by Jason Arnopp
JACK: Kill it.
SHERILYN: Jack, listen, don’t do this. Sit down. I’m sorry I lost my temper, okay? It’s just, you’re not being honest, and—’
JACK: Just kill it, Sherilyn.
SHERILYN: Jack, there’s something you should know about that video. Something about the words. (Pause.) And hey, don’t you want my verdict on the book?
JACK (Walking away): I was being stupid, the other day. Just jet lag, that’s all. Get rid of the book too. Burn the rest of it yourself, with fucking sage or something.
SHERILYN (Raising voice): That book really is from the future. (Pause.) Jack, did you hear me? The book’s from the future and it does mention your death. (Pause.) Jack! Run all you like, but it’s still true. (Long pause. Sherilyn sighs. The sound of a bottle being dragged along a table. Sherilyn’s voice lowers to a mutter.) Come on then, mate. I’m so sorry. Let’s get you in the water.
1 This last sentence is untrue, as will become apparent later – Alistair.
CHAPTER SIX-SIX-SIX
(Eleanor: Very important note – please delete any and ALL earlier mentions in this manuscript of the words ‘Adramelech’, ‘Mephistopheles’ and ‘Baphomet’ on the soundtrack of the YouTube ghost video. Afterwards, check and recheck to make sure that NO mention of these words remains.)
I jerk upright on the sunlounger, the moment I realise Bex is crying.
My ringing phone woke me half blind and glistening beside a kidney-shaped swimming pool. This was no great surprise, as it’s where I fell asleep after lunch and the kind of Bloody Marys that might kill a lesser man. Less anticipated was the book-shaped hole in my new tan, thanks to Conjuring Harold: An Exploration of Psychokinesis being splayed across my pecs. During the first twenty-four hours of my stay here at West Hollywood’s Sunset Castle Hotel, I’ve absorbed half of this account of the seventies experiment that the Hollywood Paranormals plan to emulate. Can’t be bothered to read more. Books were way too long back then.
Professor Stanley H. Spence wrote this thing. He was one of the eight Toronto parapsychology researchers who conducted the Harold Experiment back in the day. Semi-impressively, Spence will be flying down to join us for the experiment, acting as ‘impartial observer and advisor’, according to one of Astral’s overexcited emails.
When the phone wakes me, it’s 5.21 p.m. PST on 11 November. Onscreen beneath the incoming number, the words ‘BEX MOB’, together with a still photograph of a laughing, drunken redhead in Brighton’s Bar Revenge, tell me it’s Bex calling, from eight hours ahead of me, GMT. Time travel.
Funnily enough, when I answer, she sounds drunk and might actually be in Bar Revenge. Yes, I’m pretty sure that’s an untalented karaoke gentleman in the background, struggling to match the frenetic pace of Beyoncé’s ‘Crazy In Love’.
And at first, I think Bex is laughing.
‘Why do I do it? Why do I fucking do it? Tell me!’
‘What’s going on?’
More sobbing. ‘I’m such an idiot,’ she says. ‘Crazy In Love’ becomes muffled, reduced to bass notes, and I hear traffic. She must have gone outside. Sitting here in the sun, I do my best to picture her at 1.22 a.m., standing distraught among bouncers, smokers and snoggers, while the Palace Pier sits dark and skeletal across the roundabout. Perhaps, nearby, a lone seagull tugs at batter-coated chicken bones on the roof of a parked Ford Fiesta.
‘Bex, what’s happened?’
‘What is it with you guys? If you do want to commit to someone, why’d you feel the need for one last freedom-fuck? If you need that, then why bother committing?’
I do my best to sound devastated. ‘Oh God. Honey, I’m so sorry to hear that. Who did he—’
‘Some slut-bitch slut with a slutty profile pic. She messaged me about it and I confronted him and he eventually admitted it and I dumped him. Oh, social media, it’s so great. It connects people.’ Her fury collapses back into bitter sobs. I can just about discern the pumping bass notes of Girls Aloud’s ‘Something Kinda Ooooh’.
