81. Echoes

I see her outline lit up by something behind her. She stands at the edge of a doorway in the back of the church.

“This was a mistake.”

I pause for a moment. It’s her voice—I can hear her and see her. Yet I don’t understand what she’s talking about.

“Jocelyn?”

“You don’t want to be with someone like me.”

What’s she saying?

“Joss—”

“Don’t ruin yourself. I’m used goods.”

I keep walking toward her. She’s looking down, not at me.

“Jocelyn, it’s me.”

“You strip this away, and there’s nothing down inside.”

Then I remember. She said that once to me. Yet I can’t remember when.

“God did this.”

I keep walking toward her without answering.

“Ultimately God let my parents down.”

What’s she saying, what am I hearing?

“If—and I mean if—God is up there, then why?”

These are things she said to me once, but …

I reach her, and she looks up at me and smiles.

But the face looking at me and those eyes looking into mine and that smile don’t belong to Jocelyn.

Up close now, I know it’s not her.

The eyes are empty and black and the gaze is needy and obsessed and the smile is hateful and wanting.

“What—who—who are you?”

She moves to kiss me, and I see her smile that’s transformed not into brilliant white fangs wanting to bite but rather blackened and oozing gums wanting to suck.

I scream and then see those eyes shrivel up to nothing. Nothing but emptiness. Nothing but rotting black holes.

“We don’t have to die, Chrissssssssssss.”

But before the rotting, sickly old man in front of me can reach over at me, I swing my flashlight and strike something hard. I think it might be his jaw or the side of his face.

I tear out of there before whatever this is can touch me.

Then I’m outside, sucking in air and sweaty and trying to find Poe to tell her to run, and I realize that I’m alone.

Poe is gone.