The things he said didn’t make any sense but I didn’t want any clarification. The jangling sensation of dread came over me as the edges of panic began to unfurl around me.

  I shivered.

  “You’ll get used to the cold,” he said matter-of-factly. “Just don it like you would your favorite overcoat and you’ll come to grips with it quicker.”

  He was right. The coldness was all around, not just coming in gusts. It had weight to it, but it also seemed able to move through me, as though my skin wasn’t even there. The cold didn’t feel harmful, it felt like me.

  An image of familiar hazel eyes popped into my mind. I knew those eyes well, and I’d never wished so hard to be safe beside Lennox as I did at that moment. He’d know what to do. That was just how he was. Whatever life threw at him, he’d just roll with it somehow. What was it he’d said to me? “You act like life has all these rules, Ames, but it doesn’t really. Those are just made up by people pretending to be in control. Just do what seems right to you and you’ll be fine. Right? Look at me.” Then he’d grinned in that devil-may-care way of his and I’d shaken my head. Of course there are rules. Society wouldn’t function without them, but there was no denying Len was living proof that nothing catastrophic happened just because you chose to live life your own way.

  I hoped he’d pop out of the blackness and we’d go back to what we were doing, although I just couldn’t visualize what that was. Thinking felt like trying to flip through file folders that were glued together while wearing oven mitts. Was I losing my mind? Would I know if I was?

  I decided to do what Len would suggest; do what felt right. Leaving felt right so I’d have to try.

  “I have to get back to Lennox. I’m getting out of here.”

  “I hear Lennox sometimes. The woman too, but her name escapes me. They’re always asking questions, but they never notice me.”

  So this guy was a watcher in the dark. He’d been spying on Lennox and another woman? There was no telling what he would do. I had to get out of there immediately.

  The only thing I could see was still the gold sparkle, like a far off star in the depths of the universe. There had to be a way out. I did a slow turn trying to locate an exit, an object, anything that could get me out.

  I just came back to the sparkle.

  “Well, my charming nameless visitor, I fear it’s been long enough. Would you mind holding this for me?”

  The sparkle twinkled and seemed to grow a little bigger. Or maybe it was getting closer. One of those things.

  “What? That?” I asked stupidly. As if he’d know I was looking at the sparkle.

  The space around it had become lighter. It was indistinct but definitely something.

  The object moved from side to side, as if being transferred from one hand to another. But that didn’t make any sense. Who could juggle stars?

  “I don’t know what it is.”

  “You don’t have to,” he said. “Just keep your eye on it.”

  Fascinated, I did as I was instructed. As I focused completely on the glittery little orb, it seemed to increase in brightness. The area around it shimmered and parted like a veil, darkness receding to an even more opaque blackness behind it. In between the two heavy saturations of dark was a flickering lightness. A gentle gray in between black. At first, it was still, and the sparkle was just a single point of light. Then my eyes acclimated to this new way of seeing. The shadow of the man I’d been seeing was resolving into something more. More than a shape. It was a fuzzy image of a man. It had a grainy quality, like a very old clip from the dawn of film. It even jumped and skipped as if coming through an old projector with a deteriorating film strip. The only thing that remained constant was the glowing glimmer of light. I could now see that the man was cradling it in his hands.

  I looked on and noticed more and more details. At first, the man’s eyes were cast down at the glittery orb, but as I stared at his face, trying to work out if I knew him, he raised his gaze to meet mine. The instant our eyes met, alarm bells went off in my head. Words were leaving me, but the way he looked at me made me defensive. It was a wild, desperate look and as uncomfortable as the intensity of his stare made me, I couldn’t risk looking away.

  The longer I stared at him, the brighter he became. Details were starting to resolve themselves, although the lines and pops like film distortion were still present. His outfit was old fashioned. It looked like he was wearing a long sleeved white blouse with the cuffs unbuttoned and rolled up to his elbows. There was a dark vest over the shirt and dark pants. A tie was loosened and slightly askew at his neck.

