Page 68 of Marked By His Hunger
This was magical pressure.
And somehow—I was at the center of it.
As I sat there waiting for it to stop, a childhood memory surfaced uninvited.
Age fourteen.
Catholic school hallway.
I was alone at my locker.
Except I wasn’t.
There was a woman standing behind the science lab door.
She was transparent from the waist down.
Her face was burned.
She whispered, “He pushed me.”
Over and over.
I tried to ignore her.
She followed me into class.
Sat in the empty desk beside mine.
No one else reacted.
Finally, I whispered back, “I can’t help you.”
She screamed.
Not loudly.
Not audibly.
But in a way that made every fluorescent light in the hallway flicker.
The next day, the principal announced a decades-old lab accident had been reopened after anonymous evidence surfaced.
Now, I hadn’t submitted anything.
Not consciously.
But something had.
Maybe it was because the dead had learned I could hear them.
And sometimes they pushed back.
In Buckie’s, I realized something with slow dread.
See, if ghosts reacted this strongly to acknowledgment, then what did Monsters do?
The awareness above the tavern sharpened.
