“No, going through an object—if you don’t affect it—doesn’t use your strength. We can all do that. And if you just release yourself—open yourself to the object—it won’t hurt anymore. Not at all.”
That’s why the other ghosts could easily pass through walls without even flinching. And when that Third Former had crossed through me from behind, it hadn’t hurt because I hadn’t even known it was happening. Now it made sense.
I had to try. I reached out to a tree branch nearby. I tried to relax my arm and move it through the dangling leaves. I recoiled. It still stung.
“You must open yourself. Completely,” she instructed.
I closed my eyes and tried my hardest to feel open, to feel free, and swept my arm up. As I opened my eyes, I saw my arm pass though the leaves and branch painlessly. I smiled, sighing with relief.
“But your power—your ability to change things, to do things in the world of the living—is precious,” Ruth urged. “Save it.”
All my efforts flashed in front of me like slides in art history class—trying to lift the leaf that first night outside Skellenger, shaking the crime scene investigator’s table, writing in the steam on the window in the library, making the butterflies flutter in the Headmaster’s Quarters, writing on the steam on Malcolm’s window … Each of those actions was marching me closer to total powerlessness. How much energy remained? There was so much left to do, but I had no idea how much power I still had. I was beginning to look almost translucent, like the others. I exchanged a look with Gabe. He could see my concern.
“Can you tell us about the other ghosts?” Gabe asked.
She shrugged. “What is there to say? We don’t talk. Minerva forbids it.”
“Does she say why?”
“She told me they’re angry and dangerous … not to be trusted. She told me to stay away from them. And she’s frightening. Powerful. So I just go about my own business. I sing. I watch the clouds. Time is all a blur.”
I knew what she meant.
Gabe reported the information to Malcolm, adding, “Minerva must not want them to talk for a reason. If they all talk they might figure something out. And she doesn’t want them to.” For someone so exceptionally skilled at concocting far-fetched theories, this one actually sounded plausible.
“That’s why we’re going to bring them all here,” I said.
“Now.”
RUTH WAS NERVOUS ABOUT the plan. She’d gone so many years without talking to the others. I understood. It was overwhelming. She was terrified of them. We all were. I pointed out that if we were scared of them, then maybe they were just as scared of us. After all, I’d been terrified of Ruth until I met her. Maybe that was part of Minerva’s plan. Finally Ruth nodded, agreeing to proceed.
We didn’t want any of the living people to hear us, so Gabe and Malcolm remained silent. I sprung up to the roof of the Founders Tomb so that my voice might boom all across campus. I shouted out each girl’s name, turning to face in the direction where I knew she resided. “Clara! Florence! Mary! Lydia! Brit! I’m speaking to all the dead of Wickham Hall! You were murdered! You are stuck here—lingering—and I am, too! I need to know why! Why us?! I want to free us so we can move on! Please come! Talk to me! Talk to us! Tell us your story!”
Silence.
No ghosts. I couldn’t blame them if they needed more convincing. Years, decades of fear must run deep. I jumped down off the crypt and looked to the notebook Malcolm held open for me with notes about each girl.
I started with Mary because I knew she lingered right there in the cemetery.
“Mary! Do you hear me?! Did you really cut your own wrists because you were depressed? Unable to hack it here at Wickham Hall? Seriously?! You were on the honor roll, and you couldn’t take it here? What a lie! They said the same thing about me! Are we going to let that be the record forever? That we were quitters and losers?! I don’t believe these stories! None of them! Do you even know what they said about you?!”
Gabe stepped back, staggered by my force. I was surprised, too. I hadn’t planned this speech. It just barreled out of me, fueled by my anger at my own death and its cover-up, Ruth’s death … all these senseless deaths. Anger I hadn’t even known I had bottled up.
“Florence! Were you really so clumsy that you slipped and fell off the top of Skellenger? You were a dancer. You were graceful, weren’t you? And Clara, you were a smart girl. Did you really just go out in the lake alone at night?! I don’t believe it! And Brit, you did kill yourself, didn’t you? But why? What did they do to you?! And what about the rest of you?! Where are you?! Come out! Tell us your stories!”
