by Darcy Coates
Bree looked down and let out her breath in a hiss. She hooked one arm under Jenine’s shoulders and pulled her up. “C’mon, we’re getting in the car.”
“Huh?”
“I found something that might help, but we can’t do it here. Hang on. I’ll get the camera.”
Jenine hovered in the hallway, waiting for Bree. The hairs on her arms were raised and she had goose bumps down her back. The house felt suddenly ice cold. She let her eyes rove over the furniture, the fixtures and the photos she’d hung in the hallway. They felt alien, as though a stranger had come in the night and replaced everything with imitations. It was surreal. She rocked onto the balls of her feet and wrapped her arms around her chest, panting.
Bree reappeared, holding not just the camera but also a slip of paper. One look at her face told Jenine she’d made a decision. Bree’s panic from before was gone, replaced by sheer determination. “Into the car, quickly,” she said, ushering Jenine to the door. “We’re going for a drive.”
The rain was coming down in thick sheets, flattening Jenine’s hair and sending a trickle crawling down the small of her back. They ran for the car, feet slapping on the cooling pavement, Jenine’s breath coming in short, hard bursts. Bree pulled open the passenger door and practically threw Jenine in, then slid around the front and into the driver’s seat. She started the car, set the heat to high, and switched on the radio, turning up the volume until it was loud enough to drown out the drum of the rain.
“Where are we going?” Jenine asked as the car split away from the curb.
“To see the jackass.”
Jenine frowned. “We’re going to Travis?”
Bree snorted in laughter. “The other jackass, babe. The one who’s going to help us whether he wants to or not.”
“Richard Holt?” Jenine shook her head. It felt fuzzy, as if someone had stuffed it full of cotton candy. “I don’t understand…”
“I found a blog that was talking about ghost cameras. This woman has a theory that you can talk to the ghosts, to find out what they want. EMF tools, sensitive audio devices, whatever you can use to pick up their voices. She thinks some of the ghosts will help us if we can just communicate with them.”
Jenine glanced at the bruise on her arm. It had turned a dark, mottled blue. If that was how they communicated, she wasn’t sure she wanted more of it. “Has she ever tried it?”
Bree’s laugh was shorter and harsher than before. “Nope. It’s the best I could find, though.” She handed the slip of paper to Jenine. “I wrote his address down. Can you put it in the GPS?”
Jenine’s hands were shaking so badly that the task took her several minutes. She could feel Bree watching her and was grateful she didn’t say anything.
The rain had only gotten worse by the time they reached Richard’s home on the outskirts of the suburbs. It looked a lot like its owner: tall, meticulously neat, and very dull.
Bree parked on the street and opened her door, but Jenine hesitated. “Are you sure we should do this?”
Bree closed her door. “You don’t think we should?”
“He wasn’t very happy to see us last time. Even if he has equipment to hear ghosts, he may not let us use it.”
“I’ll convince him.”
Jenine hazarded a smile. “You’re not going to threaten him with your tape gun, are you?”
Bree laughed and got out of the car.
Chapter Six
Richard opened the door, then closed it immediately. Jenine had just enough time to see he was wearing a heavy red dressing gown—his professor-ish streak ran deep, apparently—and that his face blanched as soon as he saw them.
“Come on!” Bree yelled, banging on the door as the rain plastered her hair across her forehead. “Please, talk to us for a minute. It’s raining! You can’t just leave us out here!”
He certainly can, Jenine thought, wondering how long Bree would persist in the face of a locked door—but after a minute, Richard relented and opened the door with a heavy sigh.
He didn’t look happy, but he carried himself as professionally as he could in an oversized maroon dressing gown. He gestured for them to come into the foyer and said, “Wait here,” then disappeared into a side room.
Jenine gazed around the foyer. It was filled with expensive-looking decorations. She and Bree stood on a plush rug, to their left was a dark wooden stand, and large paintings hung on the wall.
The paintings seemed wrong somehow, and Jenine approached the nearest one for a closer look. It showed a nineteenth-century family picnicking beside a scenic river. The man and woman leaned against the trees to their backs, while the boy was on his stomach, gazing into the river. After a second, Jenine realised what was wrong: the people were dead. Gaunt and grey, they stared, slack-jawed, into the distance with empty eyes. It was as though the artist had taken three bodies from the morgue, dressed them in luxurious clothes, and arranged them into casual positions before laying out a rich feast of fruit, breads and wine as a twisted joke.
Jenine jumped as the door behind her opened. Richard returned, carrying two towels. He handed one to Bree and the other to Jenine.
“I’m not getting rid of you, am I?” he asked, resignation thick in his voice. “I don’t blame you, but really, truly, there’s nothing I can do.”
“Don’t be so sure of that.” Bree towelled her hair aggressively, making it spike up at odd angles. She paced about the room, glancing at the paintings on the wall. “I found something that might work. Do you have audio equipment that’s sensitive enough to pick up ghosts’ voices?”
Richard snorted. “Of course I do. But if you’re hoping to talk to the spirits, I’m afraid that won’t work. I already tried with my last client. Ghosts don’t think like us. I expect you’re hoping to reason with them, but they’re far too… what’s the word? Instinctual, for that.”
Bree raised her eyebrows questioningly. That was all the prompting Richard needed.
“Ghosts are no longer human. You have to remember that, above everything else. The best way I can explain is that they’re like imprints of emotion. If someone is murdered, dies tragically, or goes insane and kills themselves, the emotions and thoughts experienced immediately before death will be what makes up the ghost. Once they’re created, they have no ability to learn or grow. A man who finds his wife has cheated on him, kills her, then turns a gun on himself will only ever be able to feel those last few strong emotions. Wild rage, resentment against women—especially women who resemble his wife—and self-loathing. He will never be able to let it go. Not until his energy becomes too weak to sustain him, and he dissipates.”
“You lost me,” Bree said as she leaned against the wall.
Richard shrugged and put his hands in his pockets. “Ghosts are, essentially, energy. It’s the same sort of energy that makes us alive, compared to, say, a rock. If a human experienced a significantly strong emotion as they died, it’s often enough to imprint their energy on the spectral plane. However, it will slowly dissolve. Depending on the strength of the initial energy imprint—and how much energy it can find to consume—the ghost may last for a few years or a few decades. Very rarely do they last more than a few hundred years. This is why we don’t have any caveman ghosts. They simply dissolved over time.”
Jenine nodded, thinking about the ghosts in the photos. A few looked as though they’d come from the ’20s or ’30s, but otherwise they were dressed in modern clothes.
“So you’re saying they won’t want to talk?” Bree asked.
“Exactly. They’re energy—pure, raw, instinctive emotion. They’re past reason.”
Jenine could see Bree chewing that over. Their gazes met for a second, then Bree frowned and grabbed Richard’s elbow. “Can we talk? Let’s talk. Come on.”
She ushered him through the door to their left as Jenine watched in stunned silence. She could hear their voices—Bree talking animatedly, almost frantically, and Richard’s subdued responses—but she couldn’t make out any
words. She turned back to the paintings as she waited.
The woman by the river had turned to face the painter, her lips peeled back to show rotting teeth. Jenine started, took a step back, then leaned forward again for a better look. Hadn’t she been gazing into the distance before?
Jenine quickly looked at the other paintings. The one to the right showed two puppies lying on the ground, eyes closed. They looked as though they were sleeping. Had they not been juxtaposed with the corpse picnickers, Jenine wouldn’t have looked twice. She leaned closer, and a shudder of disgust rolled through her stomach as she saw the small cluster of flies gathered about the puppies’ eyes.
The door behind her opened and Bree and Richard came back into the room. Bree looked relieved; Richard seemed to be trying hard to keep emotion from showing.
