Jeff's shower was a disaster of cataclysmic proportions. My heart ached for the scattered, fallen bottles of shampoo, body wash, and shaving cream (and...faygo?), which had obviously experienced some sort of apocalypse. What horrors they must have seen.

Miraculously, I emerged from the ruins unscathed, albeit smelling rather masculine. (I didn't mind.) Much to my relief, the doctor retrieved some clothes for me from some gracious female resident of this enigmatic sanctuary.

I've got to ask his name. I can't keep calling him The Doctor like he's the last living timelord himself.

There were no undergarments to be spoken of, so I'd have to do without, for now. It was unfortunate, but the tatters I'd arrived here in were disgusting. And, I suppose if they'd had fresh undergarments my size, I may have been tempted to punch a gift horse in the mouth because that would be highly suspicious.

The outfit itself was entirely black, consisting of sweatpants that were a little tight on my hips, but otherwise adequate, long socks, and a sweater that should have been oversized by design but was a size too small for me. The sweater already had slits cut in the back, although I had to rip them a little further for my wings to fit through.

Curious. That warranted further investigation.

Once I was dressed, I steeled myself. My fingers curled around the scissors the doctor had left me with.

This was it. I had to look.

I'd been avoiding the mirror. I was afraid of what lingered in my eyes. But I could feel that half of my hair was gone, surely taken by the fire that had claimed the lives of-

Best not to let my mind wander that way.

And there I was.

I looked...different, in these clothes. Paler. Smaller. Frightened.

Or maybe that was just who I always was, beneath a thin veil of propriety and sensible fashion. Some false sense of control over my life, over my own mind. And a crystal that held memories just beyond my reach.

Sighing, I got to work on my pitiful, copper-hued hair-or what remained of it. It had reached my waist before, but most of that length was unsalvageable. What I ended up with was a sort of jagged style the length of my chin in the front and cropped close in the back.

Not bad, for my first time cutting hair. But then again, I am a perfectionist.

I followed the doctor's simple directions-down the hall, take two rights, last archway on the left-towards the chaotic echoes of overlapping conversations. Perhaps I should have been apprehensive; when venturing through a palpably haunted mansion to meet a host of supernatural serial killers, such a reaction would be normal. Human.

Which I am not.

Like a cloak, I wore the same easy sense of calm I'd woken up with. It was rather inexplicable, given the circumstances. I didn't waste time trying to unpack it.

As I stepped into the threshold, the aforementioned conversations came to a grinding, skittering halt, washing the dining room in an unsettling silence. The room, which had only a moment ago been teeming with life, was now dead. Eyes of all different shapes and sizes-some glowing, some bleeding, some through masks, some lacking eyelids-stared up at me, waiting for me to make a move.

And then there was the man at the end of the table. He didn't have eyes to stare with.

Splitting through the silence like a bullet splits through air, a gentleman in a blue mask with eyeholes oozing something akin to black tar cleared his throat. "You must be Alida." He placed a gloved hand on his chest. "I'm the one they call Eyeless Jack. It's a pleasure to meet you."

Some sort of creature with no discernable face, but two glowing red eyes peeking out of a yellow hoodie, leaned over to a guy in a generic slasher film mask. "I didn't think she would be white," he whispered.

"You can't just ask why people are white," the masked man whispered back.

Side note. That marks the third person I'd noticed here with glowing red eyes. And the second one who'd commented on my ethnicity.

This is becoming a little ridiculous.

On the far end of the table, next to the impossibly tall (and impeccably dressed) faceless man, the link cosplayer-Jeff had called him Ben-raised a glass of what appeared to be chocolate milk to his lips, muttering ever so softly into it: "Nice tits."

I narrowed my eyes. "Thank you."

He spewed chocolate milk everywhere.

I could list a plethora of grievances I have with my lack of humanity, but the raptor hearing continues to be a maliciously glorious boon.

"I trust you found your way around Jeffrey's bathroom without too much trouble?" inquired the good doctor, pushing his glasses up on his nose. "I know his living conditions are rather hazardous, but your instincts are sharp."

"Hey," Jeff cut in, fixing him with a glare that might have bordered on menacing if not for the sloppy joe mix dripping from his lips. Looking up at me from his place between Ben and the doctor, he nodded towards the table. "You just gonna stand there all night?"

Cautiously, I relented, easing myself into a seat near the end of my side of the table. I was stiff and uncomfortable sitting down for a meal with such curious strangers, and it must have shown more than I intended it to.

"Relax," breathed the girl beside me, the only female at the table. Her smile was kind, but as she turned to me, I found myself studying the black hollow of her left eye socket; it was as if her eye was more than missing, as if it had been replaced by some endless black void, a hungry maw hanging wide open in wait of devouring all light in the world. And beyond that, there was the deep, discolored slash across her throat that should have been gushing blood, and yet…

Wow. Unsettling.

"I'm Sadie." Her voice was ethereal, light, as was her presence. As much as my own two eyes could clearly see her, she was more like a whisper on my psyche than a solid, defined person. Of course, she was far from the only one here whose attributes defied logic, but something about her pale, dead skin and whispery vocal tones struck me as particularly unnatural.

"You're a ghost, aren't you?"

She nodded. "Me and Ben both."

I peered down the table at him, observing silently as his teeth viciously ripped into one piece of fried chicken after another. His face was a battlefield of grease, slobber, and that ever-dripping blood, and at the moment, it seemed the chicken was winning.

"What?" he spat around his mouthful of food. "Gotta maintain this physical form somehow."

I turned back to Sadie. "But you're a poltergeist, and he's a wraith, right?" It's what the doctor had told me. "What, exactly, is the difference?"

She offered a small, bashful smile. "I'm afraid that kind of classification is the doctor's specialty, not mine. But I can tell you that Ben is the embodied form of a haunted object, a soul tied to a physical item. I don't have anything like that, and so I'm a little less, um..."

"Tangible," offered the doctor.

"Right." She gazed down at her empty plate. "I don't have a physical form in the sense that the rest of you do. I can appear on the physical plane and even interact with my surroundings, but it takes a lot of energy."

"Riveting," I mused, narrowing my eyes as I processed the description. "I never imagined there would be so many subtleties in the supernatural world."

I never imagined I'd be chilling at the dinner table with ghosts, either, but I had no desire to come off as impudent by voicing that.

You must be hungry, child.

My heart froze in my chest at the booming, earth-shattering voice that echoed through my mind. All at once, it was loud and soft, chaotic and still, overwhelming and simple. Utterly stunned, it was all I could do to blink in response.

Jeff shrugged one shoulder. "You'll get used to that."

Wide-eyed, I stared up the entity that had spoken directly into my thoughts. I'm not sure how I knew, but it was him. The tall, faceless man at the head of the table, who had been silent all this time. In his presence, there could be utterly no question that he was the one in charge here; if I had any further doubts about his authority, they were quashed as I recalled something Jeff had mentioned that time he broke into my house. He'd named "No-Face" as the one who had ordered him to capture me, who'd had visions of me, who had plans for me.

There's no need to be wary of me, he projected, stirring up a cold, uncomfortable feeling in my stomach. Was that...fear? Awe? It'd been so long since I truly knew either, it was difficult to know for certain.

At long last, you are here. And now, all will be revealed to you.