The steam from the bath made the washroom muggy, humid and sticky. The mirror was steamed opaque, leaving streaks as she brushed her hand across the moist glass. The bathrobe holding her slid off her arms and she hung it up on the hook, taking one last look at her reflection. Vanity had always been a comfort for her, although she only saw something right now, that no one else saw. Diana Smith was a tender young woman of quiet beauty and subliminal words, with a full time job at a renowned BCBG designer outlet, her life revolving around the store, her circle of girlfriends, her casual flings and alcohol. Both her parents had died within two years of each other when she was from the ages of 11 - 14, taken by the inevitable reaper in the form of cancer. Their deaths had been fast, almost painless, drugged. It gave her comfort.

Dark shadows enveloped the bathroom, and she used her fingers to feel her hair as she wound it up in a bun, and then slipping into the bath, breaking through the criminally hot water with a soft hiss of relief. She lay her head against the bath pillow, propped up against the ledge, resting her aching head. Her scalp pressed into the tiled wall. Her movements made the candles flicker with the wave of her motions, her breath exhaled into the thick air. She felt almost suffocated, sadly.

Diana gathered the thick cloth from the rack a bit above her head, and pressed it into the water, and then placed the soaking article over her face. The heat made her skin's pores open and she sighed in content. Her toes cracked and rolled under the water as she stretched them. She lay thinking for many minutes, listening to the outside silence and the words within. When she arose from her deep reverie, she removed the cloth and started abruptly.

There was a man in the bathroom, standing in the short, stubby hallway, shrouded in the damp, dim light, hard to completely distinguish his features. Slightly overweight, balding, glasses, wearing a business suit with the sport jacket missing. His Italy-imported loafers did not seem real. They stared at each other for what felt like forever, Diana's heart fluttering anxiously, until the panic ceased and she sat up, covering her small breasts half-heartedly. "What do you want?" She asked, leaning over the edge of the bathtub, where there was a decorative stool. A crystal ashtray, a cigarette and a BIC lighter rested upon it. She gathered the cigarette and lit it.

"Will you listen?" He asked subtly, inching forward. As his face came into better view, it was pasty white- unnaturally white. Almost transparent- at most, translucent. He was wearing thick rimmed glasses, and the left lens was cracked in a spider web, and a disgusting, caved in bruise coloured rudely with black, purple and brown pulsed at his left temple. A fatal blow.

"Why are you dead?" Diana asked, sucking in harshly on her cigarette. She was still rattled from the man standing in here and staring at her while she lounged in the tub privately, naked. Who knows how long had he been standing there? From the looks of him, the last time he saw a young woman naked when she was willing was at least 20 years ago.

"My wife, she hit me on the head with a hammer." He released, his tense shoulders loosening visibly. "She found me… with the babysitter's panties. One of those neon coloured slut thongs." He said, a bit of pride behind his voice. Disgust rippled through her and she stared at the tap, listening to the confession. "I was playing with it, while the kids slept. My wife came in to my garage, and we argued." He looked up at the ceiling thoughtfully. "I had a good job. Nice car. My mortgage was almost done. I had good friends, and the babysitter was barely 19 and I could do whatever I want to her." He smirked a little. I lit another cigarette.

"Go on."

"Anyways, my wife took the hammer I use to fix up the board rails on the stairs. I didn't even have time to get out of my chair- she whipped that thing back over her shoulder, and with all her might she ploughed it into my forehead." He pressed a pudgy finger into the disgusting bruise, and it oozed yellow liquid and squished in under the pressure much too far. I bit my cheeks to resist the urge to gag. "After, she cried for at least an hour, then wrapped my body up in an old carpet she got from the shed, took me in my own damn car, the bitch, with me in the back, and stayed up all night burying me in the backwoods, at least 8 miles out of the city."

"What do you want from me?" Diana asked, turning to face him. He had silently slunk closer, until he was only two feet away from the bath tub. He towered over her laying form but she showed no signs of intimidation.

