Maybe they should talk it through, but later. He couldn’t risk upsetting her before her performance. “I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about,” he said in his best attempt at a calming voice.
She smiled, wanting to reassure him too, expecting he was probably right. If there was something to worry about it would be apparent soon enough. Tonight she had an audience to delight, and she wasn’t planning to disappoint.
The walk up and back down the pier was concluded impassively, their concerns distracting them both too much to enjoy the benefits.
When they reached the University, Claire turned to her husband, plastered the biggest grin onto her face and took a deep breath.
“It’s show time!” she declared cheerily.
“Knock ‘em bandy!” Chris grinned back.
The famous psychic arrived on stage to her usual enthusiastic approval. “Hello, Hello!” she greeted her fans. Immediately perceiving a rush of psychic energy, visions coming strong and fast. One in particular was taking shape. That’s what she shared with them.
“Ooh! I can see a road. Quite busy, but there’s a vehicle standing out to me. Has anyone lost a bus driver or lorry driver?” A few hands went up and Claire made relevant enquiries. She continued describing what she was seeing to the audience.
“I’m sure now, it’s a bus. Not a red double-decker from London. I would call this one a bendy bus. It’s concertinaed in the middle.” She wafted her hands back and forth, playing the concertina. Blank faces stared up at her, but the vision was too strong to ignore. Claire persisted, certain she’d hit the jackpot soon.
A look of recognition came over her face as it began to take shape. “It’s not driving the bus they’re doing. They’re not a bus driver, or a lorry driver. No. This person lost their life to a bus!” The audience gasped as one. “She’s been run over. Oh it’s horrible. She’s just lying there on the ground. Oh, poor love.”
Whilst several of the audience members had associated with passing family who were bus or lorry drivers, no-one seemed to relate to a bus fatality. Some of them wondered (and then berated themselves for their disrespectful thoughts) if the deceased had worn clean underwear that day, as mothers across the land were prone to warn.
It was a warning to live life to the fullest; and to live as you would like to be remembered. They all hoped, with no hint of disrespect this time, that this person had done the things they’d wanted in their life; that they’d taken the chances which made them happy before the advice: You never know. You might get hit by a bus, proved deadly accurate.
Slowly, arms lowered, their owners forced to admit with regret that this spirit wasn’t there to speak to them after all. They each looked around the auditorium for other interested parties, keen to find out where this story would find its home.
Not as keen as Claire. She was becoming more than a little anxious again. She had an exceptionally clear vision of someone losing their life. It was unpleasant to witness even as a retrospective psychic image.
Where were the takers? Someone shy at the back of the theatre perhaps? Her eyes squinted, peering through the dazzling stage lighting to see if she was missing anybody, but was soon convinced that she wasn’t.
Examining her ethereal image once again, she hunted for what she fervently wished would prove pertinent information to one audience member. Clammy hands began their clawing at her faith. Pleading with the powers that be that someone, somewhere was perhaps biding their time for the right piece of evidence before declaring their connection to whomever spirit was with her now, she struggled to maintain her composure.
“It’s a busy street. Someone is there helping.” Squinting even more, she tried to find more empathy with the scene. “I can’t see who has died very clearly. I think it’s a lady, but the image isn’t sharp. It’s rather blurry.” Her attention raced through the vision to find something, anything, to clarify.
Angharad fidgeted in her seat. Attaining a tranquil state of mind was difficult to begin with. Then, all of a sudden she became calm and still, overcome with a peculiar, ethereal smog. It seized her very sense of herself until she didn’t feel like her at all. It was an experience of being lost yet assured she was in the right place.
There came a sense of rising above her body, above what she usually thought of as herself sitting in her little car. Looking down from high in the heavens, she felt a lightness and a comprehension of truth that would have taken her breath away if breathing was something she was even aware of.
As her mind adjusted to its new surroundings, a vision entered her sphere of awareness. She couldn’t decipher it yet, but it was becoming clearer.
Familiar with the concept of experiencing visions in meditation—some of her former colleagues had been what she had described as ‘flaky’ –she’d always imagined they’d simply dropped off to sleep and later falsely recalled their dream as a ‘psychic vision’.
Was she in the middle of a dream? Not floating high above her physical body at all. Of course. It made sense, didn’t it? She’d fallen asleep at the roadside and was dreaming. From her floaty state, she laughed quietly to herself.
The vision in her dream was forming readily. She recognised it and was pleased with herself. It was a bus! Why on earth was she dreaming of a bus?
The dream bus came closer and closer. She wondered what it meant. What could it mean when you dreamt of a bus? Different dreams were supposed to mean things weren’t they? And not usually what one might expect, either. Shaking her head, she decided it was silly. Why did people always try to make things deeper than they were? She thought the obvious connotations were probably the true ones. That’s if they meant anything at all.
Memories of a dream about a math's lesson at school came to mind. All the desks apart from hers had faced the black board. It clearly meant she was struggling with maths, which she had been.
Other dreams returned to her memory too. She, like most people, had dreamed of being able to fly. And after watching the film Jaws, she had been troubled by shark nightmares. She had even had the classic dream of being at work with no clothes on. And she frequently woke from dreaming she was falling.
