“Mac, it’s Sunday.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t see what that had to do with anything.
“The library is closed. There’s nobody else here.”
My blood suddenly went cold in my veins, and my hands felt numb. Was I hallucinating again? Did I fall asleep and dream about that woman? I needed to see a doctor—get a CT scan or something. Maybe there was a problem with my brain.
“Come on,” Kit said, grabbing my hand. “We have to get my dad.
Chapter Ten
Yuri jabbed at the monitor. “There! Right there!”
The four of us were all back in the van, huddled around the computer monitor that sat on the desk in the back. On the screen, I was sitting in front of the window, raising my hands above my head in a stretch. The area beside me began to grow fuzzy, as though a greasy fingerprint had smudged the lens of the camera. The blur shimmered, and for a moment it seemed to take a solid shape.
“Go back to that!” Yuri shouted.
Mark ran the recording back then froze it on the frame where the blur began to shimmer. He continued to move the recording forward one frame at a time, and we watched as the shape shrank and expanded, back and forth, morphing and changing. Then, for a single frame, it took on the unmistakable outline of a person, a person with long hair cascading down around her like a veil. In the next frame, it was back to the shimmering, changing form.
My heart thumped so loudly I thought everyone in the van would hear it. On the video, next to the blurred shape, I was scratching Striker under her chin. My eyes were closing. Then the beeping started, and the shape vanished.
Mark leaned back on the overturned bucket he was using as a chair and let out a long, low whistle. “That’s a good image, right there. EMF spike at the same time, huh?”
Kit nodded, her face flushed. “And the temp dropped ten degrees.”
I frowned. I’d felt so warm and comfortable. Why didn’t I feel the area go cold?
Yuri put a hand on my arm, and I jumped.
“It’s okay,” he said. His voice was soothing. “Here, come sit down.”
He guided me to one of the van’s bucket seats, and I slumped down into it. Striker jumped onto my lap, turned around twice, and lay down.
“Can you tell me exactly what you saw?” Yuri asked, taking the seat across from me.
I told him about the woman in the brown dress and how she’d smiled at me before focusing on her book. His eyes grew wider with each word.
“Amazing.” He pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose. “That’s consistent with the other reports. According to the local legend, she was a young woman named Rebecca who threw herself off the roof of the building in 1928. Other library patrons said they felt a presence sitting next to them on that same bench or joining them at one of the tables on the second floor. During thunderstorms, some claimed to have seen her face appear in the round window, her features obscured by a mass of golden hair. Your description of her is the clearest, though. No one has ever mentioned a brown dress before or been able to interact with her.”
I stared at him. “That’s so weird. I didn’t think she was a ghost at all. She seemed like… a person.”
“Is this your first experience with a spirit?” His brown eyes, so much like Kit’s, were filled with kindness.
“I…” Suddenly I wasn’t sure. I thought about the wet footprints in my motel room and the man in my nightmare, and gave Yuri the most certain response I could muster. “Maybe?”
Yuri chuckled. “You might be surprised how often that is the answer. There are spirits all around us, but as we grow up, we train ourselves to ignore them. We explain away odd occurrences as tricks of the light or a lack of sleep.”
Once again, the face of the man in my bathroom mirror swam in front of my eyes. Whenever I pictured it, I told myself I’d dreamt it. But if that were true, why couldn’t I look in that mirror while I brushed my teeth or washed my hands? Was I just trying to explain it away so I didn’t have to confront it?
“What about when you were a child?” Yuri asked. “Did you ever see anything you couldn’t explain or anyone that shouldn’t have been there?”
Shouldn’t have been there. Surely it wasn’t normal to have so many imaginary friends, for them to all be old, tired, and homesick. They shouldn’t have been sitting on my bed in the middle of the night, keeping me up with their stories.
For the first time since my teen years I seriously considered the possibility that the Travelers could be ghosts, and I felt queasy.
“When I was a kid, I saw people,” I said. “In my room, and on my couch. I don’t… I don’t know what they were.”
“I see,” Yuri said. He kept his voice low and calm, like a doctor who’s about to reassure you that everybody gets pains in their legs sometimes, and it’s probably not deep vein thrombosis like you read about online. “Anything more recent?”
“Well, for the past few days, I feel like something has been…” I swallowed. I didn’t dare say it out loud in case talking about it would give it shape and substance.
His eyebrows drew together. “It’s okay. We can talk about the details later when you aren’t so rattled. Kit said you just moved to Donn’s Hill a couple of days ago? Is that when you started having these experiences again?”
The entire time I’d been away at college and lived with Josh, I couldn’t remember a single extraordinary or unexplainable thing happening to me, unlike here. I nodded.
“Kit, Mark, will you step outside with me for a moment?” Yuri stood up and the three of them left the van, sliding the door shut behind them.
I felt a sudden wet sensation on my arm and looked down. Striker was licking me, her rough tongue scratching my skin as she groomed me. It was an unmistakable action; she was taking care of me. I scratched behind her ears.
“I’m the human,” I muttered to her. “I’m supposed to pet you.”
She didn’t appear to care about social norms, however, and carried on with her cleaning until a little red welt appeared on my arm. She blinked up at me, pleased with her handiwork.
