Chapter 16: THE TRAINING MONTAGE
The case file landed on my apartment table with a thud.
January 3rd, 1969. My first C-rank solo assignment. A haunted textile mill in Providence—three workers injured by "falling equipment" that witnesses swore moved on its own. The system had flagged it overnight, and Ed had approved it over the phone with three words: "Prove yourself, kid."
I proved myself.
The ghost was a foreman named Hendricks who'd died in a machinery accident in 1923. He wasn't malevolent—just confused, still trying to run a factory that had changed ownership four times since his death. I found his story in old newspaper archives. I located his unmarked grave in a potter's field outside the city. I said the prayers that needed saying, laid flowers on soil that hadn't been visited in decades.
He crossed over at 3:07 AM, right on schedule. The system awarded me 200 EXP, 100 FP, and something more valuable: confidence.
[CASE CLOSED: HENDRICKS TEXTILE — C-RANK]
[RESOLUTION: PEACEFUL CROSSING]
That was the first of thirty-two.
February brought a string of D-ranks—routine hauntings, residual energies, objects that needed blessing or containment. I handled them during weekends while keeping my janitor job at St. Michael's. Father Mancini noticed the dark circles under my eyes, the way I moved slower during morning Mass.
"You're burning the candle at both ends, Paul."
"The work doesn't stop because I'm tired."
"No. But you will." He pressed a thermos of coffee into my hands. "Pace yourself. The dead aren't going anywhere."
I took his advice. Mostly.
March brought failure.
An elderly man in Stamford—Harold Crenshaw, eighty-two years old, living alone in a house his wife had died in three years prior. She was still there, still reaching for him in the night, still trying to drag him to whatever waited on the other side.
I could have saved him. Should have saved him. But when I explained what was happening—that his wife's spirit had become something hungry, something that wouldn't stop until it had him—Harold looked at me with eyes that had already made their choice.
"Let her take me," he said. "I've been waiting to see her again."
"Mr. Crenshaw, that's not your wife anymore. What she's become—"
"I don't care what she's become. I'm tired, young man. I'm ready."
He died three days later. The coroner called it heart failure. I knew better.
[CASE FAILED: CRENSHAW HAUNTING — C-RANK]
[RESOLUTION: CLIENT REFUSED INTERVENTION]
Ed found me at the Warren house that weekend, sitting on the back porch, staring at nothing.
"Mancini called," he said, settling into the chair beside me. "Said you've been quiet."
"I lost someone."
"Tell me."
I told him. The whole story. The wife's ghost. Harold's choice. The way he'd smiled when I left, like death was a gift he'd been waiting to unwrap.
Ed listened without interrupting. When I finished, he was quiet for a long moment.
"You know what the hardest lesson in this work is?"
"Don't die?"
"We save who we can." He looked out at the yard, at Judy playing on the swing set, at Lorraine watching from the kitchen window. "The rest we pray for. You can't force someone to choose life, Paul. Some people are ready to go. Our job isn't to stop death—it's to make sure the crossing is clean."
"It wasn't clean. His wife was—"
"Was she there when he passed?"
I thought about it. The reports I'd gathered after. The peaceful expression on Harold's face when the paramedics found him.
"The coroner said he looked... content."
"Then maybe it was cleaner than you think." Ed stood, clapped a hand on my shoulder. "We're not gods, son. We're just guides. Sometimes the path leads where we wouldn't choose. That's not failure. That's life."
I didn't fully believe him. Not then. But the words lodged somewhere inside me, waiting to become wisdom.
April was worse.
A B-rank in New Haven. A family of five, children ages four through twelve, tormented by something in their attic. Ed led the investigation. Drew and I assisted. Standard procedure. Except nothing about that night was standard.
The entity was stronger than the case file suggested. When Ed began the binding ritual, it lashed out—not at him, but at Drew. My friend went flying across the room, crashed through a window, landed on the lawn two stories below.