Somewhere she had read that if you switch a light on in a dream it won’t work. Either a room is already lit when you walk into it, or you cannot escape from the darkness. She had scoffed at the idea, wondering how anyone could possibly test such a hypothesis. She would love sometime to remember a dream where she had successfully switched on a light, just to prove them wrong. Typically she woke with no recollection of any dreams at all.
Why she was dreaming now about a bus, she couldn’t comprehend. She’d used buses quite a lot when she’d lived in Bristol, but now, back home in Wales, the bus service made that impractical. She had relied on her car for years.
As she pondered its meaning the dream took on a realism she had never before experienced. The smell of diesel assailed her nostrils, along with burning brake pads, melting with friction. The squealing of rubber on metal, and the hiss of hydraulics as the driver of the bus stomped hard on the brakes, entered her ears as real as could be.
The assault on her senses horrified her. An awareness for the first time of the bus baring down upon her was an unbelievable shock. The image repeated over and over in slow-motion in her mind. All five senses alerted further to the danger as the heat of the bus burned her skin.
The utter panic in the driver’s eyes as they met hers through the glass of the bus’s windscreen pierced her core with their vividness. Closer and ever closer they came, but the noise of the brakes could no longer be heard, instead replaced by an eerie silence; leaving Angharad focussing on what she could see.
As the behemoth monster of the sliding bus neared her fragile body, the drivers face became too close to focus on. The image of his features blurred and mixed with the features of someone else.
The ‘someone else’ took her full attention now. She struggled at first to recognise who it was, and then in bewilderment she knew her completely.
She saw her own anguished face reflected back at her in the shiny glass of the bus windshield. And then it was too late.
As soon as she felt the hulking metal killer against the furthest extremity of her being; as soon as her annihilation was absolutely inevitable, it stopped.
From wherever she had been, Angharad felt suddenly herself again. As though submerged in a pool and finally breaching the surface, she gulped hungrily like a new-born taking its first lungful of air. Her entire body shook as an immense rush reconnected her with her physical self once again.
Sitting in her car at the side of the coastal road to Aberystwyth, she opened her eyes to the darkness. So disturbed was she by the images, so real to her senses, it was almost inconceivable to her now that she actually was where she remembered.
Panic shot through her; adrenaline surging around her body. She quivered uncontrollably with incomprehensible fear. With no option to fight or fly, the energy escaped from her as an enormous sob; her eyes streaming with huge, salty tears.
Chapter Nine
Claire focussed intently on the psychic image. She wasn’t as surprised as she might’ve been if the bus accident had been familiar to any of the audience members when she eventually identified the deceased from her supernatural likeness.
Ann looked almost unrecognisable, but despite her horrific appearance from her fatal injuries, her face was still distinguishable, as was her shorn head and tell-tale home-made clothes.
Claire knew now why she had failed to connect the audience to this psychic vision. Why hadn’t Ann passed over to the other side as Claire had tried so desperately to help her with? What she wanted, and what to do about it, Claire didn’t know. She explained as best she could to the audience.
“I’m sorry. I know what’s happening now. A spirit has been trying to contact me all week. She needs my help, which I will gladly give. We now all know at least how she died. Unfortunately though, I don’t think she does. She doesn’t know she’s dead!”
The audience gasped their astonishment.
“She seems to be having trouble coming to terms with dying. Don’t worry though. I’ll get to the bottom of it. I will help this spirit. She’s called Ann, by the way.”
The rest of the show went by without further interruptions. Connections for many of the audience members were strong and impressive. Apart from her growing concern with what on earth to do about Ann, Claire was very pleased with the performance.
Angharad’s sobbing abated with time. She wasn’t sure how much time and didn’t much care. She adjusted the rear view mirror to look at her reflection. Haggard, exhausted, sallow features peered back. What was happening to her?
Her own reflection in the bus’s windscreen crowded her mind with every thought. Like a wallpaper background to any other idea attempting to force its way in. She had to make sense of what she was seeing and hearing. She simply couldn’t see any way to go on with her life without understanding.
Whatever colour her ragged face had clung onto in her moments of abject terror drained from her features, as she recalled with a clarity she was usually unaccustomed in her addled thoughts, a numbing fact: her friendly shop keeper was the only person she’d had interaction with since Claire Voyant had called her name for the first time. And how many times had she said she was ‘a bit psychic’?
Unthinkably now to her logical mind, Angharad couldn’t even be certain she wasn’t dead. A hard pinch of her arm hurt, but she knew as confirmation of being alive it was poor. She had pinched herself in dreams before with the same result. Upon waking she had realised that the old ‘pinch me, I think I’m dreaming’ proved nothing at all.
Foul tasting, bile filled vomit reached her mouth. She struggled, but swallowed it down. Was she dead? She had always believed that when you died you just ceased to be. That you were no more and just stopped existing. She didn’t hold with an afterlife, assuming people just used the idea of it to make death seem more palatable.
