I tried to course-correct, as much as anyone can do that while they’re falling. Maybe I’d end up splitting my head on the crate on the opposite bed, but at least heads can theoretically heal. Everything happened so fast, though, that all I really did was tilt a bit to one side.
I put a hand out, hoping to rappel off the side of the TV rather than land on it full-force, and my skinned knuckles rasped over something surprisingly rough. I bounced off the cabinet, smacked the empty crate, and hit the floor with my shoulder. The snow channel cut out as the power cord popped from the wall socket. The crate lid fell on top of me.
“Stay still,” Jacob said. He pulled the lid off me—which, since it was lined with that spongy egg-carton foam, hadn’t hurt anything but that dumb pride of mine. “Are you all right? What happened?” I chose to answer the least embarrassing of those two questions.
“I’m fine.” My hand had landed in something wet. And red. The knuckles looked like hamburger.
“You’re bleeding.”
“Only my hand.” I pushed myself up off the floor and cast around for whatever had just flayed me. A brown fabric panel lay half-under the bed. The sparkly fibers weren’t as visible on the back side of the fabric, though tiny pinprick glints showed through enough for me to recognize the speaker cover, and its sandpaper-like synthetic fabric, face down on the floor. Great. Now I probably had microscopic traces of fiberglass coursing through my veins.
Leave it to me to be laid low by a piece of material.
I snagged the corner of the cover and pulled it out from under the bed. Hopefully nothing was broken, and it’d just pop right back on, no harm, no foul. The framework beneath the fabric felt like it was still in one piece. I knee-walked to the console, hoping I hadn’t broken off whatever tabs or grooves held the cover in place, when something inside the speaker well caught my eye.
It was shadowy in the recess of the cabinetry, but then I spotted it, something that wasn’t original to the set, protruding from the shadows—a thread-fringed corner of duct tape.
“You’re really bleeding. We need to wrap that up.”
“Jacob.” A juvenile fear of “jinxing” myself stole over me, and I couldn’t even bring myself to say,
this is it
. “Give me your flashlight.” Jacob handed it over and I shone the beam into the speaker well. A device was taped to the side—four dials. No LCD readout like the TV in Missouri. No instruction manual, either. But I knew, with a cold certainty, this was the real deal.
Carefully, Jacob climbed over a bed, rounded the TV, and crouched so he could peer over my shoulder. He admired the machinery for a long moment, then said, “How do you work it?”
I didn’t know.
Jacob said, “I’m getting Dreyfuss.”
That was about as close as he’d come to asking my permission. I didn’t like it—but I didn’t stop him, either. He ducked into the bathroom and crammed himself back into the room with Dreyfuss two minutes later. “What’s on tonight’s lineup?” Con said. “I don’t suppose this thing gets HBO.”
“How do you work it?” I said.
He stepped over the corner of the bed and into the gap between the beds and the GhosTV with me, but thankfully he’d managed not to touch me. “Plug it in, for starters.”
Jacob plugged it back into the outlet he’d used before. “Okay.”
“Okay,” Dreyfuss echoed.
“Now what?” I said.
He looked at me with raised eyebrows. “Are you shitting me? I thought you knew.”
“This is not the time to get cute.”
He held his hands up beside his head in mock surrender. “Cross my heart, we all figured you’d snuck a peek at Roger Burke manning the helm and you picked up a few pointers.”
“Maybe you should’ve thought it through better than that before you had him killed.”
The tube crackling inside the TV console was conspicuously loud over the sudden silence of the three of us holding our breath.
“Sounds like you’ve got your mind made up, but I promise you this, Detective. You might think you know everything. But you don’t.” Funny. I’d expected Dreyfuss to deny the FPMP’s part in killing Burke.
Did he realize I knew about them offing Dr. Chance, too?
And speaking of Dr. Chance…if Richie hadn’t managed to exorcise her from the FPMP offices, then it meant that at least
someone
knew how to work the GhosTV. But what good did that do me at the moment? It wasn’t as if we could shoot her a quick email.
“The GhosTV I saw before had a digital readout,” I said. Not that I knew what any of the numbers meant…but it was there. “You turned the dials, and….”
“And they affect different waveforms. Our lab determined that much—
but what it boiled down to in the end was that whatever this thing does, our tools, for the most part, don’t have the ability to measure it.”
