Day 213

Would you be able to live with yourself if you accidently killed someone?

I never meant to, you see, it just sort of... well, happened.

We were just kids, it was only a dare.

How were we to know the flat was actually haunted?

I mean, nobody believed in that, right?

Paul and I didn't.

We only went in there cause the old lady who lived there died recently.

We thought it would be cool to contact her spirit with a ouija board.

Yeah, its the start of every cliche piece of crap ever written.

Not that we noticed at the time, we were just playing.

Except it went wrong, it went so wrong.

It started with the usual "are you there", "prove it" stuff and nothing happened.

As we got bored we wandered around the house, it was pretty much empty, her family had

already cleaned out whatever they wanted.

The only interesting thing we found were some of those old fashioned fire poker things.

We had a sword fight with them before we got bored and went back to the ouija board.

The planchette had been moved from the floor to HELLO.

Neither of us could have done it, we checked out the house together.

While we were bickering over whose fault it was it began to move by itself.

It was spelling out something repeatedly, after a few attempts we got what she was saying.

G - E - T - O - U - T - G - E - T - O - U - T - G - E - T - O - U - T - G - E - T - O - U - T -

We fled to the front door but she was already there.

The papers said she died of old age.

They were so wrong.

Her clothing was heavily bloodstained, one of her hands was missing as were her eyes.

Whoever had killed her was brutal about it.

We ran, I was faster and managed to duck into a room as she went chasing after Paul.

Hearing a scream I ran out of the room to find that the old lady had cornered him by the back door.

Fire poker in hand I did what I thought best at the time and, ridden with fear and childish

stupidity I jammed the poker into her.

And through her.

And she vanished.

And Paul was still there.

I never told anyone what really happened, managed to hide the poker under a loose floorboard

in the house and ran home.

Nearly twenty years later and I've gotten married, had a kid and moved out of town.

Thought everything was going perfectly.

Then my daughter learned to talk.

She has an imaginary friend you know, as most kids do.

He's called Paul.

She tells me he hasn't forgotten.