Bright Obscurity

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Bright Obscurity Page 11

by Ruby Brown


  Mal squeaked as she came up against the wall, her back pressed flush against it and the ghosts advancing from every direction. She cringed away as one of them leaned down like it was going to kiss her, its expression changing from a gruesome scowl to a silent scream as its mouth opened and its hands reached for her. As its fingers pierce her flesh, Mal feels herself seize up and her mind is swimming. She’s drifting in and out of reality and struggling to keep a hold of her consciousness is like trying to stop water from trickling through the gaps of your fingers. Somehow, she manages to stay awake, but suddenly wishes that she’d allowed herself to pass out once the pain starts.

  Terrible, blinding, unbelievable pain starts assaulting her. It’s like her entire body is ripping itself apart, stripping away her flesh piece by piece until there’s nothing left but broken bones. Her vision is swimming, making the hellish apparitions in front of her even more terrifying. She tries to fight back, to get away from the flames consuming her, but her body isn’t responding. Nothing is working anymore. She can’t even think straight. Her thoughts are shattered like fragments of glass from a broken window. Involuntarily, she starts to shake violently, her eyes rolling into the back of her head like she’s having a seizure. She can’t breathe, she can’t hear, she can’t see, she can’t feel anything other than the pain. It swallows everything, makes her blood boil and her heart freeze. This is it. It’s over.

  “Mal? I’m home!”

  Hope leaps to life inside of Mal’s chest. She tries to cry out, but her muscles are so stiff that all she can do is moan as drool runs out the side of her mouth. She tries to pound on the wall behind her with her legs and arms to make more noise, but she can’t. She can hear her dad’s footsteps getting closer, and all at once the ghosts disappear. The white smoke that their disappearance causes fills the corridor momentarily like fog, but Mal barely notices as she falls to her hands and knees and heaves, leaving the contents of her stomach as a splattered mess on the floor. Every part of her aches and burns.

  Her dad finds her collapsed at the end of the hallway, pale and shivering and drenched in a cold sweat. He pleaded with her to tell him what had happened, but Mal didn’t respond. She tried to, honestly she did, but she couldn’t speak. She just sat and trembled in her dad’s arms, her tears trickling down her face and leaving a salty tang on her lips as she gasped for air. The only time she managed to speak was when Peter suggested going to the hospital. Weakly, she pushed against him and quietly insisted that she didn’t need to go to hospital, she just needed some rest. She tried to stand, but her legs collapsed underneath her and she fell flat on the floor, making a groan of pain escape from her lips.

  Then she felt Peter’s arms slide underneath her broken body and lift her up so he could carry her to her room and softly drop her on the bed. He pulled the covers up to her chin and ran a wet flannel across her face to clean up the remnants of spit and vomit and asked if there was anything else he could do, but Mal was too far gone to listen or care. She just rolled over in her cocoon of blankets and fell asleep. The ghosts chased her even in her dreams.

  Chapter 13

  After her close encounter, Mal developed an intense fear of being left alone, and since there was less chance of her being alone if she was at Tenebar, she told her parents she had been chosen to help out with a big project at school which meant she had to stay behind every single night. Of course her parents raised concerns, but Mal assured them it would be a temporary thing with her fingers crossed behind her back. Honestly, she was trying to reassure herself rather than her parents. Once she’d gotten them to agree, she had a cover to stay at Tenebar every single night and usually arrived home at about 6:30pm, trembling with slightly wild eyes, a part of her not quite there, still lost in the mystery that surrounded the ghost.

  The only good thing that came from her spending so much time at Tenebar was that she was learning how to control her magic better. She had to do it largely on her own, as no one else could control what she could, but Rose and Dallas helped when they could. She spent a lot of time in the library, studying ancient, leather-bound books full of legends about Praethen and Akraansir. Although she had no idea which ones were true and which ones weren’t, if you looked closely enough they contained clues on how to use her magic. She was almost banned from the library after she was trying a new technique Praethen used in one of the legends and as a result almost made the room explode. She seemed to be causing a lot of accidents like that, but only because she was still getting used to just how powerful her magic was.

  Everything was going fine, for a while. Mal was learning how to control her magic, she felt like she had the ghost under control and the suspicions of her friends and family had been adequately diverted by her cover story of a school project. That was until she got a phone call from her mum while she was at Tenebar, using her magic to blow apart several targets Rose had set up. Laughing at something Dallas had said and wiping the sweat from her brow, Mal picked up her phone. “Hey, mum.”

  “Where are you?” Abigail demanded tensely.

  Tendrils of fear wrapped themselves around Mal’s thoughts, but she forced herself to remain calm as she said “I’m at school, working on my project. Just like I said.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Mallika.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “Oh really? Because I’m at your school right now. I was dropping in a note that you forgot about, and I thought I’d check in and see how your project was coming along. I asked the principal about it, and she said she’s never heard of it. So what are you really doing?”

  Mal froze. “I...um...I’m at a café with Claire.”

  “What are you doing there? And why did you tell me you were at the school?”

  “I was. Claire and I did some work on the project, but then we ran out of materials and couldn’t work anymore so we decided to spend some time at a café before heading home.”

