She followed the sounds, the echoes, and the shadows deep into the forbidden hall. They seemed to bounce off of every surface, growing loud in the tight hall and faint in the massive bedroom. She glanced around, distractedly, until she noticed a small door set into the warped wood wall. As she reached tentatively towards the brass knob, Alastor burst in, throwing her backwards. How he found her, she could never discern. The house was so large, the halls so maze-like. Did he, too, hear the cry?

As he caught her, his massive fists descended and a familiar pain set in. Her whole body ached, throbbed, and pulsed with anguish. Her screams recoiled agonizingly off of the age-worn walls until her pained shrieks seemed to resonate perfectly with The Girl, melding into one call of misery.

The soft footsteps of Alastor ripped her mind from the past and sent her flying quickly out of the reach of his thin shadow. This was not an easy feat. It seemed as though his shadow haunted her continuously, as if it lurked in every corner and prowled every inch of her mind. The only place she could escape his perpetually watching eyes was in the utter darkness of her dank closet. This place was the closest she could get to the west wing. Here she could close her eyes, press her ear against the wall, and both hear and feel the reverberation of The Girl’s never ending call.

She did not know why The Girl gave her a sense of safety. She did not know why her call had grown louder and more piercing as the years went on. But, most of all, she could not decipher why The Girl’s voice had shifted into the voice of a woman.

Sometimes she swore that she saw her. The Woman would be there, frail and sickly, staring at Lamia, and Lamia would stare back at her. In those moments, The Woman was silent and they would both stand and stare until Alastor’s shadow found them and sent Lamia fleeing in fear as The Woman disappeared into nothingness. She did not know how old The Woman was. She looked to be in her thirties, but it had seemed so long since her young eyes had graced anything but darkness and Alastor.

She shook her head, suddenly; these thoughts were distracting her from her mission. Lamia took a deep breath and listened to The Woman’s cooing voice. She gathered herself in the darkness and clutched her conviction in her small, ample fingers, bringing it close to her heart as she slipped into a broken slumber.

The room was already blackened with twilight when Lamia emerged from her hiding place. She took a deep breath and glanced down at her hand. She blinked. What she saw was not her own hand, a hand of youth and childhood, but the bony, shriveled paw of an age-worn woman. Her head pulsed, and her ears began to ring as her mind desperately struggled to grasp the relevance of what she saw. The answer, elusive to her tangled faculties, disturbed her. She did not know why, but deep within her heart, she knew that this was not an answer that would please her. But, before she could consider this further, The Woman screeched, more painfully than she had ever heard before.

This scream served as a signal for Lamia, for in that moment, as if she were a doll void of will and consciousness, her mind grew blank and her body moved of its own accord. She padded silently through the dusty rooms, creeping ever closer to her destination. When she arrived at the door, she paused; her heart beat loudly in her ears and seemed to echo deeply through the house. This was the moment she had been waiting for. She slinked into the room, swapped a pair of scissors resting on the worn desk, edged closely to the bed, and glared down at the sleeping behemoth. His form was swathed in darkness and seemed to writhe like a bed of insects upon the dingy sheets.

The rusty scissors in her hand arched through the charged air and smashed recklessly in what was supposed to be the delicate flesh that coated his pale stomach. Lamia imagined there would be a sickening thud that would reverberate through the room as blood slowly gushed from the wound and a suffocated scream escaped her victim’s lips. But, this was not the scene that awaited her.