It was past noon when Hannah headed for the cemetery gate.

There she met Lug who was leaving his house.

He was bent slightly forward, his hand on his stomach.

When Lug saw her, a mixture of panic and joy came over his tired face.

"Hannah? I didn't know you were here, it's been a while!"

Hannah could hardly recognize him, it had only been a week since she last saw him but he looked changed.

He was very pale, his emaciated look betrayed that he was weakened.

"Lug, is that you? What happened?" Hannah asked with a concerned expression.

Immediately Lug straightened up and puffed up his chest.

"It's all right, the task the Wise One gave me is a bit difficult but I'll be fine."

She felt like telling him that he could stop if it was too difficult, that everything that was going on was a bit much for her, that maybe the best thing to do was to forget everything and to leave this place...

But she remained silent.

She felt deep inside her that gears had started to move inside her, for the first time in her life.

She felt that she was now part of something bigger than herself.

Even Lug, who hated change, was doing his best to live up to the fate that awaited them.

"I'm going to start my training too, I hope I look a little better than you." she joked.

They both smiled.

"Do you want to have lunch together?" Hannah asked.

Lug held his stomach, as if every reference to food felt like a stab.

"No, I'm not really hungry right now." Lug replied with a strained smile.

"No worries, take care of yourself. See you later!"

Lug watched Hannah leave the cemetery.

His stasis was interrupted when he heard the engine of Hannah's car start up.

"Ah, I have to get back." he thought to himself.

He grabbed a bucket full of water and his trusty broom.

On the way to Primont he reflected on the words of the Wise Man as he held his belly.

"Strong dhiarrhea and headaches? Yes, that makes sense. The ghosts of Primont are very violent and territorial, they attack anything that moves. Yes... Obviously a stabbing from a ghost won't leave any wounds, but... The psychic body impacts the physical body, so after dozens of blows your body will react. The aches and pains all over your body, the vomiting, the headaches and so on... All of this comes from your physical body reacting to these attacks."

Lug sighed heavily.

He looked at his reflection in the bucket of water he was holding.

He didn't see much, but he guessed that his face would look like a Picasso painting.

And it was with that face and that puke breath that he had run into Hannah.

He wanted to plunge his head into the bucket and die of shame.

But he couldn't, he had a mission and it was far too important to allow himself to die.

When he arrived at the door that separated Primont from the rest of the cemetery, he looked at it for a few minutes.

Like a condemned man watching the guillotine.

He knew he was going to be attacked, stabbed everywhere by countless knives, even bitten.

But he didn't back down.

He had no way of differentiating whether his bellyaching was stress-related or due to the dhiarrhea that had nailed him to the toilet all morning.

It didn't matter. He went in.

Immediately a short, bald ghost jumped at him with a knife.

It was not a surprise to Lug.

This ghost always attacked in the same way.

At that moment, maybe because of the fatigue, maybe because of his headaches or simply because a part of him didn't want to be there, he dissociated himself.

He felt as if he had stepped out of his body.

"Poor man, he's getting torn apart!" He thought as he looked at himself from the outside.

He could see the ghosts getting closer to him and attacking him.

But his mind was already elsewhere.

He sailed from thought to thought.

Did not stop on any.

Until he came back to a recent memory, a discussion with the Wise One.

He didn't want to remember, but something inside him urged him to do so.

Finally and after an inner conflict, he dived into that memory.

He was sitting on this large varnished coffin, listening to this ghost who seemed much too young to carry so much knowledge.

His voice, which seemed far away, came gradually closer.

"...When you die your energy centers concentrate all the available energy and expel the soul and the psychic body..."

Lug's mind began to wander again.

He thought of Hannah, of his life in the cemetery.

Then he pulled himself together and focused on that memory, like a sailor clinging to the mast of his ship.

"Ghosts are a soul inside a psychic body, yes. When the psychic body disappears the soul escapes... Yes it is possible to die and have your psychic body disappear directly, in this case there will be no ghost..."

Lug began to daydream, again.

"I would not like to be a ghost..." he thought, floating above his body.

He had not yet realized that he had just split into two.

He thought he was dreaming, this couldn't be real to him.

After a moment he returned to his memory.

"Too much psychic energy at once, or on the contrary a lack of energy. Those are the two things that can make a ghost disappear." said the Wise One, tapping the back of his hand with the chalk, probably a habit he kept from when he was still alive.

Suddenly, Lug regained consciousness.

He was floating slightly above the ground.

For how long? Why had he done this? How had he done it?

These questions were only answered by a sharp pain in the back of his head.

"Pain?" he thought.

His intuition was correct, feeling pain was a sign that he was going back into his body.

Suddenly, before he could string together another thought, he opened his eyes.

He was on the ground and two ghosts were on top of him.

The small bald man was stabbing his stomach.

Another ghost, a little taller, with long hair was biting his shoulder.

He managed to push them with the little strength he had left.

He left the bucket and his broom behind.

He ran to the big metal door he had left open.

And as soon as he crossed the threshold, the ghosts stopped following him.

It was as if there was an invisible barrier that prevented them from leaving their eternal prison.

Lug had no time to rest as his stomach told him to find the nearest toilet, and fast.