by Eve Paludan
I had a problem and a rather big one—my gig on Monday that I had forgotten about.
I made a phone call to Julie—a former client who had become my closest female friend. Even though she was a “baby” psychic, I needed her help. Again.
Part of me felt guilty for even asking her for another favor like this, but it couldn’t be helped. I touched her name in my smartphone’s contacts list and pressed the telephone icon. It only rang twice.
“Hi, Pauline!” answered brightly. “So nice to hear from you on a weekend. What are we drinking tonight, girlfriend?”
I laughed nervously and got a little choked up because she had no clue about where I was or what I was doing. At this moment, she was most decidedly not very psychic.
“Hi, Julie. I’m actually doing a weekend stay in a wellness clinic in the Hollywood Hills. Tofu salads and herbal wraps and chanting. That sort of thing.”
“Is this spa weekend actually rehab?”
“It’s that obvious? Ugh. I’m going to call it rehab lite.”
“Oh, Pauline,” she said, chagrined. “I had no idea that things had gotten that bad with your drinking.”
“Well, they have. They did. They call it a spa weekend here, but it’s really me drying myself out in a voluntary, upscale clinic. I’m also quitting cigarettes because I need to get rid of this disgusting cough that I wake up with every morning. I sound decrepit and I don’t want to be coughing like this on my birthday next week.”
“Oh, those pesky birthdays. I support your desire to get cleaned up, but can I ask what happened that you checked yourself in somewhere?”
I sighed. “I hit bottom. I woke up on the bathroom floor with yuck on me.”
Julie squealed in dismay.
I continued, “It’s more than that. It’s my inner life falling to pieces. My psychic powers—my entire existence as a medium—is in serious jeopardy.”
“Oh, no. Until now, you didn’t say anything about this to me. Psychic friends should talk to psychic friends when they have a problem. What’s going on that you hit bottom?” Julie asked.
I sighed. “Nothing external. The substances are getting in the way of my psychic abilities. I mean, how can I be a decent medium and be sensitive to the people and spirits around me when I am de-sensitizing myself to everything with booze?”
I heard the sound of clapping and then Julie’s voice rang in my ears again, “That applause was me congratulating you for coming to that realization and decision, all by yourself.”
“It didn’t happen by myself. Mack began noticing that my mileage is starting to show and he’s been scolding me. I need to turn back my odometer, before it’s too late.”
She took a long deep breath and let it out. “Well, crap. While it sucks that I’m losing my drinking buddy because I love cutting loose with you, I’m happy to see that you’re taking care of business. At long last.”
“Thanks, Julie. And now, to the second part of my call.”
“Oh, no,” she said in a dismissive voice, “please don’t tell me you’re asking me to teach another class for your wannabe psychics.”
“You must be psychic.” I laughed.
She didn’t.
I grimaced because I could sense she was ticked off, and I didn’t need to be psychic to come to that realization. “Julie, I’m asking you to please teach my class. I’m sorry to impose on you, but I truly need your help.”
She protested, “But you said you’re only in the wellness clinic for the weekend! You could still teach it. Your class isn’t until Monday.”
“You’re right. It is on Monday, but I have a new client and a new gig. I have a ghost-whispering gig on the haunted set of a horror movie in the Hollywood Hills. It’s for a week and it will cover my rent and utilities for a whole month! I have to be on set all week, 24/7, even sleeping there, so I can’t teach my Monday class.”
There was a pause and a huffed breath from her. “Congratulations for using me once again. Or trying to.”
A stab of guilt went through me. “Please? I have no one else I can ask to substitute for me and teach my class.”
There was another pause. “Once again, you ask good old Julie to teach your class when you line up the students, take their money in advance, and then, you conveniently can’t even make it to teach your own cool-sounding class in a rented room in your own apartment complex.” After yet another pause, she blurted, “I have bills, too, and you never paid me for the other classes I taught for you. I feel imposed upon, to say the least.”
