Unnatural Occurrence (An Anna Morgan Novella (Part 1)) (2 page)

There was one thing that I hated more than crowds, and that was crowds of people my own age and younger gathered in the name of higher learning. I snorted under my breath as I walked quickly up the steps of the building I was headed into. High school had never been my thing and I was pretty sure college was going to be even worse. But after several failed attempts to get a meeting with the man I wanted to talk to, the renowned Dr. Christopher Young, I became desperate. So here I was auditing a class at Duke University against my own sense of self preservation and sanity. After bypassing a group of guys chugging hot cokes and entertaining the idiotic masses by belching the national anthem, I slid into the classroom I was looking for and quickly found a seat in the far back-corner at the top of the amphitheater style room.

The room filled rather quickly and I realized I’d been wrong in thinking this class wouldn’t have been a popular one to choose. I watched in horror as the majority of the seats were filled
in the final moments before the class started. Just before class was to begin, Dr. Young came in with a leather satchel and took his spot near the huge chalkboard at the front of the class. It was immediately apparent to me what held the rapt attention of the class. The good doctor ran a hand through his disheveled auburn hair, pushed his just-nerdy-enough-to-be-sexy glasses up, and grinned crookedly into the crowd. He wasn’t my type, but I could see how some women could lose all their senses in his presence.

“Well, looks like a full house again this year,”
he said, his blue eyes raking across the classroom. The audience sighed audibly. Dr. Young had a thick British accent. Good God. I glanced around the room again and realized that about eighty percent of the class was female.
Unbelievable
.

“I didn’t realize how full this class would be,” someone murmured next to me. I glanced over from behind
the curtain of my hair. The girl was pretty, with wide, brown eyes and a light smatter of freckles across her nose. Her light brown hair hung all the way to her waist and looked like it belonged in a Pantene commercial. She wore expensive clothing and carried high-end designer accessories. I could feel the nervousness and unhappiness flowing off of her. I wondered what she could possibly be nervous about. She looked like she’d fit in anywhere and probably in any crowd she chose. She fidgeted and I realized she was waiting for me to reply. I shrugged. She turned back to the front without another word. Man, I sucked at socializing.

“Let’s begin the semester with some basics, to give you some ideas of what we’ll be covering in this class, and more importantly, what we
won’t
be covering,” Professor Young said with a self-indulgent grunt. “Let me clear up what we will
not
be covering in this class first. We will not be studying mermaids, fairies, werewolves, Greek or any other mythological gods, and will most certainly not be studying sparkling vampires.” The class laughed at his summary.

“Can someone tell me one of the topics we
will
be covering this semester?” He turned, picked up a piece of chalk, and then quickly swung back around. Several hands were in the air. He pointed to someone.

“Precognition
,” a girl in the front answered. The professor nodded and turned around to add the word to the board.

“Good. Anyone else?” he asked as he wrote. “Yes, you.”

“Telepathy.” He nodded once again and added that word to the board. By the time the outline points that were readily available to any idiot who signed up for the class were on the board, I was already getting irritated. Precognition. Telepathy. Clairvoyance. Psychokinesis. Near-death and apparitional experience. How was I going to be able to learn anything from the class when he’d probably be covering the same generic crap I could’ve gotten off of the Internet myself? That was the whole reason I’d been trying to set up a private meeting with the man. I didn’t have time for this.

Forty minutes later, th
e professor glanced down at his watch and then back up at the class. “Does anyone have any questions?” He began putting papers back into his bag. My hand was the only one in the air. He found my hand in the crowd and pointed to me. Crap. Everyone turned to me. I shrunk down into my seat a bit.

“What about extrasensory perception?” I asked. His brows rose as everyone turned back to him at the front of the room.

“Extrasensory perception isn’t something most students are interested in, so I don’t usually get to it by the end of a semester.”

“What is extrasensory perception?”
someone asked from the other side of the room.

