Still shadowed in the poorly lit room, it took off its hood. Before the girl stood a young woman with brown hair-herself. It said, "You've blocked out the truth. Go ahead. Figure it all out."

Mary slowly walked to the coffin and opened it with a loud creak. Inside was a decaying body of what appeared to be a young woman in a t-shirt and jeans.

It all came flooding back to her: the attack, the murder, all of the truth. It was all so overwhelming at first.

She knew what she had to do. The time had come. This could very possibly be her last chance to move on.

Mary was in the dark forest again, but this time crouching behind a tree. A stiff, decaying zombie said, "Where have you been? We've been waiting for you."

She stalled, "Oh, you know. I've just been doing... stuff." They obviously thought she was one of them.

Mary concentrated as hard as she could. A ball of flames appeared in each of her hands. She threw them at the approaching zombies, new fireballs being formed one after another. When all enemies were gone from her vision, she heard a scream.

Walking toward its source, Mary produced one last flame. Crouching behind a tree was a younger version of Meg, scared to death as a zombie came to her.

Mary vanquished the creature with her firepower and bent down to the terrified firl, "Please Meg, I know I sound crazy, but listen and try to take me seriously. I really need your help. When you wake up, I need you to call the police. Tell them you suspect there's something suspicious about my room. Just make sure they look under the floor. Please Meg, you must. My destiny depends on it."

Meg, her own age again, woke up and mumbled, "Whoa, weird dream."

Curiosity overrode her common sense, and she cautiously walked to her sister's old room.

Mary woke up from her dream as she always did. She wasn't in her room, but in Meg's. She couldn't touch anything, like there was a thin barrier between her and the world. There seemed to be a thick green fog blurring her vision. She wasn't sure how she knew, but she was aware that she was on another plane; there was no way to make things clear or make full contact with anyone.

Mary went to her old room and watched her sister. Meg knelt in the corner and pulled up a floorboar. The terrible reek of decay met her nose. She ran to the living room to grab the phone and hurried outside to escape the smell.

*Mary walked into her house and tried to find the light switch, but someone behind her gagged her so she wouldn't scream.

"I'm so sorry, Mary. God told me I have to do this. I'm on a mission," came a familiar woman's voice.

She blacked out when the lady hit her on the head, but she could still somehow see everything from the viewpoint of the cieling.

Mary's mother put a silencer on a shotgun and put three bullets in her daughter's heart to make sure she was dead.

Mary and her family had sent her mother to insane asylums five times before so she knew the woman was crazy, but not necessarily to the point of killing her own child.

The mad lady tore up the floorboards in Mary's room so she could bury the body there, and she carefully replaced them. When the cops came later, even they didn't notice anything suspicious at the spot.

Mary's father had witnessed the whole event, and in a fit of shock and rage, found a shotgun to kill his wife and self.

In shock, Mary's soul couldn't move on, but instead went into a repeating lapse of fantasy. There she had normal parents that died in a normal way. There, though it may not seem good to most people, her life was normal, and that was all that mattered. There she felt more at peace than she ever had in life.*

Later Meg told the police that she had witnessed the whole crime, but was too scared to tell until then. She knew she could never let anyone know how she found out what had really happened.

A very faint voice said, "Thank you."

Without looking for the source, Meg smiled and said quietly, "You're my sister, my best friend. Besides, I owed you one."

In an alley downtown, not far from Meg's home, a man is shot dead out of hatred. Suddenly, a blue-green swirling vortex opened next to the bloody body, and another soul was sucked into the world of fantasy.

~ THE END