Young Writers Society

When the knife stabbed me in the stomach, it burned.

I was used to the pain of being stabbed. I was used to the pain of having someone pull a knife out of me. Natty boy's “friends” weren't always the nicest, and some liked to play dirty. It was understandable. If I had been on Nathaniel's bad side, I would have probably wanted to do the same thing, too.

But I was on his good side and was currently getting attacked along with him while Asmira was out getting us supplies, so I wasn't feeling all that fond of the people around us. It seemed like we might honestly die again. For all my joking about my invincibility, moments like these reminded me just how close I had come to permanently kicking the bucket.

So I did what I didn't usually do.

I tapped into my ghostly reserves of power—to the ectoplasm that probably was dancing with my blood and adrenaline and all the other stuff I had never bothered listening to Cubbins explaining—and sent a few people flying. I broke a few weapons. The air temperature was dropping fast. I saw glimpses of a tall, lean shadow moving out of the corner of my eye. That had to be Nathaniel, taking care of the few enemies I hadn't hit.

My head was spinning. I felt another sharp pain in my stomach and looked down to see that the guy who had stabbed me before decided to make it a repeat performance. I went to jerk the knife out of my stomach with a push of ghost powers-

-and suddenly found myself getting jerked out of my body instead.

I went tumbling forward, tripping over my own two feet as I was ejected. I landed face-first in the dirt with a pained groan.

I raised my head.

I had heard Nathaniel yelling my name right before getting thrown from my body, but I couldn't see him anywhere. The more I looked at the trees above me, the more I realized how different this place looked. This wasn't the spot I had been earlier. Nathaniel wasn't anywhere to be found. The trees were all wrong. And even though I was in my ghostly form, which usually meant I had the same kind of life-focused vision I had when I had actually been dead, I saw everything as if I was still in my body.

I rushed to my feet and looked down.

I was still out of my body. My ghostly form, which had gotten in the habit of changing with the rest of my body, had a nasty, bloody gash across its stomach. When I touched it, it still burned like it had when I had been stabbed. The knife must have had some kind of ability to tied to it.

For a moment—a terrifying moment that made the air temperature drop, which only reinforced my suspicions—I thought that I had finally kicked the bucket. But when I closed my eyes and tried to get the temperature and whatever malaise I was accidentally generating under control, I still felt my body. I couldn't feel where.

But if I still felt it in a way I had never felt my skull...

I was still alive.

I opened my eyes and let out a sigh of relief. The temperature returned to normal.

I didn't know where I had ended up, but the only thing I could do now was try to find someone who did.

Susan was starting to get ever so slightly bored. It had been a few weeks now since she'd been free to roam around and the places she'd roamed around in were starting to become too familiar now, there was hardly anything new to see left anymore.

The Underworld was a big place but when you only knew a tiny fraction of it, that meant you ended up with a rather limited area to roam around in. Susan really needed to pluck up the courage to ask Jennifer or Harry about how to get to some of the other islands in the abyss.

She was currently roaming around in the little forest she'd managed to find, tucked away in a tiny corner of the neighboring island. It wasn't much to look at after a while, the glowy trees had nice patches of color here and there illuminated in a way she was getting ever so used to, but besides that, it was still yet another rocky bit of land. She'd hoped that with enough walking she'd find some sort of river or something of that sort, but she'd had no such luck. Maybe she should return.

That's when she spotted the figure. The ghostly figure of a man standing among the trees. What's a ghost doing here of all places?

She found herself torn about what to do. On one hand, talking to a new person might be a nice break from the monotony, but on the other hand...it was a new person. They might... Susan decided maybe getting away was the best option, before this person managed to spot her.

I scanned the forest. I still couldn't see anyone, but another person could have easily be hiding behind the trees. My body could have been hiding behind the trees. If I looked closely enough, I might have even see my feet sticking out from a tree trunk.

But instead of seeing myself, I caught a glimpse of someone else—of something white, like a long white dress or piece of cloth. The person wearing it was just out of view, but it was clear I wasn't alone.

I started walking towards the person.

"I know you're here," I said.

