My Dead Sister Part 2

A Story by SpookyCrayon

Something strange happened to my sister.

Find part one here:

Chapter 2

I gasped, my mouth aghast as my sister eased herself up on the bed. Her skin was a sheet white, dark rings encircled her eyes, and her joints creaked as the cadaver shifted unnaturally upright. She looked at me through her glassy, dilated pupils.

“M-Mills?” She said. Her voice wavered. She looked at my white face and unblinking eyes staring at her in horror, “Millie, are you okay?”

I tried to speak, but the words caught in my throat.

“L - Lena?”

I approached the bed, trying my best to remain composed for the sake of the ghostly form before me staring back with fear in her eyes.

“Are you okay?” I asked, because well �" what would you have said?

She nodded, looking on warily. I reached the bed and sat next to her, my gaze never leaving her forlorn face. You could still see the bruises, in fact they were pooling into large, purple blotches all over her body, giving her a very strange hue, and I could see a strange sheen forming on her face.

“What time is it?” she asked, looking around for the alarm clock instinctively, but it hadn’t worked for weeks.

“We missed school” I said, simply. The idea of spending the day in a classroom seemed utterly and completely absurd in that instant, but I didn’t know what else to say.

“My head is killing me” Lena said, massaging her temples. I snorted: “Yeah, I’ll bet” I thought.

Propping myself up on my arms I turned my gaze to the wall in front of me, and I let out a slow breath. Now what?

“Did mum get mad? I didn’t mean to sleep all day. Why didn’t you wake me?”

“I tried” I said, “You were dead to the world”

She grimaced. “Everything hurts. And all for a carton of bloody custard.”

“Well, maybe you’ll listen to me next time. Listen, there’s something you should know�" “

“Listening to you results in us being kept under her thumb for the next two years. If a couple of bruises are what it takes to earn us some freedom, I think that’s worth it.”

This was such a pointless conversation. Lena was acting as if everything was normal; no �" Idealistic.

“How exactly is you getting beaten up going to keep us from being under her thumb? She’s gone and bloody locked us in.”

“What?” She said, startled.

“Try the door, it’s locked.”

She slowly creaked off the bed, her purple legs barely propping her up as she hobbled to the door of the bedroom. Turning the handle, she forcefully pushed against it with all the might she had in her, which wasn’t much.

“No.” She said, “She can’t do this. This is illegal.”

I laughed, “Illegal? Do you think she cares? We’ve been nothing but annoying to her ever since daddy left.”

“That doesn’t give her the right to lock us in a bloody bedroom.” Lena threw her shoulder at the thing, forcing the whole weight of her against the wood.

“Stop!” I jumped, I could see the flesh begin to tear, the white shoulder barely covered by the spaghetti strap of her pyjama top began to pool another purple blotch, and the joint no longer held together by living tissue looked ready to snap.

“What?” She asked, “I’m actually trying to do something. Have you just been sitting on your hands all day?”

“Let me do it.” I said firmly, walking over to the door and pushing her aside. I was smaller than Lena, and probably half as strong. She knew this and resisted, but the adrenaline flowing through me gave me an edge, and she plopped herself down on the bed as I took a running start at the aged and hardly-all-that-strong door. Of course, it didn’t work. Nothing we tried did. The old, splintered door that could have come from a set in a play based in the 1960s just wouldn’t budge. I was too small, and Lena was too. Well. Sinewy.

“This is pointless” Lena said, tears in her eyes “What about the window? We could smash it and jump down. It’d hurt, but there’s grass down there”

I looked at her “Only if we jump past the patio”. She wouldn’t be able to jump, she could barely push herself against a door, and if we managed to escape, then what? Her skin looked waxy, she was moving stiffly with �" I could only assume - some sort of animated rigor mortis, and there were blisters forming on her right arm where she had slammed into the door. How could she go outside while looking like an extra from the Walking Dead?

“Lena�" “ I began, “do you �" feel any different today?”

“You mean besides the agonising pain my own mum inflicted on me last night?”

“Y-yes.” I said. Carefully.

“No”

I found that extremely hard to believe.

“Well, look at your arm, do you not notice anything?”

She held up her left arm, “Bruise, bruise, bruise, bruise” she said, pointing to the huge purple blotches all along her limb. I tried my best to keep my composure.

