Gertrude poured the tea from a china pot decorated with pink roses and gold trim into our matching cups. Mesmerelda's Tea Room was the perfect place to talk shop when we were tired of the office. Its members-only clientele could be trusted.
"What do you think?" I asked Gertrude, after telling her everything that had happened at the orphanage.
She unfolded her napkin and took a strawberry sandwich from the serving plate. "I think you are uniquely qualified to handle this case." She paused and took a sip of tea. "Whether you like it or not."
"But I might be making it worse!"
"Hogwash," Gertrude exclaimed, setting down her cup. "You have a rare talent, which you are not putting to full use, I might add. And that boy has it, too. He needs you--you in particular."
I crossed my arms. "Then tell me how I can control this so-called talent. You're the mind expert. All my old tricks aren't enough—meditation, lucid dreaming, psychic compartmentalization.... I can't have it flaring up now, while I'm trying to track down this beast of a ghost."
"Did you ever think that maybe your... sensitivity... could help you, and them?"
I snorted.
She sighed. "Well, maybe your old tactics of seek and destroy aren't going to work this time either. Have you considered that Pendelton might be right? That his brother has returned for him?"
"Don't be absurd," I said. "We know that ghosts don't work that way."
"Do we?" Getrude asked. "There are ethereal forces of push and pull always at work. You're so fixated on getting rid of ghosts, that you never stop to think about how and why they come back here to begin with."
"Metaphysical claptrap," I muttered.
"I'm serious. Ghosts don't simply attach themselves to objects, you know. They're born from somewhere. Our current research suggests that they're drawn to us--to our human minds, like a beacon."
I rolled my eyes, but she persisted. "A wise scholar once said: 'We the living are complicit in our own hauntings.'"
**********
That night I took out the child's crumpled drawing of the orphanage from my first visit. I stared into the empty eyes of the dark figure in the window and wondered if Gertrude was right, and if, with so many ghosts in the world, we weren't all a little bit complicit somehow.
Philosophical blather!
I went to sit at the mirror, brushing out my long hair. Esoteric theory and philosophy weren't going to help when face to face with a ghost, though I had to smile because among all Gertrude's abstract musings, there were always some useful kernels of practical wisdom. It was just a laborious process of separating the wheat from the chaff.
I continued brushing, lulling myself into a sense of calm after such a trying day. Elisa had phoned in the evening to report that Thomas was thoroughly recovered. My eyes settled on the drawing, supposedly of myself, that Thomas had given me, stuck in the corner of the mirror. In some ways, I suppose it looked vaguely like me—brown hair, slim frame, narrow eyes, but a child version of myself. I seemed to remember having such a checkered pinafore as a young girl, but didn't everyone?
Thomas was so intent on his drawings, and I envied him. My own love of drawing was just another thing my ghosts had taken from me, once my parents discovered that my supernatural companions were the inspiration for my drawings.
On a whim, I rose from the dressing table and rummaged around the nightstand drawer for one of my many notebooks. I wrote a great deal of course, but I had not drawn anything in years.
YOU ARE READING
Revenants & Remains | ONC 2021
ParanormalAmelia Holte banishes ghosts for a living... and she's good at it. But when she's hired to investigate a haunting at an orphanage, she begins to realize that some ghosts are not so easily cast aside. The dead always return to us, one way or another...