Chapter 15 #2
“We weren’t expecting you to have any. I don’t think anybody really has experience with this,” he shared, a note of laughter in his tone.
“You can laugh,” she stated, “but we’re sitting here on the spot and terrified.”
“Of course you are,” he said, his voice soothing. “I’m not trying to laugh at your predicament, but we rarely ever understand what we are capable of doing until we’re called on to do it.”
“Yes, but listen to yourself. We don’t even know what this thing is.
According to Eric’s assessment, it’s hungry and looking to feed, and I don’t want to be its next meal.
For all I know, that’s exactly what happened to Debbie.
Were you able to find out anything from the woman who you helped escape? ”
“No, she disappeared into the light very quickly, with a huge sense of gratitude for having been saved from whatever that was. There was definitely the sense that she had been there a very long time, but it didn’t seem as if whatever it is had taken her deliberately.
It was more likely she fell into it and had been searching for a way out ever since. ”
“That almost sounds even worse,” Eden whispered. “The thought that somebody can fall into this, then have no idea how to get out, is very disturbing.”
“For a lot of souls, when they pass over, there’s no thinking about it.
They go directly to where they are intended to be,” Stefan explained, “and their crossing over is simple and clean. And sometimes you get either people who are still caught in the middle or who don’t even realize they have died because it happened so fast. You know, people happily having a conversation while driving in a car, and suddenly something falls on top of them mid-conversation, and they know nothing.
Yet, in their mind, they’re still sitting in that car, trying to figure out what happened, maybe even still talking to the person who may or may not be there beside them anymore. ”
She winced. “And you’re saying that sometimes the one person stays and the other person has already crossed over?”
“Yes, it depends on what their perception of death was at the time. As in the case of a child, they generally don’t come with all that baggage, and they move on very quickly. In some cases, the parents are still looking for that child, refusing to leave until they can take that child with them.”
“Which would be horrific,” she whispered.
“Absolutely. The depth of love often supersedes this transformation process in some situations, though not all of them. I mean, if we have a mother dying of cancer, she generally dies in a peaceful manner, heavily medicated, and she carries on. But, if she’s murdered, while being kidnapped with her child, then she may be clinging to whatever that landscape was in the hope of finding that child and still being able to rescue it.
And, if that child was murdered at the same time, which has certainly happened, the child quite often will have crossed over, but the mother may not have been cognizant of that happening, and she is stuck, still looking, whereas the child is long gone. ”
“I don’t even want to contemplate any of that.”
“Right, so we have a problem with that portal—”
Just then, while they were talking, a heavy rumble cane underneath their feet.
Eden jumped up, spinning around in a wild circle.
Stefan was still talking, until Eric said tersely, “Stefan, hang on a sec.”
Stefan asked, “What happened?”
“An earthquake beneath our feet,” she cried out.
Stefan paused for a moment, then replied, “It’s listening to us. It’s hearing us. Good God.”
“Now you’re saying it’s alive, as if it has senses?” Eden asked.
“Everything is alive,” Stefan noted. “Whether we want to think of it or not, everything has energy. And if there’s energy, there is some semblance of cognition to go along with it, with different levels for each state.”
She closed her eyes. “So, are you saying that this entity, this … whatever this is, knows we’re talking about it?”
“Yes, that would be my presumption.”
She took several deep breaths and kept backing up, farther and farther away from Eric on the phone.
“Easy,” Eric muttered, as he stood up and walked closer to her.
“We need to get off this hill,” she snapped. “We need to get out of here.”
“Why?” he asked, his tone sharp, as he reached out a hand.
She grabbed his hand but turned to run, dragging him with her.
Eric spoke into his phone. “Stefan, I don’t know what’s going on, but she’s freaking out right now.”
“Freaking out?” Stefan repeated.
Eric asked Eden, “Are you trying to tell me that was an earthquake? Earthquakes do happen around here, not very often, but they certainly do happen.”
“That wasn’t the same thing,” Eden yelled, turning to look at Eric. “You know it wasn’t the same thing.”
Stefan called out through the phone. “She’s right. It wasn’t the same thing, and it is interesting that it’s hearing us, that it’s listening in.”
“It’s not interesting,” she cried out. “It’s—I don’t even know what to call it, but this is not good. We need to leave, and we need to leave now.”
“And where will you go?” Stefan asked. “Will you take everybody with you?”
She froze, and Eric noted that she was hyperventilating.
“Easy, easy,” he whispered, as he tugged her into his arms and just held her. “Stefan, I’ll need to talk to her a little bit.”
“Understood, and I will call you back because—”
“I know,” Eric interrupted. “This isn’t over.”
“No, it can’t be over,” Stefan countered. “This cannot be left as is.”
“She may not be the right person to help,” Eric pointed out.
“She is,” Stefan confirmed. “She has an awful lot more abilities than she has any idea of.”
“But she’s not interested in working with any of these abilities,” Eric argued. “She’s apparently told ghosts to buzz off before because they were in her space, in her face, or just generally irritating her.”
Stefan snorted. “Yeah, a lot of them are irritating, but the fact that she can see and can communicate with the dead means a lot.”
“But that’s a different story with me,” she cried out into the phone.
“I communicated with somebody who I knew, my mother, my family, and my friends who had passed over, and I did ask some of them to move on because they were in my face all the time. It was so hard to concentrate at work. Every time I looked up, there they were.”
Stefan didn’t say anything for a moment. “That just means that your ability to communicate has been fine-tuned more and more. Have you ever had to try harder to talk to them?” Stefan asked.
