The Poltergeist (Trade)

She was alone. Alone in the building, she used to protect. She could only remember the guards and patients from up there, but even that was fading. Hysteria couldn’t remember the soft glow of the moon, or the harsh, glaring light of the sun. All she could remember was them, what they did to her. 

Everything was blurring together, with no sun or moon to gauge the time. Only the occasional flash of light creeping under the door, or when he came back, could signal what was going on outside, or the occasional yell, but other than that. Silence.

It was deafening. Not even a drip of water. The sounds of her shackles and her overgrown claws hitting against the floor was the sound down there, nothing else. 

That was it. Until she heard it. The sound of sobbing. At first, she looked up towards the door, still shut. Not even the creak of the probably rusting metal from it. She could hear the soft murmurings and cries echo throughout the stone walled basement she’d been trapped in. She could hear it… begging for help. Not like one of the patients. It had a cold, and rough cry, something more of a laugh than anything. 

She flicked her ear forward, scanning across the near pitch black room as best she could. All the same as usual. Except one thing. The small white dot of light hovered over the staircase, occasionally jittering up and down like it was shaking something off. The noise seemed to fall from it, though it had no mouth to make it form. 

Little by little, the orb floated closer to her, hopping down the stairs, still sobbing. Louder and louder as it edged closer to her. Through the sobbing, the thud of heavy footsteps came thundering down. When it hit the bottom of the stairs, Hysteria fell backwards, hitting her back against the wall, and chafing the metal shackles over her already sore skin. The orb vanished, nowhere to be seen anymore.

Still, the soft cries rang around the surrounding room, before warping into a wicked, cackling laughter. All of her loneliness and pain, the aching in her heart to see something alive again, peeled away, overtaken by something else. Anger. 

Her life. 

Gone.

Over one. Stupid. Mistake. 

Hysteria curled her lip up, scanning around the room for whichever joker found this funny. Gone. She’d expected them to stay away from her, but whoever this was obviously didn’t care. At least not anymore. 

She hoped for the silence to return, rather than this.

Crash. Next to her, now. There was nothing, not even a shard of cracked ceramic. 

Slowly, she stood up, the sounds of her chains dragging across the floor mixing with the manic laughter of whoever that was. This wasn’t an ordinary person, she knew that now. It was something far, far worse. 

Then, as if a wall broke between her and the entity, she snapped, flinging her body toward the corner where the crash came from. Standing there was the faint outline of a man, almost like a shadow. Her jaws clenched around the entity, but they just snapped shut, and her body slammed against the wall. 

For a moment, she was stunned. She had run at this thing full force, and it had vanished again. That would not work. She flicked her tongue across her lips, thinking. 

She moved over to another section of the wall and waited, scanning over the walls.

The room was much smaller than she’d first thought, just smaller than one of the patient’s rooms, while there were small shelves on the backs of the walls from where they used to store things before she was imprisoned here. She picked up a section of her chain with her teeth, before a flash of the shadow ran across her view, with a quick tug, the shadows feet were pulled out from under them with the chain, and they crashed into one of the heavy shelves. Piles of the metal fell onto him, but once again. He was gone. 

Hysteria snarled. This was getting old. Stepping forward, she scanned over the shelves. It was like there was nothing there to begin with. Just a pile of junk lying on the floor. She knew it was really there. It was. All of that training she had wasn’t for nothing. She could tell what was true, and what wasn’t. This thing was the realest thing that she’d seen in days. 

She backed up against the wall. The entity couldn’t get behind her if there was no space. It wasn’t like what she was used to, but she had been trained for situations like this. She had left enough space at her sides for an escape to the other corners of the room in case she needed it. Even with the small size of the room, she could quickly jump from the corners, using the chains to pull the entity along. It got caught up before. She was sure she could recreate it if she did it right. 

As the figure remerged and reached for her collar, she pushed on her hind legs and leapt towards the other corner. The figure reached forward, yanking on her collar, pulling her backwards, and throwing her against the floor. 

Still, there was nothing.