by E. E. Holmes
It took Pierce’s startled response for me to realize that she was addressing him; I’d only ever heard him called by his last name.
“Annabelle, what … do you two know each other?” he asked.
Annabelle ignored the question and continued glaring at me. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” she demanded.
“I told you there was going to be another possible medium! That was the whole reason I wanted you here, remember? What the hell is wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with me? Why would you bring her into this?” Annabelle shot back, defensive enough to step out from behind Iggy, who looked just as lost as Pierce.
Pierce turned to me, eyebrows raised.
I found my voice, not to mention my own anger. “Yeah, we’ve met, actually. She was scamming people with tarot cards at the fall carnival.”
“Scamming people? How dare you—”
“—And she decided to try out some of her more theatrical tendencies on me while my roommate was getting her fortune told.” I made little quotation marks in the air, infusing my last two words with as much sarcasm as I could manage.
Annabelle opened her mouth to argue and then snapped it shut again. With her nose in the air, as though she was above addressing me again, she turned herself around to face Pierce.
“I did meet this girl at the carnival. And yes, I was giving tarot card readings, David, as you know I do. She entered my tent with her friend and completely disrupted the fields. I could hardly hear myself think.”
I snorted and rolled my eyes. She looked daggers at me.
“What do you mean?” Pierce asked. He had that familiar note of scholarly interest in his voice, the traitor.
“I mean, I couldn’t even pick up on the other girl. I was getting so many conflicting energies, so many life forces at once, that I couldn’t focus on a single life to read the cards for. I was getting readings that completely contradicted themselves.”
I noticed Neil perking up in interest, his pale eyes gleaming queerly.
Pierce frowned. “And you’re sure it was Jess that was causing—”
“—Yes, of course I’m sure!” Annabelle snapped. “She was all but pulsating with it! As soon as she’d left, the atmosphere was instantly cleared. I can still sense a very strong spiritual presence around her now! And it’s not pretty, David.”
Everyone was suddenly staring at me like I was something fascinating stuck to the bottom of a Petri dish.
“Professor, you’re not actually buying this, are you?” I asked, but couldn’t quite manage the proper tone of incredulity. My recent experiences were starting to give Annabelle’s words an eerie ring of truth.
“Well, I trust Annabelle, if that’s what you mean.” Pierce turned back to Annabelle, whose fiery hair was practically crackling with anger. “Annabelle, I know that strange things are happening with Jess. She does, too. That’s why she came to see me. That’s why we’ve been working together. There’s no point in running this investigation without her because she’s the reason we’re here.”
Annabelle’s eyes darted back and forth between me and Pierce, but she did not interrupt him.
“Now, if you don’t want to stay, that’s just fine. You can go, and I’m sorry if I’ve upset you. But it would be a big help to me if you stayed. Jess doesn’t understand her abilities yet, and I think you might be able to help; that you might even want to help, given what you’ve sensed about her.”
“Are you sure she’d accept the help of a fraud like me?” Annabelle sneered at me.
“I would think,” Pierce answered for me, “that she would accept the help of anyone who might be able to help her understand what’s happening to her.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but my supply of sarcasm and bitter retorts had dried up. A lot had changed since I’d first set eyes on Madame Rabinski and her battered tarot cards. Hell, my whole damn world had been turned upside down. And as much as I hated to admit it, my own personal experiences had become even less believable than any carnival trick. Did my old prejudices even make sense anymore? Could I really doubt Annabelle’s abilities after discovering my own? I felt myself deflate.
“You’re right, Professor,” I said quietly. I turned to Annabelle. “I’m sorry.”
Annabelle said nothing, but after a moment of tapping her foot and glaring, she took off her coat and threw it on a chair. “Well, who’s going to fill me in, then? Let’s get this show on the road.”
Oscar took this task on enthusiastically, launching into a description of everything they knew about Evan using Pierce’s familiar battered notebook. Iggy distracted me by requesting some data. He held up a couple of complex-looking gadgets.
“Will it hurt?” I asked
“Not unless you wrestle it away from him and beat yourself with it,” Dan said, not taking his eyes off his computer screens.
“Charming,” I muttered.
“Naw, they won’t even touch you. They only record the atmosphere around you,” Iggy promised.
He started running one of those EMF thingies up and down me like a security guard at an airport. His eyes widened as he stared at it and, with a low whistle he then recorded whatever it told him into a spreadsheet, noting the time and exact area of the building in which we were standing.
“What?” I asked nervously. “Is it bad?”
“You are a walking EMF magnet, kiddo. Off the charts,” Iggy said, looking at me like a long-anticipated Christmas gift. Then he picked up another item and held it up to show me.
“This is a thermal imaging camera. This part,” Iggy explained, holding out a device that looked like a little security camera with a handle, “is used to scan the room to measure temperatures of different objects. Then we can watch for temperature fluctuations here.” This time he showed me a little portable screen, black at the moment. “Watch this.”
He mashed a red button with his massive thumb and the screen flickered to life. It was one of the oddest images I’d ever seen. As Iggy panned the room with the little camera, the screen reflected it back, but in a crazy, psychedelic spectrum of colors.
