The room was empty of guests and I went to stand by the bay window and look around at the various sofas and chairs. Each and every one was festooned with antimacassars. On the backs, the arms—they were everywhere.
Since these things were antimacassars, I wondered what a macassar was.
From behind me came the answer. “Gentlemen used macassar oil on their hair, so antimacassars were used to protect the upholstery. They still have their place today with so many people using mousses and gels, not to mention hairspray.”
My own hair stood up on the back of my neck, and I forced it back down by sheer will power.
“Hello, Aunt Clem. Reading my mind again, are you? With all the clutter in my head, I’m surprised you were able to pick out one thought.”
“Your face is quite expressive, dear, and quite easy to read. No need for me to strain myself by reading your mind.”
Since my back was to her, reading my face must have presented quite a challenge, but I preferred her explanation to the alternative. Then I realized she could see my face in the ornate mirror hung between two tall windows.
“Come on back to my spirit room, Lyris. I feel quite in touch today with my guides. Since this is my day off and I am rested and refreshed, I think we could have a good session.”
Whoa, back up the soul train. I was feeling unsettled enough without activating Aunt Clem’s spirit guides. The less they knew about me the better.
“I wanted you to tell me about the 1943 reunion, Aunt Clem. Since you were there, I…”
“All one and the same, Lyris.” She turned and led the way to her spirit room. For the first time I noticed what she was wearing. Just because she lived in a time warp didn’t mean Aunt Clem dressed to match her décor.
Aunt Clem was a funky dresser. She wore black stretch leggings and a tunic top of deep purple that shimmered in silvery tones as she walked. The fabric was slinky and looked light as air. A black silk scarf tied around her short white curls, and new white Nikes on her feet completed the ensemble.
She led me along the hall to the back of the house, and into the room where the same clients returned year after year for a psychic update. I heard Hollyhock Cottage Bed and Breakfast was booked for the next twenty-five years, and that made me wonder if Aunt Clem planned to run her business from the next level of existence.
The spirit room was in a turret wing and had one stained-glass window to allow muted sunlight inside. The walls were painted ivory and the ceiling was a deep midnight blue. Some kind of luminous paint had been used to dot the ceiling with silver stars.
The bare hardwood floor was coated with a matte finish that glowed in the reflection of the light from the candles. Dozens of candles. They were in sconces on the walls at different levels, in tall holders on the floor, and several in varying sizes on the round table in the centre of the room. A dark cloth covered the table, and three plain wooden chairs waited.
Aunt Clem gestured me to take a seat, then moved the candles to one side of the table. From a chest in a corner she took out an object covered with a black handkerchief. She set this in the middle of the table and took another chair.
Under the handkerchief was the crystal ball. It was a plain globe chopped off at one end so it would sit still and not roll off the table in the middle of a discourse by one of the spirit guides. There was nothing in it. I looked. No images, no scary face peered back at me. Believe me, if there had been a face in there, Aunt Clem would have had to call for the paramedics and their defibrillator.
Aunt Clem had been trying to get me in that room for years. She kept telling me I had the gift too and needed to nurture it. Hah. Not in a million years. Correction, not in two million years.
From inside the filmy sleeve of her shirt, Aunt Clem pulled out a tissue and started rubbing the ball. “Just to clear it a bit, you know.” Then she blew her nose in the tissue before returning it to the sleeve.
“A bit of a summer cold,” she explained. “Or possibly an allergy. The ragweed is early this year, since the heat has been so intense.”
I sat still as a stone.
“Now. I should explain about this crystal ball. It is merely a tool I use to focus my mind and allow my spirit guides to talk to me.”
“Then how do you know things?” I was curious in spite of myself. “Don’t you see things?”
“No, not anymore. When I was a child I used to see people who weren’t there, who were dead. But not anymore. Now, my guides talk to me.”
“You mean, you hear voices?”
