Essence

by Mandi Lynn

  Chapter 33

  Savior

  The trails that run through the White Mountain National Forest are winding and seem endless. As soon as I think I’ve found the end of one path, I look up and find a turn in the trail that uncovers more. It seems like hikers are contently on the trail rain or shine. Nothing is more magnificent in this area than the waterfalls. When it does rain, the added water just makes the falls so much grander.

  Eliza leads in front of me. We don’t normally travel along these paths, because we might run into and be seen by hikers. It isn’t that they may recognize us from when we were alive, it’s fear that they’ll see we’re different. Although we can both physically be here, water passes through us. The hard stone and soft bark of trees may be solid to our skin, but water moves through us like it isn’t even there.

  The roll of thunder sounds above us. This is why we are here. The beauty of the waterfalls may be precious enough to call hikers out during a shower, but it isn’t enough to bring people in during a storm. Hiking on a path is dangerous enough during a rainy day because of the rocks and roots that stick out, never mind adding in lightning.

  A flash lights the sky. In front of me, Eliza has stopped walking.

  “One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand.”

  Crash.

  The sound is loud enough to be felt. It’s a dramatic long rumble in the sky. Eliza turns around to face me, a look of awe and wonder on her face. “And with the thunder in the air, nothing can stop me,” she whispers as the crash fizzles away in the distance.

  “Three?” I ask. Years ago my dad had told me to watch the lightning in the sky and count. For every five seconds that passes, it means the lightning is a mile away.

  Eliza nods, smiling for a moment as she watches the sky. “It’s close.”

  The wind picks up and brings a shower of rain with it. Like always, it passes right through us, giving the feeling of bugs crawling across our skin. Eliza hugs herself, bracing against the wind, but continues to walk forward. With the wind and rain increasing in strength, it feels like needles being jabbed into my skin, passing through my soul in a slow breath and coming out the other side. I try not to let it slow me down, but Eliza has noticeably lessened her pace.

  “Are you okay?” I ask, just as the rain picks up again. The sounds of the drops hitting the ground fill the forest, and it’s almost as loud as the waterfalls that surround us.

  Eliza shivers, composing herself, ducking her head down without looking at me. She makes a quiet cough and huddles in on herself. I can see the pain she’s going through as the rain passes through her. Every time the wind grows stronger, she cringes, trying to shield herself from the effects, even though it’s a useless effort.

  “Eliza?”

  She looks up at me then, her body shaking. She isn’t cold—an Essence can’t physically feel cold—but something is wrong.

  “I’m fine,” she says, pulling her chin up. Another roll of thunder orchestrates through the air. Her body stills as the sound passes through, and it’s like the thunder has given her strength. I remember what she had said just seconds ago.

  And with the thunder in the air, nothing can stop me. I can see her mouthing the words now, convincing herself the words are true.

  Eliza smiles at me as if to say she’s fine and then just continues on.

  I follow without a word, seeing her pace steadier than ever.

  Just out of the corner of my eye, I see a sharp white line flash across the sky. It’s thin and smooth as it spirals downward toward the Earth. Like a dagger, the lightning aims for something on the ground. Not even a second later, a sound very similar to a whip snaps in the air.

  It seems like the world stops. Eliza is frozen in her tracks, afraid to move. The only thing I can hear is my breathing, loud and nervous. It was as if I could feel the sound waves of the lightning pass through me, but now the entire forest is silent. I close my eyes, listening for something to tell me that whatever the lightning hit, it wasn’t near us. It’s a useless hope, because I saw it. The strike was so frighteningly close, and the snap it made as it crossed the sky was deaf defying.

  “Emma?” Eliza’s voice reaches me, and I can hear her slow footsteps as she comes closer to me. When I open my eyes again, she’s standing just a foot away, hugging her body again like she’s a small pup. “Did you see that?”

  I swallow, my eyes flickering to the corner of the sky where I had witnessed the lightning.

  “We have to leave.” Eliza begins to pull my arm back to where we had come from, away from the lightning.

  “But…” I say, not quite sure why I feel like we have to stay; something keeps me in place.

  Eliza looks at me like I’ve gone insane. “Come on.” She tugs on my arm again, clearly frightened.

  “Help!” The muffled sound is farther away in the distance. Neither of us spoke the words, so we stare at each other in disbelief.

  I turn my body to the source of the sound, away from the path that would lead us back to Phantom Lagoon.

  “What are you doing, Emma?”

  “Finding whoever that was.” I pull away from Eliza’s grasp and toward the sound. It came from one of the waterfalls. The voice sounded close, but with the loud rush of water coming from the falls, it also felt impossibly far.

  “You’ll get yourself killed!” Eliza shouts back at me. Even though she may not believe in my struggles to save whoever is out there, she follows anyway. She’s just a frightened shadow behind me. Eliza doesn’t follow because she wants to help; she follows because she doesn’t want to be alone.

  “I can’t be killed, remember? But whoever is out there can,” I say.

  Eliza just stares at me, the falling rain passing through her body. None of it soaks her skin or drips through her hair.

  “Do you remember what you told me, when I first came to Phantom Lagoon?” I ask, but her face is scared.

