by Helen Scott
"Is that all?" He quirked an eyebrow at me.
Before I could reply Avery reappeared and saved me from further interrogation. Her black skinny jeans were ripped across both knees showing a sliver of skin each time she moved her legs, which was matched with the skin on her belly that was displayed from the short t-shirt she was wearing.
"How did you...?" Avery trailed off as she gestured to our clothes.
"Ghostly powers, babe. When you've got 'em flaunt 'em," I said with a grin as I slung my arm around her shoulder. She fit perfectly there and I just wanted to pull her even closer to me. What was it about this woman that was so alluring?
"And when do I get my ghostly powers?" she asked looking up at me.
For a minute all I could see was her staring up at me from a bed, her head thrown back in ecstasy. I blinked and cleared my vision before smiling back at her. "Once you finish Ghostly Studies 101, of course."
"Of course, how silly of me," she said poking her tongue out at me.
"Come on, let's go pick up Sasha and get some food. I'm starving." Noah took off toward the other side of the dorms, apparently already knowing where Sasha lived.
"Can we actually starve?" Avery asked.
"Not so much, but we can waste away, slowly consume the energy that keeps us alive," I said, not particularly liking this train of thought.
"So if I am losing my solid form that could mean that I'm feeding off myself?" Her voice was a squeak, which broke my heart.
"I don't think so in your case, but you might want to make sure not to miss any meals, just to be on the safe side," Noah teased.
I caught the glint of worry in Avery's eyes though. None of us really knew what was going on, and that was the worst feeling I'd had in a while. All I wanted to do was tell her that everything was going to be okay, but I couldn't. It was a promise I simply couldn't make.
"Professor Matthias said that if I can't get whatever is going on with me under control then he would have to tell the school council and I would probably be expelled, which I guess is like a final death that there's no coming back or moving on from," Avery said quietly.
"They can't do that," Noah replied with a deadly edge to his voice. I'd only heard it a couple times before, but nothing good came from that side of my friend's personality.
"We won't let them. We'll figure it out, no matter what, okay?" I said, squeezing Avery's shoulders in a weird, sideways hug.
"I don't want to die... not again." Her voice was barely above a whisper when she spoke.
I stopped the two of us in our tracks, and when I turned to face her head on I saw one crystalline tear rolling down her cheek. "Avery, listen to me, I promise we won't let them kill you. You've done nothing to deserve it, and if it comes down to it then we'll figure out a way to get you into the aetherworld or reincarnated or something."
"You promise?" she breathed, her teary eyes staring into mine and tearing my heart to shreds.
"Pinky promise," I said holding out my pinky finger.
She took it in her own little finger and curled it around mine, we shook up and down, and then when she released my finger she smiled. "I haven't made a pinky promise in years."
"Me either, but you're worth it," I said, and watched as a blush rose on her cheeks. She was so damn beautiful inside and out. I winked at her and straightened just in time.
"I'm here, bitches. Let's get some food!" Sasha called from the doorway as the metal and glass swung open.
11
Avery
I was worth it? What was that supposed to mean? Was he hitting on me? Or was it like a brother-sister thing? I didn't know and I wasn't about to ask him with Sasha and Noah right there.
"Come on, there's a shortcut this way," Noah said as he started walking once more without waiting for the three of us to catch up with him. There wasn't much to do other than follow him since I had no idea where we were going and the cafeteria was in the opposite direction.
As it turned out we were headed toward a small town that had been set up on the extended academy grounds. Sasha wasn't afraid to demand to know where we were going. Her no nonsense, direct attitude surprised me, but I was learning that I really liked it. She may be the polar opposite of the friends I'd had when I was alive, but I hadn't really liked them all that much anyway. She also wasn't shy about peppering the two of them with questions about their deaths and how long they'd been in purgatory, all of which were artfully avoided by both of them.
The path through the woods was worn, but the bushes and trees were working on reclaiming it, although they hadn’t succeeded yet. There was the odd patch where a tree had fallen down here or there, not that I knew what made trees in the afterlife fall over, just that the path continued on the other side, so we had to go around it.
I knew the moment my foot landed in something squishy that my night wasn't going to end well. "What the fuck?" I wondered as I pulled my shoe out of the gunk and it made a suctioning sound.
The other three stopped, turning to look at me. I was leaning against a tree I'd hopped over to that wasn't far from the downed tree we'd been skirting around. When they walked over to me, Noah’s and Bowie's faces fell.
"Ewww, what is that?" Sasha cried as she examined my boot and the curdled milk and jelly like substance that was clinging to it. It was like pudding with an eerie white glow to it. Not obvious enough to see when traipsing through the forest, but when it's on my lovely black Doc Martins it is pretty damn obvious.
"That is the remains of a ghost," Noah said, sounding grim.
"Excuse me?" I demanded. There was no way I had just stepped in some dead ghost. I thought we were supposed to just go poof and disappear not turn into some milky vomit looking substance.
"It was a ghost, now it's... ectoplasm?" Bowie said, his voice raising at the end. I was pretty sure the guy was grasping at straws, but I didn’t have a better name for it, so I decided to go with it.
