now that you’ve received his message, there’s the paperwork to talk about.” He tapped the manila folder.
“Oh, of course.” She hesitated, her mind no longer entirely made up as to who should have the responsibility of his funeral arrangements. It was obvious that, even through his illness, he felt remorse for so long for what he’d done to her at such a young age. She could almost feel his sadness through his words.
Through the hospital, her father had carried not a large life insurance policy, but a sufficient one.
“I think it would be best for the final arrangements to be left up to me.”
“Very well. It’s always somewhat of a spirit-lifter when the family of one of our patients agrees to put their own to rest, even under circumstances such as the ones surrounding your father’s illness. I have all the paperwork prepared, all that’s left is your signature on a few of the documents.”
“Okay.”
“Here you go, this form just states that you are, in fact, his daughter and his only living family. If you’ll just sign right here…” He handed her a pen and pointed to a line at the bottom of the page. She scribbled her signature.
“And this one verifies that you’ll be taking responsibility for the arrangements.”
She signed that one, and waited for him to fish the last one out of the stack of papers.
“This one states that you’ve been informed that your father’s death might be ruled as murder, in which case you’re entitled to a settlement of twenty-thousand dollars from the hospital, in the event that we find it was a patient who‘s responsible. In the event we discover an employee of the hospital is responsible, the settlement will be twenty-thousand from the hospital and up to fifty-thousand dollars from the employee in question.”
She looked at Dr. Young, bewildered. “Are you serious?” she asked in shock.
“Very serious, Percy. The murder of a patient is no laughing matter. If, in fact, the hospital is responsible in any way, we are well-prepared and more than willing to compensate as best we can. Although, of course, money is no compensation for the death of a loved one.”
“I never said that man was a loved one, doctor.” she said, and signed the form.
“Of course, and understandably so. There will be additional forms to sign once this thing is settled. Forms that will allow you to either accept or decline the settlement money.”
“Alright.”
“And as it would be, it seems we’re finished here.” He stood and extended his hand once again. She took it, hesitantly, and departed the office, the building, and her past once again.

The next few days were more than a hassle. The selection of the casket seemed to be the easiest task. She had no reason to purchase a lot, for one had already been purchased by William Gannon Sr. for the entirety of the Gannon family in the farthest reaches of the town cemetery. The funeral services were short and proceeded with indifference. The only one who seemed to be saddened by her father’s death was her grandmother, Susana. The only people who elected to show up at the burial were Persephone herself, Alisha, and Susana. The visitation and services held at the church attracted some people who’d known John William’s father, Joseph Allen Gannon, and by her grandmother’s coven.
After the services and burial, Persephone, Alisha, and Susana retreated to the family homestead for dinner. Roast duck, fresh from the lake and hunted by Persephone, garden salad, and homemade mashed potatoes. For dessert, fruit salad.
Halfway through the meal, her grandmother commented on Persephone’s expertise in the kitchen, wondering where she’d gotten it from. Her mother was also an amazing chef, but Persephone couldn’t possibly have learned from her.
“Perhaps it’s inherited, dear.” her grandmother said. “All of us old witches were always skilled with food.”
“Well thank you then, Nanna,” Alisha said, “because if it weren’t for her I’d starve.”
This comment brought soft laughter to the table, and after the meal, they made the two-mile hike through the woods behind the house to the Circle, a place that had been used by her mother’s family and ancestors since before the family began with William Gannon Sr. in 1845.
Her mother had come from a bloodline of powerful witches as far back as the Salem witch trials of 1692. Her mother’s ancestors had moved here to Southern Illinois from Salem, Massachusetts to escape the injustices brought upon them by the non-believers of that era and had found in this new area a freedom they could have never imagined. Their coven, as well as their power, grew and grew, and now the coven consisted of thirty-seven family members, friends, and their children. Persephone and Alisha were part of this coven, and were in fact two very powerful practicing witches. If it had not been for the coven, the two would never have met. Persephone was an idolized part of this coven, coming from two of the most powerful witches the coven had ever known: her mother, Sorina Nightingale, and her grandmother, Susana Redwolf. Her mother was legendary, having done great and wonderful things with her power, including saving a whole crop of corn and green beans from a terrible drought in 1975 by bringing two days of blessed rain to the area. This, in turn, saved the coven from starvation as well as bankruptcy. The coven strongly believed that, to truly appreciate the Earth and the very substance of our existence, one must make their own fortune. For the coven, that fortune was not the money for which they sold their crops, but the fact that they survived by their own will and know-how and not by society. They made their own way, and that ability had been passed on to the children in the coven. Persephone was a living example of that.
The Circle was a large clearing, surrounded by ancient, lumbering cedars and oaks and sycamores. Once there, they prepared for a common meditation ritual. They each had their own personal reasons for meditation, and often brought with them items that either helped them concentrate or that they wanted to concentrate on more clearly. Today, Persephone brought her father’s journal. She hoped that this session would at least bring some understanding to her of the meaning of the message and the circumstances surrounding her father’s death. However, after an hour of concentrated meditation, not a single answer came to her. She, in fact, felt spiritually drained and exhausted from trying so hard to concentrate on something that troubled her as much as that message did. Her and her company trekked home, where Alisha and Persephone said their goodbyes to Susana as she made her way down the gravel road to her home on the opposite side of the property.
As the sun began to set, Alisha lost herself in the newest Dean Koontz novel under the light of the reading lamp next to the couch, and Persephone began the harrowing task of delving into her father’s deepest thoughts through his journal. The first entry was dated August 20th, 1977.

