Confessions of a Shaman 4

The case worker didn’t understand the need for secrecy even now and my next foster parent was made aware of the whole situation immediately, why I was placed in her care and why the former foster parents kicked me out. She said she didn’t mind as long as it wasn’t disturbing to the other children. I kept it way secret now, no matter what anyone said. The rule “keep it secret” was making a lot of sense to me. I never told anyone what I was doing or did anything too out of the ordinary.

Once she asked me if it did me any good to work spells and such. I said that it did, that it taught me things I didn’t know before. She said she supposed I was right but if I wasn’t in heaven when she got there she would come looking for me downstairs just to ask me again. So I said I would then answer her honestly again. And when I began doing cartomancy, divination with regular playing cards, she asked me once or twice for a reading.

I was peaceful there and things were very calm. Everyone got along and ate together and there were rules and rewards and it was not bad at all. One time after school a tornado warning was issued for our county. We live in Tornado Alley and it was spring. We began to watch the storm closely and it was headed directly our way. We looked outside and saw the clouds shifting and then hail came. I sat in the middle of my room, the lights were out and I performed a simple but powerful blessing on the house. I filled it with pure white light and in response to it the tornado suddenly fishtailed and ended up going to other way. I kept my mouth shut though. I wasn’t about to tell anyone about it. But I was relieved.

School began to get better. Of course there were still whispers and such but I was used to it all by now. I focused on my studies and decided to just lay low. Hang out with only people who didn’t go to school, which meant like two friends. And so I passed for a while.

I was eventually able to move back in with my father and so I did. This time I just spent most of my time on my own, either in my room or in some train of thought somewhere’ sitting out in the yard or wandering town. My dad’s girlfriend and the kids were still there, and the daughter was now in her tween years and the boy was a young but coherent child.  

I lived a block away from the school in a haunted house on Jefferson. I didn’t know it was haunted when I first moved in but it was. At night if you stayed awake and sat in your room you could hear whispers and shuffling in the living room. The basement was unbearably evil and if you went down there alone at night woe on you. Shadow people were frequent and unexplainable things happened. Also, there were bats, snakes and spiders. I was brave at first so I went down into the basement at night once and cast a circle. My well-practiced circle kept out all evil. Nothing could cross it. I watched as the shadow people came and went, with fascination and awe. I listened to the whispers and unexplained knocking noises with the motive to understand. But all I received was whispered threats and warnings.

So I performed frequent cleanings down there, but this only made the spirit disappear for a while and if I forgot he would come back and be very irritable. There was a piece of him somewhere in the house but I could not find it. So I just swept away all the negativity as often as I could. But he got stronger somehow and I eventually feared him.

One night the summer of sophomore year I was playing video games. I thought I saw a shadow person out of the corner of my eye so I sat still and looked around. When I glanced up there was a woman with her jaw missing and blood all down a white dress she was wearing.  It was vivid and she sounded as though she wanted to say something but couldn’t due to her injury. I fell out of the chair and immediately scrambled into the room where my father and his girlfriend were. I lay on the floor in a full out panic attack, hyperventilating and unable to speak. I could still see her and somehow she told me about the spirit downstairs, she called him “Big John” and he was evil. He killed her and her daughter and he was bad to the core. She pleaded with me to come save her daughter. My dad and his girlfriend were entirely freaked out by my panic; I bolted from the room, grabbed some salt from the cabinet, and my black handled knife and went out to the shed following the woman. My dad ran after me and the moment I stepped foot in the shed I was knocked off my feet and back out. My father saw this and ran up to me. I got up unharmed and spread the salt around us and cast a circle. The spirit went away and everything was normal.

My father said he didn’t see anything but when I was thrown out he saw me fly out of the shed and knew something was wrong. After that we began to look for a different place to live. The spirits calmed down but my dad’s girlfriend kept hearing things shuffling around at night and such and I feared I didn’t do anything to help. So I left it alone and avoided it. I repelled it with spells but it was somewhere always. Then as we locked the door to the house and handed it to the landlord I spat upon the doorstep.

In the time I spent living there however, I learned a lot about my craft and what it meant. I understood now the rule about not harming anyone. It can come back hard and bite you in the ass. I considered Big John a prime example of that. I learned the consequences of trying to control other people as well, the hard way. But I got very good at it. I was working the summer of my junior year in a pizza place run by an old lady and an old man. They were not exactly what I would call professional but they were serious about their business. Unfortunately the old woman wasn’t all there and she would constantly bitch us out about one thing or another. I would just focus and think clearly about her just leaving suddenly and she would. And day after day I would do this as I walked in. Soon she was hardly there at all. I would cause the business some days to be unspeakably slow by carrying the four of swords in my pocket and using it to cast the business slower and make the time go by faster. It worked fine for a while but the business we were doing did decide to decrease and there were rumors of people getting fired.

But I learned there were always those rumors so it didn’t bother me. Also I worked there six months in what seemed like two and soon everything was moving way to fast. I quit after I was verbally abused by the old woman for the last time. I left for other reasons too, they were paying me under the table, working me ungodly hours when I also had to attend high school, and I was not getting much sleep. I was also tired of the constant stream of crap that the old man and the old woman would throw my way, and the sheer unprofessionalism of the woman. She wasn’t even sanitary…

I continued my craft, mostly just drawing love into my life. I knew it was impossible. I wasn’t even out yet, how could it be right? I didn’t take it seriously but I would always find myself out under the twilight wishing for love. But no one came for a long time. I also continued advancing my knowledge on the craft and after four years I knew a lot. I was stable, and had realistic goals and plans. I drew away from my craft for a while after that time, and I began doing more mental work. My experiences with the haunted house had shown me spirits. I was interested further.

I began to dream journey and The first time it was successful, which was like the billionth time I tried it, was of me walking down a path. I meet a woman who looks about middle aged with orange hair and a black dress sitting in the middle of a forest clearing. I asked her for her name and she said it was Beatrice. She was my spirit guide, and was sort of like a guardian spirit. She would be my teacher if I decided to journey again, and she taught me much about how to navigate the spirit world. She taught me how to speak one time. It’s different from the normal third world. You have to send it all out at once on a sort of radial energy pattern. This is where things become hard to explain so please forgive me if I sound unclear.  I continued to journey and she taught me where to find what she called “The Tree”