“You’ve stopped believing.” Liz. She was always with him. She’d been gone over a year, and he still heard her voice, still talked to her.
“You were always the believer,” he answered, though he probably shouldn’t speak to her out loud. It was crazy, wasn’t it? “I was just the willing assistant.”
“That’s not true,” she said, laughing. “You’ve seen it too. You know what’s possible.”
“Maybe I saw something, once, when I was a kid.”
“That’s when we’re the most open, the most accepting, when we’re children. As we get older, we close ourselves off to more and more possibilities.”
“I’m open. I’m here, aren’t I?”
“You’re just going through the motions.”
She lounged on the couch, her feet up, wearing a flowy top over leggings, her wild, untamable curls up, wrapped in a colorful bandeau. Not a ghost. Just the painful longing of his own mind and heart. She wasn’t haunting him; he was haunting himself.
“They’re nice,” she said. “I like them. Especially her. She’s a sensitive, an empath. Maybe she is picking something up.”
“I really don’t think so.”
“Cynicism isn’t a good look in this line of work.”
“Ghost hunting.”
“Energy stabilizing.”
“Exorcism.”
“Space cleansing. Get with the program, Ian. Stay in step with the moment. This isn’t a your-mother-wears-combat-boots-in-hell kind of a thing.”
Her laughter was throaty and deep, seeming to echo in the high-ceilinged room.
The first time he’d made her laugh like that he’d fallen helplessly in love with her. They had been in college. He’d seen her in his class on the teachings of Carl Jung and dug up the nerve to follow her to the coffee shop where he knew she always studied on Thursday afternoons, asked to join her. What had he said that had made her laugh that day?
“It was your Carl Jung impersonation, that horrible accent that you thought approximated Swiss. You were adorable.”
“I miss you.”
But she was gone. He stared at the empty couch, then continued setting up the equipment. He knew there were cameras in the house; everyone had them now. And the truth was that Astrid had caught something strange and managed to record it.
He flipped on the light and walked down the steps to the basement, where Astrid had her studio.
Unlike other basements he’d visited, creepy places, musty and dark, this was finished and brightly lit. High, wide windows let natural light in during the day. The solid white oak floors butted up against soothing eggshell walls—not too white, but not quite cream. A huge hand-carved wooden mandala dominated one wall. At the head of the room, a tall stone Buddha smiled peacefully behind a low wooden altar of candles, flowers, prayer books, and mala beads. Astrid’s mat and meditation cushion were neatly placed and waiting in the center of the room. A big camera sat atop a tripod, for recording her YouTube and Instagram videos.
For all its simple, peaceful beauty and brightness, the room did feel “off.” A tension settled into his shoulders as he set up the equipment. There was a tingle on the back of his neck.
The video Astrid showed him was one of her signature recordings, a yin yoga flow with affirmations—where she moved her lithe body into a number of seemingly impossible postures and said things like I surrender to the flow of the universe. Or I am exactly where I need to be.
For exactly a blip, in the middle of the recording, there seemed to be a shadow in the corner. And at the end, a strange gray fog appeared to surround her. Again, only for a second. They’d tried to frame through the video. Sitting at her kitchen table with the laptop in front of them, they’d inched through the recording but were never able to freeze-frame on either image.
“The whole time,” said Astrid, “I felt like someone was watching me. That’s why I rewatched the video, which I usually don’t do.”
“Why not?” He’d imagined a yoga instructor might watch her own videos to improve.
“No one likes to see themselves on camera, hear their own voice, do they?”
“I wouldn’t think you’d have a problem with it.”
Truly, she was luminous. Her skin seemed to glow, eyes shining with health and vitality, her movements hypnotically fluid, her voice mellifluous and soothing. He could see why she had a million followers on YouTube. He was willing to bet that more than a few of them were not yogis.
“What do you think?” she’d asked, looking at him. “About the video?”
He could tell she was scared.
“I really don’t know,” he’d admitted. “You caught something there. I just don’t know what.”
“So you’ll help us? My friend Elenie says you don’t take everyone.”
That was true. He didn’t. Not everyone needed a “space clearing.” Some people needed therapy, others needed marriage counseling, some just needed a good kick in the ass.
“Of course I’ll help you,” he’d told her.
Now he finished setting up the equipment in her studio and headed for the stairs. That was when he felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. He turned to look behind him, but there was no one there except the Buddha, impervious.
“See,” said Liz. “You do believe.”
“I believe I’ll have another one of those vegan energy bars.”
Her laughter followed him to the kitchen.
2.
The barn smelled of oil and hay. Matthew rested his hand on the red hood of the old Aston Martin. A beautiful car, evoking the image of a glamorous couple wending through the English countryside. The old man had let them all—the Mercedes, the BMW roadster, the old Karmann Ghia—rust and rot.
“I know an antique car dealer,” Avery March was saying. “I’ll have him come by. He’ll know what to do here.”
“That would be amazing,” said Samantha, peering in the window of an old Mustang.
Matthew was about to assert that these cars, though not running, were not junk and that he hoped for a good price when the
