“Now you understand the problem with just about everything we do,” Gary said.
“Maybe you’ve been going about this backward,” Peter said. “This isn’t random, right? Someone put this in motion. So go to
the source. Shut them down on their end.”
“Kitty can’t go to Vegas,” Ben said. “They already tried to kill her once, I don’t want to give them another chance.”
“And Odysseus Grant, my contact there, is missing. I’m afraid something’s happened to him.”
Peter shrugged. “I could go look for him. Maybe dig up anything else on whoever’s doing this.”
“Would you?” I said.
“Can you front the money for a plane ticket?”
Straightforward guy. I liked him. Give him a few more years and a few more hard knocks he could do Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade.
“Sure.”
“Maybe that’s what we need,” Jules said. “We work on the paranormal end of things, and you can figure out how they started
this in the first place. Is that a plan?” With a look, he consulted everyone gathered in the room: me, Ben, Peter, his teammates.
Any plan that didn’t involve Roman made me happy.
“When can you leave?” I asked Peter.
“As soon as we get a flight, I can leave. I’ll need to park my bike somewhere,” he said.
“You can use the carport at our place,” Ben said. “I can drive you to the airport.”
The plan, such as it was, came together. Using Jules’s computer, we ordered tickets for an afternoon flight for Peter. Ben
and Peter would drive to the condo to drop off Peter’s motorcycle, then Ben would drive him to the airport. I’d stay and help
with the research, even though I wasn’t much good for anything beyond creative Internet searches. Sometimes, creative Internet
searches could be incredibly useful.
The hope was we’d have more information by evening, so we wouldn’t be going into the second séance quite so blind. Roman kept
stressing how little time we had to solve this thing. I didn’t know what that meant, but the sooner the eureka moment came,
the better.
Peter and Ben headed out. On his way out, Ben took my wrist and pulled me to a private corner on the porch. It was about as
domineering as he ever got with me, and I couldn’t say that I liked it.
I pulled my arm away from him and glared. “What?”
He held my face in his hands and studied me, looking into my eyes like he could see through them, see to what I was thinking.
“Ben.” He was starting to freak me out.
“I just know you’re going to do something stupid and crazy as soon as I leave.”
I smirked. “Don’t have a whole lot of faith in me, do you?”
Glancing away, he brushed his fingers along my hair, then shoved his hands in his pockets. “We joke about being a pack. Like
it’s an excuse for every little neurotic twitch we have about each other. But it’s real. It’s there. It drives me crazy thinking
you might be in trouble and I can’t help you.”
I knew that fear. There’d been times Ben was in trouble, when I’d believed I was too late to save him. Racing to him with
a hole growing in my gut, draining everything but panic. I knew what Ben was feeling.
“Likewise,” I murmured. “But do you think we could live never letting each other out of our sight?”
He chuckled. “We’d really drive each other crazy.”
“We were both lone wolves for too long, weren’t we? Not used to all this togetherness and sharing.”
“Ah, more pop psychology.”
By this time we’d pulled each other into a hug, belying my claim. “That’s me,” I said, tipping back my head so I could nuzzle
his chin. He obliged me with a kiss. And another. We sort of kept going like that until someone cleared his throat. Loudly.
“Um, yeah,” Peter said from halfway down the sidewalk, pointing a thumb over his shoulder. “Sorry, but we should get going.”
Ben and I managed to pry ourselves apart. “Grr,” I muttered.
He held my shoulders and planted one more kiss on my forehead. “Call me if something happens. Call me if you go anywhere.
Okay?”
“I will, I promise.”
“Be careful,” he said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
“I never do anything stupid,” I said.
He gave me a very unconvinced glare.
“You be careful, too,” I said.
He left with Peter and didn’t look back.
Right. Time to get to work. No sense worrying about him yet.
G
ary, still recovering, went to sleep. Jules had been making phone calls, about a dozen by my count, and the conversations
ranged from merely odd to outright bizarre. He’d been saying things like, “Yeah, but this isn’t localized like the Enfield
Poltergeist. I’m talking about free-ranging activities linked to a specific person. You’ve never seen a similar case?” and
“But EMF readings aren’t a reliable indicator of psychic hostility.” Finally, he said something that made sense to me: “Professor,
I’m telling you, there was a fucking humanoid shape standing in the flames and laughing at us! No, it wasn’t a guy in an asbestos
suit!”
