Between Life & Death

by E K Bennett

  Josh knocks again, harder this time, and the conversation stops. Apparently, though, I'm the only one that was listening to the conversation.

  The voices are so familiar.

  I'll cut your ankles again.

  The antisocial one or the bitch?

  The lady in white.

  "Go the fuck away," says a prissy, yet venomous voice from behind the door.

  Sam makes a face, but Josh just sighs and I look at him in disbelief. Of all people to be Josh's sister...

  "Open the door, Lissi," Josh says. "I need to talk to you."

  ~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~

  The door swings open and Lissi stands there with an agitated look on her face. She's wearing the regulatory hospital gown for the mental patients, and her puffy ankle is clearly visible. So that's how it happened, Lissi cut herself to punish Natalie. But how did she get in the lounge the day I first met her? She must be crazier than I thought. At first I just thought she was a gossipy, insensitive bitch, but now I can see she's much smarter than that. And more aggressive.

  She sees Josh and her face lights up a little bit. She hugs him and pulls us into the room, then sits on her little bed. Her room is even smaller than mine, but definitely not less decorated. There have to be at least thirty Justin Beiber posters on the wall.

  Lissi looks me up and down, then purses her lips. "Look at you, Lydia! You look like shit!"

  I roll my eyes.

  "Lissi!" Josh snaps.

  She just laughs. "Chill, Josh," she giggles. "We're friends! Right, Lydia?"

  "Uh," is all I can come up with. The last thing I said to her was something along the lines of 'you're a psycho bitch'.

  "Wait, you know each other?" Josh asks in disbelief.

  "We met in the lounge," Lissi says, picking at her nails. All the malice is gone from her voice, and she's back to her bitchy self. "You're the weird girl who writes on her arms with knives, right?"

  "No, not really," I say.

  "And you've met my sister, the freak," she adds.

  "Wait," Sam interjects. "How many sisters do you have? What's going on?"

  Lissi peers over at Sam. "Oh, you're cute. And what did you do, dip your hair in a vat of colorific?"

  "What?" she sneers. This is not going well.

  Lissi laughs before Josh can yell at her, as he's clearly extremely embarrassed. I feel so bad.

  "Anyway," Lissi gets up from her bed and plays with Sam's hair. "My brother has two sisters, I guess. Apparently we have Multiple Personality Disorder or something. There's a fancier name for it, but I don't give a damn about it. I think it's bull. We're twins, but God just forgot to give us an extra body. Right, Josh?" She smiles at him.

  He nods uncomfortably.

  "I'm Lissi, and my sister's Natalie. She's a loser though, she always hides from people. I do all the talking, even when there's not ghosts around. She's so silly. She thinks she can see ghosts."

  "What?" Sam asks.

  "She's scared right now. She's always scared. Loser. Anyway, yeah, she keeps telling me about this little girl who's chasing Lydia-Scissorhands over there around, and how all the other ghosts are afraid of her, and now she's freaking out about some white lady. Or something."

  It's easy to tell how much Lissi really cares, which is very little.

  "White lady?" Sam and I ask simultaneously.

  "Yeah, it's pretty trippy. I don't even think the little girl knows about the White Lady yet. It's kinda funny actually."

  "Wait," Josh stops her. "What do you mean, she doesn't know?"

  Lissi doesn't answer, she just stares off into space. She starts to smile slightly, then winces, then widens her eyes. "Oh, that's very soon," she remarks to no one in particular.

  Josh grabs her shoulders and turns her to him. "What's soon? Did you see the future again?"

  Sam turns to me and gives me a look that's beyond confusion, and I shrug.

  We wait for an answer, but Lissi just stares at Josh. They stare at each other for a minute or two before she snaps to face my direction, and looks at me right in the eyes. "You can't save that nurse. But if you want to watch, she's in room 246, cutting some girl's hair. You've got about three minutes."

  29. She Watches

  In a heartbeat I’m tearing down the hallway, ignoring all the quizzical looks from security guards and nurses. “220, 222, 223,” I mutter, reading the plates next to each door. “I’m going the wrong way.”

  I spin on my heel and nearly slam into a tall, balding security guard. “Where’s 248?” I ask frantically, before he can say anything to stop me.

  “Are you supposed to be here, young lady?” he asks in an even tone, ignoring my question. “I can’t have you running around here like this, it’s not a playground.”

  I roll my eyes and push past him, then race to the next hallway. 244, 246, then finally 248 is at the end of the hall, next to a large and sickeningly familiar window. I run faster but stop, overwhelmed by a strong feeling of anxiety. It’s like hitting a brick wall. A brick wall covered in spikes.

  Dread washes over me and I hear light footsteps coming from behind, too light to be Sam’s or the security guard’s or Josh’s. They’re too light to be human. Why didn’t I just tell Samantha to leave the hospital right away? Why am I so stupid? The room is exactly where it was in the vision. Right by the window. My head is spinning , and the lights in this end of the hallway seem dimmer than everywhere else. The anxious feeling coiling around me is foreign, not my own. It feels like the anger that Lotty made me feel when I was in the hospital during winter break, and it gets stronger with the sound of each tiny footstep.

