Shadowing My Dreams (Haunted Hearts)

Chapter 2

2

Archie

“ Y ou’re not welcome here,” I whispered into the ether of the old house and waited. The ghost had communicated, but it was broken and difficult to hear. Sometimes, the veils between the Earthly plane and the ghostly one were thick and impenetrable. Other times, they were as thin as the air itself. It depended on so many variables. Not all ghosts were the same.

“I know you can hear me.” I opened my palm and tried to feel the other side. My hand tingled. The veil was fragile, and I knew that my words were resonating with the undead person still lingering within these old walls. “Speak to me. I want to help you find peace. This realm is no place for you.”

I live here.

“You used to. Now, you no longer live. It’s the way of all things. We’re born, we age, and eventually, we pass into the unknown. But you are in between.”

No.

“I am afraid so. You’re trapped in a loop of your own making. You died many years ago. Do you remember your name?”

Beatrice

“Beatrice Cummings?” I held up a death certificate. Sometimes, they could see the here and now, and other times, they couldn’t. Since I had seen Beatrice moving small objects around in the house, I assumed that she could. I had to do a lot of research to find who I thought they might be. “You and your husband Daniel built this house in nineteen-twenty-nine after you moved here from New Jersey. He passed away fifteen years later, but you lived here for another twenty years. You died of natural causes in nineteen-forty-nine at the age of fifty-three.”

Died? I… I remember going to bed last night.

I tried to connect with her without letting her completely in. I had been taken over once before, and I never wanted that to happen again. This spirit was not violent or evil – she was just confused. I wished I could understand how or why this happened. But no one knew for sure.

“See what I know, Beatrice. You passed away in your sleep almost seventy-five years ago. You’ve been living the last day of your life over and over, but you don’t have to stay there. You can move on and cross over to the next realm. This is not the place for you any longer. See what the world now is, Beatrice. See what I know.”

I opened my mind up and pushed my thoughts outward. It was a trick I had learned when I was a child, and one that had served me well. I protected myself now much more than I ever had. But sometimes to communicate, the walls had to brought down for the spirits to know the truth.

What is this… This is not what I know.

Her energy came together, and for a brief moment, she stood before me. Beatrice had been trapped in her loop—doing the same actions she completed on her very last day of living for too long. Now, as she shimmered into view and all of her swirling soul entered this plane of existence, she looked around and knew that what I said was true.

The look on her face broke my heart.

“I do not know this place.” Her face broke into grief, but there were no tears for her to cry. The dead did not have the substance of the living. “It is true? Daniel? I could have been with Daniel.”

“You still can be, Beatrice. He is waiting for you on the other side.”

“Heaven?”

“Only the dead know. It remains the last true mystery, even to me.”

“How do I… Oh,” she whispered and looked up. What they saw, I had no idea. But the look of calm and peace on her face gave me hope in the afterlife. Souls were real, so why not all of the other stuff we desired to be true? Her form shimmered once again, and I could see her essence fade and float away.

The light. That’s what some called it. I once had a ghost who saw a bridge, and that has made me scratch my head for quite some time. Whatever it was – I hoped that those lost souls I helped found the peace they deserved. The same peace that one day I knew I would also see.

Death was the inevitable outcome for everyone.

I reached out once again with what many psychics called their third eye – I had named mine Barbra. I was a fan and super gay, so, of course, it was named for a diva. Nothing but silence – the way it should be in a house that was clean of the past.

Ghosts usually fall into a few categories. None of this was science because science hadn’t been able to prove that whatwe psychics could see was even true. Some called what we could do a gift – others a curse. For me, it lay in between like many of the spirits I saw in my day-to-day life. This world was filthy with spirits. It was sad. The world was a confusing place – but what happened after death was riddled with inconsistencies. I had yet to discover a real cause for the affliction of these spirits. Whatever trapped them here remained an unknown.

Oh, the categories!

I usually get ravenous after communicating with a spirit, and it makes my mind wander. All I want is a medium rare steak and a vat of potatoes.

Most ghosts are just echoes of a moment during their previous life. This was what was happening to Beatrice. She only saw the house as she knew it. Her energy passed through the other people living here without her knowledge. She didn’t coexist – she lived trapped within this box of her past life. Ghost hunters liked to call these residual hauntings. There was nothing residual about Beatrice, though. That was her complete spirit or essence that was here. She just didn’t know what had happened or that she was repeating the same day for almost seven decades.

Ghost Hunters usually have this wrong. Their residual hauntings are usually much more than that – but sadder. In all my time of communicating with spirits, I’ve only seen one true residual haunting. There was nothing I could do because it was just a figment of reality – a small leftover piece of soul that the deceased could never have back. Most were memories of trauma that they left behind when they passed on. It was probably better for them that way.

