“I had sex!” Pete [my best friend from college] announces in lieu of “hello.”
“Good for you.” I survey my disaster of an apartment. It’s 10:30 and I just finished rehearsal. Mike said he was going to come over to watch a bit of the Teen Angst Occult Cult Classic after his 9:30 ghost tour which means I have half an hour, maybe 45 minutes to overcome four months of depression induced squalor.
“I’m telling you Viv, you gotta try this someday.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” I mutter as I survey the precarious tower of dirty dishes in my sink. I love to cook. Well… loved to. I used to send Rick text messages with accounts of the fantastic meals I had made so he would understand just how lucky he was to have such an amazing girlfriend even though he lived 7 hours away and didn’t get to taste any of it. But someday, when we moved in together--
“So what’s it like to sleep with someone who didn’t hand you an instruction manual first?” Pete didn’t tell me the story about the instruction manual. But his college girlfriend sure did. It had cartoons. She turned out to be a lesbian.
“It’s great!” Pete says and joy just radiates through his voice. He’s had a long road with Stacy. She disappeared from his life for six months after a single kiss one summer night. I’m glad he finally caught her. It’s a nice reminder that everything that should work out does. Eventually. In God’s good time. Or the gods… or the Story’s. After all isn’t that the god I’ve decided to serve?
“What are you doing?” Pete asks after several minutes of rambling on about the joys of his new relationship to minimal response from me. He must have heard the clanging.
“I’m putting dishes in the dryer.” My apartment was spotless the day Rick arrived for his last visit. I spent 8 hours obsessively cleaning every inch. I suppose this should have clued me in to the fact that subconsciously I knew what was coming and thought it could be avoided if that tile on the counter was just clean enough. He’d see what a good wife I’d make, what a good house I could keep. Everything would be perfect.
“Why…?” Pete asks.
“Because I’m having a guy over. Mike. The tour guide. And he‘s a total neat freak and I don‘t have time to clean these dishes and I don‘t have anywhere else to put them so I stacked a bunch in the oven and now I‘m putting them in the dryer.”
“Are you ok?” Pete asks.
“Yes.” I say, looking around at my apartment which is apparently clean for the first time since the day Rick left and trying not to see anything as a metaphor.
~*~
I’m curled up on the futon staring at the text from Mike that says he’s not coming. I suppose that’s it then. So much for no strings attached fun. The worst part is I don’t even know why. He really seemed to like me. We wanted the same thing. We even talked about the fact that we both kissed people over New Year's and it wasn’t a big deal. But I can’t really ask what happened. That’s something a girl who cared would do.
At a loss for anything else to do, I call my new best friend. Violet answers immediately.
“What’s wrong baby? I thought you had a boy tonight.”
“He’s not coming.” My voice waivers so much more than I want it to.
“He’s a jerk. Didn’t I tell you he was a jerk? I went on a date with him once by accident. I didn’t realize that’s what it was until he tried to pay. He’s awkward and a jerk.”
“He’s not a jerk.” I say. Violet speaks in emphatic statements. I love this about her. She’s such a force of nature it’s hard to wallow. What she decides goes.
“But he is awkward!"
I laugh in agreement and she continues.
"I am coming to get you. Right now. You are not going to sit around your apartment and be sad. You are coming on a ghost hunt with me and Frank and other people from the theatre. And you are going to meet Sam. And he is going to teach you to be a proper witch.”
Violet has gotten it into her head that I’m a witch. She decided this for some reason the first day we met and everything I’ve done since has only seemed to confirm it for her, particularly after she came over and counted my tarot decks.
I’ve started reading cards again. The first morning I didn’t go to church, I went out to the beach and sat in the fog and shuffled the cards. The first one to fall out was the Moon, which in my Shakespeare deck is the Three Witches. Maybe Violet’s right. Maybe all I did was spend three years as a Mormon because as weird as it is to be a Mormon, the numbers make it seem a whole lot saner than being a witch.
“I’m not a witch.” I tell Violet, who of course, is.
“Yes you are.” She says. “You’re just confused because you decided to be a Christian because then you didn’t have magic powers, you had ‘spiritual gifts’ and somehow that was ok. You have to meet Sam. He’ll help. You’ll see. I‘m outside your house”
A honk of her car horn confirms it. I leave the dishes in the dryer and walk outside.
~*~
“The difference between a ghost tour and a ghost hunt” Sam explains “is that on a ghost tour you walk people around town, point to things, and tell them stories about things that may have happened there once upon a time. On a ghost hunt, you go sit quietly somewhere dark and creepy with your friends and wait for something interesting to happen that you can hopefully turn into a story.”
