by E. E. Holmes
Celeste gave me a sad smile, a knowing smile, which honestly only aggravated me more. “I understand,” she said.
“Like bollocks you do,” I muttered.
“I assure you, I do. I’ve seen spirits all my life as well. Ever since I can remember.”
“Oh, yeah? And how is it that you’re so cheerful about it, then? How is it you haven’t been chucked in the madhouse?”
“Because I know the purpose of my gift,” Celeste said, her smile blossoming, “and now you will, too. I assure you it makes all the difference in the world.”
“Is that so? Well, enlighten me, then. I can see I’m going to have to hear this whether I want to or not,” I said.
“You are a Durupinen, Savannah: a living embodiment of the Gateway between the worlds of the living and the dead. It is your gift—your calling—to shepherd the spirits trapped here on earth through to the Aether and beyond. Spirits are drawn to you because they sense this gift running through your veins. They can sense that you have been put on this earth to help them, and they yearn for your guidance.”
I’m not proud of what I did next.
I’m still not quite sure how it started. The laughing came first, I think. Yeah, I laughed until I couldn’t hardly catch me breath and great fat tears started leaking out of my eyes. Once they started leaking out, though, I couldn’t seem to shut ‘em off, and they sort of turned into these great heaving sobs that took my body over. And then, even as I was crying, I could feel my anger at myself boiling over because I’d let myself cry in front of this woman I’d never met before, and then, before I knew it, I was ranting and shouting like a complete nutter, just screaming my bloody head off at this woman, at me, at the crowd of spirits who were gathering to see what all the fuss was about. And even though I don’t remember deciding to do it, I found myself running as fast as I could back to my flat, nose dripping, eyes leaking, laughing, and crying and ranting all at once.
I suppose my mum must have said something to me as I charged through the door, but blast if I know what it was. My sisters took one look at me as I entered the bedroom and scattered like cockroaches. I crawled into my bed, pulled a pillow over my face, and screamed and screamed and screamed until I lost my voice. It’s possible that I smothered myself into unconsciousness, because the next thing I knew, it was the middle of the night and I woke up to find the worst headache of my life bashing away at the insides of my skull like an enthusiastic collection of sledgehammers. It was hard to see—my eyes were swollen and my eyelashes were sticking together like I’d pasted them. My throat was raw and my mouth was dry. It was worse than the worst hangover I’d ever had, and I’d been spectacularly pissed more than once.
My sisters’ beds were empty—they hadn’t dared to come back into the room, even after I’d passed out. I squinted at the clock. It was 3:11 in the morning. The house was completely silent except for my stepdad snoring like an asthmatic rhinoceros in the next room. I peeled myself out of my bed and twitched aside the blind to have a look down into the street. I’m not sure what I expected to find—Celeste standing outside my window, throwing pebbles like a lovesick bloke desperate for a shag? What I didn’t expect was the emptiness. For the first time in nearly a week, there wasn’t a single spirit in sight.
I should have felt relieved. Instead, I felt desolate. That’s just so bloody typical, isn’t it? I spend my entire life trying to get away from ghosts, and the moment they finally scarper, I miss them.
I scrounged around for my slippers and padded out into the kitchen to see if I could knock up something to eat, and had just cobbled together a half-decent cold bacon sarnie when I noticed the envelope pushed under the door.
I just stared at it for a minute, kind of hoping it would vanish into the god-awful orange floral pattern on the linoleum. Poof.
It did not.
I already knew who it was for, and also who it was from, so I left it there until I was good and ready to deal with it. Who knew if I’d be able to eat a bite once I’d read it, and that would have been a waste of a perfectly good sarnie. Only when I’d devoured the whole thing, which didn’t take long, did I shuffle over, pick it up, and have a look.
Blimey, even this woman’s paper was posh—heavy, cream-colored, with a purple design on the back, kind of like three spirals put together. It even smelled good—like lavender. I unfolded it to see a few sentences written in penmanship neat as a pin.
