Dedicated to Aayushi thebaddestwoman, my favorite fan <3

• chapter fourteen•

I was falling. I had a strange sense of déjà vu, like I had felt this sensation before, but I couldn't place it. I was completely blank, I didn't know where I was or what was going on around me. All I knew was that it was impossibly cold. When had I felt like this before? I was pretty sure I had.

Slowly everything came into focus. My feet were on solid ground. I was looking down a long corridor through the eyes of someone. It was late at night. Surprisingly, I already knew what was going to happen: I was going to walk down this passage and enter a room. And that's what I did. I glanced up as I walked in. Room 502. The sense of déjà vu was getting stronger.

As I expected, a man wearing a doctor's coat stood there. He smiled at me.

"William," I said.

"Come, sit." He gestured towards a bed which stood against the wall. "I need to talk to you about that little secret."

A wave of despair washed over me. "What about it?"

"Why don't you come in?"

I went in and sat on the edge of the bed, keeping my eyes on him all the time. Something bad was about to happen. I could feel it.

"So, Mary." He walked over to me and cupped my face in his hands. "What have you decided?"

"I want the baby, William," I pleaded.

He slapped his hand on the bed beside me. "You cannot have the baby! I am not married to you, Mary."

"Then marry me!"

He looked away. "I cannot."

"Why? You love me, don't you?" He didn't answer. "Don't you, William?"

When he looked at me again, he was ashamed. "I'm married."

I sat still with shock. "What?" My voice came out in a whisper. "What?" I felt my hands curl into fists. "You are married and you never told me? YOU RUINED MY LIFE, WILLIAM! I am pregnant with your baby! What am I going to do if you don't marry me? I can't have the baby! People will not speak to me!"

"I have told you what you should do. Get an abortion."

"I DON'T WANT TO! I MIGHT DIE!"

"That is not my problem."

"Not your problem?" I screamed. "HOW DARE YOU? It's OUR baby! You can't just walk away like this."

His jaw was rigid. "I can."

I wanted to kill him. I thought of performing dark magic on him, but that needed me to be calm, which I was not. "I will kill you," I hissed.

"Yes?" he said with a mocking smile. "You can not kill me."

"I will tell everyone."

His smile vanished. "What?"

"What you have done to me. I will tell everyone that you're married and you raped me."

"I did not rape you."

"Yes, but only you and I know that."

He took a step towards me. "You can not lie. I will lose my job. I have children to look after."

"Oh, you have children? You care about them but you don't care about the child inside me?"

"No, I do not."

Blood pulsed in my ears. "What am I going to do with the baby?"

"Get an abortion."

"I don't want to."

"Not my problem."

I slapped him. The sound echoed in the room, and he stared at me in shock. Before he could react, I slapped him again, and then I jumped on him and screamed and pulled at his hair. "YOU CAN'T DO THIS TO ME! YOU CAN'T RUIN MY LIFE!"

"Get off me! Let me go, you whore!"

"What did you call me?" I tried to hit him. He caught my wrist and pushed me over to the bed. I noticed his hands then. He was wearing doctor's gloves, which meant that he could kill me and his fingerprints would not be found. I tried to yank off the gloves. He picked up a pillow and pressed it to my face, smothering me. I kicked at him; he yelped.

"Leave me!" It was hard to breathe. I saw stars. I opened my mouth to draw in more air, but it didn't help. I screamed at the top of my lungs. "Leave me!" The darkness threatened to overtake me. I fought it, but eventually everything went black, and I let go.

I relaxed. I felt myself going still, and soon, I could not feel myself anymore. I didn't know where my hands were, I didn't know where my feet were, but I was there. I was conscious, but I could not feel my body. Was I numb? Was I paralyzed?

William lifted the pillow and threw it aside. With his gloved hands, he pressed his thumb to my wrist, then to my neck, but I could not feel his touch either. I could just see him touching me. Quickly, he walked out of the room.

I tried to move. I tried to sit up. And the strangest thing happened. I floated up. My point of view shifted, and I saw everything from a height. It was like I was rising, but I didn't see myself rising, and when I turned around slightly, I saw my body lying on the bed.

I was dead.

I rose up higher. It was like I was swimming in a roomful of water. I'd never felt so light, so powerful. I floated out of the room, looking for William, but he was not there in the corridor. I swam back into the room and looked at my body. And I felt angry. I had done nothing to deserve this. He had seduced me. He didn't have to kill me to hide what he had done. We could have run away and had the baby. How dare he? I wasn't going to let him get away with it.

He entered the room with a string of Christmas lights in his hands. Where had he got that from?

He brought the string to my body. He took my hand in his and pressed my fingers to the string. At first I didn't understand what he was doing. He did it all over the string, from one end to the other.

He was taking my fingerprints on the string.

