Popcorn and Poltergeists

by Nancy Warren

  Rafe said, “All right. The library isn’t overrun with students or teaching staff, so it shouldn’t be difficult to find a time when you can be alone.”

  “Has the college considered closing the library until the ghost can be removed?”

  “They can’t do that without admitting they believe in ghosts. The stairs and banisters have been checked and found to be sound. To the logical mind, it’s merely bad luck that two people fell down the same staircase and died. The deaths were ten years apart, after all. They’ve blocked off that stairway, though, and are going to have it modified to make it safer.”

  “It’s going to take more than smoother stair rails to make that place safe if a poltergeist is attacking the unwary.”

  “If we can…” He paused here and I felt he was searching for the right word, something he rarely had to do. “Encourage the ghost to move on, that should help.”

  “Okay. When do we start?” I was a big believer that if I had to do something unpleasant and dangerous, I might as well get it over with, and I suspected that dealing with angry energy was going to be very unpleasant. And dangerous.

  “First, you should talk to a couple of the students who have experienced the activity. Get them to share their experiences so you’ll know what to expect when you go in.”

  “Oh, great, I’m going to sit alone in the middle of the night waiting for the ghost to attack me?”

  Rafe reached out and touched my hand. His cool touch was oddly reassuring. Like putting a cool cloth on a feverish forehead. “No. I will be there.”

  Violet shook her head. “Not if you want any activity, you won’t. No offense, Rafe, but the ghost won’t appear when you’re around.” She looked at me. “Lucy, if you’re serious about this, you’ll have to go in alone. We need to work on a protection spell. Something that stops you from being hurt but doesn’t repel the poltergeist.”

  “But we want to repel it, all the way across the rainbow bridge.” I made skipping motions with my fingers to illustrate my point.

  Violet seemed more poltergeist-friendly than I was, no doubt because she wouldn’t be the one sitting alone in the dark waiting for it. “It could just be malevolent energy that’s feeding off student drama. But it could also be the haunting of a ghost who has unfinished business. If you can acknowledge that and do what needs to be done, the ghost can pass on. If it were me, it’s what I would want.”

  I liked this theory much better than the angry, destructive energy one. “All right, then. I’ll see what I can do.” To Rafe I said, “Can you set up meetings for me with the students who experienced the activity?”

  “Yes.”

  And so I found myself back at the college that evening.

  Ghost hunting.

  Chapter 6

  Rafe had found two women who’d agreed to talk to me about their experiences with the poltergeist. He’d suggested we meet in one of the lecture rooms, but I’d been to college a lot more recently than he had, plus, I was female. I told him I wanted to meet in a dorm room, and he wasn’t invited. I was hoping to inspire a cozy atmosphere of girls sharing secrets in a dorm room. He would definitely ruin the mood.

  He raised his eyebrows at that but followed my wishes. I knew it was the right call when I knocked on the door of the room I’d been invited to and a very pretty dark-haired student opened it. She wore sweats and mismatched socks.

  “Judith Morgan?” I asked.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Lucy Swift. I understand you’re willing to talk about the”—I dropped my voice—“poltergeist.”

  She let me in. She’d invited another student who’d experienced the strange activity, Fabrizia Ramos. I wasn’t very good at picking out British accents yet, but Judith sounded vaguely northern, while Fabrizia introduced herself as a linguistics student from Brazil.

  They were clearly friendly, and since Judith’s roommate wasn’t home, I sat on her bed while the other two sat across from me on Judith’s bed. It was very much like a sleepover party atmosphere, the kind that encourages confidences.

  I introduced myself and stuck as much to the truth as I could. I told them I’d agreed to help with some research in the library but I’d heard about the supernatural activity there, and I wanted to know what to expect before I went in.

  The two young women glanced at each other, and Judith shivered. “I never go in that library alone, and you shouldn’t either.”

  Fabrizia sounded less panicked. “Most people never have a bad experience. You’ll probably be fine.”

  “Tell me what happened to you? Just so I know what to expect.”

  They looked at each other again. “Shall I go first?” Judith asked. Fabrizia nodded.

  Judith drew in a breath, but I could tell she was sort of excited to be telling her very own ghost story. Around a campfire, while toasting s’mores, it would be fun. As preparation for me trying to provoke this spirit, not so much. “It was quite late one night. I was working on a paper. I’d gotten so far behind I knew I’d have to pull an all-nighter. It was quiet and I was working away when suddenly I heard tapping on the wall.” She dropped her voice as she came to the last part, and a horror-movie shiver went down my spine.

  “Tapping?”

  “Yeah. At first I thought somebody was trying to get my attention, so I looked up, but no one was there. I didn’t think much about it. This is an old building, and sometimes it makes strange noises. I went back to work. Then the tapping started up again. It was louder now. I looked around, but still, there was no one there. I started feeling cold, so I put on my sweater. I probably would’ve left then, but I had all my books out and open around me. Frankly, I was more frightened of my tutor than of banging on the wall.” She reached for a purple water bottle that sat beside her on the bed and took a drink.

  I studied her. She seemed fairly down to earth, not particularly hysterical.

