How's that? Is that better, now that I've released you from all that seeing? All that feeling?

Yes, I could have made you feel my death, too, but I think that might have been too much. Come and see me once you're worthy to call yourself a wraith - much less a Haunter - and maybe I'll walk you through that. Or not...

Because it's powerful, little ghost. It's dreadful power, that moment. It's what made me what I am, over here. It's at the core of my being.

And if I'm going to be honest... I'm afraid I might not stop with that. You know how we get when we're letting that moment rule us, and I am no exception. Maybe if I knew you better, I might let you see. But for now I'm not willing to risk it.

And don't be foolish enough to ask me again.

Maybe you will never see this, but I will never forget the very moment he decided to finish me. He did it almost like an afterthought, as though the knife he'd threatened me with needed to be blooded before he put it away.

But he didn't have the look of murder in his eyes - they were still half-closed and unaware when he slid it beneath my ribs and into my heart.

And I didn't even feel that pain - not at all. Doesn't that sound strange? Everything he'd already done to me was painful, but hardly as traumatic as having six inches of sharp metal put through my heart.

And yet I didn't feel that pain. Being stabbed didn't even hurt. The fear had taken it all away.

I bled to death, there, coughing up bubbles as he got to his feet and walked away. I coughed three times, each one less forceful than the last. The first time I was trying to say "help me," but it came out wrong, and the second and third times I was trying to clear my throat to say it better, and louder.

I never got the fourth cough. My heart stopped before I could get another wet, syrupy breath in, and everything went...

Well, it went.

So I was dead. But yet I lived on, after a fashion. And I haunted that place, over there, in the trees.

I did so mindlessly. I did not think, or dream, or do anything that might have been intelligent. I simply relived those last, awful moments before my death over and over again.

Oh, I suppose it was like an improperly-done act in some kind of perverse stage play, with an unsatisfied director stamping his feet down at the end, each time, and saying "No, no... not good enough. Do it again, damn you. And this time get it right."

Only I had no idea I was doing it again and again. Each night I started from this bench, as though I'd just been lulled off by my killer. And I went over there, with him, and died all over again. Night after night after night.

I don't know where I was when I wasn't dying. I wasn't aware of the passage of time, or any space, or anyone else. I just replayed that one, hideous, last act again and again. And the director was never pleased with it, I suppose...

Since then, that little nook has had a bad reputation. I know you heard all the stories. Scared children seeing a woman die at night? Frightened lovers coated with blood that was not their own? Hardened police being scared into early retirement at what they think they heard while doing the late night park patrol...?

Yes. That was all my doing. I died over and over again, each and every night, and whenever there was someone near me I reached out. And when I did, I took their fears and added them to my own.

It was unconscious on my part. Sort of like breathing, really. I needed their fear, so I added to it - fed from it.

And when they ran away, screaming loudly at the awful thoughts of what might be there, I breathed very, very deeply.