by J. Thorn
Corey saw the look in Singleton’s face after each session and he knew the doctor knew. The “memories” as Corey decided to call them, were becoming more visceral. They came from the past and from the future and each one left him exhausted and starved for an explanation.
He began to feel more of Dr. Singleton in each session. The man could not hide his past from Corey and the information came to him in slow pulses.
Corey learned Dr. George Singleton’s quest began by studying Pythagoras. George was an inquisitive teenager, scouring libraries and looking for information on the mysterious ancient Greek. Much of what was known about Pythagoras was written hundreds of years after he died, leading to an almost cult-like following.
Singleton discovered Pythagoras believed in reincarnation, the cycle of the soul leading to immorality. He claimed to have lived four previous lives, one as a beautiful, wealthy woman. Pythagoras claimed to have heard the voice of his dead friend in the bark of a dog. Aristotle believed Pythagoras discovered how to travel through time and space, as well as how to communicate with animals. One story from antiquity claims Pythagoras could write on the surface of the moon.
That idea led Singleton to another story, the Pythagorean Brotherhood. This was a secret society devoted to the study of mathematics. They left volumes of equations, each one with esoteric language and cryptic symbols that Pythagoreans had studied for thousands of years.
Corey knew Dr. Singleton traveled to Egypt and spent time camped at the base of the great pyramids, conferring with local shamans about the power of the structures. Singleton studied the pyramids and their mathematical implications, taking his theories beyond the “pyramids as star charts” theories and into the realm originally explored by Pythagoras.
In their sessions, Corey could feel Singleton’s dark ambitions. While Pythagoras could write on the moon, Singleton wanted to explore the inverse power of that claim. He wanted to use the inherent power of physics to bring entities to Earth. Dr. Singleton believed it was possible to summon souls from the distant realms of space and across time. He wanted to open the portal again.
Corey kept this to himself and did not let Dr. Singleton know he knew of the man’s past. But on some level, Corey believed the doctor sensed his powers. And all the while, Corey sensed the illness growing inside of his father.
It wasn’t until a few weeks after a shopping trip with his grandmother when Corey suspected his dad was sick. He didn’t have prostate cancer or torn ligaments in his ACL. Corey thought his father might be sick in a different way. During one of the memories that took place inside of a dream, Corey heard bits of conversation between his dad and Pappy Fred. His grandfather was warning his dad, trying to explain to him the danger in a particular path and yet his father heard only what he wanted to hear. Hank heard the possibility and not the risk or the consequence. Fred told Hank a story that had to do with opening a door to another world and creatures coming through it.
In the same way Corey heard colors, he felt the dangerous vibrations of that conversation. What his dad wanted was not only wrong, it was profane. Disgusting. Corey couldn’t tell exactly what it was, but he felt his grandfather’s concern inside of their conversation.
Corey rolled over and faced the wall separating his room from his father’s and he sensed fear. In that silent moment in the middle of the night, alone in his bed and knowing his father’s thoughts were but a room away, Corey identified it for the first time. The center of the anguish, the question around morality and righteousness and all things holy. Those thoughts inside of his father’s head hit Corey with almost as much force as the lightning bolt. The dilemma eating his father’s soul from the inside out had a name and it was one Corey recognized.
Michelle.
Corey shivered and pulled the covers up over his head.
He can’t let Mom go.
Chapter 23
Hank heard the floor creak and hoped Corey was not having nightmares. He stared at the ceiling with his hands beneath his head and underneath the pillow. The wooden floorboards of the house cracked and popped as the seasons changed. He knew the sounds were normal in an old house, but he couldn’t shake the feeling something was more sinister about them, something hidden and now rising to the surface.
He grew increasingly focused in the past few weeks. The conversation with Fred left him shaken but also driven. He felt a purpose that was missing since Michelle’s death, but he couldn’t quite allow himself to go all in. Fred shared the story as a warning, but Hank interpreted it as a possibility.
“This is fucking nuts,” he said to himself.
