She shrieked, kicking and writhing like an eel while I half dragged, half shoved her towards the circle of candles. She’d started levitating other objects. The combination locks spun out of their cores in the locker doors, and careened through the air at me like tiny little flying saucers. Then a tornado rolled in, sucking the contents of those lockers out into the breezeway, so that textbooks and three-ring binders were flying at me from four directions. I kept my head down, but didn’t lose my hold on her even when somebody’s trig book hit me hard in the shoulder. I kept saying the words I knew would open the hole again.

‘Why are you doing this?’ Heather shrieked. ‘Why can’t you just leave me alone?’

‘Because.’ I was bruised, I was out of breath, I was dripping with sweat, and all I wanted to do was let go of her, turn around and go home, crawl into my bed, and sleep for a million years.

But I couldn’t.

So instead, I kicked her in the centre of the chest and sent her staggering back to the centre of the circle of candles. And the minute she stumbled over that photograph of herself she’d given to Bryce, the hole that had opened up above her head reappeared. And this time, the red smoke closed round her as suffocatingly as a thick wool blanket. She wasn’t breaking out again. Not that easily.

The red fog had encased her so thickly, I couldn’t see her any more, but I could sure hear her. Her shrieks ought to have woken the dead – except, of course, she was the only dead around. Thunder clapped over her head. Inside the black hole that had opened above her, I thought I saw stars twinkling.

‘Why?’ Heather screamed. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’

‘Because,’ I said, ‘I’m the mediator.’

And then two things happened almost simultaneously.

The red smoke surrounding Heather began to be sucked back up into the spinning hole taking Heather with it.

And the sturdy pillars that supported the breezeway over my head suddenly snapped in two as cleanly as if they’d been two inches, and not two feet, thick.

And then the breezeway collapsed on top of me.

Eighteen

I have no idea how long I lay beneath the planks of wood and heavy clay tiles of the crumpled breezeway. Looking back, I realize I must have lost consciousness, if only for a few minutes.

All I can remember is something sharp hitting me on the head, and the next thing I knew, I’d opened my eyes to consummate blackness, and a feeling that I was being smothered.

A favourite trick of some poltergeists is to sit on their victim’s chest while he or she is just waking, so that the poor soul feels he or she is being smothered, but can’t see why. I couldn’t see why, and for a second or two I thought I’d failed and that Heather was still in this world, sitting on my chest, torturing me, getting her revenge for what I’d tried to do.