Totnes smells like yesterday’s herbs and forgotten rain. Lavender bushes lean over old brick walls like gossiping crones, and the River Dart does its slow ballet beneath the bridge, whispering only to those who’ve lived here long enough to understand water’s peculiar grammar. Allie has. Allie does.

She lives at the top of Fore Street, above a defunct haberdashery that never truly closed so much as gave up. Her windows catch the sun in strange ways, and sometimes she swears the glass hums when no wind moves. Some would call that a sign. She knows better. Or thought she did.

Her name is painted in gold flake on the front door in a florid curl: Madame Alexandra — Channel to the Spirit Realms. Readings by Appointment. There is no Madame. There is only Allie. The “channel” is a folding chair in the back room and a table she once stole from a chapel.

And spirits? Well.

She’s never seen a single one.

People come anyway.

They always have, since she was twenty and working out of a tent at the Totnes Summer Fayre, fake emeralds glued to her temples and a well-thumbed deck of tarot cards that had once belonged to someone else’s grandmother. They’d sit, they’d talk, and she’d say what needed to be said.

Your grandmother forgives you. Yes, he still loves you, but he had to go. No, the baby isn’t afraid. You will not be alone in the end.

She said these things and meant none of them, but spoke them as though the ghosts had curled up inside her lungs and were whispering directly into her ribs. She learned early to weep without tears, to look beyond people as though seeing something flicker in the periphery of the soul.

She was good. Too good, maybe.

“You’re a gift,” they used to say, like she was a wrapped parcel tied in silk.

“You’ve helped me move on.”

“You knew things no one else could know.”

She didn’t. She doesn’t. Not really.

But Allie hears things. The pause between a sigh and a sentence. The ache in a hand that won’t unclench. The way a person rearranges themselves before saying what they think they came to say.

That’s the trick. Not ghosts. People.

It’s a Monday when the doubt begins to feel less like erosion and more like excavation. She’s forty-nine and the candles she lights now are from Wilkinson’s—plain, unscented, cheap. Incense gave her migraines, and too many skulls on shelves had made the place feel like Halloween come to rot. These days, her “altar” is a sideboard with a cracked quartz sphere and a framed picture of a heron she tore from a gardening magazine.

The bell rings—just once—and in walks a man with a face made of geography. Lines cut from decades of weather and regret. He wears corduroy. He smells like the sea, or maybe just the longing for it. He doesn’t sit down immediately.

“I was told to come,” he says.

“By whom?”

“My wife. Though she’s dead.”

He waits. She says nothing. This is not new to her. He nods as if her silence confirms it.

When the reading begins, Allie does what she always does: she reaches into the static between moments. She watches the twitch in his right eyelid when she says the name Clara. She follows his glance to the candle flame when she says unfinished. She touches her chest and says, “She left without pain.”

He breaks. Like crockery. Like something unglazed.

And when he leaves, steadier than when he came, he kisses her hand.

Not out of show, or superstition. Out of something like thanks.

That night, Allie doesn’t sleep. Not quite. She drifts in and out of thoughts that don’t belong entirely to her.

What does it mean to speak as if you’re sure? What is a lie, if it heals? And is there something—just something—in the way the room breathes when the lights are low and her voice drops to a hush?

It’s not ghosts. She would bet the house on it.

But it might be grief, disembodied. Longing, externalised. Memory, misremembered into miracle.

It might be channeling, just the same.

Totnes is quiet at 2:17 a.m., when she stands barefoot on the cold kitchen tile, a cup of nettle tea going lukewarm in her hand. Her flat smells faintly of bergamot and dust, and the night presses close, warm as a cat against the windowpanes.

She thinks of every reading she’s ever done. The accidental prayers. The way people left a part of themselves behind in the room, tucked between the cushions of the chair or snagged in the fringe of the curtain.

She walks to the mirror. Not the big one—the little oval one, chipped on one side, set in tarnished silver. The one her mother gave her before her mother forgot her name.

She looks into it, and sees nothing special. Just the face of a woman halfway through something she doesn’t fully understand.

But she raises her hand.

And behind her, for just a moment, the candle flickers blue.

Not gold. Not red.

Blue.

Outside, the river murmurs something unreadable, ancient, like a page half-turned. Totnes sleeps, but the veil—if there is a veil—is thin.

Allie sits down at the old table, lights another candle, and places her hands on the surface the way pianists do before the first note.

Her eyes close.

She waits.

Not for a voice. Not for proof. But for the feeling that arrives like a hush after thunder.

Maybe it’s only her imagination. Or maybe it’s something that knows her name, too.

Allie begins to keep a notebook.