He made a noose, and tied the other end of the string to the doorframe. He lifted my body and carried it to the noose, and put my neck in it, as if I had killed myself.

He looked around and walked out again, and came back with a stool, laying it sideways on the floor just under the spot where he had hung my body. He made the bed, looked around one final time to check if something was out of place, then walked out.

I watched him descend a staircase. I thought about following him. And then I was floating next to him. It was like one moment I was in the room, and the next minute I was beside him. So much power, I thought. I followed him to his office. I had come here a lot of times, whenever we had wanted to be alone. I felt even more angry. He had never loved me. Never.

William sat on his desk, with his head in his hands.

I thought about picking up a pen, but it didn't rise into the air. I tried again. I focused all my energy. The pen didn't move.

I tried to say something. I thought about it hard. I thought about an angry whisper, and I thought about what I had to say. And then I heard it. The voice came from all around me. "I will kill you, William."

He jumped up. His chair toppled over. "Wh-Who is this?"

"You don't know who I am?"

"D-Don't come near me." He backed away towards the door, his eyes searching all around. He ran out of the room.

I flew back to Room 502. I was just a consciousness, floating around. But I missed having a body. I went to a corner and thought about what I was going to do now. I did not want to stay here. I wanted to move on. I wanted to be born again. I wanted a body.

The Portals to Hell and Heaven should have opened by now. I didn't know how I knew this; I just did. The Portals would open, and I would go through, and I would be reborn.

I waited. It felt like I had been waiting for just one second, but when I looked at the clock, three hours had passed.

Your time has not yet come, a voice said in my head. It wasn't my own thought. It was a voice, I'd distinctly heard it, but who it belonged to, I couldn't tell. Had my time not come yet? Was I destined to live more? I looked at my body. The string must've damaged the windpipe by now. I couldn't go in. I didn't even want to.

I sat and waited for another second, and two hours passed. Time was flying for me.

So was this what happened when a person fell asleep? Often I had fallen asleep and found upon waking up that it was morning, even though it had felt like a few minutes had passed. Actually, it did feel like I was sleeping. I wondered if I was in my subconscious state of mind.

I had once read that the subconscious mind was much more powerful than the conscious one. Hypnosis puts a person in their subconscious state of mind. In an experiment, a woman hypnotized a person and told him that her finger was burning hot, and when she touched him, his skin formed a blister on that spot, because in his subconscious mind he actually believed that the finger was hot. I wondered that if I tried to believe I had a body, would I somehow get a body?

I focused again, thinking about the face I had had when I was alive. I visualized myself wearing a black gown. And when I looked down at myself, I saw a body. It was not a body, exactly, for I could see through it, but it was something like a body. Maybe it was just energy, but at least I had arms and legs and a gown. Then I saw something which shocked me. My feet were facing backward. I thought about normal feet, but no matter how hard I tried, they remained that way. I gave up.

I looked at the clock again. Two more hours had passed. The sun was breaking over the horizon. The sky was tinted red and purple. Why were the Portals not opening? Did I have to do something to open them? Did I have to kill William?

Was there any way to kill him? I couldn't move any object. Maybe with some practise I would learn to pick up a pen and write messages, but there was no chance I would be able to pick up a knife and kill.

Then I remembered my diary. I could use it as a Binder. I could do some dark magic. I could— 

My eyes shot open. My whole body was covered in sweat, but I was shivering like hell. I tried to curl up, but my legs didn't move. I tried again. I tried to move my arms. It felt like something invisible was pushing me down into the bed. Some force was holding me there.

My breathing quickened.

"Go back to sleep," someone whispered. I knew the whisper. But this time the voice didn't come from all around me. The throaty whisper was inside my head.

"No!" I cried, trying to wriggle free. "Let me go!"

"I won't."

I dug my nails into the mattress and tried to kick out at what was holding me. My legs merely twitched.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move. I turned my head as much as I could to look at it. The bedroom door was open. Mary was standing there.

I tried harder to break free. I tried to kick. I frantically grabbed the edge of the bed and attempted to push my body upwards.

She walked towards me slowly. Her eyes were fixed on me. I struggled uselessly. Cold sweat broke out on my forehead. I screamed. My eyes were wet.

I screamed as loudly as I could, even though I knew there was no one to hear me. The entire house was empty but for me and her.

She was coming closer.

"Please let me go." I closed my eyes and let out a shaky sob. "Don't hurt me. Please." I felt a tear trickle down my temple into my hair.

And just like that, the weight lifted off me. I broke free. I jumped out of the bed and ran without thinking.

She appeared in front of me suddenly. I saw the anger in her eyes. I backed away and changed my path and ran towards the door again.

She appeared in front of me this time too, but I didn't stop. I ran straight through the ghost. As I did, a wave of cold passed through me, freezing my insides. For a moment my sense of time was disoriented. It felt like I had travelled back in time, like I was in 1928, like my mind was lost in some very, very old memory, but then I came back to 2009 and I kept on running.

