if you haven't read the first part, this won't make much sense. If you have read the first part, please review it so I know how to make it better. I haven't edited it any since the comment on the first part, but I'm hoping to get to that tomorrow. Please help me to make it better!
-Addict
“You came,” he said. I could hear the pleased smile in his voice, even though I couldn’t see it.
“Curiosity,” I said simply, attempting to keep up an air of nonchalance I wasn’t feeling at the moment. “Who are you?”
“Jimmy Amherst,” he said. “I’ve been anxious to meet you, Nigha,” he added more softly. The hairs on my arm tingled at the way he said my name. Almost like he’d never said it before, and liked how it fell off his tongue.
“I’ve been pretty anxious too. Though I wish I could see you better, I must admit.” And suddenly I was glad of the dark, because my cheeks went furiously pink after realizing what I just said. I felt the blush creep up to my ears as I berated myself silently.
He laughed softly. “I agree. But, I wonder if I’d have the courage to meet with you if it had to be light out,” he said. “It’s been awhile since I’ve talked to a pretty girl.”
“Why not? You’re such a charmer,” I said sarcastically, secretly meaning it. After all, he was the first guy ever to send me flowers and a letter. And a bridge? There’s no place on earth more romantic for first meeting.
“I don’t know. I guess girls just aren’t into guys like me. I actually take things seriously. Look ahead, I guess. After all, beauty is such a short-lived thing. That’s why I like art—it lasts.” His change in subjects caught me off guard and for a moment, I was left stumbling around my head, trying to figure out how to answer. He turned to me and I could feel his gaze.
“If I’m not mistaken, you just called me pretty a minute ago,” I said instead.
I saw him nod from the corner of my eye. “Yes. In fact, I think you’re very pretty. You have a pretty face, you know? It’s the hardest part to paint, too. It’s really all in the details.” He seemed to get lost in his own side-tracking thoughts as he talked, which I found both a little annoying and cute.
“You like to paint? That’s cool. Do you just paint people?” I asked, hoping he’d keep talking. His voice was smooth and easy, but I could tell there was power behind his words.
“Not just people. Sometimes landscapes, or even abstracts if I’m in the mood. In fact, I don’t paint people very often. I just started in the past year or so. Wouldn’t you like to be beautiful forever, Nigha?” he asked suddenly, changing subjects all over again. Talking to this guy was like going on a roller coaster when it was too dark to see anything, with unexpected twists and curves all over the place.
After a second, I was able to answer. “I don’t know. I think most people would think it’s a great thing. But frankly, I think I’d rather only be pretty for while. That way I could enjoy it,” I said. “If a gift lasts forever, it’s not really a gift, is it? It could be more like a curse.”
It took him a moment to answer—which made me feel less stupid—but he finally said, “I think it could be a gift. After all, isn’t immortality what everyone’s after? Old women want to look young, little girls want to grow up, and pretty girls want to stay pretty.”
I didn’t really know how to answer him. I guess he was right in a way, but I still found it sort of odd. “You’ve certainly got an interesting perspective,” I said after a moment.
“I suppose. But when you’re me, it’s perfectly natural,” Jimmy said.
“When you’re you? What’s that mean?”
“Some people say that I’m crazy since I can often see things other people miss. And while on the subject of missing things, have you ever thought of immortality?”
I looked up at him, my eyebrows knitting together in confusion. “What’s that got to do with immortality? And what do you mean? I mean, I guess I’ve thought about it, but I’ve never taken it seriously,” I admitted.
“If you had the chance to be immortal, would you take it?” he asked, ignoring my questions.
I thought about it for a minute. “Maybe. But just like being pretty, I think immortality would suck after awhile,” I said. “You see everyone you love die, and the world will change, and you’d still be standing there, unchanged and never to die. I think that would be a curse.”
“I think you ought to be immortal. Matter of fact, I could do that, you know,” he said. It was as if he didn’t even hear me, like I was just his private audience to listen to what he had to say.
By now, I was just about scowling. “No, I don’t like that idea,” I said, pushing upright and staring at him, straight into his almost black eyes.
He nodded. “Most definitely immortal; beauty really should last,” he insisted.
“Would you drop the immortality thing?” I said harshly. Suddenly my romantic mystery man turned into a strange, slightly scary person.
“No. I could show you the secret to perfect immortality,” Jimmy insisted.
I backed up slowly, my back hitting the other railing. “Look, just cut it out with immortality! I don’t want to be immortal,” I said firmly. My heart was hammering in my ears now and I was just about to run for it.