Susan froze in place at the voice of the man. She'd been spotted. Her decision had been made for her. She made a fleeting attempt at turning invisible like Jennifer had been teaching her but her body flared white, her feet rising off the forest floor a few centimeters to let her know she was now intangible. She was never going to get these powers to work at this rate.

Giving up that attempt, she turned to face the person approaching her, trying for some sort of smile, trying to quell her inner desire to run away from the stranger.

The girl who stepped out from behind the tree was right around Lucy's age, with bright red hair that rivaled Nikko's. Stepped out wasn't the right word to describe what she had done—she was floating above the ground. Between that and the feeling in the air right now, I knew she had to be a ghost.

But she wasn't like any ghost I had seen before.

A pit formed in my ghostly, bloody stomach. There weren't supposed to be any other Type Threes. She hadn't said anything yet. I could hope that she was just a Type Two.

...Even if she had a power to her that most Type Twos could only metaphorically dream of.

"Hi," I said, with a friendly smirk. I kept my distance. I had been a powerful Type Three before and could still access some of my abilities now, but I wasn't eager to test them if this got messy.

Susan took a moment to calm herself. Not being able to breathe made this so much harder. It wasn't like she even had a heartbeat to listen to anymore. Hoping she didn't sound too squeaky like she always did when talking to someone she didn't know, she spoke.

"Hello"

I froze. My smirk faltered.

...she has returned my greeting.

Maybe it was just one of the last things she had said before she died. Maybe it was her digging into my brain to figure out what to say next—some Type Twos excelled at mind games like that.

I smirked again, this time more uncertain than before. I had to keep holding onto the hope that I was misreading the situation. The hope was seeming more and more desperate with each passing second, but what other choice did I have?

"You haven't seen a body bleeding out near here, have you?" I nonchalantly asked. "It'd look like me."

For a second Susan froze. Was that some kind of threat? Was she going to be attacked? What is going on here?

In the end, realizing that either way it would hardly make a difference, she answered, her voice small and definitely squeaky now. "No"

Was that squeaky voice a sign that she wasn't a Type Two, or was it just how she sounded? I didn't know her well enough to guess. I also wasn't getting much out of her hello and no. Both of those could have been the work of a type two. I needed something more to confirm my gut feeling about her.

I sighed.

"That's frustrating," I said. "I was hoping to get back into it soon."

Maybe that would be able to get enough of a reaction out of her. A Type Three would be genuinely confused; a Type Two would be unfazed by the suggestion that I wasn't fully dead.

Susan gulped. She really didn't know if this was some kind of test or if she was being lead into some sort of trap or just maybe this was all exactly what it seems. She tried to quickly gather herself.

"I'm so sorry if this is rude, but umm...are you...youu..uhh...dead?" she asked. It seemed like the only reasonable way to find out where this conversation was going.

“It’s complicated-” I started to say out of habit, only to stop when I realized that her reaction confirmed my worst suspicions. I wasn’t dealing with a tricky Type Two. I was dealing with a Type Three.

"Who are you?" I asked, my tone wary. Someone must have made her into a Type Three. I had only become one because of my closeness with Bickerstaff's old mirror, and I was sure old Ezekiel had some kind of involvement with the deceased prior to his death.

Susan frowned. This conversation was going from being terrifying to just confusing. What kind of questions was this ghost..person..she didn't really know...asking. She debated between spitting out her name and stalling. What had Jennifer said to her that one time? Don't reveal yourself to people you don't have to, but then that was for when she was on a mission. Here she was in the Underworld.

"I uhh...I'm...I'm the Phantom," Susan said finally, deciding to use the name she'd been slowly hearing more and more of in the past year or so. It wasn't her real name, but it wasn't a lie either. She hated having to lie.

Well, that was a suspicious name.

That sounded like the kind of name a living person would give to a ghost—not the kind of name that a ghost would pick for themselves. If you added in how Type Threes usually were created by people meddling with the dead, my theory started looking more and more likely.

"I'm the Skull," I offered. Two could play at that game. I smirked again. "Short for the skull in the jar."

Susan gulped once again. What was it with this person and saying every word like it was a death threat of some kind?

"That...that's cool," Susan managed. Really, she just found it a little bit creepy but she couldn't possibly say that out loud.