The woman clutched her Afghan blanket around her more tightly, desperate for warmth in this frosty winter night. Her night gown billowed in the cold breath of Jack Frost.
It was the middle of the night and she had woken up from a nightmare. It was her again. The little girl with the raven black hair and piercing green eyes that looked too intelligent for such a young face. Her lips, so like the lovely petals of a pink rose opened and formed a word. When she woke up trembling, the familiar voice was still echoing eerily in her ears, "Mummy, save me..." It was as if her daughter was still alive.
She had looked out of her window at the lake in front of her house. There was nobody there. No white arms protruding from the surface, no violent splashing of the green waters, nothing. Just the voice of her daughter ringing in her mind, calling her out to the lake. And just as the she was about to turn away from the window, she caught sight of something. It was her daughter's ribbon, floating in the middle of the lake like a water serpent.
It was too much. The water lapping at the shore, the gentle cry of the wind, the voice that haunted her night after night and finally the ribbon... Her daughter's ribbon. She grabbed an Afghan blanket and made her way to the lake. Her heart throbbed against her ribcage and she could hear the water lapping in her dreams. The lake had called to her, just as it had called to her daughter. And in her mind came that poem, "I will arise and go now, for always night and day; I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; I hear it in the deep heart's core..." Hadn't her daughter said it was her favourite one by the Irish poet?
She walked to the rocky shore of the lake, climbed up a huge one, and peered into the black depths of the lake. A white face stared back at her, her green eyes dead and lifeless, her lips was washed white by the cold water but the lips pulled itself into a gruesome smile. And the woman let out a terrible scream.
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