I don’t know these people very well, but it might be nice to be counted among their friends. Jack and Zelda run the theatre where I’m currently in a show. Violet’s boyfriend Frank is Jack’s best friend. A bunch of other cast members are here too. And Damien, the stage-manager, seems to stay within six inches of Sam at all times asking questions.
Sam runs a theatre as well, for the Savannah city government. I’ve never been over there but, best I can gather from the way everyone hangs on his every word, he’s been a mentor to all of them either in theatrical or esoteric pursuits. He’s also an extraordinary storyteller. That may have something to do with it as well.
We’re standing in the middle of an old graveyard in the middle of nowhere, so far out of Savannah I couldn’t even begin to tell you where we are. But Sam explains:
“Welcome to The Witches’ Graveyard” and suddenly his pronouncement is underscored by the Iconic Wicked Witch Theme Music. I laugh and look to see Jack holding a smart phone and grinning. Sam glares at him. Jack smiles back. Sam is 6’4’’ and over 200 pounds. Jack is 6 feet even and maybe 115.
“Really?” Sam says, apparently unamused. Jack shrugs sheepishly and Zelda, who looks like some kind of seductive dark fairy, plucks the phone from his hand and turns it off. Sam shakes his head and resumes his oration with every bit of booming expressive voice and overflowing authoritative presence. Jack catches my eye for a second as he assesses the audience reaction and I smile. It’s a good thing he’s married, otherwise I would be in trouble.
The rural graveyard looks like what I imagined in all those ghost stories I read in middle school about the young woman, suddenly orphaned, who moves into a Victorian house where strange things begin to happen. Or maybe it’s the sort of place you’d find a group of Stephen King’s teenaged characters if Stephen King had written about the south. Sam had a Stephen King adolescence from what I hear. And this was apparently part of its backdrop.
“So after they executed the three women, they buried them here.” Sam is pointing to three graves and I realize I’ve missed most of the story of the three witches who give the graveyard its name. Violet takes my hand.
The first grave is a normal grave with a full headstone that faces the right way. Savannah teaches you a lot about proper burial procedure. Any ghost tour guide will tell you that half the city is built on top of graves, though any two will argue about which half it was. Colonial Park, Savannah’s oldest cemetery, is full of gravestones that got separated from the graves they belonged to by Union Soldiers and who knows where those graves are now. Of course a lot of what a ghost tour guide will tell you is hearsay and they probably have no idea whether it’s true or not, but Sam seems like the kind of guy to never let his stories be tarnished with silly things like truth.
“The second woman was buried with her stone backwards so that she could never rise from her grave.” That for example, isn’t true, at least not according to what I’ve heard from Mike and the internet. Colonial Park is also filled with gravestones that face the wrong way, and the wrong way is any way but east. Graves are supposed to face east so that when the sun rises in the morning the first thing it does is light the name on the grave and identify who lies there. The reason you would bury someone with her headstone facing the wrong way is to keep her from resting rather than forcing her to it.
“And this final grave was vandalized back when I was in high school.” Sam is in his late thirties, I think, so that would have been maybe 20 years ago.
“Look” Violet hisses and I do. The third grave has no headstone or rather the headstone was broken off at the base leaving jagged points of rock jutting out of the ground. But that’s not the most disturbing thing. The grave is empty.
Well-- I mean-- it’s covered. It looks like a normal grave, a slightly indented patch of ground. But the longer I look at it, the emptier it looks. Like a deep, dark, gaping black hole just waiting--God I feel dizzy-- It’s almost like it’s—
Violet tugs on me sharply. I look at her.
“Stop it.” She says.
“What..?” I’m confused. I still feel a little dizzy.
“You know what.”
I really don’t. Is Sam still talking? Where did everybody go?
“You were tilting” she says with a disapproving expression.
“I was?” I was. Huh.
“Yes. You need to be more careful. You’re new at this. You don’t know how to protect yourself.”
“From what?”
“From whatever was trying to pull you in.”
I’m not sure what to say but that does seem an incredibly apt description. Like the grave was waiting for a body and I would do as well as anyone.
“What did you see?” I ask, since, after all, she was the one who told me to look.
“Vines pouring out and grabbing you around the wrist.” She says as though this happens to her daily but I should still be terrified of it.
I blink. I’ve always hated animate plants. They scare me more than just about anything. Except fire. From an elemental magic perspective one might say that means I fear passion and… instability? Or maybe disorder. Plants would be earthy things like practicality, stability and order. Moving plants…
I shudder.
