14 Christmas Spirit Read online

  She certainly did. She owed Millie that, and a whole lot more. Maybe it was time to have a serious discussion with the ghost of Great Aunt Millie about it. Especially now that she could devote her time to the question of why Millie chose to hang around Misty Hollow.

  "Popcorn!" Jon said cheerfully, placing a large plastic orange bowl next to her on the couch. Darcy blinked, coming back to herself. She hadn't even realized Jon had left the room to get their snacks from the kitchen. On the television, the title scene for Meet Joe Black played over and over, the music swelling and falling, with the choices to play the movie or jump to certain scenes and so forth listed across the bottom of the picture.

  Jon sat down in the overstuffed chair again. In his hands was his own bowl of popcorn, layered with white cheese powder by the smell of it. He knew she didn't like that flavor. Hers smelled of melted butter and just a hint of salt. Mmm. He did know her pretty well. She smiled at him, knowing her eyes held the same unspoken thoughts she saw in his. Love, and a promise of what might come later on.

  After the movie, of course. It didn't matter if she could quote every line Brad Pitt said. Something this good never got old.

  Smudge purred a little question, looking up at her and sniffing the air. Rolling her eyes, Darcy tore apart a single popcorn kernel and fed a small bit of it to the big cat, who lapped it up greedily and meowed for more.

  "That's enough for you," she scolded. "This isn't cat food. It's people food."

  "He's just going to get into the leftovers anyway," Jon said, aiming the remote at the television and starting the movie up. "He's crafty that way."

  A strong purring rumbled through Smudge's chest, like he understood the compliment that Jon had just given him. Those two had come to an uneasy understanding, a mutual respect and acknowledgment that both of them were going to be in Darcy's life long term. It hadn't happened overnight, but now the two of them were something close to friends. Darcy was glad to see it. There was no way that she could ever marry a man who didn't accept Smudge as part of her family.

  She was a few handfuls of popcorn into the movie when Jon set his bowl aside and came over to sit close to her, his arm around her shoulders, his body warm against hers. He put her popcorn aside, too, so that he could pull her into him, but not before she grabbed another handful to munch on. Laying her head down against his chest, she watched Anthony Hopkins explaining to Brad Pitt what love really is.

  "Trust, responsibility, taking the weight for your choices and feelings…"

  "…and spending the rest of your life living up to them," Darcy finished for Hopkins' character. "And above all, not hurting the object of your love."

  "I swear you could recite this in your sleep," Jon said in a whisper.

  "There's a lot of truth in this movie."

  "Says the girl with more knowledge of death and the afterlife than anyone else I know," he teased.

  "And don't you forget it. Now, shush. I'm watching a movie."

  His fingertips stroked her cheek, and she felt her heart skip a beat. The movie might be talking about what love was, but she was living it.

  The scene they were watching took place inside the lavishly appointed office of Anthony Hopkins' main character, Bill Parrish. It was just Hopkins and Pitt and a whole lot of discussion, and it was amazing how much emotion those two actors could squeeze out of a few lines of dialogue when no one else was there…

  Except that blonde woman standing over by the lamp in the back of the shot.

  Darcy sat up straighter, gently extricating herself from Jon's arms. Smudge woke up with a mrowl of displeasure but managed to hold onto his spot on her lap. Darcy stared, the interaction between Hopkins and Pitt forgotten, trying to place the woman she was seeing.

  "Darcy?" Jon was saying. "What is it?"

  "This isn't right," was all she could say. "That's…not right."

  "What?" He turned his attention to where she was looking, at the movie playing out on the television screen. The shot had panned away from the desk and the lamp for the moment, away from the woman Darcy had seen.

  "There's someone in there who shouldn't be." Darcy realized exactly how crazy that sounded, but that was the truth of it. She'd seen this movie too many times to have forgotten something like that. There was someone in this scene who shouldn't be there.

