Cree told him the story, starting with the shoe tip and ending with the attack by the boar-headed man. She didn't interject any of her own opinions.
'Holy shit.' Fitzpatrick looked shaken. 'Damn! That poor woman.'
'That wasn't all of it. Lila ended her narrative very abruptly. She's still keeping something to herself.'
'Do you have any idea what?'
Cree did – Lila's body language and her sudden compassion for Jack suggested what came next. But she'd wait until she heard it from Lila before jumping to conclusions or sharing assumptions. Cree just shook her head. Instead, she told him about the polygraph scroll and how it corroborated Lila's trauma.
Fitzpatrick was staring at the lake's western horizon, his forehead troubled, his hands still in his pockets. 'Got to get those brain scans,' he said. 'Soon.' He shot a sideways glance at Cree. 'So -don't take this the wrong way – how do you explain ghosts that are seen by just one person and no one else? Without explaining it as a psychopathology?'
'Most ghosts are seen by just one person. It's just a matter of variations in sensitivity. Not so different from other senses – any audiologist will tell you that some people hear higher sound frequencies than others. Wine tasters have verifiably more acute senses of taste and smell.'
'But, I mean… a boar-headed man, a talking wolf? Are those typical denizens of the otherworld?'
'There's only one world – this one. It's just bigger and stranger than we know.'
Fitzpatrick nodded, accepting the point.
'And the answer to your question is, I've never encountered creatures like Lila's. I'm not sure what to think. Except that, as I'm sure you know, reality and psychology mix and recombine in an endless number of ways.' Cree went on to explain the idea of epiphenomenal manifestations.
Again Fitzpatrick nodded, but his brows knit in doubt or puzzlement.'I don't have any background in your field. Zero. I've never had a paranormal experience. I haven't any idea what your diagnostic methodology is, or what your models of psychology are. I'm coming at this from a strictly psychiatric paradigm, and from here the whole thing of ghosts doesn't make sense.'
'What exactly doesn't make sense?'
Fitzpatrick took his hands out of his pockets long enough to grapple the air as if trying to wring the right words from it. 'Any of it! I mean, what is a ghost?'
'It's a loose and imprecise term for a set of phenomena we don't understand well. There are many forms of ghost, and they probably manifest through many different mechanisms. But most are not so much beings as they are experiences. Essentially, you might say, most ghosts are mental constructs.'
'Mental constructs! So, really, you're saying that ghosts are psychological in origin.' Fitzpatrick sounded relieved at being back on more familiar turf. 'Meaning you're basically a… a practicing psychiatrist who specializes in patients who think they're seeing ghosts!'
'Not at all! Ghosts are completely and objectively real. I mean that in the sense that life and self and the world are also mental constructs. There's a hidden link between material reality and consciousness, a link between mind and world. And that's what I'm most motivated to explore.'
He looked at her with keen appreciation. ' 'A hidden link between material reality and consciousness' – God, I love it!' Then sobered and turned thoughtful. 'That's really the… crux, isn't it? The place where philosophy, psychology, medicine, and religion converge. Even physics, nowadays…'
Cree nodded. Fitzpatrick caught on fast.
'Okay,' Fitzpatrick went on, 'so ghosts do have an independent existence outside the minds of those who perceive them – '
'Yes and no.' Cree smiled at his confounded expression. 'Most ghosts appear to be residual, fragmentary elements of human consciousness – intense memories, traumas, feelings, or just drives – that continue to manifest independently of a living body. They may require a living human consciousness to manifest themselves.'
'But not all ghosts?'
'Some are more fully integrated personalities, more complete beings. And I suspect there are other entities as well, I'm not sure what to call them. There's a possibility that some ghosts are rare forms of geomagnetic phenomena. Some might be manifestations of nonhuman entities -most cultures have at one time or another believed there were spirits of the earth, or of animals, or local gods of one kind or another. But I don't know.'
'But you've… experienced… ghosts. The more human variety -you've met them?'
'Often.'
'Oh, man.' Fitzpatrick shook his head, frustrated but grinning. 'So what's it like?'
'Different every time. It takes a while for me to get there. Usually, it starts with moods or vague feelings. I'm highly synesthetic, so the… impressions or sensations come across to me as sounds of a particular color, or tactile feelings of a specific odor, or, I don't know, maybe vertigo that's like citrus mixed with sadness – not easy to translate. Further along, I experience their specific thoughts, sensations, and emotions. In some cases, it can be just like a conversation.'
That was it for Fitzpatrick. Abruptly he turned aside and threw himself down on a bench that faced the rippling expanse of water. At a picnic table forty feet behind him, a family was busy with a big pile of steamed orange crawfish, breaking the little lobsters apart and bickering noisily. Sprawling at one end of the bench, Fitzpatrick gestured for Cree to sit also, and then laughed at himself. 'Okay. I'm out of my depth. I've run out of academic terminology. I have to go back to when I was a kid. Question: If ghosts are just these… pieces of a personality, sort of floating loose, how come they wear clothes? How come they even look like human beings?'
Cree chuckled with him. A childish question, and a good one. 'They don't always. But if they do, it goes back to their being mental constructs. And for better or worse, our sense of ourselves is that we have human forms and wear clothes. How do you picture your mother – the way she looked when you were a kid?'
Fitzpatrick thought about it. 'Yeah. I sure don't picture her without clothes.'
'Now take it a step further – picture yourself back then.'
'Yup. I'm a little freckly guy wearing blue corduroy overalls. Damn!' Fitzpatrick thought for a moment. 'Okay, another question. How come they hang out in particular places? Why do they haunt particular houses? Why don't they just, I don't know… drift off into space?'
Again Cree laughed. Fitzpatrick had set this up nicely – being honest about his skepticism but truly trying to understand, easing it with good-natured self-deprecation. He'd set this up as a game of twenty questions, not an interrogation.
'Well, maybe a lot of them do just dissipate. But most ghosts are highly localized, haunting a specific place such as a house, or even just a specific room of a house, and nowhere else. My colleague Edgar Mayfield has a theory that localized haunts happen because the ghost came into existence in a particular geomagnetic field, a particular locale. He thinks an intense human experience can make an electromagnetic imprint on a local field, like a recording that can be played back only in that environment.'
'You sound a little dubious about such a mechanistic explanation.'
He was perceptive. 'Yeah. I tend to think of it in existential terms. As a mental construct, especially one reenacting a specific experience, a ghost thinks of itself not only in terms of a body image – male or female, with a specific face and wearing specific clothes, for example – but also in terms of a particular physical environment. Usually it's the perimortem environment – the place the person was in at the moment of death, which is a very poignant moment. But often crucial memories replay at that moment, too, so it can be confusing for me. If you had died suddenly back at the Wan-ens' house, and your consciousness perseverated in some way, you would most likely manifest elements of their living room along with your own body image. A ghost is just an echo of a whole being's experience at a crucial moment, complete with an environment, smells, sounds, objects, thoughts, feelings. I experience the ghost's world as much as the ghost itself. That's because 'world' is in fact equally an artifact of consciousness.'
Fitzpatrick was nodding thoughtfully, and Cree got the sense he had not only followed the line of reasoning but also appreciated its ramifications. 'So this is really a very… metaphysical field. And that's the part that attracts you, isn't it? You're after the big truths.'
Cree smiled, pleased to be understood.
'And you tune in, um, you sort of commune with the ghost. You share its experience?'
'The ghost and the people who perceive it. They reveal a lot about each other. It's not so different from standard psychoanalysis. People who come to you for treatment have unresolved issues that trouble them, right? As
