I had gotten very little sleep that night. I would guess 3 or 4 hours at most, but I cannot be exact. I had lost my appetitte and not eaten much of my supper, and I did not rest well on a half-full stomach, but that is not what kept me up so much. Everytime I managed to fall asleep, nightmares like the previous one of my father kept reoccuring. These times, I was now in a morgue. Surrounded by people I knew, cared about... They were these sickly, decaying corpses, faces twisted into a silent scream in death.

In my last dream before I stayed awake for the night, I began to try and navigate my way around the morgue, carefully pushing the coffins out of my way. And I knocked one over. The sound echoed in the otherwise dead silent morgue making me jump automatically at the loud sound. And as the lid slid off, a very dead Tom Chaney jerked and twitched to his feet, groaning, like an animal practically begging to be put out of its misery. I never thought I would have the displeasure of seeing him again. My hand jerked to my side, expecting to find my father's old gun which had killed Chaney once upon my hip. I had not carried the gun with me for almost a year and I did not have it with me in the dream, either.

As I began to back up further from this walking corpse Chaney, I hit another coffin. This one also fell to the floor with a loud crashing noise and I was now pinned. If I had ran to my right or left I would smack into another coffin, and make matters only worse. Swallowing, I decided to see whom was behind me.

I could see only one bloodshot and cloudy red eye over my shoulder before I woke, flinching and clutching my pillow.

My pillow was damp with sweat so I flipped it over and laid back down on my back, staring up at the ceiling wide-eyed. These dreams were honestly more unsettleing than anything I'd seen or heard of before, surpassing even the news almost a year ago that my father had been killed. As embarrasing as it is to say, I needed the restroom after all of that. But thankfully, the storm had passed and all that remained was some thunder passing overhead.

At times like these I wish I hadn't insisted chamber pots kept under the beds were revolting, and that the outhouse suited me just fine...

However, sliding out of my bed on shaky legs, I looked around in the dark corners of my room for a moment then darted to my bedroom door and out into the hallway, not wanting to linger in one place for too long, for some silly reason. It was around 6:30 in the morning by then and there was enough light outside for me to navigate my way out the backdoor straight across to the outhouse, without the bother of having to ready a lantern for such a short trip. I grabbed my coat off of the rack, and slid it on.

I sprinted to it, flinging the old wooden door open, and then locked it behind myself in a hurry. As strange as it might seem to you now, I felt safer in a tiny wooden outhouse than I did in the safety of my own bed, in my own room. I had begun to feel my way around the dark outhouse, which, mind you, was not very enjoyable.

Before I could manage to even begin to get situated I began to hear a shuffling outside. This worried me. I was getting very jittery over the smallest of things. I stopped moving, as I hadn't got situated enough to even sit down, and concentrated on the shuffling outside. I let out a little yelp upon hearing something slam against the outdoor door, then smacked a hand over my mouth to prevent from making more noise. At the time this was a foolish action, a waste of time, if the person outside the door had been some kind of killer he would shot me through the wooden door!

However this...As I thought at the time, this THING did not carry a gun. Least it did not use it. It continued to bash itself against the outhouse door and common sense had escaped me to believe this could have been one of the ranch hands! Drunk, perhaps, not realizing what he was doing... I was detirmined to believe it was something far worse. It was one of the few times I wished I had not been right.

I backed further up into the outhouse, scrambling to stand up above the toilet itself with my back to the wall, as far as I could get from the door, and whatever was bashing itself against it, making these horrible groans. I wondered, would this be the end of me? I had faced death a couple of times before on my last excursion... This was somehow even more frightening.

I had begun to break a sweat now as the pounding upon the door got heavier, it seemed it was more detirmined to get inside of the outhouse now upon my fear growing. I kept a hand clasped over my mouth, trying to remain quiet as possible even though whatever it was knew I was in there, obivously.

The old outhouse door could hold its own no longer and came crashing down. My eyes had not had time to adjust to the light outside when the door fell, and all I could make out was the silhouette of a man, hunched over as he was. He had just begun to advance towards me when the sound of a shotgun boomed, echoing in the quiet morning air.

I had lost the ability to shriek now, I was so terrified. This would frighten anyone, but with what had been happening lately, made it even worse. However, I looked up upon hearing a familar voice, calling out to me. "Sis?"

Okay, I don't like this chapter very much. It's the worst so far, in my opinion. My apologies if you get confused at any point during this story. I'm not a writer all the time, art is more of my thing... so I'm not exactly good at this... Hopefully this story will help me get better :/