I had the strangest dream last night. I dreamt I was walking the path to the Circle, and on each side of me the forest was pitch black, I couldn’t make out the silhouette of the trees at all. It was just empty blackness, like a void in space. The strangest thing was that it was daylight. The sun was shining bright above me, but it didn’t reach the ground. It was like it was night below the treetops and day above. When I reached the Circle, though, daylight shone in upon it and cast an ambience of peace. I noticed that I heard no birds singing, and the wind didn’t blow. When I tried to enter the Circle, it was like a force held me back, I couldn’t move forward at all. I turned to look behind me, and looked into a darkness deeper than that which surrounded me. When I turned back towards the Circle, there was nothing but that same darkness and suddenly I was completely surrounded by pitch black. I turned back to where the path should be and began to run. I ran and I ran, for what seemed like forever, and finally I woke up, panting as if I’d actually been running. I was sweating and scared, immensely disoriented.
This was not the first time I’ve dreamed like that. When I was eleven, I’d gotten lost in the woods with Sorina. We were lost for three days, and there were search parties out at all hours of the day and night. We’d eventually managed to find our way back to the path leading to the circle and found our way home from there, but the night I returned home, I had a dream that I was still lost, running, and Sorina was no where in sight although I could hear her terrified cries. She was calling for me, but she couldn’t find me. All of the sudden, her cries stopped, and I was lost in blackness. I woke up screaming, and crying, and utterly terrified that something horrible had happened to Sorina. I didn’t sleep for two days after that dream.

Persephone was confused. Her father’s journal was practically identical to her great-great-great grandfather’s in physical appearance, but also in content. They’d both recorded accounts of dreams, almost the same dreams, yet they were over a hundred years apart. She read on.

August 23rd, 1977
Last night, I could’ve sworn that there was someone unwelcome in my home. After I’d come in from the fields for the day, the door was standing wide open and every drawer in my kitchen and bedroom had been taken out and dumped on the floor, as if someone were looking for something. All the books had been thrown from the bookshelves, the coffee tables were overturned, some thrown against the wall, one kitchen chair was thrown through the window by the table. My whole home was in upheaval. I was so angry, so disturbed that someone, whomever that may be, had come into my home, had the nerve to do it in the middle of the day while people were working everywhere on the farm, and destroyed everything.
I’d asked the man who took care of the barns, which were closer to the house than the fields, if he’d seen anything, or heard anything. He said he hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary, had seen no strangers wondering and snooping about the place. I got the police involved, but all they can really do is find out if there are any new people in town and ask them questions. They’d asked me if I had any enemies. ’I am a decent man,’ I told them, ’I’ve never hurt or angered anybody in my life and never would if it could be avoided’, I told them. ’We can only come to the conclusion that it must’ve been an out-of-towner or drifter, perhaps looking for money or valuables.’ they said. I could see that the police would get no further than I would on my own, so I gave up on them and began questioning people myself. No one in the town could recall having seen any strangers come into town that day. I am angry, no, I’m pissed, and baffled, and I have to replace a window. I’ll write more tomorrow.

She turned the page to August 24th, 1977.