"Ectoplasm, like we're in fucking Ghost Busters or something?" Sasha’s eyes practically rolled back into her head with how unimpressed she was.
"I mean, I don't know the technical name for it, but yeah, that's the brass tacks of it," Noah said.
"So why is this the first I'm hearing of it?"
"Because it's not normal. Most ghosts don't die in purgatory, they move on, solve their problems and get on with whatever afterlife they have planned. For a ghost to leave this kind of residue they were most likely murdered or executed or something. It's not something that's normally left behind." Bowie's gaze was soft as he delivered the disgusting news, like he hated upsetting me but knew he had no choice.
"It's old, too." Noah prodded the remains on the ground with his own boot. "I've seen remains before, but they were more congealed, not lumpy like this mess."
"Couldn't it have something to do with the type of death, the manner in which... uh..." I couldn't bring myself to say the way that the other ghost was murdered because there was no way this was above board, not with the remains being out here in the woods. Whatever had happened, someone had wanted to hide it and we had just stumbled across their hiding place.
Panic gripped me, and I knew Noah was responding but I couldn't make sense of what he was saying. Something was propelling me forward, some instinct pushing me to get away from the remains. At least that's what I thought.
When my foot landed in another leaf covered hole and made a squelching noise, my stomach turned. No, it couldn't be, could it?
"Uh, guys?" I called, and Bowie was there next to me in a matter of seconds. "Can you look down and tell me if I stepped in another dead body? I don't think I can handle seeing it."
Bowie sucked his breath in and disappeared from my line of sight for a moment. I heard the rustling of leaves and felt things moving around my boot, but when he came back up the expression on his face wasn't one of good news.
I lurched forward, desperate to get away from the ghostly remains I was standing in, only to pause when my foot squelched again. "What the fuc
k is this? A mass burial ground?" I cried. Every time I took a step I heard a squelch and felt my foot get suctioned into whatever remains were underneath. My breath started coming faster and my whole body tensed with every sound, just waiting for another ghost’s remains to pop up under foot.
When my breath caught and blackness claimed me I thought at first that I'd passed out, but my mind was still functioning so I knew that wasn't what had happened. I wasn't unconscious, but I didn't feel fully conscious either, it was like I was stuck in some kind of limbo. Ha. Ha. The ghost from purgatory is stuck in consciousness limbo. Good one cosmic powers that be.
"Guys?" I called out, but got no response. My voice seemed to echo around the space, reminding me of a giant empty gymnasium. I tried to move around, to figure out where I was but the more I did the less energy I had, and that scared me.
"Hello? Anyone there?" I tried again, and once again the only thing that greeted me was the echo of my own voice. That was when everything seemed to stop, like my brain had frozen and shut down or something.
When it started again the blackness seemed less dense, more like fog than a complete sensory black out. Slowly, the world seemed to come back into focus, the only problem was I wasn’t where I remembered being. The world around me looked different, not unfamiliar, just different.
It was a moment later when I realized that I was in my room. Not my ghost dorm room. My room I had when I was living. Only everything was different. None of the stuff in it was mine, not that I expected my roommate to turn it into a shrine or anything, but still it was weird to see. Whoever Becky was living with now sure seemed to like pink, which was much too similar to Rose for my liking.
A sniffle came from the other side of the bedroom door and I couldn’t help but try and figure out who was upset. I went to walk through the door, like I could in the afterlife but I smacked into it instead. The resounding thump scared the shit out of me and the sniffles stopped as well.
“Becky?” Rachel's voice called from the other side of the door. She didn’t sound upset, just confused. Whenever Rachel cried her voice got this weird nasally sound to it that I teased her about mercilessly after sappy movies so she didn’t wallow too much.
I could hear her breathing as she listened from the living room side of the door, something I’d never been able to hear before. When I heard her hand on the door handle I froze. If I could hit the door was I solid enough to be seen? If she opened it would she think I was still alive and had just been fucking with her this whole time? Unlikely, but in that moment my panicked thoughts didn’t care what was possible or not.
The door handle bent and the door swung in, passing through me this time as though the previous time had been a fluke. I stared at Rachel’s face as she looked right through me. An ache formed in my heart and all I wanted to do was reach out to my friend and hug her. I honestly didn’t realize until that moment how much I missed being alive.
Rachel’s gaze darted around the small room and the open door to the en suite bathroom. It was obvious that no one was in either of the rooms, and the closet doors were wide open so it wasn’t like anyone could be hiding anywhere. After a shake of her head Rachel turned around and walked back toward the sitting area.
“So sorry about that, Mama G. I could have sworn I heard something,” Rachel said, her words making my heart freeze in my chest.
“Mom...” I said, feeling my heart crumble in my chest.
Rachel paused and looked around, her eyes landing on me for a split second before drifting over the rest of the room. I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d heard me, or perhaps seen something, to make her stop like that. What was more important, at least in my mind in that moment, was why my mom was there.
“Oh, Rachel, it’s okay. I think I see and hear her too. Grief is funny like that,” my mom said, her voice distorted by unshed tears.
“It is,” Rachel replied, her voice sounding tight. She didn’t want to admit what she’d heard.
