by Nancy Holder
Think fast, Erin told herself. She forced what she hoped was a look of sheer, flabbergasted astonishment onto her face. “Wait. You don’t think that’s me in the video, do you?”
The dean turned to look again, and after satisfying himself, he stared at her without blinking.
Denial was second nature to her. She had learned that survival meant denial. It meant that therapists eventually stopped asking questions and left you alone, and that the kids at school finally got bored and found someone more interesting to bully. And with that in mind she said:
“But this isn’t something I’m really involved with. Truly.” She added a couple of head bobs to hard sell it. But it didn’t appear that Dr. Filmore was in the market for prevarication. His blank expression did not change.
“I hope you understand that when we give someone tenure, they represent this institution,” he said. “They affect such things as grants and our standing in the collegiate rankings.”
Oh no, not my tenure. But this should not affect my tenure. It’s not like the book. It was a spontaneous moment. He doesn’t know the context. We could be practicing for a play, or playing a joke on someone, or—or—
Her only option was to try to shift the context, put a different spin on the video. She forced a wide smile, leaned back, and made her hands into a pair of finger guns.
“Gotcha! Ha!” she said. “You should’ve seen your—”
“Please, don’t pretend this is a prank,” he said.
“—face,” Erin finished weakly. “Okay.” Deflated, she lowered her hands to her lap.
“I’m sorry,” the dean said. “This just isn’t what this institution is about.”
“It’s not what I’m about, either!” she pleaded. “I’m about real, serious science. And I want to work at a university that takes that as seriously as I do.” She swallowed down her fear and cranked up the wattage on her fake smile even higher. “That’s why I conducted this test, so congratulations, Dr. Filmore.”
She extended her arm to shake his hand.
“This is just uncomfortable now.”
Deny that this is happening. And it won’t be.
“Well, my class starts in an hour, so I’d better get back to it.”
Dean Filmore said nothing as she jumped up from the chair. The way he looked at her she could have been a bug on the wall or a bit of loose fluff on the carpet.
* * *
The box containing the gathered contents of Erin’s office was very heavy. She shifted it in her arms and trudged through the hallway of the physics building. Students and faculty milling in the corridor watched her, and she could hear them whispering. Her cheeks blazed.
The whispering and snickering behind her grew even louder. At least this was her last trip through the gauntlet.
It was a true walk of shame.
She turned and looked down the hall a final time, a game smile plastered on her face—and once again let fly with a denial:
“Just taking my plant for a walk,” she proclaimed to all the people staring at her. She raised and lowered the heavy box. “Getting a little exercise. Woo-hoo!”
I have lost it all. This is the dark night of my soul. At three forty-seven in the afternoon.
The corridor was as endless as her despair.
And her anger.
It did not abate as she caught yet another cab, briefly panicked at the thought that she no longer had an income, and clenched her hands tightly in her lap. The contents of her office, of her entire academic life, sat beside her. So few objects when you considered how long she had worked at Columbia. It was all so wrong, so unjust.
“I have an article coming out in Nature,” she growled through clenched teeth.
“Hey, that’s swell,” the grizzled cabbie said. “Is that like Playboy? Because you know, they’re going to stop having nudies.”
“No.” Tears welled. She was so frustrated, and that was such a stupid question. “But that’s very forward thinking of them,” she managed to say. “Women should not be objecti—”
“Can’t compete with the free porn on the Internet,” the cabbie elaborated.
“Oh.” She chewed the inside of her cheek and stared out the window. The world was no longer her oyster. It wasn’t any kind of shellfish. It was a gasping, dying striped bass yanked from the Hudson River.
“Throw it back, throw it back,” she whispered. If only she could start this day over. This day should have been illegal from the get-go.
“My brother-in-law told me once him and my little sister thought about making a sex tape,” the cabbie informed her. “To make some dough, you know? Like them Kardashians. I liked to deck him.”
Erin balled her fists and dug her nails into her palms. Abby had promised to take down the book. How had she not realized that posting that idiotic video would be just as problematic for her, if not more?
Because she is obsessed and self-centered, and always has been. As Erin answered her own question her simmering fury spiked and hit boiling point.
“You’d do okay in the free stuff,” the man said, still prattling on about pornography. “Well, here we are.”
Erin handed him some money, grabbed her carton, and slid out of the rear of the car. The cabbie frowned at her. “Hey, there’s no tip.”
“Here’s your tip,” Erin said. “Don’t be a pig anymore.”
“Hey, what’s your problem?” the man shouted through his open window as she walked away. She wobbled under the weight of the carton, ignoring the cabbie’s long, colorful string of X-rated words.
Perfect, just perfect, Erin thought. She staggered into the hallway and headed toward the stairway to the basement. Her back muscles were screaming. When she reached the door to the Paranormal Studies Laboratory, she set down her box, straightened, and kicked open the door.
Hell hath no fury like a college professor fired.
Abby and Holtzmann were bent over a piece of equipment. They looked up in surprise as Erin stormed in. The sight of them sent her even further around the bend. She was so angry she was frothing at the mouth, as if she had rabies.
