Eight Days

As Scott and I walked around the nearby area trying to figure out what we wanted to eat, we talked a good bit. We talked about how he loved sports and was very active and how I didn’t have an athletic bone in my body. We talked about foods we liked and disliked. It turned out that he loved the typical foods—pizza, burgers, tacos—as well as sushi. I also loved the pizza, burgers, and tacos, but I could never get past the smell of sushi.

“So are you telling me you never tried it?” he asked in disbelief.

“Oh no, I’ve tried it,” I said. “I ate a piece and then I got sick some twenty minutes later.”

“Oh.” He paused, so I looked over at him. He seemed to be thinking about something, so I didn’t bother him. Finally he said, “Tell me something, Casey. If you aren’t into sports, then what are you into?”

I wracked my brain for an acceptable answer. What was I into? What was I good at and enjoyed?

“I write a lot,” I answered offhandedly. “I also listen to people, and help those who have problems they need to fix.”

“What kind of problems?” he asked. “Don’t be offended by this, but you don’t seem like the type to help others since you keep to yourself so much.”

“To be honest, Scott,” I said as I locked eyes with him, “I don’t know how I could explain it without sounding crazy. All I can say is that I’m not really a normal person.”

“All right.” He sounded disappointed. He sighed and added, “And you know, Casey, being different, as opposed to normal, isn’t a bad thing. You just have to know how to embrace it.”

“I know,” I muttered. I softened my voice and tacked on, “And Scott? I don’t mind talking to you, but I can’t tell you everything like you seem to want. I just can’t, nor do I expect you to tell me everything. I need you to understand that so this whole talking thing can work.”

“I can understand that.”

Again I found myself smiling.

We walked in silence for a few moments when we came to a small grocery store. “Hey, why don’t we get some food in here and then go sit down somewhere?” I suggested. “There’s a park not too far from here.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “That sounds nice.”

***

If the tension and awkwardness between us hadn’t been demolished before we went into the store, then it certainly had vanished afterwards. We spent twenty minutes in the store, most of which were spent goofing around. It took us all of five minutes to find pre-made sandwiches, chips, and drinks. The other fifteen minutes were spent running around the store, playing our own version of hide and seek, and avoiding the employees who happened to be walking around the store. How we had even managed to start playing games in the first place was unknown to me. Finally, after having caused enough of the mischief we had stumbled into, we bought our stuff, receiving annoyed glances from a few of the cashiers and passing workers. They had watched our antics and were happy to have us leave.

“And when that old lady told us to stop acting like three year olds,” Scott recounted with a laugh. “That was priceless.”

“Yes, it was.” An old lady who looked to be in her late eighties had been shopping alone. She happened to be on the aisle I turned down at one point when Scott had been chasing me. We were playing tag—yes, tag—and I was trying to keep from being ‘it’ again. It’s not like one of us almost ran into her or anything. We actually managed to steer clear of her pretty easily. It was just that, like with everyone else in the store, we had been a nuisance. “That’s probably going to come back to haunt me, though.”

Pun intended, I thought to myself.

“Why?” Scott asked. He had the most curious expression on his face.
I wanted to tell him: “Because that old lady looks like she’ll drop dead any day now. Hell if I know she won’t come after me once she’s dead.” But I couldn’t tell that to Scott; that kind of talk was reserved for Grammy or one of the other few mediums I rarely came into contact with. Instead, I decided to give the best lie I could. “My mom knows a lot of people around L.A. I think she knows that lady, or someone related to her.”

“So?”

“So what happened back there could get back to my mom,” I said slowly, watching the ground. “My mom looks for any little reason to punish me.”

“Really?” He didn’t sound skeptical, just surprised. “What about your dad?”

“Now he actually likes me,” I said with small laugh. “We get along well. We’re actually pretty close.”

The park then came into view, and I froze. It was loaded with ghosts, not that I didn’t encounter ghosts every other place I went. There easily could have been more than one hundred of these ghosts—possibly two hundred, not that I was about to stand there and count. These spirits walked to and fro, creating a sea of bodies only seen by me.

