Needles pierce my arms.
“I clothe myself in the white light of protection.”
Knives slash at my legs.
“I ask that the white light of protection release the spirit from this house.”
A kick in the gut.
“Set it free.”
Another kick.
“Release it.”
A punch in my stomach.
I’m doubled over, lying on the floor behind the bed, when the door opens.
“What the hell are you doing?” It’s Erin.
I don’t want her to see me like this, curled up and writhing in agony. I pray she can’t see me.
“Erin, go back downstairs. We’re dealing with it,” her mum says. She turns to the woman. “Is anything happening, Rose?”
Rose nods. “Yes, it is. It’s leaving. I can feel its power dissipating. We need to keep it up.”
Erin’s eyes scan the room. She hasn’t seen me. Yet.
“Erin should stay,” the woman says calmly. How can someone who looks so benign be capable of so much damage? “She could be useful,” the woman goes on. “If this is her room, she’ll have the strongest connection. Her presence might even help us to get rid of it.”
“I don’t want to help,” Erin says firmly.
The others turn to look at her. But she’s not looking at them. Her eyes are still scanning the room.
“Are you sure?” her mum is asking. “I know you don’t want to, but it might be good for you to be part of dealing with this.”
And that is the point when Erin walks around the bed and her eyes finally land on me. Writhing on the floor. Weak, pathetic, in pain. If I had any doubts about whether she’d be able to see me or not, the look in her eyes gives me my answer.
“Please. Erin. Go. I don’t want you to see me like this.”
“I — I can’t,” she stammers.
“Why not?” her mum asks.
Erin takes a step toward me.
“No!” I shuffle away from her.
“I can’t bear to see you like this,” Erin whispers.
“I know,” her mum replies. “I can’t quite believe I’m doing it, either. It definitely feels a bit odd to begin with. But if you just repeat what Rose says, you’ll get the hang of it.”
“We need to get back to it,” Rose says. “We’re getting somewhere. We can’t afford to lose the connection now. Erin, just join in when you feel ready.” She reaches into her pocket and pulls out some of that evil herb stuff. Holds it out to Erin. “Here. Take some of this. Get the matches from your mother and take it into the corner over there.”
Erin doesn’t take her eyes off me. “No,” she says. “I’m not going to help.”
Rose holds the sage out for a moment longer. Then Erin’s mum shakes her head, and Rose puts it back in her pocket.
An old memory bursts into my brain. Goofing around with Olly. I must have been about eight or nine, I guess. I was a weedy runt back then. He was always the cool older brother. Summer holidays down on the beach. We were playing at the water’s edge. Running into the sea, farther and farther. Swimming across the bay.
We swam farther out than usual that day, messing around as always. Olly kept grabbing my head and shoving me under the water. He was just playing — trying to get me to grow up. I remember his words. “Come on, big man. Take a breath.” He’d give me half a second each time, then dunk me again.
It was fun and games. To him, it was. I never told him how scared it made me feel. The dunking. The gasping for breath.
The memory slips away as the chanting begins again. They dunk me under the water. Again and again. Barely any time to take a breath in between.
I’m drowning.
I do all I can to focus on Erin. Her face, her eyes. She’s fading.
I reach out to her.
She’s crying.
“No. Please. Please don’t cry,” I urge her. My voice is hoarse. Can she even hear me? I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Who I am. Where I am. What’s happening.
All I know is that I want this pain to end.
Rose and Mum keep going on about white light. Waving that horrible stuff around the room. It stinks.
“It’s working!” Rose exclaims joyfully. The furniture’s shaking; the bed looks like it’s about to collapse in on itself. Drawers are opening. Curtains are flying around. Even by the standards I’ve grown used to over these last few weeks, this is weird. And yes, it’s terrifying.
Joe’s on the floor, writhing in agony. I kneel by his side.
“Are you OK?” I ask. Ridiculously. Of course he’s not OK.
I want to scream at them: Look what you’re doing to Joe!
I settle for “Please stop.”
“We can’t stop now,” Rose snaps. She’s transformed from nice lady coming over for tea into some kind of crazed preacher, wreaking havoc all around her. “This is it. It’s happening! Open the window!” she barks.
Mum crosses the room and starts battling to open the window. “Give me a hand,” she calls to me over her shoulder.
“It won’t open. It’s painted shut,” I reply.
“It’s coming loose. Help me!” Mum urges.
I ignore her. Instead, I take advantage of both her and Rose facing away from me and reach out to Joe.
My hand goes through him.
“Joe,” I whisper. Tears are blocking my throat.
He doesn’t reply. His eyes are closed. He’s veering in and out of my vision.
Mum’s still battling with the window. “Erin! Do you want this to go on all day?”
Joe’s eyes flicker open. “Don’t forget me,” he croaks. His voice is like gravel.
“Of course not.”
“So give me a hand, then,” Mum calls over her shoulder, still thinking I’m talking to her. Still oblivious of the fact that she’s destroying my life.
I can’t keep on ignoring her. “Mum, I don’t know if we —”
“Got it!” Mum gasps as the window finally slides open.
