Caroline is dead, and right now, she knows it.

She knows this as the dreamer comprehends the dream; some small, unnatural thing occurs, and the truth comes rushing in: the dreamer knows the dream and awakes; Caroline understands that she is dead, and at once remembers that she is more than dead: she is murdered.

When Caroline remembers, Caroline burns. Young, beautiful, her abounding passions snuffed by murder, Caroline shivers, sparks, shakes with rage. The material world shudders with the power of her ethereal emotion. The house itself trembles in sympathy, swelling against the bricks and boards that are its flesh, settling upon the foundations that are as bones.

Only the death of her killer will release her from this anguish, Caroline knows. Justice will open the door to eternal peace.

The house has stood empty for a long time, for few people would live in a place of such history. The misery has seeped into the wood, stained the walls with invisible corruption, flows in the wiring and pipes, as silent and powerful as thought. The rooms and corridors seem unnaturally close. Temperature is unreliable. Cold breathes blow down the corridors, shutting doors and cutting each room off from the next. The effect is unnerving, like being trapped in a chamber of a huge dead heart.

Caroline is in the back bedroom, looking out through the window, watching the wind play in the trees. Her hands stitch at nothing, and the rhythm makes her feel good. Then the man enters the house; not just any man, but THE man. Her murderer. Caroline feels him as soon as he crosses the threshold, her awareness tugged as a sleeping man tastes smoke with a casual breath.

The father of a family that is growing and needs more room, is at once taken with the house. The cold spots do not bother him, the stealthy swing of the doors, the creaking joists and the unpredictable air: all of these are problems that can be solved with simple corrections all within his power to make. The price is too good to be true. He knows the stories, but also knows that the long dead have no sway in this world.

The fact of her death, the memory of the killing act, hit Caroline like powerful current. She senses the man with nerves of air, with the perception of the house itself: She feels his footfalls upon the floor, feels the scrape of his palms against the stale atmosphere as he gestures. Those hands, rough with work, strong with lifting and pulling, strong enough to close her windpipe, break her bones. Caroline at once begins to simmer, to stir.

The movers bring in the family's possessions, feeling the hair on the back of their necks stand up in sympathy with the strange influence of the house. They empty their trucks and speed off, all of them strangely quiet, but certainly relieved. There is something wrong with that house, they all understand this, and they do not joke about it.

The man is in the basement, now; Caroline can feel him there. There are others in the house, the man's family is here, and their living state hurts Caroline, plucking at her incorporeal nerves like smaller pain in the limbs of a man having a heart attack. The man, she feels that one like an icicle through the base of her skull. The other pains will disappear, Caroline knows, when she visits justice upon him. All sensation will end there: she will be free.

Caroline, now firmly in grasp of her own lifeless state, floats down the stairs, flows through the parlor and hall. Newspaper, used to wrap candlesticks and china, lies crumpled on the tables and floors, and it stirs as she passes, the thin paper twitching with the near-imperceptible tug of Caroline's emotional energy.

The energy builds as she draws nearer to her murderer. As Caroline floods with passion, she begins to glow with anger. Her impossible form, now lit from within, bleeds over into spectrums visible to the human eye. The man is on the basement stairs, having just finished working on the furnace. He feels a static charge building in the air around him as an unnatural cold seeps into his limbs. He lifts his eyes and sees the semi-transparent thing gliding towards him.

Caroline had been beautiful in life, but her murder had finished her beauty forever. She can see herself in the man's wide eyes; can see the half-human, distorted skull of her once-beautiful face, her long hair splayed behind her head like a weak halo. She rushes at him, hands and teeth working, her dead, insubstantial body given impossible strength by the undeniable power of justice.

They find him at the foot of the basement stairs, his body contorted, broken. The verdict is heart storm, odd but not impossible in a man so young. His family mourns, regroups, leaves, for they cannot bear the place any longer. The house stands empty once again.

Except for Caroline. She sits in the chair by the window, looking out over the trees, feeling nothing-not hunger, nor grief, nor anger, wholly unaware, now, that she is dead, forgetting, now, that she has been murdered, has herself murdered. She sits and stitches at nothing.

Then, after a long time, a different man enters the house, crossing the threshold with the tentative yet eager step of a person who believes that he has at last found just what he has been searching for.

Caroline senses him at once. Her perception spins to tight focus on the front hall. The man's occurrence, his imperceptible essence, stabs at her. She knows at once that he has come back, her murderer has returned.

She knows that she must destroy him, to be free.