Dust to Dust

by Melissa Walker

  And then, I’m hit by a rush of heat—a powerful surge coursing through my body. I double over, dropping my physics book and putting my hands on my knees.

  There is a hammer pounding each and every inch of my veins into long, flat strands of agony. The pain slices through every nerve, every bit of skin, every cell—from my fingertips to the inner point of my gut. Throbbing, beating, pummeling, thrashing. It’s the kind of pain that makes you black out, and when I start to lose my vision, I think that I might.

  It’s the kind of pain that makes you wish you were dead.

  It is that horrible and all-consuming.

  As the details of my surroundings start to fade away behind a veil of black, a pair of glowing eyes appears, floating right in front of me. Within seconds, there are hundreds more, piercing through me along with this unrelenting searing pain. A collection of voices seeps into my ears, singing to me sweetly, as though trying to comfort me.

  We’re coming for you, we’re coming for you.

  In an instant, they all merge together, forming a devilish roar that sends me to my knees.

  And then it’s over.

  Ten

  I HEAR HIS VOICE before I open my eyes, and when I do, the room is dark. I try to get my bearings, but I just see plain gray walls around me. And then he speaks again.

  “Callie.”

  “Thatcher?”

  I look around, letting my eyes adjust in the small, square room but I don’t see him. And yet he’s here. He came to see me. For a moment I think I died—for real this time. I don’t feel devastated. I feel almost . . . hopeful. I’m in the morgue, on a slab.

  But then I sit up and my hands touch the fabric underneath me. Slabs don’t have sheets.

  “What’s wrong? What are you doing in the nurse’s office?” His voice is a whisper, a dream.

  That’s when I notice the small window with slits of sunlight poking through the drawn shades. The nurse’s office. I flex my fingers and toes, then my arms and legs. I wrap myself in a hug, trying to see how my body feels, expecting to be sore all over from the incredible anguish I felt in the hallway. But there’s nothing. I feel fine. Did the nurse give me a painkiller or something?

  “When did you get here?” I ask quietly, and I can’t tell if I hear his answers out loud or in my head.

  “Just now. I didn’t plan to linger, but you seemed hurt.”

  “It happened in the hallway,” I say. And then I tell him about the searing, ripping, earth-shattering pain that I felt.

  “Did you see or hear anything? Or anyone?”

  The hairs on my arms stand up as I recognize fear in his tone.

  “No,” I say. “I couldn’t. Not until just now with you. There was only this terrible . . . it felt like every part of me was being crushed.”

  “I’m so sorry,” he says. “I should have been closer. I might have been able to—”

  “It’s not your fault,” I tell him. “I went off the meds on my own and I knew there was a possibility that the pain might overwhelm me at first. I—”

  “I don’t think this has anything to do with your past injuries.”

  “Then what was it? What caused the pain?”

  “Not what. Who.”

  “Who?”

  I hear the regret in his voice, and I can almost picture his solemn face when he says, “Reena and Leo.”

  “Oh no,” I say, my heart beginning to race.

  I close my eyes, which helps me block out this bland room and imagine that Thatcher and I are talking together in a better setting. One where the mist moves around us and the air sparkles with an ethereal glow. I picture us in the Prism, where we met. Where we . . . connected.

  “You remember them, don’t you? And the rest of the poltergeists?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Everything has been coming back to me slowly.”

  As I tell him about what I heard in my room, what I felt in the cemetery, and the memories that have been flooding back, a deep chord of dread starts to sound within me.

  “Thatcher? Can they still use my energy?”

  “The other Guides and I, we think they’re still trying,” he says. “But now that you’re back on Earth, alive, we don’t believe there’s any way they can draw the level of energy they’d need for another possession or anything close to that.”

  “Then what just happened to me?”

  “I’m not sure. All we know is that they’re desperate to gather energy—they’ll do almost anything, and you’re an obvious target. You were the one they hoped to use all along.”

  “And you can’t stop them?” I say, my voice trembling a bit.