  As he regarded me, a wolfish smile spread across his gray lips. He fidgeted with the glitter orb, passing it back and forth from hand to hand. As he did so, the orb seemed to increase and decrease in size and shift from a silvery color to a warmer yellow and back again. It was such an usual sight that I turned my attention to it.

  “It’s pretty isn’t it?” He held the sparkle up.

  “Yes.” I agreed. “Pretty.”

  “Wait until you see what it can do.”

  He raised his cupped hands to his lips and blew on the sparkle. In response, a shower of tiny light fragments rose from it and filled the air. They spun up and around us and all over the blank space we were in. In an instant, it looked like we were enclosed in a sparkly sheer net of static. It seemed as though someone had spun a delicate lace out of light and draped it at the periphery of what could be seen. Only he and I were inside this glittering area. Beyond, things were dull and muddy in dark shades of indigo and black. If I really concentrated on what was past the lights, it seemed that shadowy figures were moving around, but I didn’t want to focus on that. The sparkles were too beautiful.

  Like floating in a lake at night. I had a sense of endlessness. Past, present, and future were all around me, but not in a chaotic or linear way. It was comforting.

  “This is nice,” I said.

  “Yes,” he murmured. “Would you like to stay awhile?”

  It was so beautiful, I couldn’t imagine going anywhere else. A dull sense of alarm pulsed through my mind, but it was secondary to the wonder at our surroundings.

  “You know,” he looked at me earnestly. “There’s something I’d dearly love to share with you.”

  “Hmm?”

  “How would you like a little gold?”

  He held up the sparkle, which was glowing a warm golden yellow, brighter than ever, even though he’d blown so many sparks off it to decorate our space.

  “Catch!” he called and tossed it up. It seemed to fly at me from the hazy center of a dark tunnel. Firefly sparks swirling all around it. Maybe it was coming toward me. Maybe I was moving toward it. However it was happening, the sparkle and I would intersect with each other.

  Even though I’d never seen such a wondrous thing, my arms instinctively stretched out in front of me as the object got closer. When it reached my fingertips, reality changed. The thing I was reaching for split into countless golden pinpricks of light. I watched in slow-motion wonder as the opaque confines of my own body did the same. It would appear that I had morphed into a shadow person too. There was nothing more than a deep black outline of the body I’d had. Like the dawn of a universe, my shadow fingers swept away in a galactic haze. My hands followed suit. My wrists. It was mesmerizing to see. The vague sense of being in my body that I’d always taken for granted was replaced with a sensation I’d never felt before. It was cold, so very cold, but I felt like I was opening up. Joining the current of unknown existence. I was everything, everywhere, nothing, and nowhere all at the same time.

  A fluttering sensation started in my chest and it seemed like I was tilting somehow.

  “It’s a fair trade!” he bellowed as if very far away. “A life for a life!”

  He laughed and laughed, the sound filling my head as my eyes stared in awe at the transformation I was undergoing. As his laughter grew stronger and clearer, I noticed that my glowing cells weren’t just fanning out into the ether. They were flowing to him. Every brilliant speck of mine that broke off was adding to his increasing brightness.

  “Wha—” I tried to ask what he was doing, but the word wouldn’t even form for me anymore.

  “Do you have a question, my dear?” He stopped laughing long enough to ask. “No matter. You’ll be out of energy soon and have more than enough time to ponder all your questions here.”

  The words caught somewhere in the back of my mind and prickled there. I couldn’t quite access what they all meant at the moment. It couldn’t have been a conscious thing, because my thoughts were getting fuzzier by the moment, but the primal urge to survive took over.

  “St—” I tried to speak again but the word wouldn’t come.

  I’d been so caught up in watching myself unravel that I hadn’t noticed how vibrant he’d become. He shone with bright colors and his edges were sharply defined against the murky darkness behind and around him. His eyes glowed a bright blue. His lips were a lovely shade of pink. He seemed like a thing of beauty, and I smiled as the tips of my hair began to sparkle off toward him.

