by E. E. Holmes
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, David. I’m Annabelle Rabinski,” I said, acknowledging Iggy over his shoulder with a flick of my hand.
“Good luck today. Maybe you could give me a reading later!” David said. And with one last, almost longing look at the cards, he turned and wandered off through the tables.
It was a busy morning on that first day of what would prove to be one of the better attended conventions I’d ever worked. I pressed through a steady queue of readings all morning, and by the time I put up my sign that I would resume readings after the lunch break, my voice was growing hoarse. I would have to pace myself if I hoped to last the weekend. Despite my preoccupation with customers, I did not fail to notice that the table beside me had also attracted a lot of traffic. Small crowds gathered to watch equipment demonstrations, video clips, and to flip through binders of “evidence,” which, from what I could see, was nothing more than an assortment of nebulous, shadowy shapes caught in photographs. Still, I might have let it all go, and let them have their harmless fun, were it not for the couple who appeared just after noon time.
I noticed them right away, because they stuck out strikingly from the rest of the crowd. They were clearly out of their element, and they didn’t stop to browse or peruse any of the tables they passed. They were consulting a map and staring around with wide, anxious eyes. It was with palpable relief that they spotted the sign for “Ghost Hunters of Central Massachusetts,” and made a beeline for it. As they drew closer, I let out an audible gasp.
These people, whoever they were, were not alone: an intense spirit energy was attached to them. I felt it immediately, the shivers up my arms and into the roots of my hair, the way the very gravitational balance of the room seemed to shift to account for the spirit’s pull on its surroundings. I could not make out a shape of any kind—the spirit had not manifested, and in any case, I would need a stronger personal connection before I could hope for a visual, but the emotional state was as loud and clear as though the spirit itself were shouting it through a megaphone.
Sadness. Frustration. Desperation.
Keeping my eyes carefully on my lunch, I shifted my chair closer to the edge of my booth, so that I could better hear what was happening.
“Hello, are… are you David Pierce?” the man asked. He was somewhere around fifty years old, though I had the distinct impression that grief had aged him considerably, so that he looked closer to sixty. The woman beside him—his wife, I was guessing—was clinging to his hand with a white-knuckled grip.
“Yeah, that’s me,” the man who I now knew to be called David replied, smiling genially and holding out a hand. “How can I help you?”
The man did not take David’s hand. He looked down at it in bewilderment, as though he hardly knew what to do with it, before looking up and declaring in a hushed voice, “We’re being haunted by our son.”
The smile slipped from David’s face instantly, and his hand dropped limply to his side. He threw a look at Iggy, who seemed to know instantly that David was dealing with a sensitive situation. Without missing a beat, Iggy gestured to a group of teenagers around the far side of the table, drawing their attention to a video screen, so that David could engage with the couple more privately.
“What’s your name?” David asked quietly.
“I’m Lionel. Lionel Thompson. And this is my wife, Patricia,” the man said, gesturing to the woman, who gave a weary nod but did not speak.
“And your son’s name?” David asked.
“Reginald. Reginald Thompson,” Lionel replied.
“Everyone called him Reggie,” Patricia added, in a voice so quiet and hoarse I could barely make out her words.
I turned in my seat and pretended to be looking for something in the bag slung over the back of my chair, which allowed me a few surreptitious glances. David’s eyebrows had drawn together thoughtfully.
“I’m so sorry, but the name sounds terribly familiar,” he said.
“Probably from the missing person flyers. We’ve had them up all over the state since Reggie disappeared six months ago,” Lionel explained and, reaching into the pocket of his coat, extracted a folded, dog-eared piece of paper. He unfolded it, pressed it smooth on the tabletop, and handed it to David, who peered down at what I could only assume was the face of Reggie Thompson.
“Ah, yes,” David said, nodding his head. “I remember now. There are several of these flyers up around the campus where I work. I’m a professor at St. Matthews College,” he added when he saw the puzzled expressions on the Thompsons’ faces. “So, forgive me, but are you saying that your son’s been found?”
Lionel shook his head. “No. The police have barely taken an interest in the case, because Reggie is a legal adult. At eighteen years old, he’s free to come and go as he pleases, they say.”
“Young men take off, stretch their wings, rebel a bit,” Patricia added, in a voice clearly meant to be mocking the nonchalance of the police officer. “Give him some time, he’ll find his way back.” She snorted. “They don’t know my son. He would never put us through this kind of heartache. Never.”
“And what young man walks out his front door to stop by the corner market with nothing but five dollars in his pocket and never comes back? No keys, no wallet, no cell phone?” Lionel asked incredulously, then shook his head. “We’ve known from the start that something must have happened to him—something that was preventing him from coming home to us. And so, we’ve been on our own trying to track him down.”
“And have you come up with any leads?” David asked.
Lionel shook his head. “The store manager says he never came in. It’s only a few blocks’ walk. Someone has to have seen something, but every person we’ve talked to claims ignorance. We’ve knocked on every door between our house and the store. We’ve canvassed pedestrians day and night. Nothing.”
