Prelude to “The Whisperer”

The Door Opens

“Happy Birthday Mama,” she said, going down on her haunches and onto one knee to pull a stray weed near the headstone. Anna Sharp adopted a conversational tone and made small talk among the graves. From her beginning days, going cemetery to cemetery with her geneaologist mom, she figured the folks buried there were bored at the very least, so the least she could do was talk to them.

“Any news from the family over there?”

She waited as if she expected an answer.

Occasionally when her team investigated a house or land where there was a haunting there WAS an answer in that space of quiet, she’d hear it on her digital recorder or the spirit box. In her other visits to her mama though, so far there’d been nothing, but it never hurt to try.

The recorders were her specialty on investigations with Carol and Richard. The Trois Fae team had been in operation for only about a year but they’d gathered enough evidence that their reputation among the paranormal set was a good one. She flipped the recorder around her neck on its jeweled lanyard and turned it on. Then she reached for her reason for being there. It was her mother’s 77th birthday and the gold wrapped box bore a piece of the most exquisite chocolate she knew. An appreciation of chocolate was something she’d learned at her mother’s knee. The gift was an appropriate one. She bit half off and let it melt in her mouth and left the rest on the stone.

“Do you still meet on the beach?” Anna asked, as if the other woman could answer back, like a spiritual Skype or Facetime.

Her mom’s family had been fond of beaches in Mexico. So the beach was how she and dad had talked about heaven while each had held one of her hands in her hospice bed. They’d thought that, if any of their descriptions had gotten through her stroke wracked form, then maybe they’d help her shape her perception of heaven as a bonfire on the beach with her parents and her sister who’d gone before.

The one person she’d refused to see in the warm light on that beach was the shade of her younger brother, who’d been a nightmare to the family in the weeks before his suicide. In the hours after she’d sent her dad home to his own bed, and she’d be alone with her non-responsive mother on what would be her final night, she’d warned her brothers ghost to steer clear of their mother. This mother wouldn’t be the frail woman he left behind.

At that exact moment, the old body in the bed had arched up and her eyes had flown open and looked into the middle distance at a point just behind her, over her shoulder.

Her logical mind knew there was just a lamp there.

But her head had spun as if on a swivel and her illogical brain expected to see a nightmare version of her brother there with half his head blown off and the gun pointed at her.

There was only the lamp.

About six hours later she woke from her light dose on the couch at the foot of the bed. The white noise of her mothers rattling breath had stopped.

It was the loudest silence she’d ever heard.

Mama had been buried where generations of her family lay. It was located east of nearby Mountain Home on the main road out of town. Anna had driven it many, many times – most of her father’s family were buried here. Her mother’s side was ensconced in the cemetery downtown.

The land, with it’s fringe of headstones, wrapped around the little white church and snuggled it into the space next to the highway just across from the Ozark cedar forest. She could remember when, looking out the opposite direction from the road, she would’ve seen a pond and hay fields.
During her Grandpa Red’s funeral she’d thought the view poetic as he’d actually created that pond years before with his ‘We move the earth’ bulldozer business. His view had only lasted a decade or so when the strip mall parking lot filled in the pond.

At the time she’d imagined her grandfather’s spirit leaning on the cemetery fence and cussing out the construction guys. She’d hoped he’d made life difficult for them if he could influence anything off the church grounds.

Lets just say imagination is not something she’d ever lacked.

So, on her way to see her father, she’d swung off the road on her terracotta red Ural motorcycle with it’s sidecar and pulled into the church driveway where he’d see it when he drove to join her. She hung the full face helmet, with it’s wand and sparkles ‘Flora’ logo painted along the back, on the handlebars. Her bike bore the same name along the gas tank. He’d be pulling out of his woodland house and coming to join her.

She carried on pulling non existent weeds and talking to the air.

“So what’s the news from Grandmu and Poppy? Or is Grandma taking off on her own,” Anna recalled a story one of her mom’s visitors had told her about her Grandma and mentioning that she’d said, some years ago, that she’d sold herself into slavery once in her life and wouldn’t do that again.