  She doesn’t want to stick around here much longer, let alone have a lengthy discussion about right and wrong.

  “You told me that you thought saving a life is a ticket out of here. That’s how you pass on. It’s why you tried to save me.” She looks away from me. “Eliza, you couldn’t save me then, but maybe you can do it now.”

  “I can’t.” When she says it, it’s almost a cry. There are only a few feet of distance between us, but she begins to back away from me.

  “Why?” My voice is a whisper. She doesn’t understand how frail one human life is. I’ve seen my father die in front of my eyes; Eliza’s parents have died, but she’s never seen death. I watched my dad draw his last breath.

  “I can’t fail again, Emma,” she whispers. “I failed to save you and failed to save Kenzie when she ran away.” Another step away from me.

  A quiet, muffled yelp comes from the waterfall again. Eliza hears the sound too and perks up a bit. For a moment I can visibly see strength in her, but she doesn’t step forward.

  “If whoever that is dies…I don’t know what I’d do.” A final crash of thunder rolls over the mountains, and Eliza turns away from me.

  I don’t stop her, because I know it’s useless. She knows her limits, and she doesn’t dare cross them like I do. It’s kept her safe here in Phantom Lagoon, but that’s the problem. No one knows how to leave. What if there’s more out there? What if we can pass on?

  Between the rolls of thunder, I hear the whimpers again. The rain beats down the ground in a rhythm of percussion. The forest is filled with so much noise and life in this one simple frame of time; yet within all that, I can still hear the struggles of the human.

  It doesn’t take long to find the helpless man.

  Following the sound, I see a man with graying brown hair. He’s held prisoner in a stream of rushing water, holding on only by a slippery rock near the edge. The water is deep enough that the man can’t find any footing to get out and other rocks within reach are smooth to the touch with no way of gaining traction. Shrubs and loose tree limbs crowd
around the stream, having accumulated from the winter storms. There’s very little room for the man to move. Every time he finds purchase on a branch, it just falls loose and makes him slip deeper into the water.

  He doesn’t even see me as I approach. Although his arms are rigid, trying to hold on to the rock that keeps him out of the water, his face displays nothing about the situation at hand. His lips move, forming words that he whispers to himself. There’s only a short distance between us, and I can see his entire frame shaking from the cold.

  Kneeling just inches from his hand, which has a vise grip on the rock, I lean forward to grasp his shoulders. It was stupid of me really, because I forgot what I was. Just like that, I lost touch with reality and forgot the simple fact that an Essence can’t make contact with another human. Instead of grabbing the man’s shoulders like I thought, I pass through his body and fall onto the rock he holds.

  We share the same space—he holds the rock, and my ghost form lies across it. I stumble for a moment, and the man notices. His face lifts just long enough to see my face, as I back away. I focus my energy as quickly as I can so I can haunt the man—the beat of a heart, the rush of blood pumping through my system, but most of all the rise and fall of my chest as air passes through. With as much concentration as I can muster, I slip into his body and take control.

  A jolt of freezing cold tingles my skin. The water of the stream rushes against his body and forces me up against the rock. His grip is holding, and I can feel the muscles strain against the push of the stream. Something weighs down on me, and I realize it’s the man’s clothing, drenched and heavy, clinging to his body.

  Everything happens so quickly that I don’t even hear his thoughts—or maybe he was too scared to process anything—but I use my will to urge him out of the stream.

  “Out!” I shout to him. His arms pull him up, but it’s useless; he doesn’t have enough energy.

  “Pull yourself up! Use your feet to kick yourself up!” I scream this time, fear instilling in myself. I haven’t felt this vulnerable in so long. I feel so close to death, and it hurts. The cold wind pushes down on us, trying to stop us, but I urge him forward.

  “Go!” I yell, and this time it works. He uses all his might to fight his way out, but then I feel him give up. He lets me take control, as if he knows I’m there to catch him if he falls. In full command I pull his body the rest of the way out of the stream and onto land. He’s reticent in his own body.

  “Wake up,” I whisper.

  I’m not even sure if that will keep him alive, or if it’s a useless effort, but I try anyway. There’s a stir, as his mind begins to take control again, so I slip out of his body and into the real world. I lose some of the senses that accompany a human, but this time I welcome it. I no longer feel scared or frantic like I had. I’m not cold or hot, because there is no feeling, and for the first time I’m thankful for that, as the rain continues to beat down.

  Everything is a blur for moment. I can’t find my place, and whenever I try to move, it feels like my limbs are weighted. A few feet away, the stranger lies on the forest floor, coughing up water, but besides that, he seems fine.

  I try to bring my feet forward to walk away before the man notices me, but I stumble and land on the ground. The man hears me and looks up. A roll of thunder sounds, and it calls his attention for a moment, but it fades away quickly.

  “What the hell was that?” He laughs to himself, picking himself off the ground in a nonchalant manner. Leaning against a tree for support, he gives me a full appraisal. Nothing about me says that I’ve been standing in the rain. My long brown hair looks perfectly dry; my clothes have mud on them, but no water. He looks down upon himself, clearly confused because he is drenched. He sees the stark difference between us but chooses not to voice it out loud. On the ground, I lie on my side slightly, propping myself up with my elbow. Then it hits me. I know this man.