“And now you think Reggie is haunting you?” David prompted.
“It started about three weeks after he disappeared,” Lionel said, dropping his voice to a whisper now. I leaned back in my chair, tipping it back onto two legs, in hopes of catching more. “At first, it was just strange noises around the house—knocking, footsteps, that kind of thing. I thought I was losing my damn mind. Sometimes I still think I am.”
“That’s a common reaction,” David assured the man. “Don’t question your sanity. Believe yourself. What else have you experienced?”
“Whoa, cool! Why’s it doing that? It’s like Ghostbusters!” One of the teenagers from the other side of the table was laughing and pointing to a piece of equipment in Iggy’s hands. He had been showing them how it worked, pointing it in various directions when the thing quite suddenly went haywire. He looked up to see that the device was pointing directly at the Thompsons.
“Ah, too much electrical interference in here. It’s all these damn cell phones,” Iggy said dismissively, switching the device off at once. But he shot David a significant look which David silently acknowledged.
Picking up a small audio recorder from the table behind him, David held it up and said, “Do you mind if I record what you’re saying? I’m afraid I haven’t got a pen or paper handy, and it will be the easiest way for me to make sure I’ve got all your information. Totally understand if you’d rather not, of course,” he said, and half-lowered it to the table again.
“No, please, go ahead,” Lionel said in an almost weary voice. “It’s nothing we haven’t already told the police, private detectives, and anyone else who would listen to us.”
“Excellent,” David said, pressing a button so that a tiny red light flared to life on the recorder. “Please go on. You mentioned knocking and footsteps.”
“That’s right,” Lionel said, picking up his thread again. “It usually only happened at night, when both of us were home. Then things started moving.”
“Moving?”
“Yes. Like, we’d put something down in one place, and then when we went back for it, it was gone,” Lionel said.
&n
bsp; “What kinds of things?”
“Little things. Keys. Phones. Earrings. Hairbrushes. And they almost always seem to materialize in the same location.”
“Which is?”
Lionel hesitated, as though he thought the answer too absurd to speak aloud. He glanced anxiously at Patricia who whispered, “The windowsill in Reggie’s bedroom,” before dissolving into tears.
At that moment, a burst of energy surged over me like a tidal wave and I saw, for a fraction of a second, the outline of a young man just behind her, waving his arms frantically. As quickly as the image presented itself, it was gone, nothing but a negative behind my eyelids, a darkened suggestion of a shape, like the sun was playing tricks with my vision. I shook my head to clear a kind of ringing that had begun in my ears, something akin to—but not exactly—a distant screaming.
By the time I recovered myself enough to tune back into the conversation, Iggy had shooed the teenagers away and David was pulling out his phone to exchange information with the Thompsons.
“Let me see if I can make some adjustments to our investigation schedule, since this is clearly a case that needs immediate attention…”
I felt a toxic mixture of panic and anger surge up inside me. How dare the man prey on grieving parents like this? Before I knew what was happening, before I could stop myself, I had risen from my chair and approached them.
“Excuse me, can I interest you in a reading free of charge?” I asked, doing my best to smile serenely. “You folks look like you could use some peace of mind.”
Patricia opened her mouth as though to agree, but Lionel cut in sharply. “No, thank you very much. We’ve gone down that road before, and we will not be taken advantage of again.” He turned back to David. “We’ll be in touch, Mr. Pierce. Thank you very much for your time.”
And with an utterly poisonous look at me, he put his arm around his wife’s shoulder and steered her away through the crowd, their son’s energy trailing behind them, leaving me light-headed. Before I was able to properly recover, David was confronting me angrily.
“What the hell did you do that for?” he hissed at me.
“Do what?” I asked, rubbing at my temples and willing my head to clear so that I could think straight.
“Couldn’t you see that those people were vulnerable? You can’t just swoop down on them when they’re trying to—”
But I had recovered sufficiently enough now to let out a derisive squawk of laughter. “You can’t possibly be lecturing me on taking advantage of vulnerable people. How you would even find the nerve…”
“Hey, they came here seeking me out, not the other way around!” David shot back. “And where do you get off telling me that I’m taking advantage of people? We don’t charge for our services. Not a penny.”
“What services?” I admit I actually placed air quotations around the word in a fit of sarcasm I couldn’t suppress.
“Evidence collection! Analysis! Validation of their experiences!” David replied, ticking them off on his fingers.
“Oh, come on,” I scoffed. “You don’t really expect me to believe that all this crap is actually capturing ghosts, do you?”
“It captures a fair amount of evidence of paranormal activity, yes,” David replied indignantly. “Photographs, EVPs, fluctuations in electromagnetic fields—”
“And how is any of that bullshit supposed to help those people?”
“It’s not bullshit! We’ve been able to conclusively prove the existence of spirit activity in dozens of—”
But I wasn’t interested in hearing about his Ghostbusters cosplay. I plowed on, speaking right over him. “So, let’s say you go in there, you set up your equipment, and then you get a few blurry photos and inconclusive sounds on a recorder. Then what? How have you helped those grieving parents? How have you helped the boy that’s clearly attached himself to—” I stopped suddenly.