Jenine was glad for a distraction from the morbid images. “Hey,” she said to Richard, trying to lighten the mood, “do all ghost investigators own horrible paintings?”
“Huh?” He blinked at her as though she’d disturbed him from an important train of thought. “You don’t like them?”
Maybe he doesn’t see anything wrong with them, Jenine thought as Richard led them out of the foyer and into a dining room. Maybe he thinks they’re ironic or high art or something.
The dining room was decorated in luxurious style similar to the foyer. A large mahogany dining table, a modern kitchen, and several large sculptures adorned the room. The sculpture nearest Jenine featured a mostly-nude woman with a snake wrapped around her torso. She was caressing the serpent lovingly, even though its fangs were embedded in her neck.
“Wow,” Bree said, turning in a circle to admire the room. “If ghost hunting is this lucrative, maybe I should change my career.”
Richard laughed. “Actually, I started out in the stock market. I got lucky, and now my investments pay the bills. Paranormal investigating was initially only a hobby, but now that I can afford to, I do it full-time.” He began pulling boxes out of cabinets on the wall. “This will just take a minute to set up. Would it bother you if I asked about the camera?”
Bree was instantly defensive. “What about it?”
“I take it you haven’t destroyed it yet,” Richard said with a heavy sigh. He pulled a large, old-looking machine out of one box and placed it on the table, then glanced at the purse Bree had tossed into the corner of the room. “Do you have it with you right now?”
“Maybe.”
“Go and put it in my study. Second door to the left in the foyer. It’s better not to have the camera anywhere near this.”
Bree picked her handbag up, but otherwise didn’t move. “Why’s that?”
“Remember what I said about the camera being like water that connects the paper?” Richard was plugging cords into the machine. “It’s a channel for hundreds, possibly thousands, of ghosts. Having it in the same room would be like trying to hear a whisper in a rock concert. Better to put it away, so that you can only hear the ghosts that are fixated on you.”
“Fixated?”
“The ones you photographed.” Richard turned on his machine, and it let out a high-pitched whine that subsided when he adjusted some knobs. “They’ve seen you, and now they’re following you. There are plenty of other ghosts around, but they don’t know you’re there until you take a picture of them, or until—” He stopped, coughed, then busied himself adjusting various sliders.
“Until what?” Jenine leaned forward.
“Never mind. It’s nothing to concern yourself with.”
“Oh, no, I think it is,” Bree said. “How will the others be able to see us?”
“Let it drop.”
“No.”
Richard let a sigh out between his teeth and frowned at her. “As this… curse, I suppose you might call it. As your curse progresses, you’ll move closer and closer to their dimension, until they’re able to see you, even without the camera.”
Jenine swallowed. “Is that… bad?”
“We’ll take care of it before it reaches that stage,” Richard said. “If this doesn’t work, you can take a few sleeping pills so you won’t have to feel them—or see them.”
He broke off and stared into space. Something in his tone sounded like grief.
Jenine took a stab in the dark. “That last girl, Becca, she didn’t take any sleeping pills, did she?”
Richard jolted at the mention of the girl’s name. His face scrunched up as though he were trying to repress memories. “No, no she didn’t. I was with her at the end. There—” He took a gulp of air and moved to get another box out of the cupboard. “There wasn’t anything I could do to help. I’d tried, I’d made promises, but she still… I hope you understand that it has been very hard to help you ladies. After Rebecca—well, it’s a situation I’ve explicitly tried to avoid.” He paused then turned to Bree. “Please. Put the camera in the study.”
Bree chewed her lip for a second, then she nodded, tossed her bag over her shoulder and marched into the foyer. Jenine sat on one of the kitchen chairs to wait, her towel draped over her lap and her damp hair sticking to her neck.
“Can I ask you something?” Jenine leaned forward and lowered her voice. “After everything you went through with Becca, what did Bree say to change your mind? She didn’t… threaten you or anything, did she?”
Richard let his face relax into a wry smile. “Unless emotional blackmailing counts, no.”
