Authors: Brian Mercer
****
"I say we go up there tonight," Sara suggested excitedly. "Get to the bottom of this once and for all." She hungrily attacked her toast and marmalade. None of the rest of us had touched our breakfasts.
"I-I-I don't know," Becky said. "I think we've gotta tell somebody. I mean, come on, people. You heard the noises up there. I don't think we should be messin' with this stuff on our own."
"What does Charlie say?" I asked Nicole.
"He says it's noisy spirits but that's about it."
"Let's spend the night up there," Sara insisted. "Come on, it'll be fun!"
Becky sighed in exasperation. She seemed to be trying really hard to keep the nervous warble out of her voice. "First of all, there are no lights in that creepy old attic. We'd be stuck using flashlights. And even if it wasn't filthy, think about how long it took to find that little corner where our rooms are. And that's when there was light coming in from those little windows. If we're up there in the dark and something happens and we have to get out in a hurry, it'll take forever to find the stairs. Screw that. Count me out."
In the end it was Becky who the next day told Ravi, her meditation partner, about the hauntings, and it was Ravi who informed Mrs. Apple. That's how the investigation started. Waltham Academy had some of the world's leading and most up-and-coming psychics, and all their powers were directed to find out what was going on. Yet even with all that psychic talent, there wasn't much they could tell us. Over the next several weeks, all types of spiritual sensitives trudged through our rooms and the attic above it, but no one could find anything out of the ordinary. The nighttime noises had ended abruptly, robbing us of the evidence we needed to prove that what we'd heard was more than just floorboards settling or creaky old wood moving around in the wind.
When no further disturbances took place, the girls and I felt embarrassed about the commotion we'd caused. Even Becky regretted telling anyone.
"I think I might know why no one can find out anything," Nicole said one quiet night when we were all lounging around the fireplace in our sitting room. "If Waltham really is full of bright, vibrant energy, maybe it's powerful enough to erase any negative residue, kinda like rain washin' away footprints."
Of all the people who tried to learn something for us, it was Ravi â Becky's meditation partner â who finally had something to offer. He visited our rooms one Saturday afternoon when the clouds had parted enough to show hints of blue sky and passing gleams of sunlight.
"This is appearing to be a male presence," he told us after meditating quietly for almost a half hour. "Something that has not been alive in a long time. It seems like a foreign energy to me, something that did not live here or die here. But it knows you," he added, opening his eyes and looking at each of us in turn. "It knows you girls and is not liking you. There is a malevolence about it that is there just under the surface, but that exists nonetheless. It tries to hide the extent of its hate, fearing detection. This is very bad. Very bad energy, indeed."
"Should we ask Sir Alex for other rooms?" Becky suggested. "Maybe if we were in a part of the house where there were more people around..."
Ravi shook his head. "You could, of course, but this thing would just follow you. It seems to me that if you like these rooms that it is as good a place as any to confront it. And confronting it is something you are having to do, because this is not something that will leave you alone. It will keep provoking you and provoking you until you pay attention to it. It may be quiet now, but I am thinking that this is not something that will be ignored."
Becky
Stables, Waltham Manor
March 27
"What," Cali asked, wrinkling her nose, "is that smell?"
"Why, that is horse," Sara answered. "Only the most wonderful, fragrant, aromatic scent known to man. Roses would be delighted to smell as good."
"It smells," Cali went on, "like the zoo."
Sara, Cali, Nicole, and I were headed toward Waltham's stables. The rain had stopped for all of three days and the sun had made a rare appearance, taking curtain calls between opening and closing screens of clouds.
"Shhh! Quiet. They'll hear you," Sara said, referring to the horses. But too late. It felt like they'd heard us already. "You're lucky they're slow to take offense."
"Why, young Miss Sara. Hello." Old Mr. Chalmers stepped into view as if he'd been expecting our visit. "And Becky! How are my favorite students? Please, introduce me to your friends."
"We're here to see the horses!" Sara exclaimed after Mr. Chalmers exchanged pleasantries with Cali and Nicole.
"Go in through that door." Old Mr. Chalmers pointed to it. "I dare say the beasts will be right happy to see you again, Miss Sara. You haven't been out to the barn in almost a week."
Sara stuck her tongue out the side of her mouth and sagged like a scarecrow with all its stuffing suddenly pulled out. "Schoolwork. Schoolwork. Schoolwork."
The four of us had just come from the kennels, where Sir Alex reared and trained hounds of different breeds. His most prized dogs lived in the manor house and often followed him on his daily rounds, but the kennel dogs were just as well treated. In some ways it seemed like their facilities just north of the house were better than in the house itself. The dogs appeared to think so, too, though there seemed to be a certain pride when the dogs were invited into the main facility.
