Barrett knew he had to move at this point, or be stuck behind the couch until daybreak. Peeking his head up above the back of the couch, Barrett scanned the room. There she was, just as she had been when he had thrown himself behind the furniture. Sitting blithely at the kitchen table, staring right at him, no expression on her slightly translucent face.

Barrett had been sitting in his favorite chair in the living room, an old war movie on the television in front of him. He had been dozing a bit, the flickering light from the screen having lulled him into a sort of trance. He hadn’t been paying much attention to the movie to begin with, so the sound of a particularly loud explosion on-screen had made him jump. He had blinked his eyes free of the filmy grit of half-sleep and was getting up to get himself a snack when it happened. Walking past the kitchen table to grab a soda from the fridge, he thought he saw something out of the corner of his eye. Barrett turned his head, expecting to have to shoo his cat, Archimedes, off the table as usual.

Archimedes was, in fact, on the table, and Barrett had just opened his mouth to chastise the white cat away, when he noticed just what said cat was doing. Archimedes’ back was arched, his fur standing on edge in a ridge down to his tail, which was puffed to roughly twice it’s normal size. As Barrett watched, his usually complacent, cuddly pet opened his mouth and hissed viciously in the direction of the head of the table. Almost as a reflex, Barrett shifted his gaze to the chair at which the hiss had been aimed.

To Barrett’s great surprise, there was something quite fantastical at the receiving end of Archimedes’ wrath. Sitting in the chair at the head of the table there suddenly appeared the rough shape of a woman. As he watched, the outline resolved and formed into the clear image of a girl who appeared to be in her early twenties. She sat straight-backed in the chair in the wooden chair, with the air of one who was perhaps overly conscious of her posture, her palms flat on the table, black-hole eyes focused straight forward. In a direct contrast to her prim pose, her long dark hair surrounded her face in a dark tangle of wild curls.