When The Spirit Moves You

by Thomas DePrima

  With fear-widened eyes, Megan said, "You're creeping me out, Arlene. I thought that we were only going to call one spirit, not the whole spirit world."

  "Once we open a door to the spirit world, we may not be able to close it, or control what comes through."

  "You mean they might stay here? They might be in my bedroom when I'm trying to sleep— or getting dressed? Or when I'm bathing?"

  "They aren't interested in corporeal matters, Megan. They've left the concerns of the flesh behind."

  "If they're not interested in concerns of the flesh, why does food still attract them?" Megan asked, her uncomplicated mind immediately picking up on the inconsistency. "And even if they're not interested, it will bother me if I see them watching me."

  "So you don't want to do this now?"

  "I don't know."

  "Decide. We're only doing this because you wanted it."

  "Have you ever done it before?" Erin asked.

  "No, I've only read about it in books, and seen it portrayed on television and in the movies."

  "So it may not work?"

  "Perhaps; perhaps not."

  Megan hesitated for a few seconds as she considered whether or not to participate. "Okay, let's try it."

  "Everyone put your hands flat on the table, touching pinkies with the girl on either side of you." As four pairs of hands touched, Arlene looked at each girl. "No more talking now. We're committed to doing this. We're going to try to summon a spirit that can tell us why our futures appear so murky. Don't move your hands or it will break the circle. Now close your eyes and focus your mind on seeing into the great beyond. Free your consciousness to expand out into the cosmos."

  Arlene watched as each of the girls closed her eyes and appeared to concentrate, then closed her own and tried the hardest. For as long as she could remember, she had been able to sense things about people, but those around her had always attributed her impressions and premonitions to feminine intuition, déjà vu, or simply foolishness. With the onset of puberty, her sensitivity had seemed to intensify significantly. She had begun performing tarot readings almost a year ago, after receiving her first deck as a grab bag gift during a party, and the colorful deck of cards with their unusual pictures had given focus and clarity to her insights. Her predictions had been uncannily accurate from the very start, although admittedly she had made them a bit general at first. But lately she had been sensing even more detail in the cards, and revealing much of it to those for whom she read. She tended to withhold dire forecasts, or at least minify painful tidings. Her successful prognostications led her to believe that some unseen force was guiding her during the readings, and she truly believed that spirits could be contacted, if the spiritualist was strong enough.

  In a slightly raised voice, Arlene said, "We are here today to contact a spirit who can help us solve a mystery. We wish to know why our futures appear so uncertain. Will any spirit come forward to help us?" After waiting for a few seconds, she said, "Spirits, hear my call and respond. We need your help. Won't you come forward? Knock on the table once if you hear me?"

  The tension and nervousness of Renee on her left and Erin on her right flowed through Arlene. Although they'd averred disbelief, the touch from their fingers refuted their professed reservations. She felt the stiffness and anxiety in their digits, and each of them was barely breathing as they strained to hear the faintest of knocks. As the silence in the room became deafening, Arlene could hear her own increased respiration and feel the pounding of her heart.

  It seemed like minutes, but it was really only seconds before the knock came. Erin and Megan shrieked briefly, their eyes opening wide with fear. With their hands pressed flat upon the table, touching their neighbor's, all knew that none of their group could have rapped on the surface. Renee didn't scream, but in the flickering candlelight, Arlene saw that she was trembling visibly. Arlene herself remained calm, on the surface.

  "Spirit," Arlene said, "thank you for coming. Can you help us? Knock once for yes, or twice for no."

  At least ten anxious seconds passed before another faint knock came. Arlene had begun to think that she might have imagined the first faint response.

  Suddenly, Renee jumped up, knocking her chair over backwards in her eagerness to get away from the table quickly.

  "It touched me!" she screamed. "The spirit touched me on my leg."

  A fit of childish giggling could be heard echoing softly around the room, seeming to come from everywhere at once. The heads of the three frightened visitors swiveled, trying to locate the source, but Arlene's expression merely turned angry as she bent over to look beneath the table.

