The fragile body of a little girl at the bottom of a well shuddered with sobs. Samara Morgan had never wept before in her life. Now, with Death's cold hands resting on her shoulders like the skulls of birds, all the world closed in until it was naught but the space inside the well.
"How did I get here?" she asked herself over and over. Of course, Samara remembered the bits and pieces that finally came back after the rock struck her head. Flashes of images raced across her dying brain begging for eternal sleep at last. Blood, water, horses neighing, static, the ladder, the wooden chair she passed her hollow days in... but she was looking for the larger why behind it all. "Why do I hurt everyone around me?" Samara gropped with the question clumsily. "I can't control it," came the only answer, from somewhere deep within. Something happened to her before she was born, when Samara was still floating in the womb.
It was always overcast or raining on Moesko Island. That last day was the first Samara had really seen the sun. Was life always like that? Right when we found something beautiful and tangible, it was taken away.
"All I ever wanted was you," her mother said, despair dripping down her chin with every fateful word. And then there was the trash bag. Black plastic ripping through her field of vision, cutting off her first and last view of pure sunlight. On the eve of the sixth day, Samara could feel Death inching closer. His grip on the little girl tightened as hers on the world above loosened with every shallow breath. Water filled her lungs and dripped down the surrounding walls, little by little. She tried to climb out, a few days ago. The walls ripped out her nails. Sharp pain like shooting stars. Closer and closer, the blackest of shadows creeped toward her like the foulest of insects. Crawling. Dancing behind her eyelids.
'I must own my death,' the thought gave her the first stirs of comfort in days.
'The world will not forget what it did to me, what it allowed to happen to me. I never sleep.' she sank with purpose then, the dark water filling the reaches of her blackened heart. The last image she had of this life was of sunlight streaming through the ring of the well's lid. The sun's life-giving warmth coming only through something dark and unmoveable from where you and I are, how appropriate. She never sleeps.