"Tell someone. I'm rotting in a shallow hole in a forest I've never even been in. Tell the police. The death penalty is still used in this state."

"Don't give me the politics." Diana said, sitting up. "I won't say a thing. You said your piece. Get out of here." She was growing a little frightened on the spirit, who in life could have been a pedophile. His ugly face twisted in rage and he knelt down until they were almost face to face. I saw dirt on his lips and nestled in the crinkles on his skin.

"Say something. You can see the dead, you're here to help us."

"Not you." I hissed back. "If you're to fuck a 19 year old girl when you gotta be at least 50, I'm not saying shit."

Rage contorted his features, and then suddenly relaxed into a placid leer.

"You know." He put his hand on the bathtub rim. A heavy gold Rolex hung on the wrist. "If I were alive, I'd drag you out of here by your hair, and bleed you out."

"I'm sure you would. Good thing you're dead." Diana replied. "Leave me alone."

And he faded into thin air, his eyes lingering the longest, and left Diana with his disturbing memoir, and she began to shake and shiver from the cold aura he left behind. Her headache returned.

As long as she could remember, the dead whispered to her. Smith had been raised from a family of morticians, and as soon as she could remember things, she remembered people coming into her room and whispering to her, whispering their secrets, wept, laughed, raged- she had been utterly terrified, but her parent's couldn't see them- neither her brother. Sleepless nights plagued her. She saw them at school sometimes, as far back as kindergarten, their faces pressed against the glass windows of the classrooms, begging her to come to them. Some were terribly mutilated, or burned, others ethereal and beautiful, tragic. They confessed their sins to her, for they were trapped on a plane of the living, living hell in purgatory, and she was the one they would speak too.

Diana had told her parents many, many times of the spirits. Eventually, their laughter turned to anger, their anger turned to worry. They moved her out of the mortuary (as a family business, they lived above the crematorium and embalmer studio), and across the city to her mother's sister, a large, cold woman with powerful hands and a lack of humour. She had been 6 years old. Diana had been relieved at first, but They still found her.

Twelve years later, They still found her. Los Angeles was a big city of darkness and doom and death, the streets overflowing with violent politicians and whores, the sidewalks littered with pain and blood and tears, the buildings drooping under the mass depression that had overtaken the city, like a permanent sandstorm. Diana had never mentioned the sighting to anyone- not even her best friends, or the boyfriend she had when she was 18 to 21, they had even lived together but Diana had to break it off, it was too overwhelming.

Diana felt her bath was dead in the water, and rose, and then her knees started to shake. Even after all these years, it still terrified her, especially when spirits like that arrived to torment her. Some were malicious, sadistic- others just wanted relief. She retrieved a towel, unplugged her bath tub, and stepped out. She wiped away the rest of the steam on the mirror, and behind her a headless woman, standing in the darkest corner of the bathroom, unmoving, naked, her crotch covered with dark, thick hair, faced her, her body pale and blue. It waited for her to acknowledge it. Diana wept.

The next morning was dark, gloomy, raining. She loved waking up to the sound of rain on her window, and she arose, feeling refreshed despite the paranormal night from before. Her toes hit the wooden floor and she walked to the window, opening the curtains and looking down at Los Angeles in all its morning glory. Cars rolled on the narrow streets. The people looked small, dashing back and forth from vehicle to store, looking so delicate from the 36th floor of the condominium building. It was nigh 7 20 AM, she worked in two hours, and she went about her routine.

Vanity was a sin she had indulged in, as for years she had combated the entities by escaping into her own world. The easiest she could do was her make up, her hair, anything to distract herself. Smith remembered vividly changing in the high school after gym class, surrounded by her friends, and sometimes there would be another girl there, or a guy, and she or he did not belong, and watched her, silently, just waiting. She remembered preparing for the big game with martinis and pictures with her girlfriends, and there would be someone else in the pictures behind her, staring into the camera. No one else saw Them. All she could do was keep staring forward into the mirror and into herself, while they looked beyond behind her, murmuring their stories, sometimes their blood if their deaths were violent would drool onto the floor and puddle gradually, running around her tanned feet in warm sticky waves and she would shudder and gag but just keep on looking forwards.