I’ve replaced the shattered window, all the locks on all the windows and doors, and boarded the cellar door from the inside. I have work to do and I can’t afford to sit around waiting for the bastard to show back up. I’ve alerted my stableman, asked him to keep an eye on things. I asked him to make several trips to the house to make sure all of the locks and windows remained in place, and I would pay him extra for the day and do the same myself. I told him if he happens to see whoever is responsible, to shoot him and ask no questions.
Halfway through the day, while I was tilling up the bean field, he came racing through the pasture on one of my horses with another one in tow, with a triumphant look on his face.
“I got’im, John! I shot the bastard dead!” I jumped down from my tractor and grabbed the reins of the spare horse and together we raced back to the house.
“I surprised him smashin’ out another window! He tried to run and I shot’im like a damned scared rabbit!” he said, proudly.
“Mark, I do believe I’ll pay you double what I was gonna pay you for today, bud!”
When we got to the house, we dismounted our horses and he led me around to the eastern side, where he said he left the body. However, when we arrived there, the only evidence that anyone had been trying to break in was another broken window.
“No, no! I shot that sonofabitch square in the back, with birdshot from thirty feet away. There’s no way in hell he’d be able to slither off on his belly, let alone get up and run away!”
There was no blood where Mark said the body was. Mark had been working for me for over five years and had never given me a reason to doubt anything he said. I trusted that Mark had, in fact, shot this man, and was bewildered at the fact that there was no body for the police to claim.
I felt that there was no reason as of yet to involve the police further. They couldn’t do anything without a body, and they’ve already done all they could as it was. I asked Mark what this guy looked like and he said he didn’t get a good look at his face, but that he was dressed in a black robe with the hood up. That doesn’t do much good as far as a witness description goes.

Persephone closed the journal and stored it away in the same drawer she keeps William Gannon’s.


The Coven met late that night, unknown to Persephone. A very important situation was arising, and the elders of the Coven needed to be filled in on the circumstances.
Susana began the conference.
“I’m sure we’re all familiar with the ‘curse’, for lack of a better word, surrounding the Gannon bloodline. The stories go back for a century or more, and all have a central focus. This withered woman,” she said with a grimace, “ existed in the minds of all every Gannon since William Gannon Sr. first began his life here, on this very property, in 1865.” She was silent for a moment, carefully planning her next words. “For decades, these occurrences have been written off as insanity, but I’m sure that we all, having experienced certain situations of our own, can agree that it goes beyond insanity. It goes beyond the mere physiology of the human mind.”
Lilly Stanton, a life-long friend to Susana and a highly regarded member of the Coven, stood up to enforce Susana’s point.
“I’ve meditated repeatedly on this very subject. I’ve done everything within my power to discover the true meaning of these strange happenings, and found that I can come to no other conclusion aside from the fact that these ‘happenings’ are in deed the hauntings of a spirit that I have not, nor can find any other instances that some one else has encountered.”
Regina, Lilly’s daughter, spoke up: “So, what you’re saying is…?”
“What I’m…what we’re saying, is that we believe this entity was created by the ancestor Gannon, or more-so by his mind.”
“Ancestor Gannon,” Susana continued, “had a mind much different from ours. In his mind, he possessed powers that no ordinary human being can comprehend. We, that is, Lilly and I, have not quite been able to grasp this concept completely, but we do know that whatever entity has latched on to his bloodline, came into existence through those powers.”
“So, you mean he meant to create this ghost?” Anna, a first generation witch, inquired.
“We do not believe that is so, Anna. We believe his conscious created the idea of the entity, and his subconscious inadvertently brought it to life.”
“Well then, if he created it, why would it be so…malignant toward him?”
“I do not believe it is in the nature of this entity to show mercy. I believe this whole situation goes much deeper than we could know.”


Persephone sat awake in her living room for hours that night, unable to fall asleep even after twenty or so chapters of the book that Alisha was reading. It was already daylight. In a few hours, Alisha would be getting up for work, grumbling through the house as she hunted out her uniform, clean socks, hot coffee, and a newspaper. Persephone didn’t have to work today. Come to think of it, she probably wouldn’t have to work another day for the rest of her life according to Dr. Young. She would go into town today and pick up some stuff for the house. It was spring, time to get the garden started. Persephone and Alisha hardly had time for each other, let alone time to run a farm, so they kept it simple with a small garden and some chickens.


