Gifted

by Campbell, Jamie

  “I have to admit we did the same thing when it first started happening a few weeks ago. I had almost convinced myself I was ready for the loony bin,” Charlie confessed.

  “You wouldn’t be the only one, my dear girl. The most important thing to do when you return is to start talking to the spirits. That way, they can see that you are open to communicating with them. They will do everything in their power to get their message through to you once they realise you want to help.”

  “How do we communicate?”

  “Every time you feel their presence, just say something to the room. They will respond. A lot of people ask them for a sign, such as playing with the lights or moving something. It’s quite tiresome for them to do party tricks over and over again so try not to make it repetitive. They are trying to tell you something, not just amuse you. Another thing you can try is to sit in front of a mirror and stare at your reflection. Some people believe that if you allow yourself to be open, your reflection will morph into that of the spirit. There is a whole belief out there that mirrors hold some kind of other dimension. I’m not completely convinced of this yet, but I have heard of some good arguments for it.”

  “Could that work for any reflective surface? I know I saw a man’s face in the reflection of a window one night. He was just staring at me and then all of a sudden he lunged at me,” the memory still brought a shiver to Charlie’s spine.

  “Any reflective surface fits the profile. The idea is that it’s not really a reflection of our world, rather a parallel world that is similar to ours. In that world, we all have a twin yet we aren’t the same person. If you look hard enough into the reflection, you can see the real world behind ours. As I said, I’m not convinced yet but it’s worth a try when all else fails,” Stuart glanced at his watch as he finished speaking.

  Blair tried asking one last question before their time was up. “Do you have any last tips on how to survive the haunting?”

  “Just be careful. Like anything in life, you have your good and bad things. Some spirits are good and will only stick around long enough to resolve their issues. Bad spirits, on the other hand, will hurt you if they so desire. You must be diligent and careful when you are dealing with them. Don’t let your guard down for even a minute. Rahni will be more susceptible, so keep a close eye on her. I’m sorry I have to cut this meeting short. It’s been such a pleasure meeting you both. Staff meetings and budget discussions wait for no man, unfortunately.”

  “We really appreciate you taking the time out for us. I think I speak for Charlie and myself when I say we’ve certainly learnt a lot.”

  “Any time spent educating is time well spent.” The three of them stood from the leather couch and were shown to the door. “Give my love to Catey. I’m sorry I couldn’t spend more time with her at James’ funeral. She seemed best left with her family. Is she coping okay?”

  “She’s doing better. Blair and I decided to spend the summer with her because I was so worried about her. She has her bad days still but is slowly getting through it. It’s going to take a while.”

  “That’s to be expected. It was such a terrible tragedy. I hardly believed it when I first got the news. You don’t expect someone so young to be taken away.”

  “No, you don’t. Anyway, thank you again for your time. I’ll make sure Cate knows you said ‘hi’.”

  They shook hands again before return to the corridor outside. Stuart picked up some books from his desk and hurried away in the opposite direction. If the students walked with a purpose, he walked with a mission. He scampered through the crowd like a bull in Pamplona at festival time.

  Blair and Charlie slowly meandered back to their car. They were processing and replaying what they had just learned. It seemed like there was a whole world out there they didn’t know about. It had given them a few ideas, however. Charlie was considering the mirror theory. She was keen to try it at least once. When she was younger, she and a group of friends had heard that if you stare into a mirror and recite ‘Bloody Mary’ fifty times in a row, she would appear. Who exactly Bloody Mary was didn’t matter, it freaked her out enough so she couldn’t look in a mirror for a week after trying it. Mary never appeared, but it was an interesting concept anyway.

  They reached the car after a considerable walk and negotiated the city traffic before getting back on the highway. They drove the four and half hours until they arrived back in Pickerton and then Sage Manor. It was just on dusk. They carried their overnight bags into the house and put them in the blue room. Charlie filled Cate in on their meeting with Stuart while they ate toasted sandwiches for dinner. She was happy to hear he had been so accommodating for them. Old friends really were the best type of friends to have.

  “… So apparently we have to talk to spirits more. That way, they will understand we are trying to communicate and understand them,” she finished.

  “I guess all we can do is try. I’m glad the séance is only a day away. I want it over and done with,” Cate replied. “Maybe we should take some pointers from Rahni. She has been going on about Alice all day today. Alice did this, Alice did that.”

  “Did she say anything interesting?”

  “She reckons Alice used to live in this house. I told her she wasn’t on the record as being an occupant. I got into trouble for not believing her,” Cate rolled her eyes, still sceptical.

  “I agree with you. I don’t remember an Alice being an owner. Unless, she might have been part of the staff?”

  “Who knows? I just know if I hear the name Alice one more time today, I may go crazy.”

  * * *

  That evening, Charlie and Blair went straight to bed. They were tired from the long drive. As they lay back on the pillows, they noticed the feeling of the dark cloud had returned. With the lights on, they tried to go to sleep. Once again, Charlie dreaded having another dream. Her fears were unfounded for that night, however. They slept soundly until morning.

