"You can't just go off gallivanting like that, Frank. You know your grandfather and I warned you not to for a very good reason and this display of 'teenage dominance' has done nothing but prove us right in the belief that your mind is damaged by loss and you need to see clearly once again." The nineteen year old gave a vague nod in a generalised gesture intended only for her complacency in the matter of reciprocation of her words and as some sort of masquerade of interest in the endless and trivial lectures his grandmother subjected him to on almost a daily basis since he'd snuck out when explicitly instructed not to.

Frank had no intentions of coming off as an unreasonably moody and generally untrustworthy teenager, and more so of a respect worthy, independent young adult in a terrible situation and living with terrible people in a terrible town.

The town was just so terrible that Frank had in fact began to deem the darkened figure he'd spotted in the graveyard on the evening he'd disobeyed rules and broken his grandparents trust, only to have the shit scared out of him by what Frank's common sense would instruct him to label as nothing more than a trick of his sleep and nicotine deprived brain, or perhaps just some kids messing about, or perhaps nothing at all. 

Perhaps all Frank had seen was a normal human being stood at the graveyard gates and what Frank had really seen was far too many horror movies.

But.

There was always was a but, and for once Frank was plagued by gratitude; desperately clutching at the only excitement remaining a town that stunk of bigots and smoke, even if it was just a trick of an overactive and severely underused imagination, or perhaps, even worse, that wasn't the case at all.

There was no lie in the fact that Frank had toyed with the possibility of there being something more to the figure; he couldn't blame himself - his stomach just wouldn't settle and his mind wouldn't focus on anything but the black smoke and the unmissably human aura, and the unsettling gut clenching feeling that despite the fact his eyes told him human, everything else didn't.

Frank opened his eyes wide, fixating upon the horizon that slowly fell behind him out the window of his grandfather's prized vintage car, imagining the figure and placing him into the crowd of people outside, placing him into the world and he came like an instinct - a human body, dressed in a dark suit and long black hair draped over his face, giving me no clues as to just what secrets he hide in the grin he flashed him when nobody was looking.

He.

Frank wasn't sure how he'd assigned the figure gender, but masculinity seemed to fit the figure haunting his every thoughts.

Frank blinked, dismissing the figure he'd drawn up amongst the citizens, rubbing his eyes a little as he couldn't help but shake the notion that the place where he'd stood seemed to cast an everlasting shadow, almost as if he'd left himself in spirit behind. Frank blinked again; shaking off the shivers that ran down his spine with the mental reminder that he was in fact the one who'd placed the figure there in the first place.

It was all in his head anyway... not that Frank would deem that the safest of places at all.

But as his eyes seemed to catch in their sockets for a prolonged moment; his vision fading and darkness wrapping around him as he eyelids stayed shut - forced shut, either by the press of ethereal fingertips or the gut feeling that had rendered Frank's appetite practically none existent recently. And Frank didn't know which unnerved him more at all.

And then in the self concocted darkness he saw the figure once more, but this was a different type of 'seeing'. This was sight without your eyes, the kind of seeing where you noticed not their clothing and face but the falter in their smile and the nervous twitch as they stumbled over words - it was the type of seeing where your eyes couldn't distract you.

Frank saw the figure again, but this time without the distraction and the people, or the fog or the town. He saw nothing, and then he saw everything.

And everything was an awful headache.

Frank's head spun as his self-concocted vision initiated a one-person masochistic disco, and masochistic discos were the place to dance with death.

And dance they did; Frank felt himself gripped a forced back through his memories like someone ripping through pages of a book, and then coming all too soon to a halt at one single word, at one single scene, one single memory - the time Frank's parents took him to church as a little boy, and how he could never stop staring at the beautifully carved silver cross, set in the wall above the altar, clearly the main attraction here, overlooking the whole church, almost in a protective manner too, and Frank thought the designs carved into the silver were beautiful, having paid more attention to the decoration than the actual church service.

And that was when everything stopped.

Frank's eyes flew open and the world around the car seemed to illuminate, almost as if someone had just turned on a light, but nothing had happened at all, and no reaction was visible from either of Frank's grandparents.

