Dane hadn't been lying about Kim Sarang's potato chips. The damned things were delicious, with just the right amount of crispiness and salt. The bag rustled as I helped myself to another handful. I pushed it towards Liz to encourage her to eat some, too.
"I may not like the Koreans, but I have to admit it was very nice of them to include an instruction manual." Liz studied the small booklet in her hands, squinting to see the words in the dim lights of B-block's bathroom. She glanced at the bag of chips, but didn't move to touch it. I supposed the unsavory smell around us didn't work wonders for her appetite.
Not that I minded. More chips for me.
"They got the job done fast, too," I said with my mouth full. "My cellmate definitely knows the right people for shit like this."
Liz frowned. "Why do I feel like you're talking about the chips?"
I swallowed my bite, ignoring the cold, unpleasant feeling of the counselor's negative energy digging its claws into me. "They're important. Not as important as the board, but still..."
Outside, thunder rumbled. That August night was dark and humid and I didn't doubt we'd see a storm. For a second, I thought about warm, lazy mornings smothered in the lingering scent of petrichor, and ice cream on hot days and terrible summer songs playing on repeat on the radio. Those memories seemed long gone, belonging to a life I'd lost sight of along the way. A life I'd return to after sitting out my sentence, if the world could be kind for once.
If I made it through the night with my body and mind still intact.
"It says here the medium has to make it very clear they won't be open to any negative energy or spirits," Liz said slowly, her nose still buried in the instruction manual. "So only positive vibes allowed."
I recalled the Live, Laugh, Love sign my mother had once bought as living room decoration, how proud she'd sounded while talking about her exquisite talent for interior design. I pictured a sign with Liz's words regarding positive vibes and wondered what Counselor Taylor would think of it if I put such a sign on display in his not-quite-beloved bathroom. I liked to think it would piss him off big time.
"But we can't do that," Liz continued, glaring at the Ouija Board positioned between us, "because we're going to be chatting with a malevolent spirit who decided to die in a fucking bathroom, of all places. I mean, come on. It couldn't have been anywhere cleaner?"
"It's not like he got to choose where he was murdered."
I studied the Ouija Board, took in its design. It was brand-new, judging from the sophisticated black letters and numbers on the polished wood: every letter of the alphabet in the middle, numbers one to nine with a zero at the end below it and underneath that, the foreboding word goodbye. In the upper left corner, a black sun with a bad case of rape face was depicted next to the word yes, and in the upper right, a black moon found itself in a similar predicament, right next to the word no. The board was a real piece of work.
"And besides," I followed up, fighting the desire to touch the board, knowing I was in danger of angering the spirits if I ran my greasy chips fingers over it and defiled the damned thing, "we've got to get started already. If someone finds us here like this, they'll be screaming bloody murder."
Even though it was the dead of night, we still weren't alone. We'd gotten officer Davies with all his acne to cover for us once more, but there was always the chance we wouldn't get lucky this time. There wasn't much personnel left in the building; the few officers working the graveyard shift, a handful of nurses in the infirmary, and Doctor Jones, if he'd been stupid and diligent enough to work late once more. Still, the idea of anyone spotting us, two prisoners sitting cross-legged on a bathroom floor while preparing to communicate with an evil spirit, made my skin crawl more than the ghost did.
"So let's get this over with. I'll be our medium." I pulled out the heart-shaped planchette and placed it on the board, my now-clean fingers resting on it, and motioned for Liz to follow my example.
To my surprise, she crossed her arms with a huff. "And you get to make that decision because...?"
Was that necessary? I sent her an annoyed glare. "Oh, I don't know. Maybe because I'm the one with the sixth sense and more ghost experience here."
Liz discarded the booklet, done reading. "Shouldn't matter when it comes to Ouija. It's just... Letting you be the medium could be a bad idea."
I'll be honest with you. I knew myself well enough to understand letting me be anything could be a bad idea. Still, I couldn't help but feel a little offended. "What do you mean? Why?"