  The coldness that filled me became more intense as he grew brighter and stronger. I didn’t know how to fight, although I understood that I wanted to. Trying to anchor myself to that feeling, I needed to summon whatever strength I had left to reverse this process. Wishing for some sort of miracle, a tiny sensation of warmth pressed into my chest. Next, there was a phantom sensation of a warm hand wrapped around my cold one…although visually, my hands had already turned to glittering stardust and floated away.

  The warmth was comforting, but it was nearly finished then. I couldn’t think of anything to do and all that was left was my hair, halfway gone already. I couldn’t see my own face, but that must be next and then the transformation would be complete.

  As I watched the last of my hair spiral way, like a double helix of tiny galaxies, the sense of warmth spread throughout the space my body used to occupy. I could hear something that seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it. An image of hazel eyes flitted across my remaining consciousness, peaking my interest.

  Sound rustled into the memory of my ears.

  “Amy! AMY! Wake up! Please, Amy!”

  They were interesting sounds. Amy sounded familiar, tickling at the edges of my mind.

  “Don’t listen to that,” the man said. “It’s too late for you. It’s my time now.”

  I didn’t have the energy to respond. It didn’t make sense to me anyway, but the small voice was persistent.

  “Amy, do not let go. You have to remember who you are.”

  There was that sound again…Amy. It felt like something powerful. Something I knew.

  The sparkles from my hair were moving in slow motion now. I guess there were still some left.

  “You are Amy Jean Morrison and you are the most important person in my life. Do you remember that?”

  Familiarity pulsed around me. Amy Jean Morrison. I knew that combination of sounds. And that voice. It was very low and quiet, but I knew it too. It had my attention.

  “Amy, do you remember that time in ninth grade? I convinced you to cut class with me, even though you really didn’t want to. But you did because I told you we were just going to come back to my house so we could watch Alfred Hitchcock movies. Remember how scared you were? You just knew we’d get caught, and you thought Hitchcock would scare you too much. I insisted you would love it, and we wouldn’t get in trouble, and you finally caved because you trusted me.”

  The voice caught, like it was suddenly in great pain.

  One of my sparkles stopped in mid flow to the man and hovered between us.

  He saw it instantly.

  “No!” he bellowed.

  Unlike the little voice I was hearing, this man was much louder. The sound thundered over me like being pummeled by a boulder.

  The sparkle shuddered for a moment and slowly started back on its journey toward the man.

  All my sparkles would be gone soon. Then I’d be able to rest. How calm and quiet that would be.

  But the small voice came back. Even quieter than before but still clear enough for me to hear.

  “Amy, please don’t give up. I need you to remember who you are, okay? I can’t do life without you, Ames. You’re the only person who knows me, and I love you so much.”

  Ames. Amy.

  The pieces clicked into place and understanding came back. I was Amy. That distant voice was Lennox. I didn’t remember how we’d gotten separated, but this was wrong. I wasn’t in the right place, and I needed to get back to Lennox.

  All at once, it felt like someone simultaneously pressed the rewind button and dropped a lava-hot elephant on my chest.

  “I’m Amy,” I said, my memories flooding back to me as if a dam had burst. “I’m ghost hunting with Len. We’re hunting you! You don’t get to have my life.”

  “I told you not to listen to him!” The former shadow man had transformed again. He was bigger and brighter than ever, his eyes golden with light like two blazing suns. “It’s my turn to go back! You stay here now!”

  “No!” Warmth flowed through me, dispelling the cold nothingness that had nearly overtaken me. “You had your turn. My life is for me!”

  Cross over. A female voice tickled my mind, vaguely familiar. Meaning was still a little fuzzy, but this made sense. Ghosts need to cross over. This one was trying to come back, but it was a one way ticket. If he wanted to leave wherever we were, he’d have to go the other direction, but I had no idea where that was or how to push him in that direction.

