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  “Alex?”

  There was silence.

  “Alex…is that you?”

  “Yes, Sugarplum. It’s me…”

  It was his voice! This was his nickname for her! He pulled her towards him and she felt his soft lips on hers. They were warm, not cold like the last time. “I’ve missed you so much, Alexander!” she managed to gasp between feverish kisses.

  “I’ve missed your body, baby,” he said hungrily as he kissed away her tears of joy. She had so many questions to ask him. There were so many things she wanted to say, but there was no time for small talk about life and death; it was time to make love. He picked her up with ease and carried her off into the darkness. They reached a dimly lit bedroom and as they entered the door it felt just like it did when he carried her across the threshold on their wedding night. He laid her down gently on the enormous bed and slowly began unraveling her wrap dress. “I remember when I bought this dress for you to wear to that work Christmas party. I enjoyed taking it off you then too…”

  She helped him undress and he climbed onto her, their bodies melting into each other. After three years of grief-imposed celibacy, it felt incredibly sexy to have a man on top of her again, his weight and size holding her down. She nuzzled her face into his neck as she breathed in his cologne. She’d never smelled his distinctive, spicy scent on any other man.

  “Mmm. You smell so good, Alexander.” His touch sent electricity through her entire body. “You feel so good too. I need you…”

  “There’s nothing more important to me than being able to touch you in this way again,” he whispered in her ear.

  They made love tenderly, like it was their first time together, although knowing it was their last. She soon felt her orgasm building up and she began screaming, “Alexander!” just like she’d always done in bed with him. She sang his name again and again as she came hard and fast, propelling him to join her.

  “Katherine… I love you,” he groaned as he drained himself deep inside of her. He wrapped his arms around her tightly and they fell into a deep sleep as their time together slowly ran out.

  When Kate awoke she was naked in the bed between blue satin sheets, but alone. She quickly threw on her crumpled clothes and did her best to fix her tangled bed hair. She grabbed her high heels by their straps and navigated the maze of halls and rooms until she finally stumbled across the reading room. The mood was now completely different. The curtains were open and the room was brightly lit by sunshine, although Kate could see outside that the trees were swaying and their colored leaves were falling to the ground. She found Gil sitting at the table drinking a cup of coffee and leafing through the latest issue of GQ. She stood there in her wrinkled dress with her unruly hair, mascara stained cheeks and smeared red lipstick, while Gil looked as poised and polished as he did during the psychic session; just like a fashion model out of the magazine he was reading. She tiptoed into the room but he looked up instantly when her feet stepped on a creaky floorboard.

  “Ah, Mrs. Thompson!” he greeted her enthusiastically but formally. “I hope my reading gave you a sense of comfort and closure.”

  “I-it d-did,” she spluttered, unable to make eye contact with him. She kept reminding herself that he couldn’t possibly know what had just happened. “I can’t tell you how much it meant to me. Thank you for bringing my husband back to me.”

  “The pleasure was all mine,” Gil said with a grin. He stood up from his seat and approached her. “I have another client who’ll be coming here soon, so please allow me to show you out.” He placed his hand on the small of her back and ushered her towards the door.

  As they walked together she said, “Mr. Godsend, my husband died three years ago and I’ve spent that entire time on your waiting list for a private reading.”

  “I apologize,” he said. “I’m glad I could finally fit you in. My waiting list is long, but I always make time for urgent readings such as this. Here’s my business card with my direct phone number.”

  She exchanged this with her payment for the session. Gil took the check from her shaking hand and as she threw on her shoes his eyes flickered down momentarily to ensure that the amount was correct. He typically requested a “donation” of $1,000 per hour for his private readings. Kate had written a check for double this amount.

  “Thank you and goodbye, Mrs. Thompson. Call me.”

  “Goodbye, Mr. Godsend.”

  As she stepped outside an icy cold gust of air hit her face and the afterglow flush disappeared from her cheeks. She suddenly felt alone, like she’d lost Alex all over again. Then a jolt of realization struck her. In five years of marriage, her husband had never called her “Katherine”.