With the speed of thought, that blew her mind whenever she thought about it, her mind envisioned the sort of adventures a woman who came of age in the 20s might crave now. Where would Grandma Ellen go if she could? Somewhere in Mexico, she thought. There’d been loads of pictures and slides to attest to their interest in the culture when she and dad had begun to go through and catalog the family boxes and papers. In their new existence perhaps Grandma would be the expedition leader in the Mexican jungles and her grandfather would be the expedition photographer panting after her with no success as she made him work for her love and attention.

“I’m just going to visit the others while I’m here, I’ll stop back by…” she stood and closed her eyes mentally willing herself to perceive whatever might be in the area. She did this always, at every investigation, and it usually yielded not much more than a creepy feeling or two.

This time it felt different, like walking through one of those fun houses where the hallway you’re walking down suddenly turns on its side. Her mind showed her a doorway, large and wooden, like what might front a castle. With a click it swung open.

She turned 180 degree — behind her were the graves of her great uncle Mike and Great Aunt Joanna.

Standing between the graves, the dark haired, 20-something woman in the light blue homespun dress, gently smirked at her. Her hands rested on the shoulders of a 10-year-old boy dressed as a cowboy.

Anna felt like a cloak of cotton filled her head and muffled her hearing.

She looked more closely at the young boy. Great-uncle Mike? She didn’t know for sure who he was. She’d never found a picture of him. He’d died by accidental gunshot when his older brother had played indian to his cowboy and hadn’t known the shotgun was loaded.

Aunt Joanna had passed away at the Sedgewick County Tuberculosis Hospital. In the five years she was in residence she often wrote to her younger sisters Agnes and Margaret that her condition was improving and she expected to come home soon. If the grave she was standing on wasn’t ‘proof’ enough of her identity, there was the fact that this woman was very, very thin. And for just a moment both let her see how they died. The boy manifested his death wound and the skin on her bones tightened to almost terrifying levels before both returned to ‘normal.’

They both smiled at her as if they knew her. But neither spoke so she introduced herself.

“I am Margaret’s granddaughter, Sonny’s daughter.” Anna said. “I am grateful to see you and wish you nothing but peace.”

She remembered who else was buried in this land and turned her head to the left 90 degrees where her grandparents Red and Margaret were buried. Margaret was perhaps 20. Red was a few years older. Both showed themselves at their prime of life. Most spirits seem to imagine themselves at about that age. She hypothesized that self visualization plays a role in the finished product in the afterlife. She’d always wanted to be able to see like this, and she wasn’t sure if the ability would last, so she made use of what she could.

The young couple smiled at her as she walked to them.

‘Do you know me, I’m Sonny’s girl,” she asked eagerly. They just nodded once they tried to speak and realized she didn’t hear them. She felt the wave of love, and frank amusement, from them.

Her grandfather quirked a brow at her, his red hair, mirrored on her head, moved in a nonexistent breeze. He laughed. Over his shoulder she saw her grandma’s brother Bob and her sister Agnes maybe. She’d not seen photos of them at a young age. It was supposition that it was them as their graves were to either side.

She looked back at her grandparents.

“Is Daddy ok,” she asked. “He misses momma so much I know. Are you all keeping him company? Is momma keeping him company” She lived a few hours away from her father and she couldn’t help but be worried about him.

Margaret’s eyes met hers, and looked significantly past her over her left shoulder. Her heart raced and she spun back to her mothers gravesite.

The slim, blonde woman stood on the headstone, finishing the chocolate and smiling. Anna saw her mouth move and was so frustrated that she couldn’t hear her.

Anna’s eyes teared up as she took several steps towards her mother, the funhouse feeling intensified as she only tangentially took note of her father’s car pulling in behind the bike and his form coming around the church before she whispered ‘I love you’ to the spirit and promptly fainted.