So. Jules’s contacts weren’t panning out so much.
Tina and I had been engrossed in Internet research on two different laptops. I’d been learning a lot about hauntings, demonic
possession, hoaxes, and the people who talk about them. It was like a religion: No amount of proof seemed able to sway the
absolute skeptics or the absolute believers.
Typing in a phrase like “demonic communication” got about a quarter of a million hits. After looking at a dozen sites, my
eyes started to glaze over. The tones varied from wild belief to scientific skepticism. But a phrase kept jumping out at me,
something that none of the Paradox crew had mentioned yet.
I leaned back, stared at the screen a good long time, and finally asked, “What do you guys think about trance mediums?”
Tina didn’t say anything. Jules peered over the screen of his own laptop.
“Theory or practice?” he said.
I shrugged. “Both.”
He leaned back in his chair. “The theory is that certain people have the ability to channel spirits directly. They go into
a trance, and any presence at a haunted location can speak through them. In practice, it tends to be bollocks. It’s too hard
to verify and too easy to fake. The charlatans have built up this image of it being really dangerous, so they use it as a
way to get a good scare out of people.”
“So it’s not real?” I said.
“It’s real,” Tina said. “Just very rare.”
“Do you think it’s something we could use to learn more about this thing?” I said.
“No, I don’t think so,” Tina said quickly.
Jules blinked at Tina. “Wait a minute. Tina. What do you know about trance mediums? It’s not actually something . . . I mean
you
don’t have any experience with it. Do you?”
She smiled. “It’s almost gratifying that you’re taking me seriously now.”
“Can you really do it?” Jules said.
Her hesitation, and the way her gaze darted nervously between us was enough of an answer. She couldn’t come right out and
say no.
“Oh, my God, Tina, this is incredible. We’ve got to get a tape of this. If we can show what the real thing looks like and
maybe find a way to demonstrate how the fakes—”
“No,” she shook her head. “I want to help, really I do, but this—the Ouija board is one thing, but actually channeling it
directly . . . it
is
dangerous. I’ve never wanted to get that close. It’s better having something like the board between me and the phenomenon.”
A lead, any lead, was too good to give up. I said, “But Tina, if you could contact it directly—”
Tina said, “This thing has killed. If I let it inside me—could we even stop it?”
“Or maybe we could stop it from killing again,” I said.
“If you could talk to it, directly, through me,” Tina said. “What would you say?”
Good question. “I’d want to find out where it came from, what it wants, and what I need to do to convince it to go away. However
it was sent here, there has to be a way to send it back again. If it’s sentient, I have to be able to reason with it.” That
was my idealism talking again.
Tina took a deep breath. “The reason I’ve kept quiet all this time about what I can do is because in a way, even when this
stuff works, it’s still all parlor tricks. The only people who are really interested are the ones who want to exploit it,
or desperate people messed up with grief, like Peter. They treat it like a psychic hotline they can call up whenever they
want. When really, I don’t understand what’s going on most of the time.”
“I’m just asking you to try.”
“Gary wouldn’t go for it,” Tina said.
“We’ll tell him it’s an experiment,” Jules said.
Tina leaned back and studied the ceiling. Communing with the beyond, maybe. I wondered for a moment what it would be like
to be her. Did she hear voices all the time? Some of the time? Was it like listening to a faint radio, like she only tuned
in to distant spirits, or did they speak to her directly, loudly? How did a person live with something like that?
How annoyed would she be if I asked her all these questions?
Rubbing her face, she leaned forward and let out a sigh. A weight seemed to settle on her, slumping her shoulders, pulling
her lips into a frown. It made her look older, far different from her screen persona. It wasn’t fear or trepidation, I didn’t
think. More like resignation.
“Here’s what we do. I call the shots. If it doesn’t feel right, we stop, no arguing. Got it?”
Jules and I nodded.
“Where are we going to do this?” I asked. “What can we burn down this time?”
She scowled at me. “Not here. We have to keep at least one place safe. Can we get into New Moon? It talked to us once, there.”