  "Jimmy Watson, I'm going to strangle you!" Arlene shouted, as she made a pretense of reaching for him under the table.

  Her little brother was quick. The eight-year-old crawled from beneath the table, where he had been hiding since he first heard the girls coming down the stairs. He darted through the hallway that led to the kitchen, giggling loudly as he ran. They heard the door to the backyard slam loudly a few seconds later.

  "Sorry, guys," Arlene said apologetically. "I really thought that we had made contact. Let's go back up to my room. My brother, the little pest, will only come back in if we try it again now."

  Extinguishing the three candlewicks between saliva-moistened thumb and forefinger, Arlene returned the candles to the mantle in the living room, while the other girls opened the drapes and Venetian blinds. After covering the bowl of soup and returning it to the refrigerator, Arlene followed the others upstairs.

  As they settled down onto her queen-sized bed, Arlene said, "I'm sorry about Jimmy. I guess that we'll have to do it somewhere else. But, you know, I could almost sense a presence, other than Jimmy's. I think a spirit might really have come in response to my call."

  "We could use my house," Renee offered. "I don't have any bratty younger brothers."

  "I have a better idea," Arlene said eagerly. "We're trying to contact a spirit, right? We should go where we're more likely to find one."

  "I don't think that I'm going to like this," Erin said. "You want to do it in a cemetery, don't you?"

  "No, but you're not far off."

  "In a mortuary?" Megan asked.

  "A hospital morgue?" Renee guessed.

  "All good places to find spirits, but we need more privacy than they offer. I was thinking of the old Westfield Mansion."

  "Oh no, no way," Megan said. "That place is haunted."

  Arlene grimaced slightly and just stared at Megan until she realized what she'd said.

  "Oh— sorry," Megan said, looking a little foolish, then adding quickly, "but that place scares me."

  "We can't go there anyway," Erin said. "A private security company patrols it constantly. We've all seen them going in and coming out the gate. I'm not going to get arrested just so we can hold a séance in a spooky old house."

  "They only patrol during the day," Arlene said. Speculatively she added, "I think that they're afraid to be on the estate at night. They always leave and lock the gates before it gets dark, even in winter when it gets dark before four-thirty."

  "Everybody's afraid to go there at night," Renee said, "that's why they don't have to patrol after the sun goes down. The ghost patrols for them. Everybody knows somebody who's seen the ghost that haunts the estate, or knows somebody who knows somebody who's seen it. I don't think that I want to go in there either."

  "Ten minutes ago we were trying to call a spirit and now you say that you're afraid of spirits?"

  "That was here," Erin said, "in your dining room, not in a haunted house. I didn't really expect that you'd be able to contact a spirit anyway."

  "So you're all still thinking of this as a joke. Okay, I wash my hands of the whole idea."

  "I'll go, Arlene," Megan offered quickly, "if you're sure it's safe."

  "It's just a spirit, Megan; an ethereal being that can sometimes appear in vaporous form. You couldn't touch it even if you wanted to."

  "I'll go too,"
Erin said firmly. "The three of us should be enough for a séance, right?"

  "I'm not sure how many are needed, but in the movies there are usually four or five. We can try with just the three of us, though."

  "Oh, okay, okay, I'll go," Renee said, not really wanting to go, but certainly not wishing to be excluded either. "I should have my head examined though."

  "I'll ask the spirit to take a look inside," Arlene said in jest.

  Renee raised her right arm and pointed her index finger at Arlene's face. "Don't even joke about the spirit coming anywhere near my head or I'll back out."

  "Alright," Arlene said, grinning, "I won't ask the spirit to look inside your head. All we really want to know is about our futures, right?"

  "Should we invite anyone else?" Megan asked. "Maybe we need to have more people?"

  "No, I think that four will be enough. We're the only ones that need to have things cleared up. As Erin said before, the cards always give more definitive answers about everybody but us."

  "When are we going to do this?" Erin asked.