“I know it looks like that from your perspective—that I took advantage of our friendship—but I didn’t do it on purpose and I never mean for things to turn out this way.”
“Yet, they do, every time,” Julie said ruefully.
“Are you that mad at me?” My heart was hurting.
“Yes, I am. I feel used and I’m setting boundaries right now. I’m not going to let you do this to me. Not again.”
My stomach did a flip. “I’m really sorry, but it’s the last time I’ll ask you for a favor like this, I swear.”
“I can’t.” After a few moments, she said, “As it happens, I have a job now, too, Pauline, not that you ever ask me what’s going on in my life.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve been such a bad friend.”
“Sometimes, you are. You helped me so much, right when we met, but ever since I crossed the bridge from client to friend, it’s been all about you for a long time. I’ve felt like your disrespected sidekick. And I just don’t like feeling as if I’m always being taken for granted.”
Tears sprang to my eyes as she rattled on, unloading on me in an assertive voice that I had never heard before. “You always decide what we’re doing, and where we’re going. You never even ask me if I want to help you. You just assume I will do whatever you command. Like a…vampire.”
I was aghast. “Did you just call me a vampire?”
“Yes. An emotional vampire, Pauline. A psychic vampire. I feel like I have no personal power in our friendship. Everything is about you.”
Ashamed, I said, “Apparently, I do suck and I’m sorry that I didn’t realize I was doing this or that you felt this way about our friendship. I thought we were very close friends.”
“If ‘close’ means that I do things for you on this one-way street that you call a friendship, yeah, we were close.”
“Julie, you mean a lot to me. Now it seems like you resent me.” I was holding back my need to sob.
“I guess I’ve been holding back negative things. I hate negativity, but I guess resentment has been building up.”
“I’m sorry. What can I do to make things right between us?”
Julie sighed. “Nothing. I thought things would blow over in my head and heart, and that the next time I heard from you, it would be because you care for me, for who I am, not for what I do.”
“I do!”
“You just think you do, but you don’t, not really. And now, you’ve pushed me into telling you off by asking me for a huge favor. Yet again. There’s not a lot of balance in our friendship, Pauline. Everything is your way or the highway.”
Her words hit me like a fist to the gut. “You’re right. I really am sorry. Now, I’m asking you about yourself. How are you? So, tell me about your new job. What will you be doing?” I pushed down my anger, recognizing there was no need to escalate her venting into a shouting match.
She replied, a little defensively, “I have a new job as a telephone psychic. It’s only a temp job, but it’s really important to me. A woman named Allison Lopez got suspended and I’ll filling in for a week, maybe two, while they decide whether to fire her or not. Or maybe she’ll quit. Either way, I now have my foot in the door as a professional, paid psychic. It’s my big break, Pauline, and I’m not going to blow it by canceling my gig to take on yours.”
In hurt disbelief, I said, “So, you really can’t teach my psychic polyphony class?”
“Pauline, are you even listening to me? No! I can’t teach people how
to swap their consciousness into other people’s bodies and back again. For one, my psychic abilities are not as advanced as yours. There, I admitted it. You are an advanced medium and I am just barely a real psychic. Barely. I don’t want to fool with something that advanced. What if someone got possessed and I didn’t know what to do?”
“That hardly ever happens. And you’re growing. Your medium abilities are developing. I’m so proud of you, Julie. I’m also kind of desperate and I will pay you, I promise. You could teach my class if you practiced first.”
“Practiced? Over the phone with you for five minutes? Nope! And thank you, but flattery is not going to get me to take your teaching gig on Monday. I have my own bills to pay. And so do you.”
“I apologize that I pressed the point, but what am I going to do?” I was stunned.
“Look, Pauline, I truly admire what you’re doing this weekend, but you shouldn’t take other gigs when you already have gigs scheduled. You do this kind of thing to me all the time and then you leave me and your ghost boyfriend to pick up the pieces.”
“Mack is not my ghost boyfriend. He’s my ghost friend.”
