Carolyn Jourdan - Nurse Phoebe 03 - The School for Psychics

by Carolyn Jourdan

  School for Psychics

  By

  Carolyn Jourdan

  This is a work of fiction. Real places or real persons are sometimes mentioned herein but the story is a work of the author’s imagination.

  © 2014 Carolyn Jourdan All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means—electronic, mechanical, photographic (photocopying), recording, or otherwise—without prior permission in writing from the author.

  ISBN – 13: 978-0-9899304-8-2

  Cover by Bran Rogers - www.postmodernobody.org

  Chapter 1.

  As she drove the narrow winding road across the top of the mountains that separated Tennessee from North Carolina, Phoebe wondered if she’d bitten off more than she could chew with this new job. She’d been desperate for employment when she’d miraculously gotten an offer to work as a private duty nurse, but she had to admit her new situation came with a significant component of wackiness.

  Okay, maybe she’d injected some of the wackiness herself during that first week, but it none of it had been her fault. Or at least not totally her fault.

  Several hours before her new job started, she’d become embroiled in a medical emergency and, since she was a nurse, she’d felt obligated try to help. It had been a spectacularly wild and wooly few days, but everything had come out right in the end. Now she hoped things would settle down and stay quiet.

  She’d met some amazing people in the last few days. They were almost too amazing—what you might call excessively amazing. She liked every one of them, so she didn’t want out, exactly, not yet anyway. But she’d learned there was a slippery slope from interesting, to exciting, to chaos, to running for your life. Phoebe intended to stay on the less thrilling end of the spectrum for the foreseeable future.

  She was an exceptional nurse. It was wonderful to have her talent recognized and get a spiffy job caring for the sweetest man in the world. Her patient was the top guy at a monastery just over the state line on the North Carolina side of the Smokies. Her workplace was a medieval-meets-modern architectural marvel built into the side of a high cliff.

  Her new boss said the building housed The School for Mysteries, a successor to a line of esoteric spiritual mystery schools that went back thousands of years. The monastery was extremely secluded, but highly inclusive. It housed men and women of all ages from every denomination you could imagine. Inside, it was like a giant costume party where everyone had been invited to come as their favorite priest or nun.

  There were Protestants in blue jeans and t-shirts, Catholics in anything from elegant black cassocks, to rough Franciscan robes, to Mother Theresa saris, Eastern Orthodox men with long shaggy beards, Jews with yarmulkes, Hindus in loose flowing garments dyed in gorgeous colors sporting red dots on their foreheads, Buddhists with shaved heads in eye-catching saffron robes, Sikhs with their long hair hidden beneath splendid turbans, and Sufis in full-skirted dervish robes, red sashes, and hats shaped like inverted flowerpots.

  It was kinda fun. They were all really nice people. The common factor that bound them together was that they were each representatives from the mystical branch of their religion or philosophical group. Phoebe was comforted to learn that, at the top, all the world’s religions seemed to agree on the important points.

  Once she got used to the idea of The School for Mysteries, she had to admit that the Great Smoky Mountains was a perfect place for a gang like this to live and work below the radar. The vast wilderness and rough terrain was an easy place to hide in, and the area was already jam-packed with mystics.

  Some people said the locals were descended from Druids. Phoebe could believe it. She’d been born and raised in the Smokies and had ancestors with special intuitive gifts on both sides of her family. Of course this kind of thing was a controversial topic in certain sectors. The whole idea of psychic powers sounded a little iffy when you tried to talk about it to strangers. Even among psychics, although each of them believed that they were the real deal, they usually suspected everyone else of being a fuzzy-headed New Age dreamer or a lunatic.

  It was understandable. There were a lot of fake psychics running around.

  There were even more real ones, but the fakers tended to grab more attention. The real ones were so reverent and sober about their gifts, it wasn’t something they went around yakking about.

  The Great Smoky Mountains had far more than its fair share of seers. The oldest mountains on the face of the earth were a place of powerful emanations. The area got its name from the distinctive mists and fogs that cloaked its otherworldly inhabitants from prying eyes. The sinuous, ubiquitous, drifting blue smoke gave these sensitive souls an extra layer of protection from the outside world.

  Psychics came in countless forms with widely diverse talents. Although Phoebe rarely shared any of the abilities of other psychics, she tried to stay open to the idea that there were far more things in heaven and earth than she had personal experience of. Likewise, things that were normal to Phoebe were bizarre to other people.

  For example, notions like communications from the dead didn’t scare Phoebe, mainly because she knew for a fact that they were nothing like what was depicted in scary movies. Dead people didn’t show up bleeding or missing body parts or with axes sticking out of their heads. Why would they? They were trying to communicate, not freak people out.

  Phoebe knew from her own experience that dead people, if they were still hanging around at all, liked to hover near their loved ones to follow the events of their lives with benevolent interest. Sometimes if Phoebe was standing near a stranger, a dead relative would speak to her because they knew she could hear them. The person they actually wanted to talk to almost never had a clue they were there, so the dead person would try to use Phoebe as a messaging service.