I know Bex needs a good friend here. She needs to be told that Lawrence probably just had a dumb fear spasm on the eve of moving in with her. That people do silly things when they’re afraid. That she’s the one he wants to move in with, as opposed to Slut-Bitch Slut, who probably just looked great after five pints.
I know I should tell her to sleep on it and, if she really loves Lawrence, to sit down and talk things through with him tomorrow.
‘What a huge cunt that guy is,’ I tell her. ‘He never deserved you.’
More sobbing. ‘God, this is pathetic. You got a new flatmate yet?’
‘Yes,’ I say, intending to follow this up with the triumphant sucker punch of ‘You!’, but before I can do so, she lets out a pained wail.
‘It’s . . . you,’ I say, flatter than planned.
‘Oh, right,’ she says, controlling herself a little. ‘Then that’s something.’
I still have one of those perky, light-headed hangovers that make everything seem less real and more possible. ‘Hey,’ I tell Bex, ‘why don’t you jump on a plane and come out here? I’m doing this stupid experiment thing and there’ll be a fuck-ton of downtime. We could . . . hang out.’
A stunned pause. ‘How . . . how much would the flights be?’
I give her a rough estimate, conveniently leaving off the taxes, fees, airport charges and carrier-imposed surcharges. She starts crying again.
I haven’t experienced such a strong yearning since I emptied my study five years ago to turn it into her bedroom. I want her to move in with me all over again. Year Zero, Day One. Yes, she’ll move into my big West Hollywood hotel room and I’ll ease her pain. And mine. So I tell her I’ve loads of air miles saved up. I tell her I’ll cover her return trip. I tell her not to worry about a thing. And once she’s here, if she’s okay with it, she can crash in my room free of charge. Because that’s what friends are for.
She agrees to the trip. Says she could fly out in three days. Oh God, she says, maybe this is exactly what she needs to move on.
Beneath all her burbled gratitude, I can make out the bass notes of ‘Celebration’ by Kool & The Gang.
I only allow myself to sing it when I come off the phone.
The roof of the Sunset Castle is lined with stone turrets, just like you want it to be. The hotel was built 105 years ago, but it’s new to me and I approve. This place has just the right amount of swish, and it towers over a stretch of Sunset Boulevard that I love. The staff are slick and helpful, treating me with the respect to which I’m accustomed. I’m unhappy with the mineral water brand in my minibar, but am in the process of having that rectified.
Servers glide discreetly around the pool area with trays, delivering drinks and club sandwiches. I stop one and order a celebratory mojito. He’s wearing shades, so I can’t tell whether he’s staring at the paler rectangle on my chest where Conjuring Harold made its mark.
The YouTube video is a big boy now. The likes of Kim Kardashian and Tom Cruise have helped propagate it via social media, to the extent that it is now ripe for parody. There are multiple versions of it on other people’s YouTube accounts. One of these rather predictably replaces the audio with the Ghostbusters theme tune. Another pulls a similar trick, but dubs in audio from The Blair Witch Project, so that actress Heather Donahue is heard snivelling and crying as if it’s her filming in the basement. When those blackened feet float around the corner at the camera, poor Heather screams herself hoarse: ‘Oh my God, what is that?’ By far the most widely shared bastardisation of the video, though, employs visual trickery to place large fluffy slippers on the apparition’s bare feet. The kind of fluffy slippers with big claws. Giant Muppet flippers.
All fair enough, and mildly amusing, but triggering a pop culture phenomenon doesn’t advance my investigation. By now, several people have noticed the boiler room plug socket and messaged me about it. Depending on my mood, I’ll either reply, ‘Wow, thanks!’ or ‘I posted about this days ago, jackass.’
Astral Way and his Hollywood Paranormals could be about to hand me the biggest lead on this YouTube video since my plug socket epiphany. But let me tell you: if they intend to take me for an idiot, there’ll be hell to pay.
Noon the next day, I find Astral wedged into a booth at the Sunset Boulevard branch of Mel’s Drive-In. It’s a small West Coast chain of fifties-style diners specialising in ‘home-style cooking’. Each table boasts a mini jukebox.