Smith assembled her outfit for the day, surrounded by silence. Her morning was left undisturbed. The sightings were not a terribly frequent occurrence- perhaps three, four times a week. Certain intervals of the year though, they became more sinister and tragic. Christmas and Valentine's day were killers. Christmas, the loneliness suffered by many outcasts drive them to suicide, and she would be plagued with their dreams and failures, the deceased begging for attention, of which they never received in life. Late January, to early February, is when the older people tend to die the most- their bodies just give up in the relentless cold. Or people become depressed and might kill themselves or their familiars, sometimes both. It was a depressing way to live your life, but like every other mammal, amphibian, reptile and aquatic creature, you learned to adapt to your environment, which Diana did.

The worst were murder victims, especially children. The visits would depress Diana for days. She would cry and moan into her pillow and sometimes even the spirits cried with her, and over time her insensitivity had grown to tumultuous proportions. To save her sanity, she no longer cried, or dwelled, and thus became near robotic with her life, going about routines carefully and crisply, arranging her days perfectly and so that no matter what arrived she would not be disrupted, therefore not lose the delicate balance of her life, and thus nothing would crumble. It had been hard at first, almost impossible, but she would not kill herself. She had seen the aftermath of the tragedy.

She slid her lithe body into a white dress, and a cream cardigan over it, sliding into white stilettos of intricate design. Her make up was soft, bright, peachy. A pastel shade. Smith made a point to dress in bright, crisp colours. It made her feel more like an angel, rather then a mourning prospector, wreathed in black. She smoked a cigarette, drank coffee, and then walked out of her apartment, locking it securely and preparing to endure a day of overweight, arrogant women and men sniffing for the newest designer item to collect.

It was around lunch time, after a dragging morning of dark rainclouds dirtying the sky and a gaggle of older business men searching for fresh cuff links that insisted on flirting with Smith in the most unsubtle ways, that she noticed the creature outside the outlet.

BCBG was located on Portage Avenue, the Fashion Main street of LA. Gauthier, Gabanna, Klein and Chanel had dominated the streets, in person and in store. Tiffany's was across the street from BCBG, flanked by Victoria Secret to the left, a break in the street to the right where an alley dotted with graffiti led to the street parallel to Portage. Across the alley rested Versace. The buildings were modern, hip, made to attract young people with credit cards they could not afford. The streets were quite busy, despite the rain and darkness, black umbrellas dotting the sidewalks, beautiful people in dresses, suits and heels hurrying to the credit unions a few blocks down, or to HYS, the prestigious steak house where Roosevelt had dined several times, many years ago, or they were heading into the oddly placed 7 Eleven next to Sicilian, for their menthol cigarettes and newspapers.

It was through this crowd, that she saw, standing against the right corner of the Versace store, unnoticed by the people passing it, something she had never seen in her life. It was quite tall, topping at least nine feet, and its skin was … scaly, of a deep reddish colour, with a muscular body that just didn't seem proportioned properly. Its arms sagged to its knees, its neck was too long, its legs too short- the torso made the height. The head was a living nightmare, a face of blank red flesh with a white lightning design across it, and slitted eye and nose, and a lipless mouth of yellow teeth that, for it had no lips, bared nakedly. The other half of the face melted into a terrifying skull of a ram, its white horn curling in on itself at least a foot above its head. God, it was like staring at the devil. Its eyes had no glow.

Smith had been standing at a rack of designer shirts, her fingers in-between two of the articles, meaning to split it apart to add the cashmere silver cardigan in her other hand to the fray. Her hands began to shake instead, her eyes widened, her spit gone dry. Was that a demon? What the hell is that thing? Her scalp felt too tight for her skull. Her breath became choppy as her heart followed suit. What she didn't know, was that she was in fact, staring at a Hollow.