Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Time--a DG story

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Time

A GAC Defender Ghost short

Okay, I think the concept of the Defender Ghosts is so cute! But I can't draw worth a crap. 0_0 However, I am told it's fine for me to introduce my DG through a story, so here tis. If you have to go look up some 60s slang, well, you learned something. hehe

I do not own the GAC--there are laws against that.



Summer, 1968

Rosemary Sage Wildflower Brown, formerly known as just plain Rosemary Brown, stood on the side of a road somewhere in Nebraska, her backpack at her feet, her thumb in the air. Her sandaled feet were dusty and her dashiki was sweaty, but in the back pocket of her worn jeans was a piece of cardboard more precious to her than gold—a ticket to the Woodstock Music Festival. The fact that it was in New York and she loved in California was a minor point. The fact that her parents had yelled, pleaded, and finally pretty much thrown her out of the house when she told them she was hitchhiking across the USA, was a little more important. But they just didn't dig it. This was her generation's time! She felt the energy of her brothers and sisters drawing her to join them and change the world.

A chartreuse microbus drove past and pulled over. Rosemary grabbed her backpack and ran to climb in. Two chicks in love beads and three long haired guys greeted her. They were headed as far as Kentucky, so she settled back to enjoy the ride. The other two chicks got into a row over a joint, but Rosemary got them both to cool it; she had always had a gift for making peace. Besides the weed, the group had guitars and sandwiches, so the trip looked like it was going to be a gas.

That lasted until just outside St Louis, when the guy driving swerved to avoid a dog. Tires squealed, the girls screamed, and the microbus went off the road and tumbled over a steep embankment. Rosemary found herself outside the vehicle, looking at the bent and smoking ruin. No sound came from the wreck. She looked herself over; she seemed to be okay. When she called to her fellow riders, she got no reply, but in the distance she could hear sirens. She panicked a little then—if the pigs found her here, they'd smell the pot, put two and two together, and the next thing her parents heard from her would be a call from the local jail. Rosemary was a hippie and proud of it, but she loved her mom and dad too, and she didn't want to put them through such an ordeal. She began to climb, finally reaching the highway, and tried to hitch a ride—she needed to cut out, to put some space between herself and the accident site before the fuzz showed up. Nobody stopped, though; every car flew past her as though she were invisible. Frantic, she saw flashing emergency lights approaching, and she beat feet the opposite way. Thankfully, they didn't see her and she got away; she'd never realized she could run so fast, feeling as though her feet weren't even touching the ground.

Hitching continued to be a problem, though. Very few cars stopped for Rosemary, and when someone did, she almost always ended up dozing off, and awoke to find herself on the side of the road again. At least, she thought she dozed off; it was a weird, spacy, almost stoned feeling. There were times she wondered if she had been slipped some bad acid and was dreaming this whole thing, her mind on a bad trip while her body was safely back in the microbus riding east. Days ran into each other, until Rosemary finally reached New York, and found only a vacant field outside the village of Woodstock. Somehow, she had missed the concert. She sat down in the dirt and cried. Then, with one more sad look at the now useless ticket in her pocket, she stood up, brushed herself off, and started the long trip back home.

+++

Summer, 2011

The big white van motored down the California highway, packed with gear and headed for another lockdown. Nick was driving; Zak rode shotgun, munching on sunflower seeds and occasionally throwing the shells at Nick. Aaron sat in the back laughing, and finally pulled out his camera and started recording. "Aaron's vlog! We're on our way to the Lucas Institute, a private mental hospital with some super freaky reports of ghost attacks, to hunt some mean spirits. As you can see, Zak's building up his protein levels so he can take those nasty entities on." Zak nodded vigorously with his mouth full and flicked a shell at the lens. "Dude, watch it, you could put somebody's eye out."

"That's what she said," Zak mumbled around his snack.

"Hey, look," Nick said suddenly. "There's a girl hitchhiking. What's she doing out here in the middle of nowhere? The last houses in this area were torn down, what, twenty, thirty years ago?"

"Yeah," Zak said. "Looks like it might rain too, and it's almost dark, and she doesn't even have a jacket. Pull over, maybe her car broke down or something." He rolled down his window as Nick brought the van to a halt on the side of the road. "Hey! Can we help you?"