“Look Nigha, I’ve decided to make you immortal. You’re a pretty girl after all, so I want to keep you pretty forever,” he said, advancing toward me slowly. All indication of the prior, charming guy there just a minute ago seemed to vanish, replaced by something dark.
“No, I don’t want to be immortal. And I’m not that pretty, so would you just leave it alone?” I turned and tried to run, but I only got a few steps before he grabbed my arm and yanked me back.
“No Nigha, I’m going to make you immortal.”
“Let go of me! I’ll scream, you know!” I said, fear replacing any nervousness I used to feel.
“No you won’t. You won’t scream, Nigha, I know you won’t,” he persisted, forcing me to face him.
I yanked on his grip, desperate to break free. But his hold on my wrist only tightened, causing me to wince. For some reason, I think my fear was misdirected. I knew this was the real world, not fantasy, but I think I was more worried about become a vampire than dying. At the moment, dying didn’t even cross my mind. After all, when someone says immortal, the first any girl would think of would have to be vampires, since they seem to be everywhere.
In fact, the first time death crossed my mind was when he pulled out his knife. It was long and curved, with a wicked glint in the moonlight. My eyes widened in absolute fear and I fought twice as hard to get away. Death gives you a whole new adrenaline rush.
I fought and kicked and scratched at him, but he wouldn’t let go. He brought me up to him and held the knife out in front of me. I froze up completely, my entire body stiff and limp at the same time. I’d never pictured my death before, but now I knew exactly what would happen.
Just like I feared, he brought the knife down towards my chest. The pain erupted instantly as the blade slide between my ribs. It was like a white-hot metal piercing straight through to me. I almost screamed, but he covered my mouth instantly. My arms were free, but all the strength had gone out of me. I started feeling dizzy and my chest hurt worse than I’d ever thought possible.
He brought the knife out and stabbed at me again, this time just below my ribs. I pitched forward, tasting the metallic blood in my mouth. It happened a third time, and I was seeing white and black stars. I couldn’t breathe; the air just got stuck in my throat and wouldn’t move.
He let go of me and I fell to the ground in a heap. My head felt like it was full of bees, not something I’d expected to feel when I died. I’d always thought I’d see my life flash before my eyes, but I didn’t.
My vision grew dark, but I think I just passed out at first. I could feel everything still, the ache in my torso, Jimmy lifting me off the ground. Less than a minute could’ve passed in actuality, but it felt like several minutes of blinding pain and a blackness I couldn’t breathe.
And I think that’s when I died. I remember not wanting to leave my body, despite the pain I was in. Being unable to breathe (probably because he punctured a lung) with a heart growing tired of beating, my body desperately wanted to just give up, to let my soul move on. My body won the fight. Or, I guess you could say it lost the fight, because my body stopped working, it just shut down and cast me out.
I was looking down at my body in his arms. Somehow, every detail was sharper now that I was dead. I looked at his face, determined to remember every detail before I died. His hair was a sandy brown color now visible in the moonlight, and hung in his eyes that were so dark it was nearly impossible to distinguish the color from the iris. What stood out to me were his long, pale eyelashes, and for a short moment, I wondered why he’d dyed his hair. He was tall, though, probably close to six feet, and he was obviously strong since he was able to hold me without any visible effort.
And then I saw myself. I looked like a train wreck. Blood streaked my hair, causing it to cling to my face. My eyes were just barely open, but all the color seemed to have left them pale and blind. There was blood in my mouth, and my shirt held three dark red blotches.
It wasn’t overcast when I left, but now dark clouds hid the moon from sight. The rain started slowly, but picked up pace and began to pelt the bridge heavily, drowning away the blood that had gathered there. Jimmy looked at the sky briefly before turning back the way he’d come. Maybe I was feeling stupid and brave, or maybe I was mad; whatever the reason, I chose to follow Jimmy.
I felt slow and heavy, but each of my steps took me the distance of about three of his long strides. I had no idea how that worked, but I didn’t mind it much. It was the only way I was able to keep up with him. Even as just a spirit, I was walking like a normal person would have to, one step at a time. If I had the ability to fly, I didn’t know how yet.
I followed Jimmy down a gravel road much like the one I’d taken to get there. However, Jimmy left the path and began to trek through the countless trees, towering above us and blocking out the rain. He walked until he came upon a small house that anyone else would’ve missed completely. It could hardly be called a house from the outside, though.
It was muddy brown with ivy crawling over it, running it down to the ground. It appeared to be crumbling partly in the front, and the wood must’ve been rotting. The only window in the place was broken, with a tarp taped over the broken section. The trees made it so dark that I couldn’t even see the moon or feel the rain any longer.