And Frank's grandmother was still lecturing him, almost as if no time had passed at all, rendering the darkness in his mind just as real as the darkness of the figure, and Frank's common sense blamed it on a lack of sleep, but Frank just bit his lip, trying not look at the graveyard, standing behind its barricade of fog a little up the hill as the car came to a stuttered halt outside the church.

"We're here, Frank." His grandmother's voice seemed to come back to him like a camera back into focus or almost as if someone was turning back up the volume dial on her voice, as it had very much seemed to be completely muted as Frank was occupied with the darkness and thoughts he'd really rather not recall.

Frank just wished he could have had a volume dial like that when it came to school teachers, but the way his mind had almost seemed to have been invaded, his thoughts flicked through and scrutinised, almost like someone was watching him, and someone got inside his head.

And as much as Frank's sanity would have liked to, the unsettling feeling of intrusion, someone following you, eyes on you from behind, footsteps treading in yours - all human instinct made as such to prolong our survival and keep us away from the ones who posed us danger, that just couldn't be faked in a mind plagued by nothing other than a lack of sleep.

It wasn't as if sleep ever kept your demons at bay either, in fact demons seemed to prefer the subconscious, half empty state of mind.

And Frank left the car, following closely behind his grandparents into the churchyard, letting out a sigh of relief as his heartbeats seemed to even out as he made his way inside, never finding himself more grateful in the monotonous voice of a bigoted, grey haired preacher.

-

"Reddened eyes, nervous ticks, snappy tone, bitchy little lip quirks - you need a smoke." Frank almost jumped out of his skin at the raucous voice seeming to jump from nowhere, only to be accompanied, moments later, by its own - a guy of a few years older than Frank, with a dark hair, reaching down to his shoulders and ridden with enough grease to leave Frank to imagine that it hadn't been washed in weeks.

"Are you trying to quit? That's a fucking stupid idea, by the way - no harm meant, by look at the realistic things here, dude - if you're like this already, how are you going to manage another day?" He let out a chuckle that seemed almost too high pitched and alienated in his rough, almost gravelly speaking tone.

The guy felt no need for invitation or even a single word passed between the two of them before sitting down beside Frank on the pew in far back corner of the church. Frank quickly eyed his grandparents, sitting right at the front, away from him in what Frank would assume to be in a manner constructed in an awkward prevention of embarrassment on their part. They were still there though, and he could escape if this guy turned out to be dodgy - sure enough, this wasn't a New York downtown club, and a church in the middle of nowhere, but Frank knew the dodgy ones instantly by now.

"I'm not trying to quit - I just haven't had one for a week or so, since I moved here." Frank offered an explanation, turning to face his new found, greasy haired companion, who grinned at his gesture, letting loose a set of slightly yellowed teeth.

"Moved here?" Greasy hair shook his head at that, almost laughing at Frank and making it no secret. "You must have a death wish if you moved here."

"Not my choice - I can see why you say so. I already hate it; it's just weird, and fucking creepy. I'm staying with my grandparents." Frank explained, mildly relieved to have found someone who didn't seem to walk around with an 'I heart Jesus' t-shirt, or in a metaphorical sense at the very least, because Frank had found out rather recently that everyone in this town was so overly religious it was beginning to unsettle him more than the blanket of fog, blinding his eyes and choking him as he struggled to breathe a single unholy thought.

"How old are you, dude?" He asked in an awfully casual tone.

"Er... nineteen... why?" Frank answered the stranger, despite what common sense told him. Frank reckoned though that his common sense didn't apply here at all, and that his common sense belonged back in New York, where it told him not leave his drink or go home with people that looked like they practised taxidermy in their spare time. The common sense he needed here was just something he didn't have and was never prepared for at all.

"Good, you're legal." He added with a coy smirk, causing Frank to jump a little in his seat at the rather obvious intent behind the stranger's words. "I just wanted to make sure you weren't fifteen or something before I gave you a cigarette."

"Oh... okay..." Frank fell into a blush, watching the way the greasy haired stranger found their conversation as something completely easy and natural, whereas Frank was completely stumbling over his words with nothing to blame but nicotine withdrawal systems.

