by Lisa Cach
The darkness took on an almost physical thickness, tingling against her skin, breathing on her, exploring her face. Reaching out to touch her with its long-fingered claws.
Eric belched. “’Scuze.”
“You’re not helping!” Megan barked.
“Hey, it’s a sign of appreciation in some cultures.”
“Not ours.”
“Calm down. You need to concentrate.”
“Okay. Time to get serious.” She took a deep breath and closed her eyes against the darkness. She used a visual script to get into a trance. She imagined herself sinking slowly to the bottom of crystal-blue tropical waters, needing no air, the sunlight above her darkening with the water. When her feet hit sand at the bottom, she walked through an imaginary black cave in a reef, and when she came out the other side, she was on the Other Side.
Or at least, that’s the way it usually worked. Usually, she came out of the cave into a charcoal void through which images, sounds, and emotions would appear to her in a confusing rush with occasional moments of clarity. The closest thing she’d ever heard to it was Tibetan Buddhism’s Bardo, the hallucinatory place one visits after death and before rebirth. It could be a frightening experience, making her feel that she was without identity or an existence of her own, lost and drifting in chaos. While there, she always tried to keep one part of herself centered on who she was in her own life.
This time, she came out to a gray nothingness where all the spirits seemed to have gone on vacation. There were a few glimmerings of distant movement, a few whispers of sound and emotion, but basically the place was deserted.
A few long, silent minutes passed, and she realized she wasn’t getting anything.
Perhaps their laughter had spoiled the ghostly mood. Or maybe she was clinging too tightly to reality, afraid to let go and experience whatever was there for her in the house.
Eric shifted in his seat, the sound distracting her more than it should. She was too aware of both men in the room, too aware of their expectations that she perform.
If she didn’t get something, it would mean wearing that evil helmet next time. She took another deep breath and concentrated on the charcoal void.
Minutes passed.
There were still movements and sounds in the distance but nothing she could make out. And then, softly but distinctly, she heard the sound of weeping.
“Someone’s crying,” Megan whispered. “A woman.”
“What’s her name?” Eric asked.
Megan let the question flow through her, knowing it was easier to remain in the trance if she channeled questions instead of composing them. She rephrased Eric’s words in her mind: What’s your name?
“Te…Te…” Megan said, searching for the sound. It came to her as if heard through a wall, the syllables barely audible. Usually, she heard sounds much more clearly; this time, it was as if something were interfering with their communication. It was like trying to yell to someone at the other end of a football field. “Something that begins with the letter T.” She paused, listening carefully. “Theresa?”
“Why is she crying?” Eric asked.
Megan saw a brief, distant flash of what looked like a broken window, plastic taped over it. A wall with a square hole, the pipes showing. A gutter half torn off the roof. “Her house is falling apart.”
Case made a sound.
“Is it this house?” Eric asked.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Why is she here?”
Megan asked it, Why are you here? It took a few moments to get a response. Again, it was unusually hard to decipher, the image faint, the sense of it brief. “I think she’s showing me a hammer, an old hammer with a red wooden handle and a wedge-shaped top.”
“Christ,” Case said under his breath, his voice shaky. “I think it’s my mom. That’s the hammer I made for her in shop class when I was thirteen.”
The moment he said the words, a flood of warmth filled Megan, the love so strong that it brought tears to her eyes. That, at least, came through loud and clear. She nodded, then remembered that Case couldn’t see her in the dark. “Yes. She loves you very much.”
“Does she have a message for Case?” Eric asked.
The answer came in a spoken sentence that Megan could not decipher. Again? she silently asked. The sounds came a second time, and then a third. “You couldn’t…” Megan made out. “You shouldn’t have…something.” She listened again. “You shouldn’t have tried to fix it.”
“Does that make any sense to you?” Eric asked Case.
“I don’t know. Not really.” Case shifted again in his chair, and when he spoke, there was a crack in his voice. “Megan, is my mom…is she okay?”
“I think she’s fine. And she’s saying it again. ‘You shouldn’t have tried to fix it.’ She seems to really want you to know that. And now she’s fading, she’s pulling away…”
There was quiet in the room, and quiet in the charcoal void.
This was the strangest séance she’d ever attempted. She’d never had such a lack of response before. It was as if she were isolated there, as if no spirits could get to her.
Long minutes passed. Megan felt herself pulling out of the trance, and as she did so, her memories of it started to fragment. She could still see pieces, but she had to struggle to repeat them in her mind, trying to lock them into her memory as she emerged into full consciousness.
“I’m done,” Megan said, and opened her eyes.
“Is that a message?” Case asked.
She laughed. “No, that’s just me.” She reviewed in her mind what she had cemented as well as she could into memory. “This didn’t work very well, did it? They couldn’t get to us?”
“Well, obviously, they can get to us, given what you two have said goes on in this house,” Eric said.
“There was activity until Eric arrived,” Case pointed out. “Do you think it could have something to do with all the equipment?”
