The Girl in the Reeds
Some ghosts don't want to be found. They want you to find them.
The lake was bleeding twilight when I first saw her. Not that I was looking. At sixteen, you don't admit to seeing things that aren't there, especially not when you're supposed to be mourning your grandmother's death. But there she was, a pale silhouette standing waist-deep in the reeds at the far end of Willow Lake, her arm raised in a perpetual wave. My breath caught in my throat, a cold fist tightening around my heart. I blinked, rubbed my eyes, and when I looked again, she was gone. Just ripples in the still water, and the oppressive silence of a dying summer.
I told myself it was grief playing tricks on me. The old house on the shore had been my grandmother's sanctuary, and now it felt like her tomb. Every creak of the floorboards, every sigh of the wind through the pines sounded like her voice, or worse, the absence of it. But I couldn't shake the image of that girl, her arm frozen in an eternal greeting. My mother had warned me about staying out after dark, about the stories the locals whispered about Willow Lake. Drowned girls and restless spirits, she'd called them, the ramblings of superstitious fools. But I'd heard those stories too, at the funeral, from the old fishermen who wouldn't meet my eyes.
The next evening, I found myself drawn back to the water. The sun was a blood-orange disc sinking below the treeline, painting the sky in strokes of violet and crimson. And there she was again, clearer this time. A young girl with dark hair plastered to her face, wearing a dress that looked decades out of place. She didn't just wave this time; she beckoned, her lips moving in a silent plea. Something in the way she moved, the unnatural angle of her limbs, sent a fresh wave of terror through me. This wasn't a trick of the light. This was something else. Something ancient and hungry.
I took a step back, my foot snapping a twig in the unnaturally quiet air. The sound was deafening. The girl's head snapped in my direction, her empty eyes locking onto mine. The water around her seemed to darken, thickening with shadows that weren't her own. The air grew cold, so cold I could see my breath mist before me. Then she began to walk, not through the water, but on it, her feet leaving no ripples as she glided silently toward the shore, her arm still outstretched, her smile widening into something that promised only pain.