  Chapter 2

  Author Gem Forrest was invited to spend three weeks with Gil Godsend to experience his lifestyle and mission. Gil had been somewhat of an enigma to the public, so he welcomed Forrest into his home in San Rafael, California, where she had the opportunity to observe his psychic readings with clients, meditate with him, and take long walks with Gil to discuss his philosophies about life and death, and the beyond. During their time together, he shared his life story with Gem, which she retells in the authorized biography 21 Days with Gil Godsend.

  According to the book, Gil Faulkner grew up in Sebastopol, California, a city known as "The Gravenstein Apple Capital of the World." His parents owned a large farm where they grew apples, cherries, and berries. The family had a roll-up-your-sleeves, old-fashioned work ethic and the young Gil picked raspberries from the field and helped his mother make jams and bake pies for their roadside farm store. Year after year, Mrs. Faulkner was the winner of the Best Apple Pie award at the Sebastopol Apple Fair. Her secret was to poach the apples in spiced orange juice before baking the pie.

  Gil became aware of his psychic gift at an early age. Even as a young boy he didn’t see eye to eye with his parents, but he was very close to his father’s sister, Tillie, who had a deep interest in the supernatural. When he was 10-years-old, Aunt Tillie introduced Gil to the occult. One day his mother discovered him playing with a Ouija board when he should have been canning blackberries. He was sent to bed without dinner, although later that night his mother sneaked into his room with a slice of strawberry rhubarb pie.

  A year later, Aunt Tillie was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of thyroid cancer. She was dying. Gil and his aunt began holding lengthy conversations about spirituality and the after life. She promised him that after she died she would return to enlighten him about the other side. Merely months after her diagnosis, Aunt Tillie died. She passed at home in her sleep at 2am so Gil wasn’t there to say his final farewell. Instead, she appeared to him by his bedside and said, “Goodbye Gil, but just for now. I will return.”

  And she did return. Aunt Tillie started reappearing to Gil daily to continue schooling him in the supernatural and to bring him revelations from the other side. One morning, his mother was distraught because her antique string of pearls had vanished. She tore the house apart searching for them, but to no avail. The family had a maid who cleaned the house on Wednesdays, and she accused the woman of stealing them. She was about to report the necklace as missing to the police when Aunt Tillie’s ghost appeared to Gil and revealed their whereabouts. “The string of pearls is in a box of tissues underneath the passenger seat in your car,” he told his mother. Gil was accused of hiding them as a prank and he was grounded for two weeks.

  Gil continued to make predictions based on the information his Aunt Tillie shared with him from beyond the grave. At first, these seemed like good guesses to his parents, but they became concerned when his visions became too specific, and too accurate. One night his parents were watching television when there was breaking news about a 6-year-old girl who had gone missing from her home in San Francisco. The girl’s disappearance was a complete mystery. Gil wandered into the room as they were discussing the incident and he assured them, “Don’t worry, in two days she’ll be found alive in an abandoned building near her home.”
Sure enough, the little girl was discovered two days later in a derelict factory, right near her home.

  One evening during dinner, Gil and his parents were eating in their usual uncomfortable silence. All that could be heard was the scraping sound of silverware grating on crockery. In order to avoid eating his Brussels sprouts, Gil decided it was the right time to ask about a family secret, and not his mother’s secret to baking winning apple pies.

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me that I had a twin brother named Will?” he blurted out. His father choked on his lamb shank while his mother began crying. It was true. Will died of pneumonia at six months of age and they never talked about him again.

  When he’d dislodged the offending chunk of lamb from his throat his father demanded, “How did you know about that? While we’re at it, how did you know that Uncle Jim was adopted, that your cousin Michael is gay, and that Grandpa has Alzheimer’s? How did you know these things before they did? How do you know everything about everybody before anyone else?”

  “Aunt Tillie told me,” Gil said to their astonishment.

