Going Lucid, A YA Paranormal

  Going Lucid

  By

  Holly Dae

  © 2013

  Holly Dae

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents:

  Chapter One: Heaven and Hell

  Chapter Two: The Exorcism

  Chapter Three: The Rave

  Chapter Four: A Bad Trip

  Chapter Five: Eliza’s Boyfriend

  Chapter Six: Julius

  Chapter Seven: Sadist

  Chapter Eight: Lucid Dreaming

  Chapter Nine: Lucifer

  Chapter Ten: Chaos

  Chapter Eleven: Malakha’s Exorcism

  Chapter Twelve: Nocturne

  Chapter Thirteen: Proposition

  Chapter Fourteen: Waking the Dragon

  Chapter Fifteen: Convictions

  Chapter One

  Heaven and Hell

  “Your parents are concerned. They say you’ve lost faith.”

  Malakha looked around, hoping to find something that might distract her. She didn’t; nothing that would interest her enough so she could tune the priest out. The room was small and only had two red leather chairs that matched the deep burgundy walls and one of those tall plants with the big leaves that reminded her of elephant ears. There was a window, but the glass was stained in the shape of the Virgin Mary. She didn’t want to see that. Enough of that story was drilled into her. She sighed, resigning herself to turning back to the priest her parents had requested of the school to counsel her about her faith in God… or her lack of it rather.

  Finally resigning herself to talking to the priest, she said, “Can’t lose something you never had.”

  He ignored her and continued, “They tell me you don’t believe in God or heaven or hell or that Christ came and died for our sins. Why is that Malakha?”

  “I don’t disbelieve in God or heaven or hell. I just don’t think God’s waiting for me to die in a kingdom in the clouds called heaven. I also don’t believe the devil is waiting in hell for the ones God doesn’t want.”

  “Then what do you believe in?”

  Malakha wasn’t exactly sure. That’s why her parents sent her here. That’s what the priest was supposed to be helping her figure out. If he had to ask, what good was the help he had to offer? Her mind drifted as she tried to think of an answer, to a piano solo whose tune was stuck in her head. She couldn’t remember the name of it or the composer and began singing it in her head over and over. Maybe it would come to her.

  “Malakha?”

  She blinked, remembering she was supposed to be coming up with an answer to his earlier question. Malakha sighed. Well if he wanted the answer…

  “I believe that if God really is waiting for me in heaven after I die, then he’s a cruel god to make us suffer to his whims on earth, only to get tired of us and let us die and as compensation let us live forever in a so-called paradise in the sky. Sounds kind of boring eventually,” Malakha said dryly and then looked at the priest dead in the eye, daring him to tell her she was mistaken.

  “Oh,” was the priest’s reply.

  Malakha glared at him. She wasn’t sure whether or not she preferred him trying to shove proofs of God and his unconditional love for her down her throat or him pretending he might agree with her. She hated being patronized.

  “I believe heaven and hell co-exist together on earth,” she said suddenly, surprising the priest. He hadn’t expected her to say that.

  “Tell me what you mean. Give me an example of this heaven.”

  He sounded cautious. Malakha was glad. He should be.

  “That’s easy,” Malakha said looking back at the stain-glassed window. “Heaven is being happy with who you are, being allowed to find your own path, having everything you need and being happy with it.”

  “You define happiness as having a lot of money?”

  “No. Celebrities have money and a lot of them commit suicide. Heaven is more complex than that. Heaven is peace.”

  “And hell?”

  Malakha glanced at the clock. Her hour was up.

  Then she looked back at the priest and narrowed her eyes while saying, “Sitting in this stupid room talking to you like I’m some nutcase.”

  ******

  Malakha didn’t find what was so funny, but apparently her best friend thought it was hilarious.

  “Shut up,” Malakha muttered, aware that the nuns might hear them talking through the lecture. They always kept a close eye on her as it was. That meant no escaping from this boring webcast viewing of the inauguration of the new pope.

  The girl stopped her laughing, cautiously eying the nun that had looked in her direction and said, “You told him you were in hell as long as you were talking to him?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “You may as well have.”

  Malakha rolled her eyes at her roommate, Sabrina, and turned her attention away from the Caucasian girl to look back at the screen so the nuns would think she was at least trying to pay attention.

  “You could at least try to pretend like you believe in something,” Sabrina suggested. “You don’t have to really believe. You just have to satisfy your parents so they bring you back home.”

  “Why? So I can be a hypocrite or something?”

  Sabrina scoffed. “For someone who doesn’t believe in God, she’s really concerned about not being a hypocrite.”

  “Not being a hypocrite has nothing to do with God and religion. And I never said I didn’t believe in God.”

  “Then what do you believe in?”

