Jason's Ghosts

• Alice Heffernan, Grade 6
• Short Story
• 2015

Every night I hear them, moaning, crying, calling my name. I try to put up walls in my mind, but the voices are too strong for me. The diagnosis was a disease with a long name, which I can’t spell, that means I don’t sleep at night. I tried to tell the doctors, and my sobbing mother, they were wrong.
They smiled.
Patted my head.
“Probably just confused, and with all the stress it’s normal.”
They had no idea.
We tried everything. The only one who believed me was my sister Nelly.
She disappeared two years ago.
I don’t sleep because they tell me not to. I thought I was going crazy. But now I can shut them out. Usually.
My poor mother is being torn apart. I can’t go to school. I sleep in the day. So does my mum. I love her to the end of the world, and yet I can’t bring myself to tell her nothing is helping. Nothing will ever help.
I found it! I have realised how to stop the voices, the ghosts in my head. She always said she would find a way to stop it. To let me rest again. I finally knew the answer. Nelly.
I didn’t sleep yesterday. I was up all day planning. Looking, snooping, police records, maps, security cameras, everything we had left of poor little Nelly. As I searched I noticed tears of sorrow, frustration and pain rolling down my cheeks and dampening my notes. I let them come. In great bubbling lakes I cried. When I pulled myself together, I glared at the maps, willing them to make sense.
I saw it then.
Goldfall Forest. We would play together there in the summer, before the ghosts. It was our favourite place in the world.
It was two o’clock and everyone was at work or school, too busy for a pretty walk in the Goldfall Forest. I stood on the footpath, the gold leafed trees towering over me.
Nelly was sitting in the big oak we loved so much in those days. She smiled at me and burst into tears.
“I knew you’d find me!” she screamed, nearly knocking me over in a violent hug.
The police, the hospital and the army, could not explain why they failed to find her the first time, why I could find her, or how she survived. Nelly simply said that she was asleep in the tree until I found her.
Days after I found Nelly, a voice, stronger than the rest of them spoke. “Nelly is a girl of great light. She was good to us. We have given her back, you have been given back.”, I told Nelly and the part that haunted us the most was; “I shall not shadow again this hallowed door of Jason Meggs”.
That was the last I heard from the ghost voices in my head. I slept peacefully that night.

The End