As I shouted, shadowy figures peeked from the trees. They started to surround us, but none drew close. Each was still dressed in her period clothing—a flapper dress, a sixties suit, a Victorian bathing costume, skinny jeans and flats—it was like being encircled by an exhibit at The Met, “150 Years of Style.”
Finally, Mary, who had been lurking in front of the Founders Tomb, stepped forward. But she kept silent.
Then Florence appeared. “I was not clumsy!” she insisted. All at once she was raving about Willfred Pinfolds and the Skellenger cupola—how he’d been disgusted with her immigrant status and challenged her to climb to the very top. Did he push her? Did she slip? She wasn’t certain. The details were blurry. She’d had something to drink that night. A few somethings. He might’ve come up behind her. She might’ve slipped. She wasn’t at all sure.
At some point Nature Preserve Girl arrived. I saw now that she was clearly from the seventies—with bell-bottoms and long flowing hair. But she lurked in the shadows behind the others, with her arms clutched to her chest.
Then Brit approached. She told us her story. It was devastating, but none of the other ghosts understood what MySpace or cyber-bullying was.
Then Clara—still in her Victorian bathing suit—appeared, attempting to cover herself although the bathing costume concealed practically every inch of skin.
They all hovered around us. I was partly grateful to see them and still partly afraid. But so were they. Which made me more certain that Minerva had somehow orchestrated all of this.
“And, Lydia, did you know they found ten hits of LSD in your system and said you broke your own neck, high on drugs?! Do you really want your family to think you took those drugs and died that way? Do you want to be remembered like that? And let people get away with murder?!”
Lydia was suddenly there. She remembered the bitter taste as Cyrus Huckle had kissed her; he’d slipped her LSD. As she lay dying, LSD was pouring into her system. It seemed to stick, making her eternally aggressive and crazy. She was enduring every teenage druggie’s nightmare: the never-ending acid trip. At least now she understood why she felt this way, as much as you can understand anything while on ten hits of acid.
I turned to them all. “What about the rest of you?!” I noticed Nature Preserve Girl slip off into the night. I continued, louder; I needed as many as I could get. “Do we want to be remembered this way?! Will we accept these murders?!”
Lydia screamed, “NO!” Then there came a chorus of NOs. Ending with Mary just shrieking, silencing everyone.
“I was murdered,” Mary said. And the others chimed in, speaking over one another.
“As was I,” Clara vowed. “They drowned me. They pushed me under.”
“I can tell you one thing for certain,” Florence insisted. “I did not jump!”
“And, mon dieu!” Ruth added. “I did not cut my own throat!”
I saw relief wash over Gabe. He’d spent so long fearing—even tortured by—these girls. He’d finally heard the truth: we were all victims and had no intention of hurting anyone. Not yet, anyway …
The chatter ended when Mary said, “I saw who did it. His name was Samuels. Burr Samuels. He looked me in the eye as he cut my wrists.”
Gabe and I exchanged a look. “Burr Samuels is still alive,” Gabe told her. “He’s here on campus. Right now.”
I wat
ched Mary fill with rage—unsure what we could say or do to calm her—so I didn’t notice we were surrounded until it was too late.
It all happened so fast. There were more police officers than I’d ever seen in one place before. And campus security guards. And Headmaster Thorton. And there, skulking at the very far back of the crowd, was Kent.
They were there to arrest Gabe for my murder. Apparently they had “more than enough evidence to indict.” They’d been to his room and discovered the strange objects. They’d found my phone—which he’d discarded in the dumpsters behind the Art Center—smothered with his prints. The clincher: his prints were all over the well. They grabbed him and held him firmly, handcuffing his hands behind his back. Through the trees I could see the flash of sirens.
“You’re wrong!” Malcolm shouted. “He didn’t do anything! He’s innocent!”
Gabe looked at me, his eyes terrified.
