Scarlet died on July 20th, 1955. She was five years old. However, when she died, something peculiar happened. She wasn’t gone. She stayed. 

It was as if she was pushed behind a thin curtain. Scarlet was still there, but she wasn’t. Unable to communicate, she became a watcher. 

She watched her family mourn her loss. She watched her mother die of fever. She watched her father do the same. She watched new families move into her home, and watched when they frantically packed up and moved out. 

Scarlet never understood why they moved out so quickly. She did everything she could to make them feel welcome. Though she hadn’t figured out how to directly talk with them, she liked to leave messages for them. 

She would play with them, leaving chairs upside down and turning lights on and off. For  some reason, though, they never played with her back. They yelled and screamed when she would flicker the lights, and would throw objects into the darkness where she stood, invisible to them. 

Scarlet lost count of the number of families that she watched enter her home and then shortly depart it. After, a while, she stopped trying to keep track. 

Then came the Watson family. They were a small family: two parents and a daughter, who was about Scarlet’s age–or at least, the age she was frozen at seventy years prior. This was thrilling news to Scarlet. She hadn’t seen another little girl her age in decades.  literally. Hence, she tried more than ever to reach the new girl. 

“Daddy, why is it so cold in here?” Lily, the new daughter asked innocently.

“Let me see… Oh, man, the thermostat is broken.” Lily’s father grunted, frustrated. “Just what I need: another thing to fix.”

“It’s okay, honey. We knew it was a fixer-upper. You just have to be patient,” Lily’s mother said, trying to lighten the already dark and cold cavern of a house they had just decided to inhabit.

Suddenly, the lights flickered and then fizzled out. 

“Damn it!”

“Language!”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing, baby.”

Scarlet giggled, watching them. But something peculiar happened. She watched the father of the family look around, fear and confusion in his eyes.

“Did you hear that?” He asked into the darkness.

“...Yes,” the mother shakily replied.

“Was that you, Lily?”

“No!”

Scarlet was so shocked by what had just happened, that she had forgotten to turn the lights back on. Did they hear her? Could someone finally hear her? Years of speaking out and being ignored flooded her memory. 

Were things finally changing? 

The four of them stood there in the darkness silently, standing deathly still. Excited by her new skill, Scarlet decided to speak again. 

“Hello,” she squeaked. Her greeting was met with a shriek and a clashing sound. The next thing she knew, there was a vase flying her way, thrown by the father. As the glass shattered at the spot where she stood, Scarlet began to cry. However, the sound that the Watson family heard had not sounded like a greeting. Rather than a friendly acknowledgement, what they heard was a warped version of it, the sound resembling claws being slowly dragged against a fresh chalkboard. The crying was even worse. 

“GET OUT OF OUR HOME!” the father bellowed, holding his mortified wife and crying daughter in his arms. 

Sobbing, Scarlet ran upstairs to her room, if you can call a wooden floor, one window, and no furniture a room. She sat in the corner, hugging her legs, her face buried in her arms. 

The lights flickered on. Scarlet decided to never try to contact them again.

A few months later, Scarlet’s room had been completely renovated, with the walls painted pink, pink curtains draped over the window, and a pink carpet installed. The twin bed had a pink silk canopy hung over it, with princesses decorating the blankets. The room was bright and full of life, but one corner of it was darker than the rest. Sunlight never reached that specific corner, and Lily tended to avoid it. She spent most of her time in the other areas of her room, playing with her dolls and race cars and trains, among other toys. 

Scarlet never moved out of the room. After all, she lived there first. She inhabited one of the corners (you can probably guess which one), and watched longingly as Lily played with her toys, blissfully unaware of her presence. Coming out during the day was difficult for Scarlet, so nighttime was Scarlet’s favorite. 

When the sun went down, and Lily went to sleep, it was finally her time to play. Seeing in the dark was no issue for Scarlet, so she didn’t have to risk waking Lily up when she played. Her favorite toys were Lily’s dolls. She had never seen such beautiful dolls before in her life. They had hair just like real life hair, which she could brush and style whatever way she wanted. They all wore the prettiest gowns, and some of them even had high heels. 

Every night, she played with them, putting them in different scenarios and fairy tales. Tonight, Scarlet was reenacting the story of Cinderella for the tenth time. She never got tired of it.

“Ding! Ding! Ding!” Scarlet whispered, mimicking the clock as it struck midnight.

“Oh no! It's midnight!” Scarlet held up the doll that resembled Cinderella the most, shaking her as she spoke.

“But your shoe!” Scarlet exclaimed, deepening her voice and she held up the one and only boy doll that she could find.

“What are you doing in my room?”

Scarlet jumped about ten feet in the air, whirling around to see Lily sitting up in her bed, staring at her curiously.

“You can see me?” Scarlet asked, stupefied.

“Of course I can. You know, my daddy would be really mad if he saw you.” Lily whispered back, gesturing towards the door.

“Promise not to tell?” Scarlet murmured, desperately. 

“Promise. Can I play with you?”

