Understandably disappointed, I settled onto a wooden folding chair opposite her and awaited instruction, taking in the familiar paintings of Joy’s spirit guide, an imposing white wolf that graced the tan, stucco walls, along with half a dozen fanciful dream catchers and a couple of framed, autographed photos of cast members from the original Star Trek television series. Evidently, Psychic Joy was a die-hard Trekker.
“Before we get started, please go ahead and make your donation.” She pointed to a narrow, silver box also positioned on the tabletop.
For an instant, doubt reared its ugly head. Could Mark be right? Was Joy just a shrewd woman who knew how to read unhappy people and tell them what they wanted to hear?
I let the reservation come and go. It might be irrational, but instinct told me to trust Joy Ebersole. So I placed sixty dollars into the little tin, and then watched her retrieve a pen and pad of paper from a drawer on her side of the table.
“I’ve been meditating on this all week.” Her silver bracelets chinked down her arm as she pushed aside the stack of Tarot cards to make room for these other items. “Each time I make a little progress, the shroud thickens and I get booted from Spirit Land. Which is why I think we’d be better served today by doing some automatic writing.”
On previous visits, I’d learned that automatic writing allowed disembodied entities to access a medium’s body. The departed conveyed messages to the living who, in turn, benefited from these otherworldly communications. Joy told me to think of it as the written version of a divine speaker box.
I smiled inwardly, knowing that Mark would’ve kicked me under the table after hearing that particular explanation.
She reached over to give my hand a reassuring pat, and then recited a cleansing prayer. She claimed that this ensured that all energy coming through for us would be of the White Light variety—the light of Jesus Christ. Joy Ebersole granted contact only to those messengers who walked in His Light.
“Austin dear, would you mind turning off the lights?”
With a flick of the switch I plunged the room into near darkness, the sole source of illumination coming from the cluster of squat candles at the center of the table and the thin seams of day light seeping in around the plastic blinds. They cast our silhouettes as long, dramatic shadows up one of the walls and reminded me a little too much of last night’s eerie dream and the phantom figures moving in the background.
I gave an involuntary shudder. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.
About to tell Joy that I’d had a change of heart, the pen in her hand sprang into action and rounded letters began to dance across the page. Not supposed to be here…
Joy’s hand paused. “Who isn’t supposed to be here?” she asked the sprit guiding her.
The pen jumped between her fingers once more. It doesn’t want me to tell.
Joy shot me an uneasy look. “Someone else must want in.”
The bad feeling I’d gotten a few moments ago? It was now doing super-sized somersaults in the pit of my stomach, its effect further compounded by watching Joy’s head slowly begin to bob and weave. I’d never get used to her “tuning in” to that other realm.
I jumped several inches in my chair when the house gave off a shuddering groan that sounded a lot like metal straining against wood. This was followed by a blast of cold air that swept the room and scattered the forgotten deck of tarot cards in every direction. It had also snuffed out all but one of the candles, throwing the confined space into deeper shadow.
Mark sure picked a helluva time to bail on me. I could use a mega dose of his trademark skepticism right about now.
The room’s shuttered windows began to clatter in their housings and the timbers of the old bungalow groaned in greater protest from the buffets of wind outside; wind that had seemingly come from out of nowhere to slam against its clapboard siding. Leaves and other small debris sprayed against the glass, adding their own eerie song. And from somewhere in the backyard, Joy’s dog began to howl at the tolling of a lone church bell.
Okay. I was officially unnerved.
All the while her pen skittered across the notepad to scrawl onto the table top, black ink indecipherable against the dark vinyl cloth.
Trancing-out during automatic writing sessions was common enough for Joy. The howling wind, dog and spooky bell effects were not. And what was that smell? It reminded me of rotting oranges. Just like—
…comes for you, her pen furiously wrote on the notepad once more.
“Who’s coming?” I asked, not at all certain I wanted to know the answer.
