I made it back home at five-thirty that evening after stopping by the store and picking up a cheap pay-as-you-go phone. It was a bit smaller than my previous device, but an even bigger piece of shit. Its web capabilities were terrible and I doubted the actual satellite service was very reliable either.

Fortunately, that wasn't the reason I bought it. I only got it on the off chance that I would need to make a call. Not family or friends since I had none. It was just for emergency and for work, so I didn't really care how much it sucked. I wasn't entirely certain why I had left my other phone with that girl either.

I suppose mostly I just didn't feel like bothering with getting her to return it. However, there was a part of me that felt that she had liked the phone. I could be wrong, but it was the sense I got and I kind of wanted to be nice to them. I didn't think the teens were bad kids or anything, alhough they were definitely on the road to some serious trouble if they didn't get a reality check.

Laying in bed, I set alarms for my work days on the new phone before placing it on the nightstand beside me and rolling over to stare at the ceiling. This had been the most eventful day I had had in months, possibly longer, and coupled with my depression, had made me extremely tired.

Regardless, Something was keeping me from going to sleep. I was on my back, on top of the blankets that I'd thrown on the bed that morning rather than take the time to neatly fold them and straighten my pillow. I wanted to lift myself and crawl underneath, but my mind felt like it was in overdrive.

Thoughts of those kids and their reasons for treating me as they had, what had driven me to go to Daytonsville at all, and what I was doing with life in general circled in my head along with visions of Lloyd McGraff sacrificing random citizens, being beaten to death, and then coming back to further terrorize his hometown through people's dreams.

Then I thought about Ames. Damn, she'd been through a lot herself. It saddened me to see her alone, tied to that forgotten city, with apparently most people viewing her as batshit insane; just as I had thought myself insane. Through her, I had seen proof to the contrary and it had shattered me. I longed to speak with her again, to learn more, yet I was stuck in an existential crisis.

I turned my head to the side to look at my arm. I had agitated the fresh cuts by clutching them too tightly in an attempt to hide them even though they had already been seen. In a few places, the scabs had been pulled away, causing them to bleed again. Now there was dry blood in wavy lines and in spots between the cuts. Suicide was never far from my mind, and yet I wasn't strong enough to actually do it.

It wasn't that pain bothered me. I had unfortunately grown a liking for it. I wasn't afraid of hurt; I was afraid of death. As much as I wanted to be rid of this bullshit pathetic life of mine, I had no conviction of what the afterlife held great enough to keep me from worrying.

Moreover, with the new evidence of the supernatural, I felt I didn't deserve it until I had righted what I'd done to fail Tyler. Then again, perhaps the only way to find him was to be free of this body. My brain instantly began contemplating this option. I could only do so much as a human, right? So what I were to release my spirit, fully release it, not just astral travel?

That presented another possible obstacle: not being strong or aware enough witbout my physical being to carry out my mission. What if atheists were right and it was all nothingness afterward? If we were our minds and whatever else was simply different forms of energy being converted into different uses.

Or what if the religious were correct and our next lives were equally predetermined? In any case, I realized that the here and now was all I could be certain of. At least I could comprehend who I was in this life and how it worked, its rules. Besides, even if dying were necessary to fix this shit, it wasn't like I was going to magically summon the power to end myself.

However if I happened to die in some sort of accident or by someone else's hands... I shook my head. Focus! Now wasn't the time for morose ideation. Nothing was going to get solved if I couldn't come up with some sort of plan. Wandering about aimlessly was only going to cause more issues.

My brain continued to scramble from topic to topic for another hour before my body gave up and fell asleep. The dreams I had were all over the place as well. None of them made much sense and the ones that did seem to have some logic to them never lasted long enough for the story to finish. Even asleep, I found this frustrating.

I had to have been in slumber for several hours before I finally awoke to the sound of thunder and the vibrations of lightning striking not far away. I shot up in bed having caught a glimpse of four figures in black perfectly spaced in a circle around my bed during the brief flash of light.

My eyes widened as I reached to my side in the darkness for the lamp sitting next to my crappy phone. Pulling its string, I expected the sight to have been in my head. However, as the synthetic light lit my bedroom well enough to erase any shadows, I saw that the figures were still there. And they weren't just random strangers...it was the goth delinquents from before.

"Jesus," I muttered, pulling my legs closer to me.