"Hey!" The girl looked like she'd been to a costume party, dressed like a refugee from the 1960s. "My parents live a few miles from here. Could you cats maybe give me a ride?"

The Ghost Adventures crew exchanged looks. "Sure, hop in," Zak said, and the other two didn't argue. Zak was such a sucker for women in need, and she'd have to be majorly crazy to take on all three of them, so there seemed no threat.

"I'm Rosemary," she introduced herself as she settled in beside Aaron, whose camera was still rolling. In answer to their questions, she went on, "I was, um, riding with some friends, going to a concert. We had an accident, so I'm trying to get back home. I've been on the road for a long time…my parents must be flipping their wigs."

"Wanna call 'em?" Aaron offered, pulling out his cell phone from the pocket of his hoodie. It had been hanging over the seat back, but he put it on, feeling suddenly chilled.

The girl took it and stared at it as though she had never seen one before. "You're pulling my leg, right?" she said, then frowned at the camera before looking around at the stacks of gear in back. Her eyes suddenly widened in alarm. "Oh shit…you cats the heat?"

"Huh?" Aaron said. "You mean the police? No, we're paranormal investigators." She still looked frightened, so all three men tried to explain what they did, where they were going and why. Aaron even let her hold his camera.

"Far out, man," she said. "Still looks like spy gear to me. Real 007 stuff. Wish they'd had these at Woodstock, I wouldn't've missed the show."

"Woodstock?" Nick said from behind the wheel. "Now you're the one kidding, right? No way you're old enough to have been there."

His attention was distracted by a sharp turn onto the road where Rosemary had said her parents lived, but Zak saw the girl's frown of puzzlement.  He took a sharp breath and turned in his seat, as things began to fall together like pieces of a puzzle. "Rosemary," he said quietly, "when did you leave home for the concert?"

She turned her big baffled eyes toward him. "August 1," she said.

"1968. A couple of weeks before Woodstock."

"Yeah, right on."

"It's 2011, sweetie," he almost whispered.

The van stopped. "Here's the address you said you lived at," Nick began, his tone confused. Zak turned around in his seat to face the windshield. The gasp he let out was matched by Aaron's as he lifted his camera to shoot what they saw—a vacant lot.

When they looked around a moment later, Rosemary was gone. All three piled out of the van, Aaron still filming, and scattered, calling her name. When they returned, though, they had to confess that either she was the fastest thing in flip flops any of them had ever seen…or they had ridden for the past half hour with a ghost.

Back on the road, Aaron reviewed his footage; the girl was there, although usually just out of frame or focus. Zak pulled out his iPhone and started researching. Sure enough, there had once been a family living at that address, but the couple had died years ago, after the death of their only daughter, who had run away to hitchhike across the country to Woodstock in 1968. In addition, there had been reports dating back that far of a girl in hippie garb, picked up by travelers, only to vanish minutes later. It was said that only those sensitive to psychic energies would even see her or stop.

Zak passed the information to Nick and Aaron, and they all wondered. None of them had ever claimed to be psychic, but all three knew they were receptive to the paranormal. Had their combined sensitivity enabled the lonely phantom to manifest and reach her goal? And now that she had, what would happen to her now?

They had no answers, but they did have footage, not that it proved anything to anybody but them. With that, they returned to the highway and a much quieter and more thoughtful trip to their lockdown.

+++

Rosemary was lost. She seemed to be floating aimlessly in a sea of nothingness, centered on the empty space where her childhood home should have stood. The words of the cat in the van, Zak, echoed through her mind. 2011? How could it be 2011? How could she have lost, not just days, but years?

In her mind the walls of her old home rose again. She drifted through the hallways and back into her bedroom, curled up on her bed and cried, until she heard familiar voices. She looked up to see her parents standing in the doorway, and flew to them with a cry. "We've been waiting for you," her mother said lovingly, hugging her tight. "It's time for us all to go now."

Rosemary hugged her dad, but then moved away. "You go on. I'll come in a little while. I need to find some guys first, and thank them for helping me."

+++

The Ghost Adventures crew were still pondering their strange encounter the next evening as they set up for their lockdown. "So what do you think?" Nick asked while setting up a static night vision camera. "Rosemary didn't know she was dead?"

