Arielle Immortal Awakening (4 page)

Eva looked toward Arielle as Gabrielle rolled her eyes and moved to pull the board out of the closet.

“That’s absurd. Tons of people, and especially kids, use this board all the time. Come on, you guys, I’m bored to death,” Gabby said. She was relentless.

Eva was now sitting on the floor. Arielle moved reluctantly and sat down next to her. Gabby set the board on the floor in front of them, lit a couple of candles that she took from the dresser, and set them on the floor. She turned the lights off and sat down across from them. They gazed at each other in silence, and Arielle could feel tension building as she heard their thoughts, full of speculation.

“Why not try?” Gabrielle persisted in a very low voice.

“Are you sure?” Eva said. She too was very reluctant.

“Yes, I’m sure. Come on, Eva. Let’s see what you can do!”

Arielle was filled with a kind of quiet dread. She really didn’t think any of this was a good idea.

“You guys have to stay quiet, plus there may be a considerable change of temperature in the room,” Eva said. “Just try to stay calm and don’t be surprised.” She took a deep breath through her nose, exhaling slowly through her mouth several times.

“Concentrate on my visitor, and I’ll call for her,” she said.

They put their fingertips lightly on the heart-shaped planchette, closed their eyes, and tried to think hard about Eva’s visitor. After a few moments of silence Eva chanted a spell three times in a soft whisper.

“Guardians of the spirit realm, hear and guide my plea.

When the witching hour rings true,

Bring the girl that hunts me through.”

There was deafening quiet in the room for a long time as the candles flickered, but nothing happened. They opened their eyes and looked at each other but stayed silent, waiting in the shadowy candlelight. Arielle was just about to get up and turn the light back on when suddenly the candles went out and then came back on again with bigger and brighter flames. Then they went completely out. All three girls gasped in disbelief as a cold breeze blew across their faces and the curtains moved wildly in and out through the open window. Arielle stopped breathing and she could hear Gabrielle and Eva panting hard.

They were in complete darkness but for the dim light slithering from the night’s gibbous moon occupying the dark sky. Suddenly the wind seized and there was absolute stillness in the room. Arielle shivered as she thought that this was about to turn dangerous. At the same time, she was curious to find out if Eva’s spirit was really present. She could read Gabrielle’s and Eva’s minds, and they were both scared to death, but also completely intrigued.

She picked up the lighter and lit the candles one more time. Then Eva asked, in a faint voice, “Are you here?”

Their fingertips barely touched the planchette as it glided slowly but steadily, with the pointer stopping at the word “Yes.” Arielle’s body stiffened. She knew her friends felt just as frightened.

“What’s your name?” Eva asked.

The pointer moved slowly to the letter J, then moved slowly around the board, gradually spelling the word “Juliet”.

“Can you show yourself?” Eva asked in a quivery voice. There was a short lapse of time and the pointer moved again, this time to the word “No.”

The tension in the room was now thick, and they knew that Eva’s visitor was in the room with them.

“Why not?” There was no answering movement on the board.

“How old are you?” Eva asked. The pointer moved to the numbers one and then eight.

“She’s eighteen years old,” Arielle whispered. “What does she want from you?”

“What do you want?” Eva asked reluctantly.

The planchette moved slowly this time, clearly forming the words “I’m waiting.”

“What are you waiting for?”

The pointer moved again, forming the word “Jasper.”

Arielle felt a cold chill run down her spine. Her veins felt fused and her stomach was churning as if she might throw up. Looking at Eva and Gabrielle’s faces didn’t make her feel any better. They were all wondering who Jasper was and why Julia was waiting for him.

“Show yourself,” Eva demanded.

The pointer moved to the word “No.”

