by Kim Hornsby
Eve and Carlos were amused to think that some guy with a chip on his shoulder had just spent a whole evening arguing with someone he didn’t know was Moody’s assistant.
I wasn’t as amused. I was slightly bothered.
Finally, at midnight, I was tired and asked Eve to type a tweet from me to Bane from my Moody account, so he’d know it was me.
Just tuning in here
So much time devoted to figuring out how I do what I do
I’m flattered @BaneJackson
#ghosthunt #Moody #ghosts #supernatural”
I went to bed right after we posted, no longer interested in this game. I had bigger things to worry about now.
My mother was coming to stay with us at Cove House.
Chapter 4
We were limited in what we could say with Rachel in The Marshmallow as we headed west to Cove House. I did not want my mother to know anything about Caspian or about my abilities being compromised in such a strange fashion. I especially didn’t want her to know I’d lost my mojo, then got it back in the presence of a ghost who she’d most likely find extremely handsome and desirable without even seeing him.
My mother had been known to flirt with my boyfriends in the past and I knew her well enough to be sure she’d set a beeline for Caspian even though she couldn’t see him. Not that Caspian was a new boyfriend, but my mother would see any man who hung around me as such. It was her thing. She often made herself feel attractive by flirting with men around me. Harry had been immune to her because she was horribly jealous of him and couldn’t stand the fact that she’d been replaced as the most important person in my life. Instead of flirting with Harry, she announced repeatedly that she didn’t find him attractive in the least.
They hadn’t gotten along all that well.
Luckily, Harry didn’t know he was being snubbed by the head flirter of her generation. He was the king of easygoing and didn’t worry much about Rachel and her evil plan to constantly discredit and make fun of him.
Because of my history with my mother and men in my life, I didn’t want her to know that I had this apparition who came and went. Or that Caspian was a ghostly presence I hated to do without. Even after only a week of knowing him, it was hard when he left. Being able to see in his presence made him my new best friend and I did not want my mother to have any piece of him.
I’d been stress eating the whole way to the Oregon coast and was putting away the bag of candy bars I’d had Eve bring when my mother cleared her throat.
“I’ve decided to write a book,” she announced from the backseat of The Marshmallow as we turned off the highway onto a slower coastal road. “A memoir.”
“That sounds like horror,” I said, my thoughts elsewhere.
“It will have a thread of my wicked humor along with the story of raising a gifted child in a family with phenomenal abilities.” Her voice sounded dreamy as I dug into a popcorn bag on my lap and thought about how my mother was the least gifted person in our large and strange family. The only thing that kept me from screaming at her not to write a word about me was the fact that she’d threatened to do this for years and hadn’t written a page yet. I seriously doubted that Rachel knew how to find Word on the computer.
My mother lured Eve into the conversation and between the crunching of the kettle corn and Carlos turning up the radio to drown out Rachel, I heard words like “challenging life,” “single mother,” and “special needs,” to which Eve corrected my mother that special needs does not include children who know the answer to the math problem from hearing it in the teacher’s head.
I tuned out.
I still hadn’t seen or heard from Caspian in days and was worried. Just a bit. At Floatville, I’d half expected to see his form take up one of the smaller doorways, leaning against the door jam. Or, I’d expected to wake in my bedroom in the dead of night and take a deep breath to find the smell of the sea and my eyesight. I’d tried to contact him psychically by just yelling in my head, “Hello? Caspian?” I’d also tried it out loud, at Eve’s suggestion, but wasn’t able to summon my ghost. All I’d done was make Hodor run to the front door thinking someone was coming to dinner.
Turning off the coastal road onto our shell-covered driveway, I heard my mother gasp. “No, no, no, no. This place?”
I imagined Eve looking at her inquisitively. “What’s the matter, Rachel?” Eve said. “Bryn, your mother looks like she’s just seen…”
“Mom?” I didn’t know what had happened.
