• chapter twelve •
It was one of those days when you feel like you're looking at everything through a grayscale filter. The air was cool and wet, and smelled like summer, even though summer was a month away. A strong wind picked up, making my hair fly wildly about, blowing sand into my face. The grey was everywhere: the sky, the buildings, the ground, the trees were washed in the pale colored light. There weren't many people around. It was definitely going to rain. I had to go home before the downpour started.
I picked up my art-bag and began walking. My usual route was through West Pages Lane. I was ever in the hope that I'd see Liam somewhere. I probably should've gone home, because there was no chance of him being out and about in this weather, but I went there anyway.
And he was sitting on the porch alone, reading The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Even from the distance, the book was recognizable because of its distinct lime-green cover. I stood and looked at him for some time, then he saw me skulking around and waved.
My heart did a flip-flop.
I went over and sat next to him. "You're reading an amazing book."
"I know. I've read it before. I'm just re-reading it." He closed the book. "So what are you doing outdoors in this weather?"
"I really don't know."
"Me neither." He stood up and opened the door, and shouted, "Dad? I'm going to the bookstore with Hazel." He shut the door. Then he opened it again and went inside, and when he came back out his jeans pocket was bulging with something.
"What's that?" I asked, but he said he'd tell me later, and we walked to the bookstore together.
The yellow light from the store reflected off the pavement outside. The glass doors opened with a jingle-jangle sound, and inside something smelled like cinnamon. An old lady with spectacles sat behind a desk in a corner, reading the paper. Next to her, there was a sitting area which consisted of three couches and a glass table, where people were reading. The rest of the area was filled with rows and rows of bookshelves.
"Wow," I said.
"Nice, isn't it? I come here all the time."
We wandered among the rows. Liam went off to look for some encyclopedia. I walked slowly among the shelves, trying to look at as much as I could. There were millions of books here, new, old, thick, thin, red, blue, everything. I wanted to read all if them. One book caught my eye. It stood out from the rest. It was huge and black, and very old. I took it down.
The Book of Souls
It looked interesting. I sat down on the floor and put it in my lap and leafed through the delicate yellow pages carefully. Most of the text was in a language I didn't know. There were a few figures, which looked a lot like they'd been drawn by hand. I found one paragraph in English and started reading.
'The length of the life of a person is decided before he's born. The day he's going to die is predestined.
A person dies when his body becomes too damaged for the soul to live in it. After shedding the body the soul moves on to the afterlife.
But sometimes a person can die before he's meant to die: this happens when he's killed or he kills himself. His body is shed at the wrong time. When this happens the soul stays back on the earth.
This soul is what we call the ghost of a person.
The ghost cannot move on to the afterlife even if it wants to, for the Portals to Heaven and Hell don't open. The Portals don't open until the soul's mission on the earth has been fulfilled. The Portals don't open till the soul completes the task it was sent to do. The Portals don't open till the soul has played the role it was sent to play.
However, an exorcism may be performed to open up the Portals of afterlife.
This soul whose body was shed at the wrong time doesn't belong to any world. It doesn't belong to our world, nor does it belong to the ethereal world. Hence, this soul only has some supernatural powers which the ethereal creatures have.
These powers include the ability to posses someone, to move objects around, to control the wind and storms and mighty waters of the seas, and to extract energy from someone, among other things. Not all souls have all these powers.
What the soul can do, and how well the soul can do it, depends on how much energy the soul has. In the beginning, all ghosts have plenty of energy, but as time passes, they weaken. Although with time they can control their powers better, their energy decreases and they start to disintegrate. Their energy goes into their surroundings.
Some ghosts prevent themselves from weakening by taking energy from other souls. This is called Fracturing a soul.
It is known that they are stuck on the earth because they have unfinished business on earth. This unfinished business is the task they were sent to do. But some entities may start to believe that the unfinished business is killing their murderer. They believe that if they kill their murderer, the Portals to Hell and Heaven will open.
But this unfinished task isn't something that they want to do but couldn't do. It is something that they were predestined to do but couldn't do.
In order to use their powers, the ghosts have to make their mind entirely blank. Some ghosts, however, are so full of anger and other emotions churning inside them that they cannot make their mind blank, which doesn't allow them to perform any task easily. They—'
"What are you reading?" someone asked. I looked up. Liam stood there with a book in his hand.
"Oh, um." I shut the book and put it back on the shelf. "It was about ghosts and all. You know. What happens to souls after a person dies and stuff."
