Day 447

The children ran towards you.
Ran through you.
Their laughter echoed against walls that hadn't been there for centuries.

Your voice sounded strangely quiet, muffled in the evening air.
It seemed like the children couldn't hear you.
Out of curiosity you went to follow them.

They headed down the field, towards the bridge over the Rooksborough river.
Someone gently touched your arm.
You weren't the only one walking after the endless parade of spectral youths.

They looked older than you, said they'd been following the children for years.
Apparently they'd known some of them in their childhood.
Pointed them out to you as they ran past in their cycle.

The more they talked the more unsettled you felt.
They kept saying that the children were a "one way ticket to immortality".
As you both got to the bridge you made excuses to leave.

They looked so disappointed but waved you off.
The children looked different as you walked back up the hill.
Perhaps it was because you'd never properly seen their faces as they ran past.

The further you walked the more grotesque they appeared.
Eyes gradually warping into vacant sockets, flesh crumbling, a few bloated and drenched.
Some blackened with smoke pouring from their mouths, others still aflame.

You ran back to the town, back to familiar, well lit streets and kept going til the children vanished.
Sleep didn't come easy for you that night, nor for the rest of the week.
You found yourself drawn to local obituaries in the papers, never sure who you were looking for.

Eventually you found them as they ran past and through you in the street.
They wore the same clothes they had on the hill only soaking wet and covered in river weeds.
That night you found them again in the local obituary- drowned at Rooksborough River.