“In my head, I hear them talk to me. Not actual sounds. It’s hard to explain. We all have spirit guides, although most people do not accept them or realize how much help they can be to us.”
“Well, I’ve never seen anything that wasn’t there, and nobody is trying to talk to me, so I guess I don’t have the gift.”
“Lyris, psychic ability is something that everybody possesses. At least the potential is there. Everyone can use it if they work at it. And some day, I believe that all humankind will be able to tap into this ability through training and experience. In the meantime, some few are born with a greater skill in this area, call it a more finely developed psychic gene if you want. Maybe science will discover a psychic DNA, although I hope they won’t mess with it too much. I would hate to see the more psychically gifted people cloned and used as weapons against another nation, for instance.”
My eyes must have been bugging out of my head. She looked at my face, which I guess we all agreed was an open book. “I digress. Lyris, I know you don’t want to admit it, but you have one of these highly developed psychic genes. Just because you don’t see things that aren’t there—and don’t forget there are many planes of existence—doesn’t mean you don’t possess the ability to hear your spirit guides speak. You are fighting it, but why?”
I had a couple of dozen good reasons. “Who are these spirit guides anyway. Are they, like, Egyptian princesses or Roman philosophers?”
She laughed. “Certainly not, dear. Oh, I imagine that some psychics have a princess or a philosopher as a guide. Why not? Even princesses and philosophers need jobs when they pass over for the final time. But most guides were just ordinary people when they were here. For instance, one of my own guides was a stonemason who helped build Westminster Abbey in England in his final embodiment. His name is Luke. And another was a nurse in the Crimea. Her name is Florence, but not the Florence, you know.”
With my luck, my guide would turn out to be a former juvenile pickpocket who worked for Fagan and knew Charles Dickens.
“Not so, dear.” She was reading my face again. “Only souls who have lived good, useful lives are allowed to guide those still on this earth.”
Now, this made no sense to me whatsoever. “Do you mean, all the nasty and evil people who die are not allowed access to the psychic hotline?”
“Certainly not. God does not allow it. You see, Lyris, the soul’s journey takes it through many earthly lives, the goal being to advance, grow with each passage. Only those who have advanced enough are permitted to become guides for others.”
“So these guides are kind of like angels.” Why was I asking these stupid questions instead of concentrating on the reunion?
“No. Angels are something else. I will explain angels another time. Right now, just remember that your guides are sent by God to assist you. All you have to do is be still and listen.”
“But you had this skill since you were a child, Aunt Clem. I’m sure I was perfectly normal when I was a child.”
“That doesn’t mean a thing. And who’s to say what is normal? I mentioned I saw spirits when I was a child. But as I grew up I lost the ability, and by the time I was in my teens, I had forgotten all about my previous experiences. It wasn’t until something happened during my service days that the ability returned. Or, to be precise, I accepted the gift and started to hone it. You do remember that I was in the service?”
Sure I did. Aunt Clem’s military service took place during
World War II and was supposed to be top secret. She sometimes referred to it, but never explained it, as if the Secrecy Oath she took over sixty years ago still applied.
She thought nobody knew, but her sojourn at Camp X was part of Pembrooke family lore. Camp X was a secret Allied training base in a wooded area near Whitby, Ontario. The camp trained Allied secret agents and was the planning headquarters for many European resistance movements.
Aunt Clem was part of the secret communications operations developed at the camp, in a capacity no one seemed sure of. One interesting fact about Camp X was that Sir William Stephenson, the Canadian-born super spy, nicknamed Intrepid by Winston Churchill, created it.
And one of Intrepid’s best students was Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond novels. Fleming was, by all accounts, adept at weaponry, unarmed combat, explosives and all sorts of other awful pastimes. And my Aunt Clem was part of it. The tales she could tell if she would, but alas, her lips were zipped on the subject.
“Lyris.” Aunt Clem waved the black hankie in my face. “You know I can’t talk about my war work, but I was going to explain how my psychic gift reappeared.”
