Once there was this weird winged monster that thought himself an angel.
His first attempt at being an angel was Laughing Jack. He fashioned the toy clown and its box, and gave it to a little boy called Isaac Lee Grossman. he made the mistake of thinking Laughing Jack made a nice substitute for him, and left that post without looking back.
When Isaac and laughing Jack had tortured people, the "angel eventually learned about it and tried to commit suicide by getting himself run over by a cart. That's how he got his grotesque appearance.
But he didn't die. He only became dealive, and spent time following people around, unseen, though managing to tap into some young children' psyche, giving them nightmares.
One day, he got the bright idea to scare people during their waking hours. How? By writing out what he did in his spare time, and what he intended for the readers in the future. The message being "I am a ghastly looking thing, I've been stalking you all your life, and You will become me in death."
It freaked out some people, but inspired a mix of pity and anger in someone he had failed to see.
That's where it all began to go wrong for him.
One day, he did manage to cause a car to lose control and hit a pedestrian. What he didn't realize is that the car and pedestrian were invisible to anyone but him. So no ambulance was called.
Much to his shock, the accident victim extracted herself from under the car, which disappeared. ~
She stood there, a mirror image of him, gazing into his cloudy eyes. "Where were you all those nights when I was but a shadow and couldn't do anything to help?"
"What?" The angel couldn't possibly gape any more than he was already doing.
The apparition clutched the angel's arm, and as she did, she changed appearance, turning into a likeness of the pedestrian the monster thought he had hit. She looked just fine, there was not a mark on her. "You never helped. You never let me or her know you were there. You should have. I felt everything she did. I was her shadow. And you weren't there for me! You should've been there! You should have!" Her voice intensified, face contorted into an anguished one, tears flowing down her cheeks. "Why!?"
The angel recoiled. This was not going the way he planned. What went wrong? He was supposed to be leering at a patient in the hospital, then dragging her spirit along with him when she died. That wasn't happening. "I don't know who you are." He finally said.
"Then you lied! You said you were with me, but you hid! Liar!"
He tried to listen her grip on his arm and get free, to no avail. "Look, I wasn't trying to pick a fight with you, why don't you go make friends with some little girl?"
"She grew up. I grew up. You said you were there but you should've shown yourself much sooner! Why didn't you?"
"I don't know, maybe I'm not so good at this guardian angel stuff. I just said I was following you around, you, plural, everyone who reads what I wrote. It wasn't meant to get you coming after me, I just wanted to scare some people."
"You said you wanted to put your arms around my neck when I was a kid. But you didn't...When I needed it!"
He winced and looked away. He never thought he'd get in trouble for the opposite of what he had actually intended to do.
"You should've been there for me!" She screamed over and over. "You should have been there!"
"Don't you understand? I didn't know!" He rasped.
"I don't care! That's no excuse!" She railed.
"Okay, you need to chill out. I'm sorry, okay?" He appealed.
She suddenly stopped crying and looked at him with a cold expression. "You should've been there for Isaac Lee Grossman, too, instead of making that horrible clown toy, Laughing Jack. Remember him? You dropped him at that rotten home and then you just split. The results were far worse than my years of loneliness as a shadow to a girl in a good home."
"Oh, you know about Jack...?" The monster stared at her. "How? And if you're a shadow of a girl who had a good home, surely you couldn't be lonely."
"Wrong. Whenever she felt something, I did too. But the times when she got comfort from her loved ones or companionship from her friends, I could only watch. Nobody could reach out and touch me...Until now."
"What happened to change that?" The monster asked.
"You know enough about mirrors," she replied reaching out and putting a hand on his shoulder, "to figure out the answer to that one."
He recoiled.
What's the matter, don't like getting beaten at your own game?" Swan smirked, but she didn't withdraw her hand. "I was sent to look for the one who loosed that abomination known as Laughing Jack on society. Now, you will have to follow me."
Swan and the monster passed through a rearview mirror of a vehicle as it passed.
The Guardian angel monster found himself in a place he did not want to be.
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