Unquiet Souls

by Christine Pope

  “Fine,” Audrey replied, although she made sure that her tone indicated the situation was anything but fine. Wearing an apologetic smile, she turned toward the two sisters, who both stood in almost the same pose, hands on their hips, disapproving expressions on their faces. “Thank you so much for all your help, but — ”

  “But His Highness requires an audience,” Rosemary broke in. “I get it. Come on, Isabel.”

  Audrey almost expected Isabel to protest, but she wore a resigned expression, as if she knew she had done what she could and needed to let matters run their course. As she moved past Audrey and onto the front porch, she said in an undertone, “You know how to find us. If you need help, don’t hesitate to reach out.”

  About all she could do was nod. Rosemary, not as restrained as her sister, snapped at Michael, “You’d better tell her everything, or we’ll know!”

  He didn’t respond, only stood there in stony silence as Isabel took Rosemary by the arm and led her down off the porch.

  Audrey could have done without that particular confrontation, but she supposed it could have been worse. “Come on in.”

  He entered the living room, and she closed the door behind him. Almost at once, his gaze moved to the spent smudge stick in its abalone bowl, the white candle sitting next to them. The sharp scent of burned sage still lingered in the air. “That’s what they were doing here?”

  “Yes,” she said crisply, “since it seemed obvious that you had more important things to deal with.”

  Once again, his lips thinned. “You were safe.”

  “Can you guarantee that?”

  Since she’d been trained to observe people’s responses, she noticed right away how his gaze slid away from hers. “‘Guarantee’ is a strong word.”

  “Hmm.” Her throat was dry — possibly from the lingering smoke scent in the air, even though the windows were open — and so she said, “I need a glass of water. You want one?”

  “Sure.”

  Audrey left him standing by the coffee table in the living room and went to fetch some water. Since she kept a pitcher in the fridge, it was nice and cold. She took a few sips from her own glass, steeling herself for the upcoming conversation, before she went back out to where Michael was waiting for her. He still stood where she’d left him, hands jammed into the pockets of his trousers, a faint frown pulling at his brows.

  “Here,” she said, and handed him his glass. “And please sit down.”

  He didn’t protest, but took a seat in the armchair. Deprived of her favorite spot, Audrey sat at the end of the couch closest to the chair.

  Once they were both settled, she asked, “Did you really have to consult some ‘experts,’ or were you just using that as a ploy to give yourself some time to think?”

  Now he smiled, although his expression had little humor in it. “You’re a very perceptive woman, Audrey.”

  “I take it that’s a yes on the second option.”

  Michael took a sip of water, then put his glass down on one of the unused coasters on the coffee table. “I’ll be honest — I wasn’t expecting that kind of an attack right away. Usually, the house likes a bit of settling-in time before that sort of thing happens.”

  “‘The house’?” she echoed. “You’re saying it’s the house and not something else?”

  “No. I phrased that badly.” He rubbed his hands on the knees of his trousers. “It’s just that most of the manifestations have something to do with the house. They don’t appear out of nowhere — they come out of the mirrors, or the closets, or from under the beds.”

  In a confirmation of just about every childhood nightmare Audrey had ever had. Fighting back a shudder, she said, “Maybe you should start at the beginning.”

  A long pause, and then he gave a reluctant nod. “I don’t have all the details,” he began, as if he knew he needed to preface his explanation with some kind of warning. “We’re talking about more than a hundred years of history, after all. But, from what I’ve been able to tell, the place has been cursed from the beginning. Three workmen died during its construction, which was unusual even in the days before OSHA. And the people around him said Jeffrey Whitcomb began to change almost as soon as he moved into the place.”

  “That soon?” she asked, startled. “And he still lived there for more than fifteen years? You told me earlier today that he lost everything in the stock market crash.”

  “Yes, but he wasn’t living in the house by that point. His concerned children moved him to a sanatorium some five years earlier, in late 1924. Apparently, he began to show some signs of instability within a few years of taking up residence in the house, to the point where his wife left him — it was quite a scandal at the time — and took the children with her to raise them on her own. They were all too glad to sell the house when the time came, although they were very tight-lipped about exactly what had gone on there.”

  Audrey crossed her arms. “What exactly did go on in the house?”

  Michael leaned over and picked up his glass of water, drank some more. “Jeffrey Whitcomb became obsessed with the occult. He had a steady stream of mediums, swamis, and all sorts of charlatans — the words of his associates, not mine — coming and going. I think that was when Alice Whitcomb finally picked up and left. She actually died in 1920, and so it was the children who oversaw their father’s removal to the sanatorium. They were also the ones who had the house redone before it was sold…but they couldn’t quite keep the workmen from talking about what they saw.”

  “What did they see?” Audrey asked, even though she wasn’t sure whether she really wanted to know the answer to that question.

  “The carpets in some of the rooms had been pulled back, and strange circles and symbols had been painted on the wooden floors beneath,” Michael said. A sideways look from those glinting eyes, and he added, “Spell circles, that is. Spells of summoning, spells to give the caster power over those around him.”

  “Summoning demons?”