  “No, we will, Callie,” he says. “It’s just that . . . we haven’t been able to find them.”

  “I’ll find them,” I whisper, remembering what I scrawled in my journal, in a dream state.

  “I’ve been searching since they disappeared, but I will track them down,” says Thatcher, sounding more angry than sure. It’s amazing what I can hear in his voice when I can’t see his face. “It’s just that they haven’t been back to the Prism since—” He stops.

  “Since what?”

  “Maybe, in dreams, you’ve seen what happened?” I open my eyes again, and I notice a ripple in the air, his hand casting about this barren little room. “How your prism was destroyed.”

  I flash to the double exposure I keep seeing in my own bedroom—the window smashed, the bed torn apart, my things lying broken on the floor. It’s not my actual room I’m seeing in that nightmare . . . it’s my prism room.

  “I’ve seen a vision in my sleep,” I whisper.

  “Yes.”

  “I thought it was a nightmare.”

  “No. It’s real, what they’ve done to your prism.”

  “How did they do it?”

  “You invited them in.”

  In the Prism, Thatcher told me never to let anyone into my private room, but I was tired of his unexplained rules and there was a moment when I thought Reena was my friend. I’d invited her in. . . . I’d invited them all in.

  I feel a rush of shame.

  “But when could they have done it?”

  “Just before you woke up from the coma.”

  I think back to that moment, the one right before my eyes opened. When Thatcher drove my soul into my body. I remember his face—tortured, regretful, full of hurt. Despite his own pain, he chose my life. He said it was the only way to save me; he said the poltergeists would keep trying to use me to claim the lives of others as their own.

  But he never said what I wanted to hear most. What I still want to hear. He never said that he loved me.

  I shake my head and look around the nurse’s office, hating the gray walls and sterile paper sheets, and for a minute, myself, for suddenly making this all about me. Yes, I want to know, more than anything, what I really mean to Thatcher.

  But doesn’t the fact that he’s here with me now show that? Sure, there’s a bigger crisis at hand here, but couldn’t he have sent another Guide to contact me? Now that I’m aware the Prism is real and I’m off the meds, I would have been able to get the message.

  He came here himself. He came here to be with me.

  “We think the poltergeists have extra energy; that’s what they took from your personal prism and why they haven’t returned from Earth to regain strength. They can stay here. But not forever. Still, we can’t track them until they come back to the Prism.”

  “How long?” I ask.

  “We’re not sure, but it’s a matter of days—a week at most,” he says.

  “They’ll try to take bodies again.” Carson, Eli.

  “Yes,” he says. “In a way, they just did. But they failed.”

  When he says the word failed, I suddenly remember the rule of three—Carson has already been possessed once, and if it happens twice more, Reena will take her over completely. Everything that makes my best friend—her beautiful, wacky soul—would cease to exist and Reena would have what she’s always wanted.
r />   The chance to be alive again.

  “Carson. Is she safe?” I ask Thatcher, swallowing hard.

  “We think so,” says Thatcher. “As far as we know, ghosts can’t draw enough energy from living bodies for a possession. They won’t be able to get to her. It’s you I’m worried about—they can still mess with you and drain your energy.”

  “But if they can’t achieve possession, then what’s the point?”

  He doesn’t answer for a moment, but then his voice comes, quiet and hurried. “Maybe there’s a reason they believe it’s possible. And they have limited time—they’re getting more desperate, so they’ll try anything, even if it’s a one-in-a-million shot. I’m going to do my best to stay near, to be with you more than I have been.”

  “But you can’t be here all the time.”

  “No,” he says. “Like I said, it’s not good for you to be linked to anything from the Prism. Including me. I just wish there were some way for you to let me know if you sense them. . . .”

  Thatcher goes quiet, and I reach into my pocket, taking out the selenite crystals and opening my palm up into the air with a smile. “Maybe I can use these to summon you when I’m in trouble?”