"Oh. Okay." He nodded. "Have you read this book? It's great." He handed it to me. Song of the Sparrow.
"No, I haven't."
"Then you should."
"Okay." I opened the book to a random page and sniffed. It smelled like words and ink and paper. I loved that smell.
We went to Starbucks after buying the book. There wasn't a seat empty, so we got hot coffees and took them to a bench outside. I wrapped my fingers around the warm cup and watched the passers-by.
"They're in such a hurry," Liam said, nodding towards the people. "Everyone is in a hurry these days. No one has the time to sit and rest for a minute." He looked at me. "Once dad told me that when he was my age, he used to do nothing during the summer. Like, there was just nothing to do. He would sit on his bed and get bored all day long, or go to his friend's garage to play the guitar with him. Can you imagine living in a time like that?"
I smiled.
A girl with pretty, curly hair rushed by, a phone pressed to her ear. "Her hair is amazing," I said.
"I don't like curly hair. Straight is better."
I grinned. "I like straight too, actually."
"Ahem," he said, running his fingers through his hair. I laughed.
We sat for some more time, then he took out a pen from his pocket and started scribbling on the Starbucks tissue paper. I tried to peek. He folded the paper and put it in his pocket.
I frowned. "Why don't you ever, like, let me see what you're writing?"
"I wasn't writing anything."
"You were."
"I don't let anyone see what I write."
"Why?"
He stared at his feet for some time. Then he sighed. "When I was very young—I don't remember how old I was—I wrote this poem called 'My Totally Nonsensical Poem' or something like that. And I had rhymed up silly stuff like children do. Like, one stanza went like, 'Give me high-four and high-five / Where bees live is called a beehive / I used to like my neighbors until they / Put a password on their Wi-fi'. And once one of dad's friends had come over, and he wanted to read the poem, and when he read it he laughed and said that it made no sense and that it was a stupid poem. I cried for a long time. I guess that's why. I just don't feel comfortable."
"Oh. It actually seems like a nice poem, you know. I'd love to read it someday. If you'd let me," I added.
"I just might let you." He smiled. "Oh, and." He took out a cassette case from his pocket. "I made a mix-tape for you. It has all the songs that are...you know...close to my heart."
I took it from him and looked at it. Wow. My favorite person on the planet was sharing his favorite songs with me? "Thank you."
He shrugged. "Don't thank me. I wanted you to listen to these songs. You'll love them." He smiled and looked at the fading light of the sky. "It's getting dark. We should probably go home."
We stood up and started walking, and he asked me if I had a favorite word.
I said I'd never really thought about it. So he asked me to think about it. I said it was probably the word 'meraki'. He'd never heard it before. I told him that it was a Greek word which meant doing something with all your heart, so much that you leave a piece of yourself in your work. He said it was a beautiful word.
On our left, across the road, a tall girl walked by.
"Liam," I said. "I dare you to go up to that girl and say, 'Hey, are you single? I like you'."
He laughed. "What the hell?"
"C'mon. It's a dare."
He looked at her for a minute. "She's hot." He grinned at me. "Okay, I'll go."
But before he could start walking, something emerged from the fence behind the girl. She didn't notice.
The grey vapor that literally came out of the fence materialized into a woman. A white, translucent woman in a black gown. And the woman started walking towards us, glaring at us all the while. We locked eyes with her.
It grew absolutely quiet. It was so silent that you could've heard a dead leaf crumble under my foot. The birds stopped chirping. The sky was a dark, dark grey, like charcoal, and the wind wasn't blowing. The leaves on the ground were absolutely still. And yet, as she crossed the road towards us, her gown fluttered as if a wind had ruffled it. I caught a glimpse of her feet. My breath caught in my throat.
They were facing backward.
It was the most horrifying thing I'd ever seen. They were smooth and when I momentarily caught a glimpse of her nails, I saw that they were perfectly round, but the fact that they were facing backwards was enough to creep me out.
"She was a witch...?" Liam asked. His trembling hand found mine.
A car came down the road. The woman kept walking. I wanted to scream at the car to stop, but nothing came out of my mouth. I didn't want to see anything horrifying like the woman getting hit and becoming even more angry, but there was nothing I could do. And the car kept coming at the woman in full speed, and went right through her. My jaw dropped to the ground.
Suddenly she was standing in front of me. She was like the reflections you see in glass, reflections which you can look at and look through at the same time. I backed up till my back touched a streetlamp.
