DAY 17: Coming of the Psychopomp

The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited.

One summer evening, while the horizon held on to the final arc of an orange sun, Kamen made a visit to the local cemetery. He didn’t go to this place of memories to pay his respects to a loved one nor did he bring flowers to the grave of some distant relation or even a colleague. Kamen was visiting the grave of his role model/mentor.

Rey Brandon passed away less than two weeks ago and Kamen had come to invoke his spirit. Well, not really in the archaic sense of the word although, the folks in the Roman legend era would have seen that way. What he actually pray to his role model much like a wife would pray to the spirit of her departed hubby or vice versa.

In his prayer, Kamen asked that the soul, the wit, the genius and the muse of the dead writer be ceded to him. He prayed that the spirit of the writer become his personal muse and asked to be guided by whatever force decided his mentor’s daily routine especially, his writing routine.

Perhaps, what this writer needed was a little education to set him straight. Like someone ought to have been there to fill him in on the raw facts of life; there was actually a spirit, for better or worse, that lived in the dead writer. Something that was still seeking a host to possess. You didn’t just get all prolific overnight and churn out 25 bestsellers in fifteen years!

For Kamen, nothing special happened at the graveyard. No angelic voices sang Handel’s Hallelujah, the devil was probably caught up some place trying to make some kid torch his pet’s tail to come promise him the world if only he would bow down and worship, there was nothing out of the way here, folks. Just the breeze sighing through the trees. But as he got up to leave, Kamen felt moisture at the center of his head and lifted his head to the tree right above him. A raven stood on one of its shoulders. He touched his hand to the wet spot on his head and checked.

            “Good gracious!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t pray for no shit anointing, thank you.” He scoffed as he dusted the soft grassy soil off his knees. He went home not knowing if his prayer had been treated with contempt or if a favorable answer was in the details. In the days which followed however, things took a turn for this ambitious writer.

More on that later.

Kamen was single when we met him. He lived in a large apartment but rarely stayed in there. He built for himself a brick study somewhere in his expansive garden. This is where all his mysterious writings took place.

Somewhere along the line Kamen had an accident. He toppled off the staircase one morning while coming down for breakfast and suffered a mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI). It’s nothing serious, really only for him life would never be the same again. The line between the real world and the world of his imagination blurs. And something had used his dysfunctional state (he was unconscious for several hours) as a channel to possess his body. Now there are two people inside him. Kamen came to believe this was his muse and really it was. But it was much more the coming of the spirit of his mentor-the answer to his prayer. And that wasn’t such a bad thing, was it?

Meanwhile, Kamen’s stories became better; he churns out stories with amazing regularity and beats all expectations. Even his agent notes and actually commends him on his unbelievable transformation. And Kamen replied jokingly, “Sometimes, a fall could be the greatest thing that can happen to a writer.” But we know for sure that is, do we not?

And Kamen had this maid, who came in to do chores (as if maids could serve any other purpose) who’s got something paranormal about her. It was the lady who first observed that Kamen’s talent is not natural and she was also there when things got out hand to help Kamen out. This writer actually survived the possession, thank God. That would be a first for me, in any of my writer stories, I think.

Notes to myself:

Okay, it’s a story of the paranormal. Kamen’s writing periods are marked by outrageous display of the supernatural. Once, while he was in his study up there in his garden, Gerda, that’s his maid, witnessed clouds assembling over the roof and twirl in an upward winding gyre. It was one of the episodes that convinced her there was more to Kamen’s writing ingenuity.

There will be only one raven in this story and its going to be the conduit of the supernatural.