"I try to come out here at least every other day to pet and talk to the animals," Sara explained as she led us into the barn and down an aisle of ponies. "Most all the horses here are happy and well-cared for, but there are two new arrivals â an elderly mare and a young, speckled stallion â who are still rather shy, both having informed me as to being mistreated by previous owners. But I was able to convey to them how kind Uncle Alex is and how much love and respect they will be shown here. Animals understand far more than we give them credit for. It really is quite simple to communicate with them, if only we try. And listen, of course. That's the most important part."
We reached a second row of stalls. "Thoroughbred and Arabian mixes," explained Sara. The ponies all seemed to know Sara and got excited when she moved in their direction. A pair of young mares nodded to get her attention.
Sara introduced us to the horse master, Yates, before moving down a row where our own mounts were stalled. All of them were geldings. For me, Sara had picked an old and tranquil chestnut named Jasper. For Nicole there was Yorick, a roan with a little more spirit. For Cali, a shiny black fellow named Maestro.
I fed my horse an apple and petted him tentatively. "Are you sure he's safe?"
"I've explained to all your animals how nice you are and told them that they should take especially good care of you."
Nicole extended a handful of carrots toward Yorick. "He has a mischievous look in his eye."
"Yes, well, maybe just a little," Sara admitted.
Cali kept several paces back from the stalls, careful to keep me, Sara, and Nicole between her and the horses. "They're
big
."
"They're just ponies with a little thoroughbred mixed in, to give them some flavor." Sara put a mound of alfalfa cubes into Cali's cupped hands. "Maestro's perfectly gentle. You'll see."
Cali swallowed hard but did not get any closer. "I grew up with dogs but, crap, a
horse
. He's a flippin' monster."
"It's okay." Sara shoved Cali toward Maestro's stall. "He doesn't bite... usually."
Cali stumbled hesitantly up to the big ebony horse. Maestro wagged his head, blowing and nickering happily. Cali stifled a scream as the animal scooped the treats from her hands with his big, pink tongue.
"Oh, he likes you," said Sara. "He's very happy to see you. Who is Anderlyn?"
Cali shook her head and shrugged.
"He seems to be under the impression that your name is Anderlyn and that he used to be your horse."
Cali laughed nervously. "I think he's got the wrong girl."
"Are you sure?" Sara asked. "He seems quite insistent."
Maestro whinnied and bucked in his stall. "I must smell like someone he knows."
"Perhaps," Sara replied uncertainly. "He wants to be ridden and he wants
you
to ride him."
Maestro whinnied again, louder this time, and kicked out. His rear hooves connected with the back of the stall with a terrific crash. We all jumped and backed away. Cali turned a sickly shade of green.
Old Mr. Chalmers appeared from a side door. "Hello. What's this?"
"It's Maestro," Sara said. "He seems quite worked up."
"Why don't you girls wait outside?" Old Mr. Chalmers instructed. "I'll take care of this."
Maestro nickered again and shoved his full weight against the stall door as we retreated from the stable. "It's all right," Sara assured us as we emerged into the warmth-less sunlight. "He's just got a little spring fever. Anxious to get some exercise out in the sun, I expect. When the trails dry out long enough for us to start riding, he'll be as calm as an old cat. You'll see. He's a fine, dependable animal."
****
I looked up from the dark hole and into the sky. The pit was cramped and muddy, filled with too many people â girls like me, dressed in dirty white shifts that were too flimsy to keep out the numbing wet and cold. Overhead snow fell like tattered tissue paper against a grey canvas of clouds. The darkening night was stealing what precious light there was. I couldn't stop shivering.
More shouts erupted from beyond the lip of the hole. The mob was growing more frenzied and desperate. I could just make out an orange flickering â light from torches and the bonfire that the crowd had built in front of the hole to keep warm. I wanted its heat so badly, to get up out of the hole, change my drenched clothes, and feel something besides the fear that deadened everything else. I didn't have long. We were all going to die, weren't we? My growing terror pressed out my ability to sense what was coming.
The first stone shot down from the lip of the hole. It thudded sickly into the side of my sister's skull, taking her down. Now fear became panic as the second projectile rained down, then a third and fourth. Something banged hard into the side of my knee. The pain reached through the cold and numbness, filling my vision with white terror. I started screaming but it was dampened by the frenzied cries of the mob. Even as the first crumbles of dirt spilled over the rim of the hole, then a shower of mud and debris, a voice â Jenny's calming, singsong whisper â cut through the mob.
"He's co-o-o-oming.
He's almost here."
I awoke, mentally exploring the shadows around me. Sara's steady breathing in the bed beside mine gave me an idea of where I was, a context to the grey, predawn light.
