Long ago, I typecasted Vree as a main character-of-interest with an INFP personality. For the most part, INFPs are highly curious, inquisitive, innovative, highly creative, and people who enjoy doing things by themselves … ALONE. Vree has always been an excellent artist, but one who enjoys working in solitude. It’s difficult to craft action stories around a person who would rather be alone making art than being center stage, resolving a central story problem. It’s like trying to pound a large square peg through a small round hole. The writer must spend extra time whittling the character down until she is cooperative, supportive, and flexible with people trying to help her, while being passionate and energetic enough to put her own personal stamp on her work. Sometimes, finding the passion and drive in an INFP character who would rather be somewhere else, doing something else, alone, is maddening.
But I digress. Vree needs a career appropriate to her personality.
In past stories, I experimented with making her a minister. This idea came from the book, Do What You Are (third edition, 2001), by Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger. The book was—and still is—a useful reference for creating character personalities based on the 16 types (discussed in my last post), and to give my characters jobs. For the INFP, Do What You Are lists careers in Arts, Education, Counseling, Religion, Health Care, Organizational Development, and Technology.
From Arts, I chose Artist, Writer: poet/novelist/journalist, Editor, Architect, and Musician as possible careers for Vree. After all, can’t she have more than one career?
From Education, Counseling, and Health Care, College Professor of humanities/art, High School Counselor/Nurse, and Librarian interested me.
I passed over Technology and Organizational Development because I could never see Vree satisfied working in a business field. However, websites such as indeed.com and truity.com claim that INFPs’ sensitivity to the emotions of others and their supportive nature makes them valuable team members with people that have similar passions of discussing complex topics, being creative, and use big-picture thinking.
Still, I can’t see Vree working 9 to 5 in a diverse and technology focused high-stress business, dealing with sales, customers, and meetings. She would lose her mind.
She needs lots of quiet time, which is why I made her a minister—an ideal job for an INFP character because it allows her to be on her own when her church is not in session. In 2006, I co-authored and published a short story based on this idea at my old blog. I changed Vree’s name in the story, which I always did when I published stories about Vree when she wasn’t a teenager—I was never committed to write about a grownup Vree until now. As a bonus, I have attached that story at the end of this post.
I can still see Vree as a minister. She could paint and sell her art at shows, write novels, work part-time in a library, and write, sing, and record her own music for an independent record label. Would that leave her time for a husband, her obligations as a minister, and some rest and recreation to recharge? I don’t know. But I’m willing to make her that kind of character.
Next on the agenda, I must consider where she lives, what sort of home life she has, and what her husband’s personality is like. Stay tuned.
And now, as promised, story time:
Haunted
Co-authored with Lola Gentry-Dey, 2015.
How could such a beautiful house be haunted? To know the place, it looked no different from any other Victorian country house in Ridgewood.
Reverend Gloria Jackson walked the estate’s sunny grounds that October evening and sensed the leftover energy of a time when wealthy Victorians spent an incredible amount of time socializing inside their homes. In Victorian America, nothing displayed your status like your house, and the house of a successful Victorian family was more than merely a home; it was a statement of their taste, wealth, and education. This house was one of them, preserved to remain impressive through time by superb artisanship and great care. Sprawling over half an acre, with its neatly manicured lawn and shrubbery, it seemed at first glance the most unlikely of places to house demonic spirits.
“Fiona was calling forth the dead,” Melissa Bay told Gloria after dinner later that Friday night. Melissa, a strong-backed woman, sat across from Gloria at the long table. Richard sat to Melissa’s right inside the spacious dining room.
“That’s an alarming statement,” Gloria said.
“It’s true.” Richard sounded ashamed. “She wrote all about her occult doings in her diary.”
When Gloria asked what diary he meant, he fetched a black leather book atop a china cabinet. Gloria leafed through the diary and listened over a glass of tawny port.
Melissa said, “As you know, reverend, when her husband Charles died this past summer, Fiona withdrew. But she seemed happiest inside her library, so we left her alone to paint and read there. It was the library she withdrew to after the funeral. She barely ever left that room.
“Then I discovered this morning that she had locked herself inside. She refused to let me in. Her voice sounded agitated … upset, so I called Richard.”
“I had to kick in the door,” Richard said. “And that’s when, crazy as it sounds, she wasn’t there — and all the windows were locked.
“Even crazier was when we found a Ouija board and tarot cards inside, as well as her diary which tells of how she has been trying over the past several months to conjure up my father’s spirit.” Sadness and confusion twisted his features into a horrible grimace. “What’s happening?” he asked. “What has she done?” He shook his head and groaned before Gloria could answer. “Until today, I never believed in the paranormal, the metaphysical.” He searched Gloria’s face for answers. “What happened to my mother?”
Gloria’s wine glass flew from the table and shattered against the stone fireplace across the room. The Bible she had brought with her—which she had placed the diary on top of—followed her glass. The diary remained unmoved.
