Kitty Raises Hell kn-6

by Carrie Vaughn

  All the monitors, heat sensors, cameras, and microphones were in place. We retreated to the Paradox PI van, set up in grand cinematic CIA glory. Banks of TV monitors relayed what the cameras showed us. Speakers hissed and cracked with static—background noise inside the house. But wouldn’t it be cool if chains started rattling and a voice moaned? Jules sat at the far end, headphones crammed over his ears, staring intently at a monitor. Tina sat nearby, a little less intent, gaze flicking from one screen to another. Gary sat with me. A smaller camera mounted in the interior recorded all.

  As we approached midnight, my own show started broadcasting live. Which meant I got to watch everyone sitting around staring at monitors, and I had to describe it in a way that made it sound interesting. I whispered and hoped it came out sounding spooky and cool. During quiet moments, Matt could switch to my prerecorded interviews with the team to avoid dead air, then come back to the live broadcast if—when—anything happened.

  “I’m in the Paradox PI command center looking at about a dozen TV monitors and waiting for something to happen. What? Can’t say. My expectations are completely open. Gary—you guys normally film the stakeout here in the van all night?”

  We spoke in hushed voices. “You never know when something’s going to pop up, so, yeah. We tape it all and do a ton of editing.”

  “Now, this may sound boring to you all at home, but it’s actually pretty exciting. There really is this sense that anything can happen. Would you say it’s like this every time, or does it get boring after a while?”

  “It doesn’t really get boring, per se. We do this because we love it. We always hope we’ll get some good activity. But I’ll admit, we’ve staked out places that we’re pretty sure aren’t haunted—there’s a cat making noise, or some kind of electrical effect. In those cases we just want to get some evidence of what’s really going on, something we can show the owner to say, look, nothing’s here.”

  “What do you think we’ll find tonight?”

  He blew out a breath and shook his head, a gesture indicating that all bets were off. “I hesitate to make any guesses.”

  “You’re preempting us,” Jules complained at one point. “This isn’t going to air on our show for a month.”

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “All my listeners are going to be dying to watch your show to see what this really looks like. Your ratings will triple.”

  “You have that many listeners?” Gary said.

  “Er... maybe?” Actually, I probably exaggerated a bit. The ratings of a cult radio show like mine didn’t amount to much against a popular cable show like theirs. But I knew after listening to all this, I’d want to watch the show.

  Nothing happened. I had a schedule to keep. I could sit here and make observations, such as how much patience it took to be a real paranormal investigator, and prompt the crew for comments for maybe twenty minutes before this all become intolerably boring. So, before then, I’d head out to my own van and take a few calls to shake things up a little.

  I was glancing at my watch, thinking, Just another minute, but Gary and I had been reduced to trading war stories. I had resisted bringing up my one and only ghostly encounter, because it was personal, and it wasn’t even a ghost, not the way they defined ghosts. When you sensed the spirit of your dead best friend hovering, looking out for you in times of crisis or uncertainty—that was just wishful thinking, wasn’t it? Even when a professional medium tells you it isn’t your imagination.

  I wondered if they knew a way to summon T.J.’s ghost to tell Peter what had really happened to him. A good old-fashioned séance, like the kind Harry Houdini liked to debunk.

  “You guys do séances, right?” I said. “I was just thinking about the Harry Houdini episode you did. Trying to contact him.”

  The three exchanged glances, sharing an inside joke shorthand like I’d seen them do before. Brows raised, I waited for an explanation.

  Gary said, “We don’t do traditional séances—”

  “Depends on what you call traditional séances, there, mate,” Jules said.

  “What if I want to talk to a specific dead person?” I said.

  “Because you saw how well the Houdini episode worked out,” Tina said.

  Jules leaned forward and pointed his hand like he was going to start an argument with Tina, who had a “bring it on” look in her eyes, but Gary gestured and they both calmed down.

