Secular Exorcism, Part One
Clients hire me to exorcise someone deceased. But this client asked for something eerier yet.
There’s only so much market for an exorcist. When the phone rang at an ungodly hour - it must have been 8:00 a.m. - I groaned and rolled over in bed and grabbed it, hoping for a client. I needed a client. Rent day was coming up, and after I’d paid that, there’d be almost nothing left over.
“Secular Exorcism, good morning,” I chirped into the phone. I was hoping to sound as if I was sitting at my desk, alert and compiling notes. I silently disentangled my legs from the blankets and sat up, shaking the hair out of my eyes.
A deep voice with a British accent responded.
“Ehr, yes. I’m looking for Doctor Alexandra Hills.”
“Speaking. How may I help?”
“Yes, well, that’s the thing. I’m Roger Marshall, I got your number from Walter Phipps, at a conference yesterday. He recommended your services; actually he and his wife did. You get rid of ghosts, is that it? Can you tell me how, exactly?”
I have an edge on the priests and rabbis and shamans, because I work in a way that doesn’t require faith. I work with ghosts through cognitive behavioral therapy.
Now I was wide awake.
“Oh, the Phippses,” I said warmly, trying to remember them. “Such a nice couple.” My memory dredged up a fact: I’d worked with the wife’s deceased mother. “And Mrs. Phipps’s lovely late mother.”
“Phipps said his mother-in-law hung around the house all the time, interfering. Lurking in the kitchen, popping up in the bathroom, criticizing all the time, just like when she was alive. Quite annoying. Apparently you persuaded her to go away.”
“Mr. Marshall, I helped Mrs. Evans understand that lingering among the living wasn’t helping her, or her loved ones.”
“Yes, psychological therapy, I understand. An unusual approach with ghosts. Is this new?” The voice became cooler, precise. This was a businessman.
“It’s rather avant-guard,” I said. “Compared to the traditional methods. But it’s a gentler, ultimately more efficient way of settling troubled spirits.”
“Rather than burning incense and praying in dead languages, eh?”
I smiled down the phone. “I recently earned my doctorate in Discarnate Mental Healthcare. I’m fully qualified to counsel the disembodied, and have so far accumulated four years’ practical experience in the field.”
“I see.” Marshall sounded impressed.
Ghosts have been manifesting themselves and pestering people for thirty years now, ever since the Catastrophes, when Earth rebelled and Nature took revenge on humanity’s abuse of the ecology.
The planet was shaken with earthquakes and tsunami disasters. Huge potholes appeared everywhere, some even swallowing whole buildings. Rivers overflowed and flooded cities.
The Loch Ness monster rose from the turbulent lake waters and waded ashore, giving a dozen Scotsmen heart attacks. Poor Nessie, she was hunted down and slaughtered - people were starving.
Exploding volcanoes created enormous, uncontrollable lava floods that reduced entire towns to ashes. Millions died, having fallen under rubble or even, and I hate to sound Biblical about it, swallowed up by the earth. Or swept out to sea.
On top of all that, plagues emerged, deadly viruses that killed millions around the globe. Every family lost someone. Survivors named the years of chaos the Catastrophes.
It took a generation for the survivors to restore order and revive pre-Catastrophian life. And the Internet. How lucky that all data sitting in the Cloud remained there. And how lucky that enough scientists and technicians survived to restore access to information.
Strange to say, some positive things came out of the Catastrophes. People put their differences aside and began to cooperate. It was the only way to survive; a sort of miracle, given the idiotic way people used to go on before. Humans of all genders and statuses - not to mention the whole spectrum of religious believers - harnessed themselves to each other, to make life workable again.
Naturally, this idyllic state didn’t last forever, but the old folks say that there’s much more equality now than there used to be.
Be that as it may, and frankly, I could use some income equality, the new order suffers from an eerie phenomenon. In the chaos and welter of people who died without proper burial, or whose graves cracked open, a plague of ghosts arose. Poltergeists, dybbuks, apparitions of all sorts. Worst were the phantom children, wailing and clinging.
People ran to the priests and rabbis and shamans for help. Problem was, exorcism is a really esoteric field of study. Only a few religious leaders knew how to conduct an exorcism properly, and most of those had died. Survivors had to reconstruct the rituals from memory, or figure out the rites from ancient books retrieved from the Cloud. With rather hit-or-miss results. They charged a fortune, too.
A new field developed in psychology: ghost therapy. Therapists study eight years, including the languages and dialects of focus populations. I stuck with American English, digging into vernaculars of eastern coast. I mean, an Appalachian ghost talks differently from the ghost of a life-long New Yorker, right? You have to communicate.
I was well able to deliver this English guy a solid pitch. But he surprised me. After hearing all the advantages of secular exorcism, he cleared his throat and said,
“Well my case is different. I do appreciate all you’ve told me: newly peaceful nights in the house, the spirit finally at rest and so on. But I’m looking to revive a ghost.”
I blinked. “Revive a ghost? Can you go into that a little?”
“I need to raise a ghost,” Marshall said patiently. “I’m willing to fly you over to my home in England, to do it. And pay handsomely. But can you do it?”
I massaged my face with my free hand. How I wished I’d been up earlier and at least had some coffee. “I don’t believe that’s been done before,” I said cautiously. “But I don’t see why not. We’ll have to have a face-to-face meeting.”
“Can we do that by video call? I’m returning to England the day after tomorrow, and I’m full up with meetings and seminars. I manage a boutique hotel in Cornwall. I got acquainted with Phipps at an international conference for hoteliers.”
I remembered more. The Phipps couple runs a B&B out in Maine. I’d had a lovely summer week out there three years before, counseling ghostly Grandma Lucille at midnight and lazing around on the beach all day. I don’t often get to travel for work. I relish every opportunity.
“At any rate, can your arrange a video meeting tonight at nine? Is that too late for you?”
I thought of the research I’d have to do. I’d need time for that. But apart from a late lunch with my boyfriend, Eric, I had no plans for the day. I’d hop on a fixed-route automatic taxi and get to the university library downtown. Call up my mentor and see what she might have to say. OK, I’d go for it. Pretty exciting, actually.
“Nine o’clock tonight works for me,” I said. “You say you’ll fly me over to England?”
“Yes, an all-expenses-paid round trip to beautiful Cornwall,” Marshall said with a touch of humor.
I’m a sucker for English accents, and he had a nice baritone too. And this offer was like a dream. But let’s stay professional, I reminded myself.
“How long a stay?” I asked crisply.
“For as long as it takes to raise the ghost,” he said.
Want to keep reading? Click on Chapter Two to watch Alexandra tackle this other-worldly mission.
Beautiful setting. Look forward to reading more!