  Gil began having encounters with other spirits too. Attending a school excursion to Alcatraz, he was startled by the spirit of a prisoner who asked him for a cigarette through the bars of his cell. During a trip to the hospital to see Grandpa, in the next room Gil saw the spirit of an elderly man who had just died and was gazing sadly at his own corpse. When he was at the cemetery visiting Aunt Tillie, he saw the spirit of a strange woman staring at him as she stood over her freshly covered grave. At first, he thought that everyone could see these spirits. Then he realized that he had a special gift that few others had. Soon, Gil began seeing spirits everywhere he went. He discovered that if he paid attention they could communicate with him using pictures, words, sounds, and smells. Then he discovered that he could talk back to them…

  Knowing that they had a link back to the earthly realm through Gil, these spirits begged him to deliver messages to their loves ones. And he did. He startled a widower in a supermarket by telling him that his deceased wife was angry he was buying that bottle of whiskey. He embarrassed his schoolteacher by revealing that her Catholic mother was disappointed with her for taking birth control pills, and for having sex with a Jewish man. He horrified Reverend Jones by divulging to the congregation that the clergyman had a crush on Mrs. Faulkner. Now everyone knew why Mrs. Faulkner kept winning those awards for her pies because the Reverend was the judge of the competition each year.

  Gil was popular with his school friends for telling their fortunes, but unpopular with their parents for exposing their embarrassing secrets. At Tommy Cook’s birthday party, Mr. Cook was furious when Gil informed Mrs. Cook that her husband was having an affair with his large-breasted secretary. Mrs. Cook was furious when Gil then informed Mr. Cook that Tommy wasn’t his biological son.

  The biography says that Gil sees spirits wherever he goes, but he also has a number of spirit guides to help him through life and assist him in his readings. Aunt Tillie is his chief guide and she introduced him to his guides from the other side, his twin brother Will, and a man named Oleg. Oleg had lived in the town of Voskresensk, Russia, during the 19th century. Raised in poverty and living as a vagrant, he became a pickpocket as a child. Over his lifetime he was guilty of poaching, burglary, and many other crimes. When Oleg passed, his spirit lingered in the void because of the pain he caused other people during his lifetime. When he learned to experience remorse he finally crossed over to the light, and his spirit became dedicated to atoning for his wrongdoings. After a life spent in making people lose things, through Gil, Oleg can now help people find things they’d lost. At least, this is the story that Gil told his parents.

  Initially, his parents referred to the spirits as Gil’s “imaginary friends”. They were staunch Christians and didn’t believe that Gil’s gift was of God. They feared Satan was deceiving him. They quoted the Bible at him, and warned him against wizardry and necromancy. Then, a framed tapestry of Leviticus 19:31 was hung over the mantelpiece: “Do not turn to mediums or spiritists; do not seek them out to be defiled by them. I am the LORD your God.”

  Gil began reading the Bible, much to his parent’s delight, until he discovered Revelation 1:3: “Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of the prophecy.” In defiance, he took a pencil and scrawled this verse on a piece of paper and taped it over the tapestry. When Gil was 16, his mother found him in her bed with the maid one Wednesday afternoon. Pre-marital sex was even worse than conjuring the dead, and it was then that his parents became convinced that Gil was possessed by a demon. They dragged him to church and insisted that he be exorcised. Reverend Jones was only too happy to oblige, although during the exorcism he got a black eye from Gil’s “demon”. The exorcism didn’t seem successful. Mrs. Faulkner didn’t win the award for Best Apple Pie that year and Gil continued to communicate with spirits, and sleep with the maid.

  It was at this time that Gil started to have trouble in high school. He was always an extremely intelligent boy who had a remarkable encyclopedic knowledge of many topics, but he was easily bored. He stopped doing his homework and then he stopped going to school. The principal called Mr. and Mrs. Faulkner into school one day for a serious talk. They learned that Gil wasn’t turning up to school for anything other than art class, and that was only because he was having an affair with his art teacher, Mrs. Grant. He had also beaten up his history teacher, Mr. Grant. Gil was expelled.