  Malakha didn’t have an answer, so she didn’t respond and only closed her eyes to reflect on it. That’s why she had been sent to this stupid Catholic boarding school way out in the middle of nowhere with the nearest town being an hour’s drive away. Her parents were completely prepared for her to have some other belief, some other type of faith. They would even foster it, but the problem was she didn’t know what she believed in, and not being sure what God she believed in or whether she had a God to believe in, to have faith in, was unacceptable.

  Therefore they sent her to a Catholic school where she could learn about religion and faith in God, and the study and comparison and contrast of other religions, where she could hopefully find her faith. So far, it had done nothing for her except confuse her, especially with the new counseling her parents had requested for her.

  “Still, you don’t have to give the priests so much trouble,” Sabrina said.

  “The priests are the biggest hypocrites I know… Vows of celibacy. Trust me, some of them aren’t celibate,” Malakha said. “I prefer the nuns.”

  “You can’t generalize all the priests like that.”

  “I can. I mean, I think it’s stupid. God can’t be that cruel, to give you something like that for it to never be used in the name of being a saint or staying pure. Trust me, I know some people who aren’t virgins that are more saintly than some of these priests. It just seems damn well ridiculous, don’t you think?”

  “I think it’s ridiculous that you can’t get through your head not to swear,” Sabrina said dryly.

  “I’m serious. W
hat is it with the Catholics and sex, even when people are married? What about not doing it keeps you pure?”

  Sabrina rolled her eyes. “Are you saying you want to have sex Malakha?”

  Malakha scoffed. “No. What I’m trying to do is get you to see how ridiculous some of this is.”

  “I don’t think it is. I mean, sex is pretty nasty.” When Malakha raised her eyebrows, Sabrina hastily added, “So I’ve heard.”

  “Yeah, but it’s something pretty natural. None of us would be here without it,” Malakha muttered. “I find a lot of stuff about this pretty crazy.”

  Sabrina groaned. “You might, but there are some of us who actually want to try to be good God fearing Catholics.”

  “I have no problem with that,” Malakha said, not at all deterred by her friend’s icy tone. “I just find some of the rituals pointless and ridiculous.”

  Sabrina rolled her eyes. “No wonder everyone thinks there’s a problem with you. How do you come up with this stuff?”

  Malakha shrugged. “Some people say it’s because I’m right brained, so analytical and scientific that I find it hard to grasp concepts as abstract as religion. I call it common sense.”

  “Whatever,” the redhead replied. “Now pay attention.”

  “For what? It’s boring. There’s a new pope. Big whoop.”

  When Sabrina ignored her, Malakha sighed and said, “That’s it. I’m leaving.”

  “What?” Sabrina asked, almost too loudly.

  “I’m leaving. I’ll see you in our room.”

  “Malakha!” Sabrina explained. “This is mandatory, part of our grade!”

  “I know.”

  “And what part of that don’t you understand?”

  “The part where it says I’m supposed to care,” Malakha replied as she stood up and left the auditorium. The nuns wouldn’t question her. For all they knew, she was going to the bathroom.

  Since everyone else was in the auditorium, the hallways were quiet and for that, Malakha was grateful. Silence was something she dearly missed, at least in regards to nuns, priests and teachers bossing her around. Normally the students didn’t talk to her much in the hallways because she was a known rebel. She wasn’t the only girl around here that didn’t believe in the Catholicism their parents had raised them in, but she was the one that was much more vocal and open about it. Malakha wasn’t faking anything for anyone’s sake.

  As she started to walk back to her room, that classical melody popped in her head again, the one whose name and composer she couldn’t think of. If only she could play it instead of humming it in her head.

  For the umpteenth time, she began to miss her big burgundy grand piano. Her grandfather bought it for her, said it would be nice to have a pianist in the family. Luckily, Malakha was interested in playing the instrument, and though she had quit her formal lessons long ago, that didn’t stop her from playing it. Malakha would have given anything to back home, sitting at her piano. But she wasn’t, hadn’t been since the day her parents sent her to this stupid boarding school.

  “There has to be a piano somewhere around here,” she muttered to herself.

  Of course there was if there was a choir.

  Malakha turned into a hall perpendicular to the one she was in instead of continuing down the long hallway that would take her back to the dorms. Then she began peeking into the rooms that she knew weren’t classrooms, finding more classrooms, offices and a prayer room. She started to turn back, growing tired of looking and then remembered that on extremely quiet days in the library, she could hear the sounds of the choir practicing. So she went to the next floor, where the largest room in the center served as the library. That meant one of the surrounding rooms had to be the music room. She looked into the windows of the doors first and figured the big room with nothing in it must be the music room. A piano might be off to the side, but she couldn’t see that far in.

  Malakha went to open the door and groaned when she found it locked. She sighed, taking out one of the hair pins that held her micro twists in its loose messy bun. It took a while and her hair pin was ruined for it, but she eventually managed to unlock the door.