I stared at the speaker well as if glaring at the equipment would result in a sudden realization of its inner workings.
“It’s science,” Dreyfuss said. “Physics, actually—ions and alpha particles. But something else, too. Something the old tube amplifies.
Maybe something we don’t know enough about to actually gauge.” Dreyfuss crouched in front of the panel, and I flattened myself against the opposite bed. “Right now, everything’s in the off-position. The first dial is like a volume button. It acts on the other three equally.
Dial two, three and four…we’re not so sure. The way the guys from the lab explained it to me, they were kind of like an Etch-a-Sketch.
Remember how it was always such a challenge to draw a diagonal line with one of those things? One knob went up and down, the other side-to-side, and turning them both just right was like walking a tightrope.”
I’d been in foster care with an older boy, Charles, who was always trying to render boobs on the Etch-a-Sketch. And he always shook away everything I tried to draw. That was the extent of my knowledge…though I suppose I understood the analogy well enough. “How about that last dial?”
“Same thing, only this particular toy can draw in three dimensions.”
“What kind of sketch are you aiming for?” Jacob said.
“That…we haven’t figured out quite yet.” Dreyfuss gestured toward me. “As far as we know, Detective Bayne is the only one perceptive enough to see the pictures.”
“You have a medium at the FPMP.”
Dreyfuss gave a
whaddaya-gonna-do?
shrug. “He feels cold spots.”
“So that’s why you brought us here?” Jacob said. “To figure out how the GhosTV works?”
“I brought you here to find Detective Gutierrez.” He stepped away from the console and straddled the corner of the bed to squeeze by Jacob and head back to his room. “The TV is yours to keep. If you can use it, great, knock yourselves out. If it clashes with your décor, just say the word. I’ll ship it back to our lab.”
“He’s bluffing,” I said, once the door shut.
“He’s not bluffing,” Jacob insisted, with the certainty of someone who’d been working side-by-side with a talking lie detector for the past five years. He listened for the door to Dreyfuss’ room, and once the coast was clear, went into the bathroom himself. He came out with a roll of toilet paper still in its wrapper. The paper wrapping was covered in graphics of leaves. Recycled—extra scratchy. “Let’s take a few steps back, breathe, and come to a plan of action we both agree on.”
He sounded terribly rational, which should have alarmed me, because the more logical Jacob was acting, the more likely I was to be cornered into a situation I wanted no part in. But I hurt all over—particularly the one leg that hurt from my ass to my knee—and I didn’t have any good ideas of my own.
I sat on the side of the bed, and Jacob sat at the foot. The corner of the GhosTV console jutted there between my knees and his, segment-ing us each into the tiny slots of space we occupied. Jacob unwrapped the recycled TP, then took my bloody hand in his lap. He swabbed off my hand and wrapped it loosely, enough to stop me from bleeding on the mountain of furniture crammed into the puny room without melding with the wound.
“We need to find Lisa,” he said, “and nobody here knows what happened. Right?”
“Right.”
“As far as we know, this building’s clean of spirit activity, but you’ve got this GhosTV that might help you locate a spirit that’s harder to see. You with me so far?”
“I guess.”
“While I focus on interviewing the residents, you see if you can find a surprise star witness.”
That’s the thing about Jacob. He always makes so much damn sense.
At least someone or something did. As plans went, it was the best one either of us could come up with, and so we planted ourselves in front of that TV set, and we played with those dials until my brain went numb. Jacob created a grid of combinations we could try, but even with the “volume” knob at a constant, there were a thousand possible combinations. I let him worry about the numbers, and I sat beside the GhosTV, and I looked.
I didn’t see anything.
The frustrating thing is, a lack of ghosts didn’t necessarily mean the GhosTV wasn’t functioning. It could’ve just as easily meant there were no ghosts there to be seen.
In an ideal world, I’d find myself a place where there was subtle spirit activity, maybe a disembodied voice, or a cold spot—yeah, sometimes they only feel like cold spots, even to me—and I’d make a quick call and have the GhosTV set up on site. Then the knobs might mean something. Temperature. Transparency. Time.
But testing the GhosTV in a spirit-free room was like learning to swim in your car. If your car wasn’t currently at the bottom of Lake Michigan, at any rate.