  “And why didn’t the principal know about your project?”

  “It’s a surprise for her.”

  A pause. Then, “put Claire on the phone.”

  “She’s using the toilet,” Mal explained, a little too quickly.

  “Come home. Now.” Abigail hung up.

  “Well, I’m dead,” Mal said cheerfully as she shoved her phone in her pocket.

  “What happened?” Dallas asked, and Mal explained.

  “Good luck with that,” Rose said carelessly.

  “Thanks for the support,” Mal said, mildly annoyed. She punched Rose lightly on the arm as she walked out, and in return Rose whacked her so hard she left a bruise for weeks.

  Mal hurried home, thinking furiously of some kind of excuse she could use, each one more outlandish then the last. All she could hope for was that the lie she told her mum held strong, and her dad believed it too. She just needed to stay calm and rational, and maybe she could get through this.

  When she opened her front door, both of her parents were seated at the dinner table with somber faces that changed to badly disguised fury as Mal entered the room. They pounced on her like predator to prey and bombarded her with questions. Mal stuck to what she had told her mum and explained as best she could, but she could tell that it wasn’t enough. They were still suspicious, and their concern heightened when the ghost appeared and Mal made them turn around to look at seemingly nothing.

  Eventually, they gave up and let her retreat to her room, much to Mal’s relief, but she didn’t dare leave the house at all the next day, which was a Saturday. She had been telling her parents she had to work on it over the weekends as well, but with their suspicious eyes following her everywhere, she knew it would only make things worse if she insisted on leaving. Her parents were constantly checking up on her, poking their heads round walls or through doors. They thought they were being discreet, but it was quite the opposite. Mal found it incredibly annoying, but refrained from snapping at them by reminding herself that it was her own fault. The appearance of the ghost that night did nothing to make the
situation better.

  Just a few minutes after the ghost appeared, the front doorbell rang. Mal jumped at the sudden and loud noise, and didn’t look up to acknowledge her parents suspicious gaze. After a heavy pause, Peter stood up and went to answer the door. He came back, laughing and smiling, with his arm slung over the shoulders of someone that Mal had never seen before. He was tall and skinny with messy black hair and circular, gold-rimmed glasses that seemed far too large for his face. He was smiling politely at Mal’s father, but seemed a little baffled by the show of affection and unsure of what its purpose was. He struck Mal as someone who was constantly questioning the motives of everyone around him, and his calculating eyes swept the room as if he was evaluating everything inside it.

  “Mal, this is Charlie. He’s an old friend of mine from the university,” Peter said. “He’s staying for dinner.”

  Mal smiled in what she hoped was a friendly manner. Charlie just gave her a curt nod, his hazel eyes flashing behind his glasses. Abigail emerged a few seconds later and talked to Charlie while Peter cooked, forcibly roping an unenthusiastic Mal into the conversation at certain points. Mal usually hated having to speak to her parents friends. They were patronizing, they asked the same questions over and over again so that Mal felt like they were all stuck on a broken record, and the conversation inevitably ended up with her parents talking about her as if she wasn’t there. But tonight she had different reasons for not wanting to talk to Charlie. There was something about him that made her uneasy. Maybe it was the way he almost never blinked, as if he was afraid that if he closed his eyes for even a split second he’d miss something crucially important. Maybe it was the way his brow was constantly creased in thought. You could tell just by looking at him that he was constantly thinking. Mal didn’t know what he was thinking about though, and that contributed to her unease. She was used to reading people in the same way she read her precious books. Some of them took longer to decipher than others, but everyone had signals that showed how they felt. You just had to look for them. Charlie had none. His face was impassive, a brick wall that Mal couldn’t scale. He seemed more robot than human, an observer, isolated in his thoughts but unwilling to emerge from their sanctity. Didn’t he ever get lonely?

  Thankfully, Peter and Abigail were chatty enough to keep dinner from becoming awkward. Charlie occasionally voiced an opinion or answered a question, but for the most part remained quiet. Mal noticed that her parents were trying to get her talk, which was strange. Usually they were more than happy for Mal to stay quiet and out of their way when they had friends over. But tonight they were relentless, asking Mal countless questions that she was forced to answer, feeling like her words were being carefully evaluated by the silent man in front of her, who gave no visual clues to show what he thought of her responses, but would occasionally ask further questions to probe deeper into her mind. Mal didn’t like the intrusion. As the night went on, she felt like there was some kind of battle happening between her and Charlie. Exactly why they were fighting, or what the prize was, she wasn’t sure, but she was careful to keep her answers guarded. To her frustration, Charlie was very good at asking the right questions that meant she unavoidably had to give him more information than she felt like she was supposed to.

  Thinking that once she’d finished her food this ordeal could be over; Mal practically inhaled her dinner and dumped the plate in the sink. To her horror, her parents insisted she sit down and continue talking to their guest. Mal tried to squirm her way out of it, but the tight-lipped and steely-eyed expression on Abigail’s face told her that she didn’t have a choice. She glanced at Charlie, and to her surprise saw something like faint amusement flickering behind his eyes. It was weak, but it was there. She felt like she had won some kind of small victory by getting him to show the only true emotion he had displayed all evening. Intrigued, she sat down again, but within minutes Charlie was back to being unreadable and as Mal couldn’t figure out what had triggered his moment of normalness beforehand, she sunk back into her disappointment.