Rose is in the middle of the room now. She’s almost standing on Joe. Not that she knows it. Not that he knows it. Joe is fading faster and faster. I can barely see him.
Rose’s hands are outstretched, her eyes closed. That bag of stupid herbs in her hand. Right now she is possibly the most terrifying thing I’ve ever witnessed.
“CLEANSE THIS PLACE. CLEANSE THE ROOM. LET THE WHITE LIGHT TAKE THIS SPIRIT AWAY NOW!”
She’s shouting, lost in her chanting. The room is shaking, and Joe is screaming, curled up in a ball.
And then —
The white light comes.
The scary woman is shouting, lost in her chanting. The room is shaking, and I’m screaming, curled up in a ball. All of my senses are alive. Too alive. The floor is digging into my bones, warping my flesh, scalding me. The air is clogging up my nostrils; it’s too thick, too stagnant.
The sound of their chanting is filling my ears so much, it feels as if every sound in the world — every sound that has ever been uttered — is being screamed through this room. The taste in my mouth is the bitterness and salty grief of my tears.
But it’s the sight that takes everything away.
All the rest of it fades away, dissolving into nothingness. In its place, there is only light. Bright. White. It’s coming for me, like an escalator I cannot run from. It is filling the room, searching, spreading, spilling into every gap.
I don’t want it. Don’t want to go to it — and yet I can’t resist, and soon there is nowhere else to go. The white light is here for me, and I know it won’t leave without me.
Erin. Erin. Please. Save me. Keep me here.
I’m clutching, grabbing at anything.
Don’t let it get me.
The voices are instructing it. I can hear them through the thickness of the mist and the fog of my brain.
Let the white light remove this spirit from the house. Let the white light protect us from this spirit. Let the white light let the whi
te light letthewhitelight letthewhitelightletthewhitelightletthewhitelightletthewhitelight . . .
There is nothing but the white light.
Eventually, I stop fighting. I know, more surely than I have ever known anything, that I am not strong enough to resist any longer. I have nothing left to fight it. It has me beaten.
I hold my hands out. I stop curling up. Stop scrabbling around, running from the light like an insect under the glare of a boy with a magnifying glass.
Did we do that? I think I remember.
Was that me? Or Olly? I want to apologize. I’m sorry, insect.
I’m losing my mind.
I’m losing myself.
The light is taking me. Taking me from here. From this. From my home. From Erin.
“Let the white light take it away, remove it from our presence, leave this house, and be gone forevermore.”
My mind is closing down.
You win. You have me. It’s over.
I realize it before either Mum or Rose does.
One minute, he was there, writhing on the floor. I’ve never seen anything or anyone that looked like such a picture of agony. So bad that, for just a moment, even I wished it would work. Anything to release him from his pain.
And then, fading, fading, until, finally, I couldn’t see him at all.
He’s gone.
Everything stops. The curtains waving, the furniture shaking, the floor vibrating.
Stops dead.
Rose is still mumbling. “May the white light of protection cleanse this house and this room and keep it safe from now and forever.”
Mum is looking at me. It’s not till she comes over to me, kneels beside me on the floor, puts an arm over my shoulders and pulls me close that I realize I’m crying.
And once I realize it, I can’t stop. Tears are running down my face like rivers, dropping off the end of my chin onto my chest, my legs, the floor.
Sobs rack my body. A tiny bit of me can hear the sound of a wounded animal and wants it to stop. The rest knows it won’t, knows it’s coming from me.
I’m not just crying for myself. I’m crying for Joe. For his loss, for mine. For his past, for mine.
“Shhhh, darling, it’s all OK. It’s gone now. You’re safe.”
Mum’s words, whispered into my cheek as she strokes my hair, only make everything worse. They remind me how alone I am now. How I can never share this grief with anyone.
But they do something else for me, too. They stop my tears. Something hardens inside me.
Rose has finally stopped mumbling into the walls of my bedroom. She turns to me and nods slowly. “I think we’re done,” she says. “It’s gone. I can sense it. You’re free.”
Free.
I swallow hard. I try to gulp down my rage and my grief. I want to scream. I straighten my back, shaking Mum off my shoulders as I do. “Get out,” I say as calmly as I can. The words feel like a low rumble of thunder burning through my throat. It’s all I can do — literally all I can manage — to add “please.”
Rose opens her mouth to speak. She glances at Mum, who shakes her head.
Rose tightens her lips, decides against saying anything, and turns to leave. Mum leans forward and gives me a kiss on the cheek. “I’m sorry, darling. I know that was all a bit traumatic, but it’s done now,” she says. “It’s all OK. I won’t let anything bad happen to you, I promise.”
I nod. I’m not giving her any more than that. “Please go, Mum,” I say carefully.
With that, Mum gives me one last sad smile before getting up. She straightens the covers on my bed — the comforter came half off while everything was going crazy — then holds the door open for Rose.
“Come down in a bit, OK?” she says at the door.
I nod tightly.
I get up to close the door behind them. And then I lean against the door and wonder where the hell to go from here. My bedroom seems to be echoing with silence and emptiness.
I turn back around to face the room, walk around it. I stroke the window seat we shared, look down at my bed and remember feeling his arm around me that first time. I stand in the doorway of the walk-in closet and think of the first time we spoke. The memory is a physical pain.