The entity using Joy’s body paused. Her chin lolled against her chest, eyes hooded, her fingertips gripping the quivering pen. Shadow Walker, she wrote.
As far as I knew, Psychic Joy was not in the business of channeling evil spirits. After all, she’d uttered the dang cleansing prayer and everything! The gooseflesh playing rush hour up and down the back of my neck and arms begged to differ.
I got to my feet, unsure of what to do or say next.
“Be seated!” My ass landed so hard on the folding chair that several of the wooden slats beneath it split. Then the entity possessing my friend trained calculating eyes on me. “Darkness is nigh, child, yet you trifle with this insignificant human.”
The tiny hairs on the back of my neck were now doing the hula.
The entity gave a dry, mocking laugh. “You are wise to fear. The Shadow Walker knows no such fear. It searches for you even now. For the essence of an incubus it must have.”
The essence of a what?
“An Eternal Child. The Dark Fruit of Lilith.”
Even if my brain wasn’t quite processing what I was being told, the entity’s words struck a resonant chord inside me, touched some dormant part of me that made the weird connection. And this time, the tremor that rocked my spine registered an eight-point-oh.
Joy’s face contracted with inner struggle, her head moving in the same erratic fashion. She was fighting the invader. Trying to push it out.
“The advent of your thirtieth year has awakened your true nature. The Shadow Walker senses this, as soon others of its kind will.”
I couldn’t budge from the chair. “Are you responsible for my dreams?”
“The vessel through which I speak is incapable of bringing you closer to your true nature,” it said, ignoring my question. “Nor can it prevent the Shadow Walker’s coming…”
Joy had warned me once that lost, angry souls existed. They clung to the living and reveled in toying with them out of spite or boredom. They often communicated in clever half-truths designed to create uncertainty and fear in the listener.
The scent of decaying citrus intensified and the air collided with itself, a hissing resonance filling my ears. “Reject my counsel and ugly death shall be your reward.”
The rage that had nearly driven me to slit that Texan’s throat last night gripped me with such force that I reeled in my chair. I could move again!
“Yes! Embrace what you are before it is too late,” the entity roared. “Let it guide you to your destiny, to your one true mother. Only she can unite you with your full potential.”
The grief and loneliness of the past month collided with this newfound rage and my voice came out in a low growl. “And you can go back to hell where you belong!”
A thunderous clap shook the bungalow to its footings and Joy’s head fell forward onto the table, her long russet hair cascading around her cherubic face. “Austin?”
I rushed around the table to kneel at her side. “Please tell me you’re okay!”
“About a couple of county lines over.”
The anger, that terrible sense of power building inside me, was subsiding. “You told me you didn’t channel the frickin’ evil dead…”
“Not dead.” Joy straightened in her chair with considerable effort and stared down at the jumble of words scrawled across the pad of paper. “When it took me over,” her glassy eyes widened and she began to tremble, “I saw
something I wasn’t meant to.”
“Should I call John?” John was her husband.
“No! He can’t help me. No one can.” She reached for my arm, but fell forward in her chair, cradling her face in her hands and began to sob. “It saw me, Austin.”
My spine gave another San Andreas shimmy. “Joy, you’re freaking me out.”
She jerked back in her chair, mascara smudged and staining her cheeks, her expression filled with pure terror now. “You have to go.”
“Joy, I—”
She shook her head violently. “Please!”
Pinpoints of light began to dance before my eyes and I struggled to get air into my lungs. Worse than that, Joy Ebersole was afraid of me. I could actually feel her fear.
CHAPTER 4
My hands trembled on the Jeep’s steering wheel the entire way home to Monrovia, my injured palm still itching and throbbing, and the headache I’d woken up with this morning had grown to T-Rex proportions. Talk about the worst birthday ever.