I was really sick of playing, “See anything?” “No,” by the time a tap on the hallway door broke the monotony. Despite all my creaky aches and pains, I was itching to do something, anything, that was different from the profound
nothing
I’d been doing for the past few hours, and so I slipped around Jacob, climbed the bed and opened the door.
It was Lyle. He had a rolling cart with him, suitcases on the bottom, and a couple of cafeteria trays on top. “The airline dropped off your luggage. And I thought you might want…” he pointed toward the trays, then spoke over whatever he’d been trying to say as if he was having trouble finding words. “It’s lentil soup. That’s all that was left, but….”
“Great.” I realized I was ready to keel over from hunger. “That’s great.” I opened the door wider, then wondered where we’d manage to fit the soup, let alone our suitcases.
Lyle actually staggered back a step when he got a load of our room.
“How…why…?” He gestured at the displaced dresser, the big plastic crate, and of course, the GhosTV. “This is ridiculous. I’ll get you another room.”
“No, it’s okay,” I said quickly, because I didn’t think I could handle being alone with the GhosTV. “It’s late. We’ll figure something out in the morning.”
As I took the tray from him, and then the suitcases one at a time to hand off to Jacob, I couldn’t help but wonder: wouldn’t it be a hell of a lot easier if that extra bed were in the hallway? True, it would be a challenge to sleep with Jacob on anything smaller than a king-sized mattress, but I was accustomed enough to having his elbows in my ribs. Lyle was obviously gay—either that, or he was in serious denial—so it seemed like I should be able to lay it all out on the table with him.
Except I couldn’t. Not yet. Because once something’s been said, you can’t exactly unsay it.
“You saw the land line,” Lyle said, once we’d crammed the final suitcase in. “I couldn’t take it any more and I pulled the plug. We’ve had our new number all of two days, and those freaks found it already and started crank-calling us again. So if you need anything, here’s my cell number.”
I took his business card and set it on the corner of the dresser with my bloody toilet paper hand. “Actually, we could use some gauze and Band-Aids, and some first-aid cream.”
Lyle gasped—he’d just now noticed it?—but he didn’t ask what had happened to me. That was good. I wasn’t sure whether to blame the crate, the carpet, or the GhosTV. “I’ll be right back—two minutes.” I closed the door after him and sagged against the closet door. “Hand me a soup?”
Jacob passed a warm takeout container across the crate lid. I took it from him, peeled off the lid, and drank it without even chewing the lentils.
Better.
Jacob decided to forego the spoon himself, though I do think he chewed. “Needs salt.”
Another Lyle-tap on the door, and there he was, pink-cheeked and breathless, holding out a white plastic first-aid kit. “I think this should work. Unless you wanted the homeopathic—”
“It’s fine.” I wished I’d asked him for a Coke, but it seemed cruel to make him run back downstairs again. He looked like he was waiting for some other exchange of pleasantries, but I was so worn out, I felt anything but pleasant. I took the first-aid kit, handed him the empty containers, said, “Thanks,” and shut the door.
In no time flat, I had my bag splayed out atop the carton lid on my bed, and I was rifling through for the pill bottles I’d wrapped in my spare socks. It was eleven thirty—holy shit, one thirty Chicago time—and I was so wiped out I’d probably sleep like a baby even without a Valium. I told myself I was in an unfamiliar place, so I should make sure I could wake up quickly if I needed to…but I wasn’t buying it. I touched the orange plastic bottles to reassure myself that they were there, but it wasn’t enough.
Half a tab wouldn’t hurt, I figured. Though when I dumped them into my palm and looked for a halfsie, I couldn’t find one, and ended up taking a whole dose.
While I re-wrapped my hand, Jacob checked that his stuff was all intact, then changed into a T-shirt and sweatpants. “We should call it a night,” he said. “We’ll be fresher in the morning.” He climbed over the foot of his bed and worked his way under the garish blankets.
The full-sized mattress was barely big enough to hold him—I knew as much from my old bed, which had also been a full. The second bed held the crate lid, and now, my torn-apart suitcase. We probably didn’t want to put anything on top of the console, lightweight or not.
But maybe if I pulled my bed away from the wall a couple of inches I could sneak the crate lid over the far side….