Bay 12 Games Forum

Two weeks. Two weeks until shipping. Around a thousand backers already, I saw with relief. Thirty-thousand dollars. Back then, I thought that'd be enough for the reward. I went to the police station later that day, asked if I had permission to put up MISSING fliers around town. After I signed some papers and made the flier, I began posting them around the block, asking passersby to spread the word.

Jane went missing three months ago. Everyone thinks she's dead. The police are on the lookout for her murderer. I'd firmly believed that somewhere, out there, she was alive. She was out there, somewhere definitely, but as I found out later, she wasn't alive.

But she wasn't dead, either.

As the week progressed from Monday to Friday, I received more calls in that time-frame than the past three months. I guess monetary incentive really can work wonders. The thirty-thousand dollar reward got a lot of people interested in searching again, down in the woods or the sewers. They didn't find her. Sometimes they mistook a hobo that was slumming in the sewer for her, merely covered with shit and grime. I wasn't too disappointed, though. I guess a whole three months made me a bit pessimistic, but nonetheless, I pressed on.

Now, most calls I got were from the unemployed or bored highschool students, looking to make money. (Which, at that time, I didn't technically have. I had yet to ship my horror game, ABBB.) But one peculiar caller got me both pissed and intrigued. A 'psychic'. The type that has those cheap-ass crystal balls, reads your palm and burns bones. I wouldn't have hung up on her because she was a psychic if she'd actually told me useful, meaningful information. No, I hung up, because she said she saw Jane's ghost.

I was pretty irritable after that, thinking it was some sort of prank in poor taste. Saturday and Sunday passed, with me pumping out an update to be released a month or two after ABBB came out. Monday, she called again. Same shit. I was about to hang up again, when she began singing. Singing the lullaby I used to sing to Jane. Her mother wrote that lullaby for her, before she passed away. No one else could possibly have known.

I stood there dumbfounded for a complete five minutes, mouth agape, until I heard the knock on my door. Dropping the phone, I slowly made my way down the stairs, all the while thinking of a rational explanation why that 'psychic' would possibly know. There must have been some info about that in Discovery Science or something. Something about cold reading? I got to the door, dismissing the thought, and opened.

There, in front of me, stood a hunched woman in complete white attire. White dress, white coat, white hat, and white veil. She was still on her phone. She gave a weary smile and put her phone away.

"Are you the one from the phone?" I asked the old lady.

"Yes," she said. "And no."

"What? What does that mean? How did you know about the lullaby? How do you know where I live?"

"My my, so many questions, never enough answers. Yes and no means we can't be sure. How do you know I was the one on the phone? By my voice? Does my voice make me who I am? How do I know you were the one speaking to me? Do I know, or do you know? Yes, and no."

I sighed. "Okay, lady, please. Get off my property. I'm really busy."

"I have not answered all your questions, dear," she said, with a look of great sadness. "How did I know your lullaby, you ask. Do I know your lullaby? Yes, and no. But how? Yes, and no."

"Yes and no isn't the answer to how."

"Yes it is."

"No, it isn't."

"See?" she asked. "Yes, and no."

It continued like that for about ten minutes. I invited her inside for a drink. We settled down in my study and began to talk about Jane. She suggested a game: I would begin describing a feature of Jane, and she'd finish it. Her hair was, I'd begin, blonde, with a streak of pink, cut and kept short, usually one of the things her teachers would nag her about, she'd finish with great detail. I began to believe her, cold reading be damned.

"So, you've seen Jane?"

"Yes, and no."

I was used to this bullcrap after more than two hours of arguing. "Okay, but is she alright?"

She gave a look of worry. "No."

That shocked me. "No yes?"

"Yes." She stood up and asked me to take her Jane's room. I took her up the stairs and into Jane's room. I left it untouched. The police merely skimmed over it. They were under the impression that she ran off with her boyfriend or something. Her sheets were still messy. Her laundry all over the floor. "Clean it," she said. She went downstairs again. Dumbfounded, I obeyed and began cleaning. I found drugs stashed underneath her bedsheet. I never had any suspicion that Jane did drugs. I was so shocked I dropped it and it spilled on the floor.

