It was twelve thirty in the morning and Jasper Whitman found himself blearily waking from a deep and dreamless slumber from inside the dusty janitor's closet. He was fortunate that he had been wearing Emmett's watch earlier that day because without it he might have assumed it was still day light when clearly it was not. Standing and feeling the distinct pop of joints as he did so he let his mind roll back to the conversation he had earlier with Edward.

Edward didn't believe him, no of course not, he had not even been surprised and wondered why he had called Edward in the first place. Someone like Emmett would have been better suited for the conversation or perhaps even Rosalie, but he had been desperate and he had known that Edward would be home and pick up the phone. He'd been too terrified to even wait the minute it would take the other two to answer their phones if they did at all.

With nothing but his cellular phone's light to guide him Jasper felt around for the knob of the door and slowly opened it, allowing him to be only slightly acquainted to the library at night and the dark that he didn't much care for. It was not that he was afraid of the dark he just didn't care for it. "I'm not afraid of anything."

He walked along the hall away from the main part of the library towards the front doors, he didn't want to be there anymore and felt a sense of doom as he walked along the hall with his fingers lightly touching the wall. He would not turn on a light he would not be afraid. After all, in this new life Jasper had come to know this place like a second home. He adored the smell of old books and new, adored the massive amounts of volumes and fell in love completely with the privacy this place provided. That something completely out of the ordinary and supernatural had decided to take residence in this sacred place made his blood boil and worse that he had actually been afraid, terrified of this thing and hid from it. Why, he felt like some sort of child and that, he most definitely was not. No ma'am he was not afraid of anything.

Walking passed the now unlocked doors Jasper sucked in a breath of fresh cooling air, it was mid October and despite the fact that it wasn't quite wintery yet there was still a definite chill in the air and when he exhaled he thought he saw his breath come out in very light white puffs as he locked the doors and jumped down the steps taking two at a time.

He meandered to the parking lot where an old blue 1964 Comet waited for him, the glass slightly fogged and dewy. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his thick brown bomber jacket searching for the keys marveling at how many things he had in his own pockets. Pencil, paper pad, calculator(?), mini dictionary, a pack of gum and finally his keys. He unlocked the car door and sat inside quickly shaking pathetically in his jacket and as he started the car he let the heater run until sweat formed above his lip. But, he was still shaking and he couldn't understand why.

"Damn spook in that library," He drawled thickly as his hand roamed the overly stuffed compartment in front of the driver's seat only finding one loose Marlboro. "That damned thing nearly gave me a heart attack. An' I am not looking' to die this early and have to start over or hell, wait for the rest to die while I wait twiddling my thumbs in limbo."He placed it to his lips and lit it with the car lighter, inhaling the bitter blue smoke deeply.

When he was alive, before his vampirism, he'd been a smoker in the times when you rolled one yourself where one didn't know the dangers of smoking and what it caused. When he was turned he had slightly missed smoking, not that he really had remembered how it felt and why he had liked it. It was a human impulse, something that he was able to do without so much as look at the tobacco and the rolling papers. Now that he was able to be human again, and again and again it seemed, he'd picked up the habit.

Starting the car, Jasper pulled out of his parking spot and drove off the lot with such a speed that he appeared like a light blue blur in the early morning. While driving to the complete opposite of town he was aware only barely that there were no other cars on the road at that hour and decided to let his boot ride a little heavy on the pedal. He wanted to get home soon, wanted to forget what he saw and just crawl into his bed and fall a sleep.

What was that thing anyway? He thought to himself barely noticing the long gray ash hanging on the cigarette at his lips. It was luminescent and translucent but wasn't cold. Aren't ghosts supposed to be cold?

He thought back to his third grade year when he'd encountered his one and only ghost; a little girl who had fallen into the ravine by his father's house during perhaps his parent's time. His mother had said she remembered the little girl.

'Oh yeah, Antha May was seven,' His mother had said with look that didn't quite fill out her long pointed face. Her mousy brown hair hadn't yet the flecks of gray in them that she had now and she had still been just a bit pretty. 'She was a girl that come from New York to visit her Granny in these parts.'

'What happened to her Mama?' He'd asked in mild confusion. He'd just seen little Antha May playing by the ravine.

'Well she dropped her ball into the ravine and tried to fetch it. Poor dear drowned and nobody found her until one week later. Turned the whole place around you know. That poor girl.'

Jasper had cried for one whole week and had never again gone back to the ravine the ghostly little girl inhabited. She had been kind, just smiling at him with her brown hair in big curls about her head and her heart shaped face looked flushed and quite alive.

Was it the same ball, he question himself, was that the same ball she had died because of…was that the one I found?


~The Forgotten Southern Gentleman~