I yanked open the front door and stumbled out into the warm night. It was dead quiet. The streetlamps were on, but even then it felt like it was dark. I was lonely and scared. I ran down the deserted roads without really looking where I was going.

Pain shot up my legs as my feet pounded against the pavement. I was barefoot.

I stopped after a while and looked around, trying to catch my breath. I sat down on the asphalt. A small girl, curled up in the centre of an empty road in the middle of the dead-quiet night, looking out over the open lawns. Mom had told me never to go out alone at night, and I had always tried to follow her advice, but I didn't care anymore. What would happen, anyway? Would someone kidnap me? Kill me? Didn't sound scary.

I got up and went to Liam's house and went around to the side where his room was. Then, I knocked on the window till I saw him sit up and turn on the nightlamp. He walked over to the window.

"Hazel?"

"Liam."

He touched my wet cheek. "What's wrong?"

"Help me get in."

He did. I walked over to the night table and looked at the alarm clock. It was 1 a.m.

"Hazel," he said. I looked at him. "What happened? I mean, it's really late."

I breathed in. "I had a nightmare. And then I woke up and... and... Mary was standing there. She wanted to kill me. I just know it. I felt paralyzed when I woke up." I let out a sob. "Oh God."

He wrapped his arms around me and rubbed my shoulders. "It's okay."

"IT'S NOT OKAY!!" I screamed, shoving him away, then remembered his father who was sleeping in the next room. "I see her all the time! One day she'll kill me and your 'It's okay' is not going to help!"

Then I hugged him again and started crying harder. "I'm sorry."

"Did she hurt you?"

"She was about to, but I ran away." I narrated the whole dream to him without leaving out any detail. "I felt what she feels. She feels so trapped, Liam. She can't go to the next life. She's just stuck there. And it's eating her up. She's so angry all the time. And I felt what it's like to die. It's like you're sleeping. You're not conscious, you're subconscious. That is the best way to describe it. It's so weird."

We were quiet for some time.

"I think she was giving us a last chance. She wanted us to know what she feels. She wanted us to understand why she wants to kill William, because maybe she thinks that if we understand, we too would want to kill him. And I do hate William right now."

"We can't kill him, Hazel. You know that. We have to find another way."

"Yeah. I know."

He took my hand and walked me to the bed. "Try and get some sleep."

"I don't want to fall asleep, Liam." I bit my lip and looked at the cozy bed. "I'll just have another nightmare."

"Should I cook noodles for you?"

When he said that, I realized how hungry I was. "Yeah. I'd love that."

Together, we tip-toed to the kitchen. He put a water-filled pan on the stove and then said that I cooked much better than he did, and so I ended up taking charge. I put a cake in the pan and promptly forgot about it. We sat on the counter and started talking.

When I smelled something burning, I hopped off the counter and turned the gas off, and let out a cry. Some blackened noodles were stuck to the pan. "Shit," I muttered. "They got burnt. We can't eat them."

He leaned over the pan and took a look. "We can, actually." He transferred the contents of the pan to a bowl. When I looked at it, it was just ten bites; the rest was stuck to the pan. "This," he held up the bowl, "is edible. And I'm sure it tastes amazing."

We sat on the couch outside and shared the bowl, sitting close to each other, the sides of our heads touching. Both of us ate slowly, trying to make the moment last longer. The noodles tasted smoky, and we laughed about it, and he said that next time when I nightmared, he would cook, and I agreed.

"Prom is a week away," he said suddenly.

"Yeah."

"I'm feeling nostalgic about school already. It's weird. Until a week ago, Luke and I were always fighting, always trying to get back at each other, but suddenly it doesn't matter anymore. When I look back at my life, I don't want to regret anything, you know. So I thought that I'd go up to him and say sorry for all the mean things I've said to him, and maybe ask him to hang out with me. But I don't know if he'll want to."

"Don't worry about that. You should ask him."

"What if he refuses and laughs about it with his friends or something?"

"Then at least you will have tried. You, from your side, should do what feels right," I said. "Besides, he's human, too. Maybe he also wants to forgive and forget and move on. Maybe he also doesn't want to regret anything when he looks back."

He thought about it for a while, then smiled. "You're right." He cupped my face in his hands and kissed me. I felt warm all over, and goosebumps rose on my back as he traced his fingers down my spine. Gosh, when will I get used to this?

He pulled back and asked, "Do you want to go for a drive?"

"Where?"

"Nowhere."

I laughed and said, "Okay."

We walked outside to his car. The comforting smell of leather and air-freshener greeted us. We rolled down the windows, and I poked my head out to feel the warm night air rush into my face. It was very quiet. The only sound was of the humming of the engine.

"This is the first time I've come for a drive at night," I remarked. He chuckled.

