by Eve Paludan
“What’s wrong, sweetheart? Are you getting something?”
She opened her eyes. Her face was extremely flushed. “Big time.”
“What is it now?” I asked.
“A horse.”
“Wait? A horse?”
“A ghost horse,” she said.
“This case gets curiouser and curiouser,” I said.
The three of us went upstairs. At the welcome table and chairs in the first-floor lobby, which already had printed brochures for each of the galleries for the First Friday grand opening, I set down the video camera and turned it on to see what was in it. Ellen sat on one side of me and Sister Maggie sat on the other side. The first thing that happened in the video was that the lights went out in the basement. I know we didn’t turn them out when we left the basement, so someone or something did.
The infrared had kicked in and so did the shadow detector. The temperature went up to about 90 and there was a big shadow that growled like a Tasmanian devil, which made me shudder as I watched the video. It moved back and forth as a big shadow in the room, dragging the bodies of the dogs and cats through the wall through a hole it made that closed up after it left the utility room in the basement. It was so dim that we could barely see what was going on, but the sounds of growling and scraping were chilling. The video shut off after only a few minutes. I couldn’t explain why.
The thermal imaging showed a very hot infrared image and its path around the room, dragging stuff. “What’s the highest temperature?” Ellen asked.
“About 125 F,” I replied.
“Not good,” she said.
“Should we have a fire engine standing by outside?”
“It would be a good idea,” Ellen said. “But how do you explain such a thing to the LAFD without looking like a potential arsonist?”
“True.”
We heard a car door slam outside and Diego came in with Whole Foods paper bags stuffed with groceries for our courtyard barbeque. “Hi. What did I miss?”
“The bodies of the dogs and cats were dragged through the wall by the demonic spirit of the chupacabra, through a hole that the entity made and then closed up behind itself,” Ellen said.
“Wait, Ellen, did you say demonic?” I asked.
“Did I?” Ellen said.
“The thing that left the basement. What did you call it again?” Sister Maggie asked.
“I believe it’s the spirit of a chupacabra let loose in the gallery building,” I said.
Sister Maggie shook her finger at Diego. “I told you not to bring that mangy stuffed dead animal into the building.”
“How was I to know that something evil would be let loose from my efforts to bring back my dead wife?”
“You shouldn’t be messing with stuff you don’t understand,” she chided him further. “How many of those little fires has ‘It’ started?”
Ellen said gently, “Actually, the spirit of the chupacabra is attached to the spirit of a human and he starts the fires. But we’ll get that entity to leave before the gallery grand opening.”
“I hope so,” Sister Maggie said. “Otherwise, people are going to be running and screaming, just from the sulfur smell.”
I nodded. “Even I can smell it at times and I am not even psychic.”
Ellen said, “This is a really complicated removal process because of so many different kinds of entities in the building.”
“It’s like Ghost Central Station,” I said. Ellen smiled at me. I loved it that I could make her smile over the corniest comment.
Diego shifted his grocery bags and said, “In spite of everything else going on in the gallery, we need to do something not related to the paranormal. This day has left me famished. Who else wants some dinner on the courtyard patio?”
“I do,” said Ellen.
“Second,” I said. “My stomach has been growling since the chocolate crepes digested, hours ago.”
“Sister Maggie, please have dinner with us, too,” Ellen said, her big blue eyes turning to on Diego. “Is it all right?”
“Of course,” Diego said. “You are always invited to eat with me, Sister. You know that.”
“Thank you, but I can’t tonight. I cook dinner at a soup kitchen once a month and it’s my night,” she said. She hugged us goodbye and excused herself. I’m pretty tall but when she hugged me, I noticed that she was taller than me. And very strong. I wondered if she was really human.
Of course she is! I heard Ellen’s voice in my head.
“Let’s get the normal part of this party started,” Diego said.
