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.
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