Well, after 3,000 years the second chapter is finally here. I want to thank the people, few as you are, who have actually taken interest in this story. I honestly wasn't expecting it.

I jolted awake with a strangled scream and, once I had control over my arms, hastily brushed them off. I took a few even breaths while I waited for my pulse to stop hammering in my ears and told myself over and over that it was just a dream. I wasn't the type to get nightmares but when I did they hit me like a truck. I just thanked my lucky stars that I didn't have sleep paralysis, or I probably would have had a heart attack. After my heart returned to its normal rate I pawed around for my teddy bear. Mush to my dismay however, he wasn't to be found, and instead of the slight give of a mattress my hand met a hard wooden floor. I rubbed at my eyes and focused on my surroundings. I had found myself in a dimly lit hallway, the only light being the flickering candles from the sconces nailed along the walls. The scent of dust and stagnant air made my nose itch.

"Alright," I began, standing up on slightly unsteady legs. "Obviously I'm still dreaming." Swiftly I looked over my shoulder to check if anything, like that woman in black, was creeping up on me, much to my relief the only thing behind me was a wall. Seeing no other option I started moving forward, every step I took echoing all around me, enhancing how completely and utterly alone I felt. In the horror movies, this was usually the part where the monster came out and killed you. Maybe that would be enough of a shock to wake me up for real, although I would have preferred that nothing happened and I could just fade out of this dream as I woke up normally.

I stopped briefly at the end of the hall to look at the picture that hung on the wall in front of me. It was a portrait of a skeletal woman with deep set eyes, the painter using so much black that it almost looked like she didn't have any. People always said that the people you saw in your dreams were people you knew in real life, but I had never met a lady like the one in the picture. Not even my old piano teacher, a high-strung lady who was all sharp edges, looked that creepy. I had never seen the woman in black, either, for that matter. With a grimace I turned the corner and continued to walk down the hall.

"I've been waiting."

I stopped dead in my tracks at the voice that echoed around me. The air turned cold and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. "...So long." The voice continued. I could practically feel her breath, ice cold, brushing against my ear, so I swiveled around and stumbled back, knocking into a side table in the process. There was no one behind me, but the sound of something smashing on the floor was enough to make me jump and scream.

"Okay, this isn't funny anymore." I said as sternly as I could with such frayed nerves. I slapped my cheeks firmly a few times. "Wake up, wake up," I pleaded to myself, scrunching my eyes shut. I counted to ten opened them. No change. I let out a whimper and kept walking, not knowing what else I could do in this situation. Whatever, whoever, was waiting for me was probably who I had to meet with to wake up. I turned another corner, and noticed one of the doors had been pushed open slightly, as if beckoning me to enter. I swallowed the lump in my throat and walked in front of the door, trying to see through the narrow opening. No such luck. With a trembling hand I reached out to ease the door open a little more-

"Don't open it! She's in there!" Someone called desperately, her voice trembling slightly. I turned my head to see a girl running towards me, a frantic expression on her face.

I jumped awake, shooting into a sitting position as I clenched my hands over my heart. It was pounding heavily, I could hear its frantic rhythm in my eardrums. I looked around the room, trying to get a sense of where I was now. I fell back onto the pillows with a gusty sigh when I realized I was back in my own room, although I probably wouldn't be getting back to sleep anytime soon.

"Where... where am I?" A gentle voice asked. The same voice I had heard in my dream... with a gasp I jolted off the side of the bed, as embarrassing as it is to admit. The voice gasped, and a gust of cold air came around the bed to hover beside me. "Are you alright?"

"Who's there?" I finally found my voice as I collected myself, trying to salvage whatever scraps of dignity I might have had left.

"Can't you see me?" The voice asked,. I shook my head, and the voice sighed, clearly disappointed. "But you can hear me, that's something." The cold air moved away from me, and I climbed back onto my bed, curling my kneed close to my chest. "Who are you?"

"My name is..." The voice paused, as if she was having a hard time recalling her own name, "Maya." She finished finally. "I used to be trapped in that house but... how did you get there?"

"So that house was real?"

"I'm afraid so." I leaned back on my pillows with a heavy sigh, running both hands through my hair. "It's a good thing you got out. But, again, how did you even get there?" I ran my hands down my face and blew some hair away.

"I wish I knew. I just got a diary from some crazy lady, then the next thing I knew-"

"A.. diary?" Maya cut me off fearfully. If I could see her, her eyes would probably be wide with horror. "Can you show me it, please?"

"Okaaaaay." I replied with a quirked brow, sliding off the bed. I felt around the air for any cold area and avoided walking through it. I had a friend who said that walking through a spirits "space" was an incredibly bad idea. Until now I had just dismissed his superstitious speeches as him being way too into the idea of ghosts in the living world. Maybe I should have listened more closely to him before he moved away. Anyway, I walked down the hall to the kitchen, feeling the cold air (Maya, presumably) following closely behind me. The diary and camera were still in the box where I left them, harmless and undisturbed by anything that might have been supernatural. I took the diary out and looked at it with pursed lips.

"That's the Diary of Faces." Maya began, her voice full of dread. "why do you have that?" I was about to leaf through the pages again, part of me hoping to find some sort of clue, but when I heard "diary of faces" I paused.