April 20th, 2007

The Journals of William Gannon Sr.
17 March, 1867
The Withered Woman
These dreams, these nightmares, get more and more terrifying each time I fall asleep. I still have yet to discover their purpose or their meaning. This afternoon, during a nap, I dreamt of the forest behind my property. When I looked toward where the tree line should be, there was nothing but black nothingness and I felt it’s infinite depth deep within my soul, a feeling so strong it pulled me toward it and I was able to do nothing about it. I could feel my soul being pulled out of my body, an utter feeling of detachment.
I awoke screaming. My room was dark except for a shred of moonlight coming through the small shuttered window to my right. I sat up in my bed and took several deep breaths, trying to convince myself to calm down and think rationally. ‘It was just a dream,’ I told myself as I grasped the sheets. I was dizzy from breathing so heavily and felt as if I would fall off the bed.
After I regained my calmness and shook the remnants of this horrifying nightmare from my mind, I turned to my bedside table to light the oil lamp. As I turned back to my original posture, facing the door that leads out of my room and into my living quarters, my heart froze in my chest and the ice spread throughout my entire body as I realized that I was no longer alone in my home, if I even was to begin with. In the doorway, a looming shadow in the form of a man stared back at me. I saw no face, no features whatsoever, only a blackness darker that the shadows that cloaked the room behind it.
My breath caught in my throat as the shadow began to move towards me. I closed my eyes, telling myself that I wasn’t awake yet, that this was still a dream. When I opened my eyes, what I saw could drive a man insane. Perhaps, I am already insane, for merely five inches in front of my face was the face of the very substance that nightmares are made of. The marrow of insanity itself . At first, what I saw was nothing more than an aged woman. Wrinkled forehead, withered mouth, sunken eyes. But when I looked into her eyes, it’s eyes, I felt that same peculiar pull that I’d felt in my dream just minutes ago. In those eyes, I saw the same empty, infinite nothing that I’d seen in place of the forest in my sleep. Then, just as my world went dark, a thought crossed my mind. Whatever has been torturing my subconscious, whatever had been haunting my waking hours, was more than evil, was more than anything created by man. I was looking into the eyes of the purest form of primal fear, fear as fear was before man walked the earth. This thought faded, as did my room, the light from my oil lamp, the withered woman, and I slept.
When I awoke, it was daylight. I had obviously been in a deep, deep sleep, because I awoke on the floor. Apparently I’d dreamt and rolled off the bed, and my theory proved true when I touched the origin of the pounding ache on the side of my head.
I sat up, shaking, my nose was bleeding, I was nude. There were cuts and scratches all over my body, as if I’d sleepwalked through the forest. My body ached horribly, my head pounded with a ferocity that could not have been caused by the singular wound alone. Once again, I felt that I was not the only being in the house. The withered woman was still here, although she was not seen. Almost as soon as I realized I was not alone, I felt ice-cold fingers wrap around the back of my neck. I bolted to my feet, spinning around to face my tormentor, and saw nothing.




Persephone

She closed the journal, her mind racing. Was her whole family, from the very beginning, completely insane? She wondered if she were doomed to suffer this mental disease just as her father and ancestors had. Haunted by nightmares, completely detached from reality…would she end up like her father, dead in the bathroom floor of a mental hospital?
She could not bring herself to read further, so she put the journal back in the drawer of the old oak desk and stood up, stretching her aching legs.

The evening was young, barely four o'clock. Outside, the air was refreshing and cool, and there were probably eggs to collect. Alisha was tending to the brand new bean sprouts they discovered this morning, and Susana was collecting the fresh mushrooms for the venison stew that was simmering in the crock pot. The evening was pretty, the moment was beautiful. Persephone took a minute to revel in the perfection that surrounded her. Her life seemed to be right where she'd always dreamed it would be. One word entered her conscious mind: stability. The one thing she'd dreamed of for years, the one thing all orphans desire; a stable homelife.
She closed her eyes, taking it all in, burning a memory in her mind that would last beyond death. Persephone believed in reincarnation, believing that the immortal human soul is too valuable to be wasted on a single fleeting life. At this moment, she thought to herself; she'd done good with this one.