I lay perfectly still, as I'd been trained to do. Dreams were best remembered in the same position as they happened. Something about body memory. I fought through hazy darkness to find key words to describe my experience:
Hole. Girls. Cold. Terror. Mob. Sister. Do I have a sister? No. No sister. Dream. Only a dream.
I remembered Jenny's voice. What had she said? I tried to pull the words out of the fog but they hovered just out of my grasp. Had they been spoken in my dream or had Jenny been at my bedside, whispering in my ear?
I reached for my dream diary on the bedside table, a journal that all us students at Waltham were supposed to keep. I felt my lamp and the half-drained glass of water that I'd put there the night before, but no journal. Irritated, I sat up, blinking in the dark. I scanned the floor near my nightstand. Nothing.
Slumping back into my feather pillows, I winced at the soreness that spread through my legs, butt, and back. How can horseback riding hurt
this
much? I eased gently onto my side, tugged the covers up to my ears and dozed until I heard movement in the sitting room. The door to the outer hallway opened and closed â Cali leaving early for her morning astral projection class. Sometime later, Sara got up to use the bathroom. The morning routine had begun.
I rose stiffly, wrangled my hair into a ponytail, and pulled on my sweat clothes. My muscles protested every movement. Shuffling bowlegged out into the sitting room, I spotted Nicole on the sofa paging through a magazine, looking way too put-together for this hour of the morning. I was hobbling over to join her when I spotted a notebook on the mantle.
I looked closer. "My dream journal." I held it up so Nicole could see. "Did you put this here?" She shook her head.
"I was sure I'd left it on my nightstand before I went to bed."
Nicole closed her magazine and looked at me knowingly. "I think we might have a problem."
This hadn't been the first item in our rooms that had been moved around without apparent explanation. We'd each had things go missing in the last three weeks. It had started with one of my hairbrushes, which was later discovered in Nicole and Cali's bathroom. Not long after, several of Nicole's fashion magazines disappeared from her dresser, to later be recovered from under my bed. Sara lost a pair of red ballet flats that were still missing. When Cali found her mascara and eyeliner in Sara and my bathroom earlier this week, it touched off our first serious argument, when Cali accused me of borrowing her eye makeup without permission. The tension between Cali and me was still running a little high, even now, three days later.
"You think our little ghostly friend is back?" I asked.
"Well, I don't think our stuff is growin' legs. Somethin' is takin' our things and tryin' to get us to accuse each other."
"I think maybe it's working."
"Whatever this thing is, it figures if it can plant a little negative energy between us it will fester and grow and it will get a firmer foothold in our world."
"What are we gonna do?" I carefully lowered myself onto the sofa next to Nicole, cringing as my weight settled. "I don't want to tell Sir Alex or Mrs. Apple unless we have something better to go on than this. I still feel stupid for telling them about the noises upstairs."
"It's not like they won't believe us."
"They have some of the best sensitives in the world here and they never found anything."
"Okay, you might have a point. I just don't want us to start blamin' each other is all. If we all know what's happenin', we're less likely to point a finger at each other."
I'd worked some of the kinks out of my legs by the time Nicole, Sara, and I reached morning meditation, but I shuddered at the sight of our normal circle of hard wooden chairs. How was I was going to sit still for the next ninety minutes? Nicole also walked stiffly, but Sara, an experienced rider, skipped into the room and plopped into her chair, seemingly unaffected by our recent riding lesson.
Our lesson had been two days ago. Sara had outfitted us in the modern equivalent of a lady's riding habit: formfitting willow riding breeches, forest green wool riding jackets, creamy leather gloves, and high-point, black riding boots. It was kind of cute to see the four of us all dressed up to go riding, but I felt a little like a poser learning how to sit a horse, being led around the corral by a handsome young groomsman named Ian, when I looked like I should be galloping across the countryside leaping over hedges.
On Sara's advice, Cali had left her lip ring behind. She looked strangely feminine all dressed up. "You clean up good," Nicole teased in her finest West Georgia accent. Cali blushed brightly. She had tried to show a brave face, but you didn't need to be psychic to see she was meekly terrified.
"It'll be okay." I tried to reassure her. "This is my first time, too." And in a comical attempt to tempt fate, I'd added, "What could go wrong?"
Cali smiled stiffly, chuckling in spite of herself.
Sara had been a good teacher, showing us how to climb on, where to sit on the saddle, and how to hold the reins. Nicole's horse, Yorick, was a troublemaker. When Nicole put her boot into the stirrup, he'd began stepping to the side, forcing her to hop to keep up with him. Thankfully, I didn't have any trouble with Jasper, who seemed to like the way I petted his bristly neck and whispered in his ear. It had been strange to sit so tall and have something so big and alive under me. Jasper made happy horse sounds as we trotted around the pen, all the while secreting the pleasant odor of wet hay.
