Ghosts - part 6

Hi! Thanks for visiting my blog :) This is part six of a little story I'm writing. For anyone who is new here, I would recommend you start at part one and work your way through. Happy reading!

I wake up confused, not sure what has happened. As I sit up in bed, Peter's arm falls off me. He mumbles in his sleep, his hand absently searching the mattress for me.
"Belle, breakfast!" my mum calls.
"Peter," I hiss in panic, shaking him. "Peter wake up!"
He comes awake instantly. "What's wrong? Is it the ghosts again?" He looks around the room, braced for a threat.
"It's my mum," I moan. "Quick, you have to leave  - she'll kill me if she finds you here!"
Peter looks for a second as though he is about to laugh. I suppose he has reason. After everything we've been through, worrying about my mum's wrath may seem silly. He's never seen my mum's wrath, though.
"Move," I whisper, listening with all my might for the sound of my mum's footsteps coming up the stairs. Peter allows me to push him out of bed and towards the window. "I'll come see you later," I whisper. "Now go!"
I have a fleeting glimpse of him swinging himself onto the vines that cover the house and starting to climb down, before my door bursts open.
"Mum," I says, spinning around, my body covering the window. "Breakfast, you said?"

It takes me two hours to escape my mum. She may not know exactly what's going on, but she can tell that something is wrong, and it takes all of my persuasive talents to get her to let me out of the house. When she does, I go straight to the library. Peter has made it clear that he is resigned to the situation, but I am not. I will find a way to free both of us from the ghosts; him taking on my burden as well as his own is not an acceptable solution.
The town library isn't huge, but it's all I have to go on right now. I've gotten to know it quite well over the years, but I've never been in the section on death before. It feels slightly colder than the other sections, as though the chill of death hovers around the volumes.
I flick through different books, looking for one that can help me. They detail different rituals surrounding death and mourning, many of them in different languages. There are so many books that it takes me what feels like hours to find the one I am looking for. When I finally do, it is tiny, squashed in between two larger volumes. The title is in white on black leather: Ghosts.
Not wanting to sit at one of the public tables and be seen, I sink down right where I am with the book, my back resting against the nearest shelf. I start reading. Certain passages leap out at me as I sit perfectly still, only my eyes moving.
Ghosts are the souls of dead humans, ever trapped between worlds, unable to go on to the world after life, unable to go back to join the world they left behind. It is a fate that none would want...
It is unknown how ghosts first came about, nor how to tell which spirits will move on and which will become ghosts. They always originate from the joining place, but spread widely after that...
"Joining place," I mutter. I flick through the pages, looking for the phrase again.
The joining place is a place where the worlds intersect - death, life, and the world of ghosts. The boundaries between them are weakest, there, so most people avoid it. The joining place and the lands around it have been uninhabited for generations.
I put the book down, thinking. If I could get to the joining place, maybe I could somehow merge the worlds - the ghosts' world and the world of death. No longer trapped, they would have no desire to manipulate the world of life - nor the power to do so from the world of death, even if they wanted to.
I carefully replace the book on the shelf and go to another section I haven't been to often: maps.
It doesn't take long, this time. There are many maps of all the lands. I quickly locate my own land of Grenet, and look around at the little houses that represent settled land. In most places, the houses are squashed so close together there is hardly any space in between them. There is one land, though, which is completely empty of anything other than mountains and hills. I lean closer, trying to read the name.
"Orisi," I read aloud. Glancing at the sun, I see that I have been here half the day. Peter must be getting worried by now. I roll up the map and tuck it into my jacked, promising myself I will return it when I get back. I get up and jog out of the library, making straight for Peter's house."
"Peter," I whisper, tapping on his window.
It opens instantly. "Belle, I was getting worried! Where have you been?"
"That doesn't matter. What matters is where we're going to be. We're going on a journey."

To be continued