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HILL HOUSE, THEN
It was getting late, they should've been asleep. But Millie was terrified and Luke was too nice to go to bed with her scared. They sat criss-crossed on Camille's bed. The only light in the room came from the moonlight that shone through the open window, making it hard to see each other's faces. Camille didn't care though, Luke's presence was enough to comfort her.
"What do you see?" he whispered as to not wake Nellie, who slept soundly on the other side of the room.
Camille shrugged, sheepishly looking down at her hands. "A bunch of things..."
"Are they bad?"
"Not all the time," Camille shook her head. "Like sometimes I can see my parents."
Luke nodded his head, his attentive eyes gazing at her through his black framed glasses. Mille continued.
"But sometimes I see... other things," she admits, furrowing her brows as she tried to find the correct way to describe her visions. "When I sleep, I see the Bent-Neck Lady... Most times she's just dark and I can't see her face, but tonight I saw her for the first time."
"Is that why you couldn't sleep?" Luke asked and Millie nodded her head. "What did she look like?"
The simple question made Camille sigh. She wasn't sure if she could properly describe what she saw. "She had a rope around her neck and her neck was broken... And she was crying and yelling that I should've done more. But she was... pretty and had long, brown hair. And she was wearing one of your mom's dresses..."
Luke's brows furrowed as he thought of how to respond. Instead of saying anything, he got up from the bed and opened the drawer of Millie's bedside table. He pulled out the Altoid can that she kept her buttons in before sitting back on the bed. Silently, he pulled out seven buttons and rearranged them in a pyramid on her blanket.
"Why seven?" Camille asked, disrupting the calm silence.
"For me, Nell, Theo, Steve, Shirl, and my mom and dad," as he said each name, he placed his finger upon each of the buttons. "So whenever your visions get too bed, you know that we're here to protect you."
He smiled and Camille couldn't help but smile back. He made her forget about her worries and the rest of the night she slept soundly.
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