  I don’t want to turn around, don’t want to see her face, so I wait for her to pass me. She just stares ahead, seemingly oblivious of my standing there, while her blonde curls swing behind her with each slow step. She’s focused on the door, and not much else. She stops a few feet from it and waits.

  I can’t take it, just standing there while Lotty waits for Samantha to fall into a deathtrap is ridiculous. I take a shaky step closer. Lotty turns her attention toward me, as if she’s just now noticing my presence. Her innocent brown eyes make me furious. She’s so fake, with her small smile and shiny hair. I’ve never focused on her like this before, and the longer I stare, the more imperfections stand out. Her skin is a little bit too pale, her eyes are glassy, and her hair looks plastic, like a doll’s. This isn’t Lotty, this is a cheap imitation of what she used to be before she became a murderer. I only see what she wants me to, not what she has been condemned to, like what I see in the mirror. Images of the blonde girl flash before my eyes. She’s with her brother, in the dark. She’s mad at him, and uneasy. She feels lost, like she’s being watched.

  I’ve seen this before, but never felt it. I’m seeing an image of her right before she killed her brother. That was before everything went downhill for her. But what made her want to kill him? I’m so caught up in staring at Lotty that I'm thrown off guard when the door swings open. Everything happens at once, or at least in about a three second time span. Samantha steps out of the room, and the black haired girl from my vision follows closely behind, trying to pull her back into the room.

  “I said stay here!” She pleads.

  “No, Yuki!” Samantha tries to pull away her arm and drops the pair of shiny scissors onto the floor.

  Do it, Lotty, a raspy voice rings through my mind.

  I gasp and Lotty looks stunned as she glances over my shoulder then turns her attention back to Samantha, and the scissors start to shake slightly. Yuki sees the movement and reacts so quickly, she looks like a ninja. She pushes Samantha away just in time for the blades to stick into the wall, missing Samantha. She stumbles back and Lotty snarls then lifts her hand up, causing the huge window to shatter. We all duck and tiny shards of glass go flying everywhere, stinging my back. When the glass is done falling, I take my hands away from my eyes and look around.

  “Oh my God,” Yuki whispers. Samantha is nowhere to
be found.

  I go up to the window and peer down, where Samantha’s broken body lays. Her leg is bent at an awkward angle and the left side of her head is bleeding. “Samantha?” I yell down at her. “Can you hear me?”

  For a second I fear that she broke her spine or is severely concussed, but she shakes her head. “I think my leg’s broken,” she croaks.

  I let out a huge sigh of relief and turn around. “She’s not dead!”

  Lotty is shaking with rage, and disappears screaming. I glance at Yuki and my eye catches something behind her. A few feet away stands a tall, sickly thin woman with long, dark, and slightly graying hair that hangs limp around her shoulders. Her eyes are black holes in her face and it’s hard to concentrate on any of her other facial features. She wears a tattered white dress and radiates a sick discomfort. The White Lady. She shakes her head disappointedly, then turns around to start walking away. At the end of the hall, Josh, Sam, and Lissi are standing together with the same sickened expressions on their faces. A pack of security guards have gathered to see what’s going on.

  When the White Lady disappears around the corner, I sprint back to my friends. The anxious feeling that I assume Lotty had something to do with is gone, and I scream for someone to go help Samantha. A few guards take off running, and push past me, probably to see if Yuki’s okay. One pulls out a taser and shocks Yuki, and she falls to the ground. Since when do they have tasers?

  “What are you doing?” I yell.

  One of them takes out a walkie talkie and mumbles into it. The taser didn’t do much (Yuki seems to be a lot tougher than she looks) but it wasn’t necessary because Yuki goes with them without a fight. I don’t understand. “Don’t worry,” the other guard says. “She won’t hurt you guys now. We’ve got her.”

  “What?” I protest. “She just saved Samantha’s life!”

  The first guard gives the second one a knowing look. A she’s obviously insane, too look. Then turns to me and says in a condescending voice, “Don’t worry, she won’t be pushing people out of windows any time soon. We’ve just called the police. We can have someone escort you back to your room, if you’d like. And where is your hospital gown?”

  I roll my eyes. “She didn’t push her out of the window! It was…well, it wasn’t her!”

  I don’t want to tell the truth, because they obviously didn’t even notice the White Lady or Lotty. “All right,” the other guy says dismissively. He points at Josh and Sam. “Are you guys all together? I suggest you clear out before we have to kick you out.”

  They act like this is an everyday occurrence. Josh grabs my hand and starts pulling me away, but I don’t move. “We can’t just leave her! She’s innocent!” I feel like I owe this girl my life, even if it’s not mine that she saved. She deserves to be rewarded, not arrested.

  The look on Josh’s face looks as pained as mine, but Lissi steps in. “Leave her,” she says softly.

  “Natalie?” I ask, because Lissi would never sound so timid. She nods.

  “Trust me,” she says. “She’s been wanting this since she got here. I’ll explain it in my room.”

  “But how do you know that?” I question.

