by Eve Paludan
“Well, I wasn’t actually kidding. I mean, look at them go! I’ve never seen two strangers do anything like that. If they keep on in this way, we’re going to have to throw a beach towel over them and politely leave for twenty minutes.”
“I don’t think it will go that far, Monty. If Sandy didn’t want to do it, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation,” Ellen said to me. “Obviously, she is a willing vessel and Rosa took possession because of Sandy’s compassion and unconditional openness to be possessed. But I think they are just saying hello. Let’s be patient and give them some reunion time.”
“Is it Sandy and Diego or Rosa and Diego?” I asked.
“Yes,” Ellen said simply. “It’s all three of them.”
“Oy!” I said. Things were getting pretty hot and heavy, making me feel uncomfortable when Sandy lifted her hands from the table and the three-way spiritual connection was broken.
“Oops, there she goes,” I said, looking at my thermal imager. “The cold blue spot is now leaving the building.”
Sandy broke the kiss from Diego by pulling her head back and they both sat there stunned and panting. They were both blushing, too. As was I. Ellen smiled crookedly, in that sort of “I told you so” way.
“Look!” I said and pointed upward in the murky night sky. Everyone followed my eye but nobody else seemed amazed. A square window of brilliant white light had opened and then some shimmering thing was lowered. It looked like some sort of ladder. I moved my camera on the tripod, trying to point it directly over the courtyard but before I could get my camera focused and adjust the shutter speed, the ladder withdrew and the horizontal window of light seemed to go away. Just closed up tight in the color of night.
“Did you see that? Did you see that?” I asked.
Ellen and Sandy looked at each other.
“It was the light! Didn’t you see it? It must have opened up for her! I think Rosa went in. I actually didn’t see her, but I saw a light. It was brilliant and shimmering! It was only there for maybe three seconds!”
“Nope. Didn’t see it,” Sandy said.
Ellen said, “I didn’t see it, either, Monty. But I know that Rosa is truly gone. I don’t feel her anymore.”
Diego said, “I didn’t see the light either. But that was definitely Rosa’s kiss. And thank you, Sandy, for being the lovely instrument for my wife’s appearance at the séance.”
“My pleasure,” she said, smiling shyly at Diego.
“Are you…are you…are you…single?” Diego stammered.
She laughed very hard for a few seconds and then she said, “Yes, I am unattached.” Then she started laughing again. “I’ll give you my number before I leave tonight.”
I tried to stop it, but I think I rolled my eyes. “Is the séance over, Ellen?”
“I’m afraid so,” she said. “As soon as everyone’s fingertips were no longer touching, that broke the communication to Rosa.”
“But, did she say anything before she left?” I asked.
“She said it all in her kiss,” Diego said. “She kissed away my sin of adultery while she was very sick at the end of her life. She understood how I was reaching out and in abject misery at losing her. She saw my departure from fidelity as some sort of surrogate that I used. She gave her forgiveness and her blessing for me to move on in this life. Her kiss said that she saw my artwork and the gallery and the legacy that I am leaving to the co-op when I die. She approves and she honored me with so much unconditional love and wonderful passion, that I won’t ever forget it.”
He sighed happily. “I feel redeemed, as if a great weight has been lifted off my shoulders.”
Ellen patted Diego on the shoulder. “I am so happy that we accomplished that.”
“So, if she’s gone, does that mean the building is no longer haunted?” I wanted to know.
“Unfortunately, no,” Ellen said. “I have this feeling that Rosa’s ghost was actually holding back the dangerous entities from unleashing themselves on this building. Now, they are unsupervised. Like leaving a bunch of high school kids in detention by themselves. They are going to get even more unruly.”
“Oh, this is just great,” I said.
Ellen added, “But at least Diego won’t be carrying around all that unfinished business, regret and uncertainty. That negative cloud should lift if it hasn’t already.”
“That was a lot of messages in a couple of long kisses,” I said. I scratched my head. “How come I saw the window of light, Ellen? None of you saw it. I don’t consider myself psychic, whatsoever, so, why did I see it?”
Sandy and Ellen exchanged looks. Sandy’s voice was very serious and she said, “When a person who isn’t a sensitive sees a window of light, the only reason I know of is that your own life is in grave and immediate danger.”
A stab of fear went through me. I shot up out of my chair as a lot of my instruments started to go crazy. The ground was even shaking.
“Hot, hot, hot!” Ellen said and tore off her jacket, as if it was on fire. Sandy did the same and screamed like she was in pain.
I heard a big whoosh from spontaneous combustion in the courtyard and the landscaping on both sides of the courtyard caught fire, crackling as if the bushes were dry tumbleweeds soaked in gasoline. Everywhere, flames surrounded us.
I dove to the pavement and covered Ellen’s body with my own and I heard someone scream, “Burning bush! Burning bush!”
And, with chagrin and horror, I realized that girlish scream was me, just like the first time I watched The Ten Commandments on our brand-new color TV. Just a small kid, I dove under the dining room table when I saw the burning bush on that big television screen. And promptly wet my pants.
History repeated itself. Well, not that last part.
