Hollywood Hills (Medium Mysteries Book 3)

by Eve Paludan

  “You okay, Pauline? You look a little pale.”

  “I feel a little sick. Sort of dizzy like the world is off-kilter.”

  She stopped drumming and it seemed as if a crowd of spirits was behind her. Not a one of them looked happy that I could see them.

  “What do you see?” Amanda mouthed to me. “I feel something.”

  “That’s because…they’re here,” I said in the same way Carol Anne had said it in the movie Poltergeist.

  “Numbers nine and ten, stop talking and keep drumming,” Blue shouted.

  I tore off my sticky label nametag with my number written on it and put it in my pocket so Blue couldn’t yell at me again.

  I pulled my gaze away from the spirits and looked at Amanda. I didn’t know how to tell her that I had a bad feeling about all of this and that we should run like hell before it broke loose.

  Blue clapped his hands three times to focus everybody’s attention on him—not that he really needed to do that. Everybody seemed pretty well focused on him already, except for the few people who were staring at Amanda, whose long, blonde hair was rising in the air, as if electrified. She looked like a dandelion. Other people noticed, too, and also stared in awe at her. I had never seen such a thing happen.

  Blue nodded and grinned. He raised his drum up to chest level. The rest of the crowd in the circle followed suit without any verbal prompting. It was amazing, really, his command of these poor vulnerable spa-weekend people just trying to kick whatever it was that messed up their lives, myself included.

  The charlatan, Blue, was like a puppet master, pulling all of the strings of his marionettes. He wasn’t that attractive, but he had this over-assertive way of getting people to do what he wanted. I wasn’t too fond of people like that. He began banging his drum in a fast, simple rhythm of three to four beats per second.

  “Come, everybody,” he said. “Just like this. And we’re going to sustain it until we are in the zone.”

  Oh, brother. I felt like he was really making up this stuff. Of course there were spirits in abundance. I doubted he could even connect with them.

  It took several minutes, but eventually, everybody in the circle began to find their own rhythm. I was relieved. For a minute there, it sounded like somebody had tossed a bunch of drums into the chimpanzee enclosure at the zoo. Finally, it smoothed out and everybody was drumming in unity. More or less. Reluctantly, I joined in and found my own rhythm soon after.

  “This is incredible,” Amanda crooned. “I can really feel it stirring something in me.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said.

  As I drummed, I kept my eye on the spirits surrounding the labyrinth. They looked like they had started to vibrate in tune with our drumming. Amanda was right about one thing, I felt an energy slowly starting to build in me.

  Swaying with his drumming, Blue began chanting loudly and passionately, even with beads of sweat rolling down his neck. It sounded like a foreign language to me. I listened more to the tone and inflection rather than the words—because I couldn’t understand them anyway. I realized that it sounded very much like a Native American chant that I’d once heard at a public powwow. The people in the circle began to mimic Blue, picking up his chanting and lending their own voices to it.

  Like a rising tide, the energy around the labyrinth was building. Despite my best efforts, I let myself get sucked into it like a ship being drawn into a maelstrom. I drummed and chanted right along with everybody else. I felt the energy building up within me. Spirit energy.

  “Isn’t it amazing, Pauline?”

  I was so caught up in it all that I seemed at a loss for words. I kept drumming and chanting and could only manage to nod at Amanda.

  She giggled and raised her voice even louder, banging on her drum with more enthusiasm.

  But then, a wind gust, so cold it almost seemed like it had come straight from the beer cooler at my favorite liquor store, blew past us. I felt a knot form and tighten in my stomach. Something was happening. I lost my rhythm and immediately felt the psychic energy within me begin to crackle.

  “Amanda, I don’t think we should stay—” I started.

  “Just pick it back up, Pauline. This energy is amazing. I’ve never felt anything like it before.”

  I cast my eyes to the spirits and felt my stomach drop as they began to take shape. No longer the dark, out-of-focus shapes I’d seen earlier, they were fully manifesting themselves into Native American warriors. Some wore headdresses. All carried weapons. And all looked angry.

  The ghostly sound of whoops and war cries filled the air around us. The drumming stopped as people began to glance around, fear upon their faces as they actually saw the spirits. Not just the medium was seeing them, everyone was. Was I doing that? And then, like a dam breaking, all of the spirits were flooding through us with a turbulent force that almost knocked me down.

  Not understanding what was happening, Amanda screamed and looked at me, terror-stricken. A warrior with a thick chest, broad shoulders, muscular arms, and a scowl upon his face stood behind her. He seemed to tower over her, his body dwarfing hers as he raised a weapon.

  I opened my mouth to scream, but it was too late. The warrior was gone. He’d disappeared. Amanda’s body jerked and spasmed, her eyes growing wide. I narrowed my eyes at her, knowing exactly where the warrior had gone. He was inside of her.

  There was quite some confusion as people started screaming and scurrying back to the clinic to get away from the howling spirits that waved their arms and opened their threatening dark maws filled with long teeth. And the spirits somehow conjured up a plethora of rattlesnakes that chased everyone off the labyrinth and down the hill. We were all screaming. Even me. Because…rattlesnakes. Tangles of them. Ropes of them. Herds of them!

  The snakes chased us all the way down the hill and then plopped themselves into the swimming pool, freaking out a few people who were swimming in there. Everyone got out really fast.

  I didn’t blame the spirits in full war bonnets and paint for being extremely upset at being awakened. Whenever I went to my rest, maybe I would want to be forever undisturbed, too.

  It was a miracle that no one got snake-bit! I, for one, was done with this place. No more swimming for me! No more drumming for me. No tofu.

  Other people from the drumming group also got their stuff from their rooms and got the hell out of the place. No one in that group wanted to stay, and Amanda and I were actually among the last clients to leave. The poor cabana boy was up in the lifeguard chair, screaming as he watched the snakes below him roiling in the pool.

  I had the guts to ask for a refund on the way out, and they gave me a receipt for a refund, albeit grudgingly, after I told them I was going to tattle to Groupon that we’d been chased by multiple rattlesnakes on the spa grounds. That put some fear into them.

  Amanda remained visibly shaken by the whole experience. Her eyes looked strange, and she was wobbly and out of balance. Well, it was no wonder because she was trailing a lot of spirits now, and more than one of them was malevolent. Oh, boy, like she needed this on top of trying to kick her cocaine habit.

  Without warning, she grabbed my arm and held onto me for dear life. “I’m scared. Get me out of here or I am going to start screaming and I won’t be able to stop.”

  “Don’t be scared. I won’t leave you alone to deal with this. Do you have a car here?” I asked.

  “No. I got a lift here from Uber.” Her eyes darted back and forth in her head as if she were watching a tennis match. It made me a little nauseated to watch, so I looked away and gathered my thoughts.

  “Come with me,” I offered.

  She wept in relief.

  I had to pack both Amanda’s stuff and mine because she was sort of incapacitated. She was busy shaking and swatting at spirits. I could see some of their auras and a couple of them were ugly and dark, spreading like a black bloodstain around her. But I could not see their full substance.

  I also noticed she was whispering all s
orts of nonsense I could not make out at first. Then, I realized they were utterings in another language. Probably a Native American language.

  Amanda kept saying stuff in this other foreign language before blurting out in English, “No! Please, don’t! Stop it!” She was fighting it. Fighting them.

  “Tell me what’s wrong, Amanda. What are you seeing?” I asked, as I put our stuff in my car trunk and helped her into the passenger seat.

  “When we were chanting and drumming, something went into me. It’s in me, Pauline. It’s in me.”

  I put my hand on her head and pulled it away quickly, looking at my blistered palm. “Oh, no,” I said. “You’re even more possessed than I feared!”

  “Even more possessed? What the hell do you mean by that?”

