Before There Were Angels (2 page)

Next door to psychic curses are the cords which those who wish you harm insert in
to your psychic fields to siphon off your energy. These folks are your psychic vampires, a most alarming breed indeed and one which explains your possible lack of motivation to, say, vacuum the house or pull a double shift at work. If you are under attack by one of these creatures, you may well be doomed to a life of filthy floors and poor job evaluations. To deal with these parasitic monsters, you need a professional cord cutter who will sever these connections via the sun - it is too dangerous to cut psychic cords directly - having taken the precaution of raising their psychic shields. Then and only then will they cut the cords and,
whoosh!
, the psychic vampire is gone and you should feel a sudden surge of energy, empowering you to fill out a credit card application, or something.

And if you are a true connoisseur of spiritual servic
es, soul retrieval is where you should be headed. As you have lived your many reincarnated lives, you have become separated from fragments of your soul and you will only become whole again if these fragments are retrieved for you throughout every time and cosmic dimension. Sometimes your soul can become so fractured that parts of it will be found in, say, Detroit, while another piece is resting in L.A., or in new age Mt. Shasta, California. It’s a tricky business finding the parts, though, and this should never be attempted by an amateur. Only a true psychotic - I mean psychic - should attempt this.

There are some people who have sampled some of these services, and some people who believe in the efficacy of some of these services
without sampling them, but only a few people who have dove into every single one of them, as Rafaella did.

That was just for starters.

Rafaella discovered through her psychics that she was once a Lemurian, which is a sort of talking lizard, and another time she lived in Atlantis as the waters rose (actually, she drowned that time around). You may not realize it, but there are a lot of secret Lemurians, bearing their Lemurian crystals and dreaming of being reunited in Mount Shasta City or the Chandos Islands, or wherever Lemuria might have once existed, except that it almost certainly didn’t. Former Lemurians all over the world share their memories of Lemuria as surfaced by psychics, and then go off and declare psychic war on Austria and Thailand, or at least that is what they were doing the other day.

And you absolutely
must
go swimming with the dolphins.

You will probably want to get into various alternative medicines too. You can hire the services of a psychic surgeon who will remove
your diseased body parts without leaving a mark, chanting surgeons who chant away those same diseased body parts, or distance healers who lock into your personal energy signatures and cure you somewhat similarly to those guys from India who take over your laptop when you need something doing that the computer whiz cannot explain but can do if you will only let him into your system.

To complete this appetiz
ing smorgasbord, you might like to visit your local homeopath, Bach Flower therapist, oligotherapist, naturopath or kinesiologist.

For those resonating at the highest levels of vibration, such as
Rafaella, there is so much for the open-minded spiritualist to explore, and so little time to do such practical things as cleaning the house or work, especially when my dead relatives took to visiting Rafaella at night to commiserate with the terrible way I was treating her, and when she kept coming across negative entities lurking in the corners of each room, fresh through a portal from hell, in sore need of being swept whence they came with earnest chanting, the burning of incense and the judicious waving of just the right crystal to remove that tricky psychic stain.

Yes, I lived with all these things …

*  *  *

… and then I lived with Belle, as great a rationalist as
Rafaella was a spiritualist, except that she was a rationalist in search of ghosts.

By the time I met her, she had
sought those ghosts everywhere: in the Hollywood homes of the stars where generations of owners had all met untimely and inexplicable deaths, to the Lalaurie Mansion in New Orleans where slaves were tortured and vivisected, to Franklin Castle in Cleveland which burnt down every time someone tried to repair it, to the New Mexico Penitentiary in Santa Fe where eighty inmates were blowtorched to death as snitches, to room 1109 of the Ramada Inn in Salt Lake City where Rachel Longo rained her seven children down onto passing traffic, to the Golden Hill Hotel in Virginia City where two long-dead star-crossed lovers still occupy neighboring rooms and terrorize the guests with the hyperactive contribution of the ghosts of a couple of mischievous children.

Living with Belle was an instant delight,
and instant peace, although that was not how Rafaella saw it. She declared an eternal curse on her in this life by whatever means, physical and metaphysical. It was to be a long siege and not a happy one for anyone.

It was time for
Rafaella to take the gloves off, to raise her psychic shield (
Whoosh!),
to astral travel, to bring a plague down up any house or apartment we happened to live in, and to torment us, yeah unto the thirteenth son of the thirteenth son.

You may believe from my description that
Rafaella was some kind of harmless psychotic, sociopathic, schizophrenic, Munchausen’s, Munchausen’s by Proxy, bipolar, narcissistic, megalomaniac weirdo, so long as you kept out of swiping distance of her sharpened butcher’s knife …

…
but she was a lot more dangerous than that, as you are about to find out.

“Darling …” Belle said. “I don’t know how to ask you this …” and that wicked smile.

“Y-e-s?”
(
I need to convey the suspicion in my voice here
).

“I think I have found our perfect home. You don’t have to agree,”
she added hurriedly, “but would you consider it?”