"Listen. It's nothing personal, not at all. But remember what you told me sometime back? About ghosts being able to hurt you more because you can sense them better? That means you're more vulnerable to this spirit we're going to contact, Church. You don't have to like it or agree, but I should be the medium. It could be... safer."
She had a point. What remained of the gashes in my hands was proof. While I'd never attempted to use a Ouija Board before, I couldn't deny the possibility the whole ordeal would take a turn for the worse. Being our medium would be dangerous for Liz, but perhaps even more dangerous for me. Speaking with the dead, in spite of their inability to do so... it was hard to picture it, but all the potential ways in which it could go wrong were clear as day.
"And besides..." Liz grinned, forgetting all about her previous disgust of her surroundings for a second. "...I'm curious. Talking to a ghost, that's not nothing. If we're going to do this, I might as well... embrace the opportunity. It's something new. Something worth exploring. You feel me?"
Oh, I felt for sure. Aggravation, for the most part. Stupid, stupid Liz, with her constant hunger for answers and her curiosity that would listen to nothing, not even reason. There was only one thing I knew about curiosity: it had killed the fucking cat and left it dying in the dark. I wanted to tell her off. I wanted to ask if she realised what she might be getting herself into. I remembered the walls of my cell smeared with blood, screaming, lots of screaming, and the disturbing end of a children's song scribbled red in my notebook. I knew we oughtn't underestimate the dead.
But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get any of those words out of my mouth. Instead, I sighed and asked: "How set on doing this are you?"
The grin she'd given me only grew wider. "Dead."
It gnawed at me. It really did. But she'd made good points, and she was too damn stubborn to back down, no matter what I said, and I never had been good at self-sacrifice. So I did what I did best.
I took the easy way out.
"I hate that joke," I grumbled as she placed her fingers on the planchette next to mine with a smug little smile. "I really fucking hate that joke."
As displeased as I was about letting Liz play Paranormal Investigator, I kept my mouth shut as she opened our deadly ghost game session in accordance to what she'd read in her manual. I listened while she drivelled on and on about welcoming any spirits, staring at the board with a burning intensity, and braced for whatever would happen.
The faint smell of sulphur grew stronger with each word my friend spoke and I had to grit my teeth to keep them from chattering. A cold, dreadful feeling coursed through my veins, as if it wanted to freeze my entire body solid. It felt like slowly dying of hypothermia: suffocating, sickening, exhausting and turning you into ice, stripping you of your senses while the seconds passed.
"What's your name?"
There was a ringing in my ears, loud and pesky, and Liz's question for the ghost barely reached my brain. I snuck an anxious glance at the mirror, trying to find an evil eye staring down at us, devouring us with its darkness. I didn't see anything.
But the planchette moved to spell a name.
I startled when I felt the piece of wood slide across the board towards the black letters of the alphabet. Careful not to flinch away, I held my breath, making eye contact with Liz. I couldn't quite place the look in her eyes; a peculiar mixture of excitement, fear, and confusion. I looked down at the board instead, thinking about the spelled name.
MATT
It was so fucking cold. Liz sent me a questioning look, waiting for my permission to proceed or perhaps wondering what to say next. My mouth might as well have been taped shut. I found myself unable to move, unable to speak. Reduced to a ghost of myself.
"Why are you angry?" Liz decided to ask, her eyes trained on the board. The moment of truth. Liz looked ashen and jittery when the planchette slowly began to move again and I wondered if she felt as sick as I did. She seemed to fare better, if only a little, but I hoped her possible nausea wasn't as crippling as mine.
The board gave us its answer.
DOG
Was that a fucking joke?
A spirit was capable of lying like a human being, I figured. But why would it lie? Did it even have a reason to? I frowned, confusion written all over my face. When I looked at Liz, I saw my own expression mirrored. And behind her stood Michael, her brother, signing. A snap of his fingers, a slap on his thigh. The meaning of that sign came back to me. Dog.
"Dog?" Liz' voice was an irritated whisper, tainted by bewilderment. She looked at me and I could see how much she hated not having an explanation for the answer we'd been given. I looked into the mirror, searching for the murdered counselor like I'd done the first time I'd gotten sick in the bathroom, but found an eerie emptiness once again.
