Vision.

The bus ride went without incident of the supernatural caste, and most of the day until after lunch was the same. Class was, as ever, boring. Mark sat in his uncomfortable, hard desk/chair contraption that was designed to look refined and high tech when it really was just an extended armrest that swooped around in front of him, so that he could put books and other school related materials on top of it. His elbow was propped up on the armrest, and his chin was resting in his upraised hand. He only payed half of his attention to the lecture that his teacher was giving. The class was freshmen English, and the discussion was about Langston Hughes. Exciting only to those who reveled in literature, and Mark was not one of those people. He was only excited because this was the last period of the day.

The other half of his attention went to the strange happenings of the day. What had happened at the bus stop that morning? Was he hallucinating? Was someone doing shrooms in the general vicinity, and he fell under some kind of contact high? He felt fine sitting in the class room, so that probably wasn't it. Lazy, half-lidded eyes meandered across the room. Mark had found that he was a very analytical person, because he noticed the small details in daily objects where other kids his age would disregard them, and move on with their merry lives. In this instance, Mark noticed that the white board had been recently cleaned, and so he could see the vague reflection of the class, and the back of his teacher. A few people had assumed the same position as him, in that they cupped their chins in their hands.

Mark's arm fell to the desk, however, as he straightened his posture. Everyone disregarded the expression of alarm on his face. They weren't very analytical. The half-lidded eyes grew to bulging as Mark's eyes widened. What he saw in the reflection of the class was not one, but two standing figures. One of them was his teacher, and the other was looming over him from behind. That was impossible, because there was a desk directly behind him. No space for there to be anyone standing, and yet some one was.

The figure's arm lifted forward, reaching for Mark, and at that moment, he twisted around. His abrupt movement had caught the attention of the class and his teacher, and the classmate sitting behind him stared at Mark with a "what the hell?" kind of look.

"Turn around, Mark" said the teacher.

"Can I go to the bathroom?" was Mark's reply.

The teacher complied, and Mark took his leave of the classroom, walking towards the restrooms. Sweat beaded on his forehead, partly from what he saw in the classroom, but also from embarrassment. He walked quickly, and promptly entered the bathroom, the door held open by a wooden doorstop behind him. He went to the sink to wash his face of the sweat that was now rolling down the sides of his face. He had always had sweating problems on his face. Nowhere else on his body, though, just his face. He didn't know if that was a strange occurrence or not, and seeing as he could live with it, he didn't care to look it up.

As he was wiping his face, he heard the door to the bathroom slam shut behind him. It was too loud to have been the wind, and the doorstop would have held it open in any case, so someone must have come in. When he heard no voices or footsteps, a chill ran up and down Mark's body, freezing his spine like liquid nitrogen. His eyes slowly traveled upward from the sink to the mirror. He knew what was coming, because he had seen it a hundred times in the movies, but he couldn't contain the horror he felt when he actually experienced it himself.

There, in the mirror, he saw, standing behind him, the ragged corpse of a dead person. The head was bald, but for a few strings of long gray hair that fell down over the face. The skin was pale, pale, pale, almost white. It had no color due to the lack of blood running through the veins. Skin on the face was rotting in certain places, and hanging off, exposing the rancid flesh beneath it. The rest of the body was covered in thick rags, torn and worn out from weather, as if the creature had been standing in the rain for days and days after escaping its underground prison. Or that's the image that went through Mark's mind. He had the innate ability to think even in the most horrifying situations, though he couldn't move his body at all. Shear terror enveloped him, and held him stiff. Mark looked over the corpse as it stared at him through the mirror, and was surprised by the sharp emotion radiating from its eyes. Its eyes were blue, and hard, but for some reason, Mark could see a sense of pride within those eyes, he could see anguish, suffering, experience. Not the glazed over look of a zombie, which was what the rest of the corpse looked like.

It lifted its hand, and this time, Mark wasn't fast enough to dodge it, unlike in the classroom. As soon as the rotting hand touched him, strange and jumbled images began to pour into his mind. He could see a great Colosseum, not in disrepair like the history textbooks had shown him, but in its prime, with people cheering on the gladiators that fought within the center of the magnificent structure. One stood out among the others, as he battled alone against five opponents, slaying each one with his leaf-shaped gladius. The weapon was so familiar, Mark knew it from some distant memory, and the eyes of the lone warrior showed a bright blue as he inserted the blade into another victim.

None of the happenings surprised Mark, though, because he knew what was going to happen next. He knew the name and the story of the single gladiator. It was just that now, he was watching what was happening, and not listening or reading the story. The gladiator would kill two more, and become wounded by the last one before he slew him. His wound would become infected, and his dying wish would be for the freedom that he had never tasted. He would be buried by the following of fans that he had gathered from fighting in the arena for so long. On his grave wrote "Quintus Arcanus, Champion and Free Man."

