Spirit Legacy (20 page)

“I think we should refocus our energies on some new areas of the building we haven’t covered yet, especially the stacks where Ballard had her encounter with Evan’s spirit. That okay with you?” he asked me.

“Sure,” I agreed. “I’m gonna run to the ladies’ room first, though.”

“Okay, everyone. We’ll head back out in five,” Pierce said.

My flashlight lit the way to the nearest bathroom, which was in the entry hall just beyond the circulation desk. I instinctively flipped the light switch when I entered the room, but then remembered that Dan had killed the power from the circuit breakers. So instead, I stood my flashlight up in the center of the tiled floor, casting a dim circle of light onto the ceiling and creating just enough illumination to see by.

Every sound echoed hollowly off the tile and unusually high ceiling, and I finished quickly, eager to get out of there. I was just refastening the walkie-talkie to my belt when I felt it: a creeping sensation beginning at my toes and crawling like insects up my legs and spine.

Swallowing back the fear, I slid the catch on the door of the stall and poked my head out into the bathroom. Nothing. No shapes, no shadows that couldn’t be explained by the inanimate objects in the room. Calming my breath, which had begun to speed up, I walked to the sink and began to wash my hands.

An icy breath caressed the back of my neck. My face snapped up towards the mirror, where two ghostly faces stared back at me. The first was my own terrified reflection. The second was just over my right shoulder, shrouded by a hooded robe. I screamed as loudly as I could.

The scream pounded against my ear drums and multiplied itself as it shattered into echoes. The figure behind me did not react to it, except to raise a luminous finger to its shadowy lips. At his gesture, the echoes muffled and died, as though the walls that were creating them had suddenly decided to absorb them. I clapped a hand over my mouth and spun around to face him. Part of me expected him to disappear, but there he was, no more than a few feet from where I stood pressed against the cool porcelain of the sink. He had a slight glow that illuminated nothing but his own form, the darkness seeming to double around him. His face was gaunt and bearded, his chin pronounced, and I could see dark hair in the recesses of his hood. I registered all of this in a fraction of a second before I was drawn to his eyes, deep pools of darkness set into his face.

Somewhere from outside the room, I could hear voices shouting and footsteps clattering toward the bathroom, but they were not nearly as loud as they should have been. The ghost’s presence seemed to muffle everything except the sound of my own blood pounding in my ears.

“W-who are you?” I whispered.

“I’ve been waiting for you. It’s been agonizing.” The figure’s mouth moved, but I didn’t hear his voice in the room. It was in my head, echoing against the insides of my skull. I shook my head, trying to dislodge it. It felt unnatural for it to be there, an intrusion.

I took a deep breath. “That’s not what I asked you.”

“My apologies, witch. My name is William. I was a student here, just like you.”

“Why did you call me ‘witch’?”

William just stared at me. I tried another question.

“You were in that group, right? The Swords Brotherhood? Isn’t that why you’re wearing that robe?”

“I had the distinct misfortune of entering their ranks, yes.” He had a slow, drawling voice.

“Why misfortune? What happened to you?”

“A regrettable error occurred during one of our ceremonies. I was meant to be sacrificed—symbolically, of course. However, the brother playing the part of the executioner got a bit, ah … carried away.” At this William parted the robe and revealed a dark stain splattered gruesomely on his white shirt. “They covered it all up, it was very hush-hush. But I would not be silenced. I stayed so that others would know what happened to me. I haunted them all, until their precious little society disbanded altogether. But by then, I was stuck here.”

“Ballard? JESSICA? Are you in there?” Pierce’s voice bled faintly into the oddly deadened atmosphere of the bathroom. There was also a dull tapping sound, which I realized was pounding on the door.

I turned to William. “Did you lock that door?”

“I did. I wanted to speak with you and I did not want to be disturbed, as we were so rudely interrupted earlier.”

I ran for the door, expecting him to try to stop me, but he did not move. I pulled on the handle and tried to turn the deadbolt. It wouldn’t budge.

“Jessica! Are you alright?” Pierce sounded frantic but very far away.

“I’m here! I’m here with the ghost from upstairs and he won’t let me out!” I shouted back.

Again, the pounding on the door was reduced to a pathetic tapping by whatever William was doing to the room. Frustrated, I turned back to him. He was just staring at me, the slightest of smirks on his face.

“I’m not finished speaking with you,” he said softly in my head. “When we’ve concluded our business here, I will gladly allow them access.”

