Sopping wet, Jordin got to her feet and turned back to the edge of the pond, searching desperately for something I couldn't see.
"If you jump back in there, I'm not helping you again!" I warned her, furious.
"I'm not going back in!" she replied.
"What were you doing? And why would you dive in when you're obviously such a terrible swimmer?"
"I'm a fantastic swimmer, Maia," she retorted angrily. "Something had a grip on my leg! It was pulling me under!"
I frowned, not liking the sound of that. "Then what made you dive in, in the first place?"
Jordin looked back at the water again, searching its calm, smooth surface. "I saw a person!" she said. "Or maybe a body! It was floating on the water."
"You almost drowned because you were looking for a body you think you saw floating on the water?" I cried.
She spun and glared at me. "I don't think I saw it, I know I saw it. It was there! I just wanted to touch it-"
"Why?!" I screamed. "Why are you willing to risk your life for this?"
She looked at me with a mixture of hesitation, fear, and defiance. "I told you, my parents-"
"NO!! Don't give me that again!" I shouted. "There's more to this, and you know it! For crying out loud, just tell me, Jordin!"
"You won't believe me!" she shouted back.
"If anyone in this world is prepared to believe you, it's me. Did you ever think of that?"
"My family is cursed," she blurted out, tears spilling out of her eyes.
I was sure I'd heard her wrong.
I turned her loose and took a step back as she took a long, steadying breath.
"A few years ago, an uncle of mine told me that the women in my family were cursed a long while back by some kind of Haitian witch doctor. My great-great-grandparents lived there as missionaries, and my great-great-grandmother did something to offend a local tribe. I don't know what. So a priest placed a curse on her, that every female descendant she had would die either right after she got married or after the birth of a child, so they would never know the fulfillment of what it truly is to be a woman."
She'd gone off the deep end. If that was seriously what all of this was about, then Jordin was certifiable. I couldn't help feeling a hint of amusement that if the two of us were at a party, suddenly I wouldn't be the one that everybody pointed at and whispered about.
Jordin spotted my lopsided smile before I could conceal it. "Go ahead and laugh. I didn't want to believe it at first, either. But it's real!"
"Jordin," I said, trying to be rational without making her sound as crazy as she obviously was, "I've never heard of a real case where anybody has been cursed to die. There have been claims, but proof has never-"
"I know it's true!" she replied, almost shouting now, and trembling with emotion. "After he told me, my uncle gave me a box of old records. Newspaper clippings, handwritten love letters, birth and death certificates. A complete record of every one of my female ancestors going back to my great-great-grandmothermy mother, grandmother, and four other women in my family between them. All of them died at unusually young ages, all within a few years of getting married or giving birth. And all under very odd circumstances."
Okay, I was a little intrigued now. "Odd, how?"
"Freak accidents, like the way my parents died."
Jordin's parents had been gruesomely killed by a runaway train engine that jumped the tracks and slammed into the back of their limousine.
"You know how my parents' deaths were all over the TV and stuff?" she went on. "It was the same with the rest. Mostly newspaper articles. I saw them all. It was one horrific, outlandish death after another. Being attacked by a wolf up north. A house catching fire and burning down because a tiny meteor hit its gas line. Getting washed into a sewer drain during a flood and drowning in sewage."
I didn't want to hear any more. "Okay, I get it...."
"These deaths were real. They happened-you can look them up at the library to confirm, and I have. Not one of them lived past the age of twenty-seven, Maia. Not one."
I couldn't think of anything to say.
"You may think it's crazy, but I want to marry Derek and live a long, happy life with him. I want to have children with him. And I don't want any of the crazy things that have happened to my family members to happen to me. Or to him because he's near me. Or to any of our children!"
"Okay, okay," I said softly, resigning with my hands up. "I understand. I get it. What I don't get is how your obsession with ghosts is going to help you undo this supposed curse."
Jordin let out another long, heavy breath. "My uncle found a diary that belonged to my grandmother. It was the reason he came to me about all this in the first place. He said that in her diary, my grandmother had written not long before her death that she found a way to remove the curse. A Native American shaman told her that a curse is like a physical, tangible mark on the soul. And the only way to remove it is to rip the curse from the soul."
My ears were burning as I stared Jordin down. This story of hers explained every bit of her motivations and behavior, but it was preposterous.
"This is what you've been after all this time? You've been trying to find a way to physically touch your own soul? Jordin, it's madness."
"I know," she moaned. "I just thought ... if I could catch an apparition somehow... maybe I could use it. It's part of the spirit world, where souls live, right?"
I shook my head in dismissal. "Ghosts are intangible, Jordin, you can't use-"
I stopped talking as we heard heavy, clomping footsteps echoing off the wooden planks of Sachs Bridge.
A dark figure walked into view at the far end. It stood there as we watched, blinking open a pair of glowing red eyes. It watched us silently.
A searing pain struck my chest and I clutched it, sinking to my knees.
"Maia!" Jordin shrieked, ignoring our intruder for the moment. "What's wrong?"
"My ... heart. . ." I gasped, finding it hard to breathe the suddenly freezing air and even harder to speak. I thought of the Valium. "Pills ... in my bag..."