"The Diary of Faces?" I breathed, my eyes going wide. I then dropped the diary like it it had burned me and wiped my hands off on the front of my shirt. It landed harmlessly on the counter, but I stared down at it like it was about to grow teeth and bite my face off. The diary had gained somewhat of a cult following among those who believed in the paranormal, especially in cursed objects. One of the most infamous cases happened across the sea, where a high school girl murdered her friends and brother, their bodies found with their eyes and mouths crudely sewn shut. The girl clawed her own eyes out sometime after. Some months later, another girl was found dead in her house with her face mutilated in a similar fashion to the other victims, the only piece of evidence being a letter pleading her brother to save her from "The woman in black."

The occult crowd had started rumors that the diary was haunted by this "woman in black", and horror stories about her weren't uncommon in those communities. In some versions of the story, she was a single entity, and in others she was a collective force. There were rumors that there would be a movie based on the story of the murderous sister, but the project was dropped for one reason or another. The internet, being what it was, took this information and said that the would-be director of the film was haunted by the Woman in Black. She didn't want her story being told to the world, and threatened to take the director's face if he went along with the project. Those stories weren't supposed to be real; the Woman in Black was just supposed to be a supernatural fantasy created by those who wanted a more interesting story than "the first sister was just crazy" and "the second sister ran away from home". The diary wasn't supposed to be real, but there it was, sitting on my kitchen counter like it belonged there.

I could feel Maya hover closer to me, something cold pressing against my back in what I guessed was a comforting gesture. I rubbed my eyes to try and calm myself down, thanking my lucky stars that I hadn't started hyperventilating out of fear. I remembered the breathing exorcises my brother had taught me; inhale for four seconds, hold it for four seconds, exhale for four seconds. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. "There's something else in the box," Maya spoke up. Her voice was gentle, almost soothing. Maybe I was hyperventilating, and she was trying to calm me down. If she wasn't a ghost, it probably would have worked better. "What is that?" I exhaled one final time in a long, drawn out breath before reaching into the box to show Maya the camera.

"Just a oldish looking camera," I said with a absent minded-minded shrug. On a whim, I held the viewfinder up to one of my eyes, "nothing out of ...the... ordinary." I blinked and lowered the camera from my face, then raised it back up again almost as quickly. Through the viewfinder I could see Maya, a gorgeous young woman with long black hair and almost impossibly pale skin, dressed in a flowing white dress. Almond shaped blue eyes regarded me curiously, head tilted slightly to the side in confusion.

"What?"

"I can see you when I look through this camera..."

"Seeing spirits through a camera," Maya mused, bringing one hand up to her chin inquisitively. Her hands were tied tightly at the wrist by was looked like dead ivy vines. I could almost see red marks were the vines would have cut off her circulation and rubbed the skin raw. " I've heard about something like that, but from where?" She tilted her forehead down into the palm of her hand, like she was trying to massage the memories out of her head. Maya shut her eyes tightly for a few seconds, eyebrows knitting together in concentration before she gave up with a hopeless sounding sigh, shoulders slouching downwards and her attention drawn to her wrists. Her wrists rubbed together feebly, almost in an attempt to loosen the vine. "Another thing that I don't remember." She said despondently, more to herself than to me. A few seconds passed, and she looked back up towards me. "I have an idea, but you probably won't like it."

"Yeah?"

"Well..." Maya worried her bottom lip, once again looking away from me. "I was thinking that, maybe, we could use that camera to examine the diary, it might provide some answers. For you, and for me."

"No way." I denied adamantly, putting the camera back on the counter. "I don't want to risk being pulled back into that house again." I leaned against the counter and crossed my arms across my chest.

"I don't blame you," Maya replied timidly, "but it couldn't hurt to try. The Woman in Black might pull you back into that house again, pull me back into that house." Maya paused again, carefully considering what she would say next. I could appreciate the fact that she wasn't just dragging me into investigating the possessed diary from hell without a thought-out reason. "And she'll take our faces if we go back there!" Maya said finally, her voice raising in urgency. "There might be something in the diary that can give us some clues. Something to stop her, why she's doing this, anything!" She took a shallow breath, "something that her other prisoners didn't know about before they were trapped." I drummed my fingers on the counter top, pursing my lips together. Other prisoners... then those stupid stories I used to read on the internet did hold some merit to them.

Well Fuck.

I pinched my forearm, jumping slightly at the sharp pain and feeling dread drop heavily into my stomach. If this was some sort of crazy dream that had come about from post-moving stress and being freaked out by that lady, I could accept that just fine. I would have a laugh about it when I actually woke up, maybe tell my brother about it and have an exchange over the symbolism of dreams; but that wasn't going to happen now. "Well, I've already fallen down the rabbit hole, might as well see how far it goes." I picked up the camera and ran my thumbs across the display screen absently. Anything was better than just twiddling my thumbs waiting to die, or go crazy and claw my own eyes out.

Post Chapter Notes: This was pretty much "infodump the chapter", sorry. It may seem like padding, but I honestly think one of Spirit Diary's major flaws is that it's too short and too rushed. After you escape the house with Maya, you fight Kaito almost immediately. It lacks the same sort of atmosphere as the other Fatal Frame games, you know? Speaking of our lovely ghost side-kick, she is going to have a lot more to say to the narrator. As much as I loved her character, it's a bit under developed. As for the Narrator, I'm trying to make the prose as ambiguous as possible, to try and emulate the feeling in the game, which is why Maya never asks for a name. Hopefully this approach will work out the way I want it to, and not make the Narrator's prose bland and uninteresting.

Anyway, hope to have the next update soon c: