by Dima Zales
He held out his cup and returned her smile. While he was studying his cake, no doubt deciding how best to attack the mountain with his fork, my sister winked at me.
With a huff of breath, I got up and left. She could flirt with George on my behalf without me.
That afternoon she knocked on my bedroom door and said we were going to visit Mrs. Wiggam.
"Can't you go alone? I'm very tired." I'd just woken from a nap but I felt like I needed more sleep. I couldn't imagine ever feeling completely awake again. Jacob was gone. What was there to be awake for?
"No. She sent me a note, pleading our help, blaming us for her husband haunting her. Can you believe it! The nerve of the woman when it was her demands for money that made him so angry."
"Let them sort out their own problems," I said and rolled over in bed.
She sat down on the mattress behind my back and placed a hand on my shoulder. "You can't remain in here forever. He's gone and you're needed."
"I don’t care."
She hugged me, her face close to mine. Her hair smelled like lavender. "You have a gift, Emily. With that gift comes the responsibility to use it properly. If the events with the demon have taught me something, it's that. We summoned Mr. Wiggam, admittedly on his wife's behalf, but we now must end her suffering. At least we have to try. I … I'm worried about what he might do to her if we don't intervene."
I sighed and rolled over. Why did she have to be sensible all the time? "Let's go," I muttered.
She smiled sympathetically and hugged me tighter.
I expected the Wiggam household to be in turmoil but it was quiet. Messy but calm. Shreds of newspaper littered the hallway and drawing room floor, muddy footprints spoiled the rugs, and what appeared to be flour was strewn over every piece of furniture. Most of the figurines, candelabras and other objects that had decorated the mantelpiece, walls and tables were either broken or missing although a few had been spared. An oil painting of a lighthouse by the sea, a small black statue of a rearing horse. They had probably been favorites of Barnaby Wiggam. It was truly a terrible scene and I could only imagine what it had been like for his widow living there while her dead husband made his presence known by destroying her house.
Mrs. Wiggam calmly laid out a cloth on the flour-covered sofa for Celia and I to sit on. She offered no apology for the state of her house, or her person. It had only been a few days since the séance but she looked like she'd not eaten or slept in that time. Her waist seemed to have shrunk, sacks of skin hung loosely under her eyes, and her hair looked more tangled than mine had that morning after my night out. I felt sorry for her but didn't dare show it. Nothing about Mrs. Wiggam's countenance invited pity.
"I'd have tea brought up but the maids have all left," she said with not a hint of shame.
Barnaby Wiggam appeared in the vacant chair by the window. He seemed more translucent than the last time. Or perhaps I was used to seeing Jacob, solid and strong, not dim with fuzzy edges like Mr. Wiggam and the other ghosts. It made me wonder, again, why Jacob appeared so real to me. I would probably never find out now.
Mr. Wiggam crossed his arms and glared at his wife as she exchanged inane pleasantries with Celia. The entire scene struck me as absurd and a bubble of laughter escaped, despite my best intentions to smother it.
Mrs. Wiggam glanced at me the way her husband looked at her—as if everything was my fault.
"He's here isn't he?" she said, glaring at the chair in which her husband's ghost sat.
"Yes," I said.
She humphed and shrugged, accepting the ghost's presence.
"Good," Celia said, urging me to speak with a raise of both her eyebrows. "We're here to speak to him."
"Don't trouble yourselves," Mr. Wiggam said, heaving himself up from his chair. His face was still very red, the purple veins prominent on his cheeks and nose, as they would always be thanks to the manner of his death. "I'm leaving."
I almost choked on my surprise. "Why?"
"What's he saying?" Mrs. Wiggam asked. "What does that good-for-nothing lump want now? My life?" She stood and offered her wrists to him like a platter of biscuits. "Take it! Isn't that what you want to do? Fetch a knife from the kitchen and end it all here. Go on!"
He laughed, a grating, humorless laugh. "Tell her I don't want to take her with me. Eternity is a long time and I'd prefer to spend as much of it as I can without her."
"Is that why you're leaving?" I asked.
Mrs. Wiggam, sensing her blood would not be spilled by the ghost of her dead husband, lowered her arms. She sat back down in her chair, smoothed her skirt over her lap and gave my sister a polite smile as if nothing was untoward. Celia didn't return it.
"I'm leaving because I'm tired of haunting her," Barnaby Wiggam said. "No, actually I'm just tired of her. This is only fun for so long and I've realized something important these last few days." He picked his way across the messy floor and removed the painting of the lighthouse from the wall. The sea in the picture was calm and the sun shone on the red-brown rocks and the white sail of a ship in the distance. "As much as I wanted to hurt her, I couldn't bring myself to do it. It's not in my nature." He returned the painting to its hook on the wall and stood back to admire it. "It's strange, don't you think, Miss Chambers?"
"What is?" The painting? It looked lovely to me, peaceful.
"That the characteristics of who we were during life, our essence if you like, are carried with us to our death. Up there, in the Waiting Area, there are thousands of souls waiting to cross over, each one of them as unique as they were in life. Did you know the Otherworld is segmented?" I nodded. "The segment we're assigned to depends on how good we were when we were alive. A scale of worth if you like." He looked down at the flour-covered rug. "I don't know what the segment where the rotten ones go is like and I don't want to know." He thrust his triple chins at his widow. "I've never committed a mortal sin so I'm quite sure I won't end up in the worst section. However I'm not so good that I'll help her clean up."
I stared down at my folded hands in my lap. Jacob too had been a good person in his lifetime. Even George thought so and he hadn't been his friend. As Mr. Wiggam said, a good nature in life meant a good nature in death too. That didn't change. Jacob hadn't changed. Everyone told me he'd been kind when he was alive—a little unobservant of those around him, but never mean. He'd never harm anyone on purpose. It was the same in death. He wouldn't hurt me. Couldn't. I knew that to the depths of my soul.
Jacob Beaufort wasn't dangerous.
Mr. Wiggam gave me a short bow. "Good bye, Miss Chambers."
"Wait!" I sprang up from the chair. Mrs. Wiggam and Celia watched me, curiosity printed on their faces, but neither interrupted. "There's a spirit in the Waiting Area … I want you to give him a message from me if you see him."
"But you're a medium, you can summon any ghost you wish at any time. You just called my name and I came."
"You came when I called because you wanted to. Jacob … probably doesn’t want to."
"Very well. How will I recognize your ghost? There are many souls up there."
"He's more solid than others. You can't see through him and—."
"What do you mean, more solid?" He held up his hands, twisting and turning them as he studied them. "I'm as solid as I ever was when I was alive." He patted his bulging stomach and laughed.
"Not to me you're not. But Jacob was."
Mr. Wiggam dismissed my description of Jacob's presence with a shrug. "What's his name?"
"Jacob Beaufort. Tell him I said he was wrong. Then tell him what you just told me."
"Very well. I'll see what I can do." He bowed again and winked out of existence.
I turned to Mrs. Wiggam. "He's gone."
Her eyes narrowed and her gaze flitted around the drawing room. "Is he coming back?"
"No. Celia?"
My sister rose. We said our farewells to Mrs. Wiggam and she promised to employ our services again when the house was set to rights.
I couldn't agree more.
We walked for a while without speaking until we turned into Druids Way. We held onto our bonnets and bent our heads into the breeze.
"You asked Mr. Wiggam's ghost to tell Jacob something up there." She nodded at the sky—it was cloudless for once, the constant haze turning it a faded blue—but neither of us knew where the Waiting Area was actually located. It was as good a place as any I suppose. "What was it?"
I told her about taking our good and bad characteristics with us when we die. We'd arrived at the steps to our house by the time I finished. I looked up, half hoping to see Jacob lounging against the door as he had been on our first meeting. He wasn't.
