Whatever it is, it’s led me here, to staring at a sea of the dead.
I take a few tentative steps, then really wish I hadn’t because hundreds of milky gray eyes turn toward me. Seconds later, they all start slowly floating in my direction—which, I decide, is an invitation to get the hell out of dodge.
I take off at a sprint, with Luis right behind me. I sidestep a couple of giant hoop skirts and a rolling head right off the bat and even manage to juke my way around a conductor waving his cane in the air as he leads a symphony none of us can hear.
Confidence fills me—maybe I’ll actually make it to the end without getting stopped—but then, out of nowhere, something flickers directly in front of me. I have one moment to recognize it as a teenage girl—one with waist-length hair and a septum piercing—and then I’m running straight through her.
Pain slams into me, taking hold of my insides and shaking them until I feel like I’m about to explode. Like the very molecules that make up every part of me are spinning faster and faster, bouncing off each other before hurtling themselves at the inside of my skin. I clamp my teeth together to stop an instinctive whimper from escaping, but I stumble regardless. Luis makes a dive for me, but his hand glances off my shoulder, and I fall flat on my face. What the hell was that? It didn’t feel like a ghost—or at least, not like any ghost I’ve ever touched before.
Luis reaches down and pulls me up, but I barely take more than a step or two before I come face-to-face with Finnegan, one of the ghosts I’ve known the longest.
“Clementine.” His low rasp fills the hallway, along with the clank of his manacles as he lumbers toward me, dragging his left leg behind him through the mist. One of his eyes is hanging halfway down his cheek, attached through the eye socket by a thin, barely visible silver thread.
As he makes his way to me, I catch a streak of red out of the corner of my eye.
I turn my head, try to figure out what other student would be foolish enough to risk it down here if they didn’t have to. But before I can figure it out, Finnegan reaches for me and snaps me back to my oh-so-painful reality.
“Clementine, please,” he mumbles, his dislocated jaw popping and clicking as one translucent hand tries to touch my shoulder. I dodge it just in time and start running.
“I can’t help you, Finnegan,” I tell him, but as usual, he can’t hear me.
I don’t slow down, just keep racing toward the stairwell. Something else flickers to my right, and I jerk backward, whirling away so as not to get caught by whatever that is again.
It works, and I even manage to avoid a small group of ghosts dressed in shorts and bathing suits…only to plow through yet another flicker-like being that materializes directly in front of me.
The thing is huge—dressed in what looks, alarmingly, like a spacesuit—and trailing the same kind of shimmery material the teenage girl was. It appears totally different from the usual mist. But before I can even wonder why that is, I run headfirst into what feels like a million fragments of glass.
They slice through me, burrowing beneath my skin, cutting into my flesh, my bones, my heart. They shred every part of me and send the pieces crashing against each other until I can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t stand.
I scream as I start to fall, and I throw my arms out in a futile effort to catch myself. It doesn’t work, and I stumble several more steps before falling to my knees.
Behind me, Luis shouts, “Get up, Clementine!” as he grabs my arm and starts to pull.
The spirits are closing in on me from all directions now—the weird flickers and full-blown ghosts—and there’s nothing I can do to stop them.
Luis positions himself in front of me, trying to protect me as best he can from the unprotectable. He even raises his fists like he’s ready for a fight, though I have no idea what defense he thinks that will be against a bunch of ghosts he can’t even see.
I scramble for purchase as I try to get upright. But then a spectral chest crashes into my shoulder from behind, and a thousand needles prick my skin. Another ghost grabs my arm, sending ice-cold razor blades slicing through me.
My stomach rolls and pitches at the agony.
I stagger away in a desperate attempt to escape the pain…only to run into another flicker.
And not just any flicker. This one is a small toddler wearing dragon pajamas and carrying an oversize looking glass.
“Hold me!” he wails, his little fingers clutching at my hip. The pain is so intense that it burns straight through my skin to the flesh—and bones—below.
Instinctively, I start to jerk away, but tears are pouring down his little face. He’s no more than three or four, and flicker or not, pain or not, I can’t just leave him like this.
And so I crouch down until our faces are level, ignoring Luis’s startled, “Clementine! What are you doing?”
I know he can’t hear me, can’t feel me, but I reach out a finger to wipe a few of the boy’s tears away anyway. The weird, fiery feeling spreads to my fingertips and my palms.
His only response is to throw his ghostly arms around me and sob harder as he presses his little face into my neck. I can’t feel his weight in my arms, but agony swamps me at the contact anyway, pain flowing over me from all sides. But I don’t let go—how can I when he’s got no one else to hold him?
“What’s wrong? Are you okay?” I say instinctively, even though I know an answer won’t come.
But he shakes his head, sending new, deeper waves of pain through me, even as he whimpers, “I don’t like snakes.”