by Y G Maupin
Sarah shook her head. “This is troubling. We can’t do this alone and frankly even if we had help we have no idea what there is to be done,” she said, standing up. “Before I get another drink, I think it’s time we got something to eat before we starve to death and invite more spirits across!
In the house directly behind them, Olive Henderson had just gotten home from Sunday services. That day, the pews seemed particularly full compared to most Sundays, which was odd as the parking lot was the same as any other service day. The air must have been out as well, because the congregation was sweating as if the fires of hell were being held at their feet. She couldn’t wait to get out of there, it was getting to be too much so she left after the homily and made her way home. Shutting the front door, she passed the den where her dear husband had fallen asleep during the sports broadcast. She left her purse at the buffet in the hallway and took a look at herself in the mirror. No matter how happy she told herself she was, she felt rotten inside. Olive was tired of propping herself up with positivity. She was tired of her husband’s complete failure to maintain his end of the bargain in their marriage. She was tired that society was telling her she had to be tolerant of others when others couldn’t be tolerant of her beliefs and wants. She hated her life, and she was lying to herself when she said it was worth living for the thrill of the city council, the thrill of her beautiful garden. The thrill of not being alone.
It had been Carla’s idea at first. She had told Todd of where they could go where there had been a couple that she was sure they could push. “How do you know?” he asked, as he briskly walked at her side.
“Trust me I know,” she had replied, giving him one of those looks.
“So, where had you seen them before?” he asked, as they crossed the street.
They had been walking for a good thirty-five minutes at this point, being a spirit didn’t guarantee you any kind of speediness in the floating department. “I saw her at yoga class one time,” she said, finally averting his eyes.
“Yoga class? What? That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Oh yes it does,” she countered. “Uptight, know it all lady that didn’t have time to get to know what the class required. Kind of like she expected everything and everyone to change for her,” Carla puffed, checking open garages as she passed each house.
“Hmm. I think I know the type,” he murmured. Carla slowed down to stop in the middle of a sidewalk. She turned one way and then the other. “What? Don’t tell me you don’t know where you’re going?” he was exasperated at this point. He wanted to get to the killing and living again part.
“No” she replied, picking up the pace and going in the same direction. “It’s that way.” She pointed to the house on the corner.
Slowly, they walked around the house until they came to the garden gate. “Wow. They’ve got some money. Should I know who they are?” Todd asked.
In his living days, he had been a land lease agent that dabbled in the stock market between sales calls. He had racked up debt close to several hundred thousand. His death couldn’t have come at a better time, which is why it was also considered a possible suicide. They would never know.
“Yeah, I guess you could say they have money,” Carla answered, weaving between the rows of lilies and roses. A cat crossed her path and hissed at her. Carla moved to kick it, but it scooted away and ran through the bushes to the house across the way.
“Ok, so you know the woman. Tell me about the guy,” Todd asked, spinning a wind chime faster and faster.
“Oh him. That part is easy. You can tell he’s miserable. He works so that he doesn’t have to come home to be with her. He has two businesses, the feed store and a gas station…” she went on, then Todd cut her off.
“Oh I know who you’re talking about, yeah that guy is hating life,” Todd said laughing. “I’ll never forget the time I went in to get gas and his wife was in there just laying in to him in his office. It was harsh the way she was yelling at him about some random store thing. The funny thing is, all the while she’s getting in his face he’s got a smile on it looking like he’s ready to blow her head off with a shotgun he keeps under his desk. I left before they finished. It was just too uncomfortable. I think you’re right, there is an absolute opportunity to get those two to kill each other. Good Job, babe.” He motioned to go in, but Carla grabbed him by the arm.
“Wait. We need to decide what we’re going to do, so they end up doing what they need to do to help us. Let’s not have a repeat from last night and this morning,” she reminded him.
This morning with the chubby pharmacist was just confirmation from what they had thought they could accomplish the night before. The night before was their first time actively looking to push the living and they had come across a couple making out by the lake. Needless to say, Todd moved too fast and only succeeded in getting driven through as the car peeled out.
“Look, all I did was knock on their window,” he said, shaking his head. Within the hour, one of two police cars for the town, was slowly driving through the area with the flood light on, looking for a pervert looking into car windows.
“Another missed opportunity,” Carla said. “Those were two cops we could have freaked out and had them shoot each other. That’s why we need a plan,” she urged, and called him to the porch where they sat on the swing and came up with the perfect scenario.
Eleven
Beryl was awake. She finally found her phone and had seen that she had missed seven calls this morning from the time she got up until she passed out the last time. She was convinced that she had taken too strong a pill and on her empty stomach and with so much physical activity, she had hallucinated everything. She had four text messages. One from Birdie asking her to call. One from Anesta also asking her to call and two from T telling her to come over as soon as possible to Alice and Sarah’s and that there was an emergency. Beryl hobbled her way to the shower, bruised and battered from the falls she had taken each time she had fainted, once through her damn coffee table that she would have to replace. Dressed and out the door half an hour later she started her car and a surprised cat sprinted out from under her car. Mr. Bosley! Well, at least she knew he was still around. Backing up, she abruptly stopped to avoid hitting the group of kids on bikes that zoomed behind her without so much as an I’m sorry wave. Since when were there kids in this condominium complex? Finally making her way down the street, she saw the weirdest thing. People, tons of people just walking around the complex. Looking in windows, walking through doors or just standing around in people’s yards.