"What are your plans for the future? Like, college and all."

I locked my fingers together and stretched out my arms. "I don't know exactly, but I don't think I'll be going to college. After my scholarship ends in August, all five of us will get jobs. But I think we can go to college if we want to. I really don't know. I'll have to ask Sam. I have lots of exhibitions this summer, by the way, and I heard that lots of big artists will be there. And we'll also have dinner with them. Imagine. I don't know when that dinner will be, though." I turned to him. "You?"

"I want to go to NYU. And I was wondering if you'd want to come with me to New York. You know. We can rent an apartment and live together. You can have a studio there. Or you can do a job there." He looked at me questioningly. "Do you want to?"

New York, I thought. I bit my lip and thought about it. New York had great opportunities for artists. How many times had I fantasized about going there? I had probably spent half my life thinking about it. Plus, I didn't want to happen with us what had happened with me and Ryan. I didn't want to break up just because of the miles between us. So I said, "Okay."

"Yeah!" He pumped his fist in the air.

"I don't know what my parents will say."

"I don't think they'll refuse. If they let you come here, then they'll let you go to New York."

Then I remembered that I had my birthday in July. I would turn eighteen, and I would be able to do anything I wanted. So even if they refused, I could go to NY if I wanted to. That cheered me up.

Beads of sweat were forming on my forehead. I wiped them away. He looked at me. "Is it too hot? I could turn on the air conditioner."

"No. I like to sweat."

He grinned hugely. "Me, too. There's something satisfying about feeling the toxins...flushing out of your body. Does that make sense?"

"Totally." I looked down the road. The streetlamps formed circles of neon orange light on the pavement below. I thought of all the colors I would need to paint this scene: orange, white, yellow, black, grey...

"I really want to write a novel, Hazel," he blurted out.

"Who's stopping you? Write it."

He shook his head slightly, as if he didn't know how to exactly tell me what the problem was. "It's like, I keep daydreaming about it. About how it would feel to hold a book in my hands which I've written. And I'm sure it would feel great...but what if it doesn't? What if I finish the novel and then it doesn't mean as much to me as it used to? Everything is uglier closer up. Like how when you're young, you think high school will be an adventure but when you get there, you realize it's not all that great. What if I work hard and finish the story and it isn't as great as I hoped it would be? The dream is like a bubble for me. If I go closer, it will burst."

"Never think of dreams like that. They are meant to be chased. Had I thought of dreams like you do, I would never have reached where I am."

"But what if it's not that good?"

"It will be. I promise."

He nodded, then sighed. "I don't know where to begin from."

"Have you thought of a scene? Any one scene?"

"Yeah, why?"

I opened the dashboard and fished about till I found a piece of tissue and a pen. "Stop for a moment."

"Stop what?"

"The car." He shot me a quizzical look and then pulled over and cut the engine. I passed him the stuff. "Write that scene here."

He looked into my eyes, grey into blue.

"You know, sometimes people don't grasp how easy it is to start. I bet you've always thought, 'one day I'll write a novel', but don't you realize that this 'one day' can be today, right now? That 'one day' is what is stopping you. You're standing right in front of your dream. You just have to lift your hand and touch it. Don't be scared. One day or day one, you decide."

He slowly took the pen and tissue from me.

"Your story begins with the first word you write."

His expression changed: like something had suddenly dawned on him. He smiled, almost as if he had discovered something about me, and started scribbling. I stretched my arms and legs as much as I could in the limited space, and then went off to sleep. He shook me awake a while later, when the sky was a blend of purple and dark blue, and started driving again. I smiled with relief, happy that I had made it through the night. Mary could come in the daytime too, but the sunlight somehow made everything less scary.

I poked my head out of the window again to feel the wind. It felt awesome. I turned to Liam. "Can I scream like a bitch?"

He laughed. "Go on."

So I screamed "Whooooo!" like I was some chick in a movie who was returning from a late-night party heavily drunk, and when I was done, I settled down into the seat and looked at him. I liked looking at him. I'd been doing that a lot lately.

"What should I wear to Prom?" I asked.

"A dress," he answered. I laughed. "Seriously, don't wear jeans. And black would look great on you."

We drove around some more till he said that his legs hurt like someone had stabbed him a hundred times with a blunt knife. I laughed and didn't stop till we reached my house. Then we sat quietly. Finally I said, "Thanks. You know. For everything." Then I said, "This was the best night of my life."

"Mine, too." He smiled. "Do I get a kiss?"

I leaned over the gap between our seats and kissed him. It was awkward, and I felt like a giraffe with a super-long neck, but still, it was great. I pulled away. "Bye," I said, slightly shy, and got out and walked to my door. I heard the engine start up, and when I turned around to wave at him, I expected his car to already have vanished, but he stayed there till I was safely inside the house.

∞

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