  “Then a book fell off the wall. I mean, one of the shelved books fell to the floor.”

  “What book was it?”

  She looked at me like I was an insane person. “How should I know? I didn’t go near it. I was looking at the wall trying to convince myself that it was just a book that had been left in a precarious position and it would’ve fallen anyway. But then I heard this commotion at my desk, and when I turned back, all my books were on the floor. It was as though someone took their arm and just swept them all off. That was it. I grabbed my laptop and I ran.”

  My heart picked up speed just listening to her story. “I don’t blame you. I’d have done the same.” I tried to picture it. “Where exactly were you?”

  “In poetry.”

  “Did you ever have another experience like it?”

  “No. Like I said, now I never go in there by myself. Well, I never go in at all unless I absolutely have to. The strange things only seem to happen to people when they’re alone in there. The tutors pretend they don’t believe us, but they don’t go into the library alone, either.”

  We both turned to Fabrizia. She was nodding, waiting politely for her turn. When it was clear Judith was done, she said, “I also had books fall mysteriously from the shelves. I thought they hadn’t been put back properly. I was in the middle of the room at one of the study carrels. I looked to where I’d heard the noise, and where the books had been, there was writing on the wall.”

  I felt my eyebrows go up of their own accord. This was seriously spooky. “There was writing on the wall?” Spooky or not, it was genuine proof. “Did you show someone? Snap a picture?” Please let her not have run screaming out of the place like her friend. I hoped she’d had the presence of mind to snap a photo on her mobile.

  She wrapped her arms around herself like she was cold. “I tried to, but I was so scared, I dropped my mobile. When I picked it up, the writing was gone.”

  I asked the obvious question, “Did you read what the words said?”

  “It all happened so quickly, and it was in handwriting, like a scrawl. There were two words that I recogniz
ed: “secret” and “help.”

  “I know it’s a lot to ask, but would both of you be willing to go back into the library with me and show me exactly where these things happened?”

  “Seriously,” Judith said, “you should not go in there by yourself. Did you hear that our caretaker fell down the library stairs and died?”

  “I did hear that. I’m so sorry.”

  Fabrizia said, “I’ve done some research. A ghost that is powerful enough to move books could probably cause someone’s death.”

  “How? Surely they couldn’t push them down the stairs?”

  “Maybe they could. I don’t know. Maybe the spirit scared him and that made him fall?”

  I was already feeling unnerved about going into that library, and then Judith said, “I even think I saw something.”

  “You mean apart from books flying out of the shelves?”

  “It’s hard to explain. It wasn’t a shape, exactly, more like something glimpsed out of the corner of my eye that seemed to flit by. It was white, like when you’ve looked at a strong light and look away. The opposite of a shadow.”

  “But it didn’t hurt you in any way?”

  “Not unless you call being scared half to death hurt. Needless to say, I didn’t do very well on that paper, either.” She sounded bitter about that, as though her grades were more important than her life.

  I nodded. “It’s a hard excuse to pull off, too. ‘I’m sorry, Professor, but I couldn’t finish my paper. A ghost threw my books on the floor.’”

  “You can laugh, but that’s pretty well what happened.”

  “Well, if the three of us go together, nothing bad will happen. Right?”

  Fabrizia got up off the bed. “Come on. Let’s do it now. Get it over with.”

  We left Judith’s dorm room and walked down a corridor lined with doors. Some were open, and I could see students studying on their beds, bent over laptops at the tiny desks that came standard. They’d have been so much more comfortable in the library.

  At the end of the corridor, we went down a set of stairs and down another corridor, a much wider one. We passed the dining room, and I could sense that the two women were growing more nervous by the second.

  I have to admit that having heard these ghost stories, I wasn’t in a big hurry to go into that library, either. We all kept up a bright conversation as though chatter could push away the fear.

  We came to large, imposing double doors. When they’d built the college, the library had been an important place. Now it was quite literally a dead zone.

  Fabrizia pulled open one of the doors. I’d been in the library before, but not from this main entrance.

  As we entered, the three of us walked so closely together, we were almost touching. There were polished wooden cubicles in a row down the main corridor of the library. Every one of them was empty, every book and scrap of research paper cleared off the surface. The lights all turned out. Computers all taken home.

  St. Mary’s wasn’t one of the oldest colleges in Oxford, not by a long shot. It was stiff and Victorian and solid. There were wooden columns that stretched up over two floors. On either side of the study hall were the books in a series of rooms open to the main hall. The upper level had a polished wooden rail running all around it. It reminded me of a doll’s house, with the back all open, only every one of these rooms was furnished with books.

  Some Victorian sculptor, no doubt, had fashioned a series of marble busts of female writers. I thought that was a nice touch for a women’s college. Jane Austen looked at me coyly from under her cap, and I thought that might be George Eliot bareheaded and looking down. I recognized Charlotte Brontë, probably because I’d seen her picture so recently at Fiona McAdam’s flat. She gazed out as though longing to read a good book.

  About three-quarters of the way down, Fabrizia stopped and pointed. “This was the desk I was working at.”

  “And where did the books fall from? Where did you see the writing?”

