Martha nodded. “Can you be reasonably sure of not letting any get started?”
“It’s the last thing in the world we want. No three-ring circuses. My job, my family . . .”
“Would your family welcome a serious investigation of the disturbances by someone who could make first-hand observations?”
Steve almost broke down. He wrung his hands, tried to control the tremor in his chin. “Dr. Lesh. We don’t care about the disturbances . . . the pounding . . . the furniture . . . the flashes, the music.” He looked distractedly around the room, almost as if he were looking into the walls. “We just want to find our little girl.”
For the next three hours, Lesh interviewed Steve and Diane, getting all the specifics of the case—what moved when, who was in the room when it happened, when the television was on, what channel it was tuned to, how, Carol Anne disappeared, and so on. They were so glad to talk about it with someone—anyone—they needed no coaxing to tell their story.
Up to now, they hadn’t known whom to tell, or what to do. Call the police and file a missing persons report? They could just imagine the reaction that would have gotten them. Hire a medium to talk to the spirits? They had no idea how to contact such a person. They couldn’t tell friends, for fear of being laughed at. They hardly believed it themselves. Certainly they couldn’t allow the neighbors to find out—they’d be roasted out of the neighborhood, particularly by Teague, who had a distinct sense of propriety and community—and who didn’t react well to abnormal behavior in his neighbors
or
his salesmen. He’d already called once to find out why Steve hadn’t been showing up for work.
But just as certainly, they couldn’t leave the house—not while Carol Anne was still there. She might reappear at any time; she might need them to help her; she was . . . somewhere here.
Dr. Lesh’s appearance was a godsend. A sympathetic, credentialed scientist. A doctor. She could help them. She knew about paranormal events; she wouldn’t discard their apprehensions, or scoff in ridicule. She would help them.
Ryan returned from the hospital just as Robbie was getting home for lunch.
“How was school?” Diane asked.
“Oh, I didn’t have classes today,” Ryan joked, coming through the front door on Robbie’s heels.
“No lunch if you cut classes,” Diane riposted. Her spirits were elevated enormously already—she just knew these kind people would find her baby.
“But the dog ate my homework,” Ryan tried hopefully.
“Well . . . okay,” Diane relented. “You can have lunch, too.” She headed toward the kitchen. “You wash up, mister,” she yelled at Robbie.
Steve entered the hallway with Dr. Lesh. “I was just going to take them up . . . to the bedroom,” he said to his wife.
Diane went on into the kitchen, talking over her shoulder. “You guys go on. I’m gonna try to keep sane by making food for everyone—we all have our little tricks.”
Steve nodded, and began to mount the steps, followed by Dr. Lesh and Ryan, with Robbie several paces behind. Ryan wore a 35-mm camera on his neck.
“I should warn you,” Steve said as they climbed, “we’ve had to lock off the room from the rest of the house. Robbie sleeps with us now. Dana, our oldest, spends a lot of time with . . . with friends.”
“How many disturbances have you recorded in this room?” Martha asked.
“We just don’t go in there any more.”
“We can set up in there,” Ryan assured him. “We’ll record any psychotronic energy or event that occurs—we’ve got all kinds of sensitive electronic devices; they can pick up the subtlest changes—things impossible to appreciate with the human eye.”
Dr. Lesh nodded agreement. “Ryan filmed an extraordinary episode during a case in Redlands.”
“It was!” said Ryan, his excitement rising at the prospect of more positive results to publish. “A child’s toy—a small matchbox vehicles—rolled seven feet across a linoleum surface. The duration of the event was seven hours.”
“Seven hours for what?” Steve asked, a bit confused.
“For the vehicle to complete the distance. The movement would never have registered on the naked eye, but I got the event on the time-lapse camera.”
Steve nodded as they reached the landing. The hallway was dark. He crossed the carpeted corridor slowly, feeling his way along the wall until he reached the closed door to the children’s room. Lesh and Ryan followed closely behind, though Robbie had second thoughts. When he got to the top of the stairs, he turned right around and ran down again—to light, and mother.
Steve extracted a key from his pocket, bent over, and fumbled at the lock on the door. Casually, Dr. Lesh and Ryan peered around the hallway, noting room positions, structural points. Quietly, Steve turned the lock and swung open the bedroom door. Casually, Ryan and Dr. Lesh looked into the room.