Social media means never having to wonder how new contacts will look. Astral looks exactly as he does on YouTube, Tsu, Facebook, Google+, Gaggle, Goodreads, Pinterest, Kwakker, Reddit, Switcha Pitcha, Spring.me, Skype, Ello, HelloYou, Zoosk, Whatsapp, Wikipedia, WordPress, Quora, Kik, Uplike, MySpace, MyLife, MSN, Blogspot, Badoo, Bebo, Academia.edu, About.me, App.net, Itsmy, Instagram, Influenster, Twitter, Tumblr, Telegram, TripAdvisor, Flickr, Flixster, Friendster, Foursquare, Line, Last.fm, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, StumbleUpon, Streetlife, Spotify, Slated, VaVaVoom, Viber, Vimeo, Vine, Vig, Classmates, Match, PlentyOfFish, OkCupid, eHarmony, ChristianMingle and no doubt Tinder and/or Grindr. He’s a disproportionately confident six-foot hippy, with bold red shades propped up on his head. A late-twenties lummox, maybe five years away from being winched out of his bedroom to the nearest hospital. He wears a red baseball shirt with the number forty on it, unbuttoned to showcase a tangle of silver charms and medallions, not to mention a tantalising hint of side-boob. Big black shorts, with a wallet chain that could strangle a rhino. When he waddles to the restroom later, I’ll notice how a thick, sweaty ponytail of dirt-blond hair clings to his back.
As I walk up, the guy’s cold blue eyes flick from his phone to me. I say hello and offer a hand for him to shake. He doesn’t shake back, so I scoot into the other side of the booth and match his death stare, second for weird second.
For a moment, I think he’s going to slump forward on to the table with a knife handle sticking out of his back, as people do in movies when you meet them in a public place having been promised key information.
‘I’m waiting,’ he says.
Like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, he says, ‘I’m waiting for an apology.’
Damn you, Maria Corvi and whoever made the YouTube video, for conspiring to make me meet this oaf.
‘What exactly do I have to apologise for?’
‘Y’know, other reporters would have jumped at the chance of joining us for this experiment. But you blew me off for the longest frickin’ time.’
Pushing that unsavoury mental image aside, I tell him, ‘I’m not a reporter: I’m an author. I’m also a broadcaster.’
He half laughs, half grunts. ‘Who isn’t?’
‘Why didn’t you invite one of those reporters, anyway? Why nip at my heels?’
‘This was a real bad idea,’ he growls, looking disgusted with me, with himself.
‘Listen,’ I say, employing tact solely because he hasn’t told me yet where the video was shot. ‘Took a while, but now I’m interested, okay? Here I am. Interested and also hungry.’ With that, I offer his last chance of a handshake from Jack Sparks.
He relents and grips me with a clammy paw, tight enough to make joints pop.
‘Thank God for that,’ I say, withdrawing the hand and picking up the lunch menu, scanning the beers. ‘So where was the video shot?’
‘What made you change your mind about joining us?’ he asks, still not happy. ‘The video info? Not the experiment, or our status?’ This man’s ego just won’t quit. I feed him some flannel about how his experiment will be perfect for the book. Astral obviously knows about the Italian exorcism – social media means never having to bring anyone up to speed – but I’m not about to tell him how the Great Hong Kong Corvi Mystery influenced my LA trip.
The way Astral orders food speaks of high maintenance. When it arrives, we’re talking about my SPOOKS List and I show him how it currently looks. ‘I cannot believe,’ he says, his mouth a heinous washing machine full of mashed bread, beef, cheese and pickle, ‘that you don’t have a fourth entry on that list. Not even the possibility that ghosts are real.’
I shrug a big so-what. He snorts and takes another bite before he’s swallowed his first. ‘Man. So you don’t think ghosts are even possible.’
‘What do you care?’ I say, chewing, my fingers and lips smeared with sauce. Blue cheese, orange buffalo. ‘Your experiment isn’t even about real ghosts, right? I’m interested in what the human brain’s capable of.’
He nods his ham-hock head. ‘Psychokinesis. That’s the process of using the mind to—’
‘To influence stuff without touching it,’ I cut in. ‘I’m not a total newb.’
‘So you’ll know what a thought form is too,’ Astral says.