“What business could you have with me? I don’t even know you,” I replied, trying to keep the growing hysteria out of my voice.

“Don’t play stupid with me, witch. I’ve been waiting a long time. We all have.”

“We?”

“Eighteen years is a very long time to be trapped between where you’ve been and where you are meant to go. We’ve been waiting for you.” With that he took a small but decisive step toward me. As he did, the room filled with a buzz of whispering, many voices at once, a quiet cacophony.

I turned and pounded on the door. “Pierce! Get me out of here!”

I could hear him saying something to someone else, and other voices behind the door, which had started to rattle. They were trying to get me out.

“So eager to go? But you’ve only just arrived.” Another step toward me. I slipped away from the door and past the stalls, which gave me more room to maneuver away from him. It might have been pointless, trying to evade a ghost, who could conceivably appear wherever he wanted to be, but my flight response seemed unwilling to acknowledge this.

“You know, if you just stand still, this ought to be easier,” William suggested.

I froze. “What will be easier?”

“This.”

Without another word, William flew at me like smoke on the wind. His face, as it approached mine, was full of a manic kind of anticipation, and then I felt only an intense cold as he passed through me. It was the last thing I registered before the pain started.

It exploded inside me, expanding through every vein and tissue. Gasping and screaming, I fell to my knees. It felt like every cell in my body was freezing and crystallizing to ice.

“JESSICA!” The voices outside the bathroom grew instantly louder; whatever William had done to the room had lost effect the moment he’d attacked me. The door flew off its hinges with a resounding crash as Iggy barreled into it. The team flooded in.

Pierce crouched beside me, shaking my shoulders and shouting for me to look at him.

My vision was clouded and oddly fuzzy, as though I was looking through a fogged-up windshield. I tried to speak, but could only continue to scream as the sensation morphed from intense cold to a new feeling, as though I was becoming too expansive to be contained in my own body. Emotions that weren’t mine skittered across the surface of my mind. Anger. Confusion. Desperation. They were William’s emotions. William was inside my body.

“Help … me! He’s in … here!” I gasped.

Pierce stared into my eyes with horror and I realized that he was seeing someone else entirely staring back at him.

“Move, David! Move! Jessica, look at me!” Annabelle’s face replaced Pierce’s above me, swimming in and out or focus. Neil’s face hovered over her shoulder as well, his eyes like saucers. I tried to speak to them, to explain what was happening, when the pain shifted again.

I was being torn apart inside, the very fibers that held me together were being severed, the connections between my body and whatever of me existed that wasn’t my body. I began to shake uncontrollably, my screams reaching a new pitch, and I found myself wishing, for the first time in my life, that I was dead. William’s anger and frustration fought for domination in my brain.

A tiny part of my consciousness was somehow able to focus on Annabelle, who had begun to chant something over me, though I could not hear the words over my own irrepressible shrieking. I could barely register the sound of her voice. The last conscious, desperate thought that rose through the waves of agony was not mine, but William’s.

I can’t get through! Why can’t I get through?

And then the pain engulfed me and I knew no more.

Chapter 15—Deception

Chapter 15—Deception

I
was floating. It felt like water,
like warm, untroubled water. If I could have remembered being inside the womb, I imagined that this was what it would have felt like. My body felt wonderful, weightless, but my head felt strange, like someone had taken out the grey matter and replaced it with packing peanuts. My thoughts rustled around in there, trying to surface. It wasn’t easy, though, and for a while nothing discernible or understandable came of it.

Presently though, disturbing images began to untangle themselves from the comfortable haze. I was vaguely aware that they bothered me, and I tried to push them back down. At first it was as easy as batting away soap bubbles, but soon they grew stronger and clearer, cutting through my cozy cocoon, turning the water cold and troubled. It rocked in my head like a stormy sea, bringing on waves of nausea.

I became dimly aware of my body, and as soon as I could feel it, I wished again for the numbness. There wasn’t an inch of me that didn’t ache horribly. The ache was being propelled through my body by my veins, my pulse pushing it sluggishly as though the pain made my blood viscous.

Sounds began to reach me, muffled and warped at first, then with sharpening clarity. An intermittent beeping sound. An occasional click. A steady dripping. Two voices, one male and one female, were conversing nearby. I forced a reluctant eyelid open. A sterile white hospital room swam into focus. I turned my head slowly towards the door. It seemed to take the room a few seconds to catch up with me. When it did, I was able to focus in on Annabelle and Pierce standing just outside the doorway.

