Donn's Hill

by Caryn Larrinaga

  I was surprised to find the attic door still open when I reached the top of the stairs. I’d expected Gabrielle to close it and continue her session. When I walked into the attic, Gabrielle motioned for me to take a seat on Mr. Lasko’s now-vacant cushion.

  Instead of sitting down, I tiptoed around the table to whisper in her ear. “You want me to join the circle?”

  “You don’t have to reach out to anyone,” she muttered back. “In fact, I’d prefer it if you kept your mind clear. But this works better with nine.”

  “Nine?” Including Gabrielle and me, there would only be eight people around the table.

  “Nine,” she repeated, inclining her head toward the cat, who had returned to its place at her side.

  Frowning, I skirted back around the table to close the door and then sunk down into Mr. Lasko’s cushion. It was far more comfortable than my stool had been, but I wasn’t happy to be participating in the séance. A warm hand grabbed mine, and I turned to the left. Mark’s aunt Sheryl was smiling beside me, her heart-shaped face aglow with excitement.

  “You’ll be fine,” she whispered.

  I swallowed and took the hand to my right, which belonged to Lillian. She gave me a reassuring squeeze, and I nodded at Gabrielle to let her know I was ready.

  Gabrielle took a deep breath before speaking again. “Please, everyone, focus your minds. If there is someone you would like to make contact with tonight, think of them.”

  I forced any thoughts of my mom and dad from my mind and focused on thinking of nothing. It was difficult, and I closed my eyes to avoid distractions. A few minutes later, Lillian gasped from beside me and her grip tightened on my hand. I opened my eyes, expecting to see another ghost in the room, but there was nothing. The only figures in the room were those sitting around the table. I allowed my eyelids to slide downward again and turned my attention to the way my breath felt in my lungs. It felt good. The air around us didn’t feel so close anymore, and the incense was beginning to dissipate.

  Breathing is one of those things we take for granted, I thought, beginning to imagine what it would feel like if I couldn’t breathe. What if I was stuck inside a closet or was drowning? I saw myself falling off the dock at Lake Anam and disappearing among the reeds. Would my lungs feel full if they were filled with water instead of air?

  In my mind’s eye, the image warped and shifted. It was no longer my body among the reeds. The figure became bloated, and instead of my own face, I saw Tom Bishop’s.

  The frail hands in mine began to shake and tremble. I opened my eyes to check on Lillian and Sheryl. They were both shivering, and their breath puffed out of their mouths in clouds of white mist. My eyebrows came together. This hadn’t happened earlier.

  Something bumped against my elbows, and I glanced downward. The table shifted, hopping into the air a fraction of an inch, just high enough to crack into my elbows again. Had someone kicked it from below?

  I looked around at the rest of the people in the circle, checking to see if anyone was messing with the table, but everyone seemed quite still. They were all staring at Gabrielle, their eyes wide with fear.

  Seeing that expression on the faces around me made my heart jump. There hadn’t been any fear before. The table bounced upward again. My gaze flew to Gabrielle. She was silently panting, and sweat poured down her face. Her eyes were squeezed shut as though she was putting a lot of effort into keeping them closed.

  The cat jumped forward from its place in front of Gabrielle and landed in the center of the table, where it began to growl. The deep, rumbling sound rose to a shrieking crescendo as the cat arched its back. The table beneath the cat’s paws bucked from side to side, and the circle broke as everyone around the table was knocked backward by a concussive BOOM!

  Sheryl screamed and crawled toward the door. The rest of the people around me scattered for safety, seeking cover behind the folding screens or beneath side tables.

  “Everyone stay calm!” shouted Gabrielle.

  One of the folding screens crashed to the floor, narrowly missing a shrunken older man with a long beard who’d been attempting to get behind it. The fabric above our heads began to billow as though blown by a strong wind. I ducked my head and sprinted to Gabrielle as books and letters flew around the room. It felt like a tornado had touched down in the attic.

  “What’s going on?” I shouted over the chaos.

  “It’s a poltergeist!” she yelled back. “It must have slinked in while our minds were open. Quickly, get me the sage from that bowl!”