  Teenagers are too old to have imaginary friends, and non-Catholic psychiatrists don’t believe in demons, so at the age of 18 his parents decided Gil’s gift was a mental disorder. During a mental health evaluation he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and shuffled off to a psychiatric institution for six months. He soon learned to tell his doctors exactly what they wanted to hear; he was no longer seeing spirits or hearing voices. Those were just hallucinations and delusions. He was cured. But he was furtively disposing of his antipsychotic medication and mood-stabilizers using a slight-of-hand trick. When the doctors were off-duty for the night, Gil was still giving psychic readings to the nurses who smuggled alcohol into his room and dragged him off to the padded cell to have sex with him.

  When Gil was released from the hospital he didn’t return home. Now that they were getting older, his parents had expected him to come back to the farm to take over the family business. He refused, saying that he didn’t care about jam and pies; he wanted to become a professional psychic medium. His mother and father were inconsolable. First they had lost Will, and now Gil. To this day, he is estranged from his parents.

  Without the spiritual oppression of his parents, Gil was now free to pursue his psychic destiny. But his career had inauspicious beginnings. He traveled to Berkeley, California, where he became just another psychic reader on Telegraph Avenue. He read palms, tarot cards, and rune stones. His penniless clientele consisted mostly of students asking, “Will I pass my exams this semester?” instead of studying, and hippies asking, “When will we have world peace, man?” One regular was a stoner who always asked Gil to perform divination using the loose marijuana he’d just bought on the street. No longer a cheap refuge for starving artists, Gil ended up joining Berkeley’s burgeoning homeless population, where he often worked in exchange for food, beer, or a couch to crash on for the night. Gil considered his time living down and out as his homage to the poverty experienced by his spirit guide Oleg.

  When he was 22, Gil worked for a telephone psychic hotline in Los Angeles. He spent a year finding lost pets, advising people how to find a new job, and telling women when they’ll meet Mr. Right. Answering questions about relationships, career, and money was his bread and butter, although that sandwich amounted to cents on the dollar. Gil often worked the graveyard shift when the psychic infomercials ran on television, which would invariably bring an influx of gamblers demanding, “What are these week’s lotto numbers?” or potheads asking esoteric questions such as, “What’s the meaning of life?”

  It was usu
ally after 1am when drunken women would call and ask through their tears, “How do I win back my ex?” or “Is he cheating on me?” These same women then told Gil he had a sexy sounding voice and propositioned him for phone sex. He later discovered that many telephone psychics were former phone sex operators or doing both jobs at the same time to make ends meet. Worse still, the company’s other psychics were simply reading from scripts. These experiences left him feeling bitter and disillusioned with the commercial psychic industry. He even considered going home to face the music and take over the family farm. However, Aunt Tillie appeared in a dream and told him to hang in there. One day very soon he would become world famous for his psychic abilities.

  “It’s always darkest before the dawn,” she said.

  With few options left, Gil decided to join the psychic fair circuit at age 23. He traveled across California with a troop of psychics attending a different fair each weekend. He enjoyed the travel, and the attention of the throngs of hot hippie women, but he didn’t like the image enforced by the event organizers. His female colleagues wore gypsy clothes, headscarves, and hoop earrings, while he was expected to wear a puffy satin shirt and a turban, complete with a feather and a fake jewel like he was something out of a Zoltar fortuneteller machine.

  “Why can’t I do my job without wearing a tacky outfit?” he asked his boss.

  “Because your clients expect you to dress like a psychic,” came the reply. Gil learned that appearances were more important than talent. Many of the people he worked with looked the part, but they didn’t have psychic abilities at all. They simply had the gift of the gab and concealed their lack of talent with costumes, crystal balls and other gimmicks. Gil resolved to reject the stereotypical image of psychics. He stumbled across a second-hand Armani suit in a thrift store and this became his uniform.