Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand Read Free Page A

very last time I did Ozzie a favor. “I have this friend who wrote a book,” he said. “It’d be perfect for your show. You should interview her.” He gave me a copy of the book,
Our Cosmic Journey,
which listed enough alluring paranormal topics on the back-cover copy to be intriguing: past-life regression, astral projection, and even a mention of vampirism in the chapters on immortality of the soul. I assumed that anyone who wrote a book and managed to get it published, no matter how small and fringe the publisher, had to have their act together enough to sound coherent during an interview. I had thought we might have a cogent discussion on unconventional ways of thinking about the mind and its powers and the possible reality of psychic energy.
    I was wrong.
    Fortunately, she had decided the aura of the studio was too negative and insisted on doing the interview over the phone. She couldn’t see me banging my head against the table.
    “What did it look like?” I said, feeling punchy.
    “What did what look like?”
    “The angel. Glorimel.” And wasn’t that the name of one of the elves in Tolkien?
    “I’m sorry, what do you mean, what did it look like?”
    I huffed. “You said this being came to you, appeared in your home, and recited to you the entire contents of your book. When it appeared before you, what did it look like?”
    Now she huffed, sounding frustrated. “Glorimel is a being of pure light. How else do you want me to describe it?”
    “White light, yellow light, orange sodium lights, strong, weak, flickering, did it move, did it pulse. Just describe it.”
    “Such a moment in time is beyond mundane description. It’s beyond
words!
”
    “But you wrote a book about it. It can’t be
that
beyond words.” I was starting to get mean. I ought to wrap this up before I said something really awful. Then again, I’d always been curious about how far I’d have to go before I got
really
awful.
    “How else am I supposed to tell people about Glorimel’s beautiful message?”
    “Psychic mass hallucination? I don’t know.”
    “Glorimel
told
me to write a book.”
    Okay, enough. Time to stop this from turning into a shouting match. Rather, time to take myself out of the shouting match. “I’m sure my listeners have a lot of questions. Would you like to take a few questions from callers?”
    She graciously acquiesced. I tried to pick a positive one to start with.
    A bubbly woman came on the line. “Hi, Chandrila, may I call you Chandrila?”
    “Yes, of course.”
    “I feel like we’re sisters, in a way. I’ve also had visits from an angelic messenger—”
    It only got stranger. I stayed out of it, taking on the role of the neutral facilitator of the discussion. And made a mental note to kill Ozzie later. No more angelic-messenger shows, never again. So I’d been called the Barbara Walters of weird shit. So I regularly talked about topics that most people turned their rational skeptic noses up at. Just because some of it had been recognized as real didn’t mean it all was. If anything, telling the difference became even more important. There’s weird shit and then there’s weird shit. The existence of Powerball doesn’t make those Nigerian e-mail scams any more real.
    But it was hard convincing people that your little realm of the supernatural was real and someone else’s wasn’t.
    Finally, Matt gave me a signal from the other side of the booth window: time to wrap it up.
    “All right, thanks to everyone who called in, and a very big thank you to Chandrila Ravensun”—I managed to say the name without sounding too snide—“for joining us this week. Once again, her book is called
Our Cosmic Journey
and is available for ordering on her website.
    “Don’t forget to tune in next week, when I’ll be trying something a little different. I’ll be broadcasting live from Las Vegas, in front of a studio audience. That’s right, you’ll be able to watch me on TV and maybe even get in on