Annabelle tossed her head, looking every bit the fiery gypsy. “I have been doing this all of my life. Since I was a child, I’ve been sensitive. And I can tell you now that I have never seen anything like it before.”

“So what are you saying, Annabelle? What is she?”

“My grandmother called them ‘portar’. She’d met only two in her lifetime, and what she described is exactly what that girl is doing.”

“Yes, but you still haven’t explained what the hell she’s doing! What happened to her in there?” Pierce began at a shout, but dropped his voice at the end when he suddenly remembered he was standing in a hospital corridor.

“She attracts them, David!” Annabelle cried. “I don’t know how she does it, but they are drawn to her! Their energy is everywhere, crowding each other out, trying to get closer to her. The ones she’s seen are only the beginning of it!”

My skin began to crawl and my headache throbbed more strongly as I tried to absorb this information.

“They need her for some reason; maybe she can help them. I’ve only ever heard of one instance in which that would be true. And so have you, David. Something you’ve been trying to find for a long time.” Annabelle began nodding her head slowly, in time to some silent beat.

As though it were contagious, as though he’d just registered the tune as well, Pierce’s head started bobbing along with Annabelle’s. “Durupinen,” he whispered.

Annabelle shivered at the word and her eyes danced nervously over to me. I shut my eyes a little tighter, completely losing my visual, but hopefully appearing to be asleep.
Durupinen.
I rolled the word around in my head, committing its strange sound to memory.
What the hell were they talking about? And why did they have to be so damn cryptic?

“You can’t be fucking serious, Anna.” Pierce sounded excited now. “I mean, I spend half of my professional life trying to track down any verifiable proof of their existence and you’re telling me that one of them just walked into my office and signed up for my class? Do you know how absurd that sounds?”

“Yes, I do! I know how ridiculous it is to even be
talking
about Durupinen like they’re—I don’t know—some kind of established thing. Stories of them are as unsubstantiated as vampires, but just as pervasive, especially in the medium subculture.”

“Unsubstantiated? It’s like it doesn’t even exist! Every lead has dried up, every original document vanished, every witness unable to recall his experience! For all intents and purposes, they don’t exist! It’s an academic’s nightmare! It’s freaking Atlantis!” Pierce was shouting in a whisper.

Annabelle dismissed his words with a wave of her hand. “David,
everything
we deal with is unsubstantiated! And you have to admit, it’s the only explanation that makes sense.”

I risked opening my eyes a fraction of an inch. Pierce was pacing like a caged animal now, his hand pulling absently at his beard as though he were plucking the hairs out one by one.

“If this is true, Annabelle, if she’s really ….” he trailed off, crushing the rest of the thought beneath his pacing feet.

“I know. She needs to talk to someone, and fast by the looks of it. Who does she have? Her mother? A grandmother? From what little I know it’s always the women.” Annabelle sounded truly frightened, which made my heart start to thump unevenly. My mother? What would my mother possibly have to do with this?

“Only an aunt, I think,” Pierce said.

“Maternal side?”

“I believe so, yes.”

“Has anyone called her yet? Does she know what happened?”

“The hospital called her,” Pierce replied. “She’s on her way from Boston. Should be here any minute, I’d think. Obviously, we left out the ghoulish details, at least for now”

It was Annabelle’s turn to pace. “I don’t think we should let on that we know about the Durupinen. The secrecy is … well, let’s just say I have no idea what would happen.”

“Well then, what do we do? We have to do something! My God, if they tried to use her again like that, Annabelle—”

“—I know.”

“From what little myth and lore exist, it’s not supposed to be like that. Something’s wrong. Seriously wrong.”

“I’m going to talk to her,” Annabelle said.

“Do you think we should wake her?”

“Do you seriously think this can wait, David? Don’t be an idiot!”

Apparently Pierce didn’t think it could wait, because a moment later I heard Annabelle’s hurried footsteps clicking toward my bed. I tried to feign sleep.

A moment of silence and then, “You’re awake, aren’t you?”

There seemed to be no point in faking it. I opened my eyes and stared Annabelle in the face, which swam nauseatingly in and out of focus.

“Yes.”

Annabelle sighed, a deep release that sent ripples through her hair. “How much of that did you hear?”

“Enough to be completely confused. Do you know what happened to me? Because if you do, you have to tell me.”

“Jessica, I want you to listen to me. I know that we haven’t gotten along well, and that you thought I was some kind of fraud. After last night, can you believe me now when I tell you that’s not true?” Annabelle asked.