“Go ahead, Aunt Clem.” I still refused to admit to the so-called gift myself.
“We weren’t supposed to fraternize with the agents or other personnel. But we were young and the inevitable sometimes happened. Do you understand what I’m telling you?” She peered into my face, which wasn’t as easy as it sounds, since one or two of the candles were flickering and sending up smoke signals.
I nodded, hoping that my maiden aunt wouldn’t get too graphic for my tender ears. I was still reeling over my mother’s sex life.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said.
I didn’t doubt it.
“Just because I was left on the shelf doesn’t mean I was never taken down and dusted once or twice.”
I attempted to hurry this along. “So you met someone and he was psychic too?”
“No.” Good thing she didn’t have a ruler, she would have whacked my fingers with it. Bad, bad student.
“We were…close. Then he got his orders. He was being dropped behind enemy lines in France. When he was saying goodbye, I suddenly heard a voice in my head. It said to tell him not to trust the resistance officer who promised to smuggle him into Paris. The voice said that the officer was a traitor, in the pocket of the Nazis. I was so surprised at what I was hearing, and so confused, my friend left and I didn’t tell him.”
My nails were digging into my palms. I suspected Aunt Clem had never before uttered these words to any living soul. And it was an un-living soul who gave Aunt Clem the warning. My shoulder blades were tingling to beat the band. Damn, I wanted out of there.
“Anyway, I heard later that he died during Nazi interrogation before he reached Paris. The false resistance officer had betrayed him.”
She blew at the candle that was doing the most smoking, which made it smoke all the more. The room was so hazy I couldn’t see her face, but her words came through loud and clear.
“I believe that if I had repeated the words I heard in my head, he would have lived. He may not have believed me, but when the time came, he would have been alerted. From that day, I embraced my destiny and listened to the voices of my guides. And I have helped others. Perhaps if I am very, very lucky, I can be a guide for someone else when I pass. If, that is, I have lived through sufficient passages of my own.”
I was determined to wiggle out of my destiny. “Yes, well, I still don’t think I have the gift. All I get is a tingling in my shoulders and a few smells.”
“Those are just indications that your spirit guide is trying to communicate with you. And one of those smells is misleading. It is not from your guide. Perhaps if you learned to meditate, the voices would come through.”
No way I wanted any voices coming through. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings so I said nothing, an achievement which indicated how unnerved I was.
She broke through my bemused state. “Lyris, a psychic always recognizes another psychic, albeit a reluctant one. And by the way, just because most of the psychics you meet are women doesn’t mean there aren’t just as many male psychics. Women are perhaps more willing to accept the gift. Or some say females are the slightly higher life form. Who knows?” She smiled at her little joke.
While Aunt Clem’s Queen Anne cottage was air conditioned, she had closed the door to the room, and with no open windows or other form of ventilation, the air was growing closer by the minute. I used the tail of my shirt to wipe my face. Aunt Clem pulled off the silk scarf from around her head and wiped her own face and neck with it.
“Aunt Clem, I need to ask you…”
“Time for your reading now, Lyris.” From out of nowhere she produced a pack of cards. “Shuffle these then cut them. As with the crystal ball, this is just a way of focusing my energy.”
I complied.
“And again.”
She had me cut the deck several times, then moved them around and placed others on the ones I had turned up. She was silent for several long minutes. Then just as my anxiety level was reaching critical mass, she said, “I see you are heading into a period of potential danger.”
Routine. I gave up. It was best to just sit back and let her get on with it.
“Now you must understand, Lyris, that nothing I tell you is absolute, just possible or probable. By being aware, you can change what could possibly happen or will probably happen. Use what the spirits tell you as a guideline. They are trying to help, not constrain. Take what I say to you as a warning only. You have the power to prevent or minimize the consequences.”