Outside in the garden, Alisha had almost completed her task of fertilizing the baby sprouts, and had moved on to check each twenty-five foot row for signs of new growth.
Persephone made her way to the back of the large backyard where a well-kept old-fashioned chicken coop housed their thirty-or-so chickens that they'd accumulated through purchasing them and breeding them. They'd worked out a breeding system to keep a steady and healthy population by rotating each spring the number of eggs they collect from each nest. This spring would be the year when one egg would be left in every nest to hatch and grow to maturity, and then possibly end up on the dinner table this fall.
Persephone had made it halfway to the coop when she spotted three brown heads bounding away over the knee-high wild weat that covered most of the unforested acres on her property. She stopped, watched the coyotes disappear into the woods, then continued on her way silently cussing like a sailor.
After her chore was done, she made her way back to the garden to let Alisha know that the coyotes were back for the year.
"Well," she said, "Jackson's gonna have to sleep outside tonight, I guess."
"That sounds like a better plan than one of us having to sit up all night with a gun and watch for them bastards." Last fall, Persephone had wondered upon the remains of her favorite barn cat, torn apart and half-eaten by coyotes, after he'd been missing for weeks and presumably "tom-catting" around neighboring properties.

That evening, after letting their 85 pound german shephard loose to patrol for the night, an exquisite venison stew was prepared and consumed. A normal day with a normal ending. At least, normal for them. They couldn't have known that a severely abnormal day was due to begin in the wee hours of the morning on the 21st of April.

Persephone awoke at 2:32 a.m. to the sound of a .22 rifle exploding right outside the bedroom window. She jumped out of bed and raced outside in her boxers and sport bra to see Alisha's gun on the ground six feet away from where she was hunched over something large and furry. Her first though was that Alisha had gone and shot her dog trying to shoot the coyotes, but that thought disappeared as a limping Jackson hobbled over to Alisha and began to growl. Persephone ran back inside and retrieved the flood light that hung on the small room that served as a front porch. She turned it on and shined the light on the dead object of Alisha's curiosity and realized that Alisha's aim had been true, even in the dark, and she'd managed to bag a bobcat.
Jackson's left paw was badly lacerated, almost to the bone, a cut about an inch and a half in length on the forearm right above his ankle. Persephone got her emergency kit out of her hiking bag in the bedroom and proceeded to expertly stitch the cut with a surgeon's precision. When she'd finished, she patted Jackson on the head and left him with Alisha while she dragged the dead bobcat around back to the barn and hung it up on a rafter until morning, when she would field-dress it and take it to the taxidermist to have it mounted.

After only two more hours of sleep, Persephone awoke from a nightmare in which she sensed, rather than felt, someone or something breathing on the back of her neck. She was sweating, and nervous, and for a brief moment thoughts of her father's journal swam through her mind. She dismissed these thoughts quickly, thinking that it was perfectly normal to have nightmares of any kind, and all connections she'd made in her head of her nightmare to her father's were ignored.
It was still dark when she crawled out of bed, aware that there was no way she'd be able to get back to sleep. 'Might as well start the chores,' she thought to herself as she pulled on the pants she'd worn the day before, laced up her workboots and headed to the bathroom to brush her teeth.
She was walking out of the bathroom, brushing her hair, when she noticed that Alisha wasn't in bed, still asleep, as Persephone thought she was when she woke up. As a matter of fact, the sheets on Alisha's side of the bed weren't even disturbed as they should be if someone had slept there. She walked down the hallway towards the living room, called out for Alisha and, when she got no answer, called for Jackson. Still, nothing. She thought about this for a minute, and then decided that Alisha might have taken Jackson to the vet to get a professional oppinion on his wound.
As she walked into the kitchen, she heard something unusual coming from right inside the back door. She listened for a moment, and it was a wet, sick sound. She reached to her right and flipped the light on and stood in shocked horror as she laid eyes upon a bloody bobcat with it's muzzle burried deep in Jackson's belly.
"You're dead!" she whispered, unable to muster anything louder. At her words, the bobcat lifted it's head and stared at her with eyes that were glazed over with death, the bullet wound just below it's left ear very visible. There was a length of rope dangling from one of it's hind legs. The animal began to snarl and in an instant was off the ground, flying right towards Persephone's throat. She closed her eyes and her hands flew up instinctively to protect the bobcat's intended target. She felt the pressure of the animal throw her backwards through the doorway and into the livingroom, where she hit the ground with a hard 'SMACK'. She opened her eyes, only to find out that the creature was gone. 'Thank The Goddess, it ran away.' she thought, as she picked herself up, rubbing her chest where the animal had hit. She was surprised that there were no claw marks or even any pain at the point of impact, and when she looked down, there wasn't even a red mark. She staggered back into the kitchen. The light was off. In a panic, she flipped the switch and stared at the back door, which was swinging silently in the early morning breeze. There was no blood on the floor, no dog body, no nothing. She grabbed her flashlight and ran out into the barn, flailing the flashlight around to the spot where she'd hung the bobcat hours before. It still hung there, harmlessly dead. She ran back up to the house and into the bedroom where Alisha slept untroubled on her rightful side of the bed, and Jackson occupied his favorite spot below the window.
"What the fuck?" she exclaimed, completely dumbfounded by whatever had just happened to her.
"What? What is it?" Alisha asked sleepily, straining her eyes to see her in the violet light of morning.
"Uh, nothing. It's nothing. Just...stubbed my toe."
"Oh. Are you up for the day?" Persephone sighed, then replied, "I am now. Want some breakfast?"
"Did you get any eggs yesterday?"
"Yep. How many do you want?"
"Just two, with some toast and ham if you don't care."
"No, that's fine. Just what I had in mind for myself, anyway." she said, still a little bit of a shake in her voice. The honest-to-god truth was that she didn't want to ever step foot in that kitchen again. At least, not alone.
"Why don't you come in here and keep me company?"
"Alright, gimme a few minutes to get dressed."