  She pointed to a small copper bowl that rested near the back of the room. Strangely, it was undisturbed, and I could see several sage bundles poking up above the rim. I ran to retrieve it and brought it back to Gabrielle, who grabbed the blue candle from the séance table. She lit a sage stick and handed it to me, then lit a second one for herself.

  The comforting aromas of sage, cedar, and lavender wafted up to me, and I suddenly felt as though I was standing in the eye of a hurricane. All around me, chaos reigned, but my head was clear.

  “I’ll handle the banishing,” Gabrielle shouted. “You get everyone else and take them downstairs.”

  Her voice was commanding, and I rushed off, shepherding the elderly séance attendees toward the attic door and shouting instructions to them. They showed a surprising amount of hustle for their advanced ages, and I was able to get all six of them onto the landing outside the door in under a minute.

  “Go downstairs,” I told Sheryl. “Wait in the sitting room on the second floor. Do you know how to get there?”

  She nodded and took ahold of Lillian’s arm. “We can get ourselves down the stairs. You help Gabrielle.”

  I shot back into the attic and pulled the door closed behind me. Gabrielle was moving around the room in a clockwise circle, muttering under her breath and ignoring the projectiles that were flying from corner to corner. She’d opened the large dormer windows that stood on both sides of the room, and a light breeze was blowing around the space, tugging at the decorative tapestries and yanking the sheet off a long mirror that’d been tucked into a corner of the room.

  As the sheet crumpled to the floor, the tall figure of Tom Bishop appeared in the mirror. Our eyes locked, and every hair on my head lifted a fraction of an inch as goosebumps covered my body. I refused to look away, convinced that if I did, Tom would appear behind me and grab me like he had in my bathroom. So I stared at him, not even blinking, until he mouthed a single, silent word: Evelyn.

  Then he vanished.

  My heart pounded in a fast, steady rhythm, and I took several deep breaths to calm myself. I fell into step behind Gabrielle, focusing my will as I had in my apartment. It was much more difficult this time. Tom Bishop’s face kept barging into my mind, mouthing my mother’s name, and I shook my head to clear it.

  You shouldn’t have let yourself think about him.

  Lecturing myself wasn’t helping me focus. I gritted my teeth and concentrated on asking Tom’s spirit to go away. Leave us in peace. You’re not welcome.

  After a few minutes, the room around us grew calmer. The fabric that crisscrossed the ceiling stopped billowing and lay still. A hush fell. I could hear my own breathing and the soft sound of Gabrielle’s bare feet on the floor.

  She stopped walking and sighed. “There. The spirit is gone.”

  Tension knotted between my shoulder blades. “Does that happen a lot?”

  “I’ve never been interrupted by a poltergeist before. These sessions are usually very peaceful. Something must have drawn the spirit here.” She stared at me, her green eyes wide and thoughtful. “Something… or someone.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Well, that was certainly exciting,” said Lillian, clutching my arm as I walked her down the stairs to the ground floor.

  “Yeah, I can honestly say I wasn’t expecting that,” I told her.

  “What were you expecting?”

  “I don’t know. Before coming to Donn’s Hill, I’d thought
séances and mediums were all a hoax, so I wasn’t sure what tonight would be like.”

  Lillian raised her delicate, penciled-on eyebrows. “I didn’t realize we had a skeptic among us. I’m sure you’re a believer now, after seeing all that.”

  I laughed. “Oh, no, I’ve believed in Gabrielle since the day I met her. Trust me. And what about you? Are you disappointed that you weren’t able to see your sister?”

  “It’s funny you should ask.” We reached the foyer, and she shrugged into her fur coat. “I could swear I felt her presence there for a moment. I was certain she’d reach out to me, and I wanted to thank her for her warning last spring. But then, it was as though she changed her mind and left.”

  “Has that ever happened before?”

  “No, but a poltergeist hasn’t shown up either. Oh, well. There’s always next year. Take care, dear.”

