The Psychic Legacy

Chapter 3: Help

The pain was too much to bear. I could barely think. Even as I tried to detach from it, push it all from my mind, I could only focus on the sensation of every strand of my tissues snapping under the strain of being pulled in two directions. Snap went my skin, my muscles, my bones. Snap, snap, snap.

I no longer worried about being ripped in two, only because I knew I would be. The question now was just a matter of when.

The wooden thing beneath me had morphed again. It was no longer a chair, but had transformed into some kind of twisted tree without branches, almost like a kind of stake. I was now suspended in the air, bound to it. There was something almost funny about it—being tortured to death on a stake by a witch. Maybe, after she was done, she would light me on fire, too. I would welcome it. I wished for it.

Because all I wanted was for it to stop.

"Damn you," Matilda hissed. She was glaring at me from the circle's edge. "Release her!"

Inside nothing changed, but the ripping and tearing continued.

The old woman raised her arms and all the pulling seemed to increase. I screamed in protest.

"Release your grip, foul spirit!" she cried. "You have not been welcomed into this girl! Leave at once!"

But she did welcome me, a strange voice whispered through me.

No, I answered back, inside my own head. That night in the shop, I hadn't realized what she had meant when she offered to help me. I was drunk. I wasn't thinking clearly.

"She knew not what she did!" Matilda screamed back, like she could hear the voice inside my head, too. "She wants you no longer!"

She's right, I replied. I didn't know that when I accepted the ghost girl's offer for help, she was going to possess me. How was that helping? You lied to me!

I didn't lie, the voice responded.

"She does not need you!" Matilda cried out.

She does, the voice replied. If I go, she'll die.

I wanted to laugh. Dying sounded better than this.

"Liar! Liar!" Matilda screamed, spreading her arms as wide as they would go. "Foul, lying being! I will pull you out of her, one way or another."

Pain shot straight through me again, right down the middle.

This was it.

This was the moment it all ended and I was split in half.

Finally.

Just let it end.

"Shouldn't you be able to tell if I'm lying or not?" the voice came again, this time through my own lips. "That was one of your gifts, was it not?"

Matilda's all-white eyes bugged out from the folds of her face and she dropped her arms. For one blissful second all the pain and the ripping stopped. I hung limp in my wooden bindings.

"No..." Matilda whispered, taking a shaking step back. "No..."

The tell-tale sound of glass shattering echoed over from the next room, the room where Polly was barricaded inside. Matilda broke her stare and whipped around to look at the door.

"Pollaine! What in this green Earth are you doing?" she called, approaching the door.

There was no reply. The commotion continued on the other side—more sounds of breaking glass.