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Author’s note: The first line of this story was offered as a prompt by Darlene when I had hit a writer’s block. I hope I did it justice.

She whispered, “Home at last.”

Last year, he had hit his wife in a fit of rage, as he had so many times before that. But this one became one time too many. She had succumbed to the injuries. He had his job cut out for him as he disposed off the body and dodged the authorities, trying to prove that she had, in fact, run away with her new lover. The case was finally closed and he was celebrating his new-found freedom with a new date when ‘she’ had walked out of the closet where he had once hid her body.

She had never been a pretty one and death hadn’t done her any favours–unmade hair, shrivelled skin, bloodshot eyes, the eerie air she carried around her and the rancid smell that accompanied her had made him shit in his pants. Weirdly enough, his date couldn’t see anything and she only smelled a faint flowery perfume! So, when he went berserk, she assumed he was a crackpot and had run for it, leaving him alone with a murderous ghost who wouldn’t kill him, just brought him close enough every time. She had promised she would make him feel every single scar he had given her in her lifetime; that she would make sure he regretted the day he had married her. She had made good of her promise ever since.

When she wasn’t hitting him with things or strangling him in sleep, she would pleasantly discuss how she would torture him once she was stronger. She would often show up suddenly behind him in the mirror, in the car, in the grocery store and at work; and scare the daylights out of him. She would touch his back in the bath, leaving a trail of goosebumps, promising an eternity of pain once she was ready. He couldn’t tell anyone she was haunting him because saying that would mean confessing she wasn’t eloping and actually dead.

He tried praying, but his prayers only kept her mildly amused. Apparently, when you kill someone and they come back to haunt you, God declines to interfere and all bets are off. Eye-for-an-eye and all that. He had tried holy water, witchcraft…

When in a moment of insanity, he had begged her to kill him, she had smiled sweetly, “Killing you atones your sins. It frees you to go to heaven while I rot here in nothingness. I certainly can’t lose my only source of entertainment, can I? I want to finish what you started, very slowly, in the dragged out painful manner that you always loved…”

After too many sleepless nights with an overactive ghost trying to strangle him, always falling a little short of killing him, he had fallen sick. Hospitalised, he would wake up to find her sitting on his bed near his feet, smiling cruelly, waiting for him to wake up, so she could start over again…

He hated her now even more than he had hated her in life. He knew he had been right to kill her in the first place. But after too many sessions like this, he broke down. Assuming that gradually she would gather more power and hurt him worse, he had split his veins open, hoping to be finally rid of her. She had smiled at him sweetly then and whispered, “Running away, are we?”

When he left his body behind, he waited for the white lights to arrive, how it happens in the movies. But none came. Suicide was a sin. He realised he wasn’t going to heaven or anywhere at all. He finally understood what she had meant by once she was “ready” and “stronger”–that he had entered the same domain where she had been gathering power–when she had given him a twisted smile that promised an eternity of endless pain and whispered, “Home at last!”