Savannah,
Please forgive me for frightening you off. I know it wasn’t easy to hear what I had to tell you, especially from a stranger, and I understand completely. But your role as a Durupinen isn’t something you can run from. It isn’t going away. And I’m not going away either.
I beg your forgiveness again, for though you have expressed that you have not appreciated my indirect methods of reaching you, I’ve taken the liberty of speaking to your grandmother. Nanny and I had a charming chat. She’s lovely—and very protective of her “little poppet,” as she called you. She told me all about you, and how she has been with you all these years, guiding your interactions with other spirits, and helping you to manage your gift. If only every sensitive was so lucky, to have such a loving and guiding hand from such a young age.
I have explained everything to her, and when you are ready she would like to speak to you about it. Perhaps she can convince you where I have failed to do so. But please, do not wait too long. The spirit world depends on you to commit yourself to your vocation.
I’ll be in touch again soon. If you want to reach me, your Nanny can find me.
Yours in sisterhood,
Celeste Morgan
I probably read the letter at least ten times before the words had really sunk in, and even then I found myself feeling like I was floating, like everything in the room had become immune to gravity and there was nothing solid to hang on to.
The thing is, everyone builds their scaffolding. Do you get my meaning? Over time you build up this structure of things you can hold onto, that keep everything in place and from toppling over. The more rubbish life hands you, the more scaffolding you have to build to keep it all together, just so you can get from day to day. And here this woman came, with her fancy clothes and her sureness and her lipstick and started dismantling my scaffolding with a bloody crowbar and lavender bloody scented sticks of dynamite.
And I was supposed to be—what, exactly? Relieved? Grateful?
As I folded up the letter, I felt a creeping tickle of a chill up the back of my neck, and I knew that Nanny was nearby.
“Not now, Nanny,” I whispered into the darkness. “It’s late, and I’m knackered. Maybe tomorrow, yeah?”
The chill vanished, and I stumbled back to my waiting bed.
This is the part of the story where I ignore my own dead gran for a whole week, which makes me sound like a massive wanker, but there it is. She didn’t mind. She knew I wasn’t ready, and she didn’t push me, which was one of the best things about Nanny—she’d leave you well enough alone when you needed it. It wasn’t that I was trying to forget about Celeste and what she told me—you can’t really forget something like that, can you, and you’d be a fool to try. I was trying to work up the courage to deal with it, and that meant shoving it away in the corner and not looking at it for a while, until I started to feel brave again. It also meant a number of poor decisions on my part generally, involving some blokes of a convenient nature and a fair few pints to soften the sharp edges of reality.
There was something I couldn’t ignore though, and that was awareness. I couldn’t unhear what Celeste had said to me—not that I didn’t give it a damn good try. It’s mad, because you’d think the thing that would nag me most would be the whole Durupinen thing. You’d think my head would be filled with a million questions—what the hell kind of word is that? What does it mean? What is a Gateway? Why the fuck did I need to be one? Why couldn’t spirits just open the door and see themselves out? How did it all work? What came next?
The truth is, though
, the thing I thought about more than anything else was what Celeste called her ability: a gift. I laughed it off in the moment, but it stuck to me like a plaster and wouldn’t go away. I’d never once, in my whole life, considered seeing ghosts a good thing. It has always been, at best, an inconvenience; at worst, a bloody nuisance. Why couldn’t I see it any other way? I thought I knew who might be able to help me puzzle that one out.
“Nanny?”
“’Bout time, poppet. I was starting to think you’d forgotten about me.” She was right there, of course. She always turned up, when I wanted a word.
“’Course I haven’t, don’t be daft,” I said with a scowl.
“All right now, love, I’m only pulling your leg. I know you’ve been having a good, long think and I like to think your old Nanny knows when it’s time to make herself scarce. Now, what do you need, love?”
I sighed. When I turned, there she was, in my dad’s beat-up old chair, the first place I’d ever seen her and the only thing left in the house that bastard ever owned. I wouldn’t let my mum chuck it, God knows why. One time I dragged it back in from the curb and up three flights of stairs to put it back in its old spot.