“Great. A hickey. And here I am without a scarf to cover it up.”
A few minutes later, the door slid open, and the others piled back inside. They each took a seat and turned toward me. I felt like the target of an intervention. “Mac,” they might say, “It’s about your hair. For God’s sake, some styling products wouldn’t kill you.”
“Mac,” Yuri started, and I almost laughed at how perfectly I’d imagined his tone, but I stopped myself before the noise escaped my throat. “I’d like to offer you a job.”
“A job?”
“Yes, we’d like you to join our team. You’d be doing the same things you did today, helping Kit set up our equipment and taking baseline readings.”
I thought about it. If I hadn’t owed Kit for her help the day before, I wouldn’t have come out with them today. But my experience in the library wasn’t horrible and terrifying and awful like I’d expected. Actually, it wasn’t scary at all. That Rebecca woman hadn’t felt like a ghost, and I hadn’t felt threatened. In fact, it was very relaxing, sitting next to her on that window seat. Maybe there were nice ghosts too.
“How often do you run into friendly ghosts?” I asked, trying unsuccessfully to keep the theme song from the old Casper cartoon out of my head.
Yuri stroked his chin. “Well, to be honest with you, it’s fairly rare that we encounter any type of ghost at all. A lot of our investigations are dead ends, where loneliness or attention seeking are the only things haunting the house. That’s why places like the Grimshaw Public Library are so exciting. When you have multiple witnesses to a series of separate paranormal events, the odds are much better that you’ll actually find something.”
“So when you find a spirit, is it usually angry or nice?” I pressed.
He shifted in his seat. “To be completely frank, in residential investigations, it’s almost always a malevolent presence. I have a theory tha
t it’s a kind of confirmation bias. The people who contact us are looking for help getting rid of something that frightens them. If the spirit is friendly, they might not mind sharing their home with it, so they don’t reach out to people like us. So while we do see angry spirits more often than friendly ones, I don’t think that means most spirits are angry.”
Despite Yuri’s optimism on the ratio of peaceful ghosts to scary ones, his answer confirmed my fears. I shrank back into the van’s seat.
He leaned toward me. “I know it sounds frightening, Mac. Even I’ll admit I get scared sometimes. But it’s worth it to me. Do you know why?”
I shook my head.
“We help people,” he said. “And you can help us do it so much faster.”
I frowned. What could I possibly do? I didn’t feel as though I’d done a bad job setting up the cameras and sensors, but I hadn’t done some super-stellar job either. I didn’t really know what I was doing.
Kit cleared her throat. “Listen, Mac, we don’t want to freak you out.” She paused. “But we think you might have a gift.”
“Prior to today, Rebecca was only seen in the evening,” Yuri explained. “Usually around dusk, which was when she reportedly killed herself. Our plan was to set up the equipment, get the baseline readings, and then spend the day doing research while we waited for sunset. But with you in the library, she came out in broad daylight, within an hour of your arrival. And you saw her more clearly than anyone else ever has. Simply put, I believe you have a powerful level of extrasensory perception. Bringing a psychic like you—”
“A psychic? You think I’m psychic?”
“Well, yes.”
A sudden bark of laughter shot out of my mouth, which made me blush. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh. But trust me, I’m no psychic. If I could see the future, I’d have done a lot of things differently.”
“You may be thinking of mind reading or fortune-telling or something found in a Vegas magic show, but that’s not what I mean.” Yuri crossed one leg over the other and folded his hands on top of them. “Let me explain. Have you ever used sketch paper?”
I nodded. I had no artistic ability; stick figures were about the best I could do. As a kid, I loved the thin, see-through sketch paper my mother would buy me because I could lay it over the Sunday comics in the newspaper and trace all my favorite characters.
“Imagine a photograph of the library. A real photo taken with a camera.”
I closed my eyes and pictured a Polaroid of the Grimshaw Public Library.
“Think of that photo as our plane of existence, what you might call the ‘real world’ or the ‘living world.’ Now, imagine a piece of sketch paper has been laid over the photo, and the library has been copied onto it in exact, perfect detail.”
I saw it in my mind’s eye: a photograph, covered by a tracing of the same image. “Okay.”
“Think of the sketch paper as the spiritual plane. It’s touching our plane, and it looks just like it, but it’s not really the same place. We reside in the real world, on the photograph, and the spirits who are waiting to pass on to the next life are on the sketch paper. Understand?”
I nodded.
“Now most people can only see the photograph. They only see the real world. They go about their daily lives, not knowing or thinking about that piece of sketch paper that’s sitting right on top of us. Until one day, something from that other plane is able to poke through to our world and connect with it.”
“So that’s what a haunting is? Something from the sketch paper is able to touch the photo?”
Yuri beamed. “Exactly! It takes a strong connection or a powerful spirit.”
“What do you mean by ‘connection’?”
“Typically, it is an emotional or familial bond. For example, take an elderly man who lived on the same farm for his entire life, tending to the crops and taking care of the livestock there for over eighty years. The land was his life. He was tied to it so strongly that when he died, his spirit never moved on. His connection to that place was powerful enough that he was able to cross over to the living world from time to time and interact with the things he was close to while he was alive.”
