Young Writers Society

"What kind of place was it?" I asked. I kept my tone casual, like we were talking about the weather instead of something like being imprisoned for long stretches of time.

Maybe I had been going about this wrong. Pushing The Phantom wasn't getting her to open up. I had offered my help at first because I wanted to avoid being discarded, but the way she was acting reminded me all too much of Lucy and Nikko. She couldn't have been much older than Lucy when she became the way she currently was. I wanted to genuinely help her accept how she was now.

"Those places are..." began Susan, not even realizing she was suddenly opening up about this," confusing to categorize. It was the Great Filter and the Great Barrier." She let out another involuntary shudder at the memories. She really wasn't supposed to be feeling the cold anymore but somehow the mere mention of those places were enough to still send a chill through her.

I hadn't heard of those places before, but the names didn't sound remotely good. Add in The Phantom's shudder, and it was clear that I'd want to avoid those two places no matter what.

"They sound like in-between places," I said. "Places you go when you don't know where you're supposed to go next—like the Other Side."

"I suppose in a way they are," said Susan, voice quiet. "The Filter is sort of well a filter, souls are supposed to go through seamlessly just being redirected. You could probably go see it sometime if you want, its strangely beautiful as long as you aren't like me. I just happened to be...umm...unfilterable. As for the barrier...its not too far away actually, we're quite close to it...its this reality's recycle bin...yeah that's the best way to put it." Susan let out another small shudder, steeling herself to finish this explanation before she chickened out. "Its where I became what I am."

...Maybe The Phantom's name really was deceptive. Ghosts were common things—or at least seemed to be somewhat common here. Presumably, they'd be able to be filtered. If The Phantom couldn't be filtered, she wasn't a ghost. If she was, she was something different. Something like a Type Three ghost, too unique and sentient to be considered part of any other category.

I mulled over the last thing that she had said.

"...How did you end up there?" I asked, my voice eerily quiet. It was probably just an accident, but...

I couldn't help but think of Bickerstaff's mirror.

"It was...a...power transfer gone wrong because...well you can't blame them. It was a new process no one had tried before and it worked twice before it just went wrong and I was...launched. We were already on the edge...and..." Susan trailed off, not able to bring herself to repeat that again. It was a memory she tried to avoid thinking of when possible.

My stomach dropped.

"They ran an experiment on you," I said, my tone dark and quiet. My mind flickered back to Bickerstaff and his mirror. To Marissa Fittes, tearing open holes in between life and death. I knew a few things about experiments that weren't ever supposed to be conducted.

Susan frowned thinking about it. She'd never really thought if that way.

"In a way, I guess..." said Susan," but then not really. It was a sort of experimental plan, but then it was also going to affect them in ways they didn't really know, so we all kind of experimented on ourselves...and we did agree and help out with the procedure. It was just...well doing things you don't know about always has risk."

"But you still got hurt because of their mistake," I said. I didn't know who they were, but I quickly decided I wasn't a fan of them. Maybe the situation was more complex than it seemed. I could have just been making the wrong assumption.

But if I wasn't making the wrong assumption?

I didn't want her to think that what had happened was okay. That it was all her fault, or wasn't their fault at all. I had been there before. I didn't want someone else to deal with that, too.

"Well no," said Susan," it wasn't a mistake. The spell just reacted in a way it just hadn't before. If anything I was the safest there, the same spell done the same way had worked perfectly fine twice before. Besides I wouldn't be here if they didn't pull me out."

I still was wary of her so-called friends, but part of me relaxed at that. My posture loosened, and I stopped looking so tense and dark. Maybe her situation wasn't the perfect match for my own. Not everyone got involved with cults at a young age, and usually had better company that the ones I had kept growing up.

"You were lucky, then," I relented. "To have people there to pull you out."

"I wouldn't necessarily call it luck," said Susan after a moment, "but yeah we were lucky that we got what we did. It wasn't a great situation to end up in, especially when you don't even know the ones who did it or why."

I blinked.

"Someone did that to you?" I asked. I had assumed it was her and her so-called friends getting into trouble on their own. I had, apparently wrongly, thought that one of them had the genius idea to get into the trouble that result in The Phantom being sent to a place she was never supposed to go to.

Susan nodded. "I was on the start of a roadtrip with my family one second and then before I knew it..." She let that trail off for a while. It had been some time since that horrible day but she still couldn't quite shake off the images and the pain.

"And so I'm here now," she added, it sounding a bit unnecessary even to her own ears.

I didn't want to push her into telling me anymore right now, but I couldn't help but wonder how a family road trip could end like that. So I didn't say anything else. I kept my mouth shut and peered around at the world beyond the forest we were standing on the edge of, waiting for the demon that The Phantom had said we needed to meet with.

"I'm sorry," I finally said, because I felt like I had to fill up the silence with something. "...I know what it's like, being changed like that."