I shook my head. “If we try to get in before the investigators are done with it, it’ll screw up the insurance.”
“Then we go to Flint House,” she said.
“The house that kills people?” I might have shrieked a little.
“I figure the demon’ll know where to find us, it’s been there before.”
A combined sense of curiosity and inevitability drove us. We wanted to see what would happen. We also didn’t have a whole
lot of other options.
Well, there was always running away. Except we had no guarantee the thing wouldn’t follow us. Which was also the problem with
me letting it go ahead and get me. Self-sacrifice was all well and good if you could guarantee that it would actually stop
the attacks. Wouldn’t we all feel stupid if I let it kill me and it just kept attacking? Not that I’d be feeling much of anything
at all. Or maybe I would, and that was another problem with this whole life-after-death concept.
I’d also kind of missed the moment when I stopped being able to run away. I had too much to protect now.
Being proactive was better than being morbid. So I helped Tina and the others set up another séance at Flint House. Jules
summoned the
Paradox PI
camera crew, which arrived with the equipment van to set up the usual array of cameras, microphones, and gear.
“You guys really like getting your footage,” I said. “You’ll probably get a whole season’s worth of episodes out of this.”
“At this point, our production schedule is already screwed up beyond repair. We’re doing this for science,” Jules said. “Maybe
we can get some hard, incontrovertible measurements. This is for posterity.”
Almost made me feel like we were doing something noble.
“But it wouldn’t hurt to get a good episode out of this,” Tina called from the other room, where she was setting up another
camera. “If I’m going to do this for science I want some good screen time out of it.”
Noble and commercially viable. I could go for that.
I’d made up another batch of the blood-and-ruin potion. I should come up with a better name for it, like “Eau de Ick.”
“Don’t put it around the house,” Tina ordered when she saw it.
“Why not? I don’t want anything to burn down again.”
“We want this thing to be able to get in so we can talk to it. That can’t happen if you use that crap. But you know, keep
it around. Just in case.”
We also brought along extra fire extinguishers. Just in case.
They set up a table like last time, but this time, Tina filled it with equipment. She might have been showing off an encyclopedia
of medium and spiritualist tricks. There was a Ouija board—a new one, since the previous one was contaminated, she claimed;
a pad of paper and a pen for automatic writing; a couple of heavy wires, like straightened coat hangers—dowsing rods; a plumb
weight on a string; a bell.
“This must really be damaging your sensibilities,” I said to Jules. “All the table-rapping séance tricks, and here they are,
for real.”
“I’m trying not to think about it,” he said, distracted as he tested yet another microphone, this one set up in the kitchen
in the back of the house.
Perfect haunted-house setting, and I wasn’t sure anymore that this was a good idea. I’d felt safe at New Moon, and look what
happened there. I didn’t at all feel safe here, and we hadn’t done anything yet.
The behind-the-camera techs left, and Jules, Tina, and I gathered in the front room, what would have been a parlor, now empty
except for the round card table and filmy lace drapes over the front window.
“Right, Gary, I think that’s it. We should be all ready to go now,” Jules said into his headset microphone. Gary had woken
up and demanded to come along. Jules and Tina argued, and Gary compromised by waiting in the van, observing via the monitors
and speakers. I used the blood potion around the van, so at least they’d be protected.
Jules listened for an answer, gave a curt nod, and looked at us. “Ready?”
“What’s going to happen?” I said. “What can we expect?”
He said, “When the fakes do it, there’s a lot of swaying, moaning, convulsing, eyes rolling back in heads. That sort of thing.
Their voices change, get really hoarse and deep and the like. Maybe that’s really how it works. Tina, is that how—Tina?”
Tina went very, very still. She hadn’t even sat down yet. She stood in the middle of the floor, arms straight at her side,
fingers straight out, head canted to one side as if listening for something. Her eyes were closed, her back straight, like
she’d just frozen there. And I knew something was happening, because her smell changed. It was subtle, like the difference
in smell between the same perfume worn by two different people. She still smelled like Tina—hip twenty-something woman. But
there was something
extra
now. A touch of brimstone. I tensed up and bit my lip to keep from growling.