  “Yes. You might be thinking that Jeffrey Whitcomb’s wealth was a result of those practices, but he was rich before he ever came to California, and, as far as I’ve been able to tell, he had absolutely no interest in the occult until he moved into the house. It was working on him, rather than vice versa…or at least, that’s what seems to have happened, based on the evidence.”

  “Oh.” Once again, her spine prickled, and the flesh on her scalp crawled. Maybe at some point she’d get used to hearing about these sorts of things, but she doubted it. These weren’t stories told to frighten her, but only a recitation of facts. She knew what she’d seen in that mirror. That hadn’t been a story. It was real.

  Michael hesitated, as though he expected Audrey to say something else. When she remained silent, he shrugged slightly, then continued. “The first buyers were here less than a year. They never really said why they left, although the general belief was that Glendora was too quiet for them, and they were moving back to San Francisco. After that, the place changed hands about every three or four years, as far as I’ve been able to tell. The person who lived here the longest was a man named Abner Crawford — he stayed for more than a decade. But then his children found him hanging from a beam in the master suite, and the revolving door started up again.”

  That image made Audrey want to shudder again, partially because she’d walked under those very same beams only a few hours earlier. What if she’d looked up and seen a ghostly image of the dead man hanging there in the same place where his children discovered him all those years ago?

  Then again, it wouldn’t have been any worse than what she’d actually experienced….

  “Is it something about the land?” she asked. “Was the house built on an old Indian burial ground or something?”

  Michael shook his head, one corner of his mouth twisting slightly. “If only it were that easy. There’s no record of anything like that on the site, but I suppose it’s possible there was something else, some kind of relic or artifact that draws negativ
e energy to the place. There aren’t any ley lines — what some call rivers of supernatural energy — anywhere near the house. Maybe it all really does go back to Jeffrey Whitcomb. The seeds of his madness could have been planted years before he moved here, but they only blossomed once he was in the right place.”

  “So…what are we talking about here, really?” Audrey sat up a little straighter, her hands wrapped around the tall glass of cool water she held. “And no bullshit this time, Michael. I mean it.”

  From the way his eyes flared slightly at her remark, she could tell she’d startled him. That was the first time she’d sworn in his presence, but if what had happened in the master suite of the Whitcomb mansion was only a harbinger of things to come, it sure as hell wouldn’t be the last.

  “The rituals Jeffrey Whitcomb performed found their audience,” Michael said slowly. “When you open yourself to those sorts of energies, you have to understand that there are entities who will answer. Only they’re not coming to do your bidding. They’re coming to find a weakness, to exploit you any way they know how. A skilled practitioner of black magic, of summoning, knows how to close the gateways he’s opened and seal them so those entities can’t return, but that’s not what happened here. When Whitcomb’s children took him away, they didn’t allow him to close the loop, so to speak. The gate stayed open.”

  “And things kept coming through it,” Audrey said. Suddenly, the glass she held felt freezing cold instead of pleasantly cool, and she hastily set it back down on its coaster.

  From the way Michael’s gaze flickered toward the glass, she could tell he hadn’t missed any of that. However, he didn’t comment, only replied, “Yes, things keep coming through it. What we need to do is locate where the gate is, so we — or rather I — can close it once and for all.”

  “You’re an exorcist, too?” she asked, her tone clearly skeptical.

  “Not exactly,” he replied. “We aren’t dealing with possession here, but rather a demonic infestation. Like I said, usually it takes a while for the demons involved to start ramping up their activity. In this case, I think they recognized us as a threat and therefore mounted an attack as soon as they detected our presence.”

  “I don’t know why a demon would see me as a threat,” Audrey said, wishing she didn’t sound so shaky. She was supposed to be the cool, calm, rational one, wasn’t she?

  “I didn’t understand it at first, either,” Michael said. He leaned back in his chair as he watched her, his expression brooding. “But after seeing the way you fainted, hearing you describe what you experienced, clearly you’re far more psychic than you believe.”

  She wanted to laugh, but her throat felt too dry for that. However, she knew he had to be mistaken. She’d spent too much time around people who truly were psychic, had taken enough tests of that sort of ability to know that she simply didn’t have that kind of talent.

  Her skepticism must have shown on her face, because he said, “I can tell you don’t want to believe me. Why? Are you afraid of being the subject after so many years of being the researcher?”

  “No,” Audrey replied. “That’s not it. I just know I’m not psychic. I think it’s more that the demons targeted me because they wanted to mess with my head.”

  “Well, that is something they enjoy doing. But I think we’re dealing with more than that here.” He rubbed at the dark gold scruff on his chin. “Have you ever had any experiences like the one you had earlier today in the Whitcomb mansion? Hearing sounds that weren’t there, odors that didn’t seem to have any physical cause?”

  She wanted to say no. But….

  His voice lowered slightly, became almost coaxing. “Tell me, Audrey.”

  She glanced away from him, partly because it suddenly felt too intimate with only the two of them there in her living room, and partly, for some strange reason, because she could suddenly recall how it had felt with him holding her after she had fainted, the strength of his arms, the soothing rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. For a moment — a second, really — she’d felt safe, which was just ridiculous. No one was safe inside the Whitcomb mansion.