As it happens, I do. A thought form, also known as a tulpa, is a non-physical entity created purely by thought. If it hadn’t been for Maria Corvi in my room, I would never have entertained this pie-in-the-sky madness. But now, I’ll confess to mild experimental curiosity. In the seventies, Astral tells me, when Professor Spence’s Toronto group created their own thought-form Harold, he started rapping on their table and moving it around.
‘So they made Harold up from scratch, right? And they thought he was a manifestation of their own psychokinesis. I haven’t read the whole book – did he ever actually appear?’
What I’m asking is, you slobbering hippo: did Harold ever materialise like, say, a thirteen-year-old girl in a hotel suite?
Astral places his ten-dollar behemoth burger down with both hands, shaking his head. ‘But hey, that was the seventies. When we put sharp modern minds together, who knows? We might see our ghost.’
‘Even if we do create a fake ghost, though, won’t that disprove the supernatural?’
Astral just keeps on shaking that head. ‘Psychokinetically produced entities and actual ghosts are not mutually exclusive. Why would they be?’
The Hollywood Paranormals met through social media six years ago, ‘united by the common goal of making scientific discoveries in the parapsychological realm’. A cursory glance at their YouTube channel, on which they regularly pose and preen at various investigation sites, suggests they were also united by the common goal of making names for themselves and bagging a cable TV series.
‘Thanks for watching. Please comment and subscribe. A’
The son and grandson of episcopal ministers up the coast in bullet-riddled Oakland, Astral claims to have seen three ‘spirits’ during the Hollywood Paranormals’ tenure – although of course none were captured on video. ‘Every damn time,’ he laments to me, ‘we were shooting in the wrong frickin’ direction. I feel like spirits are camera-shy. Maybe the camera really does capture souls, like some folk believe, so they run scared. Which makes your video very interesting to me.’
Astral believes the video genuine. ‘I’ve watched it a whole bunch of times. Our guy Pascal’s really into it too, as you’ll . . . Ah! The man himself.’
A short, smiley guy, his skin the colour of a latte, slides into the booth beside Astral. The French-Canadian’s round steel-rimmed specs cling to a smooth shaven head. He has a tablet tucked under one arm and looks excited, which may account for him being caked with sweat. I can see my face in his forehead.
As Pascal swipes at his screen, my anticipation grows: part of the Great Video Mystery is finally about to be solved. Astral gruffly reminds me that the Hollywood Paranormals ‘need to get full credit for this. You need to post the news straight after and promote us as agreed. You also need to—�
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‘Yeah, all right, all right,’ I snap. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got first.’ I’m apprehensive, not least because the video’s provenance will dictate where my journey goes next. For all I know, it could have been made in some Mexican drug cartel war zone.
Pascal, bless him, launches a PowerPoint presentation.
Each of the slides consist of two pictures.
The first picture on each slide is a still from the video. A magnified close-up of some device on the basement wall. The second picture is a product page from a manufacturer’s website.
‘This junction box,’ Pascal says, indicating a still from the basement, ‘is the product of only one company.’ He points to the picture next to it: ‘Steinberg Appliances Inc., okay? You can see the logo in the video, right there. See? And this pressure gauge here is also the product of one company – Bloom & Bloom Pressure. Look real hard and you can just about see the logo back here in the still.’
Colour me somewhat impressed. No one, not even me, thought of this stuff. Pascal goes on to link several more items seen on the basement walls to these same two manufacturers. Steinberg Appliances Inc. and Bloom & Bloom Pressure.
‘So what does all this mean?’ I ask, as we reach the umpteenth slide. Admirable though all the sleuthing is, I yearn for the big punchline.
Pascal and Astral look so pleased, they could just about fuck each other.
‘Both of these companies,’ says Pascal, ‘are real old-timers. They only fit their equipment in person, locally. They don’t franchise or even ship out. So—’
Astral leaps in to steal Pascal’s thunder, heavy on the gravitas. ‘These companies . . . only supply Los Angeles.’
‘Whoa,’ I say.
‘And not just that,’ adds Pascal quickly, ‘but they only supply one area.’
They exchange glances, then say it together on the count of three: ‘Hollywood.’
‘Whoa,’ I say.
While thinking, Hmm, that’s quite the coincidence.