Turning thirty was supposed to be a milestone in a person’s life. Visiting Joy Ebersole today was supposed to offer me some semblance of hope that my biological parents were out there somewhere and traceable. All of that changed with my close encounter of the spookiest kind. The entity claimed that I was an incubus, whatever that was.
The extra-rotten cherry on top of an already rotten birthday cake? Darkness was coming for me in the form of a Shadow Walker, whatever the hell that was.
Did I mention this being the worst birthday ever?
And yet, somehow a part of me knew that the entity had spoken the truth. That it had blown the door wide onto something that, up until yesterday, had lay dormant inside me.
Scarier still, whatever that something was…it wanted out.
CHAPTER 5
After my terror-a-thon at Joy’s and the fiasco with the Texan, I deliberately avoided Mark and Christie Gold. Isolating myself from the reassurance of good friends might exacerbate my present state of anxiety, but they knew me too well. They’d figure out that my jumpiness and mood swings ran deeper than grieving for a dead parent or processing the whole adoption disaster. Imagine explaining to Mark why the injury to my palm wasn’t there anymore.
That’s right. The stinging and itching ceased after a mere two days. All that remained of the wound was a thin, purple furrow where a nasty gash should have been. Talk about irrefutable evidence that I wasn’t altogether me anymore.
Despite the freakiness that had entered my life, I did the classic guy thing. I pretended that everything was fine. Each morning I got up, worked out for an hour, showered, knocked back a Starbucks wet cappuccino, and then drove to my job as a legal assistant at a Pasadena law firm. As though I hadn’t a care in the world. As if I weren’t an incubus.
I still didn’t know what that even meant, and I damn well didn’t want to know. Because a few weeks into the denial game, the comfy fantasy began to pay off.
Early Saturday morning I awoke rested and feeling surprisingly like my old self again.
No mysterious dreams. No uncontrollable urges to make out with the “Y” chromosome side of life again. No pretty, naked strangers with bed-tussled hair and sleepy eyes I couldn’t remember bringing home grinning sheepishly across the pillow at me. Today felt like a real turning point. A first positive step toward moving forward and burying the negative baggage of my past so deep that it couldn’t find its way back up to bite me on the ass.
This epiphany also included discounting any belief whatsoever in the notion that an actual Shadow Walker existed, or that a thirty-year-old legal assistant from Monrovia, California, was a Child of Lilith. That was the plan, anyway.
After a quick breakfast, I rang up a local realtor friend to make an appointment for her to come over and view the house. I’d been ruminating over the idea of selling it for a couple of weeks now, and today seemed as good a day as any to set that idea in motion. So I agreed to her request to swing by her office in Pasadena later that morning to further discuss the matter.
A landmark in the community, the home had been built a full decade before Monrovia became incorporated in 1887, a town that enjoyed the status of being the fourth oldest general law city in Los Angeles County. Its position high atop a hill afforded the property spectacular views of the San Gabriel Valley and the sprawling old Craftsman boasted a prestigious spot on the Registry of Historic Homes, which only added to the home’s prominence. It had also been in my father’s family for five generations.
Correction. It had been in the Iverson Family for five generations. I hardly owed allegiance to a legacy that didn’t belong to me.
Besides, what reason was there for me to hold onto it? Laura was gone. She’d been dead for almost four months. I couldn’t bear another moment of the loneliness and grief of being bound to a place that represented a lifetime built upon deceit and betrayal. I wanted out.
Was this being too emotional? Irrational? Disrespectful?
Too bad.
Plus, the house gave off a weird vibe; and always had.
I had vivid memories from childhood of whispered voices at night coming up through the old heat registers. Sometimes, I’d even glimpse bursts of bluish light through them. On more than one occasion, I awoke to find a tall blonde woman standing in the shadows of my room. She would stare back at me for a moment or two before vanishing. These encounters always left me shaken, but also with a curious sense of the familiar, as if I should have recognized the woman but didn’t. Whenever I confided these bizarre occurrences to Laura, she’d offer an indulgent smile, followed by a reassuring hug, and then chalk them up to a young boy’s overly active imagination. After which she’d tuck me back into bed, kiss me on the forehead, and smile down at me again. “Sweeter dreams, my beautiful boy.”