  “While there’ve been lots of documented incidents that suggest communication with the Other Side”—he really did say it like it had capital letters—“is possible, it’s not as simple as making a phone call.”

  I said, “Oh, I don’t want to make a phone call, I just want—”

  “Did you hear that?” Tina said, straightening, her eyes growing round.

  We went silent, and a beat later, a noise came over the speakers, a series of thumps like a body rolling down the stairs. Everyone leaned toward the monitors. Jules cranked up the volume on a piece of equipment.

  But I watched Tina. Because none of us had heard anything before she asked the question. There hadn’t been anything. So—had she heard it before it happened?

  Matt came over my own headset, his voice tense, hushed. Scared, even. “That came through on the broadcast, Kitty. Everyone heard it.”

  Okay. Cool. I didn’t say anything. I cringed inwardly at the silence, anathema on the radio. But this wasn’t a talk show anymore, this was drama, and we all waited to see what would happen next.

  After a tense moment, the talking started.

  “You recorded it?” Gary said.

  Jules flipped a couple of switches, peering at the equipment through his glasses. “Yeah, of course.”

  “There’s nothing on the cameras,” Tina said, checking all the monitors. “I was looking right at the staircase, there was nothing.”

  “So nothing fell. Nothing’s out of place.” Another manic search of all the screens.

  I asked Tina, “What did you hear?”

  “What do you mean, what did I hear?” She pointed at the speaker. “That thudding. Like something falling over on the stairs. You all heard it.”

  “No, I mean before you said anything. What did you hear that made you ask if we’d heard it? Because I know I have better hearing than anyone here, and I didn’t hear anything before you spoke.”

  Now everyone was looking at her.

  “Tina has good hearing,” Gary said after a moment.

  “Not as good as mine,” I said, my smile a bit toothy. A bit lupine. “She’s not a werewolf.”

  Gary said, “Tina? Did you actually hear it before it happened?”

  The ratings hound in me was jumping up and down. Had I scooped a story here? Was I about to expose one of the Paradox PI crew as actually being paranormal herself? Clairvoyant or something? How cool would that be? I still needed to ask her about what she saw when she looked at me, at Ben.

  But Tina was stricken, looking back and forth between her colleagues and shrinking as far as she could against the wall of the van.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I saw something on the monitors. Whatever made the noise, I must have seen it. We’ll go over the footage later. It’ll be there.”

  But we’d all been looking at the monitors. Nobody saw anything.

  “Can we talk about this later?” she said, almost shrill.

  Another thumping came over the speakers, drawing us back to the task at hand. It sounded like the first noise, a rapid, arrhythmic series of hollow thumps, like something falling, or like a herd of children running downstairs.

  “Shit,” Jules murmured. The hairs on the back of my head stood up. I quelled an instinct to run.

  “Do random, unidentifiable noises like this happen often?” I whispered to Gary.

  Slowly, he shook his head. “It never happens like this.”

  It came louder, and closer, if that was possible, rattling the speakers. Still, nothing appeared on the monitors. No visible source in the house was producing
the noises. In defiance of the laws of physics, these noises seemed to come from nowhere.

  The thudding grew louder again, until the van started vibrating, like now the children were running on our roof. I could feel it in my bones.

  “Is it an earthquake?” Jules said. “Maybe it’s not the house at all.”

  “Does Colorado get earthquakes?” Gary asked. His voice was taut, anxious.

  “Sort of,” I said. “Little tiny ones. You can’t actually feel them.”

  “I’ve lived in LA for ten years,” Tina said. “This isn’t an earthquake.”

  Something odd occurred to me. “What if it’s just the speakers?”

  “What?” Jules said.

  “The speakers. Unplug the speakers.”

  Jules and Tina were still gawking at me like I’d sprouted a second head, so I lunged over them and pulled at the speaker units mounted above the bank of monitors. Custom jobbies, wires looped into the back of them.

  Of course, either way, pulling the wires would stop the noise. Right?