“Trippy,” I said, watching the colors pulse and move.
“The colors represent the range of temperatures in the room,” Iggy said. “The blue end of the spectrum is cooler, and the temperature increases as the spectrum approaches red, which shows the hottest temperatures. People and other living things appear in red, because of the body heat, see? When we get an unexpected heat signature, we call that a hot spot.”
“And what does heat have to do with ghosts?” I asked.
“You’re in Pierce’s class, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, but he never mentioned anything about heat.”
“Sure, but I’ll bet he was yammerin’ on about energy,” Iggy said with another gap-toothed grin.
“Just a little,” I said.
“I don’t yammer, asshole!” Pierce shouted from across the room.
“Supersonic hearing, that one,” Neil muttered, rolling his oddly luminous eyes. I jumped at his voice; I hadn’t heard him approach us.
“Anyway,” Iggy plowed on, ignoring everyone else, “that means you’ve already heard the theory about spirits borrowing energy from their surroundings to manifest?”
“Yes.” Evan had taught me that much.
“Well, that energy can take many forms. Sometimes, it can be electrical energy, such as from wiring or batteries. Other times it can be thermal energy, or energy in the form of heat.” He tapped the glass of the screen again as he scanned the room and stopped on the strange colorful image of Dan sitting at command central. He appeared in red, which feathered to orange and yellow, as did many of the machines around him. “See? Living people have lots of thermal energy. So do electronics and lots of other things, besides. A spirit can sap that energy in order to show itself.”
I nodded my understanding, but suppressed a shiver. When I thought of the icy coldness of Evan’s touch, I couldn’t imagine heat having anythi
ng to do with it. I didn’t mention this to Iggy, however, and let him carry on with his thermal do-hickey.
Finally, our initial data was gathered and it was time to begin.
§
I could feel my nerves starting to jangle, like an out-of-tune piano some toddler was banging the hell out of. I gathered with the rest of the group, silhouetted in the slightly greenish glow of the night vision monitors. Pierce was reviewing everyone’s instructions.
“Okay, kids, here’s the deal. First of all, we need to remember that Jess has never done this before, so we need to explain everything, be explicit in our instructions, so she feels comfortable.”
Pierce nodded at me in a reassuring way. I smiled weakly.
“We’re splitting up into pairs so that no one is ever investigating alone. All pairs will keep in touch with one another using walkie-talkies. Don’t put it down anywhere, or you’ll be stuck without com and it will be harder to find you if you need … something,” Pierce edited. I was pretty sure he was going to say “help”.
Dan started tossing walkie-talkies around the circle. He did not throw one to me. Maybe he figured I wouldn’t be able to catch it.
Pierce deftly caught his radio and continued, “We’ll be covering as many floors of the library simultaneously as we can. Oscar and Neil, you take the basement. Iggy, you and Annabelle take the ground level starting in the main reading room. Jess and I will take the upper floor, including the stacks where the first sighting occurred. Dan will take the first shift at central command and watch the monitors. All suspicious hits, or anything Annabelle picks up on, should be radioed directly to me so we can get Jess over there as quickly as possible.”
For some reason, Annabelle glowered at me. Bristling, I glared right back at her. What the hell was that, some kind of medium jealousy? I bet she was usually the one they radioed for in these situations. Well, she was welcome to it. I opened my mouth to tell her so, but just as quickly as the expression had appeared, she neutralized it. She was now looking over at Pierce, who was addressing her.
“Annabelle, did Oscar go over the entire file on Evan Corbett?”
Annabelle nodded her mane regally.
“So, you know what you’re looking for?”
“Yes.”
“Great. And please remember everyone, we can’t rule out other spirit activity. This library is old and this is not the first reported sighting this campus has had, not by a long shot. Keep eyes and ears peeled and stay safe. Every group make sure to take along an audio recorder, thermal, and camcorder. Every team member should have a flashlight.”
Pierce handed a flashlight and the audio recorder to me. It was identical to the one he’d given me to test out EVPs in my dorm room, which reminded me that I still had the thing in my pocket.
“Oh, here, Professor. There’s some stuff for you to go through on this,” I told him, handing it over.
“Great! Do you think you got anything?” he asked, depositing it onto the tech table.
“I don’t know. I was asleep. My roommate took some initiative and played detective,” I admitted.
“Oh. I haven’t met this girl, but I think I like her!” he said. Then he turned back to the waiting team. “Okay, everyone, fan out. Dan, let’s go lights out.”
14
SHADOWS COME OUT TO PLAY
THE LIBRARY WAS PLUNGED INTO DARKNESS. I stayed where I was until my eyes began to adjust and the black receded to shades of grey, helped along by the dim light of the monitors. Flashlight beams cut swathes of visibility and bounced along as pairs headed toward their assigned locations. “Ready, Ballard?” Pierce asked. His voice was calm on the surface, but there was an undercurrent of excitement bubbling beneath it. “Ready as I’m gonna be,” I said as stoutly as I could. I was very glad to be paired up with him instead of someone I barely knew.
