Spirit Prophecy

by E. E. Holmes

  “Oh yeah, I suppose you’ll get all your juicy details now, right, Lucida?” I said.

  “What details?” Hannah asked, frowning. “What do you —”

  “Does Karen know about this?” I plowed on.

  “I believe she has been alerted, yes,” Siobhán said.

  “And what did she have to say about it?”

  “Nothing that will make the slightest bit of difference to the necessity of the situation,” Siobhán said quellingly. “Now I must insist that you reconsider your attitude toward this arrangement, Jessica, as it will not change in the face of your disapproval. Lucida is by far the most qualified and appropriate mentor your sister could have. I would think you’d be pleased, for your sister’s sake, that she will have the chance to develop and learn about this most rare of gifts.”

  I bit my lip. I looked at Hannah, and fancied there was a hint of something accusatory in her eyes. A moment later I was convinced I had imagined it. “Of course I am.”

  “Well, then,” Siobhán said. “Let us have no more of these objections. Now I believe you have your own mentor meeting to get to.”

  “Off you trot,” Lucida said with a Cheshire cat smile.

  There was nothing else I could do. I turned on my heel and walked out of the room as Lucida sauntered into it. My feet carried me all the way to Fiona’s tower automatically, while my mind seethed. Of all the people to subject Hannah to, why did it have to be Lucida? Hannah needed support and encouragement; she needed to be handled with kid gloves so that the tenuous grasp she had on this new world wasn’t shattered before it even had a chance to strengthen. And instead, she was going to be mocked and made to feel a freak by someone who had no regard for her feelings or her mental well-being. I felt so helpless I could have screamed.

  Instead I called, “Milo!”

  “Yes?” came his voice from so close behind me that I shrieked.

  “Don’t do that!” I cried.

  “You’re the one who called me!” Milo said, a not-so-innocent smile on his face. “If this is the thanks I get for being a prompt and attentive little spirit guide, I’ll just ignore you next time.” I decided not to play into his banter, as I was already late and Fiona would probably scalp me.

  “I need you to go keep an eye on Hannah,” I said.

  The words wiped the smile cleanly from Milo’s face. “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “They assigned her a new mentor today. Her name is Lucida, and she is an absolute bitch. I’ll explain more about her later, but they’re meeting right now in Siobhán’s room. Can you please just go down there and make sure Hannah’s okay?”

  “Of course,” he said and vanished at once. He reappeared a moment later. “Thank you for calling me,” he said quite seriously. I nodded. “You’re her best friend. If I think she’s in trouble, you’ll always be my first call.”

  He smiled at me, a genuine smile without a trace of irony or attitude which, I noted, was a first. He started to shimmer out of view when a sudden thought occurred to me. “Milo, one more thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Have you had any luck figuring out who that little girl ghost is, the one I asked you about?”

  Milo sagged a little. “No, and I’ve been trying, I swear. She’s been here longer than all the ghosts I’ve talked to, so none of them know who she was when she was alive. I’ve seen her a few times, but she scampers every time I try to talk to her.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

  “No problem. I’m off to check on our girl,” he said, and was gone. I relaxed a little bit; enough, at least, to move Hannah to the back of my mind and concentrate all my energy on what was sure to be another strange and mildly terrifying mentor meeting.

  I’d had three more classes with Fiona since we’d met. In the first, she’d ignored me for the first half an hour while she stared, muttering, at a partially-formed sculpture. Then she’d handed me a pad of paper and a pencil, pointed at a bowl of fruit set up in the corner, and said, “Have a go at that.” I spent the rest of the class attempting a still life of the fruit while she chain-smoked and carried on her one-sided dialogue with the sculpture. During the second meeting, I handed in the still-life. She took one cursory look at it, snorted, crumpled it up, and tossed it on the floor. Then she stalked over to the bowl of fruit and knocked the whole thing over. The bowl shattered, and fruit rolled in every direction. She bent down, scooped up a single apple, and put it back on the table in front of me.