The three boys and the girl stood unwavering, simply staring at me. Their expressions were emotionless. I blinked a few times and shifted in the bed, yet they remained the same. Fuck, I'm dreaming, I concluded. I took a deep breath in, closing my eyes. Counting in my head until I reached thirty, I then began chanting to myself silently. It's just a dream. It's just a dream. I'm in control. I'm in control.

I opened my vision once more. The teenagers had broken their semi-circle and were now standing closely together by my bedside. Their faces had changed too. The girl wore a small smile and the boy in the trench-coat now held his baseball bat up as if in attack mode. He had a hint of a smirk on his face while the two younger boys stood on either side of him seemingly trying to contain laughter.

Throwing my legs off the side of the mattress, I kept them in view. I cautiously stood before turning to face them. Furrowing my brow, I glanced around the room. Everything else looked normal. My door was even ajar just as I had left it when I returned to my bedroom that evening.

Dreams, even lucid ones, had a tendency to play themselves forward with or without your consent. Knowing this, I stopped analyzing it and waited patiently for what my subconscious thoughts planned to throw at me next. After a few minutes or at least what I perceived as minutes, the girl exchanged glances with the older boy and the other two stopped smiling.

"You're not dreaming," she finally said.

Narrowing my vision on the leader first, I glanced across each of the intruders. I had inched close to my bedside table, my hands instinctively reaching behind me to take in the feel of the wood. It was a tactic for disassociation meant to ground a person, but I had found objects within reality felt incredibly tangible compared to those in a dream or whilst traveling the astral plane. This was physical.

I looked around the room again and then back to the kids. I guess it was the odd occurrence of the troupe in my bedroom along with their unusually intimidating presence that had me convinced otherwise. These fucking kids were in my fucking house. Uninvited. How the fuck did they even find me? Damn it. They had found something on my phone that led them here, didn't they?

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" I hissed, "Look, I understand that you guys have some shit going on or whatever, but you realize you're stalking me, right?" I shook my head, turning around and picking up my phone, "This is ridiculous. I'm not putting up with this."

As I began calling 9-1-1, the girl lowered herself onto my bed and sat down with legs crossed, "Have fun with that," she said casually.

I looked back up at them. None of them seemed worried at all. My initial thought was that they were just going to beat me before I could finish the call. My eyes shot between the girl on the mattress and the rest of her posse. They didn't do anything. They just stayed as they were, unmoved, watching me. The boy in the trench even let his bat drop down to his side while the girl pulled out her new device and started texting.

"9-1-1, what's your emergency?" someone on the other end of my line picked up.

I hesitated. The teenage girl sitting on my bed had raised her own phone in the air, holding it so that its screen faced me. She hadn't been sending a message; she had been typing one for me.

"Hello?" the emergency operator spoke into my ear.

We can help you, read the text held in front of me.

"Hel-" I clicked the end call button on my own phone before removing it from my cheek just as the operator began speaking again. My eyes still focused on the girl as she lowered the screen, I sat on the bed myself, putting my phone on the blankets beside me.

"What are you talking about?" I asked in a hushed tone.

"I know this way you've been acting," she said, "I've seen it before, many times. You don't want to be here."

My eyes searched hers. She did know. It was strange seeing someone so young display such intuition, but she completely understood my desolate state.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Emma."

"It's a pretty name," I copped out.

"I'm not interested in that," she replied somewhat defensively, "Do you want our help or don't you?"

"I don't see what you guys can do. I mean, what- do you need your first blood for some sort of gang initiation?" I scoffed.

She remained solemn, "We're not going to kill you; McGraff is."

I lifted a brow as I studied her face for any sign that she was making a joke. When I didn't see anything other than sincerity, I looked past her to the boys who appeared just as serious. What the fuck was this? Everything told me to react like it was some game. They had already made it abundantly clear they were fixated on me and our only meetings thus far had been them harassing me.

Yet I couldn't keep myself from being curious, from believing that maybe all this stuff was real and there were even more people like me who believed than I had ever known. My gaze was intent on Emma. Not really the typical offer given to a suicidal person- to have someone end their life for them. That she was suggesting it at all was intriguing.

"Right," I made my voice sound unamused, deciding to play my response safe, "How exactly is that, since he's dead?"

"You know exactly how," she pointed. "He may have been banished back to Hell for now, but with your help, we're going to bring him back."

My brows were raised again, "What- just to kill me? I appreciate your concern," I stressed sarcastically, "But why the fuck would you want to bring back a serial murderer?"

Emma leaned her head forward ever so slightly, an evil grin suddenly plastered across her face. "Because he killed me and my friends and I want him back...so that I can make that bastard suffer forever."