A Gift in the Dark

The Pen is Mightier

The Pen Is Mightier

Some people are born with talent. Some can soar across a piano and create music to make men weep. Others sing, produce complex mathematical theorems, or make vast sums of money through business. My talent, as it turns out, is for communication, but not through penmanship or oratory. Simply put, I ease the passage of those who have not left this world into the next.

It's not an exorcism. I do not destroy, banish or remove. I commune with those souls who have decided not to leave this particular plane of existence and try to work out why. There is always a reason: a reason which can range from the need to see justice done, to wondering whether the family estate was split in the manner asked for in the will.

I hope by reading this someone may come to understand the circumstances in which I now find myself. I hope they may be able to help me in the same way as I have tried throughout my life to help others. I hope in some small way for forgiveness for what I have done.

It seems I have been granted some time to set pen to paper, so please allow me to scribe away my remaining seconds whilst I try to ignore the screams outside.

~~

Yesterday – or so it was when all this started – I found myself in a rather grand looking manor house atop a hill in a small town in rural Devon: a gentle spot surrounded by a loop of one of the larger rivers, a property in a commanding position, sitting quietly in stone majesty from its position above the town. Dappled shade in the garden, gently sloping lawns, and a high wall separating the grandness from the rest of the town rabble had made it an irresistible buy for its new owner, an ex‑army Colonel. He had bought the house for a knockdown price from a past-it rock star who had decided to move back to London to see if he could re-start his aging rock star career and get laid. As the Colonel discovered, it went for a knockdown price not because the fading drummer could no longer pay for his drug habit, but for the simple fact that it was haunted.

Well, sort of.

There were none of the classic signs. No secluded patches of cold in an otherwise warm house, no flickering lights or feelings of being brushed in passing as if by a light draught of wind. Merely, things got moved. Or more specifically; pens and pencils, paper, anything left in the area of the Colonel's old leather-topped desk in the corner of the upstairs room.

Being a rather grand old house, it was constructed over three stories, with a wonderful eyrie-type loft space in a corner turret that looked out over the river on one side, and the town on the other. A space for thinking, a room for dreamers and artists; somewhere to sit, watch, and get lost in the patterns on the water, or the clouds in the sky, or merely wander through the corridors in one's head. This night, however, it was to be my working space.

The Colonel left me alone in the house, with assurances he would be back the following day to check whether I had been able to teach the ghost to make paper aeroplanes, or indeed whether I had managed to get him, or her, to go away. Once he had gone, I made myself a sandwich and a cup of coffee, and went upstairs to await the onset of darkness.

Unusually on this warm summer's evening, I enjoyed the change towards night. It was a truly beautiful spot, and compensated for the normal sense of unease that always precluded an attempt at communication with a restless shade.

As the moon rose through the few wispy clouds, and the bats in the roof took to the air to search for something winged and tasty, I watched silently as a piece of paper lifted as if caught in a breeze, and settled in the centre of the desk.

The seconds ticked by, and although tuned by nature and long association with the paranormal, it felt like an age before anything else happened. The hairs on my arm gently stood to attention, and then the moonlit room was graced with the presence of another as a pale translucent hand took form above the paper. I sat in silence for several minutes in expectation of more, but that was it.