I was no Charlton Heston. No wise words came to me to ask a deep voice in the sky for the explanation of spontaneous combustion fire and the thundering sort of bangs that seemed to explode on the concrete patio, all around us in a strange pattern that I couldn’t quite recognize, but had heard many times in my life.
Ellen and I crawled on our hands and knees through the smoke and flames in the heavily landscaped courtyard that seemed to be aflame as if Greek fire had been dashed over everything burnable in the courtyard.
“Stay low!” I said. “I need to get my equipment!”
“Stay down! It’s insured!” Ellen yelled.
“But the data!”
“Forget it, Monty! We all need to get out of here!”
I looked behind me and Sandy and Diego were right on my butt.
“Go, go!” Sandy said. I crawled as fast as I could, trying to keep my head below the smoke.
A sort of fireball with six prongs on it seemed to come from the sky and it was aimed straight at us, coming down in slow motion in the courtyard where the trees and bushes were already dripping fire all around us. The smoke was thick and acrid.
“Is this ghost fire?” I shouted to Ellen.
She screamed, “Watch out for the hooves!”
“Hooves?” I said and then my sweet Ellen was knocked flat and I heard her cry out in pain.
The courtyard was suddenly full of electric security lights that half-blinded us and Sister Magdalene rushed over, grabbed a garden hose, turned it on and sprayed it over all of the bushes and trees, wetting everything down until it was smoking and dripping and not one flame was left. How she put out that inferno with her thumb over a garden hose, I’ll never know. She did it in seconds, too.
“What in the name of Heaven happened here? Did the propane tank explode on the barbeque?”
“No, I think it was the poltergeist,” I said. I looked at Ellen. “Was it?”
Ellen, Sandy, Diego and me got up off the ground and dusted ourselves off. All four of us were coughing. Ellen had a burn on her forearm. In the shape of a horseshoe! She winced when I tried to look at it.
“Yeah, that was it. Ghost fire, fully manifested.”
“What was all that?” I asked, marveling
but horrified at the exact shape of the horseshoe burn on Ellen’s arm.
“It was a ghost horse with a rider, the one in the painting that Sister Maggie showed me of the small guy in the jockey silks.”
I tried to put all of that together in my head as I rushed to see if my equipment was all right and turn it off.
“Whew!” I said to Ellen. “It looks like my gear made it through the inferno. As did we.” Adrenaline was pumping through me. “None of it looked like anything to me except for a ball of fire with six prongs.”
“That was the ghost horse, the four legs and the head and tail,” Ellen said. “And then there was the jockey, riding it.”
Sister Maggie blew her breath to extinguish the candles that were set up in concentric triangles on the tabletop, shut off the outdoor faucet and coiled up the hose again. “So, this is what you’ve been doing while I was gone. I warned you, Diego. You cannot play with fire and not get burned. This stuff is not a game.”
“We made contact with the spirit of Rosa! She was here!”
“What?” Sister Maggie said. “She was here?”
“Yes. Rosa’s spirit was here. I even kissed her. Twice! She forgave me and I am free of all that sadness that was weighing me down. I’m redeemed.”
“Oh, my goodness,” Sister Maggie said thoughtfully. “You are going to be in so much trouble, Diego. Spiritual trouble.”
Sister Maggie wanted to go up to her room and bid us good night. It was obvious that she wanted no part of our paranormal investigation beyond what we had already said to satisfy her curiosity.
Diego said, “Those were real ghosts!”
We men got some Ove-Gloves from the outdoor kitchen, put them on, and carried melted plastic tables and chairs to the Dumpster outside the courtyard. Ellen and Sandy helped clean up, too, walking with us, back and forth, as the four of us talked.
Diego was shaking. “Is that what it is that is starting all of the fires?”
“That is your poltergeist,” Ellen said. “The ghost of a jockey on the ghost of a horse.”
Sandy said, “I’ve never seen an animal ghost before.”
“I still haven’t,” I said, “but my instruments hopefully caught the action.”
Ellen knelt down on the ground where a lilac bush had burned away to a few blackened sticks in one of the large dirt planting areas surrounded by concrete. “Look at that!” she said. She pointed to something sticking out of the ground.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It looks like the neck of a very old bottle sticking out of the ground,” she said. She looked at Diego. “I collect old bottles for my garden. It’s kind of a secret passion. Do you mind if I have a look at it?”
“Take it,” Diego said. “I had no idea that it was there.”
I dug it out of the moistened soil with my bare hands for Ellen. We looked at it in surprise when I took it to a patio table and set it down very gently. It was an old cobalt blue bottle, of the vintage medicinal variety. It was intact and had a cork in it. The bottle had a very old label that was quite worn away, though we could see that there was once a horse printed on the label.
“It looks like the bottle was from horse liniment or something,” Ellen said.
“I think the bottle has something to do with the horse spirit that just passed over us,” Sandy said.
“So do I,” Ellen agreed.
“We should open it,” I said.
Ellen handed it to me and I pulled the cork. I sniffed. “I don’t smell anything,” I said. I put my eye to the blue bottle and looked inside. I gulped. “There’s a paper rolled up in it. Like a tube.”