Celia did something entirely unexpected then. She sat on the top step and patted the spot next to her. "Tell me how he died."
I did, or as much of it as I knew. I held nothing back. By the end of it I was shaking. Celia put her arm around me and rocked me gently. After a while, she said, "This Frederick boy is at the heart of it all."
I nodded. "The person who killed Jacob is most likely connected to him in some way."
"No, I mean he's at the heart of Jacob's guilt and for all we know, that guilt is what's stopping him crossing over. You need to prove to him he's not a bad person. Remind him Frederick's death was accidental and help lift the guilt from his shoulders."
"How do I do that when he won't even speak to me?"
She sighed and squeezed me. "I don't know that part. But I do know you're a clever girl and that we don't yet have all the answers. Find them and then decide what to do."
Sometimes my sister astounds me. She appears so disinterested in deeper matters, matters of the mind and the heart, and yet she can say something so insightful. I tilted my head to rest it against her shoulder.
I only wished she knew what to say to make Jacob come back.
The End
The series continues with Possession.
To join the author’s mailing list and be alerted when they release new books, go here.
Dream Student
Dream Series: Book 1 - J.J. Di Benedetto
Prologue
(November 24-25, 1989)
Sara rarely remembers her dreams. She has no idea that she’s had more or less this same dream two or three nights a week since the beginning of the semester. She’s sitting there in the lecture hall, and if she were ever able to remember this dream she’d recognize it as the same seat she actually sits in every Tuesday and Thursday at nine-thirty in the morning. She’d recognize Dr. Wallabeck, too, and in the dream he’s wearing one of those dreadful patterned ties he always wears; he’s peering over his awful wire-rimmed glasses exactly the way he does in real life. Every detail of the lecture hall is captured by Sara’s subconscious with almost perfect accuracy, including her fellow students. Two rows in front of her is the tall redheaded girl whose name she can never recall and who nods off in the middle of almost every class; in her row and six seats to her left is Adam Walker, who lives directly above her in the dorm, with his huge thermos full of almost-but-not-quite-undrinkable dining hall coffee. In the dream Sara looks around and sees them and all the other faces she sees in class twice a week, and they’re all just as puzzled in the dream as they usually are in class.
Sara is the only person in the whole room who’s not. If she could remember the dream, she’d understand why: Dr. Wallabeck isn’t lecturing about angular momentum or torque or any of the other mystifying topics that make up Physics 121. Not now. Instead, the good doctor is talking about amino acids and protein structures, a topic that Sara just last week aced a quiz on in her Introductory Biochemistry course. It doesn’t seem the slightest bit odd to Sara that her physics professor is lecturing about biochemistry instead of physics…
Brian’s never properly met Sara, never actually spoken to her. He’s seen her quite often, though. In the dining hall, walking back from class, in the student union or the bookstore, in any one of a dozen other places on campus. Even, once, at a party, where he’d just about worked up the nerve to approach her before she disappeared for the night. But he doesn’t really know her; he doesn’t know anything about her that isn’t revealed in the student directory.
He’s dreaming about her anyway.
Not only about her; Sara is just one character in this dream. She’s there in a cheerleader outfit a size too tight, watching Brian, admiring him, cheering for him, shouting for him as he stands there on the basketball court about to hit the game-winning shot. Sara’s there, admiring and watching and cheering and shouting right alongside every other woman on campus that Brian is attracted to. All admiring and watching and cheering and shouting.
But for some reason Sara’s outfit is just a little tighter than anyone else’s; her voice is the tiniest bit louder than any of the others…
Sara is still in the lecture hall, still the only student in the whole room who’s not completely lost. She’s so far ahead of what Dr. Wallabeck is talking about now that her eyes and her mind begin to wander.