  She pointed to the wall at the back of the alcove directly beside where she’d been sitting. “There.”

  “Judith? Where were you when you had your ghostly encounter?”

  She took us into another alcove off the main corridor. It was a cozy nook with a table with chairs around it. It was the kind of spot I’d have chosen when I was a student. I never liked straight lines. “I was the only one here at the time.” She showed me where the single book had fallen from.

  “Was it that particular book?” It was an anthology of Victorian poetry.

  She stared more closely at that book and the few around it. “I’m not sure. It was one of those. I think. Or maybe it fell from the shelf above. I was too shattered to pay much attention.”

  That was unfortunate but understandable. “Thank you very much for showing me.”

  We retraced our steps out of there. It took everything I had not to glance back over my shoulder. As we were about to part, I asked, “What was the paper you were working on?”

  “The poetry of Emily Brontë.”

  Brontës again. I was beginning to think it was a Brontë sister who was wreaking havoc in the library.

  But what did they want?

  I heard low voices and then muffled laughter. We three exchanged glances. “I guess we’re not alone.” Sure enough, when we walked to the end of the main corridor, there was a study group tucked away in an alcove.

  On seeing us, a young woman started. “Oh, sorry, are we bothering you? Usually there’s no one in here.” There were six students crowded around a table, laptops and notebooks open. Safety in numbers.

  “No, it’s fine,” Judith hastened to reassure them. “We only wanted to check some facts.”

  Since the study group looked as though they’d be there for a while, we soon left the library. In truth, I wasn’t all that disappointed not to face a poltergeist tonight. I’d had a reprieve and mentally thanked the keeners in the study group.

  We left the library and Fabrizia saw a friend and excused herself, so I found myself alone with Judith, walking back toward her dorm room as though she had nowhere else to go.

  “It was so sad, what happened to Mr. Eels,” Judith said. “I used to talk to him, you know.”

  Really? Had the deceased caretaker let anything slip that might be useful? Some clue as to why he might’ve been killed? “What did you talk about?” I didn’t want to be pushy, but on the other hand, she’d raised the subject.

  She seemed to think for a moment. “My schoolwork, mostly. I’ve been having a hard time. Getting into St. Mary’s was amazing, but the pressure is incredible. I was a clever girl in my school, but I got here and now I’m up against the brightest minds in the world. I don’t know what I was thinking.” She nearly wailed the last bit, and I didn’t blame her. I felt intimidated overhearing undergrads talking on the street. I couldn’t imagine trying to fit in at Brainiac Central.

  “And you used to talk to Mr. Eels about this?”

  She nodded. “He wasn’t like other people here. He was regular. Like me. So yeah, I could tell him that I was having a hard time and he’d cheer me up, like.”

  “Did Wilfred Eels ever talk about himself? Do you know much about him?”

  She pondered and then she shook her head. “It’s funny that I never noticed it before, but we always talked about me.”

  That sounded very much like a self-involved college student, so I wasn’t very surprised. She continued, “Things are always going wrong around the college. He was forever fixing a window or refilling the water jugs. Sometimes it was a bit of flooring that had come unglued, or a lock was stuck. I’d stop and we’d chat for a few minutes. He always made me feel better. He was lovely. I’m really going to miss him.”

  He was an older man being friendly with a much younger woman, so I had to ask the obvious. “He never, you know, tried anything, did he?”

  She looked as shocked as though I had slapped her. “No. He was old. Anyway, they’d never let anyone like that work with
young people.”

  I didn’t want to argue the point. “Did he seem happy in his work?”

  She shrugged. “Who can say? He got the job here not long after I started college, so we were both new and finding our feet. I suppose that’s how we got to chatting. We had that in common and that sense that we didn’t fit in.”

  “ I know how you feel. Do you think it’s just college, or is it Oxford?”

  She wrinkled her nose. We were clearly kindred sisters. “A bit of both, really. Most of the girls here—it’s like they’re from a different planet. They went to public schools where they learned Latin and Greek and they were on debating teams when they were about six years old.” I always had to remind myself that public school in the UK was equivalent to private school in the States.

  “With somebody like me, I really had a struggle to qualify, and as it was, I barely scraped in. Every day I feel like I’m miles behind everybody, and as fast as I run, I can never catch up. I don’t have time to cram in a proper education while I’m trying to get my degree.”

  Frankly, I felt like that about being a witch. I was always scrambling to keep up and constantly reminded that I hadn’t had the years of training most of my fellow witches had. She clearly needed cheering up, and now that she had lost the man who used to do it for her, perhaps I should step up. “You know, just getting into an Oxford college is a major achievement. Take a moment to congratulate yourself. You can only work as hard as you can work. You will get through. You will get a degree, and no one can ever take that away from you.”

  She leaned back against the wall. “It’s funny. That’s the kind of thing he used to say to me. Always cheering me up, like. He was a good bloke. It was terrible he fell like that.”

  “It was.” She clearly believed the fall was an accident. I wasn’t so sure.

  Since she was the chatty type, I wondered if she could help me out further. “Do you know Professor McAdam? Fiona McAdam.”