"I'm Bert." He added, holding his hand out rather awkwardly, and in a manner that Frank's instinctual manners forced him to take.

"Frank." Frank responded, watching as Bert shook his hand rather firmly and in a manner that caused an odd little twist in his wrist.

"Do you want to go out and take that cigarette from me or die alone here with Jesus and nicotine deprivation?" Bert offered with a grin, leaning in and whispering the offer to Frank like a secret, and again in a manner that unnerved him.

If this were New York, he would have said no by now.

If this were New York, he would have punched Bert by now.

But Frank found himself creeping out the back of a church with a near stranger and all in hope of one fucking cigarette.

It was nothing more than idiocy at its finest, but Frank knew by now that in a place like this, he really had other things to fear than weird guys at the back of churches with bad hygiene and a need to give out cigarettes like it was the last supper.

Perhaps he was some sort of cigarette Jesus or something? Who knows?

And as Frank lit the cigarette, he just wished that really it was the nicotine deprivation that was fucking his head up all the time, and not something else, whatever the hell that something could possibly be.

-

It wasn't.

Of course it wasn't.

It could never quite be as simple and easy as that, and despite the three cigarettes Frank had ended up smoking with Bert outside the church, as soon as he closed his eyes at night, the darkness came straight back, wrapping its intoxicating tongue around every positivity emitting cell remaining in his body.

Frank couldn't scream - of course he couldn't scream. It was never going to be that easy, was it? He was just left to squirm and watch as his mind was pulled from his grasp and left to the control and mercy of an unknown force.

Frank could of course only be thankful for the fact that this time, his memories didn't go back nearly as far, only landing back yesterday with Bert and the smokes outside the church. The memory seemed to go a little fuzzy after that, the church almost seeming to dissolve around Frank and Bert, leaving the two of them and packet of cigarettes held loosely in an offering gesture in Bert's hand.

And then everything froze. Or at least Frank thought it did - the memory stopped at the very least, and his vision seeming to fade away, and he felt himself falling back into an almost peaceful sleep, but of course, it didn't let him go without one final shock - a flash of red, and then these piercing yellow eyes so close to his own almost as if they were millimetres apart, giving Frank enough of a fright to force his own eyelids open against the trance like state he'd been forced into by whatever means his sanity advised it was best he didn't dwell upon.

When he finally opened his eyes and slammed his hand down on the lamp beside the bed, he expected to see something, anything at least standing guilty and now illuminated in the darkened corners of his room, but it was completely empty and it appeared that not even the dust had been disturbed in the creation of the illusion that Frank was completely alone, and boy did he want to listen to logic, but never once before had Frank trusted the words of insanity quite so much.

Because he wasn't alone - he never was, he knew as much as that by now.

It had seemed to have developed, progressed - at first it was only when he closed his eyes, the cold breath on his neck and the unexplainable extra set of the footsteps in the mud beside him - all things he could easily pass off with false rationalities to keep paranoia at bay, but now it was almost as if he was a target in some way, he always felt the hair on the back of his neck, and he even began to suspect that whatever was watching him, stalking him, the figure or perhaps something else even more terrifying, was just toying with him now.

Because surely if it could reduce him to a state in which he couldn't even control his own mind as someone, something else rummaged through it as they pleased, then if whatever was following him wanted to kill him then they really would have done it by now.

And for once, Frank found no comfort in the prolongation of his life, because of course that could only lead to something furthermore sinister.

He contemplated going back to sleep - weighing up the pros and cons of seeing something in the corner of his eye in the dark room or having his mind taken over again as he slept, and quite honestly, Frank wasn't all that partial to either of the two options.

And he just sat there a moment, perplexed by the state of insanity he found himself reduced to, because that was the sole explanation to the fear complex constructed high in his head - constructed by the hands of others, something else, that thing.

It was connected to the figure - at least Frank knew that, and he was glad of that, even if it provided him with no comfort and in fact the opposite, because that figure didn't look an awful lot like anything except trouble.

He wondered if he was insane.

Well and truly insane.