Surprised, Gloria and Melissa yelped. Richard cried out, “Mother.” He jumped to his feet. “Is that you?”
The air turned frigid and burned against Gloria’s cheeks. She felt a winter-blooming nip at the tips of her ears and nose.
Richard yelled at the room. “Where are you? Show yourself. Please.”
Large and heavy books thumped to the floor inside the library across the hall from the dining room. Then the chill left and all quieted.
Richard settled his nerves with a hearty gulp from the wine bottle—glasses and etiquette be damned, Gloria reckoned, considering the circumstances. Richard went to the library door where either he or Melissa had nailed a cross to the damaged door as Gloria had instructed earlier during their phone conversation. Richard cursed all that is holy. When he finished, he said, “Exorcise the place, reverend. Whatever my mother has done, fix it. Please.”
Gloria joined him at the door. It had taken great force to open the large oak door. She fingered the splintered wood. “Tell me about the voices,” she said.
“Whispers,” Melissa said as she joined them. “Vague chattering whispers.”
“And laughing,” Richard added. “A woman’s laugh, but not my mother’s.”
Gloria removed the cross from the door and stepped inside the library. A chandelier lit the room and seemed to turn the oak bookshelves and furniture to gold. She helped Richard and Melissa replace the toppled books, many of them art history texts and artists biographies. Outside the room’s tall, rectangular windows, the night had become pitch black. A clock inside the dining room chimed seven o’clock.
A painter’s large easel stood near a window. As Gloria looked at the portrait, the unfinished canvas showed the swift strokes of a seasoned painter. Fiona Bay had sketched her subject with lines of umber and sienna, whisked in golden hues next to gentle blues and pink, and had started forming the glow of flesh with buttery mounds of paint. The woman in the unfinished portrait seemed to be dressed in multicolored satin linens and silk scarves. Her face was promising the color of the finest gold, ruby and sapphire. Her eyes sparkled emerald green and sky blue. Her unpainted long hair flowed down a seemingly endless body of shapely beauty.
“Absolutely beautiful,” Gloria said of the painting and the subject. “She looks familiar. Who is she?”
“I don’t know,” Richard said. “No one has been to the house to sit. My mother likes her time alone, even before father died.”
Gloria looked back at the painting. The cheeks and mouth were refined, as though someone had added paint to the portrait while she had looked away.
She looked away and back again. There was no mistaking it: The painting appeared to be painting itself.
Melissa screamed. “The light. At her easel. What is it?”
Gold light grew suddenly in front of the easel. Inside the brightness, an apparition of Fiona painted with excitement. Unaware of Richard, Melissa and Gloria, Fiona rushed her canvas and painted, and then stepped back to admire her work before repeating the process.
At Fiona’s side was her soul-stealing succubus dressed in a multicolored chiffon robe.
“Keeley.” The color fell from Gloria’s face. Even the fearful cry of the female demon’s name somehow permeated the room with beauty.
“Who is Keeley?” Richard asked.
Gloria’s throat tightened. “Someone I thought I’d never see again.” She thrust her Bible at arm’s length. She had to save Fiona, no matter the consequences. “Set her loose, demon.”
Keeley laughed. Tittered, actually. “The poet is a ministrant. Oh, my long-ago lover, what have I done to you?” She took a step forward and her robe flowed with her.
Gloria told her to stay back, but Keeley advanced slowly, her gaze fixed on Gloria.
Melissa grasped Gloria’s left arm. “Reverend, who are you talking to?”
Gloria thrust her Bible into Melissa’s arms. “Count to ten, then you and Richard go to Fiona. Get her out of here while I distract the demon. Then lock the door and bar it with another crucifix.”
“I see no one,” Richard cried out. “Only that strange light around my mother’s easel.”
“Go into the light, Richard. Your mother is there. You must pull her out while I distract the demon.”
Before he could object or ask any more questions and put all their lives at risk, Gloria rushed into Keeley’s warm, tender and passionate embrace. Evil was not always cold.
“I knew I’d find you again,” Keeley said. Her fervent kiss fell upon Gloria’s lips. Her spicy smell and taste came delivered more delicious than Gloria remembered. Keeley’s long, soft hair—now a gorgeous mélange of burnt sienna, gold, and black—brushed Gloria’s face. It aroused her, but not as it had done more than twenty years ago when she and Keeley were college students.
Within Gloria’s concerned gaze, Richard and Melissa pulled Fiona from the room. Fiona struggled but Keeley’s hold on her had weakened. Gloria expected Keeley to intervene. She didn’t. Her mouth writhed wickedly against Gloria’s and her eyes fluttered with passion.
The door slammed shut. Fiona was safe on the other side.
The kiss ended and Keeley’s embrace weakened. She took the cross from Gloria’s hand and dropped it to the floor. “We won’t need this where we’re going,” Keeley said. Her teeth penetrated Gloria’s neck.
Gloria’s concerns fell away as she plunged into a familiar world of darkness she found both sinful and heavenly.
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