Then the epiphany hit me.
That time in the bathroom on the day of my incident, I hadn't been alone. When the bloody message appeared on the wall of my cell, I hadn't been alone either. My cellmate had always been there. My cellmate whose nickname was a dog breed.
The bitch must die.
A bitch was a female dog. Michael's sign. The bruising Dane had complained about. Her refusal to talk about the riots. Here comes a candle to light her to bed, and here comes a chopper to chop off her head.
"Liz," I said, my panic levels rising with each passing second as the realisation dawned on me. "I'm not the target. I was never the target. He's after Dane."
I wanted to tell Liz to keep prying information out of our ghost, but the lights in the bathroom flickered when I spoke the name and I watched my friend double over. She convulsed and cried out, clawing at her face with sharp fingernails, obviously in pain. On impulse, I kicked the Ouija Board and the bag of chips away as if that would do anything, but when I tried to get up to help Liz, my body trembled too much and the sulphuric sickness I'd sustained made sure every movement on my part hurt.
We'd made a grave mistake.
When I looked up at Liz... I'd never forget that face. That look in eyes that weren't hers anymore. There was so much anger in there, so much hate and malice and evil, the grey void of a cataract defiling Liz's left eye staring into my soul, a glare trying to tear me apart. I was left trapped in a staring contest with the Devil.
"The bitch must die!"
I know I told you the dead don't speak. But when they do, using the voice of a living human, it's not something you'd ever want to hear. The words were a snarl, grating, hollow and shady with an icy edge to them, bringing nightmares to life before my eyes.
"Don't do this..." My words were pathetic, but they were the only ones I could manage. Every syllable cut into my tongue, weighed down on my vocal chords. I reached out to Liz, not quite sure what I was hoping to achieve, but willing to try anything.
But it was no use anymore. The ghost's power was far greater than mine. The world turned into a blur as I felt my body colliding with a grimy bathroom wall. In her possession, Liz sent me a sharp, demonic smile, framed by small streams of blood slipping out of her eyes and the wounds she'd scratched into her own face. All air gor knocked out of my lungs and I slumped to the floor, struggling to breathe.
Liz left me there without another glance, turning around at lightning speed to leave the bathroom, laughing and cackling like a maniac. Figuring out where she was heading wasn't rocket science. For the first time in days, I understood.
Dane, what have you done?
It took all my willpower, but the ghost's departure allowed some of my strength to return and I scrambled to my feet, leaning on a sink's stainless steel for support. The bathroom spun around me, became a chaos of flickering lights and bloodstained floors, chips strewn all over the place. But there was no time to waste. I shook the pain away, gritted my teeth and stumbled out of the bathroom to the best of my ability, desperate to reach my cell in time.
We'd been so stupid. I'd been so stupid. The ghost hadn't been after me, but Dane. Dane, who he couldn't get to, on whose body he could leave only bruises and no fatal wounds. The counselor had reached out to me because I was the only one he could reach; because Dane was leaving, very soon, and he had to take the last chance he'd ever get. He'd never intended for me to be his murder victim. I was supposed to be his instrument for vengeance.
And Liz had taken my place.
I heard shouting and running footsteps in the distance, confused officers and angry snarling, a door being broken from its hinges and a Spanish curse unknown to me, sounding angered and terrified at the same time. Lightning flashed outside, blinding me for a split second, and it occurred to me I'd never been more scared than in that moment.
I still don't know how I reached my cell. To this day, the memory's hazy, a panicked, bloodstained blur. I stumbled into B-block bruised and broken, found myself stopped by officers in a state of complete disarray. A large, broad figure stood in my cell, hunched over what appeared to be a lifeless body, and I wondered when Doctor Jones had gotten there. Someone else sat hidden away in a corner, breathing heavily and clutching at her throat.
The questions the officers threw at got lost in the darkness the ghost had plunged me into. Black spots danced before my eyes, clouding my view of the horrendous scene, and exhaustion took over my body. My legs gave out under me, my consciousness slipped away. All I remembered were the words of an old children's song.
Chip chop chip chop the last man is dead.