He first heard the voice as he was lying in his bed trying to fall asleep. The comforter was wrapped around his tiny body. The boy had been tossing and turning for several hours, but he couldn’t fall asleep. He turned onto his left side and looked at his toys. He had to go to the bathroom, but he wasn’t sure if the monster under his bed was asleep, and he couldn’t reach his baseball bat.

His eyes started to get heavy and just as he was falling asleep, he heard her voice...

“Sleep little boy. It is late. It is dark. Bad things happen in the dark.”

It was a voice filled with sorrow and despair. The boy didn’t want to talk to her tonight. Her looks scared him. He couldn’t see her face; it was always blurred out. But what scared him most of all was the dark, red, sticky blood that surrounded her neck.

“Go away,” he said. “I don’t want to talk tonight.”

But the sound of her voice continued. Only now the boy couldn’t understand her. It sounded as if she were talking underwater. He rolled over onto his side but he could still see the translucent shadow on the wall. It looked like a human body of water.

As the boy kept thinking about how everything to do with her reminded him of water, he accidentally peed in his bed. He didn’t care how uncomfortable it felt, he was not getting out of the bed to go to the bathroom; she was standing right in the doorway. He just lay there, trying to block out the garbled voice.

After a few hours, he heard her say, “ I have been speaking to you for some time now, child. I think I at least owe you my name for listening to me. My name is Purity."

The next day the boy awoke in a sticky sweat and shivering. The bed sheets were stuck to his pajamas. Especially his mid section. He lay there in his semi-wet urine, afraid to look and see if she was still there. Eventually, his mother came into the bedroom to get his dirty laundry and the intense smell hit her. She looked right at the boy’s bed and saw the shaking form under the comforter…and the large yellow spot.

“Dylan, why can’t you get up and go to the bathroom like everybody else?” she asked him as she pulled the sticky blanket away from his small body. He just lay there in a sticky, smelly puddle, shivering violently.

“Dylan, what’s the matter?”

His pale face looked up at her before he spoke. “She came back.”

“What? Who came back?”

“That lady. She talked to me again.” He trembled violently, almost convulsed.

“The hurt lady.”

Now that she thought about it, his mother did remember Dylan telling her about an imaginary girl. She had thought nothing else of it. Many children had imaginary friends. But she had never heard of any children being scared to death by their imaginary friends.

She peeled the sticky blanket from her son’s quivering body and picked him up, caring him to the bathroom. She set him down on the toilet and ran the bath water for him. She peeled away the soaked clothes from his tiny body and put him in the bathtub.

“Now Dylan, is that better,” she asked, taking his place sitting on the toilet. He nodded his head as his mother poured water in his hair and began to wash it with shampoo.

“What did the lady do to you?” she asked.

“She stood there in the door and looked sad,” he replied.

“Did she speak to you?”

“Yes, mommy.”

“What did she say?”

“She said that bad things happen in the dark.”

“Do you know this woman’s name?”

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

“Purity.”

Dylan’s mother poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at the dining room table. Her husband sat opposite her eating a bowl of Frosted Mini-Wheat’s.

“Well, what else did he say?” her husband inquired.

“That’s it,” she said, taking a sip of the scalding coffee. “He seemed to scared to say anything else, Shawn.”

“Listen, Haley. He just had a really scary dream. It isn’t unusual for such a little kid to get so scared that they wet the bed.”

“Yeah, but Dylan has talked about her before,” she retorted. “This isn’t the first time.”

“Well, what do you want to do?”

Haley took another sip of coffee before answering. “I think that we should take him to see a child psychiatrist.”

“But don’t you think that is a little too overprotective. I mean, it’s only happened once.”

Haley thought for a minute, then answered, “If it happens one more time, I’m taking him to a doctor.”

A few weeks later, Dylan was lying in his bedroom again. He had gone to the bathroom before he went to bed, just in case. He made sure that he could reach his baseball bat this time.

He was playing with the new tape recorder that his parents had bought for him that day. He got a blank tape and was speaking into it. As he was speaking into it, he heard her voice. It sounded even more sad and despairing than any of the other times before.

“Little child. It is night time again,”she said in her despairing voice. It sounded strange tonight, like she was tense or nervous about something.

“It has been thirteen years since the night of my death. I remember that night as if happened not to long ago.”

Dylan pulled the comforter over his head and lay there, starting to sweat and he thought that he felt more pee coming on. But she continued to speak to him.