We walked slowly and carefully in the direction of the main staircase. The circulation desk looked particularly creepy as the flashlight beams rippled across it. I had an unexpected flash of childhood memory of the phantom librarian from an old VHS tape of the movie Ghostbusters that I’d watched until it wouldn’t rewind anymore, and had to suppress a slightly hysterical giggle. Luckily, Pierce didn’t notice. He had begun a thermal sweep, panning the camera back and forth across the path in front of us.
We ascended the staircase, the ancient wooden banister creaking ominously as we leaned on it. It was easy to see how people could get freaked out even in buildings devoid of ghosts. Shadows played tricks on our eyes, shapeshifting and darting in the wavering beams from our flashlights. Every little sound was enough to make me jump. I stayed just behind Pierce, letting him lead the way.
When we finally arrived in the wide, tiled hallway at the top of the stairs, Pierce stopped so abruptly that I almost walked right into him. He swept the entire area slowly from right to left with the thermal camera, and then holstered it onto his belt. He pulled out an EMF detector identical to the one Iggy had used on me. He turned and pointed it at me like I was some TV program he wanted to mute. A slow grin spread over his face.
“Iggy’s right, you are an EMF factory!”
“You sure know how to flatter a girl.”
“Sorry, couldn’t resist,” Pierce said, and turned away from me. “Do me a favor and stay at the top of the stairs, would you? You’ll contaminate my field.”
“Right,” I said, trying not to be offended.
“And if you, y’know, sense anything or see anything, just let me know,” Pierce added.
“Yeah, about that. Is there something special I should be doing?”
Pierce turned back around. “Just do what you did in class with the doll and the other objects we tested. Just try to clear your mind and be receptive. If there’s anything here, it’s likely to come to you.”
I stood in my assigned location and tried to clear my mind, but it wasn’t easy to do with Pierce creeping around like a cat-burglar. It was much more interesting to watch him at work, so that’s what I did. When he had walked the entire perimeter of the space and returned to where I was standing, he pocketed the EMF detector and sighed.
“It’s reading pretty flat right now. Why don’t we try an EVP session?”
I pulled the recorder from its spot, safely wedged in my back pocket. I held it out for Pierce to take, but he shook his head.
“Why don’t you take lead on this, Ballard? Just remember to slate the day, time, location, and team members present before you start.”
“Okay,” I replied uneasily. I’d heard the slating done on the other recordings we’d heard in class. I knew it was done to help organize and pinpoint activity. I was pretty sure I could handle that much.
I walked to the middle of the room and plopped down on the area rug. Setting the recorder on the ground in front of me, I pressed the record button and watched the little red light flash to life.
I took a deep breath. “Investigation of the Culver Library, March twenty-ninth. Location is the second floor, foyer. Dr. David Pierce and Jessica Ballard investigating. It is eleven-oh-seven pm. EVP session starting now.” I looked over at Pierce and he smiled approvingly.
After a brief pause I asked, “What is your name?”
My voice echoed a little against the austere wainscoting and vaulted ceiling. I waited a few seconds to allow for a response, just like Pierce had taught us.
“How long have you been here?”
Silence.
I reminded myself that it was to be expected; the very nature of an EVP meant that we wouldn’t hear it until we played back the tape. Still, I felt a little silly as I continued.
“How did you die?”
I listened intently. And then, a small cold breeze brushed the back of my neck. Gasping, I whipped my head around and stared into the blackness. I couldn’t see anything.
“Ballard, what happened? Did you hear something?” Pierce hissed.
“No, I … it was just a draft, I think,” I said. But no draft had ever made my heart l
eap into my throat like that. I clutched the back of my neck protectively with my hand. The hairs were raised and the skin was covered with goosebumps.
“Do you need me to come over there?”
“No, I’m okay,” I said, and I was. My fear, surprisingly, had given way to curiosity. Had that been a draft, or something else?
Collecting myself, I asked my next question. “Did you just breathe on the back of my neck?”
Nothing happened.
“Why are you still here?”
My question was followed by what was unmistakably a derisive laugh, silvery and clear, from just behind me. This time, I tried not to move, though my instincts were screaming at me to run. Pierce, who had not responded, obviously heard nothing. I couldn’t tell if I recognized the voice. Could it possibly be Evan? I didn’t think so. I took a deep steadying breath and said quietly to Pierce, “Have you got the camera?”
“Yeah. You want it?”
“No. Just do me a favor and take some pictures right now. Concentrate on the area behind me.”
I kept my eyes trained on the opposite wall, and sat very still. Trying to keep my voice from trembling, I asked, “Evan? Is that you?”
Another laugh, louder this time.
I frowned with concentration. This didn’t feel right, it didn’t sound like him. I kept my tone light. “Did I say something funny?”
Only the frantic clicking of the camera broke the silence. I could feel the air behind me growing colder by the second, as though I were standing with my back to an open freezer. My whole body grew chilled.
“Pierce, use the thermal!” I said. I heard Pierce fumbling to unholster the thermal camera, heard the beeping that meant it was turning on.
“Holy shit,” Pierce whispered. “Ballard, don’t move. It’s right behind you.”
“I know,” I hissed back. My breath formed a little puff of steam in front of me.