I was terrified, too. I couldn’t lose him. He was my hands, my voice. He was my sole connection to the earth, to the world of the living. To Malcolm. I wanted to collapse or cry or rage—I wasn’t sure which—but I was the only person who could talk to him and calm him in the midst of the chaos, so I had to be strong. Or at least pretend to be.
“If they take you, we will save you. I promise we will get you out of there,” I assured him.
“No! Don’t worry about me,” he said to me, no longer caring that a dozen cops and security guards were glaring at him. “Don’t waste your energy on me! Just fix things here. You have to get them. You have to stop them!”
I saw the officers exchange looks. He was talking to thin air—sure evidence of his guilt, not to mention insanity.
“Don’t speak to me,” I hissed. “They already think you’re a loon ball.”
He laughed.
“And don’t laugh. We will save you. All of us.” I gestured to the ghosts. “We will save you. I promise.”
“We will,” Ruth echoed, assuring him.
One of the officers found Gabe’s jacket on a tombstone nearby, another Wickham occult vessel in its pocket.
“Is this your jacket?” he asked.
Malcolm jumped in. “It’s mine.”
The police looked at him dubiously as they pulled Gabe’s phone from the other pocket. Gabe shook his head at Malcolm. He was grateful for the attempt, but he knew it was futile. “No, it’s my jacket,” Gabe stated.
Malcolm glared at him. “Gabe, for Christ’s sake—”
“Let it go. For now. Liv wants you to let it go,” Gabe lied.
“I didn’t say that!” I yelled. But Gabe ignored me. I realized it was the first time he’d misrepresented me.
He was surprisingly level-headed as the officers patted him down. “We can’t say anything that will change their minds. Let them take me. They’ll learn the truth eventually,” he told us both as they escorted him back through the woods toward the flashing lights.
I followed, desperate. Malcolm followed as well, yelling at the police about how Gabe was different than the other students and he’d been victimized and taunted and bullied. Grasping, Malcolm told the police this was a conspiracy against Gabe created by students who didn’t like him.
“I appreciate the effort, man, but let it go,” Gabe said, sincerely. “You know what’s most important right now: to learn the truth and bring justice. For her.”
I raced to him. I was desperate to hug him or comfort him, anything. But I only had words. “I’ll bring justice for you, too,” I said. “But how am I going to do it without you?”
He quietly said, “Malcolm.”
“But he can’t hear me! I can’t communicate with him.”
“You have to.”
“Yes,” I replied. He was right. I had to.
He then turned to Malcolm and whispered, “Go back to the cemetery with Liv, try to listen for her clues. She’ll come back to your room tonight and tell you what’s next.”
Malcolm had no choice but to agree. Especially since one of the police officers barked, “And you, don’t stray too far from campus. We need to talk to you, too.”
I couldn’t just stand and watch Gabe being shoved into a car and disappear down the road in a whirl of flashing lights and sirens, I chased after him. But I started to feel weak. My thoughts became muddled and unclear. My limbs started to evaporate before my eyes—just as they had in the limousine with my parents. Clearly I was not meant to leave Wickham Hall. I paused on the threshold of the school, afraid of what might happen if I crossed the boundary. From a distance, I thought I saw him look back toward me through the window, his eyes unfocused, searching the air. He couldn’t see me, but he knew I was there.
AS I APPROACHED THE cemetery, I caught a glimpse of Minerva peeking from her tomb. When she saw me, she withdrew into the darkness. But Ruth, Mary, Florence, Lydia, Brit, and Clara were all still gathered, tentatively talking amongst themselves. I had a flash of hope. We were united now. At least most of us.
Malcolm sat slumped on a gravestone in the middle of them, unaware of the chatter bouncing around him. He’d wrapped himself in his wool blazer, chilled from their presence, just waiting for a sign from me.
Ruth and Mary, both Type A, had collected facts. “We died every ten years,” Ruth reported. “Not on the same day, but always on a full moon. In every case, it was related to a popular boy, one who was probably a Victor.”
Mary piped in, “We were all scholarship students.”
“Or outcasts,” Brit added.