Eric answered. “It does seem sometimes that all activity stops when a SPIRIT crew arrives to document events, but I always assumed that was because the people in the ‘haunted’ house were distracted and not in the frame of mind to let their imaginations run away with them.”
“That can’t be the case here,” Megan said. “Not with what I’ve heard and seen. Maybe it is something about the equipment. Maybe it’s sucking too much power?”
Case moved, and a moment later, a construction light on a tripod went on. Megan blinked against it, strangely surprised to find herself in the stark master suite. Everything looked so solid and plain in the artificial light, as opposed to the richer appearance it had held in her imagination while the lights were out.
“So, what we have are more questions,” Eric said. “Case, why do you think your mother thought it was so important to tell you that you shouldn’t have tried to fix it?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
But Megan got the feeling he did know, or at least had been thinking about it enough to form a few suspicions. “Shall we pack it up for the night?” she suggested.
Eric went to shut off the digital night-vision camera that was perched in a corner and had filmed their séance. “At least I’ve got some footage to go through, although I doubt I’ll find anything. You two go on; I’m going to finish setting up cameras and motion detectors for the night. Maybe we’ll get something while all the ghoulies think we’re snug in our beds.”
Megan followed Case out of the room.
“Do you want some coffee?” he asked.
“Sure.”
Down in the kitchen, she sat at the table while Case got some decaf going. There was something companionable and cozy about the sounds of coffee being made at such a late hour, the oil lamp glowing on the table.
“Apparently, mothers like to visit you,” Megan said. “Your second one in as many days.”
Case pulled out a chair and sat down across from her. He shook his head. “I don’t quite believe it.”
“The hammer and the decrepit house, those meant something to you. Your mother showed them to me so you’d know it was her.”
“I can’t figure out how you’d know about that hammer.”
“I didn’t,” Megan said.
“Lots of guys take shop class and make hammers. It could have been a lucky guess.”
Megan felt a spark of annoyance. “Why are you so set against the possibility that what I do might be real?”
“If it is real, I don’t know whether a visit from Mom is frightening or comforting.”
“She’s your mother. Why would you be scared?”
The corner of his mouth pulled back in a wry smile. “Maybe unnerved is the better word. Have you found, since your mother passed, that apart from the grief, there’s a certain sense of freedom and relief?”
“Relief?”
“Maybe it’s just me.”
She shook her head. “No, tell me more. What type of relief?”
“That you’re not being watched anymore by a parent. You no longer have, in the back of your head, the fear of disappointing them. The choices you make can be yours alone, not made with a nod to what your parent would think best.”
Megan sat silent, letting what he was saying soak in. She’d never considered it before, but was there any of that in what she’d been going through since her mom had died? “I think I still feel like she’s watching. Maybe I’ll never get away from that, given my psychic ability.”
He grinned. “You could always revert to adolescence and rebel. But somehow I doubt you were a wild thing in your teens.”
“Nope. Goody-two-shoes all the way. I was incredibly boring.”
“Is that what you’re still doing now? Behaving as you think your mother would want?”
Megan thought of the shop and her struggle to buy the building, and she felt a familiar spurt of desperation at the thought of possibly losing it all. She couldn’t let her mother’s work of twenty years go down the drain. “She wouldn’t have wanted to close the shop. But…” She trailed off, thinking.
“But what?”
“I don’t know. She always enjoyed having me work with her at the shop and said it was as much mine as hers. I don’t think I’d be doing it now if I didn’t enjoy it. But…”
“But…?”
“But I don’t know that she ever expected me to make it my life’s work. She was a big one for encouraging me to follow my dreams. I think she thought they lay elsewhere.”
“Do they?” he asked, getting up to fill two cups and bring them back to the table.
“That’s a bigger question than can be answered on decaf.”
“Fair enough.”
They sipped, and then Megan set her cup on the table. “So, what do you think your mother meant with her message, ‘You shouldn’t have tried to fix it’? Do you know? Was it the falling-down house?”
“That was the house I grew up in.”
“Buckled countertops?” Megan asked, pulling the image from her fragmented memory.
He stared at her. “Yes.”
“Your dad wasn’t much of a handyman.”
Case laughed, the sound dry and without humor. “He was a carpenter.”
“Then why—”
“He was also rarely home. He spent his time with his buddies, out at the racetrack or one of the strip clubs.”
Megan tilted her head, remembering how Case had commented so knowingly about the effects of not having a father around the house.
“At home, he never finished a single project he started. Until I was old enough to start fixing things myself—which was about age ten—my mother had to live with holes in the walls and toilets that didn’t flush. Sometimes I’d find her sitting alone in the kitchen, crying because the refrigerator had stopped running again or a new leak had appeared in the roof.
“A few years before she died, I bought her a town-house, and it was the first time in her adult life she got to live someplace that was completely finished.” He shook his head.
Megan involuntarily glanced around at the kitchen.
He saw her gaze. “It’ll be finished before I bring a wife here. That’s one thing I swore to myself from an early age: I’d never make my family live in a home that wasn’t finished.”
“How long will it take you to do this house?”