Strangely, Cali, who had at first seemed so afraid, took to it as if she'd been riding all her life. She hadn't needed much coaching on how to mount or the proper riding posture. Although I didn't have the intuitive connection with animals that Sara did, I could tell Cali's horse, Maestro, was â as Nicole later put it â "As happy as a cat in a ping-pong ball factory." Maestro bonded with Cali from the beginning. Even after only one lesson, he and Cali seemed to know and trust each other.
Now, two days later, I was standing in Meditation with my back to the fireplace, hoping the heat would soothe my tender muscles. Cali walked in, looking tired and beat up. She made eye contact with me but didn't smile, grimacing as she forced her stiff limbs toward her usual chair near the window.
Jean Paul walked into the room next, with Malina at his side. His dark green eyes scanned the room until he spotted me by the fire, then he dropped his gaze and hurried to the opposite end of the room, Malina trailing close behind. For the thousandth time, I cast out my psychic net, trying to get a sense of the nature of Jean Paul and Malina's relationship. They were always together. They ate meals, meditated, and took walks with each other, yet I'd never seen them hold hands or even touch each other, nothing to suggest they were anything but friends. I felt Malina's feelings for him but, with all my intuitive abilities, I found Jean Paul impossible to read.
I waited until the last possible moment before sitting down, biting my lips as my haunches came to rest on the hard meditation chair. As the others took their places, Mrs. Apple began narrating the energy-raising exercise, taking us through the usual routine of centering, grounding, and stimulating our energy bodies.
I couldn't stop fidgeting. I couldn't find a position that wasn't painful. Several times I opened my eyes to resettle and each time I caught Jean Paul peeking at me. He probably thought I had to pee. I could just imagine Malina and his comments over breakfast.
"Did you see Becky squirming? Doesn't she know by now to go to the bathroom
before
class starts?"
I cracked an eye open again and, sure enough, Jean Paul was still watching me. He wore his typical aloof expression, a look that both made my knees weak and want to wipe the smirk off his face at the same time.
"Ooh-kay," Mrs. Apple said at last, "we're gonna practice a wee bit o' aura gazin'."
The class automatically stood and paired up with our meditation partners. I tried and failed to get up, slumping painfully back into my chair. Ravi, my assigned partner, hovered over me with a bright, mirthful smile. "You are too much horsing around?" He giggled at his own joke.
Ravi moved a chair so he could sit across from me. Once everyone was in place, the aura viewing began. You're not supposed to look at an aura; you
gaze
at it. Although I'd been seeing auras since I'd woke up from my car accident, I found that if I let my vision soften they came in brighter and more vivid. Trying to look directly at them only made them narrow and disappear.
For the past week we'd been honing the clairvoyant vision that allowed us to see the colorful energy fields, learning how to pick out the different subtle layers as they moved away from our bodies. The first layer, the one closest to the body, was usually the thickest and brightest, but the layers beyond it were narrower, sometimes the barest outline. Mrs. Apple was teaching us the meaning of their colors, by themselves and in combination, as well as how to spot illness or injury based on cloudy patches of grey or black. Last week, I'd seen a dull, horn-shaped mass bulging from Ravi's right knee, which turned out to correspond to an injury he'd suffered during a cricket match when he was twelve. The injury had recently flared up again in all the damp weather.
As I sat across from him now, with luminous morning sunlight slanting in from the windows, his aura bloomed brightly, a clear violet with a thin layer of gold tingeing its outer edges. I let my gaze grow soft and dreamy and started scanning for irregularities. Although my concentration was focused on Ravi, I still sensed Jean Paul's attention on me. It felt like a nagging mental image of him that I couldn't quite let go of. What was it? Jean Paul hadn't so much as glanced in my direction since the first day of class, over two months ago.
As if answering my question, Ravi's eyes widened and his ears, which projected sail-like from the sides of his head, twitched noticeably.
"What's wrong? Something I should know about?"
"No, it is nothing," he said, then seeming to think better of it, he added, "I thought I am seeing a dark shape standing behind you."
"Dark shape?"
"It is nothing."
"Tell me."
"For just a second I saw what is looking like a human shape just over your right shoulder." He gestured in the air beside him. "It is looking like a head and a neck and shoulders. It was black, like a shadow, but only for a second. Then it disappeared. You are having problems in your room again?"
"All's quiet. Mostly."
Ravi hummed contemplatively and shrugged, attempting a smile. "I am sure it was nothing."