“Yes. It was a dark, overcast night, just like tonight. I think that I should tell you what happened to me.”

Dylan worked up his courage and said, “No, please. Not tonight.”

She continued on as if he had said nothing. “I was never popular around this town when I was young. It was because of my face. Everyone thought that I was weird.”

Dylan tried to block out her voice but it sent off a haunting sort of melody that made him sit up in his bed and face her against his will. Her face was blurred even more than usual. He fought it but for some reason he couldn’t pull the blankets over his head; he couldn’t even move. All he could do was listen.

“One night, exactly thirteen years ago, some boys broke into my house to play a joke on me. They were going to steal my cat named Whiskers and tie him to a tree outside. They were horrible, evil children. I woke up and caught them while they were putting whiskers in a clear plastic bag. I went to stop them, because I knew that it would kill Whiskers.”

Her voice was filled with sorrow, and Dylan began to pity her. He wanted to help her, but he didn’t know how. He just sat there.

“I went into the kitchen, where they caught Whiskers by his water bowl. I threated to call the police and they forgot all about Whiskers. They came after me. They got their plastic bag out and it pulled it violently over my head. Then, I heard one of the kitchen drawers open and metal sliding across metal.”

Dylan felt more and more pity for her. He wanted so bad to do something for her, but he didn’t know what he could do. So he kept listening.

“I felt a knife blade dig into the back of my neck. The pain was unbearable. They cut all of the way around my neck and left me there on my kitchen floor to bleed to death. And of course they killed my cat. Gutted him and taped him to the tree. I had to watch them do it. My parents found me the next morning, but of course it was to late.”

Finally, the spell of paralysis seemed to have left Dylan. He sat there, spellbound. He finally worked up enough courage to reach toward her.

“Lady, why can’t I see your face clearly?” he inquired.

“My name is Purity.”

“Why can’t I see your face clearly, Purity.”

“Because, I need someone to take the plastic bag off.”

“Do you want me to?” he asked, excited that he might have found a way to help her.

“Yes.”

Dylan reached up towards her face and removed the plastic bag. It was covered with crusty blood around the area near the neck. He touched the blood and some of it flaked off and fell to the floor. He looked into her face. It waas the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Shoulder length brown hair. Perfectly shaped brown eyes. Thin lips. He didn’t understand something.

“Why did they think that you were weird. I think that you are very pretty.”

“Some children can be very cruel. I was beautiful and pure, and they were not. They would never be pure. So they tried to take my purity away from me.”

“What did it feel like when they hurt you, Purity?”

“It felt like this.” As she said those words, she reached her right hand out quckly. Her arm changed position and crusty blood crumbled from her neck. Purity placed her hand on Dylan’s forehead. A rush of images and pain flew through his brain. A pretty girl in her bathrobe. A white, fluffy cat. Four boys covered in blood. A bloody butcher knife with chunks of human flesh affixated on the end. Then the shearing pain in his neck…

“Dylan! Time to wake up…"

Haley opened the bedroom door and screamed.

Her son was lying on the bed, his neck turned in an unnatural position. Then she saw the blood. The blood puddled around his head.

“NOOO…”

Ever since the funeral, Haley had kind of gone on a break…from life. She just sat around the house eating hardly anything, doing nothing except smoking cigarettes. She had spoken maybe three times in the last two weeks. Shawn had decided that neither of them could live in that house any longer, so he had rented an apartment in the next town.

The diagnosis had been convulsion. The doctors said that he had suffered from some kind of severe trauma, like an extremely terrible nightmare. He just got so frightened that his entire system just collapsed. But the doctors had a hard time explaining the blood. At first the thought that he had coughed it up, but there had been no traces of blood in his mouth. That was a complete mystery.

He was packing up some of Dylan’s old toys to give to charity when he found the tape recorder that they had bought for Dylan the day he died. There was a tape in it.

Shawn rewound it to the beginning and listened to Dylan’s voice saying “Hello, hello,” over and over. He started to cry, then he heard Dylan stop talking. He thought that he heard a different voice. He turned it up as loud it would go; it was definitely a different voice, but he couldn’t make out the words.

He took the tape into the living room and put it on the big sound system. He could hear the voice a little clearer now. Shawn cranked the volume up as loud as it would go. He heard a young woman’s voice filled with sorrow and despair say, “It was a dark, overcast night, just like tonight…”