Scott noticed my hesitation. “Casey? Casey, come on.”

“Maybe the park isn’t a good idea,” I said slowly, planting my feet firmly on the curb.

“Are you kidding?” he scoffed. “There’s almost no one there. The only people I see are that couple and their kid by the swings.”

I stood silently, studying the park. After a few seconds of examination, I saw the family Scott was talking about. A five or six year old with dirty blonde hair and cheeks pink from his exertion was happily swinging. About fifteen feet off, a couple sat on a dark green bench. The man and woman were similarly dressed in dark jeans, with the woman’s hugging her legs as skinny jeans typically did, and white shirts—the guy’s being a simply button up, and the woman’s being a short-sleeved pin-striped button up with a black vest over it. They two of them—both brunettes—talked animatedly, smiling and occasionally laughing at a recalled memory.

But everyone else in the park…There was something off about all of them. None of the children’s faces had pinkish tints as the blond boy did. No one’s eyes shined the way those full of life did. Some spirits had cuts and bruises visible on their bodies. One even had deep gashes in his arms and across his stomach and was practically dripping with blood.

These people were all void of life and emotion, and they simply just walked, and walked, and walked. No words were spoken, and no one went out of their way to acknowledge anyone else, me included.

This type of ghost-gathering thing wasn’t normal, but it wasn’t completely rare, either. Everywhere I went, I always saw ghosts like this—the ones who either hadn’t yet learned how to teleport or the ones who simply wanted to walk to their destination to prolong their arrivals or feel more alive. People were constantly dying all around the world, and some ghosts never fulfilled whatever it was that would help them move on. Both of these facts meant one thing: that Earth-bound spirits were never in short supply.

“Casey…?” Scott now sounded concerned for me.

“Ok,” I said as we stepped out on the empty street. “How about a park bench?”

“Better yet, what about a table?” he asked as we stepped into the park. He glanced at me, at which I glanced back, and we watched each other’s eyes for a moment. Scott was searching for something in my eyes, and, in his, I was searching for a clue as to what he could be searching for. I came up with nothing, but Scott found something in my eyes and frowned.

“Come on,” he said softly. He took my hand and led me to a table set underneath a tree. I didn’t even know what kind it was. Perhaps it was an oak tree, because it was huge, but I wasn’t sure. Trees weren’t my specialty.

“I’m sorry I keep acting so weird,” I mumbled after we had arrived at a table and sat down across from each other, Scott facing the road. “It usually doesn’t happen this much, or this badly.”

“What doesn’t?” he asked as he bit into his sandwich.

“…I wish I could explain it.”

“You can’t explain it, or you don’t want to?” he asked between bites, observing my face.

“I could, but you’d only say I’m crazy.” Scott was about to protest. “And don’t say that you wouldn’t think I’m crazy. You don’t know that because you don’t know what I’m not telling you, and therefore you have no basis to judge whether or not you’d think I’m crazy.”

Scott appeared dumbfounded for a moment, but then he relaxed and chuckled. “Damn, you’re good at reasoning. You could get a nice job working with law if you kept that up. Have you ever considered that?”

Just as I was about to reply, Mary’s voice sounded in my head. Casey? Casey, where are you? I lost you after you left school.

“Yeah, I have,” I lied to Scott while also replying to Mary, I’m at the park. I felt proud of myself for managing to keep up with both conversations while not zoning out.

Okay, Mary replied.

And just like that, Mary was standing beside me, the look on her face urgent.

One may wonder how Mary and I can communicate this way. The answer is fairly simple. There are three types of mediums: mental mediums, trance mediums, and physical mediums. Mental mediums can directly see and interact with spirits without the spirits being too invasive of the mediums’ mind and body. With trance mediums, the mediums allow ghosts into their heads so that these spirits can convey messages into the physical world. The mediums don’t actually fall into trances, for the mediums remain fully conscious the entire time, but they willingly ‘stands aside’ to allow the ghosts to get messages across. Lastly are the physical mediums, and in my honest opinion, the worst kind to be. Physical mediums will allow spirits to take energy from their bodies. This energy is then used by the ghosts to produce manifestations such noises, voices, or to allow themselves to appear visible to normal people.