“Extrasensory perception—ESP—is the way it is believed some people can gather information not using one of their normal five senses, but instead a sixth sense of some kind.” He was staring at me now and I recognized the glow of his aura, the way it began to reach for me just a bit to feel me out. He was wondering who I was. He was wondering why I was in his class… I wasn’t the normal type.

“I’m Anna and I’m here because I wanted to learn more about ESP and how it correlates with a near-death experience. Or death itself,” I said, answering his unasked question. His eyes widened fractionally and his aura pulled back. The entire class was quiet. I hadn’t meant to answer the questions I thought he wanted to ask. Dang it, this was awkward. His eyes left my seat and he clapped his hands together once.

“Class is over
. We will pick this up on Wednesday. Make sure you bring your textbooks and be ready to take notes.” Everyone filed out of the room as quickly as they’d filed in, with only a few brave girls hanging back to make sure they were noticed by the teacher. I rolled my eyes behind my sunglasses. I picked up my backpack and slung it over a shoulder. This class had been a horrible idea. I was getting desperate. It had been four years since my mom’s death and even though I taught myself how to use my senses a whole lot better than I used to be able to, I didn’t know enough about my condition to be able to really use it to help me figure out what had killed my mom. I just kept running in circles. There were very few so-called experts in parapsychology. Most were quacks and a lot were paranormal fanatics, waiting for their Lord and Master, Dracula to make them one of the dark chosen. It was disgusting. I marched down the steps, ready to get off the campus and out of North Carolina.

“Anna, was it?” Professor Young stepped forward, halting me halfway to the door. I nodded.

“Listen, I didn’t mean to bash your class itinerary or anything. I guess I was just hoping for…
more
,” I said in exasperation. I was getting tired of traveling all over the country and never finding anyone who could truly help me learn more about my abilities.

“No, don’t worry about that. It was nice to have someone take some initiative and step out of my regular routine.” He studied my face a bit longer and I could feel his aura pushing against me again. His eyes focused on my dark sunglasses.

“I wear them because I have an eye that was damaged when I was a little girl,” I said softly.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to
stare or to pry,” he said gently.

“I know,” I answered. And yet, his aura still swirled around me. It felt like an invasion of privacy, though the professor couldn’t have any idea of what he was doing. “You know, you can just ask me.” I said. He studied me and I just barely kept from fidgeting.

“Ask you what?” he asked with a raised brow.

“Ask me about my eye. How I was hurt. My near-death experience.” His mouth flopped open quite unattractively
, which was a difficult thing for him to accomplish. “Well, in my case…my death experience,” I went on.

“I didn’t mean to offend,” he said, his aura pulsing light blue in apology. I smiled. He frowned
.

“I know,” I said again.

“Why do you keep saying that?” he asked.

“Because I know how you’re feeling and almost what you are thinking, though not quite.” His eyebrows almost rose to his hairline.

“Really?” I nodded and smiled again. The professor was a sceptic.
How perfectly ironic
. I reached up and lowered my glasses just to the tip of my nose and held my hair back with a deep breath. When I opened my eyes, Dr. Young sucked in an audible breath. I wasn’t offended. I wasn’t disfigured. As matter of fact, except for the thin scar that ran down the side of my face, from my temple to my jaw bone, my face was flawless. My eye was perfectly intact as well. It just had almost no color at all. In the accident, nerves were damaged and somehow the blue of my iris just dissolved and my pupil was a slight shadow instead of the normal black center. I was legally blind in that eye, but not even the doctors who treated me knew that I could see so much
more
with that eye now.

“
I was legally dead for over seven minutes. When I revived, the damage to my eye left me legally blind…and yet I can see
other things
with my eye.” I was taking a chance. I knew that, but I felt like it was time that I did. “When I said that I knew how you were feeling it was because I can more or less tell what you are feeling. Your aura has been harassing me since the moment I opened my mouth to ask you a question.”

