Life After Death

Chapter 42

Being trapped in a room with two people that were fighting was torture - lovers quarrels were always hilarious, but these two took it to a whole new level.

After the yelling had subsided we all just sat on opposite sides of the room - well Roman and Sylvia did, Danny and I were sitting next to each other watching the tension grow thicker and thicker between the two. Danny and I had grown closer in a way - funny enough. Roman was feeling up the walls for Door 0 and Sylvia was lying on her back in the middle of the room muttering on how she couldn't believe that she was being dragged into this. Danny and I were talking about something rather interesting. Something I never thought I would be okay with talking about.

"So you met David at Amy's?" I asked him.

Danny nodded, a nostalgic smile tugging at the corners of his lips. "Amy and I were lab partners in Chem. David came over to pick something up - his Shakespeare poetry book, I remember - and Amy left the room to go and look for it leaving David and I alone..."

"What happened?"

Danny arched a brow at me.

"I want to know. It doesn't bother me as much as it did before." I'm in love with someone else, David Blackburn doesn't matter, I added subconsciously, stealing a glance over at Roman and hating myself for it.

"Okay..." Danny raked a hand through his unruly hair and continued. "Well, we got to talking and then, David said that we should chill during lunch. We did. We wandered through the quad, and under a tree was where I kissed him." Danny looked over at me to see if I was okay, I smiled and urged him to continue. "After that he never spoke to me - I realized why: he was dating you. I didn't know, I swear."

"It's okay, Danny."

He let out a breath. "Anyway, the first time we kissed, under that tree? Well, Amy saw us. She called me out and I didn't know what to say. She punched me in the dick and sauntered off like nothing happened and told me to stay away from Dave."

I cringed at his nickname for David, but didn't say anything and Danny didn't notice.

I smiled a little at the thought that Amy actually stood up for me. Even though the fact that she hid this from me turned my insides, she punched Danny in the dick - for me. That's a friend worth keeping.

"A couple of weeks later, on the day you died actually, David told Amy he was gay."

I remembered that day - it was the same day that Amy drove off with David. It seemed so long ago and trivial at this moment in time. I realized how stupid I had been, how ridiculous I had been, and I felt ashamed. I couldn't believe that Roman stuck around me at that time, especially when I was being an insipid, selfish bitch. If it was someone else, I wouldn't have stuck around, not at all.

"Later, David called me to have us meet up and from then we had a secret relationship - but things became less heated when we received the call about your death. Hope had never been the same. It changed. Everyone changed..." Danny trailed off.

For some reason I found that hard to believe - that my death impacted the small town of Hope let alone the people that resided in it. I always thought my presence in people's lives were useless. I was just a floater, until someone better came along and replaced me. It always happened. Nate neglected me - Amy came along. David cheated on me - his questioning sexuality and Danny came along. The nagging thought that I was never good enough always irked me. I pursed my lips pondering on the new information I had just received.

Maybe I wasn't as useless as I thought I was. Maybe I impacted people a lot more than I thought.

It was honestly a lot for me to process, to me, it felt so surreal. It felt next to impossible.

"It didn't feel real," Danny said suddenly. I looked over at him. He had this faraway look in his eyes. "I couldn't believe it. I blamed myself for a long time. Until one day, I came to a conclusion that living just wasn't for me. I just couldn't go on. I did it because I wanted to... I - I don't even know anymore. The more I think about it, the foggier it gets." Danny ran a hand through his shaggy hair. "I'm sorry..."

"Don't apologize..." I told him. "It's the past. I accepted what happened." I looked down at my crossed legs. "I've accepted everything. I can only move forward from here."

"What?"

"We can only move forward from here,"  I murmured to myself.

I stood up, looked around the ballroom. It was massive but the atmosphere was smog-filled. Breathing was horrible. It felt like I was breathing someone else's air. If I was human and well, alive, I'm sure I would've suffocated.

Door 0 had to be here. Somewhere. We must be missing something.

Danny was watching me, and so was Sylvia.

"Does anything look out of place?" I asked no one in particular.

"Besides for that bulbous chandelier?" Danny asked, looking up. "Nope."

I looked up. He was right. The chandelier was out of place in a way. You would expect something more elegant in a ballroom, something out of a Disney fairytale. Not something so crude-looking. The flames on the candles of the chandelier danced and lit up the ceiling. It was a massive mural that decorated the ceiling. It looked like it belonged in a cathedral not in the underworld.

"What if Door 0 is not like other doors?" Sylvia piped up. "What if it's -"

"Up there?" I questioned, gesturing to the high ceiling.

"Yeah."

"Well if it's up there how do you impose we get up... there?" Danny inquired.

"It was just a thought."

"No that's impossible," Roman mumbled. "Angus said he had to fix a door so we have to look for a door."

"Technically, its not a door. It's a portal." Sylvia informed him.

"She's right," Danny said.

Roman grumbled, he went back to feeling up the walls and then stopped. The same place where we entered the large ballroom in was something plastered to the wall, it seemed. Roman was picking at the wallpaper and began to peel it away. There revealed a short scripture.

Roman sighed. "I think y'all are right."

Sylvia jumped to her feet triumphantly. "When am I ever wrong?"

"Then why did he say that he fixed a door?" Roman moped.

"He probably meant portal," Danny said. "It is commonly used as a synonym for door."

"Point made."

Roman read the incantation and the light from the candles blew out.

"Shit. Shit. Shit," I began to curse.

"What the fuck just happened?" Sylvia panicked.

"I don't -"

A small blue-purple-green light, in swirling colour, began to form where the chandelier had been suddenly it grew and grew until it was consumed by the ceiling. And, like a black hole, it sucked all four of us inside it and everything went dark...