The Reluctant Psychic

by Suzan Saxman

  The blonde noticed my tattoos. “Rats?” she said. “Do you like rats?”

  “I love them,” I said a little defensively. “I have two for pets.”

  “So do I!” she exclaimed. I was surprised.

  We started talking about rodent care and tattoos. She was not the kind of person I had first imagined. She was completely open to rats and bats and all the supposedly ugly things in the world that most people reject. When I looked at her more closely, I saw that she, too, had darkness within her. But it didn’t overwhelm her. At one point I realized she was studying my face.

  “You don’t have any wrinkles at all, do you?”

  “That’s because I’m an immortal from Transylvania,” I joked.

  And just like that, she took me in her arms and gave me a real, beautiful, motherly kiss on the side of my face.

  No one had ever kissed me like that before.

  I felt acceptance and love. From a total stranger.

  I never saw her in Woodstock again. I don’t know who she was.

  I think some of my clients imagine that the spiritual life doesn’t have any darkness in it. They imagine that if they say the right prayers and do the right meditations, nothing will ever be hard for them again. They’ll always walk in the light. But sometimes the demons are as important as the angels. Sometimes the demons lead us to the angels. Don’t ever take away my demons, because if you do, you might take my angels, too.

  “I’m looking for a real psychic,” announced a brash woman with toxic city energy who barged into my shop towards the end of the day. I was sitting by the cash register, reading a novel, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore. It’s about a talking ape.

  “There’s the lady at The Golden Wishes down the street,” I answered without looking up. She’d opened a store a few months earlier next to an art gallery, scrawling the name in gold lettering across the window with an illustration of a crystal ball.

  “She’s not real,” said the woman staring at me.

  “No, she’s not,” I agreed. I turned the page and kept on reading.

  “I’m looking for a real psychic. Someone said there was a real psychic in this town. At one of these stores.”

  I shrugged. “Good luck finding her,” I said, and went back to my book.

  Nothing I said seemed to move the old woman sitting in front of me. She acknowledged the things I saw about her, but remained stern and unemotional throughout her entire reading. She’d had a tough life. I could definitely see that. Just as she was about to go, however, I noticed a goat curled up by her feet.

  “This may sound strange,” I said to her. “But did you ever have a goat? A white goat with tan markings?”

  For a moment the woman just stared at me, amazed. I noticed tears were beginning to spill out of her eyes. “You’re good, aren’t you?” she whispered.

  “That goat loves you,” I told her.

  “Shema,” she said softly, with tenderness. “That was her name.”

  “The goat says you helped her. You loved her.”

  Now the woman was openly weeping. “She helped me. She saved my life!”

  More than sixty years earlier when the woman had been a little girl, her family had been starving to death in Poland after World War II. But Shema the goat had kept the children alive with her milk.

  “I loved her so much,” sobbed the woman.

  And the goat loved that little girl enough to return to visit her as an old woman. Honestly, I’m not sure Shema had ever left her. I think Shema the goat had always stayed close. Guardian angels can look very different than we imagine.

  23

  My Reading Room

  My reading room is a small alcove off of our store not much bigger than a closet. I have filled it with the faces of the dead. My father, dressed as Robin Hood, smiles down at me from a photograph. He looks very handsome. There’s a photo from Jack’s movie-star days that he signed for me in California. Daddy’s on the wall, and my mother, too, frowning. I have a photo of myself hugging my cat, Fiona.

  When I look at her, I know that I am not Fiona. And I’m not Suzan or Seretta or Suzie. I have no name. I am whoever I always was. I’m not sure I’ve ever really had a name. I’m whoever I will be. I am the oracle. That’s why it’s always been so easy to change my name.

  On the other side of the room I have photographs of the spirits that have come through me. People bring me photos and Mass cards of their mothers, their husbands, their children, their pets. I put them all up on the wall. I’ve never known these people in life, I’ve only known them in death, but it’s not so different, really.

  A spiritual healer once visited and thought he might help me clean out the lingering psychic energy of the room, but when he entered it he said he felt like he was standing in the rushing waters of a mountain stream. So many souls pass through that room, they’re always on the move. He told me it was a beautiful place, a place of healing.

  I keep ashes in the room, too—of my own pets who have passed, of the dead my clients bring to me. A friend bequeathed to me the ashes of her Great Dane because she was moving around and wanted someplace holy to keep them. I wished my sister would let me have the ashes of my mother. I didn’t like the idea of them stuck in a box in a house. It felt wrong, sacrilegious. No one should be stuck in a cardboard box for eternity. My mother didn’t leave me anything in her will, but I wish she’d left me her bodily remains. I like to think I would have known what to do with them. They weren’t really her anymore, but spirits complain about their final resting places to me all the time. They want to be somewhere special. It should have a little thought put into it. They need to be somewhere sacred and healing.

  Particularly if they’ve been upset and unhappy in their lives.

  I continue to wish I had more knowledge of my mother and her mother. I wish my mother had opened up to me more. It’s important to know where we come from; it’s the only way we know where we are. I put up plastic bats in the room for my Transylvanian grandmother. I wish, too, that I’d known her better. The older I get, the more I feel like her. I always picture her out in the middle of a storm.