  Eventually, Mal felt it was safe to make another escape attempt, and managed to get to her room without any protest from her parents. She came out again about half an hour later, when she wanted to get a glass of water. Before she opened the door to the dining room where Charlie and her parents were currently sitting, she caught her name in the middle of their conversation. Curious and with a smile toying at her lips, Mal stopped and listened.

  “So, do you think she needs medical help?” that was her dad.

  “Maybe,” Charlie responded.

  “Do you think she’s insane?” Abigail asked tensely.

  “No, not quite. Just...I can’t find the right word for it. But she’s rattled, that’s for sure.”

  Finally, he’s speaking in full sentences, Mal thought to herself, remembering the one-word responses Charlie gave through most of dinner.

  “What about the hallucinations? Do you have any idea what could be causing them?”

  “She did seem quite stressed, although that may be a product of the hallucinations. She’s been spending a lot of time outside of home, correct?” There was silence, and then Charlie spoke again. “Is there a possibility she’s been taking drugs?”

  “I am not on crack,” Mal said angrily, opening the door and stepping through. Her parents looked quite shocked to see her there. A tremor of surprise passed through Charlie’s face before it disappeared.

  “Mal! We didn’t know you were there,” Peter said.

  “Obviously,” Mal responded tensely. She was fuming, and not in the mood to have a calm and pleasant discussion. “What the hell is going on here? Do you really think I need to be locked up in a padded cell?”

  “What? No, of course not,” Abigail said, but there was an undertone to her voice that said differently. “We just wanted to get Charlie’s opinion on the situation. You’re clearly not well, sweetheart. Maybe you need medicine, or something. Charlie studied psychology at the university, and he’s well known as one of the best psychologists around. We thought we could trust his judgement. Why don’t you sit down and tell him everything that’s been happening? He could help,” Abigail soothed.

  “I don’t want help from him,” Mal said.

  “But you do want help from someone, correct? You’re struggling with something quite big, but you don’t feel like you can tell anyone,” Charlie said thoughtfully.

  Mal was furious that he had managed to break her down like that when she had failed to get even the slightest reading on him. “Stop looking at me like that!” she shouted.

  Charlie’s expression didn’t change, and neither did his calm tone as he said “what do you mean, Mallika?”

  Mal hated how unruffled he was. “Like...like I’m some kind of guinea pig. An animal trapped in a lab for you to analyse and do experiments on. For the entire time you’ve been here, you’ve acted like I’m nothing more than something in a petri dish when in reality you know nothing about me!” Mal added the last part more to reassure herself. She was terrified that he knew way more about her then she had ever anticipated for him to.

  Charlie looked surprised, and then a small smile curved his lips before a chuckle emerged from them. Mal’s parents looked appalled at her outburst, but their scolding and apologies froze in their throats as they realised that Charlie found the whole thing rather amusing. “You’re right, Mal. I’m sorry. A lot of people have told me that I do that, and they hate it as well. I try not to let it show as much, but when I’m encountering a particularly interesting character I get carried away. And you, Mal, are a very interesting person. Besides, your parents asked me here specifically to analyse you, so I didn’t bother with trying to pretend I wasn’t examining you.”

  Mal felt like she’d won some kind of victory by receiving praise from him, but she was still annoyed at her parents for bringing him here in the first place. “I’m not sick,” she pleaded. “Why can’t you just believe me?”

  “Because it’s impossible,” Pete
r said, his voice just as pleading as Mal’s was.

  “I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” Mal said firmly, deliberately quoting one of the books Peter used to read to her and Felix when they were younger.

  “This isn’t Wonderland,” Peter said through tight lips. “Why won’t you just accept the help you need?”

  “I believe my team and I could assist you,” Charlie said, watching the drama in front of him unfold with mild interest. His tone turned soothing. “Wouldn’t you like to be free of the hallucinations, Mal? They’re clearly scaring you very badly.”

  “I’m fine,” Mal said tensely, but her voice quivered. Charlie opened his mouth to say something else, but Mal had had enough. Turning on her heel, she stormed back to her room. Abigail tried to grab her arm as she passed, but Mal yanked it from her grasp and slammed the door behind her. She was aware that she was acting like your typical bratty teenager and she’d get it in the neck from her parents for her behaviour in the morning, but she didn’t care.

  Her parents, apologising profusely to Charlie, may have thought that Mal was just going to her room to sulk, but they were completely wrong. Well...okay, maybe only half wrong. Mal had decided to finally act on a thought, a solution to her problem that had been cropping up in her thoughts ever since the ghost started arriving. The only reason she hadn’t done it yet was that her upbringing made her inherently sceptical of these kinds of people. She supposed she could do it herself, locked in her room, but she was too scared to. There was a large part of her that doubted it would work, but at this point she was desperate enough to try anything. This thing needed to get out of her life.

 

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