The darkness was pierced by a brief flicker of light and then the next slide appeared before the gathered throng.

The darkness was pierced by a brief flicker of light and then the next slide appeared before the gathered throng. It was an unusual image. It depicted what appeared, at first glance, to be a young girl of indeterminate age with long blue-black locks. Just about the time that thought registered, however, the realization that this was anything but a young girl hit us like a ton of bricks.

“Is this what I think it is?” Matt asked, leaning forward, his elbows on the table like a hungry man getting ready for the turkey to be sliced at Thanksgiving.

Carter, the fellow in control of this little presentation, said nothing. The slight twitch of the end of an eyebrow was telling, however.

“This has got to be ‘shopped, folks. I would not get all worked up about it.” Thomas (true to his name-sake) poo-pooed the whole thing outright and immediately. He’d barely even looked at it, of course.

“I don’t know, it looks legit to me,” Ginger sounded off. She was the newest member of the Observer; that fact, and that she self-identified as a “workplace oppressed female” made her desperate to have her opinions heard and validated.

Matt Olsen, senior reporter of the yellow rag known as The Orbis Observer, stared intently at the image for a long time. His eyes roved over every fragment of the picture, like a ravenous scavenger picking clean the bones of a carcass.

If the image was real, it was a doozy. What had appeared to be a girl was actually some form of free-ranging specter. The thing had no legs—its lower form vanishing beneath tendrils of floating ethereal cloth—and her visage was lacking some major anatomical features, namely a nose and eyeballs with irises and pupils installed. The thing—we referred to it as a she—had hands, but they were blunted and ended in oddly glowing orangey-yellow fingernails that were a matched set to her blocky, donkey-like teeth.

She wore one of those unusual oriental necklaces that appear to be made of giant spheres (no one knew the name of them) but these seemed to be crafted of jade, or some other exotic-looking green stone. Beneath the billowy, gauzy robe, her torso seemed to be covered in old yellowed funereal wrappings from the base of her skull all the way down to…well, nothingness.

The picture had been snapped at night, and there were three strange orbs of yellow-white fire floating in the air around her. The orbs were in no way supported by anything that could be discerned with the naked eye.

Carter let the fuzzy whirr of the projector fill the room for a few moments and then cleared his throat. “I can see you’re all stumped. Well, this is what I pay you Journalism School Drop-Outs for, ain’t it? This picture was taken last night in Chinatown at eleven fifty-six in th’ PM in an alleyway between a Chinese takeout joint called Hong-Fong’s Happy Tummy and a Buddhist Temple whose name I’m not even going to try and pronounce. Get out there and see what’s what, people. MOOVE!”

The room was empty before “MOO”.

Art Source: "Ghost" (c)/by Vaejoun
Story and Characters: (c)/by Brannon Hollingsworth

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