Shattered furniture and toys were everywhere. And everywhere, in motion.
The crippled bed hopped about in circles, as if something were vibrating the floor wildly. Records flew around in great arcs; a lamp careened by, nearly striking Ryan on the head. Toy animals sailed upside down, their stuffing half torn out; picture books flapped through the upper levels. A small plastic horse cruised by, ridden and slapped by a Barbie doll. The window was boarded up with a large piece of plywood, but inside the bedroom, a dark wind blew.
Lesh and Ryan stood motionless in the doorway, paralyzed with incredulity. “This has got to be a hoax,” Ryan whispered. “Right?”
The lamp sailed by again; as it passed, its bulb turned on, then exploded. Several books flew up to the door and hovered there, flapping madly as rabid bats. The books soared away, but were instantly replaced by a flying drawing-compass which rocketed straight at Lesh, its needle point spinning murderously toward her eye. She jumped back a step.
The compass hung there a moment, spinning, when suddenly a record floated by, directly in front of it. The compass point locked down onto the record and rotated over it, producing an eerie, unnatural melody—the sound of spirits wailing.
All at once, the door slammed shut, leaving Lesh and Ryan quaking in the hall.
Behind them, Steve nodded, and spoke quietly. “Like I said, we don’t go in there much any more.”
After a subdued lunch, Robbie went back to school; the others sat around the kitchen table over coffee and devil’s food cake.
Martha’s hands still shook imperceptibly as she lifted her cup to her mouth. Diane, on the other hand, had become totally calm, her frayed ends gathered together: for the first time in two days, she knew she wasn’t crazy; moreover, an expert was here.
“None of us have been much fun to be around,” she said matter-of-factly. “I guess you can tell I haven’t slept very much. Steve’s been staying home from work; he’s really been wonderful. Really.” Nobody said anything—Ryan and Lesh were still both rather shaken—so Diane continued, with genuine interest: “How long have you been investigating haunted houses?”
Dr. Lesh looked slightly embarrassed. “Well, Mrs. Freeling . . .”
“Diane.”
“The determination as to whether your home is ‘haunted’ is not a very easy one.”
At that moment the coffee pot moved, of its own accord, two feet, to the very edge of the table, then stopped. With great force of will, Dr. Lesh overlooked this display, and, as casually as possible, went on speaking.
“What I meant to say was, there could be numerous explanations for the things we see happening here.”
“Such as?”
“Might be a poltergeist,” added Ryan. “Instead of your classic haunting, that is.”
“There’s a difference?”
Ryan felt completely dislocated. Here he was, a scientist, a man who believed in natural cause and effect, seriously entertaining notions of ghosts and goblins. Every few minutes he quietly reassured himself under his breath: “I saw what I saw. A scientist must objectively report what he sees. I saw what I saw.”
Two bright flashes of light exploded soundlessly a few feet away. Out of nowhere.
“Anybody see that?” Ryan looked quickly from face to face around the table. Could it be a group hallucination?
“There’ll be two more in a few seconds,” smiled Diane. “They always travel in pairs.”
Ryan sat speechless, his camera unattended around his neck. Martha nudged him and pointed to it. “Ryan,” she said.
Ryan looked alert and began to fumble with the setting, just as two more flashes popped at the other end of the room.
“Gotta be quicker than that around here,” Diane said affably.
“It’s electrical,” Ryan commented, sniffing the air. “You can smell the charge.”
“Are there any large power generators in the area?” Dr. Lesh asked.
“Not that we know of.”
“I just can’t imagine any power source that I’m familiar with producing any of the phenomena we witnessed upstairs,” Ryan insisted bleakly.
“What are you saying?” Diane let a hint of doubt filter into her voice.
“Martha, maybe we should bring Tangina back here,” Ryan went on.
Lesh shook her head. “Later, maybe—if she gets her strength back—depending on what we find. For all we know at the moment, though, this could all be a function of some as yet uncharacterized electromagnetic field, which . . .”
“Of course, of course . . . all I’m saying is she may be more qualified,
de facto
, to at least delineate . . .”
