The Witch and the Gentleman

Anyway, I now remembered, more than anything about that day, the overwhelming feeling that someone had been watching me. The feeling was very familiar to what I was feeling now, here in my apartment. A slow, steady, ripple of electrical current. Almost a buzzing in my ears. Almost. A sense that eyes were on me, moving over me, penetrating me, looking so deeply that nothing was hidden. Nothing.

I remember shivering and looking up, glancing around…and seeing her sitting across from me. She was alone. And old. Very, very old. So old that I thought someone should be with her. But there was no one. No grandkids, no bored sons or daughters. She was also staring at me. Intently. I smiled. She didn’t. I looked away. She didn’t. I knew this because when I sneaked a peek back at her, she was still staring at me. I swallowed uncomfortably and shifted and tried to read but I couldn’t. After all, she was staring at me. She was distracting me. She was unnerving me.

And that’s when a towel boy waved his towel and indicated that my Accord was done. I had leaped up quickly. I tipped the kid, got in, and was about to pull out of the car wash and onto busy Ventura Boulevard when I forced myself to look back…and saw that the old lady was gone.

As if she hadn’t ever stood there.

It had been unnerving.

I’d forgotten about it totally.

Until now.

“That was you, wasn’t it?” I said to the empty room, still looking at the receipt.

“Of course, dear,” said a voice just behind my ear. “Now, can we talk?”

Chapter Thirteen

I jumped and squealed and nearly peed myself, but just as quickly as the fear and panic gripped me, it subsided, and I was left gasping and catching my breath, one hand clutching my chest. The other, clutching the wine.

“Please,” I said after a moment, and after I was sure I had full control over my bladder, “please, never do that again.”

As I breathed and held my hand over my chest, knowing that I was either going crazy or was experiencing the mother of all hauntings, I felt the sizzle of an electric current pulse through me. Stronger than before.

Not crazy, I thought. Option B…a haunting.

The old woman materialized slowly before me, taking on substance and shape and detail, and had every skeptic in the world been here with me, watching this, they wouldn’t be a skeptic anymore. They would be a believer in all things supernatural. And my little apartment would be crowded as hell. Hell, I could charge admission.

“Holy shit,” I whispered.

“Please, dear, you’re better than that.”

It took me a moment to realize that a ghost had just chastised me for swearing.

I didn’t apologize. I just closed my mouth and held my breath and listened to the small squeal that was trying to make its way out from my compressed lips, a squeal that very likely would turn into a scream. But I kept it bottled up, somehow.

In a matter of maybe half a minute, a woman who was mostly solid—after all, I could still see my fireplace mantel through her shoulder area—was standing before me, hands folded below her waist, rising and falling gently. She could have been standing in a boat in the middle of a lake. She wasn’t, of course. She was standing in my living room.

“Sweet mama,” I finally said.

“Hello, Allison,” she said.

“Erp,” I said. That was supposed to, of course, be a “hi.”

The woman was mostly white, which surprised me. Samantha Moon, my vampire friend, had described ghosts as pure energy. I wasn’t seeing pure energy. I was seeing something cottony, with splashes of color. Something mostly solid, but also opaque in spots, too. Whatever Samantha had been seeing, she hadn’t been seeing what I was seeing now. Then again, vampires were weird.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” said the ghost. Her voice had a slightly musical quality to it and seemed to reach me from everywhere at once. As if her voice was coming out of surround sound speakers.

That’s when I realized that her voice wasn’t coming from everywhere at once. It was coming from inside my ear. As in, inside my head.

“Sweet Jesus,” I whispered.

“He is sweet,” said the woman. I watched her lips move, watched her speak, but the words appeared directly in my head. “The name has power, as do many names and words, for that matter. Do not speak it lightly, dear.”

“This isn’t happening,” I said, suddenly sure I was dreaming. I looked around. I wasn’t in bed. I was on the couch. I stood suddenly, with the thought of splashing water on my face in the bathroom, but a sharp pain in my foot changed that plan. I gasped and sank back into the couch. The pain in my toe was enough to convince me I wasn’t dreaming.

Now breathing hard, I had worked myself up. “I need air,” I gasped.

“Then get some air, dear.”

I stood and staggered through the room, keeping one eye on the spirit who turned and watched me cross the room and head over to my balcony. There, I threw open the sliding glass door and breathed the not-so-fresh Beverly Hills air. I smelled traces of exhaust, yes, but I also smelled the nearby jacaranda trees, which were blooming, and the freshly cut grass, too. Good enough. I sucked and breathed and repeated, and was certain that by the time I turned around, the old woman who had appeared in my apartment would be gone.

Yes, of course, she would be gone, I thought, looking out toward the massive apartment edifice before me with its glass facade and covered balconies and awnings and doorman. Yes, this was the real world. The physical world. A world where ghosts did not exist. Ghosts would not even be allowed in Beverly Hills, if Beverly Hills had any say in it. Ghosts were something out of…Hollywood.

And so, as I turned away from the balcony, I was certain that whatever I had seen—or imagined—would be gone. Samantha and I would have a good laugh over this during drinks later. Maybe I should see a shrink, I thought, and, as I turned, I felt the now-familiar buzz on my skin, and there she was, standing there in my living room, rising and falling on the unseen tides of time and space, watching me serenely.

My heart sank…but I was excited, too. “You’re Peter’s mother,” I realized, when I stepped back into the living room from the balcony.

“Yes, dear.”

“You gave me the book.”

“Of course.”

She spoke calmly, patiently, with no inflection in her voice and no gestures, either. She could have been a projected image in my room. Except that her eyes and head followed my movements.

“Why did you give me the book?”