I am a mental medium, and proud to be one. Of course, like the other types of mediums, there is a slight downside. This downside is all the different abilities that come with being a mental medium. I am able to: see things that aren’t not physically present (clairvoyance), hear the voices and thoughts of spirits (clairaudience), have an impression of ghosts’ feelings and what they want to communicate as well as feel the same things ghosts feel before they died (clairsentience), smell scents affiliated with spirits (clairalience), to receive taste impressions from spirits (clairgustance), and to know something without receiving the information by normal or psychic senses (claircognizance).

While I am sensitive to all these different abilities, the strongest of them, for me, lied in the clairvoyance, clairaudience, and claircognizance. It was the clairaudience that allowed Mary and me to communicate telepathically.

“Casey, do you feel it?” Mary asked with the utmost serious expression on her face as she glanced around at all the ghosts around us.

I gave her a quick look that said, Feel what?

“Feel, Casey. Feel,” she said. And then she was gone.

“Casey, are you okay?” Now it was Scott talking. His face held concern, and I realized that once again my behavior was not going to help me lose my ‘freak’ reputation with Scott. If anything, I had only worsened it.

“Yeah,” I said slowly, readying a lie. “I have a slight headache, but I’m okay.”

“If you say so…” He didn’t look convinced as he now munched away on his chips. I had barely touched my food.

Mary, I thought to her with a warning tone in my mental voice, why are you getting so cryptic with me all of a sudden? What’s going on? I don’t like it.

Your Grammy said that I can’t always help you, she immediately replied. According to her, I can’t give you every bit of information I have because it won’t help you practice your powers. So, instead of giving you everything I know, I gave you the basic message.

Then thanks, I guess. And by the way, we’re picking up this conversation as soon as I get home.

Okay, she said in a cheery voice. I’m already in your room, anyway.

I pulled myself away from the link to Mary and focused in on my surroundings. And then I felt it—that wave of dread and claircognizance intermingled, the feeling that told something bad was going to happen.

I turned around on the bench to face the road. I scanned through the dissipating sea of ghosts looking for the cause of this horrid feeling. I knew that as soon as I saw the person causing the feeling, I would know that that person was indeed causing it. I just had to find the right person…

It was times like these that I wished I could just turn off the clairvoyance. I wished I could just turn it off with a little switch like people do with lights, but it wasn’t that easy. Nothing ever was.

“Casey, what are you looking at?” Scott asked.

“A person?” I tried, making it come out like a question.

“Well, there aren’t many people—hey,” he suddenly broke off, sounding surprised. “That’s my sister.”

“Sister?” I questioned.

“Yeah. Hold on, please. I don’t even know what she’s doing wandering alone. Mom never lets her.” Then suddenly Scott hollered, “Mia! Come here.”

A moment passed where the only things I saw were the ghosts, although I noticed that the park was clearing up. Then, before me stood a blond-haired, brown-eyed girl with a gleaming smile. She couldn’t have been older than eight or nine.

And that’s when I felt it.

I felt the dread intensify. My stomach twisted and then dropped as if all the dread was weighing it down. One glance at Mia told me that something bad was going to happen to this girl. Something bad was going to happen to Scott’s little sister. The question was: What would happen?

I went numb. As Scott started questioning Mia about what she was doing out here alone and where their mom was, I got up and collected my things. I excused myself, telling Scott, who protested my leave greatly, that I had some things to do.

I followed the well-known route to my house, all the while staring blankly ahead of me. There wasn’t much more I could do. I didn’t know what would happen to Mia, and I couldn’t shake the terrible feelings shrouding me.

At that moment, everything felt wrong.