“Well, I hope you’re happy,” she snarled. They were puttering away, their TV on, not a care in the world. Oblivious to what they had done to her with their stupid Reddit. She needed to smash something, anything, but preferably something expensive and irreplaceable. Snatching up a likely contraption from a worktable, she raised it in blind fury.
“Noooo! We’ll all die!” Abby and Holtzmann shouted together.
Erin froze. Very carefully she set down the device, then grabbed an ammeter to throw.
“Noooo! We only have one of those!” the two yelled.
She put that down, and feeling suddenly desperate, snagged an empty soda can.
“Okay,” Holtzmann said. “But can you throw it at the recycling can?”
“Rinse it first, please,” Abby added.
Erin stomped over to the sink and turned on the water, began to rinse the sticky can.
“How could you do that?” she ranted into the sink, but loud enough for the people on the floor above to hear. “How could you put that online? I was fired! Everyone was watching. I was completely humiliated!”
She heaved the can into the recycling bin and slumped onto the couch.
“Maybe all this is a bad dream,” she said hopefully. Then she started lightly slapping herself on the face. “Wake up, Erin.”
Holtzmann hurried over, and pretending she just wanted to help, started slapping her, too. Erin shoved her away.
“All right, knock it off,” Abby said in a tone that said she meant it. “Now, I’m sorry, but we saw a real ghost. How long have we been looking for that? And she was beautiful, Erin.” She nodded at her friend. “Well, until she dislocated her jaw and ectoprojected all over you. But even that was beautiful.”
Erin opened her mouth to protest. A real ghost, all well and good, yes, but in the real world—
She caught herself.
Except that this wa
s the real world. And in the real world, she had seen a real ghost before and no one had believed her. She had stopped believing it, too. But this time, two other people had seen it. And they knew that she was not delusional.
In her mind’s eye, she saw Gertrude Aldridge floating up eerily from the basement. She was indeed very beautiful and very strange. She changed right before their eyes, shifting form as if made of green smoke. Followed by the all-too-familiar barfing and then fluttering away down the street, as real as a runaway kite.
I was never crazy.
The anger and the urge to do battle left her. For better or worse, she had to play the hand she was dealt. Without being asked, she started to debrief.
“There was a heavy ionization discharge,” she said. “I could smell it. Somehow it got energized.”
Abby enthusiastically picked up the olive branch. “Full-torso transmogrification with corporeal aggression. Right before our eyes.” Her expression hardened as she added, “And we’re supposed to be quiet about it? We’ve been working our whole lives for this. And we got almost a hundred comments. And not just crazies.” She led Erin over to the desktop. “Read this one.”
Erin squinted to read the small type. “‘I wanna slap them wit dis dick.’”
Abby stabbed her finger at the monitor screen. “Below that. This lady describes a Class Three haunting in her home. She’s scared, she lives alone, and she can’t afford to move. We can provide a real service here. She can’t call the police. She can’t call a friend. Who is she going to call? We’re on the cusp of discovery here.” She zeroed in on Erin. “And I know you love the cusp.”
Erin nodded. That was why she had gravitated to quantum physics. “I do. I love the cusp.”
“Now, I know this isn’t Columbia,” Abby said. “But the Kenneth T. Higgins Institute—”
“Uuuuugh,” Erin said. The you’re-making-me-puke sound kind of popped out of its own accord. This place was no more an “Institute” than the Large Hadron Collider had debunked string theory.
“That is insanely rude, but I’ll ignore it,” Abby said. “The Higgins Institute grants us money and they let us study whatever we want. They don’t even ask what we’re doing. We have been left alone for almost a year.” She grinned confidently. “Watch. I’ll go ask them for more funding right now.”
* * *
Abby’s dean’s office was shabby but not un-dean-like. Erin watched his puzzled face as Abby petitioned him for more money. About halfway through her pitch, it seemed to slowly dawn on him exactly who she was. When the lightbulb went on, he grimaced.
“I honestly just didn’t know that your department still existed,” he confessed. “I can’t believe this has gone on this long.”
Abby appeared stupefied. “What?”
He shrugged his shoulders and then shook his head. “I’m sorry, but ghosts? No, no, no. We simply cannot let the twelve-year history of this institution be smeared by this.”
“Oh, come on.” Abby huffed. “Suddenly this school has a classy reputation to uphold? You’re wearing shorts.”
“You teach a whole class on Rihanna,” Holtzmann added.
As the dean’s face reddened, he half rose from behind his desk. “Well, then how ’bout you get your candy asses out of my office?”
“My god,” Erin blurted.
As they made a beeline back to the lab, loaded up their equipment, and made an undignified exit pushing a very short parade of wheeled carts, a kind of euphoria swept over Erin. They truly had nothing left to lose. How did the song go? “Freedom nothin’ left to lose?”
“You know what?” she said, suddenly energized. “We’re going to show everyone we’re not crazy. We just have to capture an entity and bring it into a controlled environment.” She turned to Abby. “When you said the equipment was close, how close did you mean?”