Not for clients—never for clients—but for what lingers. Phrases she doesn’t remember saying. Dreams that arrive unfinished. The sense, sometimes, that she is not alone in her skin. The pages remain mostly blank, her words written in a looping hand she hardly recognises as her own.

“The dog forgives you. She did not die afraid.”

“The window in your mother’s kitchen is still open. Close it, gently.”

“You never had to be brave. You only had to stay.”

They come while she washes dishes. While she hums Debussy on the back step. Once, halfway through brushing her teeth.

She wonders if it’s just the subconscious, cracking open like a window in spring.

She also wonders who—or what—is outside the frame, waiting to be let in.

Some clients return. One brings her a jar of marmalade; another brings a photograph of a daughter lost to the ocean. Allie learns not to flinch. She’s a vessel now. A sieve. A wire strung between this world and some other unnamed current.

“You have a gift,” they still say.

She wants to argue. But something inside her has stopped resisting. Something has let go of the need to know.

She sits differently now. Not like a performer. Not even like a guide.

She sits like someone listening to a song without lyrics, humming back the tune.

It’s late October. The leaves have given up and the town smells like damp bark and hot cider. The shop downstairs has become a used book cellar—run by a woman named Iris who wears her hair like a stormcloud and never asks Allie what she really does upstairs.

Today, no clients. Just the rain stitching little signatures into the windows. Allie sits at the table, candle lit, hands open. Not summoning. Just… waiting.

Then, a name:

Isaac.

It doesn’t belong to anyone. Not in the ledger. Not from any story she’s told before.

She writes it down. She breathes. The silence is heavier than usual.

A moment later, there’s a knock at the door.

He is maybe sixteen. Maybe seventeen. Pale in the brittle way grief makes people, like too much milk in too little tea. He doesn’t make eye contact.

“I—I don’t have an appointment,” he says.

“That’s fine,” she replies. “Come in.”

He won’t sit. Just hovers near the edge of the curtain, dripping onto the mat.

“I don’t believe in this stuff,” he says.

“Neither do I,” she says, and something inside both of them unclenches.

He tells her about his brother. Isaac.

The facts are thin, but the grief is thick—muddied, unsifted, raw. He carries it badly, like a heavy instrument he was never taught to play.

Allie closes her eyes.

Not to pretend.

To tune in.

What comes next is not dramatic.

No chill in the room. No candle going out.

Just a feeling: like brushing past someone familiar in a crowded station. The scent of apples. The sound of sneakers slapping on pavement. A feeling of apology.

She tells the boy nothing exact. No names, no places. But she speaks:

“He wanted to grow older. He never told anyone that.”

The boy sits. Silent.

“He didn’t mean to leave you with the rest of it.”

His shoulders shake. Once.

“And the song you keep hearing in your head? That’s not a loop. That’s a memory.”

He breaks. She holds still.

The room fills with something more than quiet.

After, she gives him a tissue, and he leaves with no words.

But as he opens the door, he pauses.

“Was he here?”

Allie considers. She could lie. Or explain. Or dismiss.

Instead, she says:

“I think you brought him with you.”

That night, she returns to the notebook. She writes with a kind of reverence, as if someone is watching over her shoulder—not to judge, but to witness.

She doesn’t write “Isaac.” She writes:

We are all channels.

Grief travels, like water. Like static. Like breath.

I think I’m beginning to hear the signal.

The next morning, Allie wakes early.

The sun glints off the rooftops like a secondhand miracle. She makes tea. Puts on the radio. A cello murmurs something wordless but true.

And she lets herself feel it fully—for the first time, really: this strange, bittersweet surrender to the unknowable.

She spent decades performing belief.

Now, she inhabits it—not in doctrine, not in dogma, but in the simple, ordinary magic of listening deeply.

Maybe she has been channeling all along.

Not the dead. Not exactly.

But the ache. The story. The voice inside the silence.

At noon, she goes out. Down the steps. Through the town.

She buys flowers from the woman near the bus stop. Yellow ones, with petals like laughter.

She walks to the river and sits. The water glides by like thought made liquid.

She closes her eyes and breathes.

If the spirits are real, she tells them: I’m here now. You can speak.

If they aren’t, she tells herself: I’m here now. I will listen.

And the breeze shifts, just slightly. The trees rustle something almost like her name. The sky stays sky. The river keeps going.

And Allie smiles, at last, without needing to explain it to anyone.

Kyle Collins is a queer writer from Falmouth, Cornwall. Now 38, he lives with his husband Mike and their two rescue dogs, Pickle and Leeloo. A lifelong aspiring writer, Kyle has fought against the fog of ADHD to build a consistent creative practice rooted in honesty, tenderness, and grit. His work has previously appeared in Neon Origami and Half and One.