The Ghosts of Tullybrae House

by Veronica Bale

  The second part would be filmed at night, when the “ghost hunting” crew would try to catch evidence of the hauntings. For this they would use a combination of hand-held cameras and stationary ones that had been rigged around the house in strategic locations. They would also use electromagnetic frequency detectors, infrared equipment, audio recorders, and a generous dose of exaggeration at every bump and creak.

  Emmie spied the show’s host, Elena Seaton-Downs, from the drawing room window when the crew arrived, and watched her covertly for a minute or two. She reminded Emmie very much of Lady Rotherham. Both were high-energy and more than a touch flaky. But Ms. Seaton-Downs had none of Camille’s genuine warmth. Deciding she wasn’t Elena’s biggest fan, she retreated to her nursery.

  Lady Rotherham soon ferreted her out.

  “Sweetheart! What are you doing in here?” she demanded, breezing into Emmie’s sanctuary.

  For a brief moment, Emmie resented having her privacy invaded.

  Get a grip, Em, she quickly chastised. It’s her house, she can go where she wants.

  “I’m working, boss,” she answered laughingly instead.

  “Oh, pshaw. Don’t worry about all that now. Come and meet the medium. It’s so exciting—a psychic medium here, at Tullybrae. She’s a nice lady. Carol is her name. Carol Bowman. You wouldn’t think she’s anything other than ordinary to look at her.”

  “I promise, I’ll come in a bit. You look great, by the way, Camille.”

  “You think?” Lady Rotherham plumped her stiff coif. Blood red nails gleamed in the morning light from the nursery’s oriel windows. “I’ve had my makeup done by the show for my interview. I’ve been ‘in Makeup’—Oh, I’ve always wanted to say that.” She clapped her hands gleefully. “Oliver can’t take his eyes off me. And between you and me, my dear, neither can some of the young chaps from the camera crew.”

  Waggling her fingers in a farewell gesture, she glided from the nursery. Emmie shook her head. Well, at least the lady was optimistic.

  “In a bit” turned into an hour. Contrary to what she had been hoping, Lady Rotherham did not forget about her. “Emmie, come out here,” she’d called from the other end of the second floor hallway, rather more commanding than Emmie was used to.

  Reluctantly, Emmie rose from her desk, pausing at the door. The Highlander was with her still. She was glad of it. As long as he was with her, she wasn’t alone.

  As if reading her thoughts, his presence strengthened. She imagined he had embraced her, offering her encouragement and assurance that it would all be okay. There was no reason to fear the medium.

  That’s what it was, she realized—fear. Emmie was afraid of the psychic. She was afraid the woman would see the Highlander. Emmie didn’t want anyone to know about the Highlander. He was her secret.

  But it wasn’t just that. Emmie was deeply afraid that the woman would see more than just the spirits in the house. That she would be able to see her, Emmie. She was afraid that the medium would cut right through her fragile exterior into her soul.

  Would she see that Emmie was losing her marbles?

  With the Highlander trailing her down the hallway, Emmie caught up to the camera crew. They were in one of the bedrooms-turned-storage rooms. She hung back, observing from the hallway, though she couldn’t see much of what was going on inside, since the (notably rotund) sound guy was blocking the door. Nevertheless, she caught a glimpse of the medium. Carol Bowman, Lady Rotherham had called her.

  She was heavy-set, but tall. Her short, fluffy hair was dyed a uniform apricot colour, and her face was round and soft and unassuming. It was obvious that she’d been to Makeup for her on-camera appearance, yet the makeup artists had not done much other than to smooth her already smooth complexion with foundation. Looking at her, Emmie had the feeling that this had been her choice, not Makeup’s. Other than a pair of beaded earrings that looked hand-crafted, the woman was unremarkable. No wild costume jewellery, no flamboyant scarves or loose skirts. In essence, not the caricature fortune teller Emmie had in her head.

  “This was her bedroom,” the woman was saying. Her hands were in front of her, palms down and fingers splayed.

  “Hers—you mean the woman spirit?”