“Yes, with Debbie, I tried. She just kept telling me that I needed to figure it out because she was murdered. Almost threatening me. She is so angry.”
“And yet she didn’t tell you where she was?”
“No, but she was talking to me normally, as if burped out of the world, like that other woman.”
Eric asked, “Stefan, does that have any correlation to the two deaths and this Origin you’re talking about?”
“I don’t know,” he replied, “and yet it is very interesting because a lot of seismic activity has happened around that area. So it’s entirely possible that something has woken up from whatever sleep it was happy to rest into.
This one woman is free, and I have no idea how many others could be in there. ”
“Please tell me that we don’t have to open this up and deal with them too,” Eden muttered. “That would be a little more than anyone can handle.”
“No, I don’t think it is more than you can handle,” Stefan stated. “I find that people who end up in these situations tend to be precisely the ones most equipped for the job.”
“That is not making me feel any better,” she muttered.
“Of course not,” Stefan agreed, “and I am sorry. I’m not trying to scare you, but I do feel as if we need to explore this a little more.”
“Great, and when do you want to do that?” she asked, staring at Eric.
He noted the trembling and the fear in her gaze.
After a long moment of silence, Eden added, “Look. If I can do something, I’m willing to help, but when and how? We’re only here overnight, before a short session on Sunday.”
“And overnight might do it,” Stefan noted.
“Plus, I’m due back to work in two days. I took an extra day off, but I’ll have to get back to my life.”
“I know, and we all want that,” Stefan said. “But, if I am right, this thing can follow you to the ends of the earth to get what it wants regardless.”
*
Eric kept an eye on Eden for the next few hours as they tried to assimilate into the next meditation session.
He wasn’t even sure why they were bothering, considering they were both now looking at something completely different and wondering just how it was all supposed to fit together. Still, he had no answers.
It’s certainly not what he expected when he got here, but, now that he was here, it wasn’t something he would walk away from either, nor should he, not if this madness was going on and there was any way to stop it.
He didn’t know about Eden, but it felt very much like, even if she didn’t stick around, he needed to.
However, since they had come together in his car, it didn’t give her much of a choice.
Finally he gave up any pretense and slipped away from the meditation session and headed back up to the hill.
He had looked around for Eden first but, not seeing her, decided that it didn’t really matter at this point. He needed to come out and see what he could do on his own, and maybe she would change her mind—or maybe not. He didn’t know.
Right after Stefan told her that she may not have choice in the matter, she’d freaked out and ran like hell. It took some time to get her to calm down.
As he sat out here again in the bright sunshine, he thought he heard a rustling behind him. As he turned around, he saw the caretaker working away on one of the hedges off to the side. “Hey, Samuel.” They had met the day he had arrived at the hotel.
Samuel was old, still fit, and in very good shape. The older man stopped when he saw him and nodded. “You gave up on the meditations, did you?”
“Let’s just say that whatever was going on out here seemed to be much more fascinating.”
The old man cackled and nodded. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Not sure how to take that, particularly in view of what they had already seen, Eric continued. “I guess you’ve seen some pretty wild things over the years here.”
“Yeah, I sure have,” he replied, “and it’s not going away anytime soon.”
That appeared to be enough of a come-on that he looked at him, wondering just what the old man had seen. “Anything interesting, Samuel?”
He laughed again and shook his head. “Yeah, but you wouldn’t believe it,” he said, with a smile.
“Nobody does. I’ve seen some shit over the years, I tell you.
And there’s days that I go home early. Although that hasn’t happened in a long time.
Days where you feel as if you need to go home early, otherwise—” He left it at that, and Eric had to wonder what it was.
“Yeah, you’re not kidding,” Eric agreed, with a headshake.
“But don’t you worry about me,” Samuel noted. “You just keep yourself safe. Only be where you’re sitting during the bright afternoon, huh?”
“Maybe,” he replied coyly. “I wondered if I was seeing ghosts here at one point in time.” He snorted. “That would be interesting.”
Samuel eyed him and added, “If you ever feel like that, you’re already too close. You need to run.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s not common knowledge, but, every once in a while,” he explained, turning to look around, making sure that they were alone, “every ten, maybe fifteen years, this place gets spooky as fuck.”
“But you are still here, aren’t you?”
“Aye, but I don’t even come into work when it’s bad.” And, with that, he lifted his digging fork and went to work on the soil, planting the pots scattered around him. “I don’t bother asking questions and don’t you bother asking me any because I sure as hell can’t answer them.”
He quickly tossed soil over the newly planted pots, picked up his things, then headed off on his own and was gone, long before Eric had a chance to even ask him what the heck he was talking about. But it sounded more like a warning than anything he had heard yet. Did Samuel know about Origin?
Eric sat down on the bench again, then looked around, wondering if, over time, Samuel had seen what was going on here. It appears the man had either ignored it or, as he said, disappeared until things got better.
Eric wanted to run after the man and see if he would say anything else. But, so far, it seemed as if he was determined to stick to whatever variation of the truth served him best and to not let anybody know too much. And it was an understandable position.
Depending on what he had seen over the years, that might have been the better answer all along.
Hell, if Eric had known about this Origin ahead of time, would he have had anything to do with this?
He wasn’t so sure. It just seemed the further into this they went, the less they really understood, and that was disconcerting too.
Frowning, and hating that he had so many unanswered questions, he sat here, just letting his thoughts flow through him as much as he could. When he heard a voice beside him, he looked up to see Eden standing there, glaring at him.