Chapter Four

Jillian's actual drowning and death are a blur to me, for some reason I cannot access those memories, however I can remember clearly the aftermath and how I reacted. I spent the nights awake and wondering what it was like to be dead, wanting to go and dig her up and ask her myself, but I knew that would be quite childish of me and that was what the local children did. Instead I composed plans of maybe how I could try to cheat death, but the recent experience with Jillian made me ever so more intelligent and I had learned that after you were dead there is no way to get more knowledge, so I quickly discarded that idea. I spent my days pacing in the hideaway until that doctor wondered what had ever become of me, so he looked my name up in the local records and noticed that I had no living relatives or friends to speak of. He quickly called the county men and they came to give me an apprenticeship and a place to stay, under which I would have a foster parent and would have to work daily under his or her care and supervision. I would have quickly declined and left if not for my curiosity, and I asked what apprenticeship could possibly be offered to me in which he replied that there was a need for help at an insane asylum or a "whack house" as he called it. I immediately accepted, for this appealed to me greatly because I was quite interested in what was considered insane, also I was slowly on the point of realizing that maybe I was a little insane also.

Chapter Three

The flooding had caused a great deal of issues. As we walked up the trail towards Jillian with me in the lead, our feet kept getting caught in the mud and we would have to stop and pull our boots out before we sunk too far in. I stopped suddenly and searched for where she should be lying but I couldn't seem to spot her. It seems Jillian had been having trouble breathing in the area with the marsh grasses, so she had moved to a more muddy and cleared section. I soon located her and led the dumb men to her pitiful body, which was floating silently on top of the musty water and was only moving slightly to allow her to breathe. The doctor being clueless pronounced her deceased, and I saw her smile a little with the knowledge that the plan was working. As the undertaker brought out the rotten old casket, I remembered the one thing she had stressed over and over before we had started, to never stop the plan in action. So even when I noticed that the casket had nail holes in it, I didn't say a word. They lowered her body into the casket, and picked up the casket by the handles which groaned under the slight weight in which they bore. We walked slowly and carefully over the flooded marsh grounds and came to a barren foggy part of the grave yard on which the kids love to play. Our boots splashed through the muddy water as we came upon an old dug grave that appeared to have not been inhabited recently. My old worry had been that they would nail her in, but I soon had come upon the new horror that the same holes that were open on the sides would soon make the casket an actual grave for Jillian if they lowered her into that water.

Chapter Two

We spent the night in that sad excuse for a shed, and as it rained the water dripped through and bombarded off the tin roof waking us up if we managed to get even a small amount of sleep. Eventually I had given up sleeping and walked over the creaking floor to the window and looked out onto the graveyards in which one of us would be lying tomorrow. All the graves were flooded from the recent rains, and since some of the local kids had taken up the sport of digging around in old graves, odd bits and pieces of who knows what were floating around in the water. It made the marsh scene even more morbid, which added a sense of seriousness to the plan. Our plan would go as followed, in the morning I would go running to the local town hall and call saying there was a death in the near by neighborhood. The town doctor and the undertaker would come plodding down the trail to the marshes to find Jillian floating along in the water. If those idiots had any clue they would have noticed she was still breathing, but since the amount of death in our society was immensely high, it wasn't uncommon for the doctor to get a bit lazy and not look quite closely enough, as we had counted on. She would be loaded into an old rotten casket and marched down to a forgotten grave. No ceremony was required since Jillian had no family, and it would all be quite repulsive with the little kids watching from the hills giggling as they knew they would have a fresh grave to explore around. As the undertaker would lower her casket into the ground, Jillian would kick the top off and scare the old man to death, possibly giving the doctor something to do. We would gain our knowledge on what exactly happened to the deceased people, and would wreck a little havoc along with it. All would have been well if our plan had actually worked. What we didn't account for what that possibly some of our information we thought we knew about was wrong, that or we left out a rather important fact.

Chapter One

The plan was absolutely flawless. There was no way to go wrong with carrying it out. However being the juveniles we were, I doubt we planned as far ahead as we should have. That day we sat down in our old club house, a broken down shed with shattered windows and a creaking old floor which always announced when anything living, or dead, trespassed on our hideaway. The familiar floor creaked quietly under Jillian's footsteps as she twirled around in her lilac petty coat, trying to seek for ideas in that delightful mind of hers. I carefully kept silent while listening to her footsteps, and looked out the shattered window onto the marshes to watch the little children play their little game around the open graves. It was then that I abruptly remarked that I had no clue what happened when someone died. Our society never spoke a word nor encouraged a word of speaking about the subject of death, which only caused it to be a matter of interest. Jillian abruptly stopped twirling and remarked that it was a brilliant idea, and we should find out immediately. I, being too intrigued, had followed right along as she plodded out of the hideaway and into the marsh lands to an open grave, and stood there with her hand on her hip and one finger pointing steadily towards the grave, with a satisfied smirk on her face. I asked her what in the heavens we would do with a dead person, and she replied with higher authority that we wouldn't be doing anything with one, but as one. I had already seen great flaws with this plan, but I let it develop out of sheer curiosity. I carefully phrased my question so that she ended up agreeing into being the one who was to impersonate a deceased person. And so, without the slightest idea of how it would end, our plans began to unfold.

Prologue

The end of September was an incredibly cool and foggy time on the marshes. I watched as the children ran and slipped up the hills as their feet were sliding into the thick damp mud. It was the year of my sixteenth birthday, yet I was still considered a "child" in this society's eyes. As I look back, I can remember seeing my friend Jillian running up the rotten hill towards me, with the marsh grasses tangling around her ankles, imprisoning her slightly, only to trip her and cause her falling onto knees. As I ran towards her, we both noticed the children playing Ring Around The Rosy while jumping in and out of open graves. It was an old past time of ours, yet we were now sixteen we were both too old to do so. However, we were also too young to do much else. Which is why we spent most of those days planning ways to create havoc. On that foggy September day, we devised an absolutely brilliant plan, which ultimately lead to both of our downfalls.