Periscope Depth

 

The tall grandfather clock stopped ticking in the wee hours and apparently the sudden absence of the ticking sound was enough to awaken Samantha.   She sat up in bed thinking something was wrong, but she wasn’t sure what.  She sat motionless, straining to hear any unfamiliar sounds.  Was there an intruder in the house?  Had someone broken in?

Finally, she noticed that it was too quiet.  The house was never this quiet.  There were always creaking sounds, general expansion and contraction noises as the house went through its adjustments from the day’s temperature changes.  Old houses make noise, she thought to herself, but none of that was going on at the moment.  Then, as she sat there listening, it came to her.  Where is the clock?  It hadn’t chimed on the quarter hour and there was no sound of it ticking.

Satisfied she had figured out the issue, Samantha lay back down and smiled as she fluffed her pillow.  The last sound she heard as she fell back asleep was the automatic ice maker in the refrigerator clunking new cubes into the tray.

The internal dialog Samantha was having, while sitting up in bed, was nothing more than her rational thought process working through the process of elimination.  Once she had justified to herself that what woke her was the clock no longer ticking or chiming, her comfort level was returned.  She felt safe.

If we were to see an exaggerated cartoon of this woman sitting up in bed, we’d see her ears trying to pick up on sound waves, and her brain activity bouncing back and forth, checking off all the possibilities, all the while her eyelids still only half open, her impulse to lay back down growing stronger.  None of these things, however, not even in the cartoon would pick up on what was really taking place in the spirit world, not even, as the spirits refer to it, as periscope depth.  That is the closest humans can get to actually seeing the activity of spirits, in other than a perceived glimmer or imagined flicker.  Only on the rarest of occasions is it picked up in an eerie silence.