My Soul To Keep

by Jackie Sonnenberg

  ***

  We all went upstairs and to our separate ways, people talking quietly or not at all. Damien and I had an unspoken agreement to come to my room.

  I turned around to the sound of him shutting my door, and saw what was underneath his arm.

  “Well?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “I have too many questions.”

  “Me too…this is just too messed up.”

  “It’s obvious Mitchell is delusional,” I declared. “The Mayan thing isn’t true. There is just no way.”

  He sat in my desk chair, placing the box down and not looking at it.

  “Do you think the others actually believe him?”

  “Yeah,” I said truthfully. “They will believe anything he says. We do too, sometimes…without really realizing it.”

  I walked over to the desk and put my hand on the box.

  “I think we both know who to talk to.”

  His lips pursed, and I agreed that I didn’t really want to do it but I felt like we had to. We both took the box and sat it down as we always did, this time more delicately, carefully pulling the Ouija board out of its box like it was a live, delicate living thing.

  Damien and I place our fingertips on the hand piece.

  “You…you go first,” Damien muttered.

  I took a deep breath.

  “Is the spirit present one who…died in the woods?”

  The piece moved. Yes.

  “And all of those spirits are here in The Manor?”

  Yes.

  “Is the world going to end on December 21st?”

  Damien and I stared at the piece, our hands shaking above it, but it did not move. I tried again.

  “Please tell us, is what Mitchell says true? Is the world going to end on December 21st?”

  The piece slid around the board.

  Maybe.

  Damien and I sighed.

  “What are we supposed to do?” I asked, shaking a little more.

  Join us.

  Before Damien and I could react, the piece started to move on its own again.

  We are waiting.

  ***

  Damien and I both stood up and walked out my door, but once we got to the hallway we realized we could not go anywhere or do anything. We just threw our heads into our hands and paced, listening to our hearts throb. It became too much and we both knew it.

  “I’m done with this,” Damien muttered.

  I nodded. “It is no use.”

  After about a minute or so, we went back into my room and quietly approached the board on the floor. While we were outside the piece had moved over to Goodbye and stayed there.

  Chapter 29

  Thanksgiving came, and Mitchell went to great lengths to remind us up until that day that it was going to be a big day. We were to have a big dinner, of course, and day and night activities with little free time. He told us we should think of it as a special day to be thankful for our lives on Earth. I only had time to call my mom at my grandparents’ to wish everyone Happy Thanksgiving, and answer the usual questions of I’m fine and school is fine and classes are fine, and such.

  Damien and I put away Ouija board, not consulting with it ever again. The spirits made their point clear, and from then on we needed to stay out of everyone’s way—everyone’s—if we were going to go through with a plan. It was starting to turn into an obsession. I couldn’t shake the idea that leaving The Manor was going to be impossible.

  “Thanks for putting that envelope back,” I told Damien next time I saw him.

  “No problem,” he answered. “You got it the first time and almost got caught. I ran in there before dinner like nothing happened.”

  “So…” I said, stating the obvious. “What’s our other plan?”

  “I don’t know. We have any?”

  We sat in the kitchen putting away our tea cups before the first day’s activity downstairs. People were around us, but not paying attention to what we were saying.

  “It seems like Mitchell is keeping us all on a short leash,” he muttered.

  “You can say that again.”

  Of course, Mitchell always showed up when his name was mentioned.

  “Come, my Lights!” announced Mitchell. He came out, greeting us in full GOL cloaks. “Put on your member cloaks now, as we take this day to be thankful, we can’t forget to be thankful of who we are. Come in to the Mess Hall!”

  It was another poster project set up at all the tables, our member cloaks greeting us at the first table. Poster boards and buckets of colored pencils and markers waited as well, blank white and ready to make our visions come to life. Mitchell beamed at the front of the room as the masses trickled in.

  “The next project we are going to do is a timeline of the most important milestones of your life. Start with the day you were born, of course, and fill in key milestones. Today on Thanksgiving we reflect on our lives and have to remember to be thankful for what we experienced and learned.”

  Mitchell’s voice hung over all of our heads, and we took his words in. He certainly wanted us to believe so. He had a childlike joy that seemed to warm us all. I thought it might actually be a good idea to reflect on important milestones in my life…even though some of them were not pleasant. I paused for a moment, wondering if I needed to include it. What I did was include it, but write how it caused me to turn inward and have more faith, have the desire for a stronger spirit. As instructed, the last thing to put on our poster timelines was joining GOL.

  When we were done, we all went downstairs to the lower lounge to put them on the walls. They filled the walls like they were engulfing in on us, and we were surrounded by the lives that we have lived.

  We had almost no free time on Thanksgiving, no surprise there, but after a while I forgot what bothered me so much earlier. The meal we had…I couldn’t even begin to describe it. It must have been two meals in one…or maybe even all three. Mitchell and Carol went all out on this one. We had the traditional turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and green beans and more. It was massive.