David squinted at me. “What did you say?”
“I said how does any of this help those grieving parents?” I repeated, my face reddening.
“No after that,” David pressed. “You said something about a boy being attached to them.”
“I just meant…”
“Is that why you wanted to do a reading? Did you see something? Sense something?” he asked eagerly, his anger vanishing into thin air.
“I… I just didn’t want to see them taken advantage of,” I cried.
But David would not be deterred. “Are you a psychic medium? Is that one of your many tricks, Madam Rabinski?”
“I don’t do tricks,” I spat at him. “Which is more than I can say for you with all of this ridiculous—ouch!” I had picked up one of his gadgets, an EMF detector, according to the label. But I’d barely lifted it from the table when the thing lit up like a Christmas tree, emitted a high-pitched shriek, and sparked alarmingly. I dropped it to the tabletop and leaped back from it.
David didn’t seem in the least concerned that I’d just short-circuited one of his expensive gadgets. Indeed, his eyes lit up exactly like the EMF detector now smoking gently on the table.
“Are you? A psychic medium? Did you sense a spirit around the Thompsons?” he asked eagerly.
“I have to go,” I said. “My lunch break is over and I’ve got a queue forming.”
And I turned away from him, my heart still racing as I sat down at my table and beckoned my next customer forward, hiding behind the privacy screen and trying to locate my usual air of mystical serenity. I need hardly say I failed miserably on that score.
§
I bailed on the occult fair the next day, emailing the organizers and begging off with a fake family emergency. I had no desire to face David Pierce and his accusations again, and I resolved to put him out of my mind. Less easy to forget, though, was the Thompson family. I even pulled down one of the missing person flyers from a telephone pole near my shop, placing it by my phone on the counter, where I nearly dialed the contact number fifty different times, always hanging up before I could bring myself to complete it. I wasn’t even sure what I would say to them if I did finally manage to complete the call.
It was the same issue I’d had all my life, and the same issue my grandmother had had before me. For most of my childhood, I had thought the stories my grandmother told me were nothing more than paramicha, fairy tales learned and passed down from the far-off days when she had traveled the world in a Romany caravan. Some nights while I slept, my dreams brought me back to her kitchen, where she made heaping platefuls of bokoli for me to eat, and I would burn the tips of my fingers stealing sizzling bits of sausage from the frying pan while she spun yarns of spirits who haunted forest groves and of the women who could speak to them. My mother would scold her for filling my head with such fodder for nightmares, but I loved every word, every rise and fall of her voice as she navigated my imagination on a vessel carved from old gypsy tales. It was not until much later, when I was a young adult, that my sensitivity to spirits revealed itself, a fact I could not hope to tell my mother without incurring her perpetual skepticism. Instead, I went to my grandmother with the news, and that’s when she finally revealed the truth to me: All of the fanciful stories she’d told me hadn’t been stories at all. They were our history, the history of the mule-vi: the Traveler Durupinen, though she did not call them by that name. They were also the most important secrets I would ever keep.
And now here I was, nearly twenty years later, plagued by the knowledge my “gift” had given me and utterly unsure what to do with it. This was how I’d fallen into the slightly ludicrous profession in which I now found myself. It was a compromise of sorts—a way for me to mask what I could really do in the guise of a Victorian parlor trick, and then leave it up to my customers whether to believe or not. And as was human nature, those who really needed to believe, did; while others laughed at the uncanny amusement and went on their merry way, unbothered by the undercurrent of the supernatural in their world.
I had finally decided to throw the flyer away and fo
rget all about the Thompsons when the bell over my shop door rang and David Pierce walked in.
“Hello?” he called, glancing around.
For one absurd moment, I considered ducking behind the counter, but before I could send the message to my knees to bend, he had spotted me, and it was too late.
“There you are, Madam Rabinski! I was hoping I’d find you here,” he said with a bit of a sheepish smile.
“I knew I shouldn’t have put my name on the sign,” I grumbled, slipping the flyer under the counter and trying to assume the air of a person who hadn’t just considered playing hide-and-seek in her own place of business. “So, what can I do for you? Can I interest you in some teas? Crystals? Occult artifacts?”
“No, thank you. I actually, uh… I came to apologize to you,” David replied, pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose like a nervous schoolboy.
My arms seemed to cross defensively across my chest of their own accord. This was definitely not what I had expected him to say. “I’m listening,” I said.
“This past weekend, I cast aspersions on your abilities. I was… well, it’s no excuse, but I was shaken as fuck over that encounter with the Thompson family, and I got pissed off because I thought you scared them off with your lack of tact.”
“I’m not sure where you learned to apologize, but you seem to have missed some of the basics,” I said dryly.
David shook his head. “Sorry, that’s not what I… what I meant was, I misinterpreted your concern as lack of tact. I can see now that you were just worried that I was taking advantage of them because you don’t understand what I do.”
My right eyebrow arched like a cat. “I’m beginning to wonder if you even know what an apology is.”