“You can see auras?” he asked. I nodded in answer. “May I?” he held a hand out and I gulped, but nodded once again. He came within a foot of me and tilted my head to peer closer at my eye. His scrutiny was clinical, but I was increasingly uncomfortable
. Besides my eye doctors, I’d never let anyone this close to me to look at my eye. I cleared my throat.

“We might want to do this elsewhere. Don’t want any of your admirers getting the wrong impression.” I smiled, but Professor Young was staring at me, weighing what I had told him. I pushed my glasses back into place and glanced over at the door. The next class would be coming in soon.
I made a tsk-tsk sound. “Your aura is molesting me again.” He looked taken aback and I grinned.

“I’m sorry. I have no idea how to control my aura
,” he said. I laughed and headed to the door.

“It’s okay. Better your aura than a wraith,” I shot over my shoulder. He picked up his bag an
d hurried over to me.

“Come back on Wednesday for another one of my boring classes and I’ll try to have some info for you,” he said quickly. I
became the sceptic. “No, really. I have some documents and studies that very few people have ever seen that you might find helpful,” he continued on. I crossed my arms over my chest.
Nothing worth anything was free.
My momma had always said that.

“And what do you get out of this?” I asked. He pulled out his most charming smile, summoning his inner Flynn Rider and it
almost
worked on me.

“Just a few nights of your time,” he answered flippantly. I set my jaw and waited. He ran a hand through his hair in agitation. I smiled. “I just want to study you a bit. Ask you some questions, do some minor experiments…” I opened my mouth to protest. “Nothing invasive or dangerous, I swear,” he interjected. I thought about the years I’d been searching for info and I wavered. I needed to know how to control my extra sense, how to really use it to my advantage. Maybe, just maybe, Professor Young would have something of use to me. I sighed and held out my hand.

“Okay, but I can’t promise anything,” I agreed. He took my hand and shook it with his grin back in place.

“I’ll see you in class on Wednesday,” he said as he walked away, his aura crackling excitedly about him. I
turned with a sigh and began my own walk back to my car. Looked like I was going to have to find a place to stay after all.

I should have known that the day couldn’t go as well as I believed it would. I was actually excited to get back to Professor Young’s class today and my head was spinning with excitement. Maybe I would actually make progress, maybe I’d find something out I didn’t know, some way to really use my abilities. If I could, I’d be one step closer to making sense of my mother’s death. After four years I’d only grown increasingly more frustrated. This had to work out. It
had
to.

As I approached the door to the classroom, I felt a familiar prickle at the back of my skull. I froze with my hand on the door knob and kept my eyes focused on the ground in front of me. The wisps of gray aura that accompanied one of the recently deceased was floating about an image in my peripheral vision. I took a deep breath as I closed my eyes. Not now. I reverted back to the days when I was still pretending to be normal. I ignored the wraith, opened the door
, and walked quickly to take my seat. I sat with my head down, my hair blocking my view of everything but my hands that were folded tightly in my lap.
Please go away. Please go away. Please go away.
I chanted the mantra beneath my breath, willing it to work for once.

Professor Yo
ung began the class, but it seemed to me to drag forever. The wraith hadn’t moved on; In fact, it had followed me right to my seat and was standing over me like a looming cloud, the harbinger of death’s unscrupulous favoritism. I pressed a button to illuminate my cell phone’s screen. Only ten more minutes until the class ended. I could handle ten more minutes. Or so I thought. This wraith wasn’t like most of the wraiths I’d dealt with before though, the ones who just linger near their body or place of death until they dissolve into whatever their next state happened to be. This wraith was
hounding
me.

I thought that maybe the wraith just wanted to be acknowledged, to know that one last person had seen them before they moved on.
Some of them were like that. Man, I’d never been more wrong. I raised my head for the first time since class started and glanced up, hoping to appease the ghost, but I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. The sight of the wraith tore a scream from my throat as I jumped from my desk, knocking all of my stuff onto the floor with a loud
thud
. Several people nearby jumped from their seats and stared at me, wondering what had happened. Professor Young stood at the front of the classroom in the shocked silence that fell upon the room. I mumbled something about a spider and stumbled back toward my seat, trying to block out the wraith who now circled about me, ‘round and ‘round, faster and faster, its mouth opened in an impossibly wide scream of terror, its face a mask of anguish.