This did not sound good - indeed it sounded ominous -
but it was Belle, she of the ‘Les Misérables’ waif look at twenty-nine - much the same as she was at six, I would guess - with a thicket of almost black hair insects had been known to tumble out of, and maybe some quite sizeable birds besides. Once in Haines, Alaska, the state where she was brought up, she had been staring perplexed at the white trees when those trees suddenly took flight with bald eagles, some of which had probably first wintered in her hair. Imagine Andie MacDowell for the hair and the sweetness, and Angelina Jolie for the eyes and the street edge.

Most people said that Belle had green eyes, just like Angelina’s, but I knew they were blue with golden irises that gave
them an overall green effect while they remained just that, blue and gold.

Now she had a project in mind that was as
likely to be about as dear to her heart as it was to be detrimental to mine. Whenever Belle got really excited about houses, somebody had died there, memorably and violently, and now she was talking about a home.

“Tell me,” I replied, forcing a smile.

“You don’t have to even consider it …” she repeated with an expression between beseeching and excitement.

“All right, then.”

The expression changed to seductive begging. “But you could.”

“Who died?”

“Well …”

So lots of people died.
“Well?”

“It’s a classic Victorian,” she started.

“Where?”

“In
Haight Ashbury.”

“And?”

“It’s very beautiful.”

She showed me a picture. It really w
as. But what was all that scene-of-the-crime police tape doing there?

“And?”

“It’s haunted,” she announced triumphantly.

“Who is haunting it?”

“Will you come and look at it, without being prejudiced?”

“Or even informed?”

A sweet smile. “I’ll tell you about it afterwards.”

“And the boys?”

“Yeah, they can come and look at it too.”

“And George?
I have a feeling we are going to need George.”

George was our alcoholic Old English
Sheepdog, just like the other two alcoholic Old English Sheepdogs Belle had owned. High end alcoholics at that - Bombay Blue Sapphire gin, Speyside 12 year aged single malts, and Fat Tire to get the day started. Still, he could hold his drink, and after obviously his hair-of-the-dog kick-starter, he was amenable enough and hopefully up to identifying any ghost loitering in the house who would be too mean to handle.

And Belle had
always threatened me that, if I were to get involved with her, I would have to accommodate a few ghosts in the closets, although she had started me slowly in an ordinary mid-San Francisco apartment with shouting outside in the street but no wailing from the bathroom.

“OK, when do we go to see this house?”

Belle leaned over the bed where I was watching a You Tube trailer for a movie we were considering seeing that evening, and kissed me. “Thank you.”

“
Mmmm,” I said cagily.

She bounced on the bed. “You’ll love it, you’ll see.”

“During daylight,” I added.

“During daylight,” she emphasiz
ed.

*  *  *

So there we were standing outside Belle’s Victorian in Haight Ashbury, all five of us - Belle, me, the twins Zack and Stevie, and George the dog. Positively ‘Famous Five’ on the cusp of their latest adventure.

The police tape had gone and the front of the house looked gorgeous with its gold and sky-blue detailing.

The realtor came running up, which is not a sight you usually see in San Francisco - anyone in a hurry. I guessed that she might be leaving the house twice as fast after the viewing.

“Hello,” she said. “Sandra Bullock.” Not the one I had seen. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?
And quite a bargain.” Well, we all knew why, but not enough of why yet; that Belle was keeping to herself.

The twins were already wrestling and calling each other identically ugly as Sandra keyed open the door and we all burst in.
It is going to be something of a stand-off
, I told myself as I watched the boys. The ghostly resident of the house might already be more scared of the new occupants than we would ever be of him.

“The main room,” Sandra said,
indicating the room to the right. It was large, light, high-ceilinged and friendly.

“Very nice,” I said.

Sandra didn’t agree quite as quickly as a realtor normally would.

“The dining room is through h
ere,” she said, leading us on and moving fast.

That was great too. I could certainly see us living here, but there was something I needed to know first …

“It has a really welcoming atmosphere,” I observed, to be greeted with a false smile.

“Y-e-s.”

I knew that inflection on the word ‘Yes’.

We saw a kitchen and another all-purpose room,
then Sandra suggested that we explore the upstairs ourselves, no need for her to join us. The function of the rooms was obvious. To scare us, probably.

But they were fantastic
too, all freshly painted, and there was a trapdoor into the attic. I wasn’t going up there, nor into the cellars.

“Looks excellent,” I said as we came back downstairs again, leaving the boys to continue arguing over what bedroom they would each like to have.

“I am glad you like it,” Sandra replied. ‘Relieved’ might have been a better word.

“Do you really like it, darling?” Belle asked me.

“Sure. So far.”

“So far?”

“Yes, so far. You know what I mean.”

“Oh that.”

“Yes that.”

“I’ll tell you all about it when we get back to the apartment. It’s a really interesting story.”

“Bet it is.”

There was a series of very loud bangs upstairs. Was that the boys, or …? Well, whoever the ghost was, he was going to have his work cut out making his presence known over the din of the boys. It was going to be ‘The
Canterville Ghost’ all over again.

“Come on, boys,” I
shouted upstairs, only to realize that they were already downstairs beating each other up in the dining room.

OK.

*  *  *

“You see,” Belle started, “there was once this family, two parents, two sons …”

“Is this us or them?”

“
Them … well, both really.”

“And …
?”

“The husband had a psychotic ex-wife …”

“Rings a bell.”

“Who lived close by …
”