  “Never mind.” I wasn’t going to tell her that the spirit of the horrific man she had murdered as a child was in her and on her and flashing a devilish grimace when I occasionally caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye.

  “Make it leave me, Pauline!” she cried.

  “Which one?” I said. “There are lots of them.”

  “I think his name is something like Tats-an.” She shuddered. “I think it means death, from the gruesome things he is showing me in my head.”

  “Hang on. I will help you, as soon as I can figure out a way to communicate with it. It’s a Native American spirit. He doesn’t speak English.”

  “I feel weird! He wants me to do stuff. Mean stuff.”

  “Mean stuff? Calm down, Amanda. No violence. Put on your seatbelt and hang on. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

  “No kidding. Where are we going?” Her voice shook in fright.

  “To my apartment.”

  “No, let’s go to the movie location. I have the keys in my purse. I’m not supposed to use them until Monday morning, but I doubt anyone is there. And I have the rental contract in my purse if there’s a security guard keeping watch.”

  “I’d like to release some of those entities inside of you without adding more. My apartment is a safer place to do that.”

  “No,” she whimpered. “We should go to the mansion. I have this feeling that everything that we need to know and do is there.”

  “First, my apartment,” I insisted.

  Amanda put her arms over her eyes. “Tats-an is trying to show me stuff. It’s violent. This entity in me is like a serial killer or something. Literally. He’s from a fierce tribe called the Tongva, or something like that. He’s trying to tell me even more horrible things.”

  “Thank goodness you don’t speak the language.”

  “It doesn’t matter. He’s showing me awful pictures in my head.”

  “Don’t look at what he shows you,” I suggested.

  “Easy for you to say. I can see it with my eyes closed. It’s sick and violent. Gory to the max.”

  I tried to hone in and could not. As a medium, I wasn’t usually this frustrated. “What is he showing you? I’m locked out. He’s that powerful.”

  She paused for a long minute. “Spanish soldiers are killing the Native Americans, who are just trying to protect themselves, their women and children, even their animals. We…we were the barbarians. But they fought back in equal lack of…mercy. It’s bloody and he’s showing me the splatter-y details. I feel like I am gonna jump out of my skin.”

  “I’m so sorry, Amanda.”

  “How could this happen? How could that spirit on the hill get inside of me?”

  “When we have addictions, we’re weak. Vulnerable. Not protected.” I paused. “This is why I have to quit drinking. Things just like this can happen when the soul is weak. And when the body is weak, too.”

  “I am a cocaine addict. Get me some.”

  “No!”

  “Why do we have to go to your house first?” she whined. “For your booze and smokes?”

  “Neither. I have to go get my—I have to pick up Mack. If he’s able to come with us, he would be very helpful.”

  “Mack? Your BFF you told me about? Why does he have to come with us?”

  “About Mack. When I told you about him, I left out one little thing.”

  Amanda gave me a curious stare, sweat beads dropping from her forehead. “What?”

  “Mack’s not just my best friend. He’s my live-in ghost.”

  Chapter Seven

  “Well, you really messed up this time, didn’t you?” Mack’s voice was mixed with disappointment and concern.

  “It’s not like I meant for this to happen.”

  “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

  “Mack, please,” I snapped. “Focus.”

  Amanda lay on my couch, passed out. Well, in a trance, actually, one that was reminiscent of Sigourney Weaver’s possession in Ghostbusters. Her breathing was shallow and ragged and sweat beaded her brow. She moaned and began to thrash about. Even though she wasn’t conscious, she was still in utter torment.

  “What are we going to do about her situation?” Mack asked.

  “I don’t know yet. Let me think.”

  I paced through my living room, trying to decide what to do. I was afraid for Amanda. Her addiction made her weak. By herself, she was unable to combat the new spirits that had taken over her body. “I’m going to have to ask all of those spirits to leave her body. It won’t be pretty.”

  “That sounds very risky, Pauline.”

