"That, admittedly, is the tricky part."
Charlie stood and seemed to regain the confidence he'd displayed the other day, when he hired me. "I mean, I would never have believed in ghosts either. But these past few months... it's undeniable. Just undeniable. Something is here." I saw in his mind's eye again the fleeting glimpses he had of movement. Glimpses only. No details. I saw again the flickering blue light, the mist, the sense of being watched. All of this played out in his mind, and all of it was, admittedly, strong indicators of a typical haunting. "And you, Sam? You believe it's her?"
"I do," I said, "and I think it's time that I show you what I saw."
"Show me? Wait. What?"
"Sit next to me, Charlie," I said.
He was pacing, but paused and sat between Allison and I. He shivered a little when his forearm brushed my own arm. I tried not to be offended.
"Close your eyes," I said.
"Why-"
"It'll be okay," I said, adding a small suggestion that all would be okay, and his eyes promptly closed.
I didn't want him too deep, because I wanted him to remember what he was seeing, so I gave him a series of prompts to remember the image I was about to convey to him, and to also believe that I had drawn the image for him. And when he was calm and receptive, I gave him a clear view, telepathically, of the woman in my own memory, and he gasped.
And then he wept.
Chapter Fourteen
"Can I keep this?" he asked, reaching for the closest piece of paper, a bill from AT&T. Yes, he believed this was my drawing of Autumn.
"Sure," I said, and reinforced the belief that the image he saw in his mind's eye-the image I had transferred to him-was, in fact, clearly displayed on the phone bill before him. Briefly, I saw what he saw: a surprisingly lifelike portrait of Autumn smiling back at him.
"Her eyes look so real," he said, staring closely at his phone bill. "You really are a wonderful artist, Samantha. I mean, this is exactly how I imagined her." He held up the page for Allison to see, showing her the AT&T logo and columns of numbers.
"She's a regular Picasso," said Allison drily.
As Charlie stared at his phone bill, often reaching out and brushing it lightly with his fingertips, Allison motioned with her head for me to follow her, which I did into the very hallway where I'd seen the full-body apparition of Queen Autumn.
Allison, privy to my thoughts, scanned the area. "There's no ghost here. In fact, I don't feel a ghost anywhere in this house."
My psychic, witchy friend was almost as good at perceiving ghosts as I was. Almost. She didn't quite see the world of energy and light that I did. Nor did she see the minor and often fleeting manifestations, or the ever-flowing currents of well-being. She didn't see, for instance, the briefest hint of a dog manifesting in the far corner of the hallway, then disappear again. But she did catch it in my thoughts.
She turned and looked in the corner. "Really, a dog?"
"It came and went, so fleeting as almost to not be here."
"A ghost dog?"
"Almost, but not quite. The wavering hint of a memory of a dog."
"But how?" she asked.
"Its imprint could be stamped upon this place, or it was just swinging by to say hello. Then again, it might have realized it had the wrong house. It was just a dog, after all."
"Do you see her now?" asked Allison. "Autumn?"
"She's not here, but this hallway..." I let my voice trail off and frowned. I hadn't really looked at the hallway before. Or, rather, I hadn't looked too deeply. "This hallway is particularly lively."
Allison saw what I was seeing in my mind's eye, so tuned in was she to me.
"You are seeing mini-manifestations everywhere, Sam. They're coming and going rapidly."
And so I was. I turned in the hallway, tuning into the energy, and watching the various eddying pools of flowing light coagulate into faces and shapes and blobs, only to disperse again. I looked toward the end of the long hallway, where the light was flowing through walls and passing through us. Some of this wasn't new to me. All light behaved this way. Although I had come to know it not as light, but as a never-ending flow of well-being, the energy that creates worlds. I always suspected that those who harnessed the energy, through focused thought and right action, had the best results. It was energy available to all. I just happened to see it, and it lit my way, even in the darkest of rooms.
But this hallway had one difference: the sheer amount of manifestations.
"What does it mean, Sam?" asked Allison, who had been following my train of thought.
"I don't know."
She nodded, frowned. "It's like we're standing in a tunnel of creation."