“Juliet, show yourself!” Eva’s voice demanded again, in a stern tone Arielle had never heard before. Their hands left the board and they reached out toward each other, intertwining their fingers as stony silence fell in the room. Arielle heard Gabrielle draw in a deep breath as her own breath seized up in her throat, and her body started to tremble from fear and anticipation. She felt a cold shiver as if the temperature in the room had dropped to below zero in a blink of an eye. Suddenly a light breeze blew through the open window, moving the curtains ever so slightly, but rapidly it grew stronger and stronger, and the curtains flapped wildly against the wall. There was a crashing sound that made them jump in fright, and their eyes widened as they watched the papers on Arielle’s desk being swept up and whirled around the room. Small objects were violently thrown off of the end tables by the sofa and scattered all over the floor. The candles went completely out, letting darkness fall around them like a curtain of death. For a moment, there was silence, and they stopped breathing altogether.

Suddenly there was a brilliant circle in the center of the room, glowing like a bright sun. A pale-faced young girl dressed in a beautiful white gown was standing in the center, wrapped in the glow. In place of her eyes were two dark holes; her long blonde hair was blowing in every direction, as if the brilliant circle was a wind tunnel. Blood was dripping slowly out of her mouth, down her neck, and onto her white gown, turning the front of it completely red. Tears were pouring out of the holes where her eyes should have been, and her hands were stretched out toward the girls. One of her hands was clutching a chain with what looked like a pentagon at the end of it, illuminated from the bright light of the circle. The girls gasped out loud, and Gabby let out a low scream. Arielle wanted to scream but she couldn’t, and she couldn’t move any part of her body. The girl was chanting words that had no meaning at all, but she looked distressed, suffering, clearly looking for Jasper.

“What do you want? I want to help you,” Eva said softly. To Arielle it sounded like Eva’s voice was coming from miles away. The young girl looked startled by the words. Suddenly, her face changed, the black holes were filled now with two beautiful blue eyes. Her tears had stopped flowing, and there was no blood anywhere to be seen. A beautiful smile covered her small white face and she looked peaceful and content. She opened her hand slowly and the pentagon fell on the floor with a soft thud as she and the bright circle disappeared into the thin air.

Chapter 3

T
he candles were burning again, the temperature in the room went back to normal, and the room looked as if nothing unusual had happened there, except for the papers that were spread all over the floor and the small items that had fallen off the table. Where a minute ago the girl had been standing, now only the chain and the pentagon were left behind.

The girls sat in complete silence for the next several minutes. None of them made a move to pick up the pentagon. Gabrielle and Arielle were trying to process this powerful experience. Eva had experienced it before, so she seemed to take it in stride. Arielle was trying to dispel the fear of insanity that had immediately come over her with the appearance of the girl. They had seen a ghost. She knew that that was an utter impossibility. It couldn’t be real…but yet the experience she just proved her wrong…
I must be going out of my mind,
she thought.

Eva was the first to move. She picked up the pentagon, walked across the room, and turned the lights on. She examined the pentagon, twirling it between her fingers and bringing it close to the table lamp.

“There’s writing on here,” she said. “Juliet Garner 1982 – 2000.” She turned the pentagon over and read, in almost a whisper, “Juliet, wait for me. I love you, Jasper”. Eva looked at them, her eyes tearing up.

“She’s waiting for someone and she can’t move on. How can we find out who this Jasper guy is?”

“Maybe we can search the computer under the last name Garner and see if something comes up about her family and what happened to her. That would be a good place to start,” Gabrielle said. But she also sounded really sad.

“Guys, I think I’ve had enough for tonight. I do want to help, but I’m tired, and honestly, I’m a little scared about this whole thing,” Arielle said. “I mean, messing around with the dead…” She was trembling like a leaf in a windstorm. Gabrielle and Eva nodded agreement. It was a bit scary, and they all knew it.

They also now knew that Eva’s visitor was an eighteen-year-old girl named Juliet who needed help finding the person she was waiting for—someone by the name of Jasper. Arielle pressed her lips together as she picked the board up, put it away in its box, and threw it into the very back of her closet.

“I was sure this board didn’t work,” she muttered.

“Well, you were wrong,” Gabrielle said matter-of-factly.

“Now I know why she has been coming to me all this time. She needs help. But I’m not sure how I can help her,” Eva mumbled.

“I truly feel bad about her and I want us to help. We can start looking on the Internet tomorrow and see what we can find,” said Gabrielle.

“How do we know what place to check in the search engine? What if she’s not from Brighton?” Eva asked.