Hank glanced at the clock on his dresser. It was almost three in the morning, the vacant real estate between night and day. He got out of bed and felt his neck crack. Hank stretched and yawned although sleep was not coming to him this night. He placed a hand on the glass door knob and spun it, the knob feeling like a dry snowball in his hand. Hank stuck his head into the hallway where a single nightlight cast a feeble ray on the floor. His eyes adjusted to the darkness and even the low power LED bulb made him squint.
He continued down the hallway past Corey’s room and stopped in front of another bedroom, the one where Michelle spent most of her childhood. The one the Siszak’s left as a shrine to their dead daughter.
Nothing good will come of this.
Before Hank could react to his thoughts, he stepped into the bedroom and shut the door. He turned the lock and stood in silence. He had been in this room before but never in the middle of the night. Hank saw a stack of stuffed animals on a single bed, the black plastic eyes reflecting the light coming through the blinds from the street. The air held a strange mixture of odors, mold and dust with a hint of rose shampoo and fingernail polish. George and Martha left the room as Michelle had when she went to college. Although she was a young woman by that time, Michelle kept many of her childhood belongings cluttering the room. Hank saw scraps of papers with phone numbers tacked to a cork board next to drawings of bunny rabbits and elephants made by the hand of a nine-year old girl. He looked to the opposite wall and shivered, his heart skipping a beat. But then Hank exhaled, realizing it was his own reflection in a full-length mirror and not a silent intruder mimicking his movements. He took a step closer and looked.
A grizzled, middle-aged man looked back. His lustrous hair was now greasy and clinging in strands to pasty skin. The stylish goatee grew over the line of his jaw until the salt and pepper stubble disappeared behind his ears. Hank’s eyes looked back, tiny orbs of sadness above bags blackened by sorrow and exhaustion. Hank wasn’t sure it was his reflection until he brought a hand to his forehead and the reflection did as well.
“Why the fuck did you leave me, Michelle? Corey deserves a mother and I can’t be that. I especially can’t do it with this guilt. It's eating me from the inside out. No matter how many times I think of you, I can’t take back those words.”
“Maybe you can.”
Hank froze, unsure if he said them or if they formed inside of his head. When he looked at his reflection, he saw Michelle instead.
“Is that you?” he asked.
The figure staring back at him from the other side of the mirror nodded. The woman’s hair was jagged and short, as Michelle’s had been when she was killed. She wore the same dark, long dress as the day they put her in the casket. Hank could see the opposite wall through her as if the mirror was not showing a true representation of a reflection. Michelle appeared translucent inside of it, like frosted glass.
“Yes, Hank.”
“Michelle, I’m so sorry... Is it really you?”
“How are you?”
Hank placed a hand to the mirror, but the reflection did not do the same. Even though the room appeared behind Michelle, the mirror was more like a window now.
“I’m hurting.”
“I know,” she said. “How is Corey?”
The sound of his name made Hank wince and he fought off tears.
“He’s coping. It's hard to tell wh
ether the lightning bolt or your death has fucked him up more.”
He sighed and continued.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make it sound like your fault that you, you—”
“Died?”
“Yes.”
“What do you miss the most?” she asked.
“Your touch. Our family dinners. God, Michelle. I miss you so much.”
“I miss you too, Hank.”
He wiped a tear from his face. While standing in a dark room, Hank was unable to see her face. He couldn’t detect the flat, emotionless expression betraying her words.
“We can be together again. Me, you, Corey. All of us.”
“Someday,” he said. Hank’s mind had yet to reach the place where she was leading him.
“No, I don’t mean in Heaven or some other version of the afterlife. I mean here. Here again as a family—the way we were before the car accident.”
Hank shook his head and crossed his arms.
“This is a cruel dream that will leave me bitter and exhausted in the morning.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” she said. “I know what to do. And I think you do, too.”
Hank sighed. He considered turning around and leaving the room, but feared what he would see if he looked into another mirror. If Michelle’s ghost, her spirit, was able to appear in this manner, he would not be able to hide from it.
“Go on,” he said, the words feeling like