  When I lived in New Jersey, I started going out each night, no matter the season, without a coat and barefoot. I would run around our condo complex, first clockwise and then counterclockwise. The neighbors must have thought I was out of my mind. When the monks came to bless our house, it reminded me of what I used to do. I needed to feel the ground beneath my feet and the stars above my head. I feel like I am a creature of the night, of the darkness, of the dead.

  I have a friend who is writing a book now about the Black Madonna, and he tells me that I am very close to her and she to me. She is the darkness we come from and the darkness we return to. She is the darkness between the stars and the darkness of the dirt. Everywhere I went in Woodstock I began to find out more about her. I’d go to a sale at the library and would suddenly find a book that was about her connections to Mary Magdalene, my old friend from childhood, the other Mary I’d always preferred. A local musician turned out to be leading tours to the Black Madonna’s shrines in Europe. A woman who came to me for a reading was having visions of her. One day I, too, had a vision of a young woman with wild hair kneeling on the ground at the center of a vortex. In one hand she held earth and in the other bones. I think it was her. I think I have always been close to her. She is my true mother.

  Two years ago a giant hurricane blew up the Hudson Valley, bringing down the grid and turning off the lights. Woodstock was plunged into total darkness. The winds were howling; fat raindrops had begun to fall; the trees were swaying back and forth. As the storm grew stronger, I felt an urgent need to go out in it, just like I had in London years ago.

  I took off my shoes and, wearing only a simple cotton dress, headed outside. I didn’t tell anyone I was going. I put my headphones on to listen to Nightwish, this sweeping symphonic folk music that matched my mood. I headed into the woods.

  The birds and other animals had all hidden
themselves away. Branches were falling, but I didn’t feel afraid. I came to the creek and the waters were furious, already spilling over the banks. I didn’t know that all around me floods were washing away bridges, cars, friends’ homes. I followed the curves and twists of the creek. I walked and walked, ecstatic as the wind roared around me. I didn’t have any sense of danger, only of freedom. I wasn’t aware of my feet squishing through mud; I wasn’t aware that I was drenched to the bone; I wasn’t aware of the trees crashing all around me. I wasn’t aware of anything but the cleansing power of the wind. I reveled in the wildness of the storm.

  Nothing in nature could hurt me. That’s what my grandmother had said.

  I was as happy as I had ever been, walking through the hurricane.

  I didn’t see a soul as I walked. I emerged at an old farmhouse, but there were no cars on the road. But, then, I didn’t want to see people or cars. Nightwish was still playing. I turned around and made my way back home the way I’d come.

  As I walked up the steps back to the shop, I realized that I should have told David and Gavin where I’d gone. I’d been out for hours and hours in a hurricane. They must be so worried about me. But when I walked upstairs, David was reading and didn’t even look up when I came in.

  “I’m back!” I announced.

  “Were you checking on the birds in the shop?” asked David.

  “I’ve been out in the storm for hours!”

  “What are you talking about?” said Gavin. “You were just here a few minutes ago.”

  “What?” I was totally confused. That’s when Nightwish clicked off. It was only forty-five minutes of music. But how could I have been gone for only forty-five minutes? It was over three miles to the farmhouse driving on the road. Walking through the twists and turns in the woods, it was over twice that. I couldn’t have walked seven miles in forty-five minutes. No one could. But somehow I had.

  When I was in England for the first time, standing in the garden with the fairies, I had felt similarly out of time. That night, listening to the storm rage, I felt something in the earth waking up again. It could only return in the darkness when the lights were off, the computers were useless, and the grid was completely down.

  The storm was devastating. It would be weeks before the power returned. The next day in town, as people emerged, they shared their stories of flooded basements and trees that had slammed through living rooms. There were other stories, too.

  A reclusive artist who lived by himself in the woods came into the shop and whispered to me, “The mythical creatures are back.”

  I’d have thought he’d been holed up in his cabin too long, if I hadn’t felt it myself.

  A client who was usually very businesslike and often skeptical assured me that, after the storm had finally passed, she stepped outside to look at the damage in her yard and saw a small creature crouching under her porch. When she came closer, he scrambled away.

  “I don’t know what he was. An elf? A fairy? A leprechaun? I don’t know, but he wasn’t anything I’d ever seen before. Do you know what he was?”

  I didn’t, but I thought probably many people were seeing things they’d never seen before, now that they weren’t looking at the television and the Internet all the time.

  I was sitting outside on the steps of our shop, talking to passersby. David had gone to find some dry ice at the fire station. I’d had a reading scheduled for that afternoon with a new client, but I was sure she wouldn’t show up. There were still roadblocks everywhere. Trees and power lines were down. Whole highways had been washed away.

  A pretty teenage girl I’d seen around town from time to time was walking up the street by herself. She had a cup of coffee in her hand, so I knew the local café must have its generator on. She caught my eye and came over to sit beside me. I have a fondness for these local kids. I can’t believe they enjoy being with me, but they do. I was so unpopular at their age, and now they treat me like one of the cool kids. Still, I dread it when they ask me for advice about their love lives.