But Jordin couldn't understand my mumblings. "Hold on! I'll call 9-1-1!" she cried, panicking at the sight of me pale and weak and in pain.
I could see past her shoulder down the tunnel of the covered bridge, and what I saw made my heart beat even heavier. "Jordin!" I hissed, raising a weakened arm to point behind her.
She turned and saw what I saw. The shadow figure was moving.
It was striding or gliding-I couldn't tell which-in our direction, right down the center of the bridge. As it walked, it passed into the ambient moonlight shining through the slats in the bridge walls, and we both gasped as we caught glimpses of it in the dim light. There, it was no longer a shadow person. It looked like a Confederate soldier, its rifle raised and pointed at us, and it had dark black circles around its eyes. Yet it wasn't fully solid; we could partially see through it.
Those eyes were locked onto ours, and it was marching forward slowly, as if planning to take us prisoner or take us down.
Jordin looked back at me. "Can you walk?" she asked, frantic.
I was still holding my speeding heart, unable to look away from the ghostly soldier bearing down on us. I shook my head in response to her question, while simultaneously wondering if this was what a heart attack felt like.
Jordin reached over and tried in vain to heft me up in both of her arms, but I was just too heavy for her. I was a good twenty pounds or more heavier than she was, and she wasn't exactly a body builder.
"Is it residual?" she whispered.
I shook my head, certain from the way the ghost had its gaze locked onto the two of us like we were prey that this was not some event from long ago merely replaying itself.
"Intelligent," I whispered through wheezing breaths.
I watched her eyes dart back and forth in thought, weighing options. She glanced over her shoulder and saw that the ghost was getting close now; it had spanned more than half the length of th
e bridge already and would be here in seconds.
"I don't know what to do!" Jordin cried, her voice echoing through the tunnel bridge.
The sounds seemed to give her an idea, so she stood to her feet and turned to face down the ghost, then screamed at the top of her lungs. It wasn't a frightened scream; it was a challenge. A primal warning to stay back.
The ghost did nothing to acknowledge her. Jordin looked back down at me and saw my eyes growing wider as the ghost drew near. I didn't want to increase her panic, but I couldn't help it. I was having some kind of cardiac arrest and this thing was behaving like it posed a genuine danger to us.
I saw Jordin breathing faster and faster, and without warning, she turned and let out a roar as she ran at breakneck speed straight into the tunnel, aiming for the apparition.
In seconds she reached it, and I watched in horror as she passed straight through it. I couldn't believe my eyes, having clearly seen the ghost envelop her completely.
I heard Jordin let out a horrendous gasp as she emerged from the other side of the apparition, and she immediately hugged herself, shivering, and dizzily fell to the ground.
I wanted to go to her, but I couldn't move. I could see her, though, and her face was whiter than I'd ever seen it. She was shaking as she looked up. Our eyes met, and the two of us watched the spirit vaporize and vanish into the air between us.
We stayed there, just outside the bridge, for the better part of half an hour. It was a good five minutes after the apparition disappeared before Jordin was able to pick herself up off the wooden bridge and feebly walk to where I sat.
She tried repeatedly to call 9-1-1, but her phone kept going dead, and when it did work, she couldn't get a signal.
What she had felt and experienced when she passed through the ghost had left her undone. Her countenance had changed drastically, her usual pretenses replaced by something much more somber and emotionally transparent.
The only words that were spoken were some she mumbled about having felt the ghost's feelings when she touched it. She kept repeating the words "no hope" and "worst fears." It was like an assault upon her senses, and it overloaded her.
I improved greatly after the spirit disappeared. Deciding that I hadn't had a heart attack after all but just the most severe panic attack ever, we sat tight for a while until I felt like I could move again.
When my strength returned, Jordin helped me stand.
We hiked the half mile back to the car slowly, mostly in silence, though once we were seated inside the vehicle, Jordin softly asked, "Why didn't you tell me?"
I was too spent to lie. "I only found out the full extent of it a little more than a month ago. It was personal. And scary. Like your curse, I suppose."
Jordin nodded without offering a reply as she started the car's engine.
Neither of us said anything else that night. We merely returned to our room at the Cashtown Inn, moving like zombies.
The next morning, I met Jordin downstairs at the checkout counter. Her bags were nowhere in sight, but I assumed she had already taken them to the rental car, because I could tell from the state of our room that she had been up for hours before I awoke.
Everything about her was different now. After last night, her disposition toward me was one of absolute honesty. Like I had seen her as naked and exposed as humanly possible, and she simply had nothing to hide from me anymore. Her arrogance, her chipper silliness, even her energetic resolve had all been dropped.
She didn't smile when she saw me descend the stairs, but her countenance wasn't cold toward me at all. She just felt no need to pretend about how she felt.
After she paid the bill, she pulled me aside in the tiny foyer, and her sad eyes darkened her usually sunny good looks. "I'm not leaving," she said.
"What do you mean?"