  “You need to cross over.” I hoped Len and the female could hear me in the same way I could hear them. If I was lucky, they could help me do what needed to be done. Maybe I should have watched scarier movies with Len. At least I would have had an idea of where to start. The only thing I knew from being adjacent to ghost culture was “go toward the light,” only that didn’t apply here since the only light was a gold glittering ball that was apparently energy.

  While I was desperately looking for some clue, I noticed that the gold particles that had so rapidly unraveled from me and built up the ghost were now flowing away from him and back to me. I was feeling stronger and more aware, but his eyes were still shining with a cold energy I recognized as fury.

  Ghost movies capitalize on the moaning wails of ghosts to elicit a quick scare, but they sound like a lullaby compared to the real sound of rage and anguish that blasted out of this being. Whatever realm we were in did not obey the laws of life on my earthly dimension. I could see the shock waves as misty distortions emanating from his gaping mouth. I watched them barreling toward me with panicky dread. What would happen to me when those waves hit? I’d already had the particles of my being whisked away, there was no telling what other things he was capable of doing.

  “Help!” I cried, desperate for Lennox to hear me somehow. “I don’t know what to do!”

  The cataclysmic roar coming from the ghost vibrated through my consciousness. It was even more difficult to hear what I needed to, but I managed to get a snippet of an answer.

  “We need to open a bridge.”

  It wasn’t Len’s voice, but the female again. With a snap of clarity I realized it must be Emlynn. I had a team of two to help me defeat this ghost. That was something.

  Even though I wasn’t in a physical state, I still had the impulse to duck to avoid the waves coming my way.

  Awareness of my circumstances seemed to sharpen my mind, even though I had no body to maneuver, I was able to “move” through space in a manner of speaking. Without the limits of physicality, I was able to move like a wave myself. Where the rage waves crested, I made a trough.

  “A bridge?” I asked. “How?”

  The moment of concentration it took to process what Emlynn said and respond cost me a smooth avoidance of an incoming wave. The edge of one crashed into my hand and made its presence known as immediate pain. My thumb burned with intense fire.

  I cried out. I wanted to protect my injured hand somehow but I had to stay focused on the battery of waves so I wouldn’t suffer anything worse.

  “Amy!” I could hear Len again. His voice was laced with anguish. “Stay with me, Amy. We’re going to get you out of there!”

  Hearing him again calmed me, despite the pain, but I had to concentrate on not getting hit again, and I still didn’t know what I could do about the bridge Emlynn mentioned.

  “Vade in pace. Intra requiem tuam. Vade in pace. Intra requiem tuam.”

  Emlynn started chanting in Latin.

  The weight of everything that was going on closed in around me. The ghost’s wailing was the main sound in my head. I was trying to hear whispers from Len and Emlynn, while maintaining absolute concentration on the relentless volley of waves so they didn’t annihilate me.

  I didn’t know Latin, and it wasn’t the optimum time to carefully process each syllable Emlynn was saying.

  It helped only a little when Len’s voice joined the chant.

  My senses already at overload, I noticed a ray of white light flickering into existence behind the ghost. His attention was focused on me.

  “Amy! Say it. Vade in pace!” Len took a quick break from his chanting to urge me to action.

  While concentrating on Len’s voice, I missed the tail of a wave that caught me in the foot.

  I couldn’t take more hits like that. My thumb still felt like it was a pot of boiling water and now my foot was suffering the same fate. If we didn’t get the ghost over the bridge fast I was going to lose.

  “Vade in pace,” I said. “Intra requiem tuam.”

  I joined the mantra as best I could while still continuing to anticipate the coming waves.

  With my voice joining theirs, the white light grew brighter and larger.

  I spoke with more conviction after a few repetitions. I was getting the rhythm of the unfamiliar words.

  Finally, the ghost seemed to understand that something was happening. He paused his onslaught of sound and shock waves and turned to look behind him.

  In that moment of respite, I launched forward, still chanting, and attempted to see if one spirit can push another one into a bridge of light.