Free Giving Up the Ghost by Eric Nuzum Page B

what She’s saying. Except for Her eyes—empty, dark, and still. Then, when I’m close enough that I could almost reach out and touch Her, She starts to shout at me.
    Then it’s over.
    I’d wake up in an absolute panic. My heart was racing and about to push itself out of my chest. I’d bolt up and scan the dark room for any sign of Her. Then I’d spend hours trying to calm myself down to the point where I could sleep again. I’d tell myself anything, just to feel safe closing my eyes, even for a moment.
    Sometimes the dreams would occur in the standard order. Sometimes the scenes were mixed up or I’d just see a few fragments and not the whole thing. I remember a few occasions when I’d only see an image—the wolf guy, or Her standing there speaking Her gibberish. Regardless, they all ended exactly the same way—with me sitting upright in bed, breathing hard and fast, disoriented, scanning the darkness for Her, convinced She had finally come for me.
    Those who’ve heard the story of these dreams have all asked the same question: What is so scary about a little girl?
    You see, that’s always been the rub. There is nothing inherently scary about a little girl.
    Which is exactly why She was so terrifying to me.
    It wasn’t what I knew about Her or the dreams that frightened me; it was what I didn’t know.
    The unknowns about the Little Girl in a Blue Dress felt like puzzles or enigmas or mysteries to be solved. Like, why was She wet? Was She sweating? Had She been in water?
    Who were the people sitting around the table? I didn’t recognize any of them. They all seemed to be in their late teens or early twenties. Nothing about them rang a bell. Nor did I have any clue where the cheap wolf costume came from.
    And what was with the gibberish? You’d think that someone motivated enough to come back from the dead, bang around my parents’ attic, and worm Her way into my dreamswould have figured out how to deliver the message. A million times I’ve thought about what I remember Her saying, to see if there is even a pattern or anything that sticks out. To be honest, I’m not even sure She repeated the same thing—it could have been different every time.
    And the biggest mystery: Why Her? There were no dead girls in my past. I had nothing in my family tree about blond girls who died young.
    I have spent countless hours over the years going over those dreams in my head, trying to find any connection, any literal, metaphorical, or figurative symbolism or meaning in
any
detail of that dream, and I always come up with exactly nothing.
    Which is when it starts to get scary to me. I mean, there has to be
some
connection. It happened to me—and it happened for some reason. She is my Jacob Marley. Somehow the wetness, the people, the forest, the man in the wolf costume—those were somehow Her version of the chains Marley forged in life and had to drag with him through eternity. If I didn’t recognize what they meant, that meant I hadn’t figured something out yet and the connections would present themselves only
after
all the bad stuff She was warning me about eventually happened.
    Then there was the message itself. Just as Marley came back to warn Ebenezer Scrooge about the coming visits from the ghosts of his past, present, and future, She was warning me about something, too. Or at least I’ve always accepted it as a warning, but it equally could be a threat, a prophecy, a harbinger of
something
. Something that someone/something else was going to do—or that She planned to do Herself. The only thing I knew for sure was that it almost certainly couldn’t have been good news. The Little Girl did not come into my dreamsto wish me a good day or compliment the shirt/pants combo I’d worn earlier. She had something to tell me that was very important.
    I feared that whatever it was had to be
so bad
that only She could deliver it. I feared what She’d do when She tired of trying to communicate with me in my dreams. I