Read Online A Summer of Fear: A True Haunting in New England by Rebecca Patrick-Howard - Free Book Online Page A

“I mean have you actually heard anything that is originating within your room?”
    “No, I haven’t. It seems to stop before it gets that far. It plays with my door, stops outside my door. It’s never come in, though.”
    “Well,” she tapped her fingers on the counter and tilted her head thoughtfully. “That’s a little unusual but not implausible. If you hear the noises in the rest of the house but not in your room, and yet the spirit is obviously trying to come in your room, then I’d say you already have something keeping it out. Do you know what that may be?”
    “Huh?”
    “A talisman, dear. A protector. There’s something in your room that is protecting you. What could it be? Because that would be helpful to know.”
    I honestly had no clue. “I don’t have anything with me like that. I was hoping you could give me something,” I said with a nervous laugh.
    “I can help,” she said with seriousness, “but you’ve already got some of the most powerful antidote with you. It is something protecting you: a talisman, a good luck charm, a picture, a letter…”
    I thought about the things I’d packed and brought from home with me but nothing was very sentimental, just clothes and makeup and books. Except, of course, for my pictures. “I have a picture of my grandmother on the wall,” I said. “She died when I was seven. Could that be it?”
    “Yes, it’s very possible. Somehow her spirit is reaching out for you and holding the other one back. Has she appeared to you before and done this? Protected you from something?”
    I nodded. When I was a child we’d lived in a haunted house for four months. My mother and I thought we were going crazy. Not long after we moved in, I’d come down with a terrible illness. A friend was staying with me and had woken me up from a feverish dream with a scream. She claimed to have seen the ghost of my grandmother sitting on the bed beside me. My fever broke later that afternoon and I became well again, as if nothing had happened.
    “She has,” I answered. “Only once, but I think it was important.”
    Again, she looked at me with those deep eyes, as though measuring me or reading my mind. Maybe both. “You feel things don’t you?” she finally asked. Her tone was gentle. She had such kind eyes and a gentle voice I wanted to cry. I felt like she was reaching out to me, seriously trying to help.
    “Sometimes,” I said carefully.
    “Not just ghosts, spirits, things like that. You feel things from people.”
    I shrugged. “I’m no psychic. I can’t read minds.”
    “But you can read feelings. You know when someone is sad when they act happy to the world. You know when someone doesn’t like you but pretends to. You know when someone is looking at you with disdain, being disrespectful even though their words and body language says differently. You can read people.”
    Yes, that was true. I’d always read people well. Even as a child I’d disliked those everyone else wanted to fawn over, just because of a feeling I got. Sometimes, it was hard for me to make friends because I felt their true character emanating within moments of meeting someone and after that it was just too difficult to give them the benefit of the doubt.
    “Yes,” I whispered.
    “You’re a sensitive, child. You hurt deeply. You feel things deeply. You try to cover this up by being alone, by acting confident, even by lying. But you carry a hurt in you for the world. This thing, and I don’t know what it is, it feels that. It’s drawn to you. And it won’t be the last. I’m quite sure it wasn’t the first.”
    “Why?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe it trusts you. Maybe you’re motherly to it. It’s seeking comfort and your energy is providing some. But it’s also draining you. You’re pale, you’re weak, you’re disheartened. It will feed off this and more. You must be careful.”
    Elsa sent me home with several black candles, two crystals, and sage to burn in all the corners.