The lone, repetitive footsteps were the only sounds accompanying Jason in the silent night. Jason struggled to keep his bleary eyes open. He hunched his shoulders, desperately trying to keep his lethargic body up. It was hard.
"Jack and Jill..."
Jason's ears perked up. He turned around, attempting to trace the mystical, girlish voice. The empty street was the only answer to what he had puzzled over.
"The shit?" he muttered. He looked around, straining his ears to catch another clue of the voice that had cheerily sang it. Nothing. He hesitantly turned around and continued to trudge down the street.
"Went up the hill..."
Jason's hair on the back of his neck perked up. He looked back once again.
Nothing.
"Where are you?" he yelled out. The eerie silence was his only reply. Jason gritted his teeth and began moving again, quickening his footstep, his shoulders no longer hunched and his body lost its overpowering fatigue. Jason's arduous breathing slowly grew rapid.
"To fetch a pail of water..."
He stopped.
"This has to be a prank..." Jason mumbled, looking around his surroundings. The street was squeezed between two huge clumps of trees on the hill, but they were too far apart and thin to have anyone hiding in them.
So where did the voice come from?
He continued walking, when he noticed the figure a few meters from where he was, in front of him.
It was a girl, her hair swaying in the exchange of breezes. The girl had her back faced towards him, and he could make out the frail dress she wore that danced along with her hair in the wind.
"Hey," Jason called out. "Were you the-"
"Oh shit." His eyes widened in disbelief as the girl's head slowly twisted around, while her body stood still. Jason's eyes met with hers, and there was nothing in them but black. Her mouth contorted into what seemed to be a grin, yet it was not.
Jason broke into a sprint. He dashed off the opposite direction, feeling the surges of panic in him, the strong winds that fought against his body as he tried to run as fast as his legs could manage. He ran, never trying to stop, never trying to look back.
Then he tripped.
Jason could have sworn he had been pushed deliberately to land on his head and he slowly felt the crimson red ooze from his forehead, the sharp pangs of pain in his head ignoring his body's screams to run. He clamped his hands over his head and groaned, yet it only came out as a slight grunt.
"Jack fell down and broke his crown..."
From the corner of his eye, he noticed the girl, now crawling on all fours in a sloppy manner, as if her bones failed to function correctly. She crawled. Fast.
The last thing Jason remembered hearing as his face turned a deathly white and the girl crawling closer and closer was the sweet, sickly girlish voice that boomed in his mind.
"And Jill came tumbling after..."