  “Just this,” she said, and started to walk away. Then she turned back, snatched up the apple, took a huge bite out of it, and replaced it. She didn’t talk to me for the rest of the class, but alternated between eating bruised fruit off of the floor and chiseling away at her sculpture, which was starting to take the shape of a woman in long, sweeping robes.

  During the third class she forced me to sit, eyes closed, pencil and paper in hand, in front of a huge oil painting of a woman. No matter how many times I asked her what I should be doing, she just shushed me and said, “Just listen to what she’s got to say to you.” But with no further illumination on how exactly to do this, I just sat there like an idiot for a full hour, trying to sense someone or something that absolutely refused to be sensed. Finally I gave up, shoved the paper into my bag and stood up.

  “This is pointless,” I said bluntly.

  “I’m getting nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

  Fiona looked up from the painting she was restoring, her eyes ridiculously magnified behind a bizarre pair of goggles. “Good. You can go.”

  “Good? I just sat there for a whole hour and got nothing. How can that be good? What am I supposed to be sensing? Who is she?”

  “She’s nobody,” Fiona said, her nose an inch from the canvas. “There’s no ghost attached to that painting.”

  I threw my hands up in exasperation. “So what the hell did you have me do that for?”

  “To keep you honest,” she said. “Congratulations. You aren’t full of shit.”

  That day it was me who came dangerously close to throwing furniture. At the end of each class, I was sure she would tell me to leave and not come back, but each time, just as the door was about to creak shut behind me, she’d say, “Next week, same time.”

  I knocked on the tower door and opened it without waiting, as Fiona rarely bothered to open it herself. At first glance it seemed she wasn’t even there. Then my gaze fell to the floor.

  I gasped.

  Fiona was sprawled spread-eagled on the bare stone floor. She was twitching from head to foot, and her eyes had rolled back in her head.

  “Oh my God! Fiona!” I dashed to her side and fell to my knees. My hands hovered helplessly above her for a moment, as I wracked my brain to decide what to do.

  She was obviously breathing, I saw with relief; her chest was rising and falling, and her mouth was moving rapidly in a silent stream of words.

  I reached down and shook her shoulders. “Fiona? Can you hear me?”

  No response.

  I rocked back on my heels and ran a frantic hand through my hair. Should I go get help? What if she swallowed her tongue or something while I was gone?

  “Fiona! FIONA!” I shouted, right in her ear.

  Her expression changed, her eyebrows contracting. My pulse quickened. She must have heard me. I looked around for something, anything, to rouse her. I ran over to the nearby desk and grabbed a small bowl of water from beside some drying brushes, and splashed it over her face.

  With a sputtering, coughing gasp, Fiona sat up. Her eyes flew open, her hands swiping furiously at the water now streaming down her face, pushing her sopping hair out of her eyes. She looked up and saw me.

  “What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?” she shouted. I backed away from her in surprise. “I…you…you were having some kind of seizure!”

  “And so you thought the appropriate course of action was to drown me?” she yelled.

  “I didn’t know what to do!” I
said, backing involuntarily away at the livid look on her face. “I thought you needed help! I was trying to wake you up!”

  “Well, I’m good and awake now!” she cried. “Dogs!” She jumped to her feet, a little unsteadily, and looked around on the floor, like she had lost something.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I’m looking to see if I managed to draw any of it before you blundered in and ruined everything!” she shot at me. She shook her fist combatively at me, and I saw a charcoal pencil clenched in it.

  “Draw any of…huh?”

  “Look! Use your blasted eyes, will you?” Fiona said, and darted forward. She grabbed my upper arm, yanked me to my feet, and dragged me back to the place I’d found her on the ground. There on the stone, clearly unfinished, was a drawing.

  I knelt down and examined it. It was hard to make out. The shapes in the background could have been trees or perhaps buildings, but they were obscured by the dark cloud of smoke rising from what was unmistakably a large and raging fire.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “I’m not likely to find out, now,” Fiona grumbled, toweling off her hair with a spare smock.