“What then? Why didn’t she want me to hear?”
He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “She said she couldn’t stand knowing she’d encouraged you to take more pictures. She said she wanted to try anything, no matter how slim the chance, to buy you some time. She said she didn’t want to die with your blood on her hands.”
Jenine groaned. Stupid, sweet Bree. If she had any sense, she would have been spending her last days with Travis.
“This isn’t going to work, is it?” she asked Richard.
He considered his answer carefully before speaking. “It’s not impossible…”
“But you don’t think it will work.”
“No.” He looked ten years older than he had that afternoon. “No, I don’t believe it will.”
The door swung open and slammed against the wall as Bree re-entered. She was towelling at her hair, which was wet again. Apparently she didn’t trust Richard enough to leave the camera in his study. “Did I miss anything?”
“We’re just about ready now.” Richard plugged in the last cable, which was connected to a microphone. “I built this device myself nearly a decade ago. Under normal circumstances, it’s not strong enough to pick up much more than faint sounds, but—well, I don’t expect that will be a problem tonight.” Sweat beading on his forehead, he glanced at Jenine and Bree. “Speak clearly when you ask questions, and try not to interrupt them when they’re talking. That seems to make them angry. And keep your voice quiet. They don’t have any trouble hearing whispers.” He pressed a button and the machine hummed into life.
Jenine and Bree scraped their chairs closer together. In the silence, Jenine could hear the rain roaring through the trees’ leaves and drumming on the windows. The machine was making a faint, almost inaudible whirring. Then a third noise became audible: a woman’s voice, speaking rapidly.
“You don’t understand. You do not understand! You don’t understand…”
Richard motioned for the friends to stay quiet, then he leaned close to the microphone. “My name is Richard Holt. Can you hear me?”
The voice abruptly fell silent.
Jenine counted the seconds: One, two, three, four, then the woman spoke again. “You don’t understand.”
“Tell me what I don’t understand,” Richard said, keeping his voice slow, clear and calm.
“Who are you? I don’t talk to you. I want the girl.” The voice was winding up, becoming higher and tighter.
Jenine could hear a rumble in the background but couldn’t make out what it was.
“I am her friend,” Richar
d said. “She would like to know why you follow her.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Explain it to me, then.”
“Give her to me.” The voice was stronger, harsher and demanding.
Richard paused for a second before replying. “She would like to end this business with your realm. She wishes to be left alone.”
Silence for a second, then the voice broke out into something resembling laughter. It was the single worst sound Jenine had ever heard; a twisted mockery of the real thing. The steady “ha, ha, ha, ha,” was completely devoid of joy, but filled with cold intent. The woman kept making that same sound, like a broken record, and the rumbling noise in the background grew in volume, becoming clearer. Other voices—dozens, maybe hundreds of them—added their empty laugher and cold voices to hers, until it grew into a cacophony of noise.
“She will never be alone again.”
“She is ours.”
“Give her to us.”
“We want her.”
“Cool her flesh. Break her bones.”
“Give her to us!”
Richard pressed his finger to his lips, urging Jenine to stay silent. Bree hooked one trembling arm around Jenine’s shoulders and pulled her closer. The lights around them flickered and the bulb directly above the machine burst in a shower of hissing sparks. Jenine shrieked, and as if she’d flicked a switch, the machine was silent again.
They froze, barely breathing, as they waited to see if the machine was still working.
“Give her to me,” the woman hissed, and Jenine jumped. The voice was no longer anxious, but hungry. “Give her to me, and I will take such good care of her. Such good care. Like one of my own babies. See how much I loved them? My neighbours didn’t understand my love. They didn’t understand at all. But you will, darling, and I will free you, too.”
Richard was trembling, but he kept his voice composed. “She isn’t yours to take. She belongs here, among the living.”
The ghost’s shriek ripped out of the machine, swallowing the room in the wailing noise. Jenine clamped her hands over her ears and squinted as two more lights blew out in a burst of sparks.