Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble

Chapter 3

Trey, Mischa and I were silent for a moment. None of us knew quite what to say. It would be fair to assume that all of us were a bit paranoid about inviting a spirit to communicate with us. After all we had been through, our wariness about paranormal situations was the only defense we had.

"We'd like to speak with her, too," Trey said calmly. "How would we go about doing that?"

"She says it's not the grandmother," the ghost told us, sounding as if she hadn't even heard Trey. Even her voice was the same pitch as Olivia's had been. "It is the grandmother, but it's more. There are more of them. You have to stop them all to save Mischa."

As much as I tried to keep my eyes on the road, I couldn't help but stare in the rearview mirror. The ghost looked so much like Olivia that it was just like having Olivia back with us in the car, only... not. Olivia had always had a feisty spirit; there had always been wheels turning in her head behind her angelic smile. This ghost was like a blank slate and her voice was a monotonous tone. Her face, although identical to Olivia's, was expressionless. I wondered if the resemblance was intentional, something that maybe Olivia's own spirit had arranged so that we'd trust this ghost. Or, maybe it was yet another trick from Violet to make this ghost look just like Olivia. Another diversion. More smoke and mirrors to spin us off in the wrong direction, further away from the truth. Violet had heard Mischa tell the Bloody Heather story, too. It was fair to assume that if she thought for a second we'd realized our mistake in destroying her locket, she'd know we'd be looking to get in touch with any connection to the spirit world. We'd have to consider anything that Bloody Heather told us with a fair amount of skepticism.

"How?" Mischa asked without turning around. Her fingers were still tightly clutching her seat in fear, but she was managing to stabilize her voice. "How do we stop her?"

"You must break the connection. Break the connection between Violet and the others," the ghost told us.

I made the mistake of looking up into the rearview mirror and noticed that there was dark blood, almost black, seeping from the ghost's eyes and nostrils. I sucked in air unintentionally at the gory sight of it. In the story Mischa had told us so many weeks ago, the ghost had left a bloody mess in the back seat of the car of the driver who had picked her up. The blood disappeared shortly after the ghost did, leaving absolutely no physical trace of the haunting, whatsoever. I kept reminding myself that it was all an illusion. It wasn't real blood. The girl wasn't really bleeding, she was already dead.

But it looked awfully real.

And the car was freezing cold, despite the heater being on full blast.

"How? How do we do that?" Trey asked. "Do we burn down the house?"

"The house must be destroyed. And they must see Violet in their own world. The deaths won't stop until she crosses over into their realm," the girl said.

In the rearview mirror, I saw the black, inky blood spilling out from between her lips. The car swerved when I unintentionally stared in the mirror too long.

"So, we have to kill Violet? Is that what you're saying?" Mischa demanded.

"Not kill. If you kill her, you prevent her from casting the spell again, but you also doom yourselves. If she dies, then her prediction is irreversible. You have to send her into their world in the place of someone else. They won't keep her there; they won't want her there. But that's the only way," the girl told us.

"How do we know you're really giving us advice from Olivia? How do we know we can trust you, and that you're not just another part of the little game Violet is playing with us?" I asked. I didn't want to spend the entire night once we got home rehashing everything this ghost had told us and trying to make sense of it, as we'd anguished so many times over messages we'd gotten from our attempts to contact Olivia and Candace with the Ouija board. Spirits tended to speak in riddles, and the stakes were simply too high for us to be making assumptions.