***
The sun had almost set and the weather was indeed improved, with the Santa Ana winds died down, and now a gentle breeze wafted in from the ocean, a block away. The air was moist and fresh, very pleasant. The twinkling lights in the courtyard patio came on, lending a festive, restaurant-like feel to the ambiance. I relaxed a bit and made myself at home.
“This walled courtyard is gorgeous, Diego,” I said, thinking about how I might want to fix up our own yard to look like a restaurant patio with all of the lights and tropical plants. He even had potted orchids. There were so many plantings that it looked tropical. He even had pineapple and banana trees.
“The party might be a departure toward normal, but I think we need to do a séance after dinner,” Ellen said. “Let’s call Sandy and see if she’ll sit in with us.”
“Sandy, our cab driver?” I said.
“Yeah,” Ellen said. “And I think we might need some support for tonight. A séance works best if three or more people are in it but I want you, Monty, to be outside the séance circle, running the recording equipment. What I would like to do is have you, Diego, and Sandy, join me in a séance circle.”
“Your cab driver is a medium, too? By all means, please do ask her to join us for dinner and a séance on the patio?” said Diego. “And ask her if she wants steak or chicken for dinner.”
I nodded and texted our cab driver with the details. She texted back immediately, excited to be invited to participate. Sandy asked for an hour to make it from Culver City in heavy traffic, where she was getting her nails done and was almost finished.
“Sandy prefers chicken,” I called out to Diego. He unwrapped another chicken breast and put it in the marinade. Now I was Jonesing for an outdoor kitchen like his. Envy. Coveting. I know.
Ellen had asked for black candles in a multiple of three, but Diego only had dark purple ones and brought a dozen from upstairs. I placed them on the table in a pile but we wouldn’t light them until the séance.
I busied myself with setting up the electronic equipment as well. With that done, I wanted to give my wife a chance to catch up with her old professor, so I lounged around, occasionally fussing with the equipment, which was already turned on, recording sounds, temperatures, images, and shadows, even vibrations. I was set. All but the eating dinner and séance part. My stomach growled. It had been a long time since the chocolate pancakes in late morning. Was this really how I wanted to spend my anniversary? I was a little bummed. I had planned on something more romantic, not that the company wasn’t interesting. I was hungry though.
As if Diego knew what I was thinking, he put out a plate of cheese and crackers, the fancy stuff from the most expensive grocery store I knew of in California. I tried not to hog the cheese bites, which I assumed probably cost around twenty bucks a pound, because it was really, really good cheese. I had two slices on some sort of rosemary-raisin crackers that seemed weird until the second bite and then I was hooked on them. It didn’t begin to fill the hungry hole inside of me. After chocolate pancakes, cheese was my most favorite food. I resisted the urge to load up on it.
Ellen brought four place settings and utensils and I began to set the table for our little dinner party. She grinned at me and sent me a mental telepathy image that was a rose with a card. Inside my mind, I opened the card and it said, “Are we still on for tonight? Later?”
I chuckled and sent her a mental telepathy message
of my own. In the affirmative.
While Ellen and Diego gabbed at the outdoor kitchen sink, chopping salad stuff, putting corncobs in foil jackets with butter and getting the grill going for marinated chicken breasts and steaks, I sat almost out of earshot at the round patio table, nursing a Coke with lots of ice and a twist of lime in it. We rarely drank alcohol and certainly never drank alcohol while on an investigation job. I expected all kinds of stuff to go down tonight at the séance. It always did.
Stretching my earshot, I caught the words “Oaxaca” and “fieldwork” a few times, so I know that Ellen and Diego were talking about the summer they spent together in Mexico. I’d never been to a barbeque séance and it felt weird how comfortable Ellen was with Diego and how strange it felt to see them cooking together when all spiritual hell was breaking loose around us.