  I’m trying to crack a joke, make things feel lighter, but Thatcher responds enthusiastically. “Good idea!”

  “Wait, what? Are you telling me these things actually work?”

  He laughs. He actually laughs, and the vibration makes my skin warm.

  “No,” he says. “You can’t call me with those rocks.”

  “I’ll have you know that they’re selenite crystals! Carson gave them to me.”

  “Of course she did,” he says, and I can hear a tender smile in his voice. “You’ll have to tell her that, sadly, those crystals are just pretty rocks.”

  “So why’d you get so excited just now?”

  I can almost see his back straighten up as he says, “I need you to find Wendy, my sister.”

  My eyes widen in surprise.

  “She has something of mine,” he continues, “a talisman. It’s an old class ring that our grandfather gave to me. I know it sounds strange, but it has a pull over me. If she’s ever holding it and thinking of me, I know it. I can feel it, even from the Prism.”

  “You want me to find your sister and ask her to give me your grandfather’s class ring?”

  “Yes,” he says. “You need to have it. It’s clear that the poltergeists are getting close to you, and if they’re near, the Guides and I should be able to take their energy and overpower them, which would force their return to the Prism. Wendy doesn’t seem aware of what the ring does, and it’s the only way you’ll be able to call to me if I’m not with you when they approach—I want you to be able to do that.”

  “I want that, too.”

  “It’s for emergencies only, Callie,” he says, his voice turning stern. “I mean it. The ring is only to be used if you feel you’re truly in danger.”

  “Got it,” I say. “Don’t use the ring because I want to tell you how my day went, but if Reena and Leo corner me in a back alley, it’s fair game.”

  But Thatcher doesn’t appreciate my attempt to lift the mood, which has grown solemn again.

  “It’s not a joke.”

  “I know,” I say. “But how will I get Wendy to give it to me? I can hardly just walk up to her and tell her I know her brother who died ten years ago.”

  “You’re right,” he murmurs. “She won’t give it to you. She’ll probably . . .” He pauses, like he’s thinking very deeply. Then he says, “Try first. Try with the truth of how we met in the Prism. Call it the afterlife—that’s what the Living are comfortable with. Maybe by now she’ll . . .” He stops talking again, and I hear the contemplation in his silence. “If she turns away, or gets angry . . . then tell her . . . tell her, ‘The treasure is in the tree.’”

  “What?”

  “If she won’t listen to you, tell her, ‘The treasure is in the tree,’” he repeats. “I’m sorry, Callie, I have to end this dream.”

  “Dream?”

  “Yes. Forgive me. I need you to remember this interaction clearly—I’m going to push you now.”

  Suddenly, I’m falling, falling fast. There’s no ground under me and I’m flailing, moving through time and space and nothingness, without him.

  I awake with a jolt, sitting up on the stiff bed in the nurse’s office. I’m panting, the selenite still in my hand, clutched to my chest. It was one of those cliff-drop moments, where you wake up sweating and panting. I’ve had them before, but never like this.

  “Lie back, dear,” says Nurse K. Her warm hand presses gently on my shoulder and I look up into her kind hazel eyes. She’s been our school nurse for years, and we all love her—she’s young but it seems like she has an old soul.

  “I’m all right,” I tell her. “Really.”

  “I’m just going to call your father. You had quite a spell.”

  “I feel better,” I say, putting my feet on the floor and standing up to head for the door.

  Nurse K tries to hold my arm, but I turn and flash her a grin. “Really,” I say, “I’m okay.”

  She calls out the door after me, “Callie, I still have to call your father!”

  But I keep moving. I have to get out of here—I have to find Carson. Because I remember every word Thatcher said to me, and I need that ring.

  Eleven

  NOW MORE THAN EVER, my mind has to be clear.

  The last thing I need is to be put back in bed by a bunch of doctors and given more pills to take. So yesterday I told Carson my fainting spell in the hallway was because I didn’t eat enough at lunch, not because Reena and the poltergeists were stalking me at school. When I came home to my father pacing around in the kitchen, upset by the concerned voicemail he’d received from Nurse K, I gave him the same story too.