I reach down to straighten the rug. It got crumpled in the corners while Joe was writhing around on the floor.
As I straighten it, I notice something on the floor. It looks like writing.
I kneel down and scan the lines. It’s Joe’s words; there’s no doubt. The writing is scratchy and shaky, but I can just about make out what it says.
I’M LOCKED IN A PLACE THAT YOU CAN’T EVEN SEE,
A PLACE IN MY MIND WHERE IT’S HARD TO BE ME.
YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT IT MEANS TO BE FREE.
JUST GO. LEAVE ME HERE. SHUT THE DOOR. TURN THE KEY.
When did he write this? It’s different from his other poems. Was it when he was alive? Or since I’ve known him?
I guess I’ll never know — but finding it now makes me feel close to him. And I know how to feel even closer.
I grab a pen out of my bag. Then I lift the corner of the rug again. Kneeling down, and scratching carefully into the wood, I lay my verse beside his.
This room, your face, these walls, I’m trapped.
My thoughts never freed me; your words did that.
Now I’m stuck with my life and the life skills I lack.
Can’t bear being left here alone —
please come back.
Monday afternoon, I’m heading out to play soccer with the lads after school. I’m late, so running to catch up. I’m texting as I run to let them know I’ll be there soon. That’s why I don’t see her till I almost run slap-bang into the back of her in the middle of the school yard.
“Whoops, sorry!”
The girl barely flinches.
I turn to glance at her, semi-running backward as I do. She looks familiar. I think she does, anyway. Something about her — do I know her?
She’s barely acknowledged I’m even here, never mind the fact that I almost knocked her over. She’s walking with her head down, earphones on, beanie hat pulled right down, hair flopping over what bit of face is showing, baggy coat. Shuffling along like she’s in a different world from the rest of us.
“I said I’m sorry,” I repeat, a bit louder. Don’t know why I’m bothering. It’s obvious she doesn’t care either way.
I’m about to shrug and move on when the girl glances up from under her hat. Pulls her bangs aside and looks at me. Her eyes are light blue, like an early spring morning full of promise.
What? Did I just think that? Jesus.
She pulls out an earphone. “Sorry, did you say something?” she asks.
Then her face changes. Her pale cheeks heat up a bit. That’s when I recognize her.
“Oh, it’s you!” We say it in unison.
I’m expecting us both to say jinx at the same time, or something.
Neither of us says anything.
She looks back down and keeps on walking before I’ve even said a word. I’m standing there with my mouth hanging open.
I try to remember the guy I used to be. I talked to anyone and everyone. No cares. No worries. Now who am I?
I actually have no idea.
There’s something about her, though. Something that makes me want to try to clamber over the wall I’ve built around myself. I don’t know why. Pride? Ego? I don’t like the idea of being rejected? Or is it something else?
Whatever it is, I find myself kind of jogging alongside her, half forward, half backward, trying to engage her in conversation.
“Hey. Look, I’m sorry.”
She nods briefly as she carries on walking. “It’s fine,” she says. “No biggie.”
No biggie? I envy her ability to say something so casual. When was I last as carefree as that?
I know exactly when.
Although there’s something about her that tells me she’s not really feeling as casual as she’s trying to make ou
t.
Which might be why, despite my better judgment, I find myself saying, “No, look. I was way out of line the other day. I need to apologize properly. And introduce myself — my name is Olly, by the way. Let me take you out for a coffee.”
It’s the first time I’ve asked a girl out since Joe died.
Well, that was unexpected.
His words stop me in my tracks. For a second, anyway. It doesn’t take all that long to figure out what’s going on, though. I mean, come on. A guy like him doesn’t ask a girl like me out on a date.
Here is the process of my thoughts.
The first second: complete shock.
The next millionth of a second: a hint of flattery.
The rest of time after that: the realization that I am almost certainly being set up. I’ve got to be.
I almost glance over my shoulder to see if there’s a crowd of onlookers waiting to high-five each other and fall over laughing when I accept the offer and he tells me he didn’t mean it and was only doing it on a bet.
I’ve known guys like that before. It’s happened to me before. Which is why I reply, “Sorry, I can’t. Thanks, anyway, though,” and keep on walking across the yard.
The only thing tugging at me, slightly making me regret the speed of my reply, is the fact that he’s Joe’s brother. The fact that there’s a small chance that he could be the one person in the world who might be able to help me.
Only as soon as I have that thought, it’s swiftly followed by another.
How the hell do I think he would be able to help me, unless as well as being a relative of Joe’s, he also happens to be a medium?
And that’s followed by the thought that’s been there all along. What if I’m the medium? Like that woman. What if that’s why I can see him? What if I’m the one who brought Joe into being? Caused him all that anguish? What if all of it is my fault? I can’t bear the thought of it. It’s worse, even, than the thought that I’m losing my mind — and that one is never far from the surface.
It’s been three days and he hasn’t been back.
The pain of his absence is like a dark hole inside me, growing bigger each day. After everything I went through at my old school, even when I look back on the worst days, not one of them ever felt as sad or as lonely as this.