“Hmm, good point,” said Arielle.

After a short pause Eva suggested that they could first search for Garlands in their town. Then, if that didn’t work they could check places around Brighton within a couple of hours’ drive since Juliet had to have lived somewhere in the surrounding area. That sounded like a logical plan, so they decided to go to bed and talk about it more in the morning. But Arielle sensed that Eva was still tense.

“What is it?” she asked, holding Eva’s gaze. Eva soundlessly inhaled and smiled tensely.

“When I was doing all the spells I felt the heavy burden of all the problems I was receiving from different spirits,” Eva said. “I want to help this girl, but after we find out who she is and what exactly she wants, I don’t want to do this anymore.” She was biting her lower lip, and Arielle could see that her thoughts were running a mile a minute.

“All right, we’ll start on this tomorrow. And when we’re done, we’re not going to do this again. I’m going to throw that stupid board out tomorrow,”

Arielle said. She was pretty frustrated that this senseless idea had ruined the rest of the night for them. This Juliet girl was now invading all of their thoughts. She tossed and turned for a long time, and when she finally fell asleep it was a restless, fitful sleep.

First thing the next morning, even before breakfast, they sat in front of the computer. They searched the Internet by putting in Juliet’s last name and her age. Then they moved from place to place, from family to family, checking the names under each household, and spent several hours without any results. They took a couple of breaks for lunch and dinner and continued their search until late Sunday night. They were tired and were planning to quit after pulling up Southampton, the last search for the night. In Southampton there were only three households with the name “Garner”. When they saw the name “Juliet” listed in one family group, they were startled and excited; there was the address, around fifty-five kilometers away from Arielle’s house.

They agreed to drive there the next Saturday and try to find anything they could about the girl. She had been dead for more than nine years, so it might be hard to find out anything, but they were going to try. They talked with each other every day that week, laying a well thought out plan, and the next Saturday morning they headed to Southampton.

The drive was an easy one, and the more they talked about it, the more optimistic they were. However, as they got closer to their destination, Arielle could feel anxiety taking over, and she could see that Gabrielle and Eva felt the same way.

They now sat parked in front of the address they had found on the computer. It was a huge house in a very beautiful neighborhood. They were completely startled to hear a young voice speaking, right next to the car. They looked over and a young girl of around fifteen or sixteen was standing there with a wide smile on her face, books clutched in her arms, asking them if they were looking for someone in particular.

“Do you know who lives in this house?” Eva asked, pointing.

“Who are you looking for?” asked the young girl. Arielle was shocked to hear Eva’s next statement, which didn’t fit well at all with the very well thought out plan they had laid out during the week.

“My sister has asked me to try and locate a couple of her best friends from secondary school. She moved to Germany to attend university a few years back and now she’s getting married.”

“Who are you looking for?” the girl asked again, a beautiful smile on her face.

“Juliet Garner.” Eva’s voice was a little shaky, but her nervousness wasn’t too obvious. The girl immediately lost her smile as a sad look took over her face.

“She’s not here any longer,” she said, in a barely audible voice.

“Oh… Do you know where she is?” Eva persisted.

The girl’s look of grief deepened. “She’s dead. She died 10 years ago.” Her eyes welled up as she turned away from the car and started to walk toward the house.

“Wait! Wait!” Eva yelled. The girl stopped and waited without turning back to look at them.

“Who are you?” Eva asked. Now the girl slowly turned halfway toward them and they could clearly see tears rolling down her face.

“I’m her sister, Rachel,” she said, her voice breaking.

“Rachel, can we talk to you, please?” Eva pleaded.

“Come on in the house,” Rachel said. “I’m sure my mum would love to see you.”

They got out of the car and followed her inside, not knowing how far they planned or would be able to carry the lie Eva had created. Rachel called for her mother and a short, very attractive woman appeared at the door to the foyer.

“Mother, these girls are looking for Juliet.”

The woman’s jaw fell open and her face showed clear emotional suffering at the sound of her daughter’s name. Arielle could clearly read her mind and she could feel the immediate change of the mother’s emotions, like a roller coaster, full of highs and lows but mostly lows that were deep and long. “Were you friends of Juliet?” she asked. Her voice was soft, filled with profound sadness.

