As the bathroom door slammed shut, Samantha quickly flipped the locking device and fell onto the floor.  Her body flopped around as it hit, like a fish, and the cold tiles sent shivers throughout her entire body.  Laying there, shivering, she could hear a sound in the distance.  It was the front door.  Rachel must have been stepping outside to get some fresh air or to check out the neighborhood.  None of that mattered to Samantha, though.  Her mind was completely shocked by the photograph she’d seen moments before.

She curled up into a ball on the floor and wrapped her arms around her legs.  She shook on the floor, violently shivering and muttering things to herself.  “No way…it’s not possible…how could this happen!?” she muttered, in shock from the event that had just taken place.  Her mind was void of all thoughts except that man’s face, his bright, cheerful face of being around his daughter in that picture.  The bright and cheerful face that she had immediately recognized when she looked at it was something she remembered all too well.

As she was lying on the ground, shaking, she started whimpering and tears began to run down her face.  An old memory was flying back into her head.  It was a memory that had changed her life forever, something that she never wanted to think of again.  As the images of the man’s face flew around in her head, she closed her eyes and began to scream.  “NO!  Go away!  Leave me alone!!!!”

She began to roll around on the ground, fisting her hands and blowing them into her forehead.  She tried to beat the images out of her head with brute force, but it only made them worse.  With each blow came pain in a certain area of her sight, and with each surge of pain came a stronger image of that man.  She flailed around, kicking the cabinet, walls, and door as her mind was exploding on the inside.  The visions haunted her to no end.

“GO AWAY!!!!  You’re…You’re…You’re not real!  You’re just in my head!  You’re not…You’re not alive!  Stop tormenting me like this!” she screamed as her face turned red and she continued to cry.  Her screaming continued as she started to remember more about the man’s face and what it had meant to her, once upon a time.

Tiring her body down, she was trembling on the ground, whispering as vague pieces of the memory came flying back to her.  Her voice was stuttering as she spoke to herself about the face that was haunting her.

“You…Why are you still here?  You’re gone…you’re a figment of the past and of my imagination.  You’ll never be back…”

Memories were flying and her body was quickly running out of energy.  As everything was plaguing her, she started digging her fingernails into her shirt.  She screamed as she did so, ripped the shirt open and grasping her bare stomach.  As her nails began to dig deeper and deeper, they scratched at her skin.  Eventually, she applied more and more pressure, too fixated on the images that were running around in her head and punctured her skin.  She let out a cry of pain as her nails dug into her and soon became stained with her own blood.

Turning over to her side, the blood slowly ran down her stomach and onto the floor below.  She let out a series of whimpers as her hands cam out of the wound and covered her face.  She began spinning her head around, pushing against her own forehead, still thinking about that man’s face.  Simply seeing it had been like a dagger to the heart.  Continuing her screaming, she called out to the face, as if it were a person near her at the moment.

“W-why!?  Why are you making me do this to myself!?  Why are you still haunting me!?  Why are you torturing me like this!?”

From behind her, Samantha could hear banging on the door and some sort of muffled voice.  She couldn’t tell what the voice was, but she could definitely hear the banging on the door.  It echoed in her heart and her head, bringing a surge of pain with every pound she heard.  She gasped as she heard it, her mind set on the man’s face.  She quickly started scrambling backwards, to the other side of the bathroom, where the bathtub was.

“N-NO!  You’re not real!  You can’t be!  Go away!  I...I won’t let you hurt me, or her!  Go away!  You can’t have me!”

She slid back further and further, shivering in fear of the door-banging and eventually hit the hard surface of the bathtub.  Letting out a grunt, she nearly jumped off of it and screamed as she met with it, sure that it was the man in the photo, trying to kill her.  She rolled over, hitting her wounds on the ground, bringing a piercing stinging pain into her stomach.  All the movement caused her to lose sight to nausea, and immediately launched her food onto the tile floor, spreading a layer of vomit in front of the bathtub.

The banging continued as she finished, and she couched out the rest of her vomit.  Screaming at the voice to go away again, she scrambled to her feet and stumbled into the bathtub itself.  Once inside, she huddled herself into the very back corner of the tub, threw the curtain around in front of her, and wrapped her arms around her legs.  She watched the curtain intently, her eyes now bloodshot with fear.  Her face was drenched with tears, and sweat began dripping from her now-drenched and flat hair. 

She closed her eyes as a few more banging sounds occurred and, finally, she could hear the door being broken down.  She buried her face under her arms and legs and screamed as she heard the footsteps of someone rushing into the room.  She heard them approaching her and then heard the curtain being yanked from it’s support.

“NO!  Please…I’m sorry!  I didn’t mean to do it!  Don’t hurt me!” she screamed, not moving a muscle, too frightened to look at the person who’d actually come into the room…