The Meeting It was a dark, chilly, moonless night so many months ago, when I was walking home from a local tavern. By chance walking through a graveyard, since it was the shortest way to my home. There’s where I saw it…a rising ghostly figure, a wraith as a matter of fact. It came at me with the speed of the wind, and as soundless as an empty room. Its long, white, clawed hands reached towards me, longing to clutch me in their grasp, I could smell the overwhelming stench of death close by. As I retreated, reacting to this horror, I stumbled upon a rock and fell hard and prone on the cold, moist, dirt. While on my back my mind became a whirlwind of thoughts going through the family, friends, and people I’d never see again…because of that thing from the grave…this stealer of lives. My mind was filled with a thousand things I’d never do, the travels I would never undertake, and adventures that had not even crossed my mind, but that would be totally lost. Closer came the angel, to look at it one would think as much. It’s floating effortlessly as it maneuvered over the rocks, grass, and even the very ground to which I was paralyzed too. It’s long, grayish-white hair waved as innocent as a young girl’s would. The face of this creature was pale white, with features of a person I had never known. But the eyes…those eyes which looked like two empty sockets, two black holes, looking on to me with a hunger, to have what was mine, my life, my soul. Yes, this was an angel, but an angel of death…my angel of death. It finally reached me, placing it’s cold; prune withered hands around my neck. Its sharp, gray fingernails scratched the back of my neck drawing blood. The wraith didn’t try to strangle me, but instead it just stared into my eyes with an almost mocking sense. I felt my life seeping away; it was like water going down a drain. I realized that the weatherworn, grayish-white gravestone that was inches away from my head would now be mine, and that the carefully carved name and date, being worn away over the years, would now be the final resting place of my disregarded bones. The last things I saw were the two empty black holes it called eyes, and for a moment, I could have almost sworn that a cracked smile had formed on it’s dry, color-bleached, lips. As the last bit of my life energy drained away, and all started to go deathly black, I heard a voice. The words came to me clear as day; they rang in my mind and stirred me to open my eyes with every last bit of hidden energy I could muster. The hardened, husky voice said, “Sir, the tavern's closing for the night. If you want to sleep, go home!” To my relief I was in the local tavern, and not that God forsaken graveyard. From the look on my face the bartender knew I had been dreaming, but a dream is too nice a word for the death and hopelessness that had emerged from my nightmares, No, it was nothing more than a delusion, a figment of a drunken state. The bartender gave me a smile, a smile that I remember all too clearly, and just then I felt a cold liquid run down the back of my neck. The fresh wound was there, the one the she-devil had placed on me as she drained my life away. Was this a Dream? Did this really happen? I wasn’t sure, but all I could do is be thankful that I had not died in the hands of that life-stealing leech. Since the events of that night, on my way home, I have avoided that shortcut…that graveyard!