  Because this type of situation had always been reality for her Phoebe didn’t think it was more unusual than a person who understood Morse code listening to a bunch of beeps and writing out a sequence of letters that resulted in a message.

  Unfortunately there was almost always a seriously disconcerting twist to communications from the dead. They knew perfectly well that the person they were trying to communicate with would have trouble believing it was really them talking. They knew the person trying to deliver their message would be labeled as a kook, or worse. So to overcome this initial hurdle of disbelief, the dead would generally start out their message with an extremely distinctive bit of information known only to two people, one dead, and the other standing next to Phoebe.

  It would be something so intimate there was no way she could possibly have known it. The message itself was almost always low-key stuff like Hello. I’m here. Everything’s okay. Love you. But a stranger suddenly blurting out an intensely personal item of information was one hundred percent guaranteed to shock the recipient so severely, they’d hardly register whatever message came afterwards.

  It was a pain delivering these sorts of messages because they provoked such intense emotional reactions. They were a twist on the dreaded telegrams from the War Office that all the families of soldiers dreaded getting. Except in Phoebe’s version, the loved one was dead, but talking!

  It got to the point where Phoebe wouldn’t even deliver these cataclysmic Hellos anymore unless the dead person was being such a pain and so persistent it was easier to simply repeat the message and get the inevitable breakdown scene over with.

  It helped that Phoebe had worked in a medical setting her whole adult life. She’d sat with people who were dying and listened as they descri
bed what they were experiencing. She’d been present when patients in extremis were having conversations with people she couldn’t see.

  The people weren’t babbling out of their minds, like some people thought. They were lucid, but in a different place.

  It was obvious to anyone who was paying attention that the dying people were having real encounters with people who’d already crossed over. They’d say Momma, or Daddy, or the name of a deceased spouse, or friend, or relative. They’d be looking steadily in a particular direction and their exhausted, careworn faces would transform with luminous happiness and relief.

  Not a single one of these people had been afraid to die when it came right down to it. Once they’d finally managed to work their way loose from their bodies, which wasn’t always easy and sometimes could take years, they’d dropped the old husk without any fuss.

  By her late fifties, Phoebe had gained a lot of experience with sacred phenomena. It was something she rarely ever spoke about, though. You had to be careful what you said and to whom you said it. There was no point in having a debate with someone who’d never experienced it. The mere idea of psychic phenomena enraged some people. A person either knew this stuff was for real, or all the talking in the world wouldn’t persuade them.

  That was understandable. Phoebe wouldn’t have believed it either if she hadn’t known better.

  Chapter 2.

  Phoebe McFarland’s career had gone through some major ups and downs. Over a period of thirty years she’d risen from a student nurse, to a chief surgical nurse, and gradually to a hospital administrator in a big city. Then, when she got tired of living in a urban environment and decided to come back home, she crashed down the ladder of success and ended up driving a route as a rural home health care nurse in her hometown of White Oak, Tennessee.

  She didn’t view the long fall as a tragedy, though. She loved working with patients one-on-one. She was much happier being at home and poor than she’d been working in a city making a pile of dough. But unfortunately, after the healthcare reform debacle, she’d lost her job because the company she’d worked for went bust.

  She’d been deeply shocked to find herself suddenly unemployed in middle-age and totally without local job prospects. She’d lain in bed, depressed, for three whole days. But then, out of the blue, she’d been offered an awesome position as a nurse to a mysterious guy who seemed to be the richest monk on earth.

  Phoebe’s new boss was an elderly, scholarly, saintly man everyone but Phoebe called Le Seigneur. The Boss and a lot of his friends were French. Unfortunately Phoebe didn’t speak French, and didn’t feel comfortable trying to pronounce his honorific title, so she just called him Boss. On her first day at work, while she was still caught up in her introductory escapade, the Boss asked Phoebe to do a couple of minor courier jobs for him and then, on her way back, to pick someone up and escort them to the monastery.

  The supposedly simple courier tasks had been anything but. They’d taken Phoebe on a whirlwind tour of the Blue Ridge Mountains, New York, Chartres, and Paris. But she’d managed to complete her assigned tasks and accompany the mysterious woman from Paris to North Carolina.

  The lady turned out to be an Italian psychic named Caterina Abatangelo. Caterina looked better in her seventies than most women had ever looked at any time in their lives. Phoebe sighed. It was hopeless to compare herself to the elegant silver-haired beauty, of course, because Caterina had the genes and the bone structure of an aristocrat and Phoebe didn’t.

  To be honest, the Smokies wasn’t known as much for gorgeous people as it was for whimsically violent ones—a huge percentage of military snipers and Hatfield and McCoy types were born and raised in the region. Nobody in Phoebe’s family had ever been movie star or model material.

  The McFarlands were known for being practical. If you were bleeding, you called Phoebe. If you wanted a hot date, you called someone else. She’d reconciled herself to this situation a long time ago.

  * * *

  Caterina was having a meeting with Le Seigneur while Phoebe sat quietly in the corner of the Boss’s austere bedroom and organized her patient’s medicine. She was counting pills and dropping them into a container that divided a week’s worth of drugs into rows for the days of the week and columns for the time of day.

