You and I | Dreamcatcher

Chapter 10

She could save them.

"Hey, hurry up!" Siyeon said.

"There's no need to hurry." Gahyeon retorted. "We have all the time in the world, being trapped here."

"You raise a sore point for everyone." Handong laughed. 

"Quiet! Everyone, please. Give me some silence. Things may get a little weird from here on."JiU turned over the hourglass in Yoohyeon's hands and spread her right arm out, the side holding the salt and recited the words scrawled on the paper folded in her grey suit jacket. As she did so, her arm swept slowly backwards with control, releasing the salt from between her fingers so that it could complete the circle.

The words she spoke held boundless power within them. They had seemed impossible to pronounce before starting the actual exorcism, but it seemed to be one of the spells (According to Dami) where the exact way to recite the spell is a mystery until it comes to the time. When she became such an expert, JiU didn't know.

On one level of the world, they were standing in the darkened room. In another, they were in the astral plane, stood on a stone septagon, holding hands as Yoohyeon lay with her eyes closed down the centre of the septogram.

She asked for the spider to leave Yoohyeon. To be banished to the astral plane. To return Yoohyeon to her rightful body. For the spirit to never return. 

Those words made her happy - They could never be tormented again by that mistake of a spider.

***

Deep in her worries, Yoohyeon barely noticed the sudden change in light of the astral plane. It now seemed a little brighter, a little blue.

When she noticed something was different, her head looked up, aching from being in one position for so long. There was something there, in that stone circle shrouded with web and trees.

There was a portal there. At least that's what she took the swirling blue and white circle to be. It was a shade of the blue similar to colour of the dark starred sky.

"What..." Her voice choked up as emotions chucked themselves out of her and she held her mouth as tears sprang free from her eyes in streams of hope. It must be the girls. They must be trying to save her. A tsunami of gratitude washed over her and she allowed herself to succumb to her tears for a few precious moments.

***

It must have worked. Something felt different. Yoohyeon still hadn't opened her eyes, but there was time. From Yoohyeon's body, a grey apparition rose and spread its arms as it sped towards the ceiling.

"Can you see that?" JiU said gleefully as she first saw the spirit.

"See what?" Dami snorted."Did it work?" SuA asked."Are we free now?" Siyeon asked.When the grey spirit of the woman touched the ceiling, things went haywire.

The candles were all blown out and any bulbs that were on shattered in hot chunks of glass, sending the room into darkness and chaos. Dami and Siyeon were the duo of swearing and the others were clutching at each other in fearful confusion.

"What's going on, JiU?" One of them asked in panic.

The spirit turned in the air and looked right at JiU with its shimmering face. The malevolence was plain to see and JiU did the first thing she could.

Bolt.

Her legs took her out of the room and into the corridor as the spirit chased her. There was no telling what it would do when it caught up.

"Please no!" She cried loudly and turned into the next corridor, glimpsing the mirror where Gahyeon often appeared. When she looked in it as she passed in haste, JiU saw a clawed hand malform from the arm of the spirit that reached out to grab at her with those sharp talons, missing by mere centimetres.

JiU whipped her head back to the front again and sped up her running, but she knew that spirit would chase her to the ends of the earth if it could.

***

In the astral plane, Yoohyeon beamed happily.The girls hadn't forgotten about her. They were themselves again, that's why they were saving her.

She got to her feet slowly and stretched, having not moved for a while. A run and jump would be the best and classiest way to leave.

Yoohyeon took a deep breath. Then took another one after letting out the first to early and started her run for the energetically spinning portal.

***

In the next corridor of what seemed like endless hallways, JiU glimpsed ahead in the centre of the corridor the spinning top again. Still spinning.

Without much thought, her mind connected the constant spinning to the feeling of doom she'd felt looking at it.

Was it the portal? Was it signalling how much time was left for Yoohyeon to escape back to her body?

"I mustn't affect it in any way." She muttered to herself and jumped over it and run up the stairs into another corridor.

"Stupid corridors." She muttered.

Her feet kicked something and she looked down at her feet as she fell.

The spinning top.

No.

What was it doing there?

Helplessly, she watched as it flew through the air, spinning as it did, and as it landed, tumbling top over bottom. Watching it as it slowed its twirling.

"No!"

***

In the astral plane, the spinning of the portal slowed. 

"No!" Yoohyeon screamed and stretched her hand out desperately to it as if she could reach it in time by doing that.

But all effort was hopeless.

As she fell to her knees in front of it, still reaching out her hand, the portal shrunk into a small ball at the centre of the circle and became smaller until it disappeared all together.

Trapped.

 Again.