Yuri seemed to be speaking from experience.
“Is this hypothetical, or was this something you investigated?” I asked.
His eyes sparkled behind his glasses. “My great-grandfather, Pasha Dyedov,” he said with a nod. “He haunts my family’s potato farm in Kolionovo. When I was a little boy, I would often see him watching over the fields in the early morning light. One night, our horse Galina broke out of her stall. I woke up to the sound of a bell ringing in the kitchen, and when I went downstairs to find the source of the sound, I saw Galina stroll past the window. There was no one else awake at the time, but I was able to get outside and rein her back in before she wandered off the property. My parents couldn’t have afforded another horse. I credit Pasha for saving our farm that day, and for starting me down the path of paranormal investigations.
“Now,” he went on, “here’s what I mean when I say ‘psychic.’ People with a gift like yours can see that piece of sketch paper sometimes just as well as they can see the photograph. And people with a very powerful gift, like a good medium, can even make a connection between the photo and the paper, allowing things from that other plane to come into ours for a little while. I think you have the ability to make those connections.”
I pictured a thin piece of paper vellum separating me from a million ghosts, all twisting and moaning on the other side. In my mind, the vellum softened and became misty, and hands and arms reached through it, groping for something around me to grab onto, to pull themselves through. I shivered.
Outside the van, I heard the sounds of the children on the playground. I wished I could be outside with them, laughing and shouting, caring only about whatever game we were playing. How had I ended up here in this van with these ghost-obsessed people? Even if Yuri was right—and I didn’t like the idea one bit—what did that mean for me? My life suddenly felt even more complicated than it already was and more than a little frightening.
Mark spoke, breaking the silence in the van. “I know what you’re probably thinking. That we’re crazy and there’s no way you’d want to join up with a bunch of weirdos who go out and look for ghosts on purpose. When they first hired me, I thought they were nuts.”
Kit and Yuri shot dirty looks at Mark, and he held up his hands in a defensive gesture.
“What? Don’t pretend you guys think you’re normal. You know you’re strange,” he said. “I just wanted to get enough experience under my belt to get hired on with a travel-doc crew or something and finally get out of Donn’s Hill. I figured I’d bail on Soul Searchers within a year.”
I stared at him. It was the first time I’d seen him smile. It made his face look a little younger and less serious, but his voice was earnest.
“That was four years ago. Once I saw the way Yuri and Kit help people, I was hooked. They help people find closure. People call them when they’re at their wits’ end, dealing with something so intense and unsettling that it threatens to drive them insane. Have you ever been faced with the reality that either you’re losing your mind or your house is haunted?”
Every day since I moved here, I wanted to say, but I stayed silent, not wanting to interrupt him.
“In less than an hour you were able to help us prove that this library is haunted,” he said. “Sometimes it takes us weeks to know for sure. If you come work with us, we’d be able to help people answer that question so much faster.”
Unbidden, a picture of my father covered in raw sewage up to his knees popped into my head. When I was a teenager, our elderly neighbor’s house had flooded during a heavy rainstorm. Most of the neighborhood just had to contend with a power outage, but Mrs. Morris’s sewer drain had backed up, ruining everything in her basement. The only thing she was concerned about was her miniature schnauzer, Bounce, who was hiding from the thunder in the basement. She cal
led down for him, but he didn’t come up, and the power outage had rendered her electric stair lift useless.
My dad went into that dark basement and waded around in at least two feet of muck, searching for the dog by flashlight. He found Bounce in the downstairs living room, huddled on the back of a sofa, trapped by the putrid water. When my dad emerged from the house with the dog in his arms, Mrs. Morris almost fainted from relief.
Dad smelled like a sewer for more than a week. He had to toss the clothes and shoes he’d worn because they were so disgusting we didn’t dare put them in the laundry and ruin our machine. “I don’t mind, though,” he had told me. “It’s always worth it to help somebody out.”
I had no doubt my father would’ve run into a burning building to save someone. That was the kind of man he was. What would he think about me passing up a chance to make a difference in someone’s life just because I was worried I might get scared?
I sighed. Damn it, Dad. Why did you have to be so good?
“I’ll do it,” I told them.
Chapter Eleven
Once I agreed to join their team, we went back into the library to finish filming for the day. Parts of it were fun, like watching Yuri interview Mr. Bayer in the archives and helping Mark and Kit shoot B-roll footage in Grimshaw to fill out the episode. I also enjoyed taking some behind-the-scene photos with my phone’s camera. But one aspect of the day was particularly nerve-wracking.
Yuri wanted to interview me on camera about my experience with the Grimshaw Library ghost while I sat on the same window seat where Rebecca had appeared to me. He said Mark could put that together with the footage we’d managed to capture of Rebecca’s shimmering form and really make the episode “pop.”
“It’ll be easy,” he said. “It’ll just take a few minutes.”
It took over an hour.
After sixty grueling minutes of trying to get me to relax on camera, Yuri was finally able to capture about thirty seconds of decent footage of me introducing myself, and then he had me speak into a microphone for an audio-only account of my afternoon in the library.
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