  “Le Seigneur,” Caterina said, “I have a message for you from our brother CR.”

  The Boss nodded that she should continue.

  “He is warning that someone should retrieve several important items that were hidden during an emergency. He says they have remained safe so far, but are now in danger of being discovered.”

  “Does he indicate where these items are?”

  “France,” Caterina said.

  Wow, thought Phoebe, that really narrows it down.

  The Boss obviously took Caterina’s message very seriously. “I am aware that various restoration projects are scheduled to take place this winter when tourist traffic would be the lowest. The most important of these, of course, are the renovations for the 300th anniversary of Jean Poisson’s birth.”

  “Ah, oui,” agreed Caterina.

  Phoebe had no idea who CR was, but the name Jean Poisson was vaguely familiar. She tried, but she couldn’t put her finger on who it was. She couldn’t even remember if it was a man or a woman.

  “I confessed I have been at a loss about who to send. It will take considerable skill to locate objects that had been so well hidden by our friend.”

  He glanced over at Phoebe and gave her one of his angelic smiles. He looked back at Caterina and said, “With some training, Miss McFarland might be able to undertake this task for us.”

  Uh oh, Phoebe thought, and dropped several of the pills she’d been sorting. They scattered on the floor. So much for things settling down. Despite a surge of panic, she also felt excited. This would be her first official mission.

  She’d become embroiled in her first tasks by accident, but apparently the Boss had been satisfied with her performance because now he was going to give her a job on purpose! She felt proud and terrified at the same time.

  “Would you be able to remain here for a few weeks to work with our friend, to evaluate her talents, and give her some training?”

  Caterina agreed, of course. The Boss wasn’t the kind of guy you could bear to say no to. So, for a couple of weeks they met in the morning and afternoon for an hour of lectures. Phoebe was assigned homework that consisted of meditation exercises to be performed first thing in the morning and last thing at night.

  * * *

  Caterina Abatangelo was the real deal. The first lesson she gave Phoebe was on the history of psychic phenomena. Caterina explained that long ago everyone had strong psychic abilities, but they were extremely weak in their ability to think. Over the millennia, as humans evolved, this situation got reversed. Modern people had the ability to think clearly, but had lost touch with their natural psychic abilities.

  Caterina said the task of modern humanity was to move toward the middle—to hone individual spiritual capacities in the light of full daytime consciousness. “The key is to remove subjectivity,” she said. “We cannot allow spiritual perceptions to become contaminated by personal opinions or judgments. Purging yourself of these sorts of influences requires extremely rigorous soul purification. Traditional methods for achieving this purification are by sitting in silence regularly and cultivating a strong meditation practice.

  Ugh, Phoebe thought, but she kept a lid on it because she wanted to be helpful, if possible.

  “I will teach you centering prayer as practiced by Trappist monks and the Buddhist Eightfold Path. These are the same sort of soul cleansing exercises that form the basis of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. That can be an excellent path, too.”

  “I’ve never had a drink in my life,” Phoebe said.

  Caterina looked at Phoebe in surprise. She was Italian and unfamiliar with Appalachian culture. “But I’m addicted to Diet Coke. And cookies, particularly Chips Ahoy wi
th whole milk,” Phoebe admitted.

  “I am not your confessor,” Caterina said.

  “And I ain’t Catholic,” Phoebe added. “I was just sayin’. Just lettin’ you know what you’re up against.”

  After a pause, Caterina continued. “Once the soul is purified, we can trust the information we are receiving. If our lower ego is allowed to have a role in interpreting or filtering the information, then the data is degraded, and not to be trusted. A large portion of our work will be learning to discern when we are receiving a pure signal from a wise and benevolent source, or something else altogether.”

  “Like the devil?”

  Caterina nodded. “It is not easy at first. You have to have training to understand how to sort among the different voices, if I may use that word. It is crucial to develop the discernment of spirits as it is called in the Bible.”

  Caterina went on to heavily emphasize the importance of moral development for psychics. “The esoteric law,” she said, “is that for every one step forward in spiritual powers, one must take three steps forward in moral development. If not, things can go awry very quickly. Then you get inflation or mental illness. Not a good situation.”

  The new rhythm of Phoebe’s days was built around meditation, her regular job as a nurse to Le Seignuer, and lessons with Caterina.

  * * *

  Her second lesson started with an examination of the artistic depictions of psychics though the ages. They went to the monastery library and paged through art history books at images of Michelangelo’s sibyls on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and paintings of saints in various states of rapture.

  Phoebe couldn’t help but notice that the people who were capable of these ecstatic states seemed to come to a bad end, most of them dying in really hideous ways like crucifixion, or decapitation, or target practice for rock throwers or archers. This was not reassuring.

  “There are various factors that can enhance psychic powers,” Caterina told her. “Some of these methods are justified for modern life and some are not. There are certain types of places that boost psychic abilities, like the caves the ancient oracles worked in, or along the ley lines where the great cathedrals and monasteries were built.