  The camera came back around as Brad Pitt started to walk out of the room. There. Behind the desk, standing close enough to Anthony Hopkins to reach out and touch him, looking not at the actors on the set but directly at the camera with eyes cloaked in shadow, was the blonde woman again.

  "See?" Darcy asked. "Right there. You see her, right there?"

  "Sure. Blonde, thin build? Kind of a triangular face and pouty lips? She's not exactly dressed for this scene. I always thought this was more of a black tie and evening gown sort of film. That sweatshirt and those jeans don't exactly fit in."

  "No, they don't," Darcy agreed. "Jon, you've seen this movie with me before. Think. That person has never been in this movie. Never."

  The woman nodded her head, like she understood what Darcy had just said. She took her hands out of the front pockets of that gray sweatshirt, and pulled on the drawstrings to the hoodie. "Saxton University" was written across the front of it. What in the world was going on, Darcy wondered.

  Then the woman looked directly at Darcy. Directly at her. She mouthed something that Darcy couldn't make out at first. When the movie trespasser saw Darcy shake her head in confusion—yes, saw Darcy shake her head—she tugged on the strings of her hoodie again and mouthed the same thing, slower.

  Find me.

  Then the scene changed to the grand party that staged the final resolution of the movie. The blonde woman was nowhere to be found.

  That had been a ghost. Darcy had no doubt about that at all.

  If a ghost had inserted herself into Darcy's favorite movie just to ask for her help, it wasn't time to ask Jon to pass the popcorn and wait for the end credits. It was time to get off the couch and do something.

  The question was…do what?

  "Well, Smudge," she said, stroking his fur one last time. "Looks like our lazy weekend plans just got changed."

  He mewled and rolled over onto his back, paws up in the air.

  Darcy knew how he felt.

  Chapter Two

  "Maybe it's a mistake?" Jon said. "You know, like that ghost boy standing in the curtains of Three Men and a Baby?"

  He had rewound the movie and played it through that same scene again twice. The figure both of them had seen standing in the background was gone now. Like she had never been there in the first place.

  "That isn't a ghost in Three Men and a Baby," Darcy pointed out. "That was an actual flesh and blood kid that got caught on set during filming. The editors missed it in the final cut. No, this was something different."

  "What?"

  She had to pick her words carefully. Partly because she didn't want to scare Jon. Partly, because she simply didn't know.

  It was a ghost, that much was certain, but Darcy had never been contacted via DVD before. How was that even possible? What did it mean? Those were the things she didn't know, and it scared her because it could mean something wicked was coming their way.

  Again.

  Jon had been wonderful about accepting Darcy for who she was. The whole talking to dead people thing spooked a lot of people. Darcy's friends in town knew she could do things that other people couldn't, knew that she knew things sometimes that no one should be able to know, but none of them knew the full extent of her abilities. If they did, Darcy was fairly sure that most of them would never speak to her again. Jon wasn't like that. He loved her, and nothing about her would ever change that.

  Just like Meet Joe Black told its audience, that was true love.

  "Maybe it's one of your deleted scenes?" was his next suggestion. "Maybe the DVD got confused and started playing the wrong segments."

  "No, Jon. That was a ghost. Can we both agree on that mu
ch, at least?"

  Jon opened his mouth to argue again, the remote in his hand ready to rewind the film one more time and search for something that just wasn't there. With a heavy sigh, he tossed the remote aside onto the couch and nodded his head. "Yes. I suppose I have to give you that one. So. A ghost just popped up on our television. What do we do about it? And for that matter how come I was able to see her if she is a ghost?"

  "I don’t know… And what do we do about it? We help the ghost, of course. Isn't that what we usually do?"

  "Uh," he chuckled, "I don't think there's any such thing as usually for us."

  Which was true enough. Every spiritual apparition was different, even if some of the paranormal techniques Darcy used were the same in each case. "Well, I suppose I could try calling the ghost up in a communication," she said. "I mean, it won't be easy because I don't even know who to call to, but there might be enough of an echo on the DVD itself for me to reach out to her. Whoever she is."