  Lillian reached out and gave me a hug, and I squeezed her back gently. She was a frail little thing. As I headed back up to the second floor, I tried not to wonder if I’d see her next year, and whether she’d be sitting next to me at the table or floating above it and speaking through Gabrielle.

  Several more people needed assistance getting down the stairs. I ferried them down, receiving pats on the hand and even a wet kiss on the cheek from Sheryl for my efforts.

  “Mark told me you were a nice girl,” she said.

  “Did he? That’s a sweet thing for him to say. He’s very nice too.”

  “He gets it all from me.” She winked and then headed out the front door.

  When I returned to the séance room, Gabrielle was kneeling on one of the pillows and cleaning candle wax off the table. She looked up when I entered.

  “I’m glad you were able to be here tonight.” She stood and brushed her hands off on the skirt of her dress. “But I do suspect you drew the poltergeist here.”

  “I didn’t mean to. I—”

  “Please.” Gabrielle held up a hand. “I don’t blame you. You clearly didn’t do it on purpose. If this was anyone’s fault, it was mine. I should’ve taken more precautions. I knew those types of spirits have targeted you before. In a way, powerful psychics are magnetic, creating a force that draws strong entities to them.”

  I swallowed. It didn’t seem as though she knew who the poltergeist was. Gabrielle looked stressed enough, so it didn’t feel like the best time to let her know that her dead lover was still wandering the earth as an angry spirit. Or that instead of speaking to her, he’d silently called to an old flame.

  “I just feel like it was my fault,” I said. “My mind wandered while everyone was concentrating on reaching out.”

  “I could teach you better focus.” She cocked her head to one side. “Are you interested in learning to be a medium? It’s very different from what you’re doing now with Kit and Yuri, but it can be just as rewarding.”

  I thought about it. It was tempting. Not only would I get to spend time with Gabrielle while she taught me, but I could help people.

  Would I be helping people, though? Did Gabrielle help Mr. Lasko?

  The old man’s face swam before my eyes. He’d looked devastated after arguing with his dead son. He seemed to be dealing with a new and different kind of loss than when David had died. Was I prepared to watch people go through that? It wouldn’t all be happy endings. In fact, I hadn’t seen a single one yet.

  “Maybe, down the line,” I said at last. “I don’t think I’m ready for that right now.”

  She nodded. “If you ever decide you’d like to be trained, let me know. Now, what did you want to talk to me about today?”

  So much had happened in the last couple of hours that I’d completely forgotten about my conversation with Kit. My confusion from earlier poured back into me, and I took a deep breath.

  “Did you tell Kit that I’m psychic, that day I met you?”

  “Not exactly. I told her I’d met a psychic who just moved here. Oh, dear.” She obviously put it together. “Were you wanting to keep it a secret? I’m sorry, Mackenzie. I didn’t realize.”

  So she had known, somehow. Anger boiled up inside me, and it seeped into my voice. “Keep it a secret? How could I… I didn’t even know!”

  Gabrielle looked surprised. “How could you not know? Didn’t your mother tell you?”

  My head began to pound again. This conversation was spinning away from me. What did my mother have to do with it? Gabrielle had somehow known I was a psychic before I did. That’s what I’d been upset about all day. Now she was saying my mom knew? I was losing my focus, and my ire was leaking out of me like water from a paper bag.

  “I don’t understand.” I sank down onto a cushion and rested my head on the table, which smelled of disinfectant. “My mother… knew?”

  Gabrielle sat down beside me and covered my hand with hers. It felt warm and soft against my skin. “Mackenzie, I am so sorry. I assumed you knew. I thought Evelyn would have told you. And perhaps she meant to… someday.”

  My mother’s death was sudden, and I was young. Was it possible? Could she have known and kept it from me?

  She kept other things from you, like the identity of your father.

  I sat up. “Okay. Let’s say you’re right, and she knew, and she didn’t tell me. How did she know? And how did you know?”

  “She wrote to me when you started seeing the dead.”

  I stared at her. “The dead?”

  “The ‘Travelers,’ as she called them. Didn’t you ever suspect they were spirits? Your mother said they even spoke to you at times.”