“I call ‘em as I see ‘em and I don’t have to be very psychic to see what you two have, or could have. If you weren’t the blindest medium ever, you’d see it, too.”
I digested that for a moment or three. Speechless.
She kept on. “Regardless, I’m done, Pauline. I’m just so done.”
“Julie, I—”
Julie hung up on me, and I didn’t blame her. I felt like I was going to cry because every damn thing that Julie had said was true. I did try to use her and it didn’t take a psychic to realize it.
I spent the next fifteen minutes emailing each of my students my apology. I told them that I was staying in a clinic and I wouldn’t be able to make it to teach the class on Monday. It was a white lie. Okay, it was a full-blown lie. I just wasn’t willing to tell them I had a better-paying gig on Monday. Cringing, I also sent them all full refunds by PayPal, which was how they’d paid me in advance for the psychic polyphony class.
Julie was right. She never would have been able to teach that psychic polyphony class. She was also correct about the imbalance in our friendship. And, she nailed the fact that I took advantage of her good nature and giving spirit.
Letting go, I cried over the debacle with my best female friend, in which I was the guilty party and she had finally stood up to me.
I wasn’t going to call Julie back and beg for her forgiveness. I knew I would have to earn back her friendship and her trust.
It was true. I was a good psychic and medium, but in her eyes, and now, in mine, I was a terrible friend. I cried about the harm I had caused to my friendship with Julie by always asking her for favors and then not appreciating her as she deserved. There was just no denying it. I had tried to use her and had done it more than once.
Now, I wanted a drink. Big time. But, if I was going to grow as a psychic and a medium—and, as a decent human being—that part of my life had to be over.
A little gong sounded for us to go to our next event or class at the wellness clinic. Oh, no.
Drying my tears, I washed my face and headed to the drumming and chanting hour to again meet up with Amanda Jordan, my new client.
And, my intriguing new friend.
Chapter Six
Blue, the “authentic” shaman leading the drum circle, was a blond-haired, blue-eyed man who handed out a tambourine-like painted drum to each person before we walked in a single-file line up the hill above the pool. We followed him past little handmade signs with arrows and the single word: Labyrinth.
As if there might be danger within its perimeter, we all lined up on the very edges of labyrinth. It was a well-worn, flat-stone path laid in concentric patterns. The tribal design looked and felt ancient…and ominous.
Blue gave us instructions in the drumming circle. We were instructed to first listen to his drumbeats, which he said were paced at three to four beats per second…what the spirits really liked.
After a minute of demonstrating this, he stopped and invited us to beat our drums in rhythm with his for a sustained minute, which we all did. It was kind of fun, but I felt something happening, as if there was a trance-y awareness building in me. I didn’t want to stop and listen for the next part of his spiel, but it would have been impolite to drum over his voice.
I let out a deep breath as he yammered on about New Age things that sounded made up. I needed to find my center. My medium center. Even as crippled as my skills were by my personal issues—and I was just on the cusp of drying out for good—I felt strongly that…we are not alone here.
That awareness of the spirits all around us brought me out of my trance-like desire to keep beating my drum and made me pay attention to some dangerous spirit energy building up around us. Around me. Especially around Amanda, who stood next to me cradling her drum. Her eyes were shining, but kind of…vacant. As if the lights were on, but nobody was home.
Amanda stood at an angle that made me realize her center of gravity was a tad off. As was mine, it seemed.
When everyone stood there expectantly with drums in hand, Blue gave a little bow and said, “Namaste. We’re all going to take a spiritual as well as a physical journey into the labyrinth and I shall lead you. Our drumbeats and our chants will call up the spirits and we will be able to feel their power and absorb their wisdom.” Blue paused, looking at all of us for any skeptics. His eyes stayed on me a second longer than anyone else’s, which amused me.
He continued, “Together, we’ll learn from them, and we’ll absorb their powerful energy and be changed for the better.”
I raised my free hand.
He nodded at the nametag on my shirt, and said, “Yes, number 10?”
