The Griffin house was lit with the coldly flickering snow light. The phantoms slowly advanced, their ragged clothing and hair whipped by the hurricane winds of the Abyss. Sam and Chris, holding their half-conscious father, could only hear the rapid panting of their own ragged breathing. Their breath formed into sparkling crystals instantly as it left their mouths, in the now freezing temperature in their house.
Behind them, Linda struggled to her feet, the intense chill driving the alcoholic fog from her mind. She shook her head in disbelief, shocked at Chris's rough shove. Her face ached from hitting the wall, and she barely stifled a sob of pain. She wasn't going to cry, not like Sandi had done, no matter what! With the single mindedness of a drunk, her bleary thoughts focused on that image, a sobbing teenaged girl, her thin arms and legs covered with dark bruises, her face buried in her hands, biting her lips to keep from being heard. She crouched down between the wall and her bed, hoping to avoid any more of her father's drunken rage. The girl raised her thin face, glancing fearfully at the open door to her cramped bedroom. But it wasn't Sandi cowering there. It was Linda herself.
Her father, Ed Johnson had died of an alcohol fueled heart attack during one of his weekly rages. Neighbors had often called the police to complain about the noise, but his wife, Alice, had never filed a complaint against her abusive spouse.
Ed Johnson had been a tough, foulmouthed man, running an auto salvage yard, and driving a tow truck. Years of frustration were taken out on his meek wife. Linda's own spirit focused on her schoolwork, where the quiet bookworm dreamed of a life a world away from the trailer park world she had grown up in. She was going to be a modern woman, is charge of her own destiny! She loved her meek, hard-working mother, only dimly understanding the trap the older woman had been born into. Alice had married Ed to get away from her own parents, only to discover nothing had changed, that life was still a daily hell. Ed would work all day, towing cars to his wreaking yards, or to a local garage, with a smile on his face.
Friday nights, though, he would start drinking heavily, and the least little thing Alice or Linda would set him off. Though neither he nor Alice knew it, Linda knew one result of her father's rages. She had seen a medical report Alice had hidden away. On discovering that his wife was pregnant a second time, a year after Linda's birth, with another girl, the disappointed man had hit Alice so hard she had fallen down the front steps to their trailer, and had miscarried. She had fantasied for years about having a little sister, even making one up as an imaginary friend, and talking to her every night, in the darkness of her bed room.
Linda didn't have any friends, otherwise. There were no young girls close to her age living in the run down trailer park. At school, her poverty was visible in her patched clothing and brown paper bag lunches from home. Though she was always clean, her lack of makeup or jewelry made her the scorn of the class elite. Marion Hassel, in particular, turned her life at school almost as bad as it was at home. Marion's father was a local banker, and the attractive blonde never failed to point out to her group that Linda's father was a drunken junk dealer. She dated the captain of the football team, Harold Olson, the king of Buford high school, as Marion was the queen.
Linda didn't date at all, as she was ashamed of bringing her date home to their rundown trailer, and her fathers drunken rages. Her father didn't generally approve of any of the boys she liked, anyway. Linda was well aware of how Marion had labeled her as "Linda the Mouse," as the phrase was often scrawled on her locker or desk. Marion also scorned how much Linda studied. Her teachers were pleased, however, and Linda desperately hoped for a scholarship, dreaming of college, and moving her mother and her away from Buford, leaving her father far behind.
But still, she had wanted to be popular, be liked by all the "cool kids," and it hurt her when she wasn't, when she had to stay home on weekends. It hurt her when she came to school and found "Mousy Linda" scrawled on her locker door, when boys wouldn't date her because they were afraid of being labeled "lame."
When Linda graduated high school, the only one who was there for her was her mother, Alice. Linda wasn't invited to any of the graduation parties. But she did get a scholarship to Middleton college, to study Business Administration, and she swore then and there that she would be a success.