Ellen said, “As soon as you opened the bottle, I felt something was let loose from it.”
“What is it?”
“A terrible sadness, a profound loss. Death.”
I handed her the bottle and she turned it over in her hand. “The paper won’t come out.”
“We could break the bottle,” Diego said.
“No, that would be bad luck,” I said. “Let me get a tweezers and try to get it out.” I looked in the first aid kit of my man purse. I had a very long-handled tweezers. I carefully extracted the rolled-up paper from the blue bottle and put it in Ellen’s hand. The Santa Ana wind was still.
She closed her eyes and breathed hard. Before she even unrolled the paper, she said, “It’s a suicide note.”
She looked at Sandy, who had tears in her eyes and nodded her agreement.
The four of us sat stood in the night and Ellen unrolled the paper on my back and read it aloud in the walled courtyard.
My Dearest Love:
Without you, I am a pink shell of misery, misunderstood by those of my kind, unable to even express my simplest thought or need without it being misconstrued or mocked.
Yet, you understood me, knew me, and spoke easily with me.
My thoughts were clear, creative, and infinite when we were together.
You were my tongue and only through you could I shout the joy of an exuberant life.
You were grace personified, the organic definition of intelligence and power.
You were my legs that took me bravely through places where I feared to travel alone.
Your profound perfection was my undeniable proof that God exists.
I have such deep sorrow that the frivolity of man took away your life and profound regret that I willingly participated in it.
I never prayed that you would become human for me, which would have bound you to this lesser existence after you soared on your own four legs to heights that no man could achieve without machines.
I cry to Heaven that I was born into the wrong body, but I have faith that God hears my plea:
I pray that I will become a horse.
I love you with all of my heart.
I am coming for you, Nightfire.
Ellen dissolved into tears. I had never seen her so upset on a paranormal investigation. She rolled up the aged paper carefully and put it back in the bottle and put the cork on tight.
“It’s a suicide note to a horse?” I asked, for the sake of clarification.
“Yes, Monty. I know it is hard to believe, but the man who wrote this note killed himself out of guilt that he had something to do with the death of a horse that he loved.”
“So, where do we go from here?” Diego asked.
She knelt down and touched the ground. “There is a horse buried here, under where the heirloom lilac bushes burned. I can feel the equine bones touching the darkest reaches of my heart, the part that is empathetic to sentient creatures that are not human.”
She looked at Diego. “The bones need to be quickly dug up by a team and in the most respectful and reverential way, they need to be gathered into a container, a big one, probably the biggest Rubbermaid container you have, or maybe a few of them. If possible, no bone should be missed, so you’ll need a team of people who can assemble the parts on the ground before they are put in the container.”
“I know who would do it for me.” He paused. “Ezekiel’s Dry Bones on the first floor of my co-op gallery. He and his family, despite your subtle body language that you were put off by their art on the bones of horses, are very respectful and loving and they take the spirits of animals very seriously. And one of them intimately knows animal anatomy. The grandmother of the family is a retired large animal veterinarian.”
“Wow,” I said. “This is so intriguing. I mean, how the paranormal investigation is unfolding.”
“Believe it or not, there is order in the universe,” Ellen said, by way of explanation. “Everything that happens in a life unfolds into the next great story, and the next, and as we get older, we see how all of the pieces that everything we have ever done and everything that we have ever known, has fit together in perfect order over time.”
Sandy murmured her agreement and looked at Ellen like she was a mentor of all things psychic. She was.
“Diego,” Ellen said, “I agree that Ezekiel’s family should be the
ones to do the excavation, if they will help. But they can’t paint on the bones or use them for any art project,” Ellen said. “I know that everyone is getting their galleries ready for the First Friday Art Walk but this unpleasant task needs to take precedence. We need to do something special with the bones as quickly as possible.”
“What are we going to do, Ellen?” I asked. I was secretly grateful that Ellen wasn’t going to make me dig up a dead horse. I would have done it for her, but I was feeling my age.
Ellen looked at me. “Monty, while Diego supervises the excavation and retrieval of the horse tomorrow, we need to find the writer of the suicide note. I believe that his body will be somewhere in, around, or under the gallery building. He wouldn’t have killed himself at the exact burial site of the horse because he knows that someone would have removed his body.”
“So, he would have settled for killing himself someplace close to the horse’s gravesite, but somewhere secret, where nobody would find his body and remove it from the proximity of the horse he loved?” I said.
“Exactly,” Ellen said. “Your logic is perfect.”
“And then we have to get the horse bones together with the jockey’s bones?”
“You are very, very smart, Monty Drew,” Ellen said. She looked up at the three stories of the building. “He’s in there somewhere.”
“But we’ve already torn this building apart,” Diego said.
“Obviously, not completely,” I replied.
I looked at Ellen and she took the lead. “Tomorrow, Monty and I are going to research the history of the building,” she said. “I have already been on Google and there was nothing but tax records to find. We need a library. We need to find out when and if horses were ever kept here and if there was ever an accident of some sort. A death involving a human and a horse,” she said. “I know now, by this suicide note, that it was a man, a very small man, not a child, as we first thought who was and is connected to this horse.”