  The alarm clock awoke them from their slumber. They quickly showered, dressed and had breakfast. Just as they were tidying the kitchen, Cate came in dressed in her gardening apron.

  “You have to see this,” she declared before turning around and rushing back out the door. Charlie and Blair followed her through the hallway and out to the conservatory. The room was quite dark due to the rain outside. Normally, the sun would have been streaming in and lighting every corner of the room with a warm glow. Cate took them to the right-hand corner of the room where she kept her seedlings. She would grow them inside until they were strong enough to be planted in the garden outside. She was proud of her makeshift nursery.

  “They are all dead!” She moaned and pointed at the pots. All they contained were brown and shrivelled pieces of plants.

  “Did you water them?” Blair asked.

  “Of course I did! Just yesterday, they were all healthy green little seedlings. They were ready to be planted in the garden. I was just waiting for the rain to stop. They were my babies.”

  “What do you think caused them all to die overnight?” Charlie patted her sister on the back, trying to make her feel better.

  “I bet it was them. They would have seen these were my pride and joy and decided to kill them all. This is personal now.”

  “I can’t believe I’m the one to say this, but you can’t jump to conclusions. Why would the spirits want to kill your plants?”

  “Because they don’t like me. They can see I’m teetering on the edge and want to throw me right over,” Cate was holding back tears as she spoke.

  “It’s okay,” Charlie continued to pat her back. “You can plant new ones. Blair and I will help you and before you know it you’ll have a whole set of new plants for your garden.”

  They left Cate to commiserate over her dead seedlings. Charlie didn’t like the way her sister had overreacted. She thought she had been improving over the last couple of weeks. Maybe she was just having a bad day.

  They retrieved the drawings they had taken of the property plans and laid
them out over the kitchen table. They started with the one Charlie had drawn of the estate grounds.

  “Hey, what was the name of the property the policeman had protested against redeveloping?” Blair asked.

  “Red Hen Estate. Why?” Charlie looked at the drawing, trying to see what Blair was seeing.

  “The estate shares a boundary with this one, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, there is a fence we share that runs right down the side of the property.”

  “Then most of the Red Hen Estate used to be Sage Manor’s. You can see here, the grounds used to be larger. On the very side you can see the words ‘Red Hen Estate’ over the boundary. Now Sage Manor is smaller, they must have given land over.”

  “In that case, because so much land was sold, Red Hen wouldn’t have been large enough to subdivide unless the sale had already gone through.” Charlie was starting to connect the dots in her mind.

  “So, when the policeman was trying to save the estate, he was really talking about the land that used to be Sage Manor’s,” Blair said excitedly.

  “Which connects him again to Sage Manor. We already have him pegged as a friend of the family because he took Eve to the Debutante Ball. Now, we have him trying to protect the land years after the Reigns moved.”

  “Interesting, but it doesn’t really tell us anything.”

  “No, but at least we’ve learned something new. What about the house plans? Let’s look at them.”

  They put away Charlie’s drawing and focused on Blair’s for a time. They looked at every room, trying to find something that was different to the current house. Almost straight away they found an obvious change in the plan.

  “There,” Charlie exclaimed. “The conservatory used to extend further out. Where the conservatory is now, there used to be a long dining hall. Behind that, was the old conservatory or day room.”

  “So when we were digging in the garden the other day, we were really digging underneath the room.”

  “Exactly. When we start looking for whatever was buried out there, we should start further back in the garden. We might just find it after all.”

  “It’s a pity it’s raining,” Blair said as he watched the rain run down the window outside. “Otherwise, we could start straight away. I’m dying to know what’s buried out there.”

  “Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s important. It wouldn’t have appeared in my dream unless Eve really needed me to find it. What else is different on the plans?”

  They kept looking through all the drawings. Besides the dining hall, there was also a large outbuilding that was now gone from the estate. It was listed as a stable. Charlie imagined it would have been used to house the horses and carriages. It would have been the equivalent of a car garage for the nineteenth century.

  In the plans, the downstairs powder room was missing. It was just a free space in the hallway underneath the stairs. It was obviously added later for the convenience of new owners. It would have been a pain having to trudge all the way upstairs just to use the bathroom. It was one addition that Charlie approved of.

  Other than those few rooms, the house was substantially the same as the original plans. The upstairs level was exactly the same with no changes whatsoever. It was interesting to see that a house so old really stood almost as it had all those years ago. Thinking about all the changes the new country had gone through over that same time period made it even more miraculous. Sage Manor had stood throughout all the country’s modern growth. It saw the rest of the country being discovered by the great explorers, it saw the federation of Australia, both the world wars, and then the bicentennial and millennium. It was impressive to say the least. They sure knew how to build things to make them last in the olden days.

  Cate stuck her head into the kitchen. “Charlie, I’ve just found all these old photos. Do you feel like going through them with me? I’m not sure which ones are our family and which are from James’.”