Jimmy walked towards it without hesitation and opened the door with his foot and walked inside, careful not to let my feet bang against the doorframe. I followed him in, wading through the ivy. It felt as though my feet were almost sinking into the mucky ground. I stumbled toward the hut, but Jimmy closed the door just before I reached it. However, I was already moving, and it was too hard to just stop.
I held my arms above my face, afraid I’d ram into the door and hurt myself further. But instead, what happened wasn’t what I expected at all. I passed right through the door. It felt like I was passing through pudding, but it didn’t hurt.
The next thing I knew, I’d stumbled into the cabin. It was dim, but I could still see perfectly clear. Jimmy was setting my body on an iron table and then went to go light some lamps. He lit the lamps in three corners of the room, and my breath caught in my throat.
Canvases of all sizes rested against the wall, filled with beautiful scenes. Most were elaborate scenes of the night, but others were birds and animals. Then I noticed that every animal in the paintings were dead, but preserved perfectly to look like they were just sleeping. There was a fox curled up on a carpet, a sparrow with its wings outstretched, and an owl perched on a branch.
Then I noticed the girls. I only saw two canvases with people on them, but they made me feel slightly dizzy. They were perfect replicas as far as I could tell. One was a dark-skinned girl in a pale dress, resting against a window with her eyes closed. Her hair was up in elaborate braids, and laced in her fingers was a black rose, almost identical to the one he’d given me. The other was a girl with skin as white as paper in a suit the color of blood, wearing a loose black tie and covered in white rose petals. She was also sitting in front of the window with her eyes closed, an almost peaceful expression on her face. Her dark brown hair looped down her back giving her the impression of a princess at twilight.
And I knew they were both dead.
Jimmy began to undress my body, ripping my attention from the disgustingly beautiful paintings. I was repulsed at what I saw. Purplish bruises surrounded three identical holes, each caked with blood and wet from rain. Soon my body was completely bare, and I felt as self-conscious as if I were still inside my skin. That’s what caused me to look down at myself for the first time.
My clothes were exactly what I’d died in, and blood coated my shirt. I was paler than how I thought a ghost would look, and I could nearly see through my hands. Scared, I looked away from myself and zipped my jacket up without looking, desperate to hide the blood I couldn’t feel.
Jimmy had started to clean the blood off my torso, and his careful dedication in cleaning and sealing the wounds on my body made me want feel sick and appalled. He was slow and meticulous, and I wondered how many times he’d done this sort of thing before. At least twice, but I had no idea if there were more paintings. Though the way he’d managed to remove all the blood off me made me assume he’d done this plenty of times.
He left my body on the table and turned towards the dark corner of the room. He shuffled around a few boxes and something that crinkled like plastic and paper bags before returning to my body. He opened a package and removed a pair of tattered jeans. I turned away, angry and disgusted, as he began dressing my body.
When I looked back, he’d dressed my body to look like a rebel punk, in those tattered jeans, a dark shirt painted with a skull and fake blood, and several necklaces dangling around my neck. Jimmy propped me up against a wall and began to carefully tie a bandana over my dark hair.
I couldn’t watch any more. I felt sick, as if it were possible for a soul or spirit or ghost — whatever I actually was — to throw up. Knowing full well what he would do next, I turned and tried to run. It was slow going at first, but I eventually picked up speed. All I knew at the time was that I had to get out. I couldn’t watch him do that to me — or rather, what I used to be.
If a ghost has a heart, mine was hammering louder than a drum as I ran from that place, that godforsaken cabin in the woods. I didn’t know where I could go or what I’d do; I just knew I had to get away.
I stumbled through the trees and undergrowth, not really hitting things, but still managing to stumble and nearly fall. Maybe it was just that I was too scared to really notice, but I was passing through trees, and the branches flew straight through my face, as though I was nothing but the wind. And maybe I was the wind, because I was practically flying through the forest now.
I saw the stream and felt stupid relief. Why a dead person should feel relief, but I think I was just glad to be out of that forest and away from Jimmy. I didn’t slow down just then—I truly felt like the wind just then, like nothing and no one could restrict me or make me stop. But then I did, after I’d fled the bridge. Something held me near the river at first though, and I followed it upstream for awhile, racing along the shore at the speed of the dead.
There was nowhere for me to go anymore. In every story I’d heard, there was only ever one person who could see the dead, and they usually had to have some connection to the dead in the first place. I had no one like that. For a scary moment, I wondered if I could speak, and I felt panic well inside me. Staggering to an abrupt stop, I desperately tried to calm myself down.