The janitor eventually found Mark laying on the floor in the bathroom an hour or so after he had left his classroom, and the teacher finally remembered him. School was over by then. The police brought him home after the ambulance people checked him for any damage. They deemed him perfectly healthy, if a little exhausted. Mark didn't pay attention to any of that. He didn't pay attention to his mom's worried voice, or his brother's jokes about how Mark should have been named Marie, since he was feinting everywhere like a girl. All he could focus on were those piercing blue eyes, staring at him through the mirror.

Ghosts.

A piece of toast, and a glass of water was enough to set Mark out the door. Late as he was, he didn't have much time for anything else. On his way out, he took a quick glance at the rack of swords that sat idly on display in the living room. There were six of them, all different shapes and sizes, and each one had a different background, a different story to be told about them.

They all came from different countries and his father had told him that they all used to belong to the greatest warriors of old. Mark knew each and every story by heart, and he had even found records in the library, confirming them as actual events that occurred in history. The stories had gown dull after awhile, though. His fascination with the swords had faded over the years, and now, to Mark, the swords were just decorations in his house. Quickly, he shut the door behind him.

The sun had already begun beating down on the Earth, and Mark was grateful that he had dressed light. His shadow was cast far in front of him, and he didn't notice for the longest time, but as he walked, even as he turned, his shadow remained in front of him, regardless of the position of the sun. Eventually, he did notice, when he started walking in the direction of the sun, that his own shadow was facing a different way than everything else. At first, he disregarded it as just weird, but it soon dawned on him that it was a physical phenomena.

Mark stopped, dead in his tracks, and stared at his shadow. To his horror, something within the darkness began stirring, and Mark was no longer staring at his own shadow, but at a human-shaped abyss in the ground. He checked to see if he was still sleeping, but he knew that this was real. It was impossible, but it was real.

Moments later a hand sprung forth from the hole. It was the hand of a rotting corpse, the skin was peeling off, revealing what had been under it, a few nails were missing, and a knuckle bone was completely exposed. Mark could only stare in fear as the hand latched onto the street around the darkness, and began pulling the rest of its body out of what used to be a shadow.

Just as the head was coming out of the hole, the loud honk of a bus horn snapped Mark's attention to it. When he looked back, the ground was normal, and his shadow was cast the correct way according to the sun's positioning. Still a bit shaken, he hasted to the waiting bus, and got on, looking for familiar faces. He found one and sat down next to the face's owner.

"What were you doing? You were standing there for like two minutes, man... Hey, you listening? Dude, you look like you've seen a ghost."

Awakening.

The solace of the morning beckoned ever so subtly, though the strength of its pull was without question, quite enticing. Rubber soles made a nonchalant thud as they made contact with the paved cement of the sidewalk, rhythmically repeating themselves in an upbeat, yet relaxed manner. A cool breeze that had the potential to incite shivers to the unprotected, moved fleetingly through the area, caressing the exposed face and hands of the only individual available in the open. The coldness of the morning was accentuated by the stiffness of the grass and trees that were present in the vicinity, and also by the grayness of the sky and neighborhood. The lone stroller knew that the day would heat up in a few hours, though, and he'd have to return home and remove his jacket and sweat pants in order to fit the requirements of the weather, lest he turn his shirt into a sweat-rag, which might happen even if he did dress down. His house was visible from his position as he calmly made his way towards it. Morning was a good time to get out of the house because it wasn't too hot yet, and the cold was not biting or bone-chilling, though it did create numerous goose bumps on the skin of his forearms.

Something, however, was amiss. He knew he was walking towards the house, but he didn't see himself getting any closer to it, and the structure remained the same distance away from him even as he picked up his pace, and the relaxed upbeat thuds became slightly frantic. Soon enough, he was running with all his might, a shout of despair swelling up in his throat, the quiet neighborhood changed into a curtain of darkness, to the point where it seemed he was running through a pitch black void of nothingness, and the fear of becoming lost pounded in his mind. He looked, hopefully, towards his house, but the building was distorted, as if he was looking at it through a warped mirror, the kind that are usually found in carnivals. Then the building started to changed. It grew in size, and became a dark tower, with giant spikes protruding from the walls. Then the tower began to fall towards him, and just before impact, he shut his eyes as tightly as possible.

And then he awoke. His eyes opened to an empty room, with the pale morning light flowing lazily through an open window on the wall beside his head. He breathed a sigh of relief, before he heard his name. "Mark!" Then he inhaled a breath of dread. It was a school day, he woke up late, and now he'd have to rush to shower and eat breakfast, then run out to the bus stop before it left him, and he'd probably forget something important, like his keys, in the chaotic turmoil.

And he didn't even get to take his morning walk.