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if his response was common, a given understanding. He brushed aside a draping vine and pressed a corroding doorbell. “That’s what I do. I channel people.”
    I opened my mouth to question him but deep inside the store a chime echoed back to us and a door groaned open at the end of the courtyard. An elderly, hunched woman wearing thick glasses and a distrustful frown appeared. She moved so slowly that I wondered how she’d reached the door so quickly, considering briefly that she may have been standing there waiting for us.
    “ Mrs. DeVille,” he called out.
    She had been looking to her left but at the sound of his voice she swung her head toward the gate where we stood.
    “ Well come in,” she spat. “Come in!”
    He pushed open the gate and allowed me to enter first so that I followed Mrs. DeVille inside the rather dusky, grungy room that housed her storefront.
    While the other shop had some semblance of organization, this one had absolutely none. Mrs. DeVille wiggled her fingers around the room by way of a brief tour. “Voodoo dolls, gris gris bags, beads, floor washes, oils, candles…” As she went on, I noticed propped in one corner a frightening wooden statue of a crouched man screaming. Directly above him was a beautifully decorated cross. Interspersed around the room and settled next to cabinets and rugged wooden tables were striking displays of elaborately decorated altars. While all of that seemed odd, they weren’t what stood out to me the most. Candles, spotted around the room, flickered despite the lack of a draft and chimes mounted to the walls and hanging from the ceiling jingled even though nothing visible was touching them.
    When Mrs. DeVille was finished, she headed for the back room summing up her tour with one final and unexpected warning. “Don’t play with anything! I know how you children are. Always wanting to touch and play. Not in this store. Not with my things. I have eyes out here and they’ll tell me if…” Her voice faded to a mutter as she left the room and we were alone again.
    Jameson caught my eye and we stifled a chuckle at the woman’s expense. Then we withdrew our lists and headed for the first item on it.
    A small sign denoted gris gris bags. Even though they were distributed around on various tables, the one beneath the sign had the largest abundance of them.
    Still, they didn’t intrigue me as much as Jameson’s comment outside the gate. “What exactly do you mean - you channel people?” I inquired, sliding up beside him.
    He shrugged. “Their abilities mostly.”
    “ I’m still confused,” I admitted.
    “ Right, I forgot you’re unfamiliar with all this…” He waved his hand across wall, motioning to the mystical items collected on it. “Everyone has a talent. My mother calls it their gift. Some people never cultivate it, some don’t even know they have it. But everyone’s born with it, that unique ability that sets you apart from the rest of the world. Mine isn’t so rare,” he admitted with a slight frown, “but it is powerful. I sense other’s abilities from the first time I meet them and, if I’m touching them, I can channel that ability to use as my own.”
    “ I see,” I replied, holding back my laughter by picking up one of the bags on the table. “What are these used for?” I asked.
    “ You don’t have to believe me, Jocelyn,” he stated, noticing my effort to hold back my disbelief. “Whether you do or not, you’ll start to witness it around you.”
    His lack of insistence made me second-guess my judgment of what he’d said. Typically, when someone is lying they are pushy, unrelenting. The fact that he didn’t care if I believed him told me that, even if I didn’t accept what he told me as truth, he firmly believed it himself. I figured he could believe whatever he wanted as long as it didn’t affect me.
    Nonetheless, it seemed he was finished with that revelation because he went on to enlighten me about something far less