Status: Complete(:

Death is Black and White

She Dances.

It takes a few minutes for my heart to stop beating, but when it does I'm still lying on the table with tubes in my arms and up my nose, completely aware of the flatline. I don't feel any different despite the fact that my body is dead, and i'm still in it. My soul hasn't wisped away in to heaven or hell. There is no "light" to go to. No world to chill in after death. I'm just sitting in my body, like it's a straightjacket keeping me from going anywhere.

 Mom's literally fighting the doctors as they try to lead her out of the room, and another set of nurses has to pry Josh's hand apart from mine and escort him out, too. Everything around me is slowly losing color, like paint dripping down a wall. Then sounds slip away and people disappear, until I'm left on an operating table in an empty room devoid of color. Only one person stands over me, tall and terrifying. 

"Thank you," she whispers in my ear. "Your lungs are a bit shredded, but that's nothing I can't fix. The doctors will think you're a miracle." 

I can't move, I'm stuck in a dead body like a bug in a web, the White Lady a spider about to suck out my blood for it's next meal. I just have to watch while she puts her freezing hand on my chest, where my dead heart lie empty.

"You can tell Lotty that I don't need her anymore. And she can rot, just like I did for the past four hundred years." 

A shock goes through me and that's it. I'm dead. 

~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~

Like a tape on rewind, everything around me comes back in fast-motion. My vision is grayscale, and I'm sitting in the corner of the empty hospital room. 

I feel like someone just stole my identity or something. I've been robbed, and no one knows it. This strange state of death is foreign and uncomfortable, and as crazy as this sounds, I think I'm in a mirror. 

Looking around, everything is backwards, like the text on the posters about handwashing and flu symptoms are all reversed, the door is on the opposite side of the room, and across from the operating table is a mirror above the sink that isn't a mirror at all. I step up to it and look in, expecting to see a black and white version of myself, but it's more like a window- like one of those one way mirrors where you can look through it and the people on the other side don't even see you. 

But everything on that side of the mirror is living. The mirrors seem to separate this world from that one. In this world, I'm all alone in a painfully silent and empty hospital room, but the other world is full of color and people and doctors running around to keep the white lady alive after her heart starts beating again in my body. Checking heart rates, feeding chemicals through my tubes, packing away the electric paddles that they think are what brought me back to life.

When we die, we go into a mirror? Is that it?

It just sounds kind of silly. 

I pound on the glass as if maybe I can get through, but a shock resonates through my body (or soul, considering my body's on the other side of the glass) and I fall back, cringing uncomfortably.   

"You need energy," a voice says behind me. The voice has the same whispery quality that Lotty's had before, but this time the whispers don't drive me insane. In fact, I don't even mind them.

I turn toward the voice and find a group of children standing by the door. They almost glow, as if their insides are made of light. Their outsides, on the other hand, are gruesome. 

They look very familiar, one boy with dirt on his hands and face has a bloody cut on his throat, and a girl with curly hair wears a ripped, lacy dress along with a bloody gash on her forehead. These are the children that Lotty killed, and they're stuck in this silent state.

"Don't bother with that world. The Witch will realize that she was wrong and she'll leave your body," says the girl. "hopefully you'll be able to stop Lotty in time to get back to it before it rots." 

"What do you mean, she was wrong? Why do you call her a witch?" I ask. 

"The Witch, or White Lady, was killed during the sixteen hundreds for supposed witchcraft and sent here, with every murdered soul in existence. Ever since, she's been searching for a host to bring her back to life, but didn't find one until Lotty came along. By then the Witch knew all about soul transferring, and began strengthening Lotty by convincing her that we needed to die." 

The boy steps forward. "The more people you kill, the less you have to live for. Once you live for nothing but the death of others, you're basically dead to the world anyway. The Witch was going to rip Lotty's soul from her body, just like she did for you, but she was killed."

I wonder how they know all this, but I assume they've been here a while and have had plenty of time to figure it out. 

"Yeah, but how did I get into this mess?" I ask, sounding kind if whiney. But hey, I'm dead so why does it matter? 

The kids look at each other, as if they're talking silently. 

"It was kind of your sister's fault," says a boy with a bashed in head. Lotty's brother. 

"Come on," he waves for me to follow him and the group out of the room. "Lotty was looking for a new host, and when your sister called her on the Ouija board, Lotty had found one." 

"But my sister's not a kid," I reply. I'm hoping he doesn't say what I think he's going to. 

Oh, but he does. 

"It's not your sister she's after," he tells me. "It's the baby." 

"You're fucking kidding me!" I shout and punch the wall, the sound cracking the eerie silence of the empty hospital. I break into a run, and surprisingly the kids follow me. 

"We want you to destroy her," one girl shouts out. I don't look back. 

"How?" I accept the challenge, even though I have no idea how to kill a demon. 

"We don't know!" they say. 

"Great, thanks," I shout. "What about the Witch?" 

"Your body just rejected her," says Lotty's brother. "You don't have to worry." 

Yet, part of me is still worrying. 

"Why not? What if she goes after the baby, too?" I ask. 

"You can only try to take someone's body once. If you fail, you're gone."

"Gone?" 

"You disappear." 

