Haunted

Physical Medium

Father Mike showed up the next morning. "I would like to bring a friend of mine in her name is Amy, she is a physical medium, she is going to do a walk through your house and give us some information about what's happening inside your house," He continued. "I also would like for her to meet you two,"

"A physical medium? What is that," Jack asked. "It's someone who can see and speak to the dead," Emily answered. Everyone turned to look at her in amazement. "What? I like to watch paranormal shows," She confided. "You are correct and with your permission, she is willing to come here to see if she can possibly help," Father Mike informed us. Jack and I agreed to have Amy come to investigate the house. 

That night Father Mike brings Amy over to check out the house. She goes from room to room describing to Father Mike about what she sees and feels in each room. "You do have a really mean demon here the exorcism you performed on the house just weakened it for a little bit. There's a female that lives in this house, though, has abilities, but she doesn't know it. She does feel like she brought the ghost and the demon here, to her home," Amy said as she made her walk. In the morning she sits down with Jack and Emily to let them know what she had found on her walk of their home and give Emily a book to help her with her abilities. "So you think I'm possessed right," Emily said.

“No,” Amy says slowly, and Emily takes another sip of water. “I’m saying I think you are a physical medium.”

Water literally shoots up her nose and she spits it out all over the table in front of us. Jack hunches over the book to protect it from the spray.

“I told you it was going to sound crazy,” She said.

Emily shook her head, pretending not to remember the way Cady looked at her when she said that she could be magical. “Okay, but there’s crazy, and then there’s crazy.”

“What makes you think that you’re not a medium,” Amy leans back and folds her arms across her chest.

“I don’t even know where to begin, Um, are you kidding? We don’t even know if I’m actually a medium outside of the ramblings of a possibly senile old woman.”

“And this book! It says here that physical mediums attract spirits and all different kinds of beings—they just have certain”- Jack struggled to find the right word—“abilities,” he decided finally, “that makes them quite special.”

“Just because something is in a book doesn’t make it true.” With effort, Emily picked the book up off the table. It’s about a million years old. Okay, not that old, but perhaps older, than even a first edition of a Stephen King novel. She flipped through it, trying to decipher what’s so powerful about these pages that they could convince Jack that she’s something extremely special. Or maybe something more.

There’s a copyright page, but no publisher, no Library of Congress description like there is on a real book. From what she can tell, it does have even have a title, but it doesn’t have an author. Maybe she is the author and just self-published it.

Every book has an author. Maybe she just didn’t want anyone to know who she was.

Emily puts the book down, her hands trembling so much that she practically dropped it and it lands on the table with a loud smack. “Let’s say—just for the sake of argument—that I am a physical medium. I can’t possibly be one. You said it yourself, they can be around the paranormal and be perfectly safe. I’m not safe! I’m scared all the time. I feel so scared every time I enter my house.”

“Exactly,” Amy practically shouts.

“Exactly what,”

“You said you were feeling weird things for months now—cold and strange—every time you go into your house here and when you were in Montana,”

“So what do you mean,” Emily asked, though she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to hear her answer.

“I think that creepy feeling is you are perceiving the spirits around you. I don’t feel it.  Only you do. You’re capable of perceiving something that the rest of us can’t—even though I believe in ghosts, just like you, and can see all the evidence of your haunted house, just like you can.”

Emily shook her head so hard that her neck hurt.

“And you said so yourself, you were talking with Andrew Hughs’s ghost. Maybe a normal person wouldn’t be able to interact with a ghost like that,”

“I wasn’t trying to interact with him. I  just wanted to see what he wanted—”

“Okay, but how many normal people would be concerned with what a ghost wanted?” Jack countered. “Plus, you love everything that has to do with the paranormal,”

“What, so having an interest in the paranormal makes me into some kind of paranormal superhero,” Emily said incredulously, as though just thirty seconds ago I wasn’t imagining all the other physical mediums loving the paranormal.

“There’s just one thing I can’t quite figure out,” he adds slowly. “The book says that being a medium is hereditary. So your mom should be one too. But she totally couldn’t see the ghost or spirit, or demon—whatever’s in this house with us,” Jack leans over the book once more, poring over the pages like he believes that if he just looks hard enough, the answer will appear.

Everything that happens next feels like it’s going in slow motion. All except for Emily’s heart, which is racing. She pushed her chair out from under the table and slowly stand. Jack doesn’t look up—he’s reading every bit as intently as Emily read Stephen King. Slowly, like she’s afraid she might trip and fall, Emily begins to pace the room. Cady and Steve followed her, with questioning looks on their faces like even they know that something is up.

Softly Emily said, “I’m adopted,”

“What?” Jack asked, still not looking up from his book.

“I’m adopted,” She repeated, louder, and started pacing at a normal speed.

Now Jack does look up.

“That doesn’t mean I’m a medium, physical medium—whatever you call it. I mean, plenty of people in the world are adopted. It doesn’t mean anything,”