  "An echo?" Jon rubbed at his forehead, and waited for her to explain.

  Darcy started twisting the antique silver ring around the finger of her right hand. It had been her great aunt's, an heirloom that Darcy had always valued for sentimental reasons. Turned out the ring was a talisman of amazing power. She might never need to use it for its special, hidden powers again, but it was still a source of comfort for her when times got tough. Or crazy. Or both.

  "When a ghost has been to a certain place," Darcy explained carefully, "that ghost leaves behind an echo of itself. It's kind of like setting down a soda can on a hot day. When you lift the soda can away, there's a ring of condensation left behind. Replace condensation with spiritual energy, and that's kind of what I mean when I say a ghost leaves an echo wherever they go."

  "So, you're going to look for this ghost's soda can," he said, deadpan.

  She rolled her eyes and twisted her ring harder. "Sort of. Yes. See, ghosts like Millie, who are always around? I can always sense when she's in the room because her echo is stronger than most. I can usually find her just by feeling for her, because she's layered her echoes over and over until someone with my talents can feel them. It's kind of like walking through spiderwebs. Sort of. You might not see it, but you feel it. At least, I do."

  "Okay," Jon said after a moment. "I sort of understood that one. You want to give it a go and try to sense out our ghost now?"

  No, Darcy thought to herself. What she wanted to do was finish watching her movie and go upstairs with Jon and spend a few hours with him in bed before falling into a deep sleep. She wanted to stay in bed until noon tomorrow and order in pizza and have Jon massage her neck and shoulders like he was so good at. She wanted to go buy a Christmas tree, and find a way to invite Jon's mother to the family dinner.

  That's what she wanted to do. It just wasn't what she was going to get to do.

  Part of her was thrilled. Another mystery where she could apply her talents and help people. She hadn't realized how much satisfaction she got out of doing that, until recently. She and Jon had been through so much together in such a short period of time, that when things had slowed down and there were no crimes to investigate and no ghosts popping up in her bathroom—long story—she found that she missed it. She really had been bored.

  Tonight, she wasn't going to be bored.

  Taking her communication kit in its lacquered wooden box from the cabinet where she kept it, she lay it on the floor next to her, and opened the box up. Inside were five fat beeswax candles and squares of dark gray slate to set them on, incense and spices, matches, chalk, and other little things that no good paranormal practitioner should be without.

  It didn't take her long to set up a simple circle with the candles on the living room floor, large enough for her to sit down in the middle of, her bare legs crossed, her oversized sweater covering down to her thighs. In her hands she had the DVD of Meet Joe Black, and she was already doing her breathing techniques to help focus her mind.

  From the arm of the couch, where he sat watching her intently, Smudge meowed loudly.

  "Not this time, Smudge," she told him. "Stay and watch me with Jon, okay? I don't want to be sitting here like this until two in the morning again."

  Her cat sneezed and looked away, as if to say what he thought about that.

  Whenever Darcy entered a communication state, she lost all track of time. Time had absolutely no meaning where she was going, either for her or for the ghosts she was trying to contact. More than once she literally had found herself sitting stiff and cross-legged on a floor for six hours or more, cramped and in pain when she finally came out of it. Having a spotter helped. Jon had been forced to pull her out of communications before. Smudge had jumped on her and broken her concentration before, too. Having both of them here together to watch her definitely made her feel better.

  "You know," Jon said to her just as she was about to enter into her trance, "maybe this is nothing more than the ghost of someone who got caught stealing videos from a movie store. A shoplifter ghost. Trying to make amends for her past crimes."

  She looked at him out of one eye, the other one closed tight. "Seriously?"

  "Hey, it could be."

  "Jon, she told me to find her. I think there's something more serious going on than a petty crime like shoplifting. Now, shush. Both of you."

  Smudge said merrl? Darcy translated that to, "Hey, what did I do?"

