Sinking into my hood, I bring my knees to my chest. Lightning assaults my periphery and frames the silhouette of a ghoul watching me from the top of the hill. It’s not scary to me now that I’ve seen the lifeless creatures enough places. I know the devil’s workers want me dead, and it doesn’t bother me.

A gust blows the carousel into motion, and I’m spinning. It’s . . . dizzying.

Is that just one ghoul? Or is there one there by the picnic benches too? The swing set? The slide?

I can’t tell if I’m facing just one ghoul or many.

I push my foot into the ground and spin myself faster and faster.

Can’t go back to school, assaulted a kid over a slave joke. Can’t go home, failed my mom.

Eyes shut, I hope for a pleasant dream. To drift off somewhere better.

“Is it too much to ask I not be haunted all the time?” I whisper to the particles of luminescent dust fizzing at my fingertips, as if they’re my connection to God.

“Can’t I have a crush at school, even if it’s a boy? Can’t I just be a kid?”

Or am I doomed to lurk in darkness? Prisoner to evil?

The questions go on, but each one gets quieter until they are barely heard, not even by me.

What did I do wrong?

What did I do?

I wake up in pitch-black darkness—darkness that makes me question if I’m awake and if I’m really here. I can’t remember the moment I passed out on the carousel. Just endless existential questions blurring into white noise, which faded, at some point, into blackness.

I lift to a sitting position and place my hands on the ground beneath me, where they sink as if in sand. A black sand.

Ecto-mist forms a ring of cold fire on the ground around me, snapping in sparks of light blue. The ring expands, growing in density and range, covering everything. Shapes rise from it—glittering bodies forming themselves from foot to pelvis to head.

Glittering people in aprons and headscarves, tunics and turbans, boots and berets. Top hats and church hats and flapper dresses. People are running with knapsacks, thrashing the reins on horses, each shape there and then gone, making way for new ones.

They grow as they move, the mist making them denser, bigger. The mist starts to rumble with a hum of voices, like a church congregation at the end of the service.

The figures fade until there are twelve left. Each is the height of a doorway, with muskets, machine guns, daggers, and sabers in their hands. They surround me like a tornado getting tighter at the center, and I collapse to my knees, hands held up in front of me.

Please don’t kill me.