Ghost Image...6

You’ve been out of it too long.

Booker opened his eyes. He was lying flat on his back on the library floor, staring at the figurine made of smoke. The figurine had morphed from a snake creature into something more resembling a centaur, but still too animalistic—no human characteristics present in the way it presented itself. Just... Just itself, as itself.

Booker narrowed his eyes. “What are you doing here?” he demanded of the figurine.

Nothing, it said. There was a pause, a moment where its head—vaguely horse like, but also just not—cocked to the side and it regarded him. Booker looked away after a moment, unable to meet those not human eyes for too long. It made him feel dizzy, almost nauseous. It was sickening and exhilarating all at once.

“Why am I here?”

Do you want to be back there? The figurine asked. It was a valid question. Booker considered the woman with the bleeding breasts and the child’s voice, the man who had been in white, and the man who looked like a version of himself.

He shivered.

“No,” Booker said finally. “I guess not.”

So there you go, the figurine said. You didn’t want to be there anyway.

Booker might have argued, but it was then that Derick Holt opened his eyes, and Booker was a little too distracted by the fact that Holt was moving again to ponder the figurine’s words.

“Derick!”

It wasn’t that he hadn’t expected Holt to move again, ever. Or not to breathe again, ever. It was just that in usual circumstances, it took much, much longer to recover from accidental possession. It wasn’t like preplanned possession, where you had all the materials on had to cleanse yourself. Being dead—well, being dead took a lot of time, and effort.

It was just something you had to learn how to maintain.

“I’m so glad you’re alive,” Booker said. It sounded weird to stay, though, like he hadn’t expected it, when he knew he had.

“I am alive,” Holt said. His words were slurred, a little stilted and stiff. But they were still words, coming from his mouth in a coherent stream of thought. That was more than Booker could say for himself.

He wiped tears—when had he started crying?—out of his eyes and beamed at Derick Holt, his hands pulled up to his chest.

Derick Holt looked down and saw the blood all over his white shirt. Booker winced slightly. It was one thing to kill someone and have a chance t o switch their clothing before they woke up from a possession. It was another thing entirely for them to wake up mid-possession exorcising, and to see themselves drenched with more blood than they currently had in their bodies.

Booker hoped Holt wasn’t too scared by it, mentally. It would be a terrible waste of a librarian if such a sight made Holt queasy, and unable to work with books ever again. Murder wasn’t normally part of the job, after all!

Maybe he’d stick with it in some other capacity, if he did leave Founder’s.

Holt shook his head. “I’m not leaving Founders,” he said.

Booker flushed a little, feeling the warmth rise to his cheeks in response. It was obvious, he told himself. Obvious that Holt wouldn’t leave founders. It was just that he was nervous about losing—

“I’m not going anywhere,” Holt said. “You don’t have to worry.”

Booker grinned, and then stood up, trying to step over the smoke, to get out of it. The smoke was thick and heavy, pulled tightly around the area he was in. He put his hands up to feel the air, and it was solid. That wasn’t possible under the rules of math, of physics. There was magic in the founder’s library but it still obeyed things simple as physics, or as complex as basic algebra.

Or maybe it was the other way around—but still!—there needed to be someone paying attention to the above, Things were really starting to get out of control, on the upstairs level, after all.

“Why’d you kill me?” Holt asked Booker. His voice was mellow, soft. He tilted his head to the side. “I didn’t want to die. And you didn’t tell me. You didn’t—“ he paused, as though looking for the right word. “You didn’t ask,” Holt finally said.

“It was an Booker said. The smoke figurine cleared its throat. “Is,” Booker corrected himself. “It is an exorcism. I’m getting rid of this pesky thing for you so that you can go back to being alive again.

There was a long silent moment and then Holt shook his head and sighed. “No,” he said. “No, no.”

Booker wasn’t sure what he was saying no to, but it didn’t really matter, he supposed. It was just...no.

Holt stood up. “I’m not happy with you,” he said. His voice was still stilted, but his words were less slurred. “I’m not happy with you at all.”

