An excerpt from a short story I’m working on, just under the wire for Halloween:
He started in bed with the call half heard from sleep, and from instinct he was half out of bed.
Again, a little girl’s drawn out and plaintive cry. “Daddy.”
Fully awake now he froze. She was dead. Buried in her grave soon after Halloween when she’d died. He seized on the conviction this was the dream of a mid-January night, or the whiskey having its revenge, or the duloxetine.
“Daddy?”
His scalp tightened and his stomach clenched.
“Daddy, I’m cold.”
In the dim moonlight he pressed himself back against the headboard. Through his open door, across the hall, from what had been her room, she called again.
“Daddy, I’m cold. And it’s dark.”
He shivered now, and his skin crawled. “Let me wake up.”
Dispatches from Obscurity 