“What the hell is going on here?” she said out loud. There were a few people that were milling around the pool and some that were just standing too close to the middle of the street. To them Beryl honked and flipped them the bird until they moved. “Christ. People just want to die around here.”
Olive and Gerald shared an office downstairs just off the entryway. Olive had always meant to turn one of the kid’s bedrooms into an office for herself, perhaps her daughters since it had its own bathroom, but she had never had the time. At first, she didn’t mind sharing with her husband. It was sweet that they worked together in the same room yet on separate projects. Olive always felt her endeavors were a tad more worthy than Gerald’s, but he did bring in the money to the household for the most part. Over time, however, it was the little things that began to get on her nerves. Like the way he chewed ice, with his mouth open and at the speed of a machine gun. That grated her nerves. He also had this little throat clearing sound that he would make every so often. Not a biggie, but enough to irk her after seventeen years of wedded bliss. It had gotten to be too much for her one weeknight several months ago when innocently enough, he had started guffawing as he read an article on his laptop. “Will you please keep it down,” she asked, as she rewrote her council proposal for the third time that week.
“Sorry,” he had replied, in that sing-songy way that meant they weren’t sorry and that you were being an utter cow for b
eing so uptight.
Olive rotated her head from side to side. Her headache was edging down to her shoulders at this point. There had been a time where Gerald would have sensed her tension and he would have massaged her neck and shoulders like he used to but he had stopped doing that for some time now. For the most part, he had stopped touching her at all. He would still give her a peck on the check when he was leaving the house for work in the morning. And another quick kiss when he returned at night, if she was home and not at the town hall. They were still young. They had a renewed life that could have resembled newlyweds since their last child had left for college. However, instead of being randy newlyweds, they were more like The Odd Couple, roommates. Their attention wasn’t diverted in another direction. It wasn’t that he had someone else. There was no one, in fact. He was simply not that kind of man. It was that Olive had started scrunching her neck every time he went to touch her or she would simply push his hands away with a “not now, Gerald, I’m busy.” In that irritated tone you would know not to push. He had resigned himself to keeping his hands to himself and in any event staying clear of Olive. She never complained. She didn’t confront him about her needs or any accusation of infidelity. On the contrary. She complimented his work and was non-committal on any joint outings. This Sunday afternoon, Olive entered their office and almost tripped on Gerald’s slippers. Fuck, that was close, she thought kicking them into a corner.
“Gerald!” she called out, but she was sure he couldn’t hear her. Although he wasn’t old, his hearing required that she be in the same room to catch her words. “Gerald!” she called again, as she settled herself behind her desk and opened her laptop. “What the fuck!” This time she had cursed out loud. Her screen was nothing but tabs of pornography. Tab after tab of the filthiest things you could ever imagine if you were anyone else but Olive. She hadn’t the slightest clue what almost all of the people were doing in almost every screen grab. As she closed them out, more tabs opened with pops ups and chat boxes asking her if she was horny and wanted to meet up. “Gerald! Get the hell in here,” she was screaming at the top of her lungs, as the screen overlapped with more and more websites that featured naked people doing what she didn’t know people could or would do. She stopped as she realized she would need to confront him with it. Standing up so fast she knocked over her high backed chair, she stomped from the room almost tripping on the rug under her desk. “God damn it! Gerald, where are you?” she yelled, knowing damn well where he was. He was asleep in his recliner where she had found him when she had come home from church less than an hour ago. She marched right over to where he was and found him with his pants around his ankles. Sputtering even more obscenities she shook the recliner from the side until he woke, which had startled him.
Struggling to get up and falling back, Gerald grabbed his pants and proceeded to pull them back. Confused, he looked around. “What the hell, Olive? Why’d you take my pants off?” he asked, once he saw that no one else was in the room but the both of them.
“You are out of your mind if you think I had anything to do with that. It might have to do with all that porn filth that you were watching on MY LAPTOP!” She leaned over and screamed into his face. This was not an uncommon response from her. Screaming into his face happened at least once every other month over some trivial, unforgotten task.
“I can assure you that I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he huffed, as he zipped his pants and catapulted up from the recliner.
“Oh don’t give me that, Gerald.” Olive was snide. “If you’re going to look at smut, I would thank you to use your own laptop and leave mine alone!” screaming, she walked into the living room.
Gerald followed her and grabbed her shoulder quickly. “I am getting so tired of all the yelling that you do around here. Especially the yelling at me.”
She spun out of his grasp with a look of mock terror on her face. “Don’t you touch me! Don’t you ever touch me again, pervert!”
“I’d be glad to never touch you again. I’ve been doing such a good job up to this point, I would think you would have given me an atta boy for my success!” he shouted back at her.