“I—I’m sorry?” Booker said, but he was really asking it more than saying it, the lift at the end of the words the dead giveaway. “I didn’t mean—“ But that was ridiculous, because in order for him to be able to free Holt, there had to have been death, and Holt was the one who was being freed, so Holt had to die. It was just the way things worked. So why was he apologizing.

“I’m going to leave, I think,” Booker said. “I’m going to go downstairs and go to sleep. It’s been a long day.”

The smoke figurine snickered, hideously. Booker waves his hand at it. “You’re exorcized,” he said, yawning. “You can go away, now. I’ve done my work with you.” The smoke figurine fluttered about, flitted and then disappeared.

Holt was gone too, when Booker looked for him, but it was all for the best he supposed, and went towards the downstairs in order to find a place to sleep.

The downstairs was empty and open, filled with benches that were brown and chairs that were white, and the tables all had candles—fake ones—on them, sparkling all night long. Until there was one that died, and Booker thought of the first time he had ever take n a girl out on a date, and how the candle between them had flickered and flickered and then finally just died, without any sort of warning.

He wondered if it had been because of leaving the windows open, but he didn’t say anything, and eventually people brought him a new button anyway.

It was just how life worked—if attractive men wanted to see you in a swimsuit, they’d buy the sped. It was...

Booker shook his head, not entirely sure about that particular train of thought.

He must have had less sleep than he’d presumed, Booker considered. It was one thing—and entirely different—to just sit around and wait for something to happen.

It was another thing, altogether and weird, to make things happen to someone else.

Less than gratifying.

“You killed me,” Holt said. He was standing right beside Booker, as Booker had lain down on the futon that they kept in the basement of Founder’s. “You killed me,” Holt said again. “You killed me.” And again. “Killed me.”

Booker shook his head. “No,” he said. “I didn’t. You’re alive.”

“But you killed me,” Holt said, and he reached out his hands to put them around Booker’s neck, and then there was some squeezing involved while Booker struggled with it, trying to pull the wiry, thin fingers off his neck before it snapped into pieces. It was painful, so painful, but there was a moment when he managed to get a finger underneath Holt’s hands, and pry the grip off his throat.

“That’s going to bruise,” he said.

“There’s only two types of things in this world—“ Holt said. “The ones you can do and the ones you can’t.”

“You can’t do anything,” Booker muttered.

“Maybe I should just kill you then,” Holt said. He reached out again and this time put all his weight behind his strangling hands. It was impossible to breathe, and Booker clawed at the hands as long as he could, until he started to hear the sirens screaming in the background, and his eyes hurt from trying to do something about it, trying to see, to hear. It was impossible.

“You’re drowning,” someone informed him. “Just try not to breathe in, too much. It’ll still hurt the same, no matter what, just try not to breathe in, too much.”

“You’re drowning. Just try—“

“I’m drowning,” Booker growled. “I’m not breathing, for fuck’s sake.”

“—no matter what, just try not to breathe in—“

“Too much,” Booker finished.

The warning kept going.

He tried to sit up but it was close and cramped, and he couldn’t move. The he pushed upwards with all his strength and suddenly there was blinding light, so bright that it hurt his eyes to see it. Hurt his nose, even, because his nose started to run and Booker choked on the excess light. He closed his eyes to slits and tried to see beyond what there was to see. Tried to see what was hiding out there.

The pod he was sitting in had constricted around his legs and kept him from being able to move the way he wanted to. He couldn’t get his legs out. He pulled and pushed and they just stayed there.

“It’s not wise to keep moving,” a woman’s voice said. Booker looked over to see a woman in a wheelchair looking up at him.

“Oh?” he asked.

“It’s not wise to keep moving,” she said again. “It’s not going to help you. They won’t’ let you go and you might accidentally injure yourself.”

“I’ll be fine,” Booker growled.

The woman in the wheelchair laughed. “They all say that,” she said, but to herself. “Now, you’ve just drowned five hundred times. If you’ll hang on, I can get someone to let you out so you can remember what breathing air is like.”

Booker stared after her as she wheeled away.