  After ruminating for a few seconds as she looked at each of her friends, Arlene said, "How about tomorrow night? We can use our sleepover trick and then crash at Erin's when we're back."

  "Okay by me," Erin said, nodding.

  "Same here," Renee said.

  "Okay with me too," Megan said.

  "Good, we'll meet at Erin's house at nine o'clock. Her mom will have left for work already and we'll have until three a.m. to get back."

  "Three a.m.?" Megan said. "How long will it take?"

  "I don't know. I've heard that it's easier to contact spirits near midnight. I have no idea why that might be," Arlene said, pausing for a second to think, "other than it's the time when witches allegedly congregate to practice witchcraft and sorcery. It's not really dark until nine o'clock this month anyway. The security patrol will be around until then."

  "Then why go so early?" Erin asked.

  "We have to get onto the estate, find a way into the house, and then find a suitable place to hold the séance. We can't wait until the last minute because we might have to try every window and door in the building."

  "I have to get going," Renee said, looking at her watch and standing. "It's almost dinner time and my mom will freak if I'm late again tonight. I'll see you guys tomorrow. Coming, Erin?"

  "Yeah." Turning briefly towards Arlene and Megan after rising, Erin said, "See you guys."

  "Bye," Megan said.

  "Morrow," Arlene said, as she stood up to turn on her CD player.

  * * *

  A little before nine the next evening, Arlene stopped at Megan's home, just three houses from her own. Built as part of the same upscale housing development on the outskirts of the city, Megan's home must surely have been constructed from the same set of blueprints. But for the different paint scheme and furnishings, you'd be hard pressed to know which home you were in.

  The friendship between the girls extended back to their infancy, and both were quick to affirm that the other was her closest friend in the whole world. Born just twelve days apart, they had shared a playpen as infants while their moms visited, and they had been sharing everything else since. Both sixteen now, they'd celebrated their birthdays together in January.

  Dressed similarly in skintight, stonewashed jeans, cotton tee shirt, and casual, soft-soled shoes, Megan was ready for their foray onto the grounds of the unoccupied estate when Arlene arrived. She quickly grabbed a handbag, crammed full with all the essentials of a teenage girl, and a large, brown-paper grocery-store bag that left the delectable aroma of freshly popped corn in its wake as she hurried to the door. Arlene would have to pass Megan's house anyway, when walking the two blocks to Erin's or Renee's, so this was the way that it had always been; Arlene would stop at Megan's house, and then they would continue on together.

  Erin and Renee had grown up in a like manner, playing together as toddlers. Both were also sixteen now. The four girls, living two blocks apart, had first met when they started kindergarten in a local public school, and had been inseparable through elementary school, junior high, and now high school. All four were looking forward to being juniors when the fall school session started in six weeks.

  As expected, Renee was already at Erin's house when Arlene and Megan arrived. The Cape Cod style house, appropriate for this southeastern Massachusetts city of New Bedford, was as different from the Raised Ranch style homes that Arlene's and Megan's families owned as houses could be. A steep stairway rose from a tiny eat-in kitchen to undersized bedrooms with inadequate headroom because the upstairs ceilings were coincident with the steeply pitched roof. Erin's mom had already left for the hospital, where she worked as a head nurse, and her father was gone as well. Of course he had left six years earlier, leaving behind an emptied savings account and a note of apology that said he just wasn't cut out to be a husband and father. The last they'd heard, he was prospecting for gold in New Zealand.

  "You guys ready?" Arlene yelled through the screen door at the side of the house.

  "C'mon in," they heard Renee yell back from upstairs. "We'll be ready in a second. Erin's just changing her shirt— again. Did you bring the stuff?"

  "I brought candles and a bag of pretzels," Arlene shouted, as they entered the kitchen.

  "I have popcorn," Megan shouted.

  "Good, we've got cold bottled water and chocolate bars."

  "I brought a flashlight," Arlene said loudly, "but it would be better if we had a second."

  "I have one," Erin said, reducing the volume of her voice as she came clip-clopping down the varnished honey-oak stairs in open-toed platform sandals, with Renee right behind her, "but the batteries are dead. Have you figured out how we're going to get onto the estate, Arlene?"

