Wendy

It’s dark outside now. I’ve been sitting here for hours, looking out of the window, watching the cold grey wintry light ebb from the day until nothing of it remains.

I’ve been thinking. Contemplating, you might say. Thinking about the change that’s in the air, a palpable, heavy, almost suffocating change. Thinking about what it might mean. Thinking about the time it happened before.

I’ve always had the gift. My mother had it, and her mother too. It’s passed down through the generations like some sort of heirloom, or a congenital predisposition to a malignant disease. When I was a little girl, I used to think that it was completely normal. Couldn’t everyone do this, couldn’t everyone see? I felt like I had more friends than anyone else, more people to play with. I certainly never felt alone. But then as I got older, I don’t know, eleven, twelve, it started to scare me. I realised it was different, that I was different. And I didn’t want to be different, I wanted to fit in. It was an awakening, like finding out that Santa isn’t real or that your father isn’t perfect. Something that I had accepted as implicitly mundane and everyday was suddenly taboo. Mother sat me down and explained it to me just before my thirteenth birthday. So by the time I reached my teens, I knew that I could communicate with the dead. And that they could communicate with me, or at least, through me. A conductor, Mother said, an aerial. The Other World Service. Her little joke.

As I got older, I began to embrace it. Or maybe it just embraced me, I don’t know. It became my calling. I remember the night that Granny died. She told me herself, sitting right there, at the end of my bed. And in the morning, when I woke and went downstairs for breakfast, Mother took one look at me and she knew that I knew. She just squeezed my hand and I squeezed hers and there was nothing else that needed to be said.

Over the years, I’ve felt useful. Needed. I’ve thought of the spirits as my friends, friends in need. It was, I’ve liked to imagine, an equitable relationship. It still can be, for the most part. But there was that one night. Back in 2000, I think it was. The first time that I felt what I’m feeling now.

It had begun as a conventional séance. And yes, I appreciate that there are those who might think that a contradiction in terms. There were six of us, myself and five guests. Jane was one, or was it June? Small, nervous woman. There was a doltish girl whom I found to be somewhat insolent. And him, of course. The musician. He was, I’m sure, the catalyst.

It had all started nicely. We had a visit, from a spirit, that’s why I remember June, yes definitely June, the spirit wanted to talk with her and she was too timid, silly woman, too timid. The whole reason she was there and she missed her chance. But what followed –

– What followed had never happened to me before. It wasn’t just the physicality of it. It was how it made me feel, for months afterwards. It wasn’t normal, wasn’t like anything I’ve ever known. How can I explain? It’s as if when a spirit uses me, uses my body, I can feel myself filling up with its presence and that presence feels thin, gossamer, like smoke. But that night it wasn’t like that. It was as if the presence that entered me was dense, somehow, heavy, like a gas. It had a weight, a definite weight, as if my blood had turned to mercury. And for months afterwards, whenever I tried to communicate with the spirits, I’d get the same feeling, the same heaviness, the same weight, as if something fundamental had changed.

And then, after a time, it stopped, it just stopped. I remember the relief one summer’s evening. I was sitting alone, listening to some Mahler on the stereo, when I felt the familiar tingling chill and I knew that I’d been joined by a presence. And all of a sudden I felt the lightness, the beautiful lightness envelop me and it was like the first time all over again. And do you know, I danced that night, around my sitting room, the spirit and I danced to Mahler. Imagine that.

But now it’s back. The weight. The denseness. It’s barely perceptible, but I can feel it’s there. It’s changing. And I’m scared.