"You're going home," she explained. "I'm staying awhile longer. I want to poke around Gettysburg some more. Then I was thinking of heading to England to check out the Tower of London-"
"I'm not going to just leave you here-"
Jordin held up a hand. "I understand why you didn't tell me about your heart thing. But you're placing your life in danger every time we do this, and the truth is, I don't need you anymore. You taught me well. I'm ready to go solo."
Her resolve was absolute. Her announcement sounded as if she'd rehearsed it.
"Jordin, I think something is wrong with you! " I blurted out desperately.
"What?" she said, curious but not alarmed.
"I think you're attracting all of this activity somehow. The amount of stuff we've seen-it's not normal. I think you might be some kind of paranormal focal point."
Jordin scrunched up her face, like she'd just smelled something repugnant. "That's not even a real thing. Is it? Have you ever met anyone who was a.. . `focal point'?"
"Well, no ..."
"Mafia-"
"If I'm right, then you'd be insane to investigate alone! You could be risking your life!"
"If I let you come with me, I'm riskingyour life. I'm not willing to do that."
My temper flared. "Jordin, you hired me to help you, and after last night, I will not let you do this alone! You're going to get yourself killed!"
Her expression hardened. "A boarding pass is waiting in the passenger's seat of the cab outside. For your own sake, Maia,you're done. If Derek or anybody else asks why you came back without me, just say the trip ended badly. We'll say we had a big fight or something and we're not friends anymore."
"Jordin, you can't do this-"
"Go home, Maia," Jordin said simply but compassionately. "You're fired."
She turned and ascended the nearby stairs, leaving me to watch her go in staggered silence.
The scales were torn violently from my eyes, and I entered a new world of majesty and terror.
The atmosphere around me drained away, water flowing out of a tub. But it wasn't just the air. Everything faded-the light and the temperature and the water in my eyes and my throbbing heartbeat and the blood pulsing through my veins....
Everything, sapped from my being.
Even though my eyes had been open when I passed through the veil, they opened anew now. Everything had an intense clarity, as if my vision had gone far beyond 20/20 to 20/ 10 or something infinitely better.
I could see for the very first time.
But that was only after the pain subsided.
I felt my soul being ripped away from my physical body, and it was an agony I've never known. The fabric of everything that was me was cleaved in two, and I felt my essence being pulled away from my skin, heart, organs, bones, and even my blood.
I understood now why death was often viewed from the outside as such a peaceful thing; with the body and all of its parts dead, there was nothing to anchor the soul, to keep it trapped within. Its separation from the body must be akin to the shedding of dead skin. Painless, easy, even invigorating.
The process I endured felt like being smashed by a steamroller and the me inside my body squeezed out. Only worse.
When it was done, I was no longer in the Body Chamber. My soul had been yanked down several stories in the building into what looked like some sort of repository. I was kind of standing or maybe floating in a cylindrical capsule that glowed white on all sides. As I tried to see out beyond the glowing walls, everything faded from my memory.
I had no idea who I was or how I'd gotten there. My essence was a numb haze, a puddle of thought and sensation. I felt my consciousness drift inside the capsule, billowing with an imaginary breeze. Self-awareness left me; I had evaporated.
My bright, glowing surroundings slid down and out of sight, and I saw impossible things I couldn't begin to describe, though I wasn't truly aware of what I was seeing or feeling. I glided out of the tiny pod I'd been contained in and was shunted out into some kind of large space where there were hundreds of others like me, billowing unconstrained in a sea.
But each soul was different. Some were bright and radiant, others dis
gusting and vile. A handful of them seemed to have a small but bright light radiating inside them....
I was taking in my surroundings without any real interest or concern, when something grabbed me. I don't know how long it was until I realized that another spirit was holding on to me, their face leaning into mine.
"Maia Peters!!" the spirit shouted. "Do you hear me? Maia?! You're Maia Peters! Come back!"
I had a flash of awareness and suddenly everything came rushing in. I was Maia Peters. This was some kind of facility in New York owned by Durham Holdings International. I'd come here with Derek Hobbes and Pierre Ravenwood, hoping to find-
"Jordin!" I said. "Jordin, you're here!"
Myvoice sounded different, just as Jordin's had. It still sounded like me, but it reverberated with a fuller, richer sound.
"Maia..."Jordin was awash in relief, but then she did a oneeighty and turned harsh on me. "Do you have any idea what you've done? You shouldn't have crossed through the veil!"
"Jordin ... I had the symbol," I explained. "On my neck. This was going to happen whether I wanted it to or not!"
"There's no way to get back!" she cried. "Once you've crossed to this side of the veil, you can't go back into your body."
"We'll see about that," I declared. "I have an idea...."
My attention shifted to the wonders of the world around me. I was still inside the DHI building, of that much I was certain. The pristine white walls were unmistakable, as was the wide-open round room that was almost the same size as the Body Chamber above us. And I knew from the falling sensation that I had passed through several floors after the procedure was complete. But without windows or some other frame of reference, I had no idea what part of the building I was in.
I could see every part of the mortal world, even though I was no longer a part of it. It was sharp and distinct in ways I had never imagined the world could be. I saw textures and colors that I had never before known to exist. And I could look at objects all the way down to the molecular level if I chose. It was effortless and it was incredible.
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