“Freaks,” Lydia barked.
“I believe we were all murdered by the Victors,” Ruth explained. “Could it have been some sort of ritual established by the Wickhams?”
“And the ritual trapped us here …” Mary paused, afraid to say forever.
I nodded, shrugging. I wasn’t certain about any of it.
“But I want to see my mother and father. My sweet baby sister. I’ve been here too, too long,” Clara said, weeping. She’d been here the longest, since 1885. “I want to ascend. I have seen so many others do it: the students who perished from tuberculosis, influenza. It is a beautiful thing. I want that, too.”
A chorus of yeses followed. All they wanted was to stop the curse (whatever it was) and move on to where they were supposed to be (wherever that was). I don’t know. I guess probably heaven. I was beginning to think, or at least hope, such a place existed.
“We’re going to fix it, right?” Ruth looked to me and gestured to Malcolm. “He can help us fix it.”
“Like how?” Brit demanded.
“Minerva! I know you’re listening!” I yelled, then turned to address the others. “The Wickhams were into the occult. They had to be the ones who created this ritual and established the Victors, right? And, for all these years, Minerva kept you all from talking to one another, from doing anything. There had to be a reason for that. Minerva’s the culprit. I think she started it all.”
They all nodded. It only made sense. So I turned to her crypt. “Come tell us what you know, what you created!” I soared over to her hiding place, but she was gone.
I rushed past Malcolm. “Time to go?” he asked, feeling the chill. He got up, shivering, but his eyes wide and somehow happy. All he really seemed to care about was that I was still here. I smiled, until I looked up and saw all the ghosts peering at me curiously.
“You are in love,” Florence said.
“Madly, madly in love,” Ruth added, almost giddy.
I nodded, then rushed alongside Malcolm. I didn’t notice Ruth following us.
BACK IN MALCOLM’S ROOM at Pitman, he cranked up the heat so it blasted onto his window, slowly forming steam. While we waited, he took out his iPhone and set it up so the keyboard on its screen was readily available to me. I needed to use the bare minimum amount of energy. So I typed dad then sam … every single stroke was excruciating. Exhausting. And I watched my consistency dilute as if the painter was mixing a bit more solvent into the paint.
“Samuels,” Malcolm said before I
finished spelling it, “I’ll talk to him. Tomorrow. And my father …” he trailed off. The mere thought of confronting his father about anything made him uncomfortable. “He was president of the Victors, so he has to know something.”
When the window was thoroughly steamed, Malcolm used it as a canvas. “I know you can’t waste your energy drawing. So I will,” he said as he drew a girl flying—not floating but flying—gliding over a small world beneath her.
He worked slowly and carefully, and I watched every stroke. I could see slivers of his reflection in the window where he was drawing. The soles of the girl’s feet were in the foreground. Her arms stretched in front of her like a superhero. Her right pointer finger reaching forward … almost touching another hand—his hand. A boy stretched out in the far distance, connected to the earth but reaching up and up, attempting the incredible feat of touching her finger. Nearly grasping her. It was kind of like The Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel, where God reaches to Adam and Adam reaches to God, their fingertips nearly touching. That was me and Malcolm: so close to each other yet impossibly apart. Impossibly disconnected.
Suddenly I saw Ruth’s faint bloody neck through the strokes in the steam. I lurched backward, screaming. She moved her head down so I could see her entire face then effortlessly pushed through the window into the room.
“Je suis désolée! I gave you a terrible fright! So sorry, but I wanted to share something with you.”
I shook my head, trying to smile and recover my composure.
She stood there awkwardly, all social graces erased over the last hundred years.
“You can visit him in his dreams, just as I visited you that night before you died. You can be with him that way. It’s just a dream, but when you’re there, it feels very real.”
Of course! I almost reached out to hug her. Why hadn’t I thought of that? If Ruth had been able to do that, I should be able to also. “But I can’t waste my energy.”
“That won’t use it. It’s only when you affect the real world that your energy diminishes.”
“How can I get there? Into his dream?”
Liv, Forever Page 17