“These photos are lovely. Thank you for calling me about them.” My mom’s voice called to me like the most essential feeling of home in the world and I couldn’t help but move toward it. The weird thing was we had been estranged at the time of my accident. She hated the way I dyed my hair and my tattoos, called me unladylike and demanded that I start acting like an adult. I always thought what she really meant was that it was time for me to get married and start popping out grandbabies like I was some kind of pedigree dog.
I moved closer, curious about the photos that Rachel had given my mom. They were all from various parties that the two of us had been to. Thankfully, I didn’t look completely drunk in any of them, just carefree and happy.
“I found them on my phone and thought you might like printouts. No big deal, really. I just couldn’t help but remember what you said at her funeral, about wishing you’d known her better, and I thought this might help.”
Regret flowed through me like a river and I was stuck wondering what exactly my mom had said at my funeral. It was a little unfair that we ghosts didn’t get to see. It felt a little like we should get a recording or something to watch when we make it to the afterlife. It almost felt like we had been cheated from the closure we all needed on our previous lives.
“It helps more than you know,” Mom said before they both fell silent. After a moment she quietly added, “I wish she would have woken up just once, just enough for me to tell her I loved her and I was sorry for trying to make her be someone she wasn’t.”
“She knew you just wanted what you thought was best,” Rachel replied, putting her hand over my mom’s shaking ones that were clasped in her lap.
A wail came from the room behind me, and when I turned to it, scared of what it might be, I found a gaping black hole seeming to suck everything toward it. I glanced back at my mom and Rachel, but neither of them seemed to notice anything.
I tried to grab onto the door frame, to hold on and hear the rest of the conversation but I couldn’t, the power behind me was too strong. A raging wind seemed to block out any sound and I was left with no choice but to let go and hope that whatever the thing was behind me didn’t kill me.
12
Noah
Every time I closed my eyes I saw Avery fading in front of me again. Her purple hair vanishing into nothingness while I watched as her mouth formed words, but I couldn’t hear them. Bowie had full on lost it, going into panic mode immediately, while Sasha on the other hand had just gone quiet. Hers was a look I knew all too well; she had watched at least one person die before. I wasn’t sure who or how, but I knew it like I knew the words to my favorite song.
I pushed up in bed and pulled on some sweats. I needed to tire my body out until I had no choice but to sleep, then maybe Avery’s face would stop haunting me. As much as new ghosts thought everything was different here, it wasn’t. Things had just shifted, that was all. Our bodies still needed to be cared for and fed, just because we weren't in the mortal realm anymore, didn't mean that changed.
The feeling of being watched prickled up my spine as I made my way out of the house and started a slow jog down the street. By the time I'd pushed myself to my limit and become lost in my thoughts I hadn't realized where I had been going. As I slowed my pace I found the forest in front of me, the same one we had cut through, the same one Avery had faded in. The gnawing sensation that I was responsible for each time she'd been hurt or in danger filled me. If I hadn't suggested the shortcut she would still be with us, but we never would have found those bodies.
Bowie had wanted to go straight to the Arbiter about them, but I talked him out of it. There was a serial killer on campus, one that knew exactly how to hide their tracks and pick victims that people wouldn't even blink about going missing.
The thing about Phantom Academy was that it was constantly in transition. New students coming in, older students moving on, going to whatever their final destination was, or returning to the mortal world to torment some poor schmuck that did them wrong during their life
there. This meant that if someone wanted to they could, apparently, commit multiple murders without anyone noticing.
I just wanted to get a little more info before we started blabbing about it to everyone. Was that so wrong? I wouldn't go straight to the Arbiter either. That guy was not someone to care about small details like spirits going extinct because of some crazy person running around. No, once I felt like I had any kind of understanding of how big this was then it would be the professors I talked to first. Then, if they insisted, I'd talk to the Arbiter.
"Noah." Avery's voice sounded faintly in front of me, and I took a few steps toward it before I realized that it was just a hallucination of some kind. My steps faltered as I reminded myself once more that she was gone. I had no idea if she'd ever be back or if her spirit had just poofed out of existence like nothing but a cloud of smoke. It was best for me to assume she was gone for good, but when I'd said as much to Bowie, he'd practically chewed my head off with how angry he was. The man was convinced that she'd be back if he could figure out how to get her to become solid once more. Needless to say, I disagreed.
I spun on my heel and began the run back to our house, not looking forward to running into any of my roommates, especially when they so adamantly tried to convince me that this wasn't my fault. Guilt scratched away under my skin until I felt like I was going to explode. I never thought I'd be thankful for class, but in that moment I was. I had a whole day of learning ahead of me. A whole day where I needed to focus on something other than my emotions, so that's exactly what I would do.
Class after class I tried to pay attention to what they are saying, but it was hard, much harder than usual. It was only when I got to Demonology that it became straight up impossible though. The empty chair in front of Sasha, combined with the vacant look in her eyes when she glanced at me, flinching as though the very sight of me hurt her, it all undid me. All the effort I'd been trying to put in, all the minutes I'd repeated what the professors were saying in my head, none of that was working while I stared at the seat that should have been occupied by Avery.