"Sounds like it," Zak replied while going over notes. "The police report said she was killed instantly, so that's one strike right there. She had a clearly defined goal, and was fixated on reaching it: first the concert, then going home. That's another factor that may have kept her earthbound."

"Well, now that she knows, maybe she can get some peace," Aaron said, standing up from his inspection of their gear. "More peace than we're probably gonna get tonight. C'mon, let's take these evil spirits on."

+++

Rosemary found her way to the Lucas Institute easily. It had stood near her home all her earthly life, and spending time with the paranormal investigators seemed to have created a bond of some sort that she could follow right to them. It was a perfect setup, she mused as she floated into the building. They had all that boss gear, recorders and cameras and such. Whether she could show herself physically or not, surely she could manage to talk to them, at least to thank them for bringing her life to a close.

When she found them though, they were not alone. Several shadowy figures hovered near them. One reached out menacingly, and as Rosemary watched in horror it hit Nick hard on the side of the head.  "Cool it!" she yelled and rushed toward the shadow form. "Back off! Leave them alone!" She reached out toward it, and to her surprise it took the form of a man, rumpled and dirty. She guessed it was one of the mental patients who had been held here, agitated and angry, but her touch seemed to have calmed it and it faded away.

She turned to check on Nick, and tensed up. He lay on the concrete floor, Zak and Aaron around him with worried looks as they examined him. That wasn't what made Rosemary tight, though; it was the sight of two other ghosts hovering over the fallen investigator. In a moment, however, she realized the situation wasn't as hairy as it appeared. The dead looked as concerned about him as the living. "Who are you?" she asked.

"I'm Dude," said one ghost. "This is my sister Aura. We're two of the GAC's Defender Ghosts. Who are you?"

While Rosemary explained, Nick sat up, a little shaky at first, but then recovered. Aaron reviewed his camera's footage and let out an excited yelp. "Whoa, dudes! Listen to what I caught here." Just after Nick was hit, Rosemary was amused to hear her own voice, faint but clear, yelling at the mental ghost.

"Yeah, it said 'cool it, leave them alone'!" Zak exclaimed. "Almost like another spirit was intervening to make the one that hit you back down, Nick."

Nick nodded. "That voice…it's weird, but it sounds familiar, from someplace."

"Yeah…yeah, it—whoa!" Aaron sat down hard on the dusty floor, his eyes huge."I know who it is."  Slowly he pulled his digital recorder from his pocket, turned it on and held it up. "Rosemary?" he called. "Hey honey, are you here? Can you come over here and talk to me? You know how this recorder works, we showed it to you in the van, remember?"

Rosemary floated over. The only thing that hacked her off about this whole ghost thing was that she couldn't see her feet anymore, and she'd been wearing her favorite sandals when she died. "I'm here!" she said as loudly as she could; calming the angry ghost had taken a lot of energy from her, and she felt almost lightheaded. She said so to Dude.

"Take the energy from their gear," he told her, so she touched an EM pump lying nearby, then floated back.

Aaron was telling the other two he hadn't heard anything when Rosemary touched his shoulder. "Wow!" he said. "I feel cold right here." He put his hand where hers was. 'It's not threatening though…kind of soothing, really, like cool water. Rosemary, is that you? What are you doing here?"

"I came to thank you cats," she said, speaking directly toward the recorder.

"Did you hear that?" Nick said. "I definitely heard a voice just then—it sounded like 'thank you'."

They played back the recording and all of them could hear 'thank you cats'. "You're welcome, sweetie," Zak said with a little smile. "Thank you for helping us out here."

For the rest of the lockdown, Rosemary stayed with the crew. Dude and Aura did too, and explained to her what they did as Defender Ghosts. By dawn, she had come to a decision. "I'm staying," she told Dude. "I want to work with you cats. What the GAC is doing, it's so cool. And I want to pay them back for helping me out. I was freaking out, but now I'm with it, thanks to them. I think this is my bag, you dig?"

"We dig," Aura grinned. "Except you'll have to teach us your lingo."

"Far out," Rosemary agreed. The three ghosts settled in the back of the GAC van as Zak, Nick and Aaron headed for their next investigation.