  The girl took a sip of her coffee. I could tell she had something big to tell me, and I was gearing up to let her know I wasn’t up to a reading when she said softly, “I saw this … this guy last night.”

  “Is that so?” I was pretty sure I’d never done a reading for this girl before. I had no idea whom she was talking about. But I’m terrible with faces and names, except in my reading room.

  “I was wondering if you might have seen him before?” She glanced at me expectantly. “I don’t know. I thought maybe you of all people might have. I’ve heard about you. My friend Laura’s been to you. You told her all about her ex-boyfriend. And my friend Ellen. You helped her talk to her dad.”

  I didn’t recognize either of these names, but now I had begun to pay more attention to the girl sitting beside me. She was small and fair and fine boned. I could see the blue lines of veins twining up her arms. She was an old soul. How do I know that? It’s information that comes to me in a flash, a stream of images from past lives cascading backwards in time. But I could also see the enormity of the girl’s spirit barely contained by her tiny body.

  “Who are you talking about?” I asked, finally giving her my full attention. Every hair on my body prickled, like it does when I’m about to receive a revelation from the other side. “Who did you see?”

  The girl shivered. There were goose bumps on her arms, too.

  “I used to see him when I was little, but I haven’t for a long time. Until last night. He came again. Right in the middle of the storm, after the lights had all gone out and it was really wild out. I’m frightened of him.”

  “Yeah? Well, what does he look like?” I asked her, already preparing myself for what she was going to say. I remembered who I had seen at the height of the hurricane in London so long ago. I felt a bottomless terror in the pit of my stomach, familiar from childhood. I’m not afraid of much, but I was afraid of this.

  “He comes to my room when I’ve just fallen asleep. He’s a tall man in a wide-brimmed black hat. He looms over my bed. His eyes—”

  “—are on fire,” I finished for her.

  We both shuddered.

  All around us were the sounds of the village struggling to return to normal. Chain saws buzzed; generators whirred; neighbors called out to each other. The sky was a brilliant turquoise blue. The storm had passed. But in that moment, the girl and I were enveloped in darkness together.

  “You’ve seen Ankou, too,” she said. “I thought so.”

  I didn’t know this name, and yet I did, in every cell of my body, in some lost place in my soul. The name plunged me back in time. I was in a cave. Waves crashed across rocks. I could see enormous gray stones stuck upright in the ground, stones that were older than Stonehenge.

  “Ankou?” I repeated. “He has a name? That’s his name?”

  “My parents say so,” said the girl. “They told me to call him by his name. They said that would make him less frightening. But I can never remember anything, much less his name, when he appears. It’s overwhelming.”

  “It is,” I agreed.

  “My friend Matthew saw him once. He’d been taking too many drugs and he was really messed up one night. He passed out in his room and when he woke up he saw this coil of smoke winding out of his abdomen—”

  “His etheric body,” I said.

  “He saw the coil and then he saw the man in the wide-brimmed black hat in his room. He knew he’d come to take him, that this was it. He was going to die. Only he didn’t. He hasn’t done any Ecstasy since then, and he’s getting his shit together now. But I’ve always seen … Ankou … ever since I was a little girl. I even used to hear his cart coming up the driveway.”

  “He has a cart?”

  “In Brittany he drives a cart, yeah. That’s how my dad figured out who he was. That and the hat and the eyes.”

  “Who are your parents, and how do they know all of this?” I was feeling disoriented all of a sudden and slightly woozy, as if so
meone had spun me around and around and I didn’t know what direction I was headed in anymore.

  “They do a lot of research for their work. That’s how they found the stories about him. They figured it out.” She sighed heavily. “I guess.”

  “What do you mean, ‘I guess’?”

  The girl narrowed her eyes. “Just because you can explain something doesn’t mean you understand it.”

  “Who do you think this Ankou is?” It had been so many years since I had last seen him in London, but the cold fear this discussion of him inspired in me was immediate and powerful. In a life filled with many strange experiences, he had been one of the few visions to ever truly frighten me. Even talking about him in the light of day unnerved me.

  The girl had a distracted, intense quality. She picked at her cuticles; she twisted a strand of her hair. She had a lot going on inside of her. And she was seeing all kinds of things that most people didn’t. I could tell. She reminded me of myself at her age.

  “Who is he?” I asked her again. My whole life I had wanted to know and feared the answer. Was he the one who had engineered the attacks against me in Woodstock?

  The girl stared at me. She was terrified, too. I could tell that she didn’t want to tell me, but that she had to. She took a breath. “He’s the King of the Dead,” she said at last.

  “What?”

  I was astounded. Was that all? The King of the Dead? The dead aren’t frightening to me. Death isn’t frightening to me … or at least I didn’t think so. “If he’s the King of the Dead, how come he’s got this name I’ve never heard of before?”

  “Oh, he’s got lots of names. He pops up all over the world. Ankou is just what they called him in Brittany, where he drives a cart when he comes for the dead. It’s an old Celtic name. But he’s also Charon, the ferryman from Greek mythology who takes the souls to Hades on his boat, and Jizo, in Japan. But what I want to know is why I see him.” She took another breath and stared at me defiantly. “Is it because I’m about to die?”