Harbinger in the Mist (Arms of Serendipity)

by Anabell Martin

  “I think it would be more prudent to speak out here.” She followed the psychic back to the van. The woman with the corn straw-colored hair was booting up a laptop on and attaching a mouse.

  “How very ‘Ghost Hunters,’” Lindsey quipped.

  “Wow. That’s quite a compliment! We really look up the team at T.A.P.S. and try very hard to be as objective as they are,” the woman with the darker hair said with a wide grin.

  “I do love ‘Ghost Hunters,’ but I have to admit that I prefer ‘Destination Truth.’ That Josh Gates … whew!” the other woman growled and fanned her face playfully.

  “Lindsey, you remember Raven, our Trinitarian Wiccan?” Sadie extended her hand toward the dark-haired woman. She then turned to the woman by the computer, “And Sara, our psychometrist?” Each woman nodded as they were introduced again. Lindsey smiled to each in return.

  Raven seemed open and warm. Sara, though, was distant, her eyes never leaving Eli. Lindsey wondered if she was an ex-girlfriend.

  “Anyway, we came in and set up equipment in each room of the house – video cameras and digital voice recorders. While those ran, we walked around the house, doing readings and trying to talk to the spirits within. There are four spirits here – none of them evil.”

  “What? Wait, wait, wait. One of those, those… things has tried to kill me several times!” Lindsey yelled, not believing what she was hearing. Not evil? Bullshit.

  “Lindsey, like in life, very, very few things are either black or white. Most things are in varying shades of gray. So it is here. Milton is angry, so very angry. But he’s not evil. It’s simply not that cut and dry.”

  Lindsey began to protest but Sadie held up her hand. “Let me start from the beginning and explain. The spirits of Olemargaret and her twin boys are still here. She is mostly residual – going about her business oblivious to the house’s living occupants, like a DVD on continuous loop. Every once in a blue moon something catches her awareness, but it takes a lot of poking and prodding for that to happen. The boys, however, are playful and lonely. They like having people around that sense them and respond. Chris Long – the deacon that was with us the other night – actually had one of the boys rolling a ball back and forth to him. We got it on tape. Watch.”

  Raven cued up a black and white clip of the rotund, balding man sitting in the middle of the living room with a soccer ball on the floor a couple of feet in front of him.

  “I hear that there might be two little boys here. My name is Chris. You don’t have to be afraid of me. I have a son of my own. We love to play ball in the backyard. Do you like to play? Well, I brought my ball if you want to play with me.”

  For a few seconds nothing happened, then the ball rolled toward Chris. Then it rolled back to its previous spot and stopped. This happed more times before Raven stopped the clip.

  “Now,” Sadie continued, not waiting for Lindsey to ask any questions, “The spirit of Milton Walker is the one that we were worried about. After much prodding, we have come to the conclusion that he is indeed angry with you, Lindsey, and thus targeting you.”

  “Me? What did I – ”

  “Lindsey, you must understand by now that a great tragedy occurred here. He lost his wife and unborn child. His grief over such a profound loss trapped him here; it was like hell for him. He really felt that he was doomed to spend eternity trapped here in this house where Abigail perished just days before she should have given birth.

  “He hated it, it ate at him. His soul became one big ball of festering grief. He took his ire out on any living soul that dared to intrude into his personal hell. Ms. Grayson successfully banished him a long time ago but he refused to go on to the Summerlands, he wanted to find Abigail first. That cleansing pushed him from this place, but he remained on the outskirts, in the void between the Summerlands and the land of the living.

  “And while he never found Abigail, at least he wasn’t here. After the cleansing, the house was calmer, lighter. The only activity was just that of the rambunctious twins running amok. Then you moved in and allowed the use of a supernatural board that ripped open the safeguards put in place so many years ago.”

  “How… do you know about that?” Lindsey asked. She had not mentioned the wudu board to anyone.

  “Lindsey, how do you think?” Raven asked, looking at her the way her mother would when she was caught in a lie as a child.