Carlos stopped The Marshmallow. “Rachel?”
“Is this the house you inherited?” my mother asked with a rusty voice.
“Yes. Why?” I ventured.
“Don’t you remember?” my mother opened the van door and left the vehicle.
“What’s going on?” I whispered.
“No idea,” Carlos said.
“We’re half-way down the driveway,” Eve said. “Carlos stopped and Rachel got out. She’s standing fifteen feet from the van, staring at Cove House like a zombie about to attack a house.” Eve’s voice was lower than usual.
“Do you know why, Eve?” I couldn’t imagine.
“Is it possible she’s been here before?”
The van took off slowly, presumably following Rachel. “Mommy Dearest is perturbed,” Carlos said.
“A play-by-play please.” I’d taken to saying this to get details.
“She’s making tracks now, swinging her arms, hellbent,” Eve said. “OK, now she’s stopped about a hundred feet from the front door, looking up at the third floor. Now she’s shaking her head.”
“Your madre is looney,” Carlos added to which no one denied.
I got out and closed my door. “Mother, what the heck has got into you?” I stood on the ground facing what I thought was the house. “Rachel, tell me right now what you’re doing.”
“This house,” my mother said, her voice getting louder as she approached me. “You and I have been here before.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, my usual denial of anything my mother said.
“You were very young, probably six or seven at the time.” Rachel’s voice sounded ominous like she was about to tell a ghost story. “The owner of the house was a painter, a beautiful older woman. I remember the details like we were here last week.” My mother clutched my arm, my elbow pressing into her side. “Bryndle, this house is haunted. You weren’t able to clear the spirit. And the woman who owned the place was crazy.”
I tried to remember a job where we learned this, but nothing came to mind.
My mother whispered in my ear, her breath fruity like the apple juice we’d shared in the van. “There’s a ghost that can’t be trusted in this place. A ghost who kills Alives.”
***
Although I didn’t know the particulars of what it was like to be a ghost, I assumed Caspian’s time away was like sleeping. He was gone for long stretches of time and said although he never actually laid down and closed his eyes to lose consciousness, nor did he eat, he was simply not present. “It isn’t like I frequent a roadhouse for an ale and await my next calling,” he’d said. In our strange conversation about his physical attachment to me, he’d admitted that showing up in the same room as me, without any effort on his part, hadn’t happened to him ever before, and was new territory for him as well.
“I just arrive and remain so for hours at a time,” he said in that 1850s way of formal speaking that I was getting used to. “Have you ever passed out and woken minutes later confused?”
I’d nodded.
“This is how I feel.” His Spanish accent was slight, but charming. It was easy to get distracted listening to him and watching him speak. I intended to ask him if he roamed Cove House by himself sometimes but hadn’t seen him recently. Had he been here, waiting? If there was a way to summon him, I wanted to know. Having sight continually taken from me was frustrating, like someone constantly blindfolding me for days at a time.
Standing in the driveway with my mother, I
wondered if Caspian was inside now. My mother’s breathing sounded labored and either from the sound of that or the clairvoyance that was returning, I was able to feel her emotions. She was freaked out that I’d inherited a house she feared, and I couldn’t blame her. She told me about running out of this place with her tiny daughter crying, twenty years ago. The artist she remembered was named Belinda, so we solved the mystery of why a stranger would commission me to find the ghost. Belinda knew me from decades earlier.
“Our client was horrified that I’d brought my child to clear the house of the evil spirit,” my mother said, standing next to me, presumably staring at the house. Luckily, it was not raining. “Then, I told her that you were the medium. I don’t know what freaked her out more. Your tiny body talking to a ghost, or me letting this happen.”
I kinda agreed. “Sheesh, Mother. If I had a tiny body, how could you let an evil spirit inhabit me?”
“Oh, the spirit that came to you wasn’t evil. And he didn’t inhabit you. Iit was another ghost that Belinda was worried about. A woman who was spiteful and mean, as I recall.”
