Ghostly Games

Flashbacks

She spent the night in an abandoned motel room. One bed had a suspicious stain and the other seemed pretty dusty. She was not planning on lying in either of them. She made sure the wood boarding up the windows had no cracks and she turned on a lamp at the side table. It gave a popping sound before casting a dull glow. She did not turn on the TV. Not that tvs showed anything, but the static from them was sure to attract other ghosts.

She instead used this time to pull out the hand drawn map from her bag and look at it, wondering where she could hide to be able to survive to the end. She had hit the ground running since her first few deaths and did not give herself time to think. With the motel being boarded up, Sidney felt very safe for the moment. It allowed her to think about the first time she arrived here, after she had first died.

She woke up on the side of the road, her hand flying up to her head. It ached but there was no blood pouring from a nonexistent wound. Her clothes weren't torn and there was no sign of an accident around her. There were no downed trees or poles, and this scared Sidney. She stumbled back towards town trying to figure out what was going on.

"Hello?" She shouted out, at the seemingly empty street ahead of her.

"Is anyone there?" Having received no response, she kept walking. She made her way towards the first little house and pounded on the door.

"I need help!" She shouted out. Sidney tried the handle of the door and was surprised when it turned and the door opened easily. She took a step inside and looked around.

"Hello?" she said again, her voice faltering. The living room that she found herself in seemed very dusty, as if no one had been there for months. She turned around to leave and felt a pain in her stomach. She looked to see another person standing in front of her. The lady gave her a smile and a laugh. She looked down at her stomach and noticed a knife sticking out of it. Sidney gasped as she looked up at the young woman again. With a sickening squelch, the woman pulled the knife from her stomach.

She dropped to her knees, feeling the trickle of blood fall from her lips.

"But..... why?" she asked, not expecting a response.

"To be rebirthed silly. " Came a response from the woman in front of her. That was Sidney's first death. She'd like to say that death made her smart but it wasn't until a few deaths later that she clued in on what was happening.

Sidney blinked the memory away as she looked back down at that map she had drawn from exploring the town. Each time she died, she had to find the knapsack she had scavenged until she had stumbled upon this motel. It seemed to be less frequented by others than some of the other buildings in the town, let alone the hospital. Sidney had found out how much of a bloodfest that was rather fast. It was where most of the crazies stayed. And despite the building being burned several times to wipe them out, in her next undead life, the building was always whole again.

She drew a question mark on the corner store she had been in. She needed to figure out why it had suddenly brightened up and looked shiny and new. She hadn't checked the west side of the town lately to see if any other buildings were like that. For now, a question mark on her map would have to work. She grabbed the red-covered journal out of her knapsack and began to record her latest death, what she had been doing previous to that, and what her mistake was.

Sidney felt this was helpful in figuring out the real extent of the ghostly games. Anything she could glean from what she wrote could help her, or maybe others who were like her that didn't want to kill to be rebirthed. Dark Shadow People, golden store. She wrote in the margins of the lined paper. Those were new, and were worth a stand-alone spot in her journal. She thought back to the shadows. Why did they simply vanish when hitting the windows of the corner store? Could she use this to her advantage? Did it work on the other people here with her? The events of her last death only left Sidney with more questions. Questions she did not seem to have the answer to. She was determined to check out the movie theater tomorrow and see if anything had changed there.

She stashed both the map and journal in her knapsack and shoved the cloth heap under the nicer of the two beds in the room. For now, she just wanted to take a nap. Granted, she did not need to sleep, but it would help pass the time from the darkness until the gray light came back. Sidney was a light sleeper and knew if there was any sudden sound she'd wake up and leave.