  To stall for time, Audrey reached over and got her glass of water, took a couple of swallows. Was she really going to confide in him? She’d kept this story to herself for her entire adult life, mostly because she knew no one would believe her. But Michael did believe in this sort of thing…and he also seemed to believe there was more about her than met the eye.

  Finally, she said, “When I was fourteen, my parents and I went to New Orleans. We did the typical tourist stuff, but I was going through a sort of goth phase at the time, and I wanted to go on one of those ghost tours. You know, where they take you around to various haunted sites.”

  Voice still calm and quiet, he replied, “Yes, I know what ghost tours are.”

  Of course he did. For all she knew, he’d guided a few of them in his time. “Right. Well, for most of it, I didn’t really feel anything at all, even though the tour guide was doing his best to give everyone the creepy crawlies in every place we visited. But then we started walking toward one particular building, and I started to feel nauseated — really sick. I told my parents I couldn’t go any closer, and I went to stand across the street so I wouldn’t vomit.”

  “And what was it about the building, Audrey?”

  She stared down at her hands in her lap, at the French manicure she’d gotten so she would look polished and put together on camera. “It belonged to a man back in the 1830s, something around then, anyway. He was supposed to be a doctor, but he performed all sorts of horrible experiments on slave women. No one really knows how many of them died in that place. The tour guide thought I must have been feeling some of the psychic residue from their pain and suffering.”

  That all sounded absolutely preposterous when she said it out loud, even though she knew that getting strange vibes from a particular location was really quite common. She risked a glance over at Michael, and for once he wasn’t frowning. Instead, he looked almost pleased.

  “More evidence that you’re a sensitive,” he said. “Or at least, sensitive to negative vibrations and atmospheres. No wonder the Whitcomb mansion affected you so much. Is there anything else?”

  “Nothing like the New Orleans experience,” she answered, hedging. The last thing she wanted to do was relive the worst moment of her life.

  But he wouldn’t let it go. “It doesn’t have to be exactly like that particular incident,” he said, his tone reasonable, persuasive. “Anything out of the ordinary that happened to you, that didn’t seem to have a rational explanation.”

  “I — ” Once again, her mouth felt dry, and she sipped some more water. “It was the day my parents died. That is, at the time, I didn’t know they’d died. We — we didn’t get the phone call until hours later. But….”

  His face looked pale. He pressed his lips together, then said quietly, “They died in the Waikiki Massacre, didn’t they?”

  “How did you know that?” she demanded, feeling somehow violated that he’d been privy to something as terrible and secret as the way her parents had died, something she’d done her best to keep in the past.

  “It was in your background check,” he said, tone still calm, almost soothing, as if he’d guessed she’d be upset that he knew such a thing about her. “Colin does one for anybody he’s considering using in one of his shows. Even though you were a minor at the time, it’s still public record.”

  This explanation sounded reasonable enough, but Audrey still hated that his producer had gone digging through her personal history. It should have had absolutely no bearing on her ability to appear on the show.

  “Right.” She pulled in a breath, then another. God knows she’d discussed that terrible event enough times with her own therapists that talking about it now with Michael shouldn’t be that big a deal.

  Only…she’d never told anyone what had happened the day they’d died, not even her aunt Deb.

  “We were just about to h
ave dinner,” Audrey said. “My aunt Deborah was staying with me while my parents were on vacation. She’d decided to give me a treat, so she’d ordered pizza for the two of us. I remember that she was at the door, paying the delivery guy. And then….” The words trailed off. Even after so many years, she still wasn’t sure she trusted herself to describe what had happened next.

  “And then…?” Michael prompted, still in that gentle tone which barely sounded like his own voice.

  “This terrible, knifing pain went through my head. I was standing by the dining room table — I’d just put down the plates and napkins for dinner. I guess I thought I was having a stroke or an aneurysm or something. I grabbed the back of the chair and hung on, because I was worried that I was about to fall to the floor. Then the pain was just…gone. By the time my aunt came to the table with the pizza, I’d gotten ahold of myself enough to pretend that everything was okay.”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  “No,” Audrey said. “I did the math later, and it turned out I’d experienced that blinding pain in the very moment my mother was killed. The bullet hit her here.” She raised a hand to briefly touch her right temple. Not looking at him, she added, “I’ve never told anyone that story.”

  So gentle, so quiet. “Why not?”

  “Because I didn’t want to sound crazy. I mean, I’d experienced it, and it seemed crazy even to me. Later on, I tried to tell myself that the timing had to be off, that I’d just attempted to manufacture a story to make it sound as if something paranormal was going on. For a while, I almost convinced myself.” Her gaze still focused on the trees outside the window, she said, “But not for very long.”

  “That’s because you knew it was true, that it had really happened to you.” For a moment, he was quiet, hands still resting on the knees of his dark trousers. “Unfortunately, it’s a common story. Not what happened to you exactly,” he went on, as if he knew Audrey was about to protest that her experience was anything but common, “but how you felt compelled to hide it from everyone. There’s such a taboo in our society about admitting to any kind of psychic talent.”