  “Why, I do believe I’ve told your fortune before!” Just like that, he forgets what happened only seconds ago. Even though his clothes are soaked and heavy on his frame, he pays it no mind. Instead, all his focus is on me. I didn’t recognize him at first, because he’s no longer in his colorful street clothes, but this is the man I ran into in North Conway. “Did it come true?”

  “Yes,” I say. “It came true.”

  “That must have been unfortunate,” he says, coming to sit next to me. Around us the rain continues to pour, but the thunder is passing. With each flash of lightning, the crash is staggered, farther away.

  I sit up and scoot away from the man, so he doesn’t accidently touch me. It’s a useless effort really, to try to hide that I’m different. When I walked away from him in North Conway, I saw the look on his face, as he registered I wasn’t human. Now it’s only a moment of time before he voices his thoughts or tries something to prove any theories he’s thinking.

  “What are you doing out here?” I ask, trying to turn the attention back toward him. Now he shivers and wraps his jacket around him. Today he is wearing dress pants and black shoes with a navy blue button-down. The formal wear is the reason I wasn’t able to recognize him in the first place. His jacket is soaked, but he wraps it closer to himself anyway.

  “I was searching. You must be too, I can imagine.” He smiles at me.

  I don’t understand this man. Everything about him is so…different. Any other human would rush at the moment to be able to run away from this forest in the middle of a storm, yet here he sits with me on the ground. His pants are covered with mud, his face drips with falling water, but he still finds reason to smile.

  “What were you searching for?” The waterfalls around us muffle my voice, and I’m not sure if he even heard me, because he stays quiet.

  “Well…I don’t know,” he says. “I was waiting for something to find me. You found me all right!”

  His laugh is like a drunk man’s, slurred and unending, but for whatever reason, I find comfort in it for this moment.

  “Tell me, though, did you find it?” he asks me.

  “What?”

  “You lost something. Did you find it? Because surely it wasn’t me!” He laughs again and reaches out his arm toward me. It would have brushed against my knee, but instead, it passes through my body. As quick as I can, I draw up my knees; an attempt to make it seem like his finger didn’t come into contact with me.

  As soon as my arms are wrapped around my knees, he stops laughing. His face is serious as he examines me. It’s clear to both of us now. I’m not human, and he knows it.

  There’s a hard silence between us. Neither I nor he moves to speak, but then he nods his head as if to encourage me to talk. “Did you find it?” he asks after another few seconds.

  “Umm…” I struggle for words. “Yes. Yes, I found what I had lost.”

  He smiles and nods his head. “Good. That’s good to hear.” There’s an uncomfortable space between us, and I look around the forest for a way out.

  “Did it come back better?”

  “Excuse me?” I ask, calling my attention back toward him.

  “The thing you lost. When you found it, was it in better condition than when it had disappeared?”

  I think back to Kenzie. Before she ran away, she had been living a happy bliss, thinking she would be an angel someday, but then she found out the truth. Sure, she’s forgiven me and Eliza, but in no way, shape, or form is she better than how she started.

  “No, not at all,” I tell the man.

  He looks shocked. “Then maybe that’s not what you lost.”

  I give him a questioning gaze so he continues.

  “It always comes back better.” He smiles at me.

  “I don’t get it,” I tell him.

  “I do.”

  He smiles at me again, clearly amused. Part of me wants to walk away and just forget about this odd man, but something about him keeps me grounded.

  “It’s you, milady. You lost yourself, but I can tell now, you’ve changed—found yourself. It’s a
truly gorgeous feeling, isn’t it? To discover yourself! To be lost, then found…” His speech fades away, until it seems like he’s just mumbling to himself.

  But I can’t help myself from smiling. “How do you know these things?” I ask.

  “How did you save my life?” He smiles at my silence. “Aha, just what I thought! I can’t tell you my secret, if you have a secret of your own.”

  “But…” I start to say, then give up easily once he raises his eyebrows, challenging me to try to change his mind.

  “You can’t tell me,” he says matter-of-factly.

  “What?”

  “Well I suppose you could…” he muses to himself. “But that wouldn’t be right, now would it? If you told me how you saved my life—because I know, for a fact, that a young girl like you doesn’t wander in the forest during a storm like this old hag—but if you told me…it wouldn’t be right. Disrupt the natural way of things maybe?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  Around us the world has quieted. Thunder can still be heard in the distance, but it’s no longer a threat. The rain still falls in the heavy and steady passing, but the wind has died down enough so the rain doesn’t feel like needles going through my body.

  “My name’s Harvi by the way,” the man says.

  When I look at him again, I see he’s shivering. Everything in me wants to escort him out of the woods to somewhere I know he’ll be warm, but I’m afraid to spend too much time with him. The longer I stay, the more opportunities I give him to question what I am.

  “Emma,” I tell him, bringing myself to my feet to leave. Harvi gets up also, taking off his jacket to wring it out. What must have been a gallon of water comes from the cloth, and I cringe looking over his attire; although formal—like he was planning on going to dinner at a nice restaurant—it is now ruined.