The hauntings that were trickier and scarier were the cases where the ghosts knew exactly what they were doing. Ghost hunters called these intelligent hauntings. The spirit did not choose to leave when its time came. Their soul was not always trapped – sometimes, it was just a choice. They never wanted to leave, and I had never been able to truly solve any of those client's problems. The ghost had free will and usually stayed too long in this plane to ever be able to cross over. At least, that’s what I thought. They were angrier and lashed out with reason and forethought.

Hey, at least Beatrice hadn’t turned out to be a demon. I don’t do that. Not anymore.

I walked out of the room where I had found her essence and opened my mind once again.

Nothing. This house was free of the dead.

“Is it over?” The young man stood from the couch and looked as if he were about to get sick.

“Yes,” I sighed. “She is gone. She didn’t even know that you were here, Billy. She didn’t know that she was dead and had been reliving her last day over and over.”

“Jesus, that’s sad,” Billy wrung his hands. “Sorry, I was so nervous and worried that I’d have to find another rental. Do you know how much a house that’s not rent-controlled costs in this place?”

“That I do,” I smirked, unsurprised that he didn’t actually care about the spirit I helped to cross over. Most clients rarely did. People, as a blanket statement, only actually cared about themselves and their own problems. “Speaking of rent…”

“I can… uh… Venmo?”

“That’s fine.” I held up my phone and pulled up the app. He held his phone near mine and grabbed the code. A few seconds later, I heard the tell-tale sound that I had been paid. “If you have any friends with an issue, give them my number.”

“Does this happen that often? I mean, this is your real job?”

That was a loaded question. “Well, you did walk into my shop, didn’t you?”

“But I mean… Your sign says that you deal with hauntings, but you also do a lot of other things, right? Like Tarot cards and crystal balls… I mean all of that stuff.”

“I can read Tarot when somebody wants it. But I’m a psychic, not a fortune teller.”

“Sorry, I… That came out wrong. I think what I was trying to say was – are there that many ghosts?”

“You have no idea.”

I opened his front door and walked out onto his very brown lawn. It had been a hot summer in Los Angeles, and with the drought, the city had really clamped down hard on sprinklers and unnecessary water use. Even his rose bushes were dying from thirst. I could feel their energy waning. The Earth was constantly crying these days.

Crystal balls? Why does every person in the world think that a psychic is a fortune teller? Even my own mother gifted me with a crystal ball one Christmas when she was actually trying to understand what was happening to me. I had a gift, or a curse, as my grandmother called it. She, too, could feel and see spirits. But my gift had quickly grown well past hers. By the time I was thirteen years old, I understood my place in the world. I had stopped being scared of the ghosts who visited me, and my family had finally stopped trying to suppress my talent.

I was born this way – and born gay, too. I chose to be flamboyant, but I never brought my gifts out for silly party games or tricks. I wasn’t a psychic who could read minds – they did exist. I could only read and see the energy from the living. It wasn’t always very helpful because people’s energies shifted constantly.

But the dead were alive to me as much as any person whose heart still beat. I saw my first ghost when I was six years old. My grandfather had died recently, and one night, there he was, sitting on my bed the way he always did when it was time for me to sleep. He had read me a story, and I fell asleep in the comfort of his soothing voice – but the first time I saw his ghost… I screamed, and the sad look on his face broke my heart, even at such a young age.

The next night, he came back, and part of me was terrified because I knew he was dead – but another part of me wanted him to appear again. I missed him so much that I lay in bed, hoping I would have one more chance to see him. He came. I could see the mist of him appear slowly in my room. It was fascinating, and my heart raced as his form slowly took shape. I reached out and he did too as he sat down on my bed. There was no shift to the mattress – he had no weight, but my heart leaped, knowing that it was him. My hand slowly went through his.

“Granpa? I’m sorry that I wasn’t there to say goodbye,” my small voice broke.

He pulled his hand back and smiled at me. My gifts were just blossoming, and I didn’t know how to communicate – it washot to listen. But the smile that appeared on his old face let me know that he could hear me.

“Aren’t you in heaven?”

He pointed upward and then pointed to me.

“Is this good… goodbye?”

He nodded, stood up slowly, and walked to where I sat. His hands passed through me, but a ghostly kiss was his last goodbye. I could see the glow, and then he was gone.

I never saw him again.

But it never stopped afterward. The seal had been broken, and my gifts jumped to the forefront of my small, confused brain. The other spirits were not my grandfather, and most of them never tried to contact me as they wafted through our house. I would pretend that I couldn’t see them. It was safer that way. Once they knew, they never forgot.

Growing up was a nightmare until it wasn’t, and I had learned to control it to whatever extent I could. My grandmother finally got my parents to understand, and before I knew what was happening, I met the person who would help me on my way as a psychic medium. She taught me everything and gave me lessons to hone my abilities. She helped me be able to control when and what I saw.

She saved my life.

It was a short car ride back to my small office on Santa Monica Boulevard, and I turned my sign on and waited. Someone else would find me soon enough. But for now, I ordered Uber Eats. I couldn’t wait to eat.