  Thankfully, they believed me. Of course, I felt bad for lying, but not bad enough to stop myself from turning on the charm and convincing them that whatever happened to me was just a random, freakish thing. However, late last night I just couldn’t hold back from Carson anymore. I called her and told her that Thatcher had contacted me and asked me to reach out to Wendy.

  Immediately, she got carried away in some fairy tale version of my life, which she still seems to think is some kind of perfectly tragic made-for-TV movie.

  “Oh God, that is so romantic! All the sacrifices and secrets and longing for what can never be!” she gushed.

  I wanted to interrupt her and share the whole truth—about the danger I’m in, that she could be at risk, too. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I’ve been telling myself that I should keep the darker side of the Prism from Carson because she’s such a believer in the good side of things, the Solus side, the heavenly side. She’s the person who wants me to help Thatcher’s sister finally cope with his death so he can merge into peace and light, and I didn’t want to take that away from her.

  But now that it’s the next morning, and we’re skipping school so we can drive to USC-Beaufort in her VW Bug, I think the reason I can’t tell Carson there’s evil and hate and betrayal in the next world is because telling her would make it all terrifyingly real. I’d have to admit to her everything that Thatcher said to me, and none of it was particularly reassuring. I’d have to tell her that I’m not sure how strong Reena is or what her powers could do to us. I’d have to tell her that I don’t have any clue how we might protect ourselves, or whether there would be anyone else, like the Guides, to keep us safe either.

  The only hope we have, really, is in an old class ring. Which I have to get from a total stranger. Maybe then, I’ll be able to say the words out loud to her:

  The poltergeists are coming for me.

  “I can’t believe we’re doing this, Cal,” Carson says as she backs the car out of her driveway. “I thought you’d given up on your wild, crazy ways.”

  “Me, too.” I glance down at the plastic bag on the floor of the passenger side and nudge it wit
h my foot. “What’s all this?”

  “Stakeout provisions,” says Carson, her smile stretching wide across her face. “I got something for every kind of craving. Salty, sweet, sour. You name it.”

  I smile and take in a deep breath. The fresh air that hits my face when we pull out of our neighborhood feels good. I almost forget for a second or two that I haven’t been able to sense Thatcher with me since the last dream I had, and haven’t responded to the few texts Nick has sent me. I can almost see the waves of late August heat as we merge onto the highway—it makes the road’s white lines look wavy and shaky, like we’re underwater. I remember how everything looked almost real in the Prism, and I wonder about people like my dad, who always need things to be tangible, solid. I know that life isn’t always that way, though.

  “I wonder what Thatcher’s merging ceremony is going to be like,” Carson says, her eyes flicking to the rearview mirror as she makes a turn. “Maybe there’ll be harps or something.”

  “I saw one actually.”

  “You did? Tell me!”

  And this is easy to share, because it’s the good part.

  “It was Ella Hartley’s.”

  Now Carson is truly rapt. She and I danced with Ella Hartley when we were little and everyone took ballet class, but Ella stuck with it and was actually really good, I heard . . . until she got sick.

  “Ella was super skilled at haunting,” I say.

  “How did she do it?” asks Carson. “Did she do things like changing radio stations or did she do that other kind—the soul kind of haunting that Thatcher wanted you to do?”

  “She did things the right way. She spent time around her family—I even saw them walking at the harbor one day. She’d been out on their sailboat with them, and the whole scene was really peaceful.”

  I pick up the cloth Carson keeps on her dashboard, feeling its velvety softness between my fingers. I take off my sunglasses and clean them with it before I continue.

  “Her merging ceremony was like nothing I’ve ever experienced,” I tell Carson. “It happened in a warm, lush place, like a rain forest. There was soft music playing, and all the ghosts gathered to watch, like it was a performance. Ella walked a path surrounded by white stones, up to a central platform where she lifted her face to the sky.”