I sat as still as possible and tried to pretend I could see the front of the room, but the wraith circled me, its gray wisps
of energy floating about me, making me dizzy. I was afraid I was going to pass out when the room began emptying out, everyone giving me a wide berth as they exited the room. I stood on unsteady legs and fumbled for my backpack.
Oh please, God, let the wraith go away. Why was it tormenting me?

“Anna?”
I stumbled down a step. Professor Young put a hand on my shoulder to steady me. “What is it, Anna? What’s going on?”

I whimpered when the wraith came even closer,
its dark, empty eyes and mouth stretched out close to my face. I grabbed onto Professor Young’s arm, clutching his coat sleeve.

“Wr…wraith,” I muttered. The room was spinning.
His arms held me up and kept me grounded.

“A wraith? What does it want?” he asked. The wraith slowed its movements, its mouth closed back to a more normal shape. I shook my head. I was on overload. Everything felt gray. Gray
ness with the inky stain of death and evil. The same stain that had coated my mother’s body. “Breathe deeply,” the professor murmured beneath his breath, coaxing me to calm down. I tried several times before my heart began to beat at a more normal pace. I peeked up from the spot on his chest that I’d fixated on and into the face of the wraith. I was surprised when I realized I knew her face. The wraith was the young woman with tendrils of hair that fell down to her waist. Those tendrils were no longer light brown, but instead a shade of ash gray. She was the girl who was sitting by me in this class two days before. I flinched. The one I couldn’t even bother myself to speak to after she’d spoken to me.

“She’s dead,” I said softly.

“Who? Who’s dead?” I removed my grip from Professor Young’s jacket and glanced up wearily into his face. His eyes were wide and concerned. But still…skeptical.

“The girl who sat next to me on the first day of this class. She’s dead.” I met the dark stare of the dead girl and felt that same overpowering feeling of
absolute helplessness as I had so many times in the past. Death followed me and yet I was still just an utterly useless observer. I couldn’t make a difference.

“I’m sorry,” I said to her. I hadn’t even known her name. I hadn’t even spoken to her. Professor Young glanced uneasily at the space that I was staring at. I felt the anger building. I was so fed up with never being able to
do
anything with my abilities. The hell with this crap. I was going to make a difference, even if I had to put up with people pointing and calling me crazy. I was going to help this girl. I wasn’t going to let her disappear without some sort of closure.

“Who was here on Monday, but was absent today?” I asked in grim determination. The professor walked back down to the front of the class and
opened up his attendance record.

“There were five absent students today. One male, four female,” he said as he ran a finger along the names. “Amy Powers.” He glanced up at me and I looked at the wraith. I shook my head. That wasn’t it. “Nicole Stanten.” Nope. I shook my head again. “Renee Fisk.” Wrong. “Julie Reese,” he said. The wraith grew agitated, circling me once again. I closed my eyes and held out a hand.

“You have to stop circling me if you want my help,” I said through gritted teeth. I opened my eyes and found Professor Young staring at me in open fascination. The wraith was hovering nearby, its mouth once again open twice as wide as it should have been able to, with nothing but a yawning blackness issuing forth. People began slowly filtering in the classroom for the next class.

“We should go,” I said after a moment. He snatched his stuff up and followed me out of the room.

“What are we going to do now?” he asked with his brow furrowed in thought. I sighed deeply and pulled my cell phone out of my pocket.

“We’re going to call the police,” I said. I could barely believe the words had come from my
lips. The professor’s mouth popped open and I could tell his mind was working through the facts like I already had. And tell them what?
A ghost had visited me and told me it had been killed?

This was going to be
hell.