  "I walked past there this afternoon. I think that we can squeeze through the front gates. The chain is pretty loose. It seems like it's intended more to prevent cars from going in, than to stop people from entering the grounds."

  "That makes sense, kinda," Renee said. "Anybody that wants to get in could simply climb over the wall. It's only about seven feet high."

  "Seven feet?!" Megan exclaimed. "It might as well be a hundred feet high. I could never climb over a seven-foot high wall."

  "Don't be such a wuss."

  "I'm not a wuss, but I'm not a jock either."

  "You're a wuss if you can't climb over a seven-foot wall," Renee said, although there was considerable self-doubt in her own mind that she could manage it without a ladder.

  "Okay, let's go," Arlene said, trying to defuse the disagreement before it really got going. "Don't worry, Meg, we don't have to climb over any walls."

  Little more than a twenty-minute walk from Erin's house, the gated entrance of the huge Westfield estate was located along what was once the main road in the area, but a newer route, with far less twists, turns, dips, and rises had long ago replaced it as the main thoroughfare. Few houses dotted the road, and not a single car passed while the four teenagers twisted and contorted their supple bodies to squeeze between the two massive wrought iron gates that completed the formidable barrier surrounding the property. The heavy, rusted chain and padlock clanked loudly against the gates as the girls pushed and pulled themselves through, but there was no one nearby to hear the noise. Once inside the estate grounds, they could only be seen by someone standing directly in front of the gated entrance, a very unlikely event on that long, empty stretch of road after dark.

  Disappearing quickly through two thick, carefully aligned rows of Red Maple trees wearing bright summer coats of green, the driveway leading up to the seventy-room mansion curved gracefully as it rose gently to meet the house. From what Arlene had heard, the estate had been the center of social life in the area from the time that it was built, around 1880, until the mid 1940's. The mansion had reportedly been empty now for some sixty years, but the estate was still minimally maintained; at least to the extent that the house was kept well sealed against the often severe
New England winters.

  The way was clear, and the four girls experienced no difficulties while using only the light from the full moon to illuminate their path. As Arlene tried to imagine what the estate must have looked like in bygone eras, she suddenly saw lush, green, immaculately manicured lawns in place of the overgrown grassy acres that a second earlier bordered the driveway. The smell of salt air from the nearby ocean was overcome by the fragrance of gardens overflowing with the fugacious blossoms of brilliantly colored flowers and plants. She closed her eyes for a second and shook herself mentally. When she opened them again, the unkempt vegetation was back, but she retained the other image in her mind.

  Two additional rows of Red Maple trees, closer to the house, obscured the mansion almost entirely from view until visitors were less than a hundred feet from the front portico. Despite her fanciful musings about the previous grandeur of the estate, Arlene felt a steadily escalating sense of foreboding as they neared their destination. The nervousness of her friends seemed to increase as well, but perhaps it was only because dense clouds had moved to completely block the light from the moon just before the house came into view. With the trees obstructing what little diffused moonlight remained, it suddenly became impossible to see the driveway. Arlene snapped on her flashlight, and aimed it down at their path to light their way as they walked.

  As they completed their passage through the last row of trees, the moon re-emerged powerfully from behind dense clouds, casting long eerie shadows as it again lit their path. Arlene flicked off the flashlight and looked up just in time to see Megan suddenly stop walking, stiffen, and let out a bloodcurdling scream.

  * * *

  Chapter Two

  At once wide-eyed and trembling with fear, the other girls looked instantly towards Megan, then all immediately turned to where she pointed, their eyes searching desperately for the danger. Perched malevolently atop the two granite columns that also functioned as the center supports of a portico, were the evilest-looking creatures they had ever seen. Terror filled their minds and they tensed to run, but reason prevailed. They realized that the creatures presented no danger. The two stone grotesques, resembling winged, horned mastiffs, had been snarling menacingly down on visitors who passed beneath them for over a hundred years.