  “Sure,” Charlie stood up and followed her sister, leaving Blair to go through the rest of the plans. She doubted whether he would find anything else.

  They went into the study where an array of photos were spread right across the desk. Rahni was sitting in the seat, studying all the photos and helping her mother to sort them. Charlie dragged a chair over from against the wall, Cate did the same. They picked up each photo one at a time and checked the back to see if there were any clues about the subjects. Most were blank or just had a year stamped on them. They were all either black and white or sepia. They were in good condition for their age. The sizes ranged from small, almost passport sized to large A4 sized ones.

  Charlie picked up a photo of a man with a moustache, he looked familiar. “This is our grandfather, George Lane. He was only young when he had it taken.” She handed it to Cate to write on carefully.

  Cate studied the man’s face. “He was good looking. I see where we all get it from,” she joked. The comment made a smile spread across Rahni’s face.

  Most of the photographs couldn’t be identified or discernable from which family branch they belonged to. Cate found a half-empty photo album and started to slot them into the pages. It was a pity all the people would never be identified. They were someone at one stage. People loved and cared for them enough to take their picture. Yet now they were just lost in history.

  Rahni was holding onto one of the pictures, staring at it. It was of a woman dressed in a maid’s uniform of a black pinafore. She wore sensible shoes and had her hair pulled back off her face in a lace bonnet. She was smiling at the camera and had a serenity to her face that drew you in. There could have been anything else in that photo but all you saw was her.

  “This is Alice,” Rahni stated.

  Charlie and Cate both looked at her before exchanging glances. Finally, Cate spoke. “What do you mean, Honey?”

  “This is a picture of Alice,” she said matter of factly, as if she wasn’t heard the first time.

  “It can’t be, Sweetheart. These are photographs of our family. Alice wasn’t in our family. Didn’t you say yesterday that she used to live in this house?”

  “She did live in the house and this is her.”

  Cate took the photo and turned it over to see if there was anything written on the back. She gasped when she saw the handwritten description. Scrawled on the photo in messy writing was the name Alice Bardot and the year of 1882. She held it up for Charlie to see.

  “That’s impossible!” Charlie exclaimed.

  Cate handed the picture back to Rahni and went to the filing cabinet. She opened the middle drawer and started flicking through the files. She was almost at the back of the drawer before she found what she was looking for.

  “James had a copy of his family tree. His grandmother gave it to him before she died. They had gone right back as far as they could.” She extracted the sheet of paper from the filing cabinet and unfolded it. It was a large piece of paper with a few holes that betrayed the wear it had suffered over the years. She spread it over the top of the desk and searched through each name, trying to find Alice.

  All three of them were bent over the document, scanning their eyes over each limb of the tree. They went through the list of names, looking at each member of the Sinclair family. A few braches up from James Sinclair was the name they were looking for, Alice Bardot.

  “There she is!” Cate exclaimed. She tried to work out the relationship she had to James. “She’s James’ great-great-grandmother. She married John Sinclair and had three children.”

  “Oh my God. Rahni, did you know that Alice was a part of the family?” Charlie looked at her niece who was sitting quietly, still holding the picture.

  “No. She didn’t say she was.”

  “Did she tell you about when she lived in the house? Did she own it with her husband?”

  Rahni shook her head. “She cleaned and cooked. She said that she makes the best sponge cake anyone has ever tasted.”

  “Cate, do you realise what this means? Your family has lived h
ere before. In this very house! It can’t possibly be a coincidence.”

  “I wonder if James knew about it. I don’t see how he could. I mean, Rahni wasn’t talking about Alice before he died,” Cate couldn’t believe what they had found.

  “I told Daddy about Alice,” Rahni piped up.

  Cate stared at her for a moment. “Daddy knew about Alice? What did he say when you told him?”

  “He said it was nice to have a friend to protect you. He believed me straight away.”

  “How long have you been talking to Alice?”

  “Ever since we moved in,” Rahni said innocently. She wasn’t sure if she was going to get in trouble or not and chose her words very carefully.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you only tell Daddy?”

  “He said to keep it a secret. He said that special friends should be kept quiet otherwise it might upset you. I was only doing what Daddy told me to do,” she said defensively.

  “It’s okay Honey. I believe you now, you know that? You can tell me anything and I will believe you. I promise,” Cate bent down and gave her daughter a hug to reassure her. She couldn’t believe how much James had been keeping from her. He obviously thought what she didn’t know, wouldn’t hurt her. She wasn’t sure what hurt her more, having now known the information or knowing that James had kept it from her. “Why don’t you go and play upstairs for a bit?”

  Rahni nodded and left the room.

  “James would have only been trying to protect you,” Charlie said, seeing her sister visibly upset.

  “I know. It’s funny, James always said he felt pulled to this house for some reason. As soon as we saw it, he knew we’d buy it and live here forever. I thought it was just because it was a beautiful old house. Obviously, he knew better.”

  “You don’t know he knew about Alice. He might not have made the connection.”