  This was Elena Seaton-Downs, and the question was said with something akin to sheer amazement. The same amazement she showed for every show. In every bedroom and every hallway and with every statement of psychic “fact.”

  Having watched the show before, Emmie knew what the host of Haunted Britain looked like. Elena Seaton-Downs was a slim woman in her mid-forties. She had dark hair and a heavy fringe bang which accented large blue doe eyes. Those eyes looked good in the night vision cameras when they were wide with fright. Emmie suspected the host knew this of herself, and knew how to play it up to elevate the drama.

  If anything could be said of her, Elena certainly knew her job.

  “She was very proud of the window in particular,” the medium continued. “Used to stand here each morning and look out over her land. I feel like she’s a motherly figure. A nurturing figure.”

  “Can you imagine?” Elena Seaton-Downs exclaimed.

  “I always felt like she was watching over me,” Lady Rotherham piped up, and the cameraman panned to the left. “When I was a girl I would often feel at night that someone was tucking me in and stroking my hair.”

  The statement gave Emmie pause. She recalled her own similar experience, and wondered if the medium could actually see the countess. If she was here, in the room with them.

  Could she see the Highlander?

  Chillingly, at the exact same time as the though popped into her head, the medium, Carol Bowman, stopped suddenly, and turned to look at her. An odd expression crossed her plain, pleasant face.

  For a fraction of a second that felt like an eternity, the woman and Emmie stared at each other.

  No, thought Emmie. Don’t tell my secret. Please. It’s mine. They can’t know.

  “What is it? Are you sensing something?” Elena touched the medium’s arm, her voice expertly hushed.

  The medium opened her mouth to speak. But then, she shook her head, and looked away. “This energy, this motherly woman, she was also partial to the gardens. Can we go see?”

  “Yes, of course,” Elena stated, as if the house were hers.

  “And cut,” announced the director in a very lackluster way. The camera crew lowered their gear, and suddenly all the pretense was dropped. Where the television personalities had moments ago been absorbed in the house and its ghostly inhabitants, now stood nothing more than a group of people, crowded together in a bedroom packed with centuries’ old stuff.

  “I feel like my hair’s doing something funny,” Elena complained in a much less flimsy voice than the one she used on camera. “Can I go see Cindy before we go down?”

  “I need the loo,” put in the sound technician.

  “All right, everybody, take ten,” the director relented. “We’ll meet in the back garden.”

  Emmie flattened herself against the wall to let the crew pass. Lady Rotherham shot her an excited smile, pencilled eyebrows raised, and squeezed her arm as she went by. No one else seemed to notice her. Carol Bowman was dictating a list of orders to a woman whom Emmie guessed was her assistant. “Then call Roger and tell him I can do five. But don’t let him know I’ve got Puff for the weekend, or he’ll lose his junk. Do they have any more of those shortbread bikkies?”

  Emmie let out a breath as they retreated. She’d been afraid the medium would stop, and would say whatever it was she’d been about to reveal.

  I shouldn’t have come, she thought. I should have stayed in the nursery. In my room. Anywhere but here.

  She fled the corridor for the safety of her nursery, despite a peculiar tug from the Highlander to follow the crew.

  “You don’t control me,” she hissed. She regretted it when the Highlander let go, let her flee. She had the notion that her slight had hurt him. It hurt her to know she’d hurt him.
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  Ten minutes later, Emmie was finishing off a response to an email from Paul Rotenfeld. He was wondering when she might want to come back down to Glasgow to go over the archives. As she clicked the send button, there was a knock on the open door.

  It was the medium. She hovered on the threshold, a tentative smile fixed on her lips.

  “Hi there,” she hedged. “It’s Emmeline, right?”

  Emmie’s stomach plummeted even as the Highlander’s spirits picked up.

  “Emmie, yes.” She smiled pleasantly back. “What can I do for you Carol?”

  “I see I don’t need to introduce myself,” the medium quipped lightly. “I hope you don’t mind the intrusion.”

  “Not at all.” Emmie gestured to the empty chair across from her desk. She cursed herself for not being able to tell the truth: No, I want you to go away and leave me alone.

