Kyle ran into the whiteness until it started to fade away around him. Like tog rolling away he found himself in a burning house. The little girl was kneeling on the ground, next to an equally faceless couple who lay dead on the ground, gaping wounds weeping crimson blood. Standing over them was a man, faceless safe for his cruel, wild grin. He reached for the little girl...

Kyle couldn't stand back and watch that, as little as he understood what was going on. He ran in and punched for the grinning figure with all his weight. The moment his fist made contact the world around him exploded onto glowing swirls, like inky water when a rock is thrown into it. When the swirls calmed, the scene had changed.

They were on a road now. On a stormy night. The scene was similar, dead parents, crying girl, although now there was a great mob of grinning shadows, a cruel gang. Still acting on instinct, Kyle waded into the mob, but as soon as he touched them the world swirled and changed around him.

This established a pattern.

A warzone. A cabin in the woods. A dark city street. Sometimes there was one killer, sometimes dozens. The parents were always there but they changed with each new scenario. Sometimes there were siblings, lying dead alongside the parents.

An office. A campsite. A ship at sea. And airplane. The world around them had become a long stretch of desert robe, a grinning killer in a sherrifs hat towering over the family now, when Kyle reached out to the only constant within all the changes.

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"Stop," he said, firmly but kindly, putting his hand on the little girl's shoulder.

"I'm just trying to show you," the little girl said.

"But you don't know what to show me," he said. "Do you?"

"No," the little girl said, in a quiet whisper. "I remember being hurt. Parents...they died. And someone evil. But I don't remember what happened. I was lost for so long. Wandering...and then I found here. This house. There's something about it that's familiar.

"Why did you start hurting people?"

"You came here to hurt me!"

"Well that wasn't really what we meant, but I can see how you could think that. I mean the other people. The ones who came here."

"They...reminded me," she said. "There was one, the shape of his ears, it reminded me of being hurt. Another one's shirt..."

"Bits and pieces," Tanya said, wandering out of the mists. "She's a kind of ghost called a wandering grudge. She's not actually the spirit of the little girl, not really. She's a memory. Of hurt and pain and something horrible. Only emotion. That's why she doesn't actually know what happened. But she's got enough memory to find a house similar to the one the little girl loved in. And to attack someone who, say, had the same shaped ears as someone the little girl saw the day whatever it was happened."

"Oh," Kyle said. "But you can't keep hurting people. Whatever happened...it was a long time ago. Far away from here. You understand that right?"

"I suppose," the little girl said. "I...I could stop."

The mist around them began to bubble with dark mists.

"Kyle? Get ready to fight," Tanya said.

"What? She's not going to..."

"Not her," Tanya said. "A wandering grudge can't normally kill people. It's a nuisance. The guy with the ears should have tripped down stairs, or gotten a cut. Maybe felt sick while he was in the house. It's not powerful enough to erase people completely, not on its own."

A shape began to move in the mists.

"There's something else in here."