“My name is Eva, and these are my friends Gabrielle and Arielle. We live in Brighton and my sister Briana, who was a friend of Juliet’s, is getting married in Germany. She wanted me to locate a couple of her friends for her. That is what brought us here.”

“Please come and sit down. I’m very happy for your sister,” Juliet’s mother said. There was sadness in her eyes, as if she were thinking about how she had once wished the same for Juliet.

Arielle was now consumed by guilty feelings about their lie, and she knew that Eva and Gabrielle felt exactly the same way. But they couldn’t change their story now. They had to move on and find out all they could about Juliet.

“Can we ask what happened to Juliet?” Eva asked. “I mean, if you don’t want to talk about it…”

“She was getting ready to go to university and she was shot by accident during a party at a friend’s house,” Juliet’s mother murmured, her eyes fixed somewhere in the distance.

Eva looked shocked, and then asked, “what happened?”

“It seems that the girl’s younger brother, only six years old, got ahold of his father’s gun—his father is a sergeant with the Southampton police department—and it went off. Juliet was shot, and she died instantly.”

Tears were now rolling down the side of her face, their hearts breaking.

“Oh, Mrs. Garner, we are so sorry!” Arielle said. But the mother continued speaking with an empty look in her eyes as if she hadn’t heard a word.

“We lost our beautiful daughter just a month before she was to be married to her sweetheart,” the mother continued. She was weeping softly now and had taken out a handkerchief from her pocket. “We buried her in her wedding gown because I knew how much she loved it and how she was looking forward to walking down the aisle to be with Jasper forever.” Her voice broke and she fell apart into a heartbreaking sobbing. Rachel put her arms around her mother and held her tight.

At the sound of Jasper’s name Arielle felt a strong jolt go through her body and, looking at Gabrielle and Eva, she knew they felt exactly the same way.

“I love you, mother,” Rachel whispered as she looked at her mother lovingly and gave her a kiss on the cheek. Arielle had tears in her eyes and her heart was breaking just listening to the mother, feeling her pain and sorrow. She looked over at Gabrielle and Eva, who were both looking down, clearly disturbed by the mother’s words.

The fact that Juliet had been shot in the mouth reminded them that when they had seen her in Arielle’s room that night, there had been blood coming out of her mouth and dripping onto her beautiful wedding gown.

“What happened to the boy she was going to marry?” Arielle asked.

“Oh…Jasper went through extreme mental agony and hurt. He seemed to do everything he could to move on and get back on his feet but he kept falling into deep depression and nobody could help him. He committed suicide a year later, leaving behind a letter with just one line:
“She’s waiting for me.”

Arielle stopped breathing as her mind went back to the pentagon and the words they had seen on it, “
Wait for me. I love you, Jasper”.

The silence in the room felt like a cold blanket on their skin, and the air got so thick that it was suffocating. They were all looking down with broken hearts and eyes full of tears.

Now Mrs. Garner stood up and looked at them with a soft smile. “I wish Briana all the happiness in the world,” she said. They thanked her and left the house in complete bewilderment. They got into the car and sat there without moving, without saying a single word. Then Arielle stepped on the gas while wiping the tears away from her eyes. She felt such a deep sadness and she wanted to do something, but she had no idea what to do. She was so lost in her own thoughts that she was startled when Eva spoke again.

“So, what do we do with all that information?”

“I think you need to find a spell and try to reunite them,” Gabby said authoritatively. Eva didn’t seem to even notice what Gabby had said, she was so deep in thought.

“Somehow she must have remained earthbound due to the emotional trauma she went through, and she hasn’t been able to move on in her life-journey. She must be waiting for Jasper and refusing to head toward the light until he comes to her. She needs your help, Eva. They need to find each other and I think you can do it. And I think she knows you can do it, that’s why she keeps coming to you.” Gabrielle was out of breath from excitement. She wanted so badly to bring the two separated lovers together that Arielle could feel her eagerness and willingness to do her part to help.