“That woman, Celeste. She talked to you?”
“Yes, love. But you already know that.”
I had about a million specific questions, but all that came out of my mouth was, “What d’you reckon?”
“I think you’re too stubborn for your own good and you run away from things that you ought to face and give a good walloping,” Nanny said, arms crossed.
I winced. “Ouch, Nan. I meant about what she said, not about me.”
“But it is about you, Sav. It’s always been about you, love. That’s the trouble.”
“I don’t follow,” I said.
“I mean, love, you’ve always thought that your seeing ghosts was about you. You thought about how it affected you, how it inconvenienced you, how it made things difficult for you. I don’t think you ever once thought that it might not be about you at all—that it might be about the ghosts themselves.”
“Gotta be honest, Nan, I didn’t call you in to make me feel like utter shite. I was doing a pretty good job of that on my own,” I said, raising my voice a bit.
Nanny didn’t mind, though. In fact, she laughed. “I imagine you didn’t call me in here to lie to you either, poppet. And the truth isn’t that you’re selfish, it’s that you’re young. All young people have to figure themselves out before they can turn their attention to the wider world. That’s not selfish. That’s just life.”
“I’m… not convinced that makes me feel better,” I said.
“I’m not here to make you feel better,” Nanny reminded me. “I’m here to tell you the truth. And the truth is that it’s time to stop looking inside yourself and start looking around you. Your purpose is larger than yourself.”
I snorted. “My purpose. What a load of tosh. How am I supposed to know what my purpose is?”
“By stopping this vanishing nonsense. No more disappearing girl, Sav. No more poof.”
“No more poof?” I asked. My voice sounded small, even to me.
“No, love. It’s time to show up. It’s time to ask yourself what you can do with these abilities of yours. Everyone has to ask what they can bring to the world, what they can make, or do, or be. And you’re damn lucky.”
“Lucky? How do you reckon?”
“Because most people have to figure it out for themselves. You’ve had someone knock on the door and point it out to you.”
“You mean Celeste Morgan?”
“Yes. She’s got the answer to the question you didn’t even think to ask. She’s handing you a chance to do something really important, love. And there’s no running from it. It’s inside you.”
“You think it’s true, then? All this bother about Gateways and Durupinen and Crossing spirits?”
“I do,” Nanny said, and finally her voice softened. “Spirits aren’t drawn to you by accident, poppet. They’re drawn to you because you can help them. You’ve got what they need, badly.”
A bloody awful thought struck me like a hammer. “Is that why you’re here? Because I can help you?” I asked.
Nanny shook her head. “No, love. I’m here because I want to be, and that’s all.”
I heaved a sigh of relief. “But the others… you think they need my help?”
“Some of us choose to stay,” Nanny said, gesturing to herself. “But others get a bit… stuck. Either they’re confused, or lost, or maybe even just stubborn. But the truth of it is, they’re here among the living and they shouldn’t be.”
“And I’m meant to do something about that?”
“They can’t do it on their own. And they haven’t just stumbled upon you, love. They haven’t found you by accident. They’re drawn to you, Sav. And that’s because of this… this Gateway.”
I swallowed. Hard. “I’m scared, Nan.”
“Good. You should be. But there’s nothing in life worth doing that doesn’t scare the hell out of you at first.”
“Right,” I said, and for some reason, this made me feel a bit calmer. “Right.”
The next day, when I walked out the door for my shift, the boy with the cap was there, standing against a lamppost, waiting for me.
“Hey, uh… Hubert, isn’t it?”
The poor kid winced, like he was afraid I was going to hit him. “Yeah, that’s right.”
“You, uh… you still know how to get in touch with that woman? Celeste?”
His eyes went all round, and he stopped twisting his cap. “Yeah, I surely do,” he said.
“Would you mind… don’t suppose you could do me a favor, then, mate?” I asked him.
“I could try,” he said, and he almost smiled.
“Go on and tell her I’m ready… when she is,” I told him.
There was no question now. He was definitely smiling. “On my way,” he said, and vanished.
