The Return: Shadow Souls

“I don’t need them; I’ll knock Caroline out again barehanded if she tries anything. But quit changing the subject. I can do this alone.”

Bonnie finally let herself put her own small hand on Meredith’s slim, long-fingered one. She squeezed. “I know you can. But I’m the one who should. It was me she invited over.”

“Yes,” Meredith said, with a slight, elegant curl of her lip. “She’s always known where to stick in the knife. Well, whatever happens, Caroline’s brought it on herself. First we try to help her, for her sake and ours. Then we try to make her get help. After that—”

“After that,” Bonnie said sadly, “there’s no telling.” She looked at Caroline’s house again. It looked… skewed…in some way, as if she were seeing it through a distorting mirror. Besides that, it had a bad aura: black slashed across an ugly shade of gray-green. Bonnie had never seen a house with so much energy before.

And it was cold, this energy, like the breath out of a meat locker. Bonnie felt as if it would suck out her own life-force and turn it into ice, if it got the chance.

She let Meredith ring the doorbell. It had a slight echo to it, and when Mrs. Forbes answered, her voice seemed to echo slightly, as well. The inside of the house still had that funhouse mirror look to it, Bonnie thought, but even stranger was the feel. If she shut her eyes she would imagine herself in a much larger place, where the floor slanted sharply down.

“You came to see Caroline,” Mrs. Forbes said. Her appearance shocked Bonnie. Caroline’s mother looked like an old woman, with gray hair and a pinched white face.

“She’s up in her room. I’ll show you,” Caroline’s mother said.

“But Mrs. Forbes, we know where—” Meredith broke off when Bonnie put a hand on her arm. The faded, shrunken woman was leading the way. She had almost no aura at all, Bonnie realized, and was stricken to the heart. She’d known Caroline and her parents for so long — how could their relationships have come to this?

I won’t call Caroline names, no matter what she does, Bonnie vowed silently. No matter what. Even…yes, even after what she’s done to Matt. I’ll try to remember something good about her.

But it was difficult to think at all in this house, much less to think of anything good. Bonnie knew the staircase was going up; she could see each step above her. But all her other senses told her she was going down. It was a horrifying feeling that made her dizzy: this sharp slant downward as she watched her feet climb.

There was also a smell, strange and pungent, of rotten eggs. It was a reeking, rotten odor that you tasted in the air.

Caroline’s door was shut, and in front of it, lying on the floor, was a plate of food with a fork and carving knife on it. Mrs. Forbes hurried ahead of Bonnie and Meredith and quickly snatched up the plate, opened the door opposite Caroline’s, and placed it in there, shutting the door behind her.

But just before it disappeared, Bonnie thought she saw movement in the heap of food on the fine bone china.

“She’ll barely speak to me,” Mrs. Forbes said in the same empty voice she’d used before. “But she did say that she was expecting you.”

She hurried past them, leaving them alone in the corridor. The smell of rotten eggs — no, of sulfur, Bonnie realized, was very strong.

Sulfur — she recognized the smell from last year’s chemistry class. But how did such a horrible smell get into Mrs. Forbes’s elegant house? Bonnie turned to Meredith to ask, but Meredith was already shaking her head. Bonnie knew that expression.

Don’t say anything.

Bonnie gulped, wiped her watering eyes, and watched Meredith turn the handle of Caroline’s door.

The room was dark. Enough light shone from the hallway to show that Caroline’s curtains had been reinforced by opaque bedspreads nailed over them. No one was in or on the bed.

“Come in! And shut that door fast!”

It was Caroline’s voice, with Caroline’s typical waspishness. A flood of relief swept over Bonnie. The voice wasn’t a male bass that shook the room, or a howl, it was Caroline-in-a-bad-mood.

She stepped into the dimness before her.

5

Elena got into the backseat of the Jaguar and put on a plush aquamarine T-shirt and jeans underneath her nightgown, just in case a police officer — or even someone trying to help the owners of a car apparently stalled by a deserted highway — stopped by. And then she lay down in the Jag’s backseat.

But although she was now warm and comfortable, sleep wouldn’t come.

What do I want? Really want right now? she asked herself. And the answer came to her immediately.

I want to see Stefan. I want to feel his arms around me. I want to just look at his face — at his green eyes with that special look that he only ever shows to me. I want him to forgive me and tell me that he knows I’ll always love him.

And I want…Elena felt herself flush as a warmth went through her body, I want Stefan to kiss me. I want Stefan’s kisses…warm and sweet and comforting….

Elena was thinking this as for the second or third time she shut her eyes and shifted position, tears once again welling up. If only she could cry, really cry, for Stefan. But something stopped her. She found it hard to squeeze out a tear.

God, she was exhausted….

Elena tried. She kept her eyes shut and turned back and forth, trying not to think about Stefan for just a few minutes. She had to sleep. Desperate, she gave a mighty heave to try to find a better position — when everything suddenly changed.

Elena was comfortable. Too comfortable. She couldn’t feel the seat at all. She bolted upright and froze, sitting on air. She was almost hitting her head against the Jag’s top.

I’ve lost gravity again! she thought, horrified. But, no — this was different than what had happened when she had first returned from the afterlife, and had floated around like a balloon. She couldn’t explain why, but she was sure.

She was afraid to move in any direction. She wasn’t sure of the cause of her distress — but she didn’t dare move.

And then she saw it.

She saw herself, with her head back and her eyes closed in the backseat of the car. She could make out every tiny detail, from the wrinkles in her plush aquamarine shirt to the braid she’d made from her pale golden hair, which, for the lack of a hair tie, was coming unbraided already. She looked as if she were serenely sleeping.

So this was how it all ended. This is what they’ll say, that Elena Gilbert, one summer day, died peacefully in her sleep. No cause of death was ever found….

Because they could never see heartbreak as a cause of death, Elena thought, and in a gesture even more melodramatic than her usual melodramatic gestures, she tried to fling herself down on her own body with one arm covering her face.

It didn’t work. As soon as she reached out to begin to fling herself, she found herself outside the Jaguar.

She’d gone right through the ceiling without feeling anything. I suppose that’s what happens when you’re a ghost, she thought. But this is nothing like the last time. Then I saw the tunnel, I went into the Light.

Maybe I’m not a ghost.

Suddenly Elena felt a rush of exhilaration. I know what this is, she thought triumphantly. This is an out of body experience!

She looked down at her sleeping self again, searching carefully. Yes! Yes! There was a cord attaching her sleeping body — her real body — to her spiritual self. She was tethered! Wherever she went, she could find her way home.

There were only two possible destinations. One was back to Fell’s Church. She knew the general direction from the sun, and she was sure that someone having an O.O.B. (as Bonnie, who had once gone through a spiritualist fad and had read lots of books about the subject, familiarly called them) would be able to recognize the crossing of all those ley lines.