My neck prickled with upcoming danger. Despite being a scientist of sorts, I was not immune to vibes when it came to the safety of my wife and my own sense of self-preservation. Things felt distinctly dangerous, even though we were outdoors in a walled courtyard and could walk away at any time and not be trapped with some entity that liked to set things on fire. I felt restless and awkward but couldn’t think of a way to join their conversation when the topics were from decades ago. And then, here we were getting ready to eat dinner in the courtyard of a haunted building, trying to do normal things in an abnormal place. The more I thought about it, the closer I was to jumping out of my skin.
I heard Ellen excuse herself from Diego. She came over and hugged me and whispered in my ear, “My love, stop agonizing over the details. We will learn so much tonight.”
“Yes, Ellen,” I said. “We certainly will.”
She walked back to Diego to chatter some more about people I didn’t know from the university and where they were now, who had died, gotten married, gotten tenure.
Our cab driver, Sandy, finally arrived at the dinner-séance on the back patio of the gallery building. I was glad to see her because she was my second security person for Ellen, after me, of course. Instead of her white button-down blouse, black slacks, and chauffeur’s cap, she was wearing a translucent turquoise caftan that billowed on her slender form and went to her ankles. She wore strappy silver sandals on her delicate feet and her toenails looked fancy, too. The messy ponytail from this morning, which had been shoved under the chauffeur’s cap, was gone, replaced by loose, long blonde hair with some streaks of silver, parted in the center, and it fell in generous, natural waves to her waist.
She was wearing makeup and her blue eyes were stunning. She wore a silver necklace with an Egyptian ankh symbol of life pendant, cut from bright turquoise. Old Diego’s eyes lit up when he saw her. There was some life in that guy yet. For someone who was pining for his dead wife and trying to call her up from the ether, he readily put his eyes on sweet Sandy from head to toe, though she didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she actually seemed to like it.
Ellen greeted Sandy like an old friend and complimented her outfit. Sandy blushed a bit and handed us the jackets we’d left in the cab that morning. We both put on our jackets. The evening sea air was getting a bit chilly. Diego had changed to jeans and a denim shirt. He looked relaxed but still neat. The guy’s hair never looked out of place. I started to wonder if he was wearing a rug.
Ellen gave me a sharp look, and I looked away, ashamed that she was reading my mind while I was kind of being catty in my thoughts about Diego.
Introductions were made to Diego and his eyes lit up even more at the sight of Sandy, who was probably in her late fifties, but still a beautiful woman when she wasn’t looking harried from her cab driver job. Tonight, she was like the “after” version of the contestants on that TV show that Ellen liked, What Not to Wear. Sandy knew what to wear, her clothes that looked stunning on her, they were the right color and style, and she wore them with ease. She and Ellen looked great together, too. It was like being at one of those Southern California parties with the beautiful people. Well, the three of them, and me, a guy who would rather have chocolate pancakes than a rack of tight abs.
While the electronic equipment recorded our every word and sound around us, the temperatures and shadows, even infrared images, Ellen and I sat at the patio table, surrounded by twinkle lights on the mature trees, while Sandy now joined Diego at the outdoor kitchen grill and sink and insisted on helping him with the dessert kabobs, which were some sort of raw exotic fruits in chunks and some dipping sauces of melted chocolate and white chocolate. Both chicken and steaks sizzled on the grill and the aroma was making me salivate.
I started to not be as anxious about all of the spirit stuff going on with the gallery. It did strike me that we had a poltergeist who liked to start fires, and here, Diego had a gas grill going. But I was more hungry than anything else.
Ellen brought me a small dinner salad with cilantro-lime dressing on it. “Bless you,” I said. “Should I help you all fix dinner?”
“No, sweetheart. Just hang out with your instruments for now,” she said. I wolfed down the salad while I waited for the protein to stop bleeding on the grill.
If the meat dared to catch on fire, Diego squeezed lime wedges over it. Brilliant. I filed that trick away for my own grilling extravaganzas that I liked to do with Ellen. No more water bottle sprays. A squeeze of lime. So simple. My mouth was watering as the scent of the grilling marinated meats drifted in my direction. It was getting hard to think about ghosts and poltergeists when I was ready to chew off my arm from hunger.