In the back of the room she sees her roommate, Beth. Sara is not surprised to see her in Physics, even though she knows that Beth isn’t actually taking the class. She’s also not surprised to see that all the students sitting near her are male. Long-legged, blonde-haired, beautiful Beth; of course the boys all look at her, she thinks, rather than plain old Sara.
Sara isn’t terribly bothered by this. First of all, Beth is not only her roommate but her best friend, and has been since halfway through the first semester of freshman year. Second, on a campus with twice as many men as women, Sara doesn’t really have to compete with Beth for male attention. The true competition is between Sara’s interest in male attention and her own generally quiet – verging on shy – nature, not to mention the extremely demanding course schedule that the pre-med program requires of her.
Suddenly, Sara isn’t in the lecture hall anymore. She’s sitting somewhere else, on metal bleachers inside a large gym. The bleachers are mostly filled, and every eye is directed towards a tall, dark-haired young man standing at the free-throw line, preparing to take the game-winning shot.
It takes her a moment to gather her bearings. Sara has no idea why she’s in a gym watching a basketball game: she has no friends on the team, and she doesn’t even like the sport. She has the oddest feeling that she doesn’t belong here at all, that she’s not supposed to be here. And then she sees herself down there on the court with the rest of the cheerleaders.
As soon as she sees that, she knows: this is not her dream anymore. It has nothing to do with her. The Sara in the cheerleader outfit is a character in someone else’s dream. She doesn’t know how she knows this, but she has no doubt whatsoever that it’s true. It’s crazy and it’s impossible and it’s happening just the same.
Sara doesn’t know what to do; this is so far out of her experience that she doesn’t even know where to begin. All she does know is that she’s in someone else’s mind – or somebody else is in hers. When the young man with the basketball looks up from the court and sees her, locks eyes with her, it’s all too much.
This isn’t supposed to be happening, Sara thinks, but she doesn’t know how to get out of his dream, any more than she knows how she got into it in the first place. And then panic sets in – what if she’s trapped here, what if she can’t ever get out of his mind, or throw him out of hers, whichever it is – and she begins screaming…
1
(November 30-December 1, 1989)
I’m staring at my clock radio. According to the big green digital numbers, it’s exactly 3:14 AM. I think it might be off by a minute or two, but that’s not really the point. The point is that I’m awake to know it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 3:14 AM.
This is not by choice. Actually, it sort of is, I guess. I’m awake because I don’t want to
fall asleep. And why I don’t want to fall asleep? It’s a fair question. I’d ask, if it were someone else.
The answer sounds stupid, even to me. If I’m honest, I have to admit I’m just being a baby about this. I don’t want to fall asleep because of the dreams I’ve been having. “Nightmares” is a better word. I don’t think even that really gets the point across, though. Is there a word for dreams that are worse than nightmares? There should be.
It’s been the same the last four nights, exactly the same. The people in it are the same, the places are the same, everything happens exactly the same way, in the same order, and the worst part is that it all feels so real. There isn’t any of that weird imagery that people always talk about – talking rabbits or losing your teeth while flying naked behind trains through long dark tunnels or whatever else. Everything that happens in this nightmare could come right out of the news. It could all really happen.
Oh, God. That’s a horrible thought. What if – maybe it is really happening?
No. Absolutely not. It can’t be.
I know, I know. There are lots of people who believe in stuff like that. Bob – my younger brother – is one of them. He’s sixteen years old, and the magazines he hides under his bed, or in the back of his closet or wherever teenage boys usually hide copies of Playboy or Penthouse, include Psychic Times and UFO Monthly.
Personally, I think most of that is nonsense. People don’t really have visions of the future or psychic flashes or any of that. This nightmare is probably just from some stupid slasher movie somebody rented for one of our dorm movie nights. Against my better judgment, I sat through it and even though I was only half watching, not really paying attention, it leaked into my subconscious or something. That makes sense, right? I’m sure that’s all it is. Probably happens all the time. Except that I don’t remember ever sitting through a slasher movie in the first place.