“She’s my patient, first and foremost, Ryan.
Primum non nocere
. First, do no harm. That’s the basic law of medicine. If and when she gets over the trauma of this experience, I may bring her back here. Until then, it looks to me like we’re going to have more data to monitor here than we can even make a dent in analyzing by traditional means . . .”
“What are you saying?” Diane interjected.
“I’m going to call up our lab tech, Marty, right now, and have him bring over all our equipment. Cameras, field detectors, and so on . . . if it’s all right with you. We will investigate these matters fully and rigorously, and . . .”
Diane touched Martha on the sleeve. “And you were saying about poltergeists . . .”
Lesh paused, and smiled empathetically: she’d gotten a little carried away in front of these poor, needy people. “I was saying at one point, I think—or perhaps Ryan was saying—that poltergeists are generally associated with an individual. So the literature claims, at least. Whereas hauntings—in the general vernacular—seem to be connected with an area . . . a house, usually.”
“Also,” Ryan added, “poltergeist disturbances are of fairly short duration. Perhaps a couple of months. Hauntings typically are said to go on for years.”
Diane, who’d been following intently what the two said, suddenly grabbed Steve’s hand and pulled it to her; a chill settled on the table, and in her voice. “Are you telling me all this could just end at any time?”
Martha tried to sound clinically detached. “Unless it’s a haunting. But as a rule—and again I must stress, this is only what I read in the published reports—but as a rule, there seems to be no living person around whom haunting incidents revolve.”
“Then we don’t have much time, Dr. Lesh,” whispered Diane. “Because my daughter is alive somewhere in this house.”
Dana sat at the lunch table at school, sipping on a carton of milk. Beside her sat Heather and Trudie. They all looked rather serious.
“But everyone’s parents are psycho, Dana. Your brain just starts to rot when you get old. Before you know it, you have a stroke.”
“But this is really the limit. My little sister is stuck or hiding somewhere in the house; it sounds like she’s scared out of her gourd—and my parents . . . aren’t . . . doing . . . a thing.”
“Maybe they’re trying to teach her a lesson, or some bullshit like that. My parents are always pulling that one. Like when they made me smoke so many cigarettes in a row I puked.”
“No, this is even weirder—they
want
her to come back. But I think they think she got zapped away by the tornado, and now this is her
ghost
they’re talking to.”
“Wow.”
“Far out.”
“Your parents think
that
?”
“Dana, your parents need est.”
“You know, my parents absolutely don’t believe my older sister Katie
exists
—ever since she joined the Hare Krishnas. It’s like . . . they really think she’s dead. Really. So maybe like this is the same type of thing.”
“Maybe.” Dana shook her head sadly. “All I know is, the whole
house
gives me the creeps now, especially after dark.”
“Who could blame you?”
“It’s like . . . they’ve almost got
me
believing I hear these funny knocks and rattles now . . . I mean, I half believe
they’re
hiding Carol Anne somewhere, for some weird reason. I don’t know
what’s
going on anymore.”
“Hey! Maybe your parents are trying to drive you crazy, like in
Gaslight
. Remember, when Ingrid Bergman thinks the lights are getting dim, and Joseph Cotton . . .”
“Why would anyone want to drive
me
crazy, idiot?”
Trudie scratched her chin and sat back. “For the insurance?”
Dusk. Marty had spent most of the afternoon setting up equipment in the Freeling living room, and now was nearly finished. Two television cameras—one with a wide-angle lens—stood covering different areas of the room. Each was connected to a videotape recorder, and each of these plugged into its own monitor. In addition, there were automatic 35-mm cameras on tripods, connected to trip-wires; infrared and ultraviolet cameras; tapedecks and microphones that registered ultra-low to ultra-high frequencies; a thermograph, an ionization monitor, a magnometer, a barometer, a seismograph, and a small fluoroscope. The place looked like a den of mad scientists.
Diane and Steve sat on the couch holding hands, while all this activity buzzed around them. Martha, Ryan, and Marty made final adjustments, checked adapter connections, and generally maintained a high level of excitement.
Dana walked in from upstairs, an overnight bag strapped around her shoulders.
Diane smiled wanly, and spoke without rising. “Dana, I’d like you to meet Doctor . . .”