  We still didn’t see anything on the monitors, which were bouncing on their shelves now. The noise had changed to a steady pounding, like someone was beating on the van. This wasn’t happening on the house—this was happening right here.

  I almost had to shout. “The other option is to go into the house and see if this is going on in there, too,” I said, growing exasperated. I was ready to pile out of the van myself, one way or the other.

  When no one said anything, I yanked the wires.

  The beating, pounding, thudding noise stopped.

  We all held our breaths, waiting for it to start again.

  Jules’s shoulders slumped. He grabbed the speaker out of my hand. “Don’t tell me that was an equipment malfunction? Christ.”

  In the midst of grumbling, I paused, nostrils flaring. I smelled something. It pinged a memory, but I couldn’t quite catch it. Something recent. Something bad, dangerous—

  Sulfur and fire. Brimstone. Attack in the forest. In the back of my brain, Wolf howled.

  I bit back a growl and lunged for the door.

  “Hey—”

  The van tipped over.

  Chaos rocked us, objects falling, monitors smashing, bodies tumbling. People shouted, cried out with surprise. I wrapped my arms around my head, over the headset I was still wearing. Then movement stopped. We ended up sprawled on the van’s side, picking ourselves out of the mess of shelving and gear that had been stored there.

  I didn’t wait. I could move, I didn’t hurt, except for the panic and anger burning in my gut. I lunged for the back door, shoved it open, and spilled out.

  The van was on its side, in the middle of the street. The windshield had smashed, spreading sparkling pebbles of glass across the asphalt. The metal side looked slightly crumpled, as if there’d been a collision. One of the tires was spinning slowly.

  Matt and Ben were jumping out of the KNOB van and sprinting toward me. Something in me identified them as friend, so I ignored them. Shoulders tight, hackles stiff, I circled, looking for the enemy, waiting for the thing to attack again.

  “Kitty?” Ben caught my body language and looked around with me, searching.

  It was here, I knew it was, I could smell it. Any minute it would pounce. I couldn’t talk. All I had in my throat were growls. Wolf stared out of my eyes.

  Ben held my arm, took a scent. His grip tightened. “You smell that?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  The three investigators had picked themselves out of the van, brushed themselves off, and looked each other over, cursing.

  The exterior cameramen, along with the crew, was coming toward us in a hesitating panic. Jules yelled at one of the camera guys, “What did this? What did you guys see?”

  “Nothing,” one of them said. “There was nothing there, it just fell over.”

  Gary looked at me. “Is she okay? Is she in shock?”

  “No. Nothing like that,” Ben said.

  A minute ticked on and nothing happened. The panic faded. Wolf crept away, and I was fully me again. Blinking, I shook my head and looked around. We were standing in the middle of the road, staring at the wreckage of the van. This felt like the aftermath of a car accident. Which it kind of was.

  A pair of cameras focused on us, capturing every moment for the show. I was still broadcasting, as well. This was going to end up making a pretty good episode for both of us.

  But this was far, far too personal for me to be thinking of that.

  “Is everyone okay?” I said.

  “Cuts and bruises,” Gary said. “What the hell was that?”

  “Full-on poltergeist, I’d say,” Jules announced, sounding excited.

  “But why us and not the house?” Gary said.

  “Didn’t like us looking at it? She really did tick it off. I dunno.” His accent had gotten thicker. He started picking through the wreckage for something. “I’ve got to get some readings. EMF, temperature, infrared. This is unbelievable. Where is everything?” No one moved to help him. The rest of us were standing around, shell-shocked. Waiting for the second round, possibly.

  “What do you know about this?” Tina said. She was rubbing her arms, obviously chilled, looking around like she expected something to drop out of the sky. “You act like you know something.”

  I didn’t know. It was just the smell, the same prickling on my skin I’d felt the other night. But it was gone now. Only a lingering scent remained. I said, “This is about me, it’s not about the house. There’s something after me.”