Ellen’s eyes were on Diego and Sandy as they worked together in the outdoor kitchen and Ellen and I put on our jackets and drank our virgin mojitos that Diego made in a blender. Sandy wasn’t drinking alcohol either, because she was driving the cab-van and it turned out that Diego was a longtime member of AA, so the four of us were all completely sober. It was a good thing because we needed to be on our toes tonight, for what might happen. Where Ellen went, spirits went, too. They were never far from her side, my ghost magnet wife.
Dinner was delicious. I don’t think there were any leftovers of the main course or side dishes. As everyone was having dessert that night—fancy fruit kabobs dipped in a fondue of melted white chocolate, I replayed some of the video footage from earlier at dinner and viewed it. I cleared my throat to tell everyone, “We are not alone out here.”
At the same time, both Sandy and Ellen sang out in unison, “We know.”
When the dishes were cleared and stacked in the outdoor sink, Diego rinsed them off and I was surprised to see him load a dishwasher in the outdoor kitchen. Man, this guy knew how to live!
After all of the food and some very good after-dinner coffee, Sandy pulled out a Tarot deck and said to Diego, “Would you like me to read your cards?”
“I’ve never had it done before. But yes, I would like that,” he said.
Ellen stood up. “Monty and I should step away so we don’t affect the reading.”
“No, no, Ellen. You two can stay and listen. I want you to,” Diego said.
“Is that all right with you?” Ellen asked Sandy.
“Sure,” she replied. “I feel a very benevolent energy from you. And a neutral one from Monty.” Ellen sat back down.
“I’m the science guy,” I said. “I’m supposed to be neutral and objective.” Ellen put a finger to her lips and I nodded, understanding that we should be quiet during Sandy’s Tarot reading for Diego.
Sandy handed the cards to Diego. “I want you to shuffle these for me. Let me know when you are through shuffling.”
He nodded and I watched his manicured fingers shuffle the cards as if he was a dealer in Vegas. His hands were artistic and graceful. I was impressed. “I’m finished,” he said.
“Cut the deck into three piles for me,” Sandy said. Diego did so, his eyes quite serious.
“Now close your eyes and put your hand on top of the pile that feels like it has a tremendous energy.”
Diego put his hands on one of the piles.
“Ope
n your eyes,” Sandy said. She picked up the pile that he had designated. She held them and smiled. “I have a little bit of a different style than most Tarot readers. What I do is I pick three cards for your future, three for your present, and three for your past. And then I take each group as an interactive storyboard and tell you about it. It is very simple and does not use a lot of complicated spreads as you may have seen at other Tarot readings. There are three cards per story and I turn them over all at once and get an impression from how the three cards play on each other and from your energy, too.”
Ellen leaned forward, very interested in Sandy’s simple method of reading Tarot cards.
“This group of three cards is going to be about your future.” She turned over the first, second, and third cards and smiled as she looked down on them and thought hard. “First, I will explain the cards individually as you may not know what they mean as single impressions. Then I will give you my impression of the three cards as one story.” The first card on the table was “The Fool.”
Diego blushed. “Oh no,” he said. “What stupid thing did I do?”
“It’s not what you think it is,” Sandy said. “The Fool is a very good card for the future. It means a fresh start, something new, or someone new. It is not negative at all.”
“Is it about the gallery?” Diego asked.
“It could be about the gallery or even a new relationship, a love interest, a business startup, even travel to a new place,” Sandy said.
“A new relationship? But I’m still in love with my wife. She’s dead, but…” His voice trailed off uncertainly. Then he nodded at her to continue the reading.
She turned over The Star. “This is also your future. The Star is very hopeful and healing. It is also mystical and spiritual. So far, your future is all good.”
“What else?” he asked. “What else do the cards say about my future?”