Workshop 001: The Haunted Attic

Desiccated, dusty detritus clutters the attic. Among them your eyes pick out a nest of hand-sewn dolls, frilly bedding, and books, perhaps the remains of a girl's hideout a century or more ago. A rocking chair looms above the vague mass, draped with lacy cobwebs. On the floor next to it are crumpled a cardigan and skirt covering bones shrink-wrapped with dried-down flesh. Mingling from the nearness, another curled lump of bones lies dusted with disintegrating dog hair like dandelion seeds rotting on the stem. A nametag reading “Bo” gleams faintly on the collar.

Poke around the odds and ends and you'll feel a presence, a consciousness in the room with you like wind on the back of the neck. Turn around against your better judgment and you'll see her wearing that comfortable floral cardigan and skirt, sitting up in the chair that was oversized for her frail 91-year-old body even before the years ate away at her abandoned corpse.

Abigail, she'll tell you if asked her name, a delighted smile on the ghostly see-through face mirroring the barely-recognizable one on her corpse face. That is where she looks first before her deeply sad look falls on the body of her dog Bo. The dog seems to have feasted before he died, or at least tried half-heartedly to stave off the gnaw of hunger by gnawing on Abigail's wrist and face. Then she looks at you.

She's such a nice, cheery lady if you speak to her. Did she kill her entire family before she died? Yes. How? Shot them one by one with the gun now lying next to her hand, empty and spent as her body. She also fed bits of her 14-year-old granddaughter to Bo. She'll answer no other question. The web between body and spirit has been cut, and the only way you can get her is through the soul and magic.

If you do try to hurt her, though, she'll wake the dog who is also beyond being hurt by the physical. He died biting and can still bite with piercing cold that can lay you out unable to move. The soul and magic is how you get Bo, much like Abigail. He won't say no to scraps of meat, though. with a hunger that outlasts the need.