“Hmm. Maybe they had difficulty selling it due to the spirit chasing away any potential buyers who went inside.” I tap my pen against the pad, thinking. A demon trying to lure people in wouldn’t scare someone off, especially before they could buy the place. I write, possibly territorial.
“Yeah, could be. The realtor sounded relieved when I passed on the tour, like she didn’t really want to go there.” Vincente exits the bucket, then climbs down a small ladder on the side of his truck to the street. “Dang. Maybe I should have gone to check it out first.”
I keep tapping my pen in thought. “It’s a bit early to give up on the house. Do you know anything about the history of the place?”
“Not really. Only that the former owner died in it. Before I called your show, I Googled how to talk to ghosts, and bought a digital recorder. I actually caught one of them talking. Hang on a sec. Let me get it.”
I blink. “You have the recorder with you at work?”
“Yeah. In the truck.” He walks around to the driver side door. “Brought it in to show the guys. They think I’m playing a prank.” Vincente leans into the cab, pulls a small black device out of a cupholder. “Might not hear too well over the phone but…”
Distant seeing, the original Facetime.
He holds the recorder up to his cell phone. A loud ‘background noise’ hiss starts. Two seconds later, Vincente’s voice comes out of the recorder, distorted due to him having the volume all the way up.
“What is your name?” asks Vincente first in English, then again in Spanish.
Three seconds of silence pass before a raspy, “Zay” follows. The ‘ghost voice’ is toneless like a whisper and spat out fast. Vincente hits a button on the recorder and replays the EVP twice more. It’s only six seconds long, so not a big deal. The third time he plays it, I make out a sound in front of ‘zay’ making me think the spirit is saying his name is Jose.
“Did you hear it?” asks Vincente.
“Jose?”
“Yeah. That’s what I think he’s saying, too.” Vincente stuffs the recorder in his pocket. “Went around the house for a damn hour with the thing. Ghost didn’t say anything else.”
Tap. Tap. Tap. I stare at the pen. Yeah, I’m not going to get any answers distant seeing the man at his job site. “There’s something serious going on at your house, and I’m worried you might get hurt.”
“Me, too.” He chuckles. “Scary as hell not being able to breathe. Felt like I was in one of those old movies where the spy comes up behind the bad guy with a rope around the neck.”
“Would it be okay if I stopped by the place Sunday or Monday?”
“Yeah, sure. Guessing you need to be there after dark, so either’s fine with me.”
“Sunday then. Sooner the better.”
“I really appreciate it. Would you like to have dinner? Just as a thank you for helping, not a date.” He chuckles.
“Sure. I’ll see you then.”
“Do you need my address?”
I read it off to him.
He whistles, impressed. “Allison, you are the real deal.”
“So I’m told…”
Wow. I lean back in my chair after hanging up. Something tells me this one’s going to be a wild ride.
Chapter Three
Meant to Be
Millicent takes a seat opposite me at the kitchen table.
She’s kind of settled on ‘dressing up’ as a twenty-year-old lately. When I first met her, she had the appearance of an old woman, Peter Laurie’s mother. She’s been de-aging herself insofar as looks go, ever since. For most of the cruise, she appeared to be somewhere between fourteen and sixteen. It has to be her trying to connect with me on a closer level, since we’ve been together over multiple lifetimes going back over a thousand years. Maybe even two. Not sure why she went through a teenage phase, but after rubbing elbows with Ivy and her Hollywood people, it seems Millicent’s settled in on ‘young starlet’ age.
For reasons she’s never fully elaborated on, she’s decided not to jump back into the universe’s soul engine after her last death. My best guess regarding why is we got out of sync. One of my past lives must have been killed unexpectedly, and she outlived me by a good margin. Millicent Laurie had been close to eighty when she died, and her son Peter was older than me by at least ten years.
So, yeah. A ghost’s appearance is determined only by their perception of themselves. If a spirit doesn’t care what they look like, they tend to appear exactly as they did at their moment of death. If they want to change their outward visage, it’s possible. Hence why Millicent has been everything from an old woman to a stunning supermodel redhead to a young teenage girl. Now that I think about it, some ‘child ghosts’ might even be people who regressed after death and can’t deal with it. Just because a ghost looks like a child doesn’t prove they died young. I mean, if Millicent can appear as an old lady one week and a high-school-aged girl the next…
“Seems you have a plan in mind, dear,” says Millicent.
Even though she appears younger than me, she still talks like she’s my mother. Or older sister. It’s bizarre to think about, but in past lives, we literally have been each other’s moms. Sisters, too. Friends. Cousins… just about every possible relationship two women can be to each other except for lovers—maybe not the weird ones like second cousin twice removed or whatever. But generally, we’ve been together repeatedly as our souls spun around and around the cosmic machinery.
Hmm. My ‘out of sync’ idea doesn’t hold up. We haven’t always been the same age like siblings, though I want to say we were most of the time. Her being my daughter or me being her daughter didn’t happen as often as us being siblings or best friends. Millicent told me the peak of our power came one time she, Samantha Moon, and I popped out of the same womb at the same time as identical triplet sisters. We’d been somewhere in the Viking lands at the time. Some people mistook us for the Norns, the three fates. But we aren’t. Merely witches. Earth witches, to be precise. To hear her talk, that incarnation had been our best. No persecution. Everyone respected us. We had power… and protected the world from darkness multiple times.
Witchcraft is kind of like ice cream, comes in multiple flavors and some of them are horrible. Not every witch is a good person. A handful are benevolent like us. A handful are dark. Most end up somewhere in between, generally out for self-interest, but they vary from nature-loving to sinister. I reserve the term ‘dark’ witch for the ones who actively try to summon demons or invoke the blackest magic and derive glee from hurting people. Selfish witches who use sinister magic to enrich themselves or harm rivals, but don’t delight in the pain they cause aren’t quite as evil—to me—as the demon-raising ones.
“Not really much of a plan,” I say. “Got a hunch this man needs our help.”
“Yes, a witch’s hunch.” She reaches out as if to grasp something off the table. A tea cup materializes out of thin air. Purely for show. When she really wants to taste food, she asks me to eat it and enjoys the flavor over our mental connection. “You should listen. By the by, I have the same hunch.”