  She glances back at Yuki and the guards walking away. “Her best friend’s ghost still hangs around. Yuki killed her.”

  30. She Lets It Go

  So according to Natalie, Yuki has been diagnosed with mild schizophrenia, but was sent to this hospital because her family did a fantastic job of hiding the fact that she's a killer. Apparently she comes from a family that's part of some weird ancient competition in which she had to fight her best friend to the death. And to do that, she had to go through legitimate physical torture to prepare for it, which messed with her head- hence the schizophrenia. This competition is so secret that Yuki's best friend didn’t even know about it until maybe a week before she was sent to fight. And even after death, her best friend follows Yuki everywhere, like their essences are attached. But no one knows about what Yuki's done and it's killing her.

  "And you're saying you can get all of this information just from this ghost?" I ask skeptically.

  Natalie nods. "Her ghost was there during the, er, incident with Samantha, and since there's that weird connection between the two girls, I was able to see almost all of Yuki's memories through her friend."

  I can't sit still on the bed. I want to go find Samantha, explain to her everything about my life, maybe apologize for bringing her into it and not being more forceful about making her leave. I want to see if she's all right.

  "I don't feel right about all this," I say anxiously. "I feel like...the king in a game of chess. Everyone around me is moving around and getting hurt while I just sit here in the back and do nothing. I don't know why you're not letting me go see Samantha. Or letting me stop Yuki from being arrested."

  I glare at Natalie. She just shrugs uncomfortably. "I'm telling you, Yuki wants to go to jail. I don’t know if that's exactly where they'll send her, but she feels like she got off the hook by getting sent here. She wants to be punished, even if it wasn't her fault that she killed her friend. It was her family's for forcing her to. And besides, what could you possibly do to stop them? From those guards' positions, it looked a lot like Yuki pushed her out that window. Do you really thing that the cops will believe you when they hear that it wasn't Yuki, it was a ghost that pushed her? All that would do is get you assigned some pretty new pills and a hospital gown."

  I sigh heavily. "But what about Samantha?"

  "She'll be fine," Natalie says after a while.

  "Oh, sure," I retort. I'm kind of offended about Natalie's nonchalance.

  "Seriously," Natalie replies. "Lissi saw it herself. Samantha's probably in the emergency room downstairs where you stayed for your first couple of days here. She'll get out in two days with just a broken leg, a sprained wrist, and a couple of cuts from the glass. That's all."

  "But I'm worried," I whimper. Sam, who's sitting next to me, rests her head on my shoulder. It's comforting to have her and Josh here. Even if it's not supposed to be allowed.

  "It'll be okay," Natalie says, smiling gently at me.

  "Thanks," I sigh. I decide I'll have to go visit her once she gets a chance to calm down and assess the situation. We sit in silence for a while, but then I suppose that I should probably get back to my room.

  "I'll walk you there," Josh offers. I smile.

  "Sam, do you want to come?" I ask her.

  To my surprise, she declines and glances at Natalie. "Actually, I think I'll actually stay here for a while, I want to talk to Natalie," she decides.

  Natalie blushes, probably because she hardly ever talks to any people other than Lissi, who's really mean to her most of the time.

  I grin and hug her goodbye. "I'm really sorry about this mess," I tell her. "We'll fix it. If anything good came out of today, it's that we know now that Lotty's not made of steel. And that White Lady had some impact on her; now we just have to figure out whose side she's on."

  She nods in agreement.

  "Soon things we will go back to normal," I say. "Thank you so much, Natalie. You too, Lissi."

  And then Josh and I leave them alone, and as the door swings shut Sam asks Natalie, "So what do the ghosts look like?"

  I laugh to myself. I should have known that's what Sam wanted to talk to Natalie about. We walk in silence to the elevator, then both reach to press the button at the same time. I blush and let Josh push the button, averting my eyes. He probably thinks I'm the most awkward person in existence.

  The elevator clambers up the passage and the scratched up doors slide open. They need to be cleaned. I've always loved elevators; when I was little I thought they were magic because I felt like I was flying in some sort of windowless plane.

  "Why didn't you tell me about your sister?" I ask Josh when the doors ding shut.

  He looks down at his feet. "I don't know," he says quietly, like he's embarrassed. "I guess the same reason you didn't want me to know about Lotty. I
didn't want to be judged based on my sister's issues."

  I shrug. "I wouldn't have judged you. I mean, look where I am now."

  He doesn't answer, just stares at the doors. After a while he says, "She's the reason I'm here, you know. That story about my parents wanting me to stay in school was bullshit."

  I look up at him, but he won't break his gaze from the doors. I realize that he's a good six inches taller than me. I always knew he was tall, but I feel so short next to him, standing shoulder to shoulder in this metal box.

  The doors open and he continues while we step out of the elevator. "Natalie was so sweet. She still is. But she was always a bit off. When she was five, she would act like two different people, and we just thought she was playing. But then she started hurting herself, like cutting and stuff. It got harder and harder to travel because she would slowly become more aggressive. She fought my parents about everything one day, and was back to normal the next. That's when we met Lissi.