  Putting them both out of her thoughts as best she could, she concentrated on the DVD in her hands, on the image of the woman who had trespassed into her favorite movie, and on the trance state that would allow her to make contact with the woman's ghost.

  Breathing in, breathing out. Clearing her mind.

  And then she slipped away.

  ***

  In her mind, she envisioned a clear plain. A flat surface of some grayish-black color that stretched away from her in every direction. The sky above was the same color as the ground. There was nothing here. Not yet.

  Before, her trances had always been filled with heavy mists that images and ghosts and stranger things than that appeared from, or disappeared back into. Since the events of Halloween this year that had all changed. The mists that had rolled thickly through the town every time bad things happened had all but vanished. Misty Hollow no longer had to suffer with the very thing that had given the town its name. That change was reflected in her trance state as well. Gone were the roiling mists. All she saw now was the endless connecting plains between the world of the living, and the world of the dead.

  Darcy sat cross-legged in this place, still dressed in just a fluffy sweater hanging down past her hips, feeling as real as flesh and blood could in a world that wasn't real. She blinked into the nothingness. It wasn't bright here, exactly, just the opposite of dark. In her hands she held the DVD.

  She turned the slim disc over and over in her fingers. She could feel its plastic edges, feel how fragile it was. Twisting it the wrong way would crack it in two.

  Breathing out, she let that motion carry a bit of her life energy with it, forcing her will and desire through the object the ghost had touched. It took her a moment to feel the faint echo of the ghost within the DVD. It was faint, and kept twisting away from her mental grasp like a strand of spaghetti she was trying to pick up with chopsticks until finally, she had a hold on it that would allow her to follow the echo back to its source.

  Calling up a ghost to have a conversation with them wasn't as easy as picking up a phone. There were no phone numbers or e-mail addresses or other simple points of contact for someone who was dead. She had to bring them to her from the great beyond and talk to them here. Some ghosts were strong enough to pierce the veil that separated life and death. Those spirits could interact with people freely, but on a limited basis. Great Aunt Millie could do that now, and often did. Her deceased ex-husband had done that with her once. So had one of her very best friends.

  That was unusual, though. Darcy could see ghosts sometimes whether they wanted to be seen or
not. That was her talent. It only went so far, though, and when she wanted to have a more meaningful conversation with a ghost this was the only way to do it. So she sat there with the DVD in her hand and the strand of the ghost's echo to follow and sent out her invitation.

  It was like asking a question to a single person in a crowd of people. A crowd of several million, all of whom had their own conversations going on.

  She felt a tug on the mental strand she had picked up, and she knew that her calling had been answered. She took in a deep, shaky breath, feeling the effort the invitation had cost her.

  Not that she was really breathing. Back in her living room, her body was definitely feeling the strain, but here everything was just a pale imitation of reality.

  Every communication required a little bit of her life's energy in order to make it actually work. That's why those Ouija boards people bought at department stores and then broke out for parties were fun, but harmless. Without a talent for calling to ghosts, without the ability to put your own life force into the communication, there was no way to make it work.

  It cost her a little bit of herself every time she did this. That's why she only did it when it was necessary. Like now.

  At the end of the ephemeral connection she had established a weight began to pull at her. A presence was collecting and forming out of the void. It manifested a distance away from her as swirling tendrils of ghostly white smoke, gathering and molding itself into a solid shape. Nothing on this dreamscape was real, but it certainly had the look and feel of reality.

  So when the woman who had inserted herself into the movie solidified in front of her with an audible POP that rolled away with the sound of thunder, it felt to Darcy like she was actually in the room with her.

  The woman was tall and thin, statuesque almost in a way that Hollywood actresses all aspired to. Her long blonde hair was loose and strands of it stirred in a breeze that wasn't really there. Her Saxton University sweatshirt and her jeans outlined the curves of her body in a way that showed how comfortable she had been in her own skin. Back when she would have had skin, that is. Her face was pretty, even with her eyes lost in deep, dark shadows.