But Middleton was rough for a small town girl, and Linda struggled desperately to stay afloat, while once again, everybody else seemed to only be there to party. When she wasn't at class or studying, she worked at any job she could find, mostly being a waitress. She didn't even go home for her father's funeral. The only thing the news of his death gave her was a numb relief.
But then, her mother married another man, even more abusive than Ed had been. Linda tried to help, but stretched between college, her jobs, and a lack of transportation(and her secret affair with Tom Griffin, her friend Patty's boyfriend,) something had to give, and it did.
Her mother Alice died when her new husband beat her to death, supposedly for not having dinner ready on time. He received a ten year sentence for manslaughter in the second degree. Linda, having raced home, stood alone at the funeral. The grass at the cemetery was a lush, almost obscene, green. When Linda climbed into the bus at the station, she never returned to Buford again.
Unaware of the storm in his drunken mother's mind, Sam grabbed at things in the hall, hurling them down at the slowly rising spirits. It was like throwing at jelly, they slowed slightly as they passed through the desolate forms, but only passed on through. Chris dragged his stumbling father up the hall, not even looking at Linda's white faced, dry eyed form. Fluffy's enraged hissing form was avoided by the specter's. Sam tried to get to the animal, but he couldn't reach it. The closer the ghost's got, the less energy he seemed to have, and he stumbled away from them. He bumped into his mothers unmoving form, she was panting rapidly, her eyes wild and blind, her word's almost incoherent, from her drunkenness and emotions. Things she had locked away for years raged in her mind.
"Marion, you bitch! Why did you always pick on me? Don't cry, Momma, don't cry, I'll get a good job, and we'll move away and be happy, you'll like it, we'll move so far away. Damm it, Dad, Mom loves you! Why do you always hurt her! Just leave us alone! Go to hell, and leave us all alone!"
Even with the peril facing him, Sam looked down on his mother, appalled. Not really used to thinking too much, the terrified boy seemed to see not only his mother, Linda, but his sister Sandi, and a third woman besides, cowering on the floor, muttering insanely.
"Mom? Who are you talking to? What's going on? Is that Sandi?"
He gasped and fell backwards. The distracted boy had been approached, and a phantom hand reached though his back. The pale fingers closed gently on his beating heart. Sam stared down at his chest, feeling the cold crawl through his veins, his hot blood slowly turning into an icy mush. He reached toward his terrified mother, the life in his eyes fading. His flushed skin faded into a pale whiteness. His brown eyes iced over, as he became a rigid, frozen statue. Linda hesitantly took his already cold hand. But, it was already too late.
Slowly, Sam Griffin's specter stepped forward out of his frozen corpse, his brown eyes now deep dark pools, staring at his mother, not with hate or fear, but only with a deep, eternal longing. He joined the crowd that thronged the upper hallway of the Griffin home, each eye gazing hungrily at Linda, but not one of them touched her. They simply walked by her, intent on the door that Chris and his crippled father had taken refuge behind. Linda stared at them in mute despair, not understanding why they had passed her by.
The sound of blowing snow faded away. The only thing Linda could her was the rapid beating of her own heart. The flickering snow light suddenly brightened, as if a flash had gone off behind her. Linda could hear the rustling of cloth behind her, and the already bitter chill deepened, feeling like a flame across her back. Her numb mind tried to hide, take refuge in it's drunkenness, but was pulled out to face what stood behind her.
Chris had piled everything he could move in his mothers den against the door, and had pushed the desk over as well. Now he and his father huddled against the wall. Tom shook in fear, even as Chris had acted. He had done nothing! Just like everything in his whole life! Those things outside had something to do with Sandi, he knew it. Was Sandi dead? His little girl, who had grown up so much like her mother? Linda had never spoken one word about where she had grown up, or her parents. Tom, who basically had always found it easier to let Linda run things. He had even gotten drunk a couple of times with Jake Morgendorffer, and the two men had shared stories of their controlling wives. Even allowing for the booze, Tom had to admit Jake's life sounded a bit better than his. Should he have opposed Linda, even a bit? Would that have helped things? Linda was so unlike his own mother, more dangerous, exciting even, but scary sometimes, too. When she had the pitiless look on her face, he had always gotten out of her way. Then, the house seemed to fill with an almost liquid silence, that filled the chilled air The wind outside faded away.