In the two weeks of taking ownership of Belinda McMahon’s house, we hadn’t seen another ghost but had had dealings with one we believed was named Jacqueline. Caspian said if anything seemed tricky or mean, it was probably Jacqueline, who came through sporadically. The fact that Jacqueline had once been married to Caspian was of little importance to Caspian when he told me to avoid her. She’d made her presence known to me in the kitchen by taking my coffee one morning. At least, Caspian said it sounded like a trick Jacqueline would play. I’d been drinking coffee and then it was gone. He’d warned me to stay away from her but how do you avoid a ghost? I’d never been able to in my twenty-eight years.
“Was her name Jacqueline?” Eve asked my mother, trying to determine the ghost who allegedly kills Alives.
“I don’t remember if I was even told. We left when the client said there’d been a murder of an Alive in a bedroom.”
I gasped out loud, something I usually left to Eve. “An Alive was killed by a ghost?” That was almost impossible.
“That’s what you said before you started screaming.”
“Jesus, Rachel,” Carlos said. He’d obviously been listening. “How the hell did you sleep at night knowing what you were doing to a young child?”
“Oh, Bryndle loved it. Being a medium made her feel like a grownup,” my mother uttered matter of factly.
“Dios.” I was used to this stupidity, but Carlos made a sound like Rachel was the devil incarnate. “Madre of the Year,” he whispered to himself.
“We’ve spent several nights inside,” I assured my mother, “and everyone is still alive. Maybe the evil ghost is gone,” I said wondering if Belinda had given me the house to banish Jacqueline seeing I was not a tiny body any longer, but a five-foot ten-inch woman. “And now,” I said, “It’s time for you to act like a grownup, Rachel, and come see my new house.” I grabbed her arm and we started for the stairs. I knew which direction we were headed because my vision was returning.
Hoorah. My ghost was back.
I saw the shadow of the house in front of us, the shape of Carlos moving toward it and as things came into focus, I couldn’t help but smile. Caspian was close, although I couldn’t see him yet. I hadn’t decided to tell my mother about my spirit guide, nor had I decided to tell her that when he was present, I could see. I often withheld information about my life. That, and I doled out bits of information to my mother in very small increments, infrequently. Knowledge is power and all that.
“I’m not going in there,” my mother said, stopping dead in her tracks.
I watched Carlos point to the coach house off in the trees. “Eve’ll bring you meals over there this week. Adios.”
Eve looked flustered like Rachel might actually set up camp in a feral cat-infested building. As she looked from the coach house to Rachel and back again, her long black pigtails swinging, she realized I could see her and nodded to me.
“You’re coming in, Mother. No one is driving you off this property today.” My vision was registering colors and I noticed my mother wore blue eyeshadow, something she’d always told me was a fashion no-no. I almost asked her if blue was back in style before I remembered to not focus on her face, to gaze into space unless I wanted her to know my secret.
“Aunt Rachel,” Eve said. “We’ve spent days in the house and no one has harmed us.”
I wondered if Eve was thinking about the hanging chandelier when she said this. Had we walked under that sucker at the right moment, we might have all been killed.
Peripheral vision is a wonderful thing. While I gave the key to Carlos to start loading his equipment into the house, I saw my mother look to the haunted house in front of us, look back to the van, look to Cove House, then the coach house, and finally she clutched my arm tighter.
“I’ll come in, but you need to keep me informed on what you feel Bryndle.”
My mother had no idea that my feelies were mostly in the shop for repairs. Aside from seeing Caspian and him telling me what was going on, and the occasional feeling of intuition like just now with my mother, my ESP signals weren’t in full operating mode and my mother would just have to believe they were. “I will.” I looked up, trying to resemble someone without sight while still casing the joint for an elusive ghost who had to be close by. I didn’t see him.
Eve took my arm and Rachel fell in half behind me, using my cousin and me as a human shield from evil spirits. We mounted the stairs and crossed the porch. Once inside, I saw the chandelier was gone and wondered if the repair man had come back to take the monster down.
