On knees, down low low against the muddied land, she let her fingers nest and tangle within the dry grasses, a padding for her scratched and bruised knees.

Hissing, hissing, kissing the great hills with her difficult steps. Her gait worse the further the day pressed into the night. Through the trees and down a ravine, across a broken beam bridge and precarious jog across a stream....A passage to a hell of sorts. Does he care?

A present. I invite you, Mr. Sorrow, to plough over the bones of the dead.

A maniacal giggle swamped the silence as she fell backwards over herself, rolling side to side as she clutched her belly, a limp, sulking excuse for flesh, from beneath the faded colour of her gown. She sits up suddenly, and rubs her hands together, a wicked smile on her lips.

"He'll come. He'll give his bones over the plane, for my self to drink of. The marrow sweeter than the blood of Angels. The Ghost will walk this way...."

And again, the laughter creeped through the silence of the ravine, as she retired to her hut, to scan the pages of those certain books of hers, and remove her belt of thorns and hang it like chimes by the door-he'd hear their pierce on the wind, and find her, like a long lost lover.

A snide, creepy smile, as she sat amongst the towers of books, green and yellowed at the seams and page ends, as she rummaged and pillaged the ones of no interest with sharpened steaks of wood.

He would come. He would feel her seduction. Cannibal. Witch. Exorcist. She was all things madness harvested.

Come now. Come come like a hail stone to the wind. Collapse yourself within my pot, come stew a while of your skin. Off with your hair, garlic within your nostrils, I'll dry your skin and hang it to collect the juices of the night. I want you flavoursome, rid of discoloration-you scarred murderer. You knipe!

Hideously she was a thing, child-hands lifted the dirt into the swell of murky, purple juice, to reflect those ghoulish lips of his. To reflect the dark of his inside.

A scream as she ran from the pot, tides too pushed to burn her wrist.

"You scorn me in your dreams. But you'll find the windworn path to me, Mr Sorrow. The bones we can pluck-carve them into drumsticks, into arrowheads the shape of the scars on your arms!

Let me eat you. Sinister son of the Dark.

She crawled towards her hut, to those certain books again, and reaching for her belt of thorns she stabbed one point into her thumb, to bleed its black river. She quivered then and shut her eyes, wiping the blood across her hands and face. It would dry as she slept, and hunted for his spirits and bones. One day it would be his own she would smother her girlchild lovely little wicked in. His she would bathe in, drink of, squirt from a fountain of a gargoyle's neck.

His blood was the blood of a ghost. The one she wanted most.

The sticks that surrounded her place massive and daring and scary and intimidating and coral coloured. They moved with the breeze and clicked against one another. They were a maze. She was the evil at the end of it. From the lonely hill he slept upon, his horse-drawn coach nearby, she would steal his travel and make him work for her, walk to her. She walked to peel the wet, blistered skin from his feet. She would rip his layers with her own teeth.

He was a ghost. The one she wanted the most. A ghost on this plane. A man in another.