Michael's Ghost Girl

The Fire Nymph

He started dreaming in the early morning hours while his room was still dark. At first, all seemed normal. The nurse came in to check on him; but, on closer inspection, he realized she had Mariah's face. The fingers she laid on his forehead were not cold, but uncomfortably warm, almost hot, and her hair seemed to writhe about her like snakes on a Medusa's head.

She turned her face to him and stuck out a long tongue. The lovely blue eyes had turned coal-black, as she exhaled she blew out a tongue of fire. The girl he knew seemed like a corruption of herself, a changeling that someone had put in her place. Then she began to laugh and laugh, and the laugh was so evil and full of malice that he tried to shut it out, putting his hands over his ears.

"NO!" he shouted and sat up. He shook himself out of his nightmare, something he had learned to do while very young. He sat in his bed, shaking, cursing Short Round for what he had told him, still not wanting to believe him, because now an inner voice was asking "what if?"

At the sound of his distress Mariah immediately materialized, and he remembered his dream and recoiled from her. She saw the look of horror on his face and immediately disappeared, and Michael could no longer feel her presence.

"No," he moaned, "Mariah, no. I only reacted to a dream. Where are you?"

The nurse came into his room to see what the commotion was about. He tried to tell her it was nothing, just a bad dream and everything was all right, but she wasn't buying it. His pulse was racing so fast that she took his blood pressure. Though the gauge showed that his blood pressure was only slightly elevated, it took a lot of talking before he could convince her to leave, and shut the door.

His head was throbbing, the world was spinning in circles, but he couldn't bring himself to try and sleep. Mariah's presence was nowhere. He wanted to call her name out loud, but that would only bring the nurse. The tears he felt welling up in his eyes were making his headache worse, but how could he sleep if she was not there? There would be no more rest for him until the fear and grief he felt went away—and Mariah returned.

All the rest of night he tried not to think about her. All night he failed. He'd barely dropped off to sleep when the nurse woke him up to take his temperature and blood pressure. Though he left the TV off, suddenly a cacophony of sound seemed to invade his head. Thoughts from the nurses, the orderlies, the patients seemed to overtake his mind and he couldn't shut them up, making his headache even worse.

The only voice he wanted to hear was absent. "Mariah?" he thought, listening hard for her. He tried to focus so he could hear her reply, but all he could hear was the chatter at the nurse's station. His efforts had only succeeded in making his head hurt worse, so he lay back on his bed and just let random thoughts he heard pass through his mind.

He was sitting up and ready when the orderly brought his breakfast. A short time after breakfast was cleared, an intern came in. He looked at his pupils, asking him questions while Michael heard him thinking, "these stupid kids and their skateboards. I could build a whole practice around head injuries. But I wonder why he seems so depressed."

Michael looked at him quizzically, waiting for him to ask the question. "He has no idea, none, that I can hear everything he's thinking. He thinks he knows so much, but he doesn't know dick!"

At last the questions came. "Everything going okay?" Michael shrugged. That was a stupid question—he was stuck in a hospital bed with a concussion. "Things okay at home?" He was lying in the hospital, just wanting to do nothing more than go home and this intern who wasn't even officially a doctor yet was trying to play shrink.

"Things are fine at home." Michael looked at him contemptuously. "I'm one of those rare teenagers with a great family," he said sarcastically, even though it was true.