Delighted, Scarlet nodded eagerly. She had not had a playmate in a lifetime. 

So the two girls played. They played until the sun came up, reenacting about every

fairy tale they could think of. One night became two nights. Then three. Soon enough, every single night was filled with playtime for the both of them. Lily asked Scarlet about her life (and death), and didn’t have a hard time accepting the harsh truth about Scarlet’s situation. She didn’t care. She was just happy to have a friend. 

The lack of sleep started to take a toll on Lily, and her parents began to notice. Lily was napping throughout the day, falling asleep at the breakfast table as she ate her cereal. She began to grow sick. As all parents do, the Watsons started to worry.

“What’s going on, Lily?”

“I don’t like sleeping at night.”

“Why, sweetie?”

“I can only see Scarlet at night.”

The Watson’s looked at each other. 

“W–who’s Scarlet?”

“My friend.”

“It’s not good to have imaginary friends, sugarplum.”

“She’s not imaginary! She’s real.” 

“We know, baby. We know.”

As you can probably guess, that conversation did not solve anything. The parents ignored it and told Lily she had to sleep at night. Of course, she refused to listen. 

Scarlet grew happier and happier, and Lily grew more and more sick. 

The Watson’s decided to investigate. To their horrified surprise, they discovered there was mold growing in the walls of Lily’s room. 

“Honey, we’re gonna have you sleep in our room for a while.” Lily’s dad announced, immediately after discovering the problem.

“No!” Lily protested.

“I’m not asking.”

Despite Lily’s refusal, the Watson parents made sure that Lily slept as she stayed with them, and sure enough, she started to feel better. Her parents hired someone to take a look at the mold, locking the door to the room and leaving it for good. Scarlet was heartbroken.

Heartbreak soon turned to anger. Anger at her fate. Anger at Lily’s parents. Anger at Lily. Soon enough, anger turned to rage.

Rage is a powerful emotion. When Scarlet experienced such rage, things started to happen. She unconsciously caused books to fly off shelves, precious china to smash on the floor, and the house to turn ice cold. The longer that Lily was separated from Scarlet, the worse things got. 

Every night, Scarlet cried in her corner. She didn’t play anymore. She didn’t see the point. With each sob, the house rumbled and shook. 

The Watson family was befuddled when they realized that the only house experiencing the nightly earthquakes in the whole neighborhood was theirs. Lily knew exactly what was happening, but her parents wouldn’t listen. 

“It’s Scarlet! She’s lonely without me. Please, if you would just let me see her.”

“I don’t think that's a great idea, Lily. You can’t go in there.”

“Daddy, please!”

“No.”

The earthquakes grew worse. The more despair that Scarlet felt, the more difficulty she had controlling her actions. Scarlet began to lose herself as she helplessly drowned in her anguish. 

A couple weeks after Lily had moved, something happened. The change had rendered Scarlet fully unrecognizable and her anger was extortionate. On the night of Wednesday, April 15th, the anger got the best of her. She didn’t mean to drop a large vase on the father’s head, but the mere thought of it mixed with her anger towards him caused it to happen.

As the father fell to the shaking floor, Lily’s mother looked up to the spot where it had been dropped. She laid her eyes on Scarlet, who was looking with vexation at the unconscious body of Mr. Watson. Mrs. Watson shrieked at what she saw. 

Mr. Watson began to get up, struggling to stand on the trembling ground. He looked up, and at the sight of Scarlet, his eyes grew wider than ever before. Who was THAT? Is she floating in the air? As Mr. Watson tried to understand what he was looking at, he glanced into Scarlet’s glowing eyes. To him, the look inside them was pure evil. As Lily looked up at her old friend through the tears in her eyes, all she saw was pain and suffering. She reached out to Scarlet, desperately trying to console her, but the earthquake just grew worse. 

Finally finding his balance, Mr. Watson knew what he had to do. Or at least, what he thought he had to do.

Blinded by fear and a surplus of adrenaline, he led his wife and child out of the house as quickly as he could. He ran back inside, frantically searching for his alcohol, which he kept on the highest shelf of his kitchen. Grabbing the nearest bottle, along with a pack of matches, he covered the floor of the house in vodka and lit a match.

Scarlet didn’t understand what was happening. Her anger morphed once again, but this time into pure fear. Scarlet slowly dropped to the floor, in a spot that was not yet engulfed in flames. Although she usually physically felt nothing, Scarlet felt the intense heat of the fire on her face. She had never felt anything like it, and she was terrified. She dashed upstairs, away from the rapidly growing fire.

“Mommy!” Scarlet cried out, tears streaming down her pale cheeks. “Lily!”

Scarlet screamed for someone, anyone to come help her. She had never felt more afraid. She had never been more alone. 

As the house went up in flames, Lily looked up at Scarlet, who looked out of her window on the second story. Lily never forgot the terror in Scarlet’s innocent eyes as she reached out to her. The pink curtains around her turned to a deep charcoal, and the smell of burning plastic filled the air as Lily’s dolls burned bright in the fire.