Frank toyed with the idea that none of this was real and seeing the dead bodies that once belonged to his mother and father on the floor of his own home did this to him, and that he’d be locked up in a hospital perhaps with life support and maybe his very own straitjacket. He wondered if they did them in black. He reckoned white looked a little tacky.

Although Frank was of course overly biased in this case, he just couldn't do anything but cling on to his own sanity and not just for his own sake, but just for the raised eyebrows Bert had offered him when he jumped a little at the shadows - those weren't patronisingly raised eyebrows, they were the kind of raised eyebrows that knew; apathetic sympathetic eyebrows. He knows but he doesn't quite care.

Something had always been off about this place - Frank just knew that, and this was only the confirmation, but what to do about his questionable sanity was a tricky dilemma and one Frank was in no way prepared for - he never imagined that he'd possibly end up in a situation akin to this one, and quite frankly he was just a little daunted by the situation.

He began to wonder how much more of this insanity driving torture he could take, and how it would end, and what would be the monster that popped out at the end to say boo, and Frank wondered if he'd even be scared anymore - after all, he'd pretty much seen it all by now, hadn't he?

It was rather depressing to an extent, he almost felt the fear itself dissolving around him and it was utterly nonsensical and completely unexplainable, but Frank didn't care right now - he just wanted answers and he knew by now that his grandparents weren't the place to go in a situation like this; they'd lock him up straight away.

Frank just really didn't know what to do; in fact, he even contemplated returning to the graveyard, returning to the place this had all started and meeting the figure once again, but perhaps sticking around this time - what was the worst that could happen anymore? Who knows? They may even be someone capable of decent conversation. That really would be a miracle, and perhaps even worth the torture, because everyone here besides Bert was overly and almost unnervingly religious. And Bert, Bert was just kind of weird... not unnerving kind of weird, but not 'omg I'm so random lol' kind of weird either, it was just unplaceable, like something at the back at Frank's mind - a worry, but not quite.

Perhaps the darkness had swallowed it up. But the darkness never did seem to take anything, the darkness just seemed to browse - a useless and annoying customer, never making a purchase or even nearing the checkout, just browsing through the stock for a while before they left the store.

Looking for something, but never quite finding it.

Not yet.

-

And funnily enough that was the exact situation Frank found himself in at eleven the following morning. He'd escaped the house as his grandparents were distracted in breakfastly matters such as the dilemma of boiling eggs to the perfect degree and perfecting the crisp of their toast, yet keeping the bread utterly unscathed.

Frank's grandparents had slowly grown accustomed to the fact that Frank was a little odd, and they wrote it off as a mixture of teenage moodiness and simply emotions running rampant after what had happened to his parents, and they'd decided it easier to just leave him be. They knew what could happen to him here, but it'd been a while and he'd shown no signs of being marked or targeted, so they reckoned he'd either slipped under their radar or they simply weren't interested in him.

And as to what they were, as to what really went on underneath the painted on grey overtones of this town - Frank needn't know, or so they reckoned.

Frank was still trying to figure this out and piece together the insanity he'd succumbed to together for himself, and with a black Misfits hoodie, pulled down over his face and paired with skinny jeans dark and tight enough for just about everyone to avoid him, he set off down the street, taking a different route to what he had before, with no destination in mind, but just anywhere but the graveyard.

He was still pretty clueless regarding the whole mess he found himself in, but even Frank who'd barely scraped C grades in some subjects and failed the others, he could figure out that whatever was going on had only began the moment he'd set foot in that fucking graveyard.

Perhaps he should have considered the fact that the padlock may have been in place for a good reason, but then again Frank had never faced consequences to trespassing that were more severe than stern looks and angry shouts from policemen. That's if they caught him, of course.

Frank wasn't having a good time right now to say the least, and really, he was beyond thankfully to find a tiny little shop practically hidden in the heart of the town labelled with a plain and simple 'Music Store'. He gave a silent smile of amusement in regarding to the owner's creativity when it came to naming the place as he tried his best not to slip on the step as he made his way into the shop.