“Well, that’s a great question,” she replied, panting as she labored to keep her cart moving. “See, we have no lab. But the good news is we also have no money.”
Total freedom!
“I have some savings,” Erin told her. “Do either of you have any savings?”
“I was planning on asking if I could borrow some,” Holtzmann ventured.
“We can do this,” Erin said. “We’re gonna be the first scientists to ever prove the paranormal exists.” And we will have the last laugh. Those stupid deans will beg us to take our jobs back!
A huge smile lit up Abby’s face. “That’s the Erin I used to know. Welcome back. Now let’s get out of here with this stuff before they make us give it back.”
With impeccable timing, the front doors to the college flung open and slammed back. The dean ran out of the building wielding a baseball bat. “Hey!” he shouted. “Bring that shit back here!”
Abby threw her weight against the cart’s handle, driving with her legs.
As Erin put on a burst of speed, she saw the man step on and trip over his flip-flops. He went down hard on the pavement and lost his grip on the bat, which rolled away.
Whoa, some serious scuffed knees there, Erin thought. That’ll teach him to wear shorts to work.
Pursuit was not forthcoming. Gleefully the trio zoomed out of sight around the corner.
This time next year, everything will be different, Erin told herself as she pushed her portion of the liberated gear down the middle of the sidewalk. We will be famous and respected. Every talk show in the world will ask us for interviews—and I will always show up.
9
Time flies when you’re having fun.
But when you’re bored? Not so much.
The Seward Street subway station seemed especially quiet today. It wasn’t a weekend or a holiday, so Patty Tolan didn’t know what to make of it. She did know how to take advantage of the occasional slow times, though. She loved to read and had turned the ticket booth into her own private library. Her favorite topic was New York. So much had been written about the city and its history, it was hard to know where to start or when to stop, so she had decided to specialize. As usual she was halfway through one book—The Gangs of New York—and she had three more in progress stacked on her desk. There was a fifth book in her lunch bag, and she’d lost count of how many at home. Working for the MTA was a great job for someone who liked to read, but it sure did get lonely sometimes.
She perked up at the rumbling approach of a subway train and the rush of gritty air it pushed ahead of it into the station. A few seconds later, the debarking passengers began to pass in front of her window. She leaned into her microphone and hit the speak button, hungry for some human conversation.
“How you guys doing?” she began. No answer.
A woman in a blue shirt passed close by, moving to the right. “I have that same shirt,” Patty told her with a big grin. “Except mine is purple and long sleeved.” The woman didn’t break her stride. “You know what? It’s just a different shirt.”
The woman was gone.
Patty deflated.
“Get home safe,” she said wistfully.
Something moved in the corner of her eye. When she looked to her left, she jumped in her seat. A man in his thirties with an ample face was right up against the glass, staring in at her. His superintense gaze and pinpoint pupils rang all her alarm bells and she carefully rolled her chair back from the window. She was a New Yorker born and bred, and while she sought out conversation, she never looked for trouble. And this dude was on drugs or a day pass or something.
“You scared me,” Patty told him, which was a nice way of telling him not to scare her anymore.
“They will always ignore you,” the man said. “Because they are walking sewage focused only on their own trivial matters.”
Wow, you must be New York born and bred, too, she thought. You’ve got the whole attitude down.
“Uh-huh. Everything good?” she asked pleasantly.
“You take pride in your work.” His inflection was flat, like he was trying out for a part in a horror movie as the hypnotized min
ion or something. And his expression, which mixed distaste, anger, and obsessive focus, was off-putting in the extreme. No way around it, this one was just plain weird.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” she said. She sold subway rides in a ticket booth. Occasionally answered a question or gave directions. There wasn’t much there to be proud of, except being friendly and courteous.
Still he stared in at her. And did not move. He was so close to the window that his exhaled breaths slightly fogged the armored glass.
“When the Fourth Cataclysm begins,” he continued, “the laborers will be among the last to the butchery. So make the most of your time.”
Who are you, my union rep? Nope, that dude’s got a tic in his right eye and a crooked little mustache; you’re just another nutcase on the loose.
“Oh, okay, my man,” she cajoled him. “Thanks so much. You have a great day.”
Pleased with himself, he nodded like a robot as if to say “You’re welcome.” That was some serious medication. She went back to reading The Gangs of New York. It was well researched. She enjoyed a well-researched book.…
There was blurring in the security monitor beside her, indicating movement. She glanced over at the screen. It was Mr. Crazy Man, of course. He walked along the platform, then climbed down and walked straight into the subway tunnel.
Patty exhaled. “Oh, come on…”
Concerned despite her irritation, she put down her book, picked up her flashlight, and left her booth. She could have alerted the transit police, but she needed to stretch her legs anyway. She had her portable radio clipped to her uniform belt; if anything looked dicey, she could give them a holler. The loony tune had only seen her sitting down; on her feet she was much more impressive, intimidating even. She had backed down more than a few would-be subway villains just by standing up straight and giving them the stink eye. When she entered the platform, she spotted her favorite pest, a young graffiti artist she had nicknamed “Tubesy” after “Banksy” in London. He was busily spray painting the platform wall.