“Are the woods glowing?” I ask and Violet looks.
“There are people out there who want to get in. Spirits.”
I exhale. At least I am back on familiar ground. I don’t remember when I started seeing the glowing outlines around people. I remember the first time I talked about it was in the summer before my senior year of college, so about 6 months after my baptism. The glowing predated my joining the Church, as did the tingling sensation of rushing energy that I learned to call “the presence of the Spirit,” and it sure was nice to find a place that would give me something to call such things. But the first time I talked about it wasn’t at Church. It wasn’t even with Rick, who did everything he could to play by the rules but didn’t have the slightest disposition toward the spiritual stuff. He made it clear that he counted on me for that.
No, the first person I talked to about the glowing was a friend of a friend who I met--on my first trip to Savannah oddly enough. She was a serious Christian but far more esoterically minded about it than any of the others I had known. We bonded over our love of the Teen Angst Occult Cult Classic and for whatever reason, I felt comfortable confiding in her that I thought I might be seeing angels.
She nodded and said “I see them too. Only trouble is, if you can see angels, you’ll also be able to see demons.”
Then she took my hands and looked deep into my eyes for a long time and added. “You’re a split soul. Both parts are bright, but there is a streak of darkness that runs straight down the middle and the two parts need each other to keep that darkness at bay. If you ever gave into that darkness… it would be disastrous.”
I haven’t seen her since.
When I finally did tell Rick, he said he didn’t doubt for a second that I could see the Holy Spirit in people and all around us. My optometrist said I have painless migraines. My mother told me to tell him he was close minded and not to worry, I was just seeing auras.
I guess auras without people are ghosts.
“When did you know you were different?” I ask Violet as we wander through the headstones and our fellow ghost hunters who are taking pictures, examining trees, or simply sitting quietly by themselves. Violet said she was sticking with me over her boyfriend because I was new to this and sometimes boys just need to be boys. Frank and Jack have apparently climbed a tree.
“I’ve always known.” she says. “But I was lucky. I had people to guide and teach me from the beginning. Even then though… I fucked up. I tried to do too much too quickly and ended up messing with stuff that could have killed me. Almost did.”
“What did you do?”
“I tried to bring someone back from the dead.”
I listen to Violet’s story torn between my natural inclination to believe a good story if I can because it makes life more interesting and the voice in my head that keeps pointing out that as nice as it would be to have somehow fallen into an episode of the Teen Angst Occult Cult Classic things like this just don’t happen in the real—
In the flash of a camera I see a woman with long dark hair standing at the edge of the woods.
I scream.
And scream.
And I’m gasping.
Violet’s arms are wrapped around me and I’m shaking. She tries to hold me still.
“There was a woman--”
“I saw her too” Violet whispers, still holding on to me. Tears are running down my face. And then I realize I’m sobbing. Because I’m scared, because Mike doesn’t want me, because Rick didn’t want me, because God wouldn’t let me stay where it was safe and there were rules and people and—
“What happened?” Sam asks.
“She saw something” Violet supplies and I try desperately to pull myself together. I am better than this. I am stronger than this. I am-- and then I feel it. Calm, safe, powerful.
I take a deep breath and meet Sam’s eyes.
“A woman” I say. People are staring and trying not to stare. They resume wandering. I’ve heard things like this happen from time to time. They probably think I’m nuts. Or just trying to get attention. I’m not sure I blame them. If it were anyone else…
“What did she look like?” Sam asks.
“She had pale skin and long dark curly hair. That’s all I saw.” My voice sounds calm and rational. Sam studies me.
“Give me your hand” he says. I do. He turns it palm up and studies it. Suddenly he drops it and pushes it away.
“What?” I say.
“Do you think it was one of the witches?” Violet asks.
Sam stares at us and for all his authority there is fear trickling through his eyes,
“A woman with pale skin and long dark hair?” he says gesturing to the two of us. “That could be either of you.” We glance at each other and it’s true but—
“But only one of you” Sam looks at me “has two life lines.”
Violet gasps and steps back from me slightly.
“What does that mean?” I ask and my voice is shaking again.
“Nothing good.” Sam says and starts to walk away “Keep an eye on her!” He calls back to Violet.
“But wait. I don’t understand--”
He turns back to me. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’” And then he’s gone.
I look at Violet and notice the woods behind her.
“The glowing… it’s gone… I can‘t see it anymore.” As if in regaining control, I had somehow shut myself down.
“Come on honey.” Violet takes my hand again. “Let’s go sit in the car. I think we’ve seen enough for one night.”