  “Well,” Lindsey tried to continue. “If he didn’t want to come back, why did he? Rip or not, why did he re-enter the house?”

  “The void of the Shadowlands, the area in between, is like a vacuum. That rip literally sucked him back. He had no choice. Milton found himself back in the place where everything ended so tragically for him. And he blames you. He is once again that tormented soul – reliving the day he lost his family. So you see, he isn’t demonic … just deranged with sorrow. That insanity led him to lynch his most devoted servant, to hang her dead children with her. It’s not something he would have normally done. Until that day he had no so much as touched one of his servants with anger or malice.

  “So, you can understand that the sooner we can get him to the Summerlands and reunited with his beloved, the better it will be for everyone.”

  “You keep talking about the ‘Summerlands’ and ‘Shadowlands.’ What are they?” Lindsey asked.

  “The Summerlands is the peaceful realm where most souls congregate after death. Some call it Heaven, others call it Nirvana. There are even those who say that the original Garden of Eden was in the Summerlands and that when humans were expelled, they were sent to the land of the living… that’s why no one has ever found the fabled garden here on Earth. Anyway, this realm is more commonly known within spiritual circles as the ‘Summerlands.’

  “Not everyone goes there, mind you. Some souls, those dark with hate or evil, those who are tormented, and those that died tragically, go to the ‘Shadowlands.’ There are many areas of the Shadowlands – from the outskirts of a place here on earth all the way down to hell itself. It’s a cold, dark, lonely, depressing state. Then there are others that are chosen who go on to train as protectors of humans. Those trainees eventually become guardian angels and such. But the most common place for the departed is the Summerlands.”

  “Wait. You just said that Hell was cold. And if the Summerlands and Heaven are the same place, how on earth could Milton go there? He killed himself. Suicide is a deal breaker. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.” Lindsey inquired.

  Raven opened her mouth to speak, but Sara beat her to the punch. “The Shadowlands is a place that is devoid of the Creator’s presence. Sacred writings almost always describe God as a fiery presence. He revealed himself to Moses as a burning bush, as flaming torch to Abraham, and even as a ‘tongues of fire’ to the apostles. The angels closest to Him are called the ‘Seraphim’ which, in Hebrew, means ‘burning ones.’ His love is like an all-consuming fire. To be in His presence is to be on fire with love and peace.”

  “But I’ve always heard hell described as a pit of fire. That the poor souls there are burning, in agony.”

  “You are confusing the concepts of fire and pain as they pertain to the human body instead of that which can cause harm and pain to the immortal soul. Let me simplify it. I can assume you’ve heard of frostbite? Or even freezer burn? There are ways to burn with ice. And the pain of hell has everything to do with being cut completely off from the warming love of the Creator. It’s like depression to the millionth degree, like dry ice applied directly to the soul. To be without Him, to be cut off from His love and warmth…”

  “She’s right,” Raven interrupted, stepping forward. “As for suicide, what you’ve been taught is mere superstition. Taking your life is an act of selfish desperation. It’s an act by someone who is so distraught with life that they can’t take it anymore. As Sadie just explained, tormented souls find themselves trapped in the Shadowlands because their sorrow anchors them there. The Summerlands repel sorrow, hate, guilt, and the like. Very few
suicides manage to escape the void of the Shadowlands, but it’s not because the Creator deems them unworthy of eternal peace – it is because they themselves have deemed it so. It is not impossible for a spirit to give up that anchor and move on. Most of the time, though, they need some help. That’s where people like Sadie, Marissa, Sara, Chris, and I come in.

  “Now, back to the reason we’re standing out here.” Raven turned to the laptop. “We didn’t catch anything else on video, although we all saw the dark shadows of the entities moving freely about the house. We did catch some interesting EVPs that we’d like you to hear. EVP stands for electronic voice phenomenon. Recorders catch other-worldly voices that we can’t hear with the naked ear. This first one was captured when we entered the house.”

  She clicked a few buttons, and the recorded session began to play. She heard the women talking about the staircase and where to start the investigation. Then, over their chatter, was a menacing man’s voice that seemed to yell “Get out!”