  The mess hall, already cleared of that afternoon’s poster project, transformed into a grand banquet hall. Velvet, maroon tablecloths covered all the tables, the uneven parts hanging by the ground and covering the chair legs. They were all decked out with fancy table settings and silver wear, and even those fancy napkin holders that you only see on magazine covers. At the centerpiece of each table was, naturally, a candleholder hosting three sharp sticks of fire, looking like burning tridents.

  The meal took our energy. Why wouldn’t it? We feasted on turkey and wine and felt every morsel of food sliding through our bellies to find room. All along the table I could see the mellow—and yellow—faces glowing by dinner candles and the warmth of the meal.

  “We are thankful for our Light,” Mitchell toasted.

  In unison, we all responded in one voice:

  “We are thankful for our Light.”

  And, in unison, we all lifted our glasses and drank that wine.

  ***

  I woke up the next day feeling like I was floating on a cloud. I was very light-headed, and when I stepped down and my feet touched the floor I was practically weightless. I barely felt the carpet under my walk as though I were walking on feathers. All I did was wipe my eyes as I made my way into the bathroom to brush my teeth.

  Once I got downstairs, I realized the aftermath of our Thanksgiving feast didn’t wear off. I didn’t remember how much wine I had. I felt drugged. I stopped on the way down the staircase when I got a look at the window. It was grayish and smoky. Very smoky. There was a fog so high it reached the windows on the top floor.

  I found Damien at the kitchen counter eating toast.

  “Er…”

  “I know.”

  It was the way he replied that made me sit down right away.

  “Can you believe it?” he asked.

  I could see the fog from the kitchen window, and the thing was, I couldn’t even make out the trees
through its thickness. Damien took a couple of looks over his shoulder before leaning in to me.

  “I tried to leave The Manor,” he started.

  I felt his nerves, and knew exactly that he meant he didn’t make it very far.

  “What happened?”

  He muttered, “I couldn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to get out today,” he continued. “Just for a bit, just for a chance, and see if the rest of campus was up and running again. I felt like going to the coffee shop in the library for a breakfast sandwich, but I never made it past the fence. I couldn’t see in front of me. I was lucky Iris saw me go out. She led me back in and told me it was too dangerous, that I couldn’t go out. Who knows how lost I could have been.”

  The fog was more than just weird. It had a presence, and it almost had a purpose. Was it surrounding us, making us float high above the world? Damien got up and got himself a mug for coffee.

  “Want a cup?”

  “Yeah,” I said right away.

  Damien fixed our mugs, cream and sugar and all, and put them at our places at the counter.

  “Ah, crap,” he said looking at the coffee machine. “Anyone that uses the last of it before noon has to make a fresh pot.”

  I drank mine as he opened cabinets and drawers in the kitchen. As he got out a filter package, Iris strolled into the kitchen with wet hair fresh from a shower.

  “Hi everyone,” she said with a smile. “Careful not to go outside today, the fog is just way too thick.”

  As if we didn’t know.

  Damien looked up at her, then back down at the coffee filters and the bag of grounds. Iris and I both noticed how lost he looked.

  “Need some help there, Rookie?” asked Iris with a flirty smirk.

  Damien only smiled sheepishly. “Yeah, you know, I had one of those Keurig things in my room with the little cups that is much easier—

  “Oh, don’t worry about it.”

  She walked over right past me and set to helping Damien make more coffee; her backside brushed against his left leg and he started, trying to act like it was nothing. I drank my cup as she made a fresh brew.

  “There ya go!” Iris proclaimed.

  I leaned my head down as she left, and kept it down until Damien sat down next to me.

  “Sky? You okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Our first gathering of the day started soon after, everyone comfortable in the lower lounge already as Carol fixed up the fireplace. High on the mantelpiece stood a Mayan calendar. I supposed Mitchell find one somewhere and found it very necessary to sit there and stare at us all. It was the digital clock counting down to Judgment Day and our supposed doom. The fog that surrounded The Manor and the wooded area kept us packed in tightly. No one dared to go outside the house for fear of getting lost. You couldn’t see your own feet outside. It just wasn’t an option. I of course had my theory on the fog.

  There were also two trays of banana bread on the table most of us had our eyes on.

  “Don’t let a little fog frighten you,” Mitchell started. “Just think of it as The White Light’s blanket of protection.” He held a stack of napkins in his hand and passed them out, turning to the table to get a tray.

  “Keep bringing leftover bananas from the caf and you get homemade banana bread!” Mitchell said enthusiastically. “Smooth and moist with a little nut crunch.”

  Nuts. The ultimate bubble burster. I stole a look at Damien.

  Mitchell passed the bread out to everyone and once Damien and I got ours, when the teacher wasn’t looking, we stole looks again.

  “What do you have?” I whispered.

  “Chocolate ho-hos,” he whispered back.

  “Close your eyes while you are enjoying your treats,” Mitchell instructed. He closed his eyes as well while Damien quietly rummaged in his backpack. I swear, he always bought snacks from every vending machine in the school store. He was my own 7-11.