The small pale hands settled firmly on Linda's shaking shoulders, stilling her quivering body. The breath caught in her throat, as she was turned slowly but unstoppable around, still on her knees. The sheer cold bit into the skin of Linda's face almost like a sunburn. She trembled, her eyes stubbornly shut like a child's, but they slowly, relentlessly opened, almost against her will.
She stared ahead of her, her eyes slowly focusing. The patterns on a kimono of the purest silk took form on the trembling pool of her minds eye. Then they focused on the sleeves of the arms that held her, following them upward, to the slender shoulders, the long delicate neck, the fine boned face, and then ...
The eyes. Large, dark, bottomless pools that drew in all they saw, everyone they saw. Linda felt like she was falling upward into a dark starless sky. Her shallow soul trembled like the frailest of leaves as it tumbled through the deep void. She fell again, screaming, for what felt like an eternity.
A small point of light grew in her eyes, the only light in the whole universe of darkness. Over years of time, it grew brighter. It became first a star, then a disk, and then finally a planet. Linda accepted it all, questioning nothing, even as she fell though the sky, her body no more than the thinnest of threads. Clouds brushed by her, as a heavily wood ground rushed up at her. A crude cabin, surrounded by snow, a pale plume of smoke torn out of its thin stovepipe by the howling winds, seemed to pull at her, to grab her. Linda's form rushed into the cabin, where it came into an abrupt halt.
Helpless, silent, only able to see without being seen, Linda looked down at a nightmare.
Quinn huddled deep inside of her mind, refusing to listen to the hissing howls that filled her hearing. Slowly, unseen by the near comatose girl, the bars of her minds cage had changed. She crouched down inside a massive human skeleton. The gnawed bones were covered with blackened shreds of flesh. The only thing that shared her prison was a large, irregular lump of frozen meat that towered over her. A faint throb seemed to emerge from it at times.
Quinn moaned constantly. Tiffany's terrified face filled her thoughts. She struggled to remember the other girl alive, but couldn't shake the picture of Tiffany's begging. Or of the pleasure it had given her to hear the other girl beg.
Quinn's fingers pulled at her ears, as if she wanted to rip them off.
"No! No more! It wasn't my fault! It was that things! That thing in my head! Why is it doing this to me!"
But I was the one who tore her throat out with my teeth.
"No," she sobbed, more and more weakly, "it wasn't me, not me, not me."
Who ate Tiffany's face, if it wasn't me? Sandi?
Quinn rolled over, looking at her prison.
"I'm inside a giants bones."
She looked at the huge pile of frozen flesh before her for a long minute, before the answer came to her.
"And his frozen heart."
The inescapable doom that had seemed to follow the girls engulfed Quinn, and she crawled over to the pile, reaching out to touch it. As she did, it steadily shrank, to fit neatly in the palm of her hand. She picked it up, staring at it. It throbbed steadily, the dull vibration running through her body, sounding in her own bones. Something gazed back at her, something powerful.
As she knelt there, she felt a warm glow from her other hand. Her dull vision followed it, seeing nothing, and then she knew what it was.
Sandi.
She's still alive.
She's laying next to me, in the cabin.
Sandi's words, heard but not understood, drifted into her thoughts.
"I'm here with you."
Quinn's dazed mind tried to grab onto that promise, but it seemed to slip out of her feeble grasp. Unwillingly, her other hand shoved the lump of frozen meat into her mouth, and she easily swallowed it.
The heart of the beast that dwells in darkness.
Quinn felt her own heart explode, her own bones shattered as her dying flesh reached outward, to seize the giant's dead and rotting bones for its own.
For a brief moment, all that Quinn had ever been passed before her. Then, there was only the darkness.
And the hunger.