It was tiny - a room at most, and of course the owner notices him as he walks in and tosses him an expression of shock - complete with heightened eyebrows and eyes the size of saucers, all in evidence of Frank's suspicion that a place playing The Misfits in a town like this really wouldn't get all that much attention or more so approval from the residents.

Frank and the curly haired owner stood in a mutual silence for a few moments as the owner pulled his gaze up from the laptop on the counter, his eyes darting to the boom box style cassette player on the shelf behind him and then to Frank's hoodie, his face breaking out into a grin as he finally broke the silence with a silence that caused to Frank to instantly love and cherish him for entirety, because quite honestly, the likelihood of Frank's insanity right now was really no longer a laughing matter, and more of a straitjacket kind of one.

"You like the Misfits? Well you are instantly my best friend whether you like it or not." The afro donning shop owner announced, turning down the volume slightly and standing up, making his way over to Frank who stood a little in awe of the first 'normal' human he'd seen in over a week now. "I'm Ray, this is my shop."

"I'm Frank, and yes I love the Misfits - I think you're the only normal person I've met in the week I've been here." The nineteen year old announced, his voice wielding a level of excitement that was borderline cringe worthy.

"Yeah, I was going to say - I haven't seen you around, and I mean, you kind of stick out here dressed like that, with the eyeliner and all. Surprised you haven't been staked or got some holy water to the face or something like that yet- oh god, sorry, bad joke. I'm not exactly all that good when it comes to human contact and acceptable conversation. I kind of live in here; my brother thinks I'm crazy."

"Neither am I, I guess." Frank shrugged in response. "Wait what do you mean by that? Like this place is really kind of weird, please tell me you get that too? Like not just 'old lady bible bashing don't wear the colour black you cultist Nazi' kind of weird, but unnerving kind of weird? I've only been here a week and I've just- it's really kind of unsettling, please tell me you get what I mean?"

Ray just looked up at him in response, his face paling as he consumed the meaning of Frank's waffly toned words, his eyes widening a little before they dropped to the floor with such a sudden impact Frank was pretty sure he felt. "I... uhh... you don't know, do you?" His voice came out in a tone hushed and almost spoken with the allure of a secret that even the teller wasn't supposed to know.

"Know what?" Frank continued, his eyes sparking up a little in search of answers.

"I-... Frank, please, just it won't bother you if you don't know. It's so much harder if you do, I promise you that, please trust me." Frank met the brown eyes of the curly hair almost stranger, because despite their brief acquaintance, Ray spoke to him like they were friends and that was the kind of trustworthy Frank couldn't pass up right now. "For Glenn Danzig. Trust me for Glenn Danzig."

"This feels like a stupid decision-"

"Most things are, Frank, and let me tell you moving here was right at the top of that list." Ray met his eyes with an unsettling kind of sincerity at that moment.

"And yet you won't even tell me why." Frank rolled his eyes, holding one finger up in a 'shush' gesture as Ray moved his lips in an attempt to continue. "It's okay, whatever. Just please tell me I can practically live in this shop with you or my grandparents are going to be the death of me."

"I need the company, Frank, as if I'd say no, and anyway if you like The Misfits I know we'll get along already."

And with a smile and the slight buzz as the music was turned back up, Frank drifted into the stock ridden shelves, flicking carefully through CDs and not quite paying all that much attention to the titles he was faced with as he flicked through the plastic cases.

He could never quite be focused though, especially not with the unmissable shadow in the mirror on the wall in front of him. He glanced in Ray's direction - of course; he'd chosen now to go to the toilet around the back.

Frank continued to flick through the CDs like he couldn't see himself and his own shadow in the mirror only accompanied by the shadow with an owner - a spectacle he daren't turn around to see.

He contemplated which he'd less rather see - a shadow alone, just dark matter clustering behind him, or a human- no, a creature not visible in mirrors, a creature, an entity, devoid even of its own reflection.

- 

Hey guys:) I should get some sleep since I have school tomorrow but I finished this fucking chapter for you - dedication, huh?;) Anyways, I suppose you should acknowledge my dedication in the form of votes and comments, but of course you don't have to but you know it'd be lovely;) I love you all<3