And with him, vanished a lot of other things, like my freedom, my independence, and any chance of a normal bloody life. Then again, though, I thought I could see, just for a moment, a path forward—something solid where I could put my feet down, one in front of the other, and actually get someplace.
And so, my fear vanished, too. Just like that.
Poof.
2
Annabelle’s Story
THE FIRST TIME I MET David Pierce, I hated him.
Well, it’s possible he hated me, too, I suppose, but for the sake of saving face, let’s pretend our animosity wasn’t completely mutual. It will give him something to yell at me about when I finally get to see him again, and we did dearly love a good fight.
Back when I first opened my shop, I supplemented my living at a mildly humiliating array of tacky fairs and occult conventions. You know the kind of thing—a bunch of goth-inspired cosplayers, who mistook a fondness for vampire fiction for a personality, crowded into an overheated function hall, perusing teas and salves, crystals and amulets, all of little more than aesthetic value for those who did not know how to properly utilize them. Most of the vendors were harmless—middle-aged women peddling naturopathic remedies, artists with dark fantasy aesthetics, antiques dealers hocking wares ranging from the quirky to the disturbing. But occasionally, I would come across a real charlatan, someone preying on people’s ignorance in ways I couldn’t ignore.
It happened that day, with David, as I watched him set up his table in the church hall, erecting a banner that read, “Ghost Hunters of Central Massachusetts,” and covering his tabletop with gadgets and laptops and photo albums. It was possible I actually incurred damage to ocular muscles from how hard I rolled my eyes. Shortly, he was joined by another man, a great hulking guy who wouldn’t have looked out of place at a biker bar, and the two began fiddling with all of their cords, knobs, and buttons, setting their gadgets blinking, flashing and beeping.
Was I honestly going to have to endure an entire weekend with such bullshit in my periphery? I was ju
st contemplating finding one of the convention organizers and begging a change of table location when I looked up and saw David heading my way, a curious smile on his face. I assumed my performative air of omniscient indifference; far be it from me to let my disdain lose me a paying customer.
“Hey, there! So, divination, huh? Excellent. What are your methods?” he said genially, his eyes scanning my table with what I can only describe as professional interest.
“Tarot, mainly,” I replied with my well-practiced cryptic smile. “But I practice palmistry as well. Or I could read your tea leaves, if you prefer.”
But he wasn’t listening. His eyes had fallen on the deck of tarot cards I had just pulled from my bag and laid on the table. His eyes lit up like a kid at Christmas who just spotted his coveted new bicycle under the tree. “Oh, wow!” he breathed. “Is that a minchiate deck?!”
His use of the word pulled me up short, and for a moment, I almost forgot to look mysterious and unbothered. “Uh… why, yes. Yes, it is. You are familiar with tarot, then?”
“Oh, yeah! I’ve made a great study of mystical arts. It’s unusual to see a traditional minchiate deck in modern tarot readings. If you don’t mind me asking, how old is it?”
“I am unsure of the precise age. But it belonged to my grandmother,” I replied, and fanned the deck out upon the table face up, so that he could see the artwork. His jaw dropped in a satisfyingly cartoonish manner.
“Are those… hand-painted?” he whispered. “Holy shit! Those must be at least a hundred years old! And in the traditional suits, too!” He looked up and narrowed his eyes at me. “If it’s not too personal a question, what’s your heritage? Italian?”
“Romany. Traveler,” I replied a bit stiffly, assuming a judgemental response I rarely received but anticipated nonetheless. It was a Traveler tradition, assuming a defensive stance, and though I was several generations removed from true Traveler status, it was ingrained in me nonetheless.
But David merely nodded, that boyish look of genuine interest still splashed all over his features. “Right. Well, I should probably get back to my table. I’m Dr. David Pierce, by the way.” He pointed unnecessarily at his name tag. “And that’s one of my partners in crime, Iggy Kowalski.” He waved over at the enormous tattooed man at his table, who returned the wave with a cheerful, gap-toothed grin.