She held that the argument ‘life just doesn’t make sense without it’ was preposterous. The concept of a deity creating life for people to learn whatever it was they thought they had to learn, far from explaining it, made even less sense.
Some people she discussed the matter with even credited they were famous figures from history in a past life. She supposed that helped them feel important. But to Angharad, the concept of life following life had no more purpose than it simply ending.
What did it matter if these lessons were learned or not? Ultimately, she believed, it didn’t give a point to life in any way. She had received no answer to her counter suggestion of ‘Okay, who made God then, and why?’
Now she was confronted with a clairvoyant announcing that she didn’t know she was dead, and the only other person she’d spoken to being psychic too! Should she re-examine everything she’d ever trusted and accept she was living in some sort of afterlife right now?
She couldn’t be certain the other people in Glandy Cross store had been unable to see her, could she? Wasn’t it more likely they were just ignoring her, as usual? Thinking about it, she hadn’t been treated any differently than any other visit to the store. Her natural inclination was to keep to herself.
Straining to remember speaking to anyone else last week, she thought she must have, surely? The letter about her Barnardos volunteer work had arrived just a few days ago on Tuesday morning. They wouldn’t write to her if she was dead. But that concession offered little comfort. It was Tuesday she’d first heard Claire Voyant, Medium at Large, calling her after a night of disturbed sleep, and there was nothing she could recall to verify having been in contact with another human being since.
She could get out of the car right now. She could flag down another driver and ascertain if they could see her, and then she’d know, wouldn’t she?
But the threat of confirmation of her worst fear was more than she could endure. And even if she could be seen, would that prove she was alive anyway? People saw ghosts all the time, and until now, she had believed them to be fools.
Sobs came violently to her throat. Fists from inside thrusting their escape. “No, no, no, no!” she roared. “I want to be alive. I’m sorry if I’ve been complacent since retiring. I loved being self-sufficient. I was really looking forward to helping the disadvantaged children in my new job. Oh why? Why? Why?”
Shouting helped to release the merest fraction of the helplessness she felt. For a stalwart non-believer in God, who was she asking anyway? A sigh deflated her wracked body. Blood accompanied the pain where her fingers had been chewed to the quick. It might have given her something tangible to cling to, but she barely noticed.
She didn’t want to admit that even though she didn’t; hadn’t ever, believed in an afterlife… she whispered it at first, and then accepted in full voice, “I’m dead.”
The realisation left her cold. Why had she not known? How could she have died and not know? Her brain must have protected her from the horror and pain the moment she’d been killed. That would explain why she couldn’t remember. Until now.
She imagined whoever or whatever came for the dead must have come for her too. She hadn’t gone with them because she hadn’t known, had she? And that was why Claire Voyant contacted her. She knew. An expert in her field, trying to help her.
A remarkable calm enveloped her. She understood, at last. And she knew what she must do. It was simple. She would go, as planned, to see Claire. But instead of asking her not to pester her with her nonsense, she would ask her for help—to pass over to the other side.
Chapter Ten
The audience cheered as the show came to its end. Mediumship is an unusual act to perform an encore. It’s not possible to perform another song, or tell a few more jokes. Claire’s only prospect of performing longer was entirely up to Spirit.
Usually forced by time constraints, and sheer exhaustion, to stop her clairvoyance after a few hours, at around half-past nine to ten o’clock, she found a brief rest to get her breath back in the wings o
ften enough to give her fans another fifteen minutes.
As she relaxed, her thoughts drifted. The tour of Wales had only one more night to run. She wanted to make the most of the time. A romantic stroll back to the hotel along the dramatic sweep of Cardigan Bay with her doting husband would be lovely, now she had calmed down. It had looked so beautiful on the walk there when she’d been too preoccupied to enjoy it.
Thoughts again turned to Ann. She had to find a way to help her. Time would have to be made when she was peaceful. Perhaps tomorrow, she would sit and channel and find out exactly what Ann needed.
She waited in the wings, listening to the cheers from her appreciative audience. When Chris appeared on stage and announced his wife would perform awhile longer, the audience cheered even louder. Claire returned to the stage.
“Oh, thank you my loves.” She signalled for them to settle down with flapping hands and went into her quiet trance-like state from where connections came.
“I have a man with me. He’s showing me a fishing rod…” Hands went up, and she succeeded in thrilling her audience for the extra time.
She wasn’t sure how long she’d been at the café lay-by, but there was noticeably less traffic now than when she had stopped. Angharad wondered what peril she was putting herself and other drivers in by even being on the road.
She pondered how she was able to drive her car in her posthumous state. Was the car supernatural too? Or, because she hadn’t passed over yet, could she interact with physical things?
Her hands felt clammy and the steering wheel became cold and hard in her grip. She would get there and be okay. Claire would have the answers.
She had been very lucky, or maybe it wasn’t luck. Perhaps guidance from a higher power had been crucial. Whatever the reason, she considered it most fortunate that the psychic shopkeeper was the only person she’d been in contact with.
Blurred Lines: A box-set of reality bending supernatural fiction (Paranormal Tales from Wales Book 9) Page 33
