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It was already Wednesday.

It was 2 in the morning.

Rara lifted up the brush one more time, but the brush tips didn’t meet the exterior of the canvas. It was then she knew she was at her limit and it was time to hit the sack and call it a night—or a day, for that matter. It was already 2:04 am.

She cleaned up for a bit, feeling her eyelids growing heavier by the second. She went to her room, changed into her pajamas in a jiffy, and crashed on the bed. In a matter of minutes, she felt her consciousness drifting off.

In what Rara concluded as a dream, she saw herself lying in the bed. She was in her room, the one where she slept in at the mansion. It was as if her soul was out of her body and she was watching herself as the third person. Suddenly, the atmosphere turned cold and chilly as a floating black figure shaped like a middle-aged woman approached her sleeping body. She was dressed in a vintage mid-length black dress that seemed to be from the 60s. Rara didn’t catch her face but she left it that way because she was already starting to feel fear creeping up on her with just seeing her appearance.

Maybe the actors she called cowards and idiots in horror movies were not as chicken-hearted as she thought them to be; after all, she wasn’t in their shoes and she wasn’t the one experiencing the paranormal. She was just watching.

The phantom floated by the side of Rara’s peaceful body. She looked down on Rara’s body for a second and intertwined her hands together, bringing them close to her chest, as if it was touched by the serenity on Rara’s face.

With a blink of an eye, she clasped her hands around Rara’s neck and started choking her aggressively.

Horrified, Rara’s spirit rushed over to her body and started pushing the woman away from her body. She tried to unbind the phantom’s iron grip from the neck; she could feel herself crying from hopelessness and exhaustion because she was tired after all. With a final shot, she had successfully released her body from the clutch of the phantom.

And when she pushed the woman away, she stumbled and fell on the floor. Rara couldn’t make out her face because of the darkness inside the room but knowing her face didn’t seem necessary since the beginning, because her glowing red eyes were already frightening enough.

Breathing heavily, she jolted awake from her nightmare. When she was still short of breath after minutes of waking up, she knew she was having an asthma attack. She snatched her phone from the table, turned her phone light on, and searched for the light switch. She smacked her palm on