Two could play at this game. Fuming, Olive stomped up the stairs to the master suite. Minutes later, dress shirts and pants on hangers were flying over the rail showering at Gerald’s feet. “What the?” he sputtered, starting up the stairs and stopped almost immediately when he caught sight of Olive with her forty aught pointed right at his face.
“You stay right there, mister,” she spoke calmly, slowly walking down the stairs.
“Olive. This has gone too far now.”
“You’re damn right this has gone too far. Too far for me to have to continue to deal with your mediocrity. Too far for me to have to listen to your ice chewing, throat clearing, fart ripping, boring self at my dinner table or any table for that matter,” she chewed each word and spit them out. “Tonight and from now on,” she continued. “You sleep in the room downstairs.” She stopped at the landing, the rifle still trained on Gerald’s surprised face.
“You’ve lost your mind, woman,” he quietly said, putting his arms down after the initial panic has caused him to raise them to the sky.
Alice pushed herself back from the kitchen island. “I think we might be going about this the wrong way,” she announced. Looking from face to face. “From what we know, and it’s not a lot, the spirit world is in a position to cross over to ours. In normal circumstances.” At this, she rolled her eyes. “Contact with the living is a welcome gesture. We haven’t confirmed, but only have been told that the way to do it, to establish a permanent, corporeal entity, is to cause the untimely death of someone living. The risk being that we don’t know who would be targeted. If this is so, then we could be experiencing deaths or suicides at any given moment.”
“Or murders,” interjected Sharon.
Alice went on. ”The other challenge is their ability, with some effort and trial and error, to enter a body and possess it. The purpose of this I’m going to assume is to murder, cause someone to kill themselves etc. etc. S, breaking this down, knowing what we know and laying it all out on the table. We are faced with the conclusion we have no idea what we can do to prevent it or stop it altogether.”
“Do we want to?” T quietly asked, more to her cup of coffee than to the woman gathered around in the breakfast nook.
“Well, of course that’s something we would want,” Sarah replied. “The chaos and disorder would be overwhelming. The world would be in a constant state of depression and people would be confused.”
“I think it would be worse for us,” Birdie answered somberly. “The call to organized religion and an increase in scapegoating would put pagans and non-believers in a sticky situation. I think it would start a panic.” She saddened over that thought.
Anesta shook her head. “I don’t agree. I think it would take a while for people to put two and two together. In the meantime, we would be searching for some kind of clue as to how to put a stop to this. In actuality, that’s what we should be doing instead of sitting around now,” she replied.
“In my readings in ancient history of our beliefs, nothing like this has ever been recorded. We have no instances where spirits roamed the earth other than what is prophesied in the bible,” Alice said. “I admit that my reading is only a sliver in comparison to all the historical documents, literature, and personal journals that may be available to us. I think we need to start in history, and read what we can find or cross reference. We have a small library here, storing mostly the rarest and most expensive volumes of history and journals that we’ve come across over the years. It’s not a complete collection, but it’s an excellent start. We also have more at the book shop. We’re better off going through the oldest texts and of course, we’re going to need reinforcements,” Alice sighed.
“This is going to be hard, because we don’t know what we’re looking for so we won’t know when we’ve struck gold. Our best bet is to stick together as mu
ch as we can, keep our eyes and ears open for changes in behaviors and do what we can.” Alice was at a loss. “I honestly can’t think of anything else.”
Anesta stood up from the table. “I’m going to start looking in your library now.” Sarah gestured to the study again and followed behind her.
Getting up, Sharon replied, ”Here goes nothing.” Turning to T, “You coming?”
“In a minute,” T replied, hanging back while Sharon and Birdie left the kitchen to join the others in the study.
“What’s wrong?” Alice could see that the woman had something on her mind.
“I’m not exactly sure. Part of me says that spirits will do what they want. I feel a bit of skepticism.” Shrugging her shoulders. “Maybe I’m being a doubting Thomas, revealing myself to be a non-believer, but ever since that thing happened with Jackson, I can’t help but think that crafting brings on trouble. For all we know, we could be speeding up the process rather than making it stop.”
Alice sighed. “What a relief to hear you say that.” She chuckled at T’s confused look. “I honestly thought you were going to say that you didn’t want to stop the spirits because you wanted Jackson to come back.” She smiled ruefully. T looked miserable. It was a truth she didn’t want to face. What if Jackson did have a chance to return? How would she know if he did or how could she get in touch with him? Maybe he wouldn’t want to come back to her. Their last exchange had been ugly.
“I just feel like we’re spinning our wheels going in a direction that we have no map for.” T replied. “It feels like we would be stressing out over an outcome that may not happen or we cannot control. It’s the most frustrating feeling in the world.” She ended by getting up to put her mug in the sink.
Alice walked towards here and stared up into the young woman’s eyes. ``We should just quit before even starting? Is that what you’re saying? We should face that our obstacles may be greater than us, so what’s the point in expending our energy?” Alice questioned. Shaking her head. “No. That’s not an option. Like it or not, we are caretakers for the earth, our community and each other. We owe it not only to ourselves, but to future covens and crafters to search for a solution and to work together. What will happen to humanity if we don't ?"