  “Now that’s a story I want to hear,” Gary said.

  I chuckled. “Got a few hours?”

  “Will somebody please help me with this?” Jules demanded, still digging through the wreckage for equipment.

  Matt called out, “Kitty, you’re still on the air. You’ve got five minutes.”

  Shit. The KNOB van was still upright. I wondered how long that would last.

  I adjusted the microphone on my headset and moved away from the group to pull myself together and get my show back on track. Not that this was getting off track—I’d been waiting for something exciting to happen, hadn’t I? Anything more exciting than this and I’d be done for the night. I wondered how this was sounding to my audience.

  “Right, okay. What just happened? I believe, in paranormal-investigation parlance, we’ve just seen some activity. Yeah, right. The freaking van tipped over, and we don’t know what did it. If you watch Paradox PI when this episode airs, you can check it out, because they caught it all on camera and I imagine it looks pretty good. Hey, Gary—tell me again you’ve never seen anything like this.”

  Loudly, he announced, “In my twenty years of investigating, I have never seen anything like this.”

  “What’s next for you guys?”

  “We go over the footage with a fine-tooth comb. Make sure there aren’t anomalies, some other reasonable explanation for this. Monitor the area. Wait to see if anything like this happens again. Are you sure you don’t get earthquakes here?”

  Tina said, “If it was an earthquake, all the cars would have tipped over. There’d be more damage. This was localized.”

  “Everything’s wrecked,” Jules said, still in his own world of picking through gear. “We’re going to have to replace a lot of this if we want to do any more tonight. Not to mention get a tow truck over here.”

  Gary sighed. “Just pull out some of the equipment we put in the house. Those should work.”

  “But what about monitoring the house?” His temper was right on the edge.

  “I don’t think we have the luxury of choosing our battles right now. It’s either the house or the van.”

  I tried to come up with some kind of wrap-up, some way to put all this in context or expound on some nice greeting card conclusion, but my nerves were shot.

  “Well, folks. I wish I had something pithy to say, but I’m kind of at a loss to describe what’s going on here. I’ll be the first to tell you t
hat the universe is filled with some pretty wild, unexplained phenomena. Me, for example. I’ll also be the first to say it’s still a good idea to take things with a grain of salt. But I’m all out of salt right now. Something happened here tonight at the old haunted house, but it didn’t happen in the house, and I’m not convinced it was a haunting. Whatever it was, it sure wasn’t happy. Tune in next week when, hopefully, I’ll have a little more to give you. I’ll also go back to taking calls so you can tell me about some of your own unexplained, unexplainable, experiences. Until then, this is Kitty Norville, and this has been The Midnight Hour.”

  Matt was in the van, pushing buttons, working his own brand of arcane wizardry. He gave a curt nod, which meant we were done. Finally.

  I pulled off my headset and threw it into the van. Then I found Ben and got clingy. I wrapped my arms around his middle and hugged him close as his arms closed over my shoulders.

  “Why do I get the feeling this is going to get worse before it gets better?” he said.

  “Because it usually does,” I answered. “Maybe it’s just trying to scare us.” After all, no one had been hurt. Yet. There was always a yet.

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  Tina walked up to us. I lifted my head from Ben’s shoulder just enough to face her.

  “You going to tell us what you know?” she said. “Something’s going on here, and it has to do with you.”

  What the hell. Maybe they knew something that could help explain this.

  “Okay. But not on camera.”

  Chapter 6

  Gary called a tow truck for the van, and the Paradox PI camera crew stayed behind to clean up the equipment. Their producers would probably have conniptions over the damage when they saw it. But think of the ratings.

  Not much was open this late, so we ended up at an all-night coffee shop downtown, five of us—the three from the Paradox team plus Ben and me—crammed in a corner booth, away from prying ears and eyes. None of us even thought about starting the explanations until we had steaming mugs in our hands. Tina’s hands were still shaking.