I found him unconscious, glass embedded in his arms, blood pooling beneath him.
The hospital kept him for three days. Fourteen stitches. A concussion. A broken wrist that would take months to heal.
I visited every day. Every day, he told me the same thing.
"Stop blaming yourself."
"I should have seen it coming."
"Nobody saw it coming. That's how these things work." Drew held up his casted wrist, grinned with the easy resilience of someone who'd already decided to move forward. "Besides, now I've got a war wound. The ladies love a war wound."
"The ladies think you're a seminary student who fell off a ladder."
"Details."
I laughed despite myself. Drew had that effect on people—the ability to find lightness in darkness. I needed to learn that skill.
May brought recovery. Drew back on his feet, arm still in a cast but spirit unbroken. More cases, smaller stakes, careful rebuilding. Lorraine spent extra time with me during this period, guiding my psychic development with the patience of someone who understood exactly what I was going through.
"You're harder on yourself than anyone else is," she said during one of our sessions. "That's both a strength and a weakness."
"How is it a strength?"
"It means you'll never stop improving. You'll never become complacent." She touched my temple gently. "But it can also eat you alive if you're not careful. Learn from your failures. Don't drown in them."
Spirit Sight stabilized that month. What had been an effort—a conscious activation that drained Psychic Stamina—became natural. The veil between worlds thinned permanently, and I could perceive ghosts as clearly as I perceived the living.
[SPIRIT SIGHT LV.2 → LV.3]
[PASSIVE PERCEPTION: ENABLED]
June brought growth.
System Level 14. Clairvoyance Tier 2 fully mastered. The Store expanded with new options—equipment I'd only dreamed of.
[SPIRIT CAMERA — 1,000 FP]
[CAPTURES SUPERNATURAL PHENOMENA ON FILM]
I made the purchase. The camera materialized in my hands, old-fashioned in design but humming with purpose. Evidence mattered in this work—not just for the families we helped, but for the Church, for the scientific record, for anyone who might need proof that what we did was real.
My reputation grew. Father Gordon—a Vatican-connected priest who occasionally consulted with the Warrens—mentioned my name to contacts overseas. "The young American with the gift," he called me. I didn't know whether to be flattered or terrified.
Thirty-two cases closed by June's end. Fifteen solo, seventeen assisted. My notebook filled with names: the people I'd helped, the spirits I'd guided home, the occasional failure that still haunted me. Danny Miller's newspaper clipping was taped inside the front cover. A reminder of where this all began.
One Sunday in late June, Ed took me fishing.
The lake was small, hidden in Connecticut woods, accessible only by a dirt road that his station wagon barely navigated. We sat in a rowboat that had seen better decades, lines in the water, nothing biting.
"I hate fishing," Ed admitted after an hour of silence.
"Then why do we do it?"
"Because Lorraine doesn't." He grinned. "Sometimes a man needs to not talk to his wife for a few hours. Keeps the marriage healthy."
I laughed. The sound surprised me—genuine, unguarded. When was the last time I'd laughed like that?
Ed told stories while we didn't catch fish. His Navy days. The ship that sank in the Pacific. The thirty days of survival leave during which he'd married Lorraine, barely knowing her, absolutely certain.
"Knew from the moment I saw her," he said. "Didn't make sense. Still doesn't. But love's not supposed to make sense. It's supposed to make you crazy."
"Did it?"
"Still does." He reeled in an empty line, cast it again. "What about you? Anyone special?"
"I've been focused on the work."
"That's a no." Ed shook his head. "You're young, Paul. The work will always be there. People won't wait forever."
I thought about his words on the drive home. About the life I wasn't living while I chased ghosts and demons. About the loneliness that crept in during quiet moments, the sense that I was missing something fundamental about being human.
But those thoughts scattered when we returned to the Warren house.
Lorraine was waiting on the porch, face pale, arms wrapped around herself.
"Something's wrong," she said. "I've been feeling it all day. The artifact room. Something's... pushing."
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