“Don’t they look a bit big to you?”

“You worry too much” She said, glancing at me sideways. “I’m fine. No worse than last time.”

That was a loaded sentence; last time was dad that had beaten her. She had tried running away from mum’s house to his, only to interrupt some sort of party. I had never learned the details but I knew it had something to do with keys, and she had been barred from ever coming to his house without his express permission again. She also came home with a black eye that night, but this was significantly worse.

I looked around the room, trying to find some sort of reflective surface for her. We only used the bathroom mirror, so there wasn’t one in there with us. As I scanned the bedroom, though, I wondered whether I was sure that she should see herself as she looked now. We would still be trapped, and we would still be alone without help or medical attention available. My eyes fell on the spoons that had come with the cereal bowls. Grabbing one, I licked it clean and used the sheet cover to polish it until it was as reflective as it was going to get.

“Look at your face” I said. By now, it was shiny and waxy with some sort of bodily discharge, her eyes were no longer the beautiful bright green as before, they were a misty dull-grey colour, and her once plump, pink lips looked drained, cracked and thin. She took the spoon off me and held it above her, staring into her up-side-down reflection.

“Is there something on my face?” She said, examining it.

“Lee, you really can’t see any difference?” I said, shocked. The spoon wasn’t the ideal mirror, but you couldn’t miss a corpse staring back at you.

“No?” She brought the spoon down, still glancing at herself with the utensil in her lap. “What should I be seeing, Mills? What’s wrong?”

“Lena, I think you died.” I said. She laughed.

“What?”

“I don’t know why you can’t see it, Lee, but your face, your body. You look like you died last night. In fact, you’ve been lying dead in my arms all day.”

She looked at me, horrified.

“You’re not funny.”

“I’m not trying to be.” I said, sitting down on the bed and looking at my hands. If she couldn’t see the problem, then my telling her wouldn’t convince her. I probably shouldn’t be telling her anything at all, but for the fact that I was becoming increasingly horrified by the figure that I was sharing my bedroom cell with. She’d notice anyway when her arm started to fall off, as it looked like it could do any minute now.

“Shouldn’t we be focusing on finding a way out of here, rather than whatever stupid game you’re playing?” she was getting very agitated.

I gazed forwards, not for one second losing eye contact with a crack in the plaster of the wall in front of me.

“Lena if we get out of here, they’ll lock you up” I said, “you look absolutely terrifying”

THWACK

Lena’s skin-loose hand collided with the side of my face, causing me to see spots and gasp in shock as a huge, throbbing pain cascaded through my head.

“What the F**k?!” I yelled, clutching my cheek as the angry, gaunt face of my sister loomed above me.

“I am not dead, you are insane, and we need to find a way to get out of here!” she shrieked, for the first time in her life sounding like her mother.

“Fine!” I said, “any bright ideas?!”

“Maybe that’s what you should have been doing today!” she yelled, “I still can’t believe you didn’t wake me up!”

“I told you before, you were dead to the world!” I retorted.

Another THWACK

“That is NOT funny!” she screamed, and angrily stomped over to the corner of the room where the door met the wall, put her back to it and slumped to the floor, nearly in tears. I didn’t know if she could cry anymore.

Later that night, Lena and I had given up on trying to come up with a game plan. We decided to go to sleep and try to yell for help the next day after we’d heard mum leave. This time, we slept in our own beds; her because she was still angry at me, myself because I was terrified what would happen to her body overnight. I didn’t know how fast corpses disintegrate, and I hoped it would be a few days at least, but based on the chicken I had left overnight on the counter once, I didn’t think so.

It must have been very late when I was awoken by Lena’s sobs. Rolling over, I saw her sitting up in her bed staring at her legs, tears rolling down her cheeks as her shoulders shook uncontrollably.

“What’s wrong?” I asked

“Millie. I think you might be right.” She said, through choked tears. “About what?” I said, still groggy.

“My legs” She said, “They’re a funny colour.”

Remembering the events of the previous day all at once, I climbed out of my twin bed and approached hers. The top-side of her legs were an ashen, chalky white, but the other side, which must have been bottom-down as she slept were a horrible, blotchy, spotted, crimson red. I prodded her calf, and it squelched inward like I was prodding a sodden sponge.

“What's wrong with me?” she said.