That wasn't the worst of it all.

I found a cutter under her pillow. It had dried blood on it. This wasn't what Jane was like. Jane was always bright and cheerful, like a personification of bubblegum. I decided to turn on her laptop, to see what it was like. It was out of battery, of course, being neglected for three months. I plugged it in and resolved to check later. By the time it was all clean, the lady in white was watching by the door.

"You've seen?"

"Yeah," I answered, pointing to the trashcan where I threw the drugs and cutter away.

She arched a brow and gave a frown. "Blind."

I dropped the broom and cried out. Behind the lady in white was Jane. "I-I see," I stammered.

She looked very worried. "Blind." She turned around and shut the door. When she opened it, she was still there, but Jane was gone. I stood there, eyes as wide as baseballs, mouth a gaping cave. She told me to come meet here downstairs when I was ready. As she left, I collapsed on the floor, sitting like a scared child, because when the door opened again, she was there, but the old lady was gone.

She looked just like the last time I saw her. Her blonde, shaved hair was now dry and old. She looked incredibly pale, as white as the old lady's attire. Her eyes were sunken and red, as if she'd been crying for a long, long time. In her hand was the cutter. She raised it. Then she leaped at me, screaming and crying, like the furious shrieking of the wind.

There was only pain. Not the pain from the imagined cut, but the pain I could feel from her cries. I didn't know what was going on. By the time I got up to my feet, my eyes were drenched in tears, as if some invisible wound was opened again. I hobbled my way down to where the old lady was drinking tea.

"I saw her," I began, sobbing.

"Did you?"

"Yes."

"And no." She finished her tea. "You are blind. You've closed your eyes to the real pain, and now the facade you've created is falling apart. All the calls you've received. Her face everywhere on the streets thanks to your fliers. They're tearing apart the reality you've created." She stood. "You are blind. To stop seeing the shadows of the past, you must give in, and see the monster of the present."

I merely stood there, stuttering, stammering, sobbing. She took out files from her white bag. "Remember that game we played earlier? When I had to describe Jane?"

"Yes, and you got it all right."

"Wrong. It was all wrong. The Jane I described isn't the Jane you raised, yet you accepted it as such. It's the Jane you created to protect yourself. The cheerful, intelligent daughter you think you had was clinically depressed. And abused." She gave me a glaring look. "After your wife died, you took out your anger and frustration on Jane for years. In turn, she took to drugs, alcohol and self-mutilation. Until finally, she attempted to run away. You killed her. You killed Jane with a cutter."

I began crying even more. "Lies. You're lying!"

"Still blind." She tsked. She left the house. I ran after her, begging her to explain. When I caught up, I couldn't see her. I thought she'd left to the streets. Instead, she went to the backyard. There she stood, solemnly searching the garden. She stopped moving, and I stopped following as well. She pointed to a spot in the ground. The soil seemed soft, and the grass hadn't grown as much as anywhere else. I began to dig, knowing deep inside what I was about to find. Jane's corpse.

Except, I couldn't find Jane's corpse. I'd dug pretty deep, by then. It was empty. I was relieved, thanking God I didn't find Jane there. All that relief was blown away as a chilling breeze blew over me. I turned up to see the white lady, and next to her was Jane, holding a shovel. She began throwing the dirt back into the hole, with me in it.

"What are you doing?"

"Helping the both of you. Death is the purest form of repentance and forgiveness."

"But, I'm going to die!"

"Die? Yes," the old lady said. "And no," Jane finished as the last of the soil encased me.

That was years ago. Or maybe days. It could have been just now. I've lost all sense of time. But I've also lost my blindness and can truly see now, because right next to me is the skeleton of my daughter, Jane.