Simple enough, but is it too simple? I hope not, I really do.

I stop at the door where Miranda is delivering her baby in actuality. 

"Good luck," they say. Their eyes are sad. They're just children, yet they know so much more about everything than I do. More than anything I want to tear Lotty to shreds, while at the same time I want to hide somewhere far away. But I owe these kids something for helping me, and they deserve to be avenged. 

"Thanks," I say quietly. "I'll need it."

I open the door and almost collapse. Negative energy suffocates me, radiating from the demonic little girl skipping around the room. She barely notices me, doing her satanic dance across the floor. She looks like a shadowy puppet, with her ripped black dress and ebony hair flipping and twirling around her. I can't believe that at one point it was shiny and blonde, with bouncy curls to frame her bright face. Now her hair is like snakes writhing around her little body every time she spins around, licking the air like flames. Her movements are quick and unnatural looking, feet barely touching the ground and arms jerking around like they're on strings.

She glances at me and bares her teeth, spattered with blood almost as black as her eyes. If I thought her image in the mirror was scary before, that was definitely before I'd witnessed it this close. Her dark energy is crippling, and her sadistic smile seems to say "No matter what you do, you will never beat me." 

I close the door behind me and, maybe it's because of her evil aura, I don't know, I glare at her angrily.

"Stop dancing, you little fuck," I snarl at her. 

She turns her head completely around, making her spine crack and crunch, and spits at me. "Go to hell," she growls, still smiling evilly. Her voice is deep and light at the same time, filled with white noise. 

"I'll meet you there," I reply. "You can go chill with the Witch. She left me a message for you, you know after she killed me and took my body. She wants you to rot." 

For half a second, Lotty looks caught off guard, but she quickly regains her composure and laughs. She twirls around again and lifts her arms up like a demonic ballerina. 

I roll my eyes. Wherever this courage is coming from, I hope it doesn't stop. "So was that your plan, then?" I ask. "Did you know that the White Lady would try to take my body before you did if you led her to believe that's what you were planning to do? She thought you were stupid and weak. She thought she could trick you." 

She stops spinning suddenly and her scream rips through the silence of the room. "SHE WAS STUPID!" she shouts while again starting up her little dance routine furiously. "Not I! She thought she was so smart that she could take my life! She thought that I bought into her act! I knew better, I tried to kill Molly on purpose so they would kill me instead! I wanted to avoid that old Witch! I knew she was going to try to kill me, but she was too dense to pick it up!" 

I'm taken aback by her outburst but let her go on. 

"She hid from me for a hundred years, watching every single move I made, analyzing what I was going to do so she could get her revenge and ruin my plans. The stupid Witch underestimated me, thinking I would try to possess you." She looks at me with distaste then continues her rant. 

"She went around like she knew what she was doing, and that she had control over me. I knew from the moment I saw that baby inside your sister that I could take it. I could have whatever I wanted. 

"So I came up with a plan. I had to weaken the mother- not through murder. I had to break her family. The stress of a mental sister, the occasional sighting of a little ghost girl, an overworked mother and the constant reminder of her unstable future was all I needed to distract Miranda.

"And then the Witch came along, just like I thought she would, and ruined you. Luckily for me, they wheeled your choking body right past Miranda's window. You know, there were already a few complications with the birth because of the insane amount of stress on the mother's part. Watching you die was all it took to send Miranda into a coma. Any defense that Miranda had to protect her baby is dead and gone, because she can't even wake up." 

I gasp. "I'll kill you," I threaten. 

Lotty giggles and twirls closer and closer until she's about two inches from my face. Even though I have to look down at her, I've never felt more threatened. "I'm already dead, darling," she says thickly. 

On impulse I shove her back and she stumbles, but my arms immediately start to go numb. Just touching her makes me feel like I'm wasting away. 

She regains her balance and glares at me harshly while I shake my arms to get the feeling back in them. She smiles that bloody smile and does a twirl on the point of her toe. 

The lights overhead flicker then go out, and Lotty pounces on me. 

She claws at my throat and I spin abruptly, sending her flying off of me. She doesn't feel solid or gaseous or anything, it's like she's made out of electricity. 

She peels herself off the floor and we stare each other down, waiting for someone to make the next move. Eventually she jumps on me again and tries to strangle me, but I don't need to breathe so shoving her off of me isn't as hard as if I were alive. 

I pull out a chunk of her hair and black blood spills onto the floor. I ignore it and kick her up against the wall. She grabs my wrist and twists it so I bend forward and she kicks my legs out from under me. 

Ignoring the roaring pain surging through me, I roll away from her and stand back up. I tackle her and start scratching at her face, trying not to pay too much attention to the pieces of her face getting stuck under my nails. 

She grabs a piece of my hair, pulling it out easily. Electricity pulses through my head and I collapse to the cold floor. Blood is everywhere and the stench in the room is worse than a funeral home. 

I grab my head and curl into a protective ball, unable to take any more pain and brace myself for the next attack. 

But Lotty doesn't do anything. She seems to have stopped long enough for me to look up and see her standing completely still, listening. A ruthless smile creeps up on her warped face. 

Then I hear it, too. The faintest sound of a baby crying, piercing the silence once more. Abby's dying.
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