It felt cold. I could feel the grief and anger radiating from her, digging its sharp claws into my heart and making me feel the pain. I tried to cross my arms to make myself warm, but she grabbed my wrist. Or, tried to grab my wrist. Her icy fingers went through my skin.
My blood froze from the cold. It was like dipping my hands into a bucket of ice. My hands were numb. I couldn't feel a thing.
And my mind became totally blank. It was like one moment I was standing there, and the next moment I had no idea where I was and what time it was or even what year it was. I was dizzy, and I was falling. I could feel the ground beneath my feet, but I wasn't there anymore. I was falling, falling, falling, till I was standing again.
The walls around me were smooth, the windows were beautiful and the glass was whole and unbroken. But I recognized the place anyway. I was in Waverly Hills Sanatorium, back when it was a working hospital. The corridor was full of evening light. The sun was just setting, making the passageway eerie. It looked very different from the place I'd seen a few months ago, but somehow I knew for sure that I was in the Sanatorium. I knew it like I knew that the sun rises from the east. Or that Sunday comes after Saturday. I was standing in the same corridor which we'd stood in when we'd come here for the first time.
I was seeing the entire scene through the eyes of someone. Everything was fitted into an eye-shaped frame. The person inside whom I was started walking. I looked down and saw a white skirt and heels and knew I was a woman. I focused on the corridor again. She walked to the end of the hallway and stopped in front of a smooth door. I looked up. Room 502, it said. The woman opened the door and went in.
A handsome man of about twenty stood there, wearing a doctor's coat. His hair was smooth and black, and combed back properly. He smiled with his full, red lips.
"William," I said.
This was William? The name had come to my lips instinctively. I realized that the woman had spoken, and not me.
"Come, sit," he said, gesturing towards a bed which sat against the wall. I didn't recognize this room, either. It didn't look anything like the broken down room we'd sat in. All I could make out was that it was a room where someone lived, not where patients were treated. A dresser stood in a corner.
He was still talking. "I need to talk to you about that little secret—"
I started falling again. I closed my eyes and tried to control the nausea. The ground beneath my feet became solid. Something warm was around my waist. I opened my eyes slowly. My face was resting on Liam's chest. His arms hugged me tightly, but it didn't warm my frozen body. I was still shivering. The woman was gone.
He looked down at me. "What happened?" both of us asked at the same time.
I breathed out. "You first."
"That woman...she dug her fingers into your wrist and you kind of blanked out. Then I pulled you away from her and she vanished. And she looked so angry that it scared me." He touched my cheek, which I realized was wet with tears. "You're cold."
"Yeah."
"What did she do to you?"
"She took me back in time. I was in the sanatorium. She took me down that corridor and into Room 502, and William was there. And we were right. He was a doctor there. He started to say something about a secret, but you pulled me away before he could finish." I took a breath. "I have a feeling that the ghost was trying to show me how she died. So it must've been 1932, right? That was the year this nurse died. And Mary, that other nurse, became pregnant with William's baby in 1928 and killed herself. So why was William talking about Mary's pregnancy to this nurse, and that too four years later?"
He shook his head. "These tiny details that you're worrying about, they're not important. If the ghost was trying to show you how she died, then I think that's what we should try to figure out. Maybe there's more to it than her simply being pushed. And if we figure it out, maybe we'll understand what she wants."
I shook my head. "That secret is important." I bit my lip. "She said once that William killed her."
"And he did it because of Mary's pregnancy. He was talking about that secret when he called the nurse into the room."
I nodded. "Yeah."
There was nothing to say after that. In the silence, I suddenly realized how close we were standing. His arms were around me. My head was on his shoulder. Blushing, I looked at his face.
If he kisses me, I thought, I'd have to stand on my toes.
But he didn't. I hid my disappointment and we walked home quietly. I kept searching the streets throughout, waiting for the woman to come back, but no one came. I didn't make eye contact with him, not even when we reached my house, not even when he hugged me goodnight. He smelled like honey soap and sweat.
I pulled on my pajamas and lit three candles, and put the mix-tape in the cassette player. Just then I heard a pitter-patter sound coming from all around me, and when I looked out the window, sure enough, it was raining.
I settled in bed and listened to the rain with my left ear and Wonderwall with my right one, and thought about Liam for some time. Then the music started sounding softer and my thoughts became a blur of colors.
∞