Eve yelped, and I summoned my best acting skills to ask what happened. “The dangling death trap is AWOL,” she whispered. “Carlos!”
While my mother spooned me from behind, clutching my upper arms to keep me in place, Carlos ran up the outside stairs to join us at the front door.
“Did the electrician take the chandelier?” Eve asked.
I could still see everything, including the absence of the chandelier, but kept my eyes lowered. “Carlos?”
“No, he did not. What the hell?” He moved past us, walking into the foyer.
“Did the electrician have a key?”
“He most certainly didn’t,” Carlos studied the mattresses under the spot where the monstrous chandelier had been hanging by one thin wire four days earlier.
“I moved it out of the way.” Caspian’s voice came from behind us and I felt my mother spin around, taking me with her, still using me as a human shield.
Caspian stood on the porch in all his swaggerly splendor, looking like a lover I’d pined for.
“Caspian!” my mother said.
My heart sank, my world crumbled, my knees buckled. My awful mother saw Caspian. Not only that, she knew his name. Caspian looked surprised to see the woman hanging on to me and took a deep steadying breath. “Rachel.”
Eve touched my arm on the right shoulder as I shook off my mother and stepped away from her. “You know my mother?” I stared at Caspian. I wanted to cry. I wanted to sink to the floor and sob right then and there. My wonderful ghost knew my mother’s name. And what’s more, she could see him. And obviously knew him, having just uttered his name. Inside my head, I let out a long string of expletives and wept in disappointment.
Rachel took two flirty steps towards Caspian. “Lovely to see you again, Captain.”
I had to fight to keep the popcorn and candy bars from coming back up. Rachel had gone from scared shitless to flirty saloon girl in ten seconds. “My mother sees Caspian,” I said to Eve, my voice sounding like a dying person with nothing to live for.
Caspian looked at me, then Rachel again, then me. “You and she. . .You are her daughter?” A crow cawed close by while Caspian put two and two together. “That explains it then.”
I let the bad news sink in.
Rachel spun around to face me, and I frosted over my gaze to hide the fact I could see. “
This makes sense now. Caspian is still here. He’s the ghost.” She turned to him and grinned. “We have some catching up to do, my friend.”
I gulped down the vomit threatening to ascend my eating pipe.
“Is Bryndle the child?” Caspian looked horrified.
“What’s going on?” Eve whispered to me.
“Rachel and Caspian know each other,” I said. “I’m hoping I’m not their love child.”
“Dios,” Carlos whispered.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
On his way from sniffing the property, Hodor ran right through Caspian causing Caspian to disappear. As did my eyesight.
“Hodor, naughty boy,” Rachel admonished. “You killed Caspian.”
I felt my dog up against my legs and reached to pet him. “He’s gone for now,” I whispered to Eve. “Hodor ran through him.” I was hoping Hodor hadn’t killed my ghost by dispersing his particles forever or anything scientific like that. “And Carlos, Caspian said he moved the chandelier, but didn’t say where. He was too busy having a lovers’ reunion with my mother.”
My mother tittered. “Oh, Bryndle. You and your imagination.”
She didn’t deny it and my hope for a normal world sank to a new hell.
“What just happened?” Carlos looked as disgusted as me.
“Mother, I’d like to hear the full story of you, me, Caspian, Belinda, and this house. Let’s make a fire in the den and have a cup of tea.”
I flicked out TapTap, my collapsible white cane, and started walking.
“Or a good stiff drink of Scotch,” Carlos added.
As I tapped my way to the den, my cane making sweeping arcs across the floor, I sang the song that was on the tip of my tongue now that my mother knew Caspian.
“You’re a real tough cookie with a long history, of breaking little hearts like the one in me, hit me with your pet shark, come on and hit me with your pet shark, hit me with your pet shark, spiral away.”