  Carol entered the nursery, but instead of taking the chair, she settled herself on the window seat. “I love these windows,” she declared, gazing out the glass at the view. “I can see why you chose this space to work in. Light from three different directions. All-day natural light.”

  “When there’s not much sunshine, you take as much as you can of whatever you can get.”

  Carol settled her gaze on Emmie, studying her curiously. The Highlander was practically bouncing—in a spiritual sense, at least.

  “I’m sure you know that I want to talk to you.”

  Emmie nodded, resigned. “But do you have time? Didn’t the director say you only had ten minutes? That was five minutes ago.”

  “Oh, don’t listen to Greg. No one else does. When he says to take ten, it means we actually have thirty. Rule of thumb with him is to triple whatever he tells you. You looked a little startled earlier when I saw you in the hallway. You didn’t want me to start talking.”

  “Maybe,” Emmie admitted.

  “Sometimes, when I’m listening—sensing, reading, whatever you want to call it—I tend to blurt out whatever I’m picking up without thinking about how it might come out, or who might not want to hear it.”

  “Oh…kayyyy,” Emmie drawled when Carol paused, looking quizzically at her.

  “Do you know about the woman? The one who follows you around? She’s attached to this house.”

  “The countess?”

  “No, not her. Although she does like to hand around you, too. No, this is a little old lady. Wiry thin, black dress, grey hair worn in a finger wave style.”

  Emmie raised an eyebrow.

  “I wouldn’t quite say the nineteen twenties. Maybe thirties or forties was her era. No? You don’t know who that could be?”

  For a moment, Emmie wondered if the woman might be her grandmother. But it didn’t seem likely. From what she could remember, her grandmother had been quite tall and heavy. And her hair had had the thin, white, wispy look of a cirrus cloud. Far from anything one could call a finger wave.

  “Sorry, can’t think.” Teasingly, she added, “Aren’t you supposed to be able to tell me that kind of stuff? You’re the psychic.”

  Carol gazed fondly at Emmie. “If they want me to know, then yes. But this one, she’s blocking me. Telling me, in her way, that she’s not important to the house’s story. I get the impression that she doesn’t consider herself an active haunting—although, I think there’s one person in this house that would disagree.” She laughed and shook her head when, again, Emmie lifted a brow. “Never mind. What I can tell of her is that she belongs to the house, and she follows you around. Kind of like a mother figure, or a guardian. Back in the bedroom, when I went to speak, she was there, standing in front of you in my mind’s eye. And she told me to leave you alone, to not talk about you while the cameras were rolling. She’s very protective of you.”

  Emmie sat back in her chair and folded her hands in her lap. She contemplated the woman, chewing on her lip as she thought. “Okay. Well, the cameras aren’t rolling right now. Have you come to tell me what you were going to say?”

  “Only if you’re okay with it, sweetheart. If you’re not comfortable, I can walk away and we can leave it at that.”

  The fact that the medium was giving her a choice took Emmie aback. She took a minute to absorb the offer, to think about what she wanted. It surprised her, but she found that she actually did want to hear what the woman had to say. The Highlander certainly did. Or he knew what the woman was going to say and wanted Emmie to hear it.

  “I’ll hear it,” she said evenly.

  “Oh, good,” Carol breathed. “Because ever since I picked up on it, it’s been getting louder and louder. You are aware, then, of the young man that’s been hovering around you?” When Emmie blanched, Carol concluded, “I see. Yes, you are.”

  “Can I ask—why does he hand aground? Why is he so interested in me?”

  The woman looked at her oddly. After a moment, she spoke, evading Emmie’s question. “You’re an old soul. Did you know that? People like to use that expression far too often, but they’re rarer than you’d think, those old souls. You’re one of them.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She shrugged. “Oh, nothing. Most of the time. But I wanted to tell you—this person,” she gestured up and down at Emmie herself, “this is not you. It’s not going to change anything. You will become what you’re meant to become, no matter how hard you try to be something else.”