  She went inside, careful to close the door behind her and then looked to the left corner of the room where a piano sat. It was old, black, a little dusty and not nearly as nice as the deep burgundy grand piano that was at home, but it would do. Malakha sat at the piano, pressing the A key. Satisfied, she began to look through the music books. Maybe it was Beethoven. As she searched through the book, she found a piece.

  “Moonlight Sonata,” she said. She knew this song well. It was the first song her piano teacher played for her and her mother liked Beethoven. But this wasn’t the song. Maybe if she sung it out.

  “La.”

  Malakha pressed a key and it echoed through the room. The note was close, but not the right one. She started to press another key but stopped and let finger hovering over the key instead as she noticed the goose bumps on her arm.

  “Odd,” she said. “It’s not that cold.”

  She ignored it, pressed another key and then clapped her hand in triumph. That was the first note at least. A lot more to go. By the time she had figured out the next ten notes, her goose bumps were still present as well as the chill of a draft.

  She looked at the ceiling, searching for a vent and when she didn’t find one near her, decided to attribute it to a crack in the seal of the window or something. It was an old building and her mother complained about the same thing back at home.

  “From the beginning,” Malakha said to herself and began to play the ten notes of the song whose name she still didn’t know.

  It echoed through the room; more than echoed actually. She heard it play again.

  “What the hell?” she asked standing from the bench to look at the other piano in the room, in the opposite corner. “Who’s there?”

  Malakha looked around the room.

  “I know someone’s here,” she said. There was no doubt about it.

  She sighed, resigning herself to search for whoever it was. There weren’t many places to hide in the room. In fact, the only place to look was behind the other piano.

  Malakha tiptoed to the other piano, grasping onto it to look behind it. She was expecting to find something, a rat, a cat, someone playing a trick on her, but there was nothing.

  “Okay,” she said slowly, turning around to look at both pianos.

  She heard it again, the same ten notes. But not only was no one at either piano, the keys weren’t being pressed. She would have at least seen that.

  In a movie, like one she had recently seen about a demon that haunted a family, the ones being haunted usually stuck around to investigate and figure out what was going on. Malakha wasn’t that brave.

  Wasting no time, or even a second thought, she opened the door to the music room and made her way out, only to be blocked by the choir director. She was a tall Latina woman with an oval shaped face and that was about all Malakha knew about her other than seeing her leading the choir on Sundays.

  “Please say you were playing a piano somewhere or a recording of a piano,” Malakha said.

  “Have you been here the whole time?” the nun asked.

  “Yes. Were you?”

  “No and you shouldn’t have been either.”

  “I know that. You don’t have to tell me, but someone else was in there.”

  “No. Everyone else was in the auditorium looking watching the inauguration of the new pope.”

  “But I’m telling you someone else was in there. They were playing a joke on me,” Malakha insisted.

  “I don’t want to hear it from you Malakha. You wouldn’t want to add lying to your record would you?”

  “No, but—“ Malakha stopped when she saw one of the monks, Brother Micha. “Oh hell.”

  Malakha didn’t care what anyone said. Brother Micha may have taken vows to be kind and celibate and to love everyone, but he sure didn’t like her.

  “You
found her,” he said firmly.

  “In the music room,” added the Latina nun. The woman gave Malakha a stern glare, which Malakha ignored.

  “I didn’t know I wasn’t allowed to be in there,” she said sarcastically.

  “Not during the viewing of the inauguration of a new pope,” the nun said.

  “Whatever. I know all that. But someone else was in there. I promise! They kept copying me on the piano. But when I looked no one was there and then the notes played again, but it didn’t look like anyone was playing.”

  “Come with me Malakha,” Brother Micha said.

  “But you have to believe me—“

  “Malakha,” he said.

  Malakha rolled her eyes. It was a waste of her time and breath to try to argue with him anyway.

  ****

  Malakha tried to be respectful at first, even going as far to admit that she snuck out the auditorium in the middle of the webcast of the inauguration of the pope. She thought being respectful would make Brother Micha and their headmaster or principle—whatever he was—Father Lucas, listen to her, but her reputation seemed to precede her. As far as they were concerned she was trying to make an excuse, and as far as she was concerned, respect could fly out the window if it meant they would listen to her.

  “But something else was in that room playing the piano. Not just me!”

  “I acknowledge that, but the point is that even though you’re admitting to your wrong, you’re still trying to get someone else in trouble with you so you don’t have to be punished alone,” Father Lucas said to her seeming not at all fazed by her outburst.

  Based on the way he was presenting himself, Malakha wondered if he was trying to be like Dumbledore from Harry Potter or something. If he was, he was failing miserably at acting the part.

  “Why won’t you listen to me? I didn’t say someone. I checked. It was something!”

  “A ghost?” Father Lucas said trying to humor her, a smirk on his face.

  Malakha was not amused and groaned loudly and flopped down in her chair. “You know what? Whatever. Just give me my punishment. What do you want me to do? Write lines from the bible or memorize some scripture again?”