  “When I was little, I thought they were imaginary friends.” I thought back to my conversation with Yuri outside the library in Grimshaw. “I only realized a couple of weeks ago that they weren’t in my imagination.”

  “Your mother was thrilled. She’d been hoping you inherited her gift.”

  Time stopped.

  I forgot to breathe, and even my pulse stopped thrumming in my veins. Gabrielle’s last words played on a loop in my mind. Her gift.

  “My mother was a psychic too?”

  Gabrielle’s face paled. Finally, for the first time during this entire conversation, I didn’t feel like the only one who was caught off guard.

  “She never told you,” she whispered.

  “There were a lot of things she never told me.”

  Gabrielle shook her head, and I was surprised to see that her eyes were suddenly full of sadness. “You and your mother are so alike. Not just in looks or mannerisms. It’s as though fate stamped out identical paths for you to walk.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your mother discovered her gift on her own too. When she began coming here, I helped her develop it. And now you sit here... just like her.” Gabrielle pushed her graying hair back from her face with both hands. “Only now I’m so much older, and I don’t have Rosanna here to lighten the mood.”

  “So you—what—trained my mother to be a psychic?”

  “You can’t learn to be a psychic any more than you can learn to be taller. The ability must be inside of you to begin with. I was helping her strengthen that innate ability, helping her focus. I could do the same for you,” she said.

  Only a few minutes had passed since the last time she’d made that offer, but her words struck me now in an entirely different way. Would learning about my abilities bring me closer to my mother somehow?

  Something was gnawing at me, and I mulled it over in silence. “What if my abilities go away again?” I finally said. “I grew out of them before, and I didn’t see any ghosts until I came back to Donn’s Hill. Something about this place woke up something inside of me.”

  Gabrielle looked thoughtful. “It’s true that most children grow out of their abilities to sense the spiritual world, but those children never regain that gift. And while this town is a place of great spiritual strength, going somewhere powerful usually isn’t enough to ‘wake up’ latent psychic abilities. Tell me, when did you stop seeing the Travelers?”

  I
thought hard. “When I was eight.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “And didn’t something traumatic happen that year?”

  “My mother died.” There were so many things I was dealing with at the time that the absence of the Travelers had gone unnoticed—the death of my mother for one, plus leaving my home and friends to live in a new state with a man I’d just met.

  “Grief can change us. It can rewire our brains and cause a complete shift in the way we look at the world. I think the shock of your mother’s death had that effect on you.”

  Realization dawned on me. “And the shock of my father’s death had the opposite effect.”

  She nodded again.

  The hammer in my brain pounded away. This day had been too long, and for every question Gabrielle answered, two new ones popped up. But I was sure of one thing: I needed to learn as much as I could about being a psychic.

  “Okay,” I said. “If you’re willing to teach me, I’m willing to learn.”

  Gabrielle smiled. “Wonderful. We’ll begin once the festival is over.”

  I pushed myself away from the table and stood up on unsteady legs. “Thank you, Gabrielle. And I’m sorry for being so… accusatory.”

  She stood as well and gave me a hug. “No apology needed. I shouldn’t have assumed that you knew.”

  “Can I ask you one more question?”

  She smiled, and for the first time since I’d met her, she looked genuinely relaxed. “Go ahead.”

  “Penelope thinks my mom and her husband were… you know… together. And that I’m Tom’s daughter.”

  Gabrielle laughed. It was a lovely, tinkling sound. “That’s preposterous. Tom Bishop was obsessed with your mother—it’s true. I think she was everything Penelope wasn’t, and he was drawn to her vibrancy and energy, but she loathed him. She had very specific ideas about love and loyalty. The fact that he was engaged to Penelope but pursuing another relationship made him completely unattractive to her.”

  I relaxed and let out a long breath. “Well, that’s a relief. I mean, I knew my dad was my dad. I could feel it. But I didn’t like the idea of my mom being a home wrecker, you know?” I looked at Gabrielle and winced. “Er… not that there’s anything wrong with that. I mean… you can’t help who you love.”