I swallowed and asked, “Blue, have you ever done this before?”
He laughed in this cavalier way that almost made me cringe. “I see we have a skeptic in our midst.”
“No, I’m not,” I said. “Actually, I’m quite the opposite. I was just wondering your exact purpose of calling up random spirits with the drums, but without knowing who you are calling. Or why you are calling them.”
“My ancestors. Of course. The spirits.”
“And when you wake them, what do you ask them?”
“Nothing. I just let their energy penetrate and fill me with their good vibrations.”
My mouth dropped open. Charlatan was on the tip of my tongue, but he started drumming again, as did everyone else, so I would have been drowned out if I’d shouted anyway.
So, he drummed, and we drummed. He nodded for everyone to follow him into the labyrinth. Even with my medium senses weakened, I knew this was a mistake. And yet, mesmerized by the beat, I beat my drum, too.
Around and around the maze we went, following the fake shaman named Blue. I knew from probing him with my medium senses that his real name was Ford Mortimer. His mom had named him for the place where he had been conceived. No, not Ford City, but the actual backseat of a blue Ford Fairlane. Poor schlub. I would have renamed myself Blue, too. I tried not to giggle when I thought of Blues Clues—a kids’ TV show. And how this Blue actually had no clue what he was doing.
I suspected that probably, nothing had happened all the times when he had drummed in the labyrinth before this—times when he did not have me in his drumming group. Or even Amanda, who seemed to be a spirit magnet. Bless her heart.
The labyrinth looked and felt ancient. I wasn’t really down with walking around its spirals to the center because I felt a healthy fear of it. Especially in its center.
But I went along, just for the sheer entertainment value. I felt ashamed and annoyed with myself and with Blue.
I stepped in time to the beat of his drum, along with the other spa guests. Unable to turn back, I was just too curious to see what was going to happen, though, on the back burner of my brain, I was afraid.
I should have been afraid. The place was haunted, big time. Even with
my diminished medium powers, I sensed so many others hanging around the labyrinth, waiting with some malevolent attitudes. For what, I didn’t know yet, but what was with all the spirits here and why were they so angry?
Amanda and I, along with the other spa clients, fidgeted in the fading golden afternoon light that began to spread like amber honey over the Hollywood Hills above and below us.
“Welcome, everybody,” Blue said cheerfully as we took our places around the center of the labyrinth. “I’m so pleased you could join us on this most glorious of nights.”
Amanda and I exchanged a look. Most glorious of nights? The ‘shaman’ was kind of a showman. And not much else. If he had an inkling what he was doing, I’d have been completely shocked.
As the last of the daylight faded and the darkness of the night bled across the sky like a pot of spilled ink, so, too, went the warmth of the afternoon.
I shivered a bit, taking stock of the other members of the drumming circle and watching their expressions as Blue explained that drumming would open a portal to the spirit world and allow us all to interact with wise ones. They watched him with something akin to rapture upon their faces. Or perhaps it was worship. I couldn’t tell.
As I glanced at the faces of the living in attendance—and looked at the dark, amorphous shapes of the dead that were literally everywhere—I knew that the other people drumming couldn’t see the inherent danger in what we were doing.
Drumming is a way to awaken the spirits. In effect, we were calling up the dead. I didn’t think anyone besides me had a clue how dangerous it was to just casually perform this ritual for entertainment purposes. That was the only value I could assign to what Blue was doing.
“Isn’t this awesome?” Amanda whispered to me as she banged her drum and chanted. “Can’t you just feel the energy?”
A big chill passed through me and I had to force myself from shuddering. “I feel something, that’s for sure. It’s either fear or extreme hunger.”
I glanced around again at the spirits of the dead. Because of my diminished medium skills, they were without real form. They appeared almost as out-of-focus photographs. Just blurred, dark spots lined up and waiting. They were everywhere. And what they were waiting for, I didn’t know. But something felt off. Something felt downright ominous to me.