  Raven looped the area of the recording, replaying it several times before Lindsey asked her to stop. Eli, who was standing behind her, wrapped his arms around her, pulling her back in to his chest. He kissed her on the side of the face.

  “This second one came from the kitchen,” she continued. A small, childlike voice said faintly, “Where’s momma? I want my momma.”

  “And this one is a favorite.”

  Lindsey listened as the women talked about heading up to Lindsey’s bedroom to try to find the man. A strange woman’s voice spoke in a language that she didn’t understand. “Weh hunnuh da gwine?”

  “Do you understand that?” Raven asked.

  “No, should I?”

  “No. We didn’t either. But Chris thought that it sounded familiar. We talked to some other researchers and found out that it’s Gullah for ‘Where are you going?’ Gullah was the language of the first black inhabitants of the Sea Islands along Georgia and South Carolina, a mixture of several West African languages with a touch of English. And it’s still spoken in these parts today among the member of the Gullah-Geechee nation. They are direct descendants of slaves and have kept the customs and language alive all these years.”

  “That was the mother to those boys talking to you?”

  “Yes, I guess she wanted us to stay in the living room with her. We went up to your room next and let me tell you, your bedroom is a hotbed of activity! A vortex, actually. I’m surprised that other spirits haven’t been sucked in here from the void of the Shadowlands. Anyway, Milton Walker’s spirit is thick in there. I even got sick at one point. I had to go into your bathroom and throw up – sorry about that, by the way. But we caught this while we were up there.”

  She hit play on the laptop again. She heard the woman talking about the ominous aura of the room. But in the background you could hear a man sobbing and yelling “Why!? Why her!?”

  “When we were in the landing, we all felt like someone was breathing on us, like we were going to be flung down the stairs. That’s when we caught the last of the EVPs.”

  Lindsey heard the women talking about how thick the air was and reminding each other to hold tightly to the railing as they went down the stairs. The slave’s voice returned saying, “Lem’lone! Lem’lone!”

  “Again, we had to consult our Gullah expert. Olemargaret was saying ‘Leave them alone!’”

  They stood there, looking at each other for a minute. Lindsey had goose bumps all over her body. It was one thing to sense the presence of the spirits, but another to hear them talking, weeping, responding – to hear their voices loud and clear.

  The woman with the lighter hair, Sara, began to talk. “Lindsey, I specialize in psychometry. Do you know what that is?”

  Lindsey shook her head.

  “A psychometrist reads the history of items. When I hold something, I see flashes of images, hear sounds, smell scents, and feel emotions that are attached to item. You see, everything on earth gives off magnetic vibrations. Humans have vibrations that can sometimes be loud or forceful, that can be imprinted in items. Things like necklaces, tables, and such act like tapes. A psychometrist is a clairvoyant that acts like a tape player for these items. For instance, have you ever smelled smoke in the hallway outside your bedroom?”

  Lindsey nodded her head. Her mom had smelled it the first time they’d been in the house. She herself had gotten a whiff of it a few times, but hadn’t thought anything about it.

  “The frame to your door holds that scent. When I touch the doorway, I see an image of Milton Walker pacing back and forth right outside of it smoking his pipe. He’s worried about his wife. Back and forth he paces and worries, worries and paces. That frame has recorded the image of the pacing, the feeling of worry, and, of course, the smell of the smoking pipe.

  “Most of the items in your home, however, that carried these recorded vibrations were nice and soothing. The credenza in the foyer, the beaded lamp, and even the chest in your room seem to have been owned by elderly women. The chest’s owner was related to you, I believe.”

  “It was my grandmother’s,” Lindsey whispered.

  Sara continued, not acknowledging Lindsey’s musing. “They hold feeling of love, contentment. Smells like fresh baked cookies and Oil of Olay lotion pour off of them. They are calm and endearing. But one item in this house holds much despair and remorse. You know that oval sun catcher in your room? The one that hangs in the window that overlooks the oak trees?”