  “You were drawing this during that…seizure, or whatever it was?”

  “It wasn’t a seizure, it was psychic trance,” Fiona said slowly and deliberately, as though this should have been obvious. “Spirit communication was being channeled through me.”

  “Well, how the hell was I supposed to know that?” I cried. “I walked in the room and you were thrashing around on the floor! I thought you were dying!”

  Fiona opened her mouth to retort, but apparently there was a little too much logic in what I had said, so she just let out a frustrated sort of growl and stomped over to her desk. I decided the safest course of action was to stay where I was and make no sudden movements until she calmed down. I watched as she rummaged around in an open trunk behind her desk and pulled out a dry, paint-spattered shirt. Finally she turned to me, and though her face was still a storm cloud, her voice had calmed down.

  “It happens that way sometimes,” she said, and without warning pulled her damp shirt over her head. She was wearing nothing under it. I quickly spun around and looked back at the strange partially-finished drawing. “If the vision is really strong, it blocks everything else out, and I collapse. Usually I can feel it coming, and I can get to the ground safely. Sometimes not, in which case I wake up with a bastard of a headache.”

  “And when you come to, you’ve drawn something?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Fiona said. “I don’t remember a thing, though. The only clues I have to anything a spirit may have said or done or shown me is whatever I’ve managed to create which, in this case,” she added with a frown, “is almost nothing.”

  I chanced a look back at her. She was clothed again. “Look, I said I was sorry. But you at least should have warned me that might happen.”

  She ignored my apology. “So what did I get, then? Anything discernible?”

  “It looks like a fire. A bad one,” I said. “Do you know who the ghost was? Is this how they died?”

  “I have no idea who it was, it just came on me. It isn’t necessarily the way they died, no,” Fiona said, coming to stand behind me and stare down at the drawing. “Sometimes it takes several encounters or drawings for the meaning to become clear. Sometimes the meaning never becomes clear.”

  It was as though she flicked a switch in my head. “Is it possible this ghost is trying to communicate with more than one person?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Fiona said vaguely, still poring over the image on the floor. “Why?”

  “Because I’ve got something to show you,” I said, and I rose to retrieve my bag that I’d dropped unceremoniously in the doorway. I fished out my sketchbook, found the image I wanted, and thrust it under her nose.

  It was the drawing I’d done of the little girl who’d been following me, the one with the wall of flames leaping around her. Fiona’s sharp, dark eyes darted over the page. It took her a moment to absorb what she was seeing, then she snatched it from my hands.

  “When did you do this?” she asked.

  “A little over two weeks ago.”

  Fiona rounded on me ferociously. “You had a psychic drawing experience two weeks ago, and you never told me? Why the hell are we even bothering with this mentor bollocks if it takes you two weeks to show me something like this?”

  “I didn’t think it was a psychic drawing, not at the time, anyway. I was drawing the little girl from a clear visual —she was standing at the edge of the forest bordering the north garden. But then I realized that the forest I thought I’d been drawing was actually…” I gestured to the sketch again.

  “The ninth circle of hell?” Fiona suggested.

  “Something like that, yeah,” I said.

  “Hmm, fascinating,” Fiona said, wandering across the room, face still buried in the picture. “Have you got any idea who she is?”

  My heart sank. “No. I was hoping you might. She follows me all over the school.”

  “Hang on,” Fiona said slowly, and placed the sketch pad down on her desk, from which she produce a magnifying glass with surprising ease. “That’s the Silent Child, isn’t it?” My pulse quickened with excitement. “Who’s the Silent Child?”

  “She’s one of the resident ghosts,” Fiona said, still gazing at her through the magnifying glass. “Been here for centuries.”

  “Why is she called the Silent Child?” I asked.

