But I felt more uneasy to be discussing ghosts and hauntings in that gaudy Palm Springs hotel room than I had in Spain. A place like Seville, steeped in millennia of blood-soaked history, was a place where it had felt right to contemplate deeper orders of reality. Palm Springs, bless it, was a monument to the trivial, the sensual; defiant in its own shallow reality it seemed to consume the whole universe, leaving no room for mystery.
Or maybe I was just feeling guilty about spending time on all this “spooky stuff,” as Tom persisted in calling it.
“Complicated thing, guilt,” Rosa had said when I tried to tell her about this. “We Catholics have been thinking about it for two thousand years, and we still have not figured it out. My advice is to embrace it,” she said dryly. “Good for the soul.”
Now she told me that whatever was happening to me, I evidently wasn’t alone.
There had been a huge upsurge in sightings of apparitions of all kinds, all over the world. The trend had been upward since the first few decades of the century, and was now going “off the scale,” she said.
“Even if each and every one of these sightings, including yours, is in some way bogus, their simultaneity is surely telling us something.”
I shrugged. “Yes. But what?”
She waggled a finger at me. “You are making progress, Michael, but you still have some way to go. If this were an engineering problem you would not be so helpless in your thinking. You would be looking for lines of attack, wouldn’t you? Such as seeking out more data.”
“And that’s what you’ve been doing?”
She had been digging into historical records, she said. She had hoped to find records of incidents there which might shed light on what was happening in the present.
And she had succeeded.
There had been similar waves of “hauntings” in the past. In the crisis of the Black Death in Europe in the fourteenth century, when perhaps a third of the population was lost, there were many accounts of hauntings, visitations, and other manifestations. Earlier, in the thirteenth century, the Mongols had erupted out of central Asia, plundering and massacring as they drove into China, Southeast Asia, and Europe — and, it seemed, they had driven a wave of ghost sightings and supernatural events before them.
Some of her examples were drawn from the archaeological rather than the historic record. “Take the pre-Columbian peoples of the Americas,” she said. “In the few decades after Columbus’s first landfall they suffered a massive implosion of population numbers, through disease and overwork, massacre and dislocation at the hands of the colonists.”
“And they saw ghosts?”
“Recent archaeology shows a huge rising in occult symbolism and practice — and this in societies obsessed by the occult anyhow. Carvings on doors. Sacrifices. Corpses dug up and reinterred.”
“The Spaniards scared the hell out of them. Maybe it was some kind of mass hysteria.”
She shook her head. “This occurred before Columbus landed. In those last decades there was a crisis coming, certainly, a terrible, culture-terminating, genocidal crisis. But they couldn’t have known it yet — not by any causal chain as we understand it.”
She quoted more examples, still more obscure to me.
“I’m impressed,” I said. “I never heard of most of this.”
“You wouldn’t,” she said tartly. “But then I have access to records which are not available to the general public…”
I wondered what she was talking about. The Vatican and its old, deep libraries? Or perhaps, even more sinister, she meant the strange community that had brought her up, the Order; I wondered what records were kept there.
But I could come up with confirming examples of my own. I vaguely remembered uncle George’s talk of UFO scares. Born in 1960, he had actually missed the crest of that particular wave of witnessing of preternatural visitations, but he had been briefly fascinated by the lore of it all when he was a teenager. But when the Berlin Wall fell, when the threat of massive nuclear war faded, the UFOs went away. The pattern was the same, I saw uneasily. It was another wave of visitations in advance of an impeding crisis, if interpreted in twentieth-century terms, in a science-fiction-informed language of aliens and spacecraft rather than specters and ectoplasm. It just happened that in this case the feared crisis, the glare of the Bomb, hadn’t come about.
Rosa said, “And if you accept the premise that waves of apparitions occur when mankind faces a bottleneck—”
“Then there should be a wave about now, as we face the Warming.”
“Yes. With the hydrate release, perhaps, as the killer punch. A wave of haunting — a world full of experiences exactly like yours — is exactly what one should expect.”
“OK,” I said. “Suppose I accept your argument that I’m in the middle of some kind of global presaging of disaster. What I can’t see is why. What’s the point?”
“Ah,” she said, smiling. “Now that is an engineer’s question. What’s the function of all this? Oh, I can think of a whole range of interpretations… Try this. Everything about us, from our toenails to our most advanced cognitive functions, is shaped by evolution. You’ve heard me argue this way before. If a feature didn’t give us some selective advantage it wouldn’t have emerged in the first place, or would have withered away long ago. Do you accept that?”
I wasn’t sure I did. “Go on.”
“If that’s true, and if these visitations, and their timing coinciding with great crises, are real phenomena, then one must ask — what’s the evolutionary advantage? How can these visitors help us?”
“By providing continuity?”
“Perhaps. A linking of the better past to a hopeful future, through a desperate present… Perhaps an intelligent species needs some kind of external memory store, an external mass consciousness, to help it ride out the worst times.”
“That sounds very fishy to me,” I said. “I thought selection wasn’t supposed to work at the level of the species, but the individual, or the kin group.”
“Maybe so. But wouldn’t it be an advantage if it did emerge? If there were lots of bands of intelligent animals running around the planet — and a global crisis hit — wouldn’t the pack with the cultural continuity offered by a halo of ghosts, no matter how imperfect the information channels, have a clear advantage?”
She was smiling. I could see she was enjoying the speculation. But right now I felt I was floundering.
“So Morag could be a ghost of some kind. But not a ghost from the past. A ghost from the future. Is that what you’re saying? But how is that possible?”
Rosa said, “A Catholic thinker would have no real trouble with that idea. Theologians don’t believe in time travel! But we do imagine eternity, a timeless instant outside time altogether, like the constant light that shines through the flickering frames of our movie-reel lives. So a visitor from eternity, an angel, can intervene at any time, historically, she chooses, because it’s all the same — it is all one to her, all in one moment, like a reel of movie film held in your hand. There is no difference between past and future to God.”
“You think big, don’t you?”
With her right hand she pointed up to Heaven. “There’s nowhere bigger than Up There.”
We were disturbed by a chime, the VR equivalent of a knock on the door. I was almost relieved to take a break from all this spookiness.
It turned out to be my brother, John, who had logged on to give me a hard time.
Projected from his office in New York, John’s VR was of an altogether higher quality than Rosa’s. It was the middle of his working day, and he was dressed in a dark business suit. I was struck by how big and solid he looked, just like Ruud Makaay.