  Lindsey knew what she was talking about. It was a small, glass sun catcher with a single red rose in the middle of it. Her mother had found it in that storage building and thought it was pretty. She had hung it in Lindsey’s room the day they moved in. Lindsey had never really paid it any attention. She nodded at Sara to show that she heard the question.

  “It was Abigail’s. It holds memories of her illness and death. And it holds Milton’s despair. When I touched it, my head felt like it would explode and I got very clammy. I could see images of a woman lying on a bed, drenched in sweat. I could see a man crying over her dead body and then blowing his brains out. I can smell the sickly sweet smell that someone has when they are feverish and the metallic scent of blood. That item has not helped your cause very much; Milton sees it as you stealing from his dead wife. I highly recommend that you move it out of the house.”

  When they were done and started packing their things back up, Sadie moved to Lindsey’s side. “We would like to arrange a cleansing. I know your hesitation. Raven has conferred with Chris. They will join forces to do a Christian blessing combined with a traditional Wiccan cleansing. It should work very well. But we need your approval to move forward.”

  “In light of this evidence, I have to agree,” offered Eli.

  “When? How soon?”

  “Give me a day so that we can prepare and organize. Raven says that it’s best to do it during a waning moon. Tonight’s moon will be full. If we do it two nights from now, it’ll be waning gibbous.”

  “I have no idea what that means, but I trust you. In two nights, then,” Lindsey said.

  Each of the women touched her hands and whispered “Blessed Be.”

  When Raven reached her she said, “I do ask that you sleep in another room. You said your mother is out of town, so perhaps her room would be safer for you.”

  Sara turned as she was climbing into the van. “Will you be here, too, Eli?” she questioned. “Or will you be gone by then.”

  Eli smiled warmly and took her hand. “I will be here, but do not fear for me. Fear for the soul of Milton Walker if he resists our efforts.”

  “By ‘our,’ do you mean this little group or do you mean –”

  “You know exactly what I mean, Sara.” Eli smiled and waved at the group. They left, leaving a dusty trail, and so many questions in their wake.

  “What is up with that one woman. I don’t think she likes me very much.”

  “Ah, Sara,” Eli looked at the ground. “She and I go way back. She is concerned that I might be
second guessing my calling; she knows how important this path in life is for me. Don’t let her bother you, she’s just being matronly.”

  Lindsey’s heart thumped wildly, but she did not say anything. Eli started toward the house but she did not follow. She didn’t want to go in now that she had solid proof of the spirits inside and their moods. It was scary to think that they were in there right now, waiting unseen but certainly not unheard any longer.

  “I’ll be with you, you have nothing to fear,” Eli said. “Let’s go in. If you decide that you can’t stay upstairs tonight, you can sleep on the sofa. It’ll be safe.”

  They walked into the house silently and went into the living room. Eli grabbed sodas from the fridge and Lindsey turned the television on, attempting to prevent the entity from completely running them from the house.

  Upstairs, in the room directly above them, a bereaved spirit was sobbing and clutching at the bed linens.

  Eighteen

  Eli walked down the hall quickly, not wanting to be away for too long. He had left Lindsey unprotected. If Milton realized this, he was sure to strike. Eli had to plead his case and plead it well.

  “Elion!” Calliel greeting him heartily. “It’s nice to see you here in these halls again, brother. We have missed you.”

  “And I you, brother, but I am dealing with a serious issue. I need Uriel’s permission for a special banishment.”

  “And for permission to –”

  “No, I am asking for no such thing. I am there to serve Him and send these wayward spirits back to where they belong.”

  Calliel clasped Eli’s shoulder. “Brother, we have all seen it before. We are seeing it with you and this girl. You have fallen in love with her. It’s obvious on many levels. Do not be ashamed. Love is from the Creator. Savor it, let its warmth fulfill you!”

  “Calliel, I do love her. But the love I feel for her is the same love that I feel for all of His creation. It is my job to protect His masterpiece from other worldly attacks. And this threat is one that requires my full attention.”