  Emmie’s brows drew together, somewhere between confused and defensive. “And what does that mean?”

  Carol shook her head, undeterred by her reaction. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I don’t always know. It’s just the impression I get. Anyway, back to what I picked up on earlier. The young man, he’s hanging around you for a reason. I think you’ve already worked out that he wants something from you, but you don’t know what it is.”

  “Do you know?”

  “I don’t. But I can say that, whatever it is, it is in your power to give him. I’m getting that very strongly. You can do what he wants you to.”

  Emmie’s voice was small. “Do I have to?”

  “Of course not. No one has to do anything. It is also within your power to choose not to, always.”

  Finished with delivering her message, Carol smiled encouragingly. Then she stood, and started towards the door. As she was leaving, Emmie called out.

  “Wait.”

  She stopped and turned back, waiting patiently as Emmie grappled with the right words.

  “I feel like… I don’t know, like he’s protecting me. Or watching out for me. Like he knows something about what’s dangerous—or who’s dangerous—that I don’t. Does he think… I mean, is Dean somehow dangerous, or a threat? Or he’s not good for me or something?”

  For several seconds, Carol stared at her, confused. Then she broke into a laugh.

  “Oh, dear me no, sweet child. He’s jealous. How have you not figured it out? Your Highlander is absolutely smitten.”

  Emmie nearly fell out of her chair. “Smitten?”

  “Mmm hmm,” Carol nodded emphatically. “Head over heels, and not shy about it. And by the way, he wishes you would stop thinking of him as ‘Highlander.’ He’s telling me quite clearly that he gave you his name for a reason.”

  CAEL. HIS NAME was Cael. And he wanted her to know his name.

  He was real. She was not imagining him, wasn’t going mad. Which, surprisingly, made the whole thing all the more frightening.

  A ghost. A dead person. He had… what? The hots for her? A crush on her? Somehow, those terms seemed too dismissive, too juvenile.

  Emmie had been shocked when Carol told her. But it was not because she hadn’t know. She had known—on some level that her conscious mind preferred to ignore—that his feelings for her were deeper than the platonic interest of one sentient being in another. The shock came from having it confirmed by an outsider, by someone who did not belong to the inner, private world which she’d thought, until then, was the only place in which Cael was real.

  With that confirmation, the s
ubconscious narrative which she’d constructed for herself to validate his existence was pitched sharply into the forefront of her brain, made all the more real because it was real to someone else, too.

  Now it was all obvious to her. Of course his feelings were deeper. When he watched over her at night, when he followed her around the house. When he wanted her to feel the things he felt and see the things he saw—

  Even worse was the fact that her conscious mind was forced to consider her own feelings for him. To admit that those feelings… were reciprocated.

  She had feelings for the Highlander. For Cael. That scared the hell out of her most of all.

  He was dead. How could one have feelings for one who was dead? What did that say about her, about her state of mind? About her stability of mind? If she thought she was going mad before, now madness seemed the better option. At least when one was crazy, it was all in one’s mind.

  No, no. She, Emmie, had to do one better than crazy. She was falling apart over something real, something that frightened her and drew her in at the same time. It tightened its grip on her, squeezing her more and more each day, and yet it wasn’t enough to cause her to turn away.

  This was what had happened to her mother. Emmie was destined to end up just like her after all.

  Cael seemed to recognize that Emmie’s anxiety had reached new heights. Unless she was imagining it, his hovering took on a possessive quality. He probably felt the anxiety rolling off her like heat from a convection oven. She could not pretend that she didn’t know why he was protective of her, nor could she pretend that she wasn’t aware of how he felt about her. It was all out in the open. They were looking at each other now with no pretense.

  She knew. And he knew she knew.

  She wandered about the house aimlessly, arms wrapped tightly around herself, unable to shut Cael out. Unwilling to shut him out.

  The second day of filming, the camera crew went about setting up their equipment for the night’s “ghost watch,” snatching covert glances at the waif that drifted from room to room, pale and drawn. When she was out of ear shot, they tossed one another snide comments.