  “She’s never spoken a word to anyone. Never even tried to, as far as I know. That’s where the nickname comes from, I expect.”

  “But do you know anything about who she was in life?”

  “No one really does,” Fiona said. “She’s always kept to the shadows.

  She hides from anyone who tries to get near her. You say she’s been following you around?”

  “Yes! And trying to communicate with me, but she doesn’t seem able to.”

  “Probably lost the ability to communicate,” Fiona said. “That can happen, you know. Their energy can weaken over time, and she’s been here quite a spell.”

  “I don’t know. She doesn’t seem weak to me,” I said, remembering how she barreled me over with the sheer force of her being.

  “I wonder what’s suddenly drawn her to you, after so many years of silence?” Fiona asked, looking at me with a budding interest, as though she’d only just noticed I was there.

  “I’m sure she would tell me, if she could,” I said.

  “And you say the flames were unintentional?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I thought I’d drawn the forest behind her. I didn’t even recognize that I’d drawn the flames until Hannah looked over and pointed it out to me. I was so intent on her face that I didn’t concentrate on anything else very much.”

  “Fascinating,” Fiona said again, tracing a finger along the tips of the leaping flames. “Quite fascinating. Well, what you describe is common to the psychic drawing experience, so I suppose first I ought to say congratulations. I think we can safely say that you are indeed a Muse.”

  This lifted me out of my brooding contemplation. “Really?”

  “Oh yes, I think so,” Fiona said. “Which means that we are definitely stuck with each other for the rest of your time here.”

  I don’t know what my expression betrayed of my thoughts about this, but Fiona seemed amused by it. She certainly smiled for the first time since I’d arrived. “We will have to spend our time exploring this aspect of your artistic penchants for now, and get back to the basics later, however badly you may need them.”

  “You mean no more fruit?” I asked.

  “No more fruit.”

  “Hallelujah.”

  §

  “I don’t know what the problem is,” Hannah said, as we climbed into bed that night. “Lucida was really nice to me.”

  “As long as she keeps being nice to you, then I guess there isn’t a problem,” I said. />
  “But why do you hate her so much?” Hannah persisted. “She was the one who tracked me down and told you where I was.”

  “I know that,” I said. “And for that reason, I guess I’ll always owe her. But you don’t understand what she was like when I met her. Karen and I were both so upset and she just seemed to…enjoy it a little too much.”

  “Why would she do that?

  “I don’t know. Why does anyone do anything?” I said, my voice rising. “She just rubs me the wrong way, okay? I know that she’s your mentor now, but that doesn’t mean I have to like her, does it?”

  “I guess not,” Hannah said, and her voice sounded tiny, hurt.

  I sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to…I want you to be happy that she’s your mentor. If she’s being nice to you now, that’s all I really care about. As long as she’s helping you, the rest doesn’t matter.”

  We lay for several minutes in the dark. I thought she must have fallen asleep.

  “How was your mentor session?”

  “It was…fine,” I said, after a moment’s hesitation. “Fiona didn’t throw anything at me, so I guess that’s progress. And she didn’t crumple up my drawing this week.”

  “That’s great,” Hannah said. “See? Maybe both of our mentors will turn out better than you expected.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said.

  I wasn’t sure why I didn’t tell Hannah about the psychic drawing and Fiona’s trance. Maybe I didn’t want to scare her. Maybe I needed a little more time to process it myself before I was ready to share it with anyone else. Whatever it was, I promised myself that I would only give it until the next day to work its way out of my system. Not telling her felt like lying, and the last thing I wanted to do was widen the space between us, even by the width of a lie.

  I rolled over and dozed off within minutes. When I awoke abruptly, several hours later, I was sure that my tangled web of thoughts had spawned a terrible nightmare.

  But it wasn’t that at all.

  The hands that grabbed my arms and forced them behind my back were real. So was the fabric stuffed roughly into my mouth. And before I could make out more than a mass of dark, moving shapes, a bag descended over my head and everything was darkness.