Nightfall ✓

Chapter 28

• chapter twenty-eight • 

"Hi. You're Hazel?" she asked in a soft voice. She was dressed like a normal person, in jeans and a black t-shirt. I had expected her to wear a long black cloak or something, with curly hair flowing around wildly. But the only queer thing about her was the bunch of necklaces she wore, with big colorful beads. Her gothic eyeliner accentuated her teal-colored irises. "Yeah," I said, just as quietly, and stepped aside to let her in. I turned on the lamp. I didn't want much light; the less, the better. Light would've drawn attention.

I looked at her. "Thanks for coming. Um...water?"

"No. I'm good." We sat on the couch, and she ran her gaze over everything, taking in the walls, the furniture. Taking her time to get comfortable. Then she looked at me. "So... there's a ghost bothering you?"

"Yes."

She extended her arm. "Can I see your hand?"

"Um... okay." I put mine in hers. The skin was slightly rough, though her fingers were perfectly manicured. And then I started feeling as if she was pulling something out of me. My whole arm was tingling with a weird sensation. As I closed my eyes, images flashed in front of me: everything, all my memories, all my thoughts were in front of me, like I was watching a movie. I saw us getting lost in the forest, us going into the wretched sanatorium and finding the diary; I saw the canvas on which Mary had left her first message to us ever; me seeing her for the first time on Christmas, when she looked lost and wanted help... it went on... I saw that dream again in which Mary got killed, I saw her Fracturing Liam's soul, I saw the building blow up. Anger surged through me. The movie-tape stopped. I opened my eyes. My arm was numb. I rubbed it in an attempt to increase the blood supply there.

"I see," she said. "Let's start right at the beginning. That diary. You must have felt dizzy when you touched it."

"Yeah," I said, remembering. "Yeah, I did." I sat up straighter.

"That diary was a Binder. Binding is dark magic stuff. Do you remember Mary's dream in which she was thinking about getting more energy, and about making a Binder?" 

That word pulled at the strings of my memory. I nodded.

"She cast a spell on that object, that is, her diary. And when you touched it, you became Bound to her. You became connected to her. That is why you can see her and communicate with her, and others can't. Except for those like me who are trained to talk to ghosts, of course. And... the thing is, now that your soul is Bound to hers... after you die, your soul will join with hers, instead of moving on and going to the afterlife. And then she'll feed off your energy, which is what she wants."

"What?!" I exclaimed, a little too loudly, and then covered my mouth. I couldn't wake Liam. "That... sounds horrible."

"Yes. It is horrible. See, Hazel, there's a Source where all souls come from. All souls are one. We all are just energy, after all. There is a giant ball of energy somewhere in the universe, and we souls are just little specks of it. We are one. After death, all souls join with this Source after completing their term in Heaven or Hell. But all that is at the ethereal level. Here, on earth, at the physical plane, trying to unite two souls forcefully can damage them. True love is the only thing that can connect two souls on the physical plane."

My mind was spinning with all this new information. "So... the people who report ghost stories from around the world... this is what happens? They see ghosts because they are Bound to them?"

"More or less," she said. "There are other ways. But yeah, essentially the ghost must connect to a person on the physical plane to make itself visible."