Over the course of the next few hours, Persephone internally debated the idea of telling Alisha what had happened to her. She knew she wouldn't be laughed at or made fun of, because Alisha wasn't like that at all. But she honestly wondered if she shouldn't make fun of herself. As the day wore on, the incident with the not-real bobcat seemed more and more like a dream to her. By early afternoon, she'd decided that it was a dream and that there was no need to alarm anyone with it's rediculousness.
After much deliberation, Persephone decided that, instead of field-dressing the remains of the bobcat, she would rather just bag it up and take it to the taxidermist to let him handle it.
As the day drew to a close, Alisha arrived home from work and Persephone finished up cleaning out the chicken coup. Halfway back to the house, the phone began to ring, so she double-timed it inside to answer it. At first, there was only static, but then she heard her father's voice coming across the line. She listened with intent horror, unable to break the connection.
"I won't fail next time, Percy." His voice was distant, rough. She threw the phone, nowhere in particular, just away from her. She could still hear the static coming from the receiver, so with as much conscious thought as she could muster, she reached behind the base and unplugged the phone line.
"What's the matter, dollface? Scared?" It came from beside her on the couch. She looked over at where Alisha was sitting only seconds ago and saw an old, almost ancient woman staring up at her with eyes as vacant as black holes, dressed in a black robe with the hood almost covering her face in shadows.
"Hey, what's the matter baby?" Alisha's voice now. Persephone blinked, and Alisha was there, sitting in the same spot she was before this old woman showed up. Persephone simply stared, utterly struck with horror, unable to speak or even to move.
"Percy? Hon, what's wrong?" Alisha was worried now. She stood up and walked over to Persephone, put her arm around her and led her over to the couch. "Hey, sit down, babe. Now talk to me."
Persephone looked at her, began to shake violently. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she slipped into unconsciousness.

The hospital wasn't large, only three floors above ground and one basement level. Alisha stood outside with Susana, puffing desperately on a Marlboro and trying to control her thoughts as Susana asked questions about what had happened.
"I don't know, I really don't. She came in, picked up the phone...it seemed like she was listening to something but it didn't even ring, then she threw the receiver and unplugged the phone base. When I asked her what was wrong she looked at me and just turned sheet-white. Something scared the shit out of her. I sat her down on the couch and tried talking to her but she started shaking and just, passed out."
"Oh, no." Susana began, then, "Has she said anything to you about something bothering her, like nightmares or anything like that?"
"No, no she hasn't. Why? What's going on?"
"Alisha, I need to talk to you about something, I'm not even sure this is related to what happened to Percy, but it's something that the both of you should know."
"Well, what is it?"
"I'd rather wait until I have both of you to explain it, since Percy might be right smack dab in the middle of it."
"Okay. I understand. I'm gonna go see what the doc has to say about all this." She threw her ciggarette butt down and proceeded inside, followed by Susana.