  I shrugged. “No riskier than letting those spirits continue to control the poor woman’s body. If we leave them in there, eventually, Amanda is going to lose any last trace of herself. She’s going to end up in a mental ward. For good. They have to leave her body. It’s necessary.”

  “I know, I know,” Mack said. Parts of his form came in and out of the visible light spectrum. He appeared tangible for short flashes, during which I could see his salt-and-pepper hair and his deep-set eyes. And just as quickly, he would be invisible to me again. “I’d just hate to see anything happen to her. Or the spirits. Evil as they might be, they need to cross over.”

  “I’ll do it carefully.” We moved Amanda down to the floor of the living room so we’d have some space to work with and so she couldn’t fall.

  Mack watched in anxious silence.

  “The only way I’m going to be able to do this,” I said, “is if I switch my consciousness with hers.”

  “I was afraid you were going to do something like that,” Mack said. “You and your canceled class for people who want to learn to switch bodies.”

  “It’ll be fine. And how did you know about that?”

  “I know lots of things, Pauline. Have you actually ever done this before?”

  I looked away and wouldn’t meet Mack’s eyes. “Not exactly.”

  Mack rolled his eyes. “This just gets better and better.”

  “Relax, it’ll save her.”

  “Uh-huh. And it’ll mess you up.”

  “Just be ready to show the angry Native American spirit to the light when I pull him out of there.”

  “Yes, boss. If the light comes. We don’t control that.”

  I nodded and tried to focus my energy. I pictured a ball of benevolent white light inside of me and watched it growing until my whole body hummed with energy.

  Mack cleared his throat. “You sure you want to do this?”

  “Shhh, Mack,” I said softly. “I’m trying to focus.”

  He fell silent and I focused on my energy buildup again. When I felt like I’d amassed all of the energy I could handle, I laid my hand on Amanda’s forehead. I began to visualize a transfer of energy—my white light pouring into her body, and a blue light coming out of her and into my body.

  It was the only way I was going to be able to rid Amanda of the Native American warrior who’d taken control of her body. It wasn’t going to be easy, and as much as I hated to admit that Mack was right—well—Mack was right. It was dangerous and there was no guarantee of success. Still, I had to try. I couldn’t let this bad guy have Amanda’s body. I couldn’t
let him wash away her consciousness and replace it with his own. I couldn’t lose her to the dark side like that.

  Entering somebody’s consciousness was an abstract experience. There were a lot of lights and strange-looking shapes. As a means of coping with the abstract nature of entering somebody else’s body, somebody else’s consciousness, my mind had come up with a way of making it more understandable.

  I imagined it and found myself in an open field. The sky was an azure blue and thick, white clouds lazily drifted by. It was a beautiful day. The grass was tall and filled with a riot of color from the wildflowers in bloom. A thick ring of trees surrounded the field. The woods were gloomy and full of shadows. And in those shadows, I saw red, glowing eyes in twisted, malformed shapes. They lurked in the shadows of the forest, unwilling to step into the light of the day. There were evil spirits in Amanda’s consciousness. A lot of them.

  But first things first. I had to deal with what was in front of me. And what was in front of me was a tall, broad-shouldered, Native American man who looked none too pleased by my intrusion.

  He glared at me in silence, obviously disapproving of my presence. He pointed at me and then pointed to the woods. The message was clear—leave. I wasn’t going to do that, though. I couldn’t.

  I returned his stern gaze. “You need to go to the light. You deserve your rest.”

  The proud warrior shook his head and pointed to the woods again. I’d hoped that I would be able to reason with him, convince him to leave and cross over into the light. The last thing I wanted to do was to have this turn into a physical confrontation.

  However, given the stubborn set of the man’s jaw and the way he stood there with his arms crossed over his chest, I didn’t see that there was going to be any way around it.

  “Last chance,” I said. “Leave Amanda’s body willingly or I’m going to have to send you into…into oblivion.”

  He arched an eyebrow and looked bemused, as if he were daring me, unconvinced I could remove him from Amanda’s body.