kh_drabble | challenge post (Reply)

Challenge: [158] Disney Rides
Title: Ectoplasmic Number One Thousand
Word Count: 295
Spoilers: None
Rating: PG for blood
Summary: Any volunteers?
Notes: When I went on this ride a week ago, I got stuck for fifteen minutes next to a red-eyed crow and a guy trying to escape from his coffin.

You learn to tune out the screaming.

Understand that matters of the heart and spirit are, more often than not, one in the same. For the heart, you see, is fueled, driven by hope, fear, love. Despair. Hatred.

And what of the souls that are prematurely freed from their mortal bindings? They are the beings that tread the earth eternally, lost in the expanses of their mind yet only focusing one solitary, wretched feeling; the one emotion trapped in the heart the moment that last breath escaped.

Betrayal grips Emily, and she flickers in and out of sight while blood runs down her arms and stains the ivory sleeves of her dress. She took her final plunge into the afterlife at the hands of her own fiancée, and she stands rigid in the attic, lamenting: Why Gracey, why am I forsaken?

But Master Gracey is plagued with his own despair, noose still hanging ‘round his neck. Elizabeth holds her goblet, swirling about rank, poison-laced wine. She lingers amongst the living through love and patience, for Master Gracey.

“I will wait for you.”

And so it is the heart that leaves the spirit to linger, long after the body is dead, rotted and buried. So who is to say, that the heart does not remain close by?

----

The mansion can house up to a thousand ghosts. There are currently 999.

“999 ghosts. 999 hearts. Some mission,” he mutters to himself as he rips open a portal, intending to leave the attic.

“’Til death do us part,” Constance remarks, cleaver gripped in a ghostly hand.

Axel barks with laughter. “You and me, sweetheart, we’re not all that different.” The room fills with the stench of darkness, intermingling with the stench of death.

“The way I see it, I’m just number one thousand.”