“At least a year. Probably two or three, given the time I have to devote to paying work.”
“Mm.” Megan dropped her gaze and sipped her coffee. “Why would your mother point out that you couldn’t have fixed your childhood home?”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“It probably does. We just don’t know how yet.” Or you’re not telling me.
He sighed. “I’m not sure I want to know. I thought all my parents’ troubles had been buried with them. I don’t like this business of the dead not staying dead and gone.”
Megan met his eyes. “I think you’re beginning to believe.”
Thirteen
Case tossed and turned in his bed, memories of his unhappy mother filling his mind. Her weeping over the house, over Case’s father, over the loss of her own mother. Her seeking of consolation in the dishonest hands of fortune tellers and psychic counselors. She’d believed she was cursed and had lost thousands of dollars trying to free herself of her bad luck.
You shouldn’t have tried to fix it.
No, he couldn’t have. It had been their family that was a wreck, and the house was only a symptom. All his childish attempts to patch up the house had done nothing to cure his parents’ unhappy marriage.
But why would his mother cross the Great Divide to tell him something he already knew?
She hadn’t. That was the answer.
Megan had somehow picked up on his thoughts or pieced together from their conversations that his home life had not been ideal. Maybe he’d mentioned his mother’s name at some point, and then he’d put his own interpretation to the house and hammer she mentioned, filling in the blanks for her like any eager rube during a cold reading. If his mother had really been present, she would have been so thrilled to be talking to a real medium that the séance would have lasted all night.
He was fairly sure that Megan was sincere in her belief in her powers. She was fooling herself, but he didn’t think she was trying to fool him. She was just another in the long list of women who misinterpreted their natural sensitivity to people as being something super natural.
He was annoyed that for a few minutes, he’d almost believed she’d seen his mother. He knew better.
That annoyance wasn’t enough to keep him from savoring the memory of Megan throwing herself on him in a sexual frenzy, though. His body got hard as he replayed it in his mind. If Eric hadn’t been standing right there, he might have taken it all the way.
The knowledge of how much she’d hate him if he bought her building wouldn’t have stopped him. Even his own conviction that having sex with her could lead only to a messy entanglement and eventual breakup would not have stopped him. He wanted her.
He heard her turn over restlessly, the sound carrying through the open doorway between their rooms. He heard her punch her pillow and sigh.
“Can’t sleep?” he called softly.
There was silence for a moment, then she said, “No. The house is too quiet.”
“You’d sleep better with slamming doors?”
“I feel like it’s watching us. Like it’s gathering information and plotting something horrible.” She laughed. “Crazy, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s good to know you’ll always be there to reassure me,” she said dryly.
He smiled in the darkness. “I can help you get your mind off the house.”
“Are you going to tell me a story?”
“That wasn’t quite what I had in mind.”
Megan’s eyes opened wide. She heard him shift on his mattress, his feet hitting the floor. “A story would be good!” she squeaked. “Tell me a story!”
&n
bsp; She heard him moving around, and then he was in her room. “Scoot over,” he said.
Frozen in place, she gripped her sheet and stared up at him. He was a dark shadow looming above her, his presence promising fulfillment of what she’d started earlier in the day.
“Go on, scoot.”
She did as told, her brain going numb at the implications even as her body tingled to life. He lay down on top of the covers, and it was only then that she saw he was wearing his robe.
Doubt trickled in. Was he going to seduce her or not?
“What type of story do you want? Pirate adventure? Cowboy campfire story?”
“Fairy tale.”
He grunted. “Figures. Okay, so once upon a time, there was this horny girl named Meg—”
“Hey!”
“Named Magdalen but called Meg by her friends. She lived in a mansion on a hill and was spoiled rotten by her father. He’d give her anything she wanted, ponies and ribbons up the wazoo, but wouldn’t let her date until she was eighteen. He was so rich and powerful, no young man dared to get near her.”
“Ponies. Do girls really want ponies? I never did. My feet would have dragged on the ground.”
“It was a stallion she truly wanted, if you get my drift.”
“I’m impressed by your use of literary symbolism.”
He chuckled, then lowered his voice and turned onto his side, facing her. “Poor Meg was suffering. Her body was ripe and ready, but no one could touch it. All she could do was lie in bed at night, her hands stroking softly over her breasts, wishing there were a man beside her to touch her everywhere that ached.”
“This is a very strange fairy tale.”
“All she wanted was someone to touch her.” Case lightly touched the side of her neck, then trailed his fingertips down to the neck of her gown.
Megan closed her eyes, goose bumps rising on her skin.
His fingertips brushed along her collarbone, then lifted away.
“He wouldn’t tell her why she couldn’t date. All he ever said was that if she let a man touch her before she was eighteen, something terrible would happen. So she was a good girl and obeyed her father, but on the day before her eighteenth birthday, she saw a young man in the garden of the house and suddenly all the years of waiting were too much for her. ‘Seventeen years, and three hundred sixty-four days is as good as eighteen years,’ she told herself, and slipped outside.”