  “Children, when The White Light appeared to me all those years ago it gave me the vision of hope. The vision of The New Life and what’s to come ahead. You’ve heard the expression ‘there is light at the end of the tunnel.’ Well, some like to say that that light is actually the headlamp of an oncoming train, if they were pessimists, but I say to you to real answer is the light symbolizes hope. It symbolizes the answer to all problems. You must follow the light to get out of the dark. The Light is waiting for us, wants us to find it. Are we ready to accept the Light? Concentrate, concentrate on your Lights. Go towards the Light. Go towards it. Cast us out of the world of darkness. We are coming, White Light. Say it out loud.”

  “We are coming, White Light,” we repeated.

  I took a deep breath and relaxed, but really, I couldn’t get anywhere. I didn’t seem to see anything or feel anything special. When the meditation session was over with everyone got up and filed out of the lower lounge like soldiers, clearly still in touch with themselves and what they were able to reach that I somehow did not. It could have been that I had so much on my mind I just could not relax. I went up the stairs like normal, but everyone else floated. They walked like they carried eggs on their heads, like these eggs were a secret everyone knew about but me.

  Almost everyone.

  I found Damien at dinner early, alone, chin in his fists. His punctuality bugged me, but it was his stature that bugged me the most. He looked like The Thinker, and that was all he was doing, and his face said that he got nowhere so far.

  “Damien?” I asked sitting down.

  “I still can’t do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “I can’t…concentrate. I think I am the only one whose…spirit…hasn’t traveled yet.”

  I wouldn’t have been more surprised if he levitated off the ground right then and there.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Iris,” he spat. “She told me I wasn’t strong enough.”

  My jaw clenched and I exclaimed before he was done talking.

  “Why would she say that?”

  “Because I wasn’t tired after the meditation session. She came up to me with a disappointed look on her face and said I wasn’t ‘connecting.’ It made me feel like a little kid.”

  “Okay,” I said finger-combing through my hair. “Well I wasn’t ‘connecting’ during that session either. All I can think about is that fog and…”

  My voice trailed off as I looked out the window.

  “Did it get thicker?”

  Damien looked in my direction and his look stayed there. The fog was so great it seeped through the windowsill and wood of the house.

  “Maybe Iris knows about it.”

  “No, man! Seriously, what is with you? Do not ask her! She’s a manipulator. She’s probably possessed.”

  We heard some voices coming down the hall, and soon the others started trickling in for dinner. We were having, of course, turkey sandwiches.

  ***

  I had some time the next day to do some exploring after we parted ways for free time…and before Mitchell could put us in another group activity. I wasn’t even sure there was going to be anything. The Manor was so quiet, the freezing fog outside enough to keep everybody in and hidden. In my mind, I turned on all my senses. I thought that now I had a very keen sense, but even more so if I concentrated.

  I need your help, I thought. Guide me.

  I wasn’t even sure if he could hear me. It bothered me that I was unable to see his spirit in a very long time, but I knew that beyond all that fog he still lingered, still watched over me. He probably knew all about the spirits of The Manor. Maybe it was he who tried to warn me. Either way, they were not letting him come any closer.

  I passed the hallway leading to the lower lounge, the door slightly ajar. The angel statue turned away from me, its nose pointing directly down the stairs. I went down, expecting candles lining the stairs but there were none, as there was no ceremony planned. The lower lounge was dark, a little chilly, and it surprised me no
one was down there. Part of me felt uneasy, thinking I shouldn’t go down there. I pressed on. I pressed on only because I heard the fireplace again.

  It wheezed as usual, but I could have sworn it was also whispering. I reached the base of the stairs and tried to make it out. I didn’t really hear words, but a human voice rushed in and out of the fireplace as effortless as wind. My legs pinched with cold, my socks stiff over numb toes as I walked downstairs. The Mayan calendar stared at me from the mantle, and the fireplace still huffed and puffed but did not blow down the poster board timelines from the walls. A whisper ran right past my left ear, forcing my head to turn towards the windows. Another past my right ear, turning my head again. I stared at both windows, back and forth, where both the fog and the frost worked together. Something was breathing on the windows.

  The fog swirled against a mighty wind, the fireplace echoing it in a wheezy burst. I saw on the window the frost began to shift and the window clear up, only to have fresh frost form against it. It heard voices fly by my ear, but I couldn’t hear what they said. It didn’t matter. The windows told me what they said.

  In the fog and frost I saw the letters swirl in cursive. First a D, then an E and more and more. My head frantically turned at all the windows, reading the phrase as it repeated itself across the room.

  Death is the answer

  Death is the answer

  Death is the answer

  Everywhere I turned the phrase ran itself across the windows, like writing on the car window with your finger. Now I could hear it.

  I went back upstairs casually and asked around if anyone saw Damien. I got mostly blank stares and shrugs. Seth was reading his braille device and Becky was helping Carol put away dishes, and no one really knew anything. The cold traveled from my legs to my heart as I rushed into the hallway to the residential floors. I had a feeling. You know the kind. When something inside you just knows that something is going on. I couldn’t exactly explain how or why, but I felt that, and after seeing what happened downstairs it was like it gave me the answer I wasn’t looking for but I thought I understood.