Say something, I tried to tell myself. Anything, I begged silently. “No!” I screamed, grabbing my head, desperate to just collapse and really be truly dead, to be gone forever. Then I thought of Kate, and of my family and friends. Now that I was dead, would they have a clue what really happened?
I picked myself up and tried to get a hold of my raging emotions. I lifted my hand and gazed at it for a moment, intrigued and appalled by the ghostly look and the obvious, webbed veins running all through my arm, down to my fingertips. I balled my fingers into a fist and turned to the moon, with enough rage and confusion to rip her down the middle and cast the pieces to the east and the west, so far apart she would never see herself whole again.
Despair nearly overpowered me, but I got a hold of myself before I let it. That’s when I made the decision to go see Kate, to at least try and get her to see me.
But before I could take so much as another step, I felt weak-kneed, as though someone had taken a club to the back of my knees. I collapsed to the ground and felt my chest twist painfully. It was like being stabbed all over again. Three times, I couldn’t breathe. Three times, I saw dark spots. Three times, I went through the pain of dying all over again.
I coughed, feeling my insides twist and my lungs scream at me. I wanted to get away, to leave my body like when I died; but this time, there was no body to leave. I must’ve passed out, because everything went black for a long time. When I woke up, it was still dark out. Or rather, somehow I knew an entire day had passed, and it was once more night.
This time, I managed to prop myself up without as much trouble. But it was almost like I had to come to grips with being dead all over again. I pushed off the ground and stood up, still determined to find Kate, to try and make her see me, to believe me.
*****
Kate seemed taken aback by the story she’d just heard. “This is really it then? You mean… you’re really… you know, dead? Gone for good?” she asked slowly.
Nigha nodded. “More or less. But now… even now, there’s something I have to do,” she answered. She leaned her head back and rested it against Kate’s wall. “I can’t leave until I know this isn’t the end, until I know that Jimmy Amherst is dead, even more dead than me. I want him so dead even the devil won’t be able to find his abolished soul.”
“Nigha, that’s dangerous talk. You’re sounding like a soul that’ll be lost forever, an angry soul that’ll never find peace,” Kate warned. She was worried; she’d heard far too many stories of angry spirits that never found peace, resorting to roam the world with violence instead.
“Peace for me, Kate, can only come when that murderer is dead. And if roaming the earth is what it takes to kill him, you know I’ll do it,” Nigha said. There wasn’t only anger in her voice, but determination as well, as if she were hell-bent on what she just said.
“You can’t kill him, you know that,” Kate said firmly.
Anger flashed in Nigha’s eyes. She shoved off the wall and took a couple steps toward Kate. “I will kill him. I have to,” she argued.
Kate snapped. She lurched out of her chair and stood furiously, her hands clenched into fists. “You can’t kill him! You said yourself that you were the wind! Well the wind can’t kill people, Nigha. You have to trust me in this. Let someone who can hold a knife and use it kill him. And my knife is poison,” she said, her voice getting dangerously dark towards the end.
The anger seemed to leave Nigha’s eyes and she seemed to accept that Kate was right. It was obviously hard for her to say what she needed to just then, but she even managed a sad smile. “You’ll make a great writer someday. I wonder if I’ll see your plays from heaven,” she mused. “If not… I just might have to come back especially to watch.”
Relief flashed across Kate’s face. “I wish I could give you one last hug,” she said softly. The fight had gone out of both of them, which was probably a good thing.
Nigha walked over to Kate and wrapped her arms around her friend. Kate felt like the wind itself was engulfing her, the icy touch making her shiver softly. After a brief moment, Nigha pulled away and smiled at Kate. “Someday you’ll hug me. And I’ll be waiting to see you again. You’ll have to tell me about everything I missed,” she said. Kate heard the sadness in Nigha’s voice and she almost cried.
“I’ll keep my promise. And then I’ll see you in heaven,” Kate said, nearly choking on the words.
“I’ll be waiting. But, Kate?” She looked up without having realized she’d looked away. “Don’t hurry. Remember, you have to live for both of us now,” Nigha said. Knowing she should leave before she lost her chance, Nigha lifted her hand in farewell and began to disappear. Kate wanted to stop her, but knew better. She mirrored Nigha’s gesture just before Nigha vanished, then let her hand fall to her side again. Kate fought back the tears that stung at her eyes. She’d made a promise to Nigha, and now all she had to do was figure out how to keep that promise.
. I hope Kate goes all avenging-angel on that psycho Jimmy. Post more!