It seemed to me this gave the spirits an out if they turned out to be wrong, but hey, who was I to criticize those who had advanced to a higher level. This would be my first existence which explained why I seemed to be screwing everything up all the time. I just needed more practice.
“This danger that is approaching you can be averted if you are vigilant. Be careful in a high place.” She peered at the cards. “There is a greater danger to someone you love. I can’t tell who it is except that it’s a man. Tell him to watch out for someone he hasn’t met yet?” This last was put as a question, and she looked at the empty chair between us. Well, I was as spooked as I was going to get and it wouldn’t have shook me much more if Florence or Luke had materialized in a swirl of ectoplasm to sit down in that chair.
Aunt Clem was apologetic. “It’s Luke today, and sometimes he’s a little vague. He doesn’t like to give out too much information in case we get the wrong impression.”
“Well, get Florence in here instead. Maybe she can be more specific.”
“Lyris, your own spirit guide could be more helpful to you if you let him. But wait a moment and I’ll see if Florence will speak.” She sat there for a few moments twirling the many rings on her gnarly fingers.
Finally. “There are many changes going on in your life. You will have to make some important decisions soon about career, love, and finances. Follow your heart for career and love, and your intellect for finances.”
“That’s pretty standard stuff, Aunt Clem. I don’t mean to offend Florence or Luke, but can’t they be more precise?”
Aunt Clem pulled out the tissue and honked into it again. “Darn allergies. It’s Florence now, and she says your mind is resisting and in such turmoil that she can’t get through it. You must stop resisting.”
I was not prepared to stop resisting and go over to the dark side. However, if Aunt Clem could answer a couple of questions, then maybe I could put some credence in all this stuff.
“How about if I ask a question?” Aunt Clem nodded. “Does Florence know who took the jade figurine and the jewelled hummingbird from Hammersleigh? We appear to have had a burglary.”
Aunt Clem looked surprised. “Perhaps not a burglary in the sense you mean, since those items have not gone far. Are you sure they were taken? Maybe Arthur moved them.”
“Nope. Conklin says they were
on the sideboard in the hall and now they aren’t. He’s never wrong about these things. Besides, there are empty spots where they used to be.”
“Well, they are very close by. In a high place.”
The high place again. Maybe Florence had mixed up those two objects with the Meissen shepherdess that had been on the shelf with the peacock.
“There is something else missing, isn’t there?” Aunt Clem said. “A doll. Have you checked the doll cabinet in the drawing room? One of those might be missing too.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know how anybody could get in there without a key. And Conklin, Caroline and I are the only ones with access to it. I’ll check when I get home.”
“These missing objects are related to the danger around you, Lyris. I mean your personal danger and the danger to your loved one. There are animals involved too. A cat and a dog. The dog could be Jacqueline, but do you have a cat at Hammersleigh now?” Not a cat lover, Aunt Clem gave me a severe look.
“Caroline Hanlon, my new housekeeper, has a cat. He’s not staying.”
“Don’t be too sure of that. Now, I think you have another question for me, Lyris?” Out came the tissue again. Honk.
“Yes. I’m wondering, since you have this psychic ability, why you didn’t know what happened to Tommy during that reunion.”
Her shoulders slumped and the lines on her face seemed to deepen as I watched. She looked her age, then some. I was almost sorry for my question.
“My gift didn’t return until I went back to the camp after that reunion. Maybe the trauma of Tommy’s disappearance triggered it. Sometimes that happens. I never asked, and my guides have never presumed to intrude.”
“I guess I can understand that. Since there were just four people staying in the house that weekend. Whoever put Tommy’s body in the box, then sealed it in the closet, had to be one of those four people.”
“Four?” She looked up. “Yes, four. Some things are best left alone. The truth would help no one now.”
She covered the crystal ball with the black hankie and gathered the cards together. “This session is over, Lyris. I can tell you nothing else, but there is much you can learn if you will listen. Oh, just one more thing—your spirit guide’s name is Leander”.
Cheat the Hangman Page 13