But as she’d turned to go, I’d see it. A momentary flicker of fear or sadness in her eyes which left me with the vague impression that Laura believed my stories, after all.
An hour after breakfast, I emerged freshly showered and into the bright, warm Southern California sunshine on my way to meet with my realtor friend.
Above me, a lone, circling falcon cried out against the backdrop of the imposing San Gabriel Mountains. The remarkably clear air made every fold and crevice in them seem etched into earth and rock, the dry air laced with the delicate scent of rose and gardenia from Laura’s garden. Surely such a glorious day screamed for an open-air drive.
As luck would have it, the perfect vehicle for the task was parked in the driveway.
Yet another break with the past, I’d retired my old Jeep in favor of the sleek, new Audi convertible that sat winking back at me under the dazzling sunlight. My sole splurge with Laura’s money, there was no reason to feel guilty about purchasing it.
With my first priority of the day underway, the second would entail finding a suitable new place to live. And I knew just where to begin the search.
My cell phone roared to life through the Audi’s Bluetooth as I was pulling away from the realtor’s office and out into busy Colorado Boulevard traffic.
I glanced at the caller’s info displayed on the nav screen and was tempted to let the call go to voicemail. Instead, I held my breath and depressed the button on the console to accept it. “Hey,” I said in a lighthearted tone, hoping to avoid the storm I knew was coming.
“Seriously? You drop an adoption bomb on me. Bail on the birthday dinner my wife went to a lot of trouble to prepare for you. Then you fall off the grid for a couple of weeks.” Mark’s voice filtered through the convertible’s Bang & Olufsen speakers as smooth and bass-filled as though God was speaking to me. “Where the fuck have you been, Iverson?”
Underestimating my new car’s ability to give good phone, I lowered the volume. The entire city of Pasadena did not need to hear me getting the ass chewing of the century.
“Sorry. A lot’s been happening and—”
“Oh, peddle that to someone who doesn’t know you better,” Mark cut me off to say.
“Whenever something bad happens, you pull the same old crap. You shut yourself off and go into your little shell of pain.”
“Mark, I—”
“I’m not finished.” Mark Gold was difficult to reason with when he got fired up. It was even more difficult to argue with him when I knew he was right. “You gotta let us in, Buddy. Chris and I aren’t here just for the good times. We were worried. I was worried.”
My best friend of fifteen years wasn’t an overly sentimental person, and I could already feel a lump forming low in my throat. “I really do miss you guys. And I’m genuinely sorry for pulling a Houdini. Guess I needed some time to sort things out.” Which wasn’t a lie.
“That’s what your buds are here to help you do.”
“If you really mean it,” I said, “how ‘bout you and Christie meet me in West Hollywood in an hour to help me look for an apartment?”
CHAPTER 6
I could hear the reservation in Christie’s voice on our way out of viewing the loft apartment my realtor had found for me online. “It’s…nice.”
“So’s his current place. And, it’s rent-free,” Mark was quick to point out. “At the very least, consider leasing out the house for a year. Then see how you feel about it.”
“Is that how long it takes to get over someone you loved betraying you?”
I didn’t mean to snap at him, but Mark couldn’t conceive of what I was going through. He and Christie grew up with a real mother and father, surrounded by siblings who adored them. He also didn’t know that my hand trembled every time I slipped the front door key into the lock, only to be greeted by dead silence once I stepped over the threshold. Nor did he realize that I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat screaming out Laura’s name. Sometimes, I thought I smelled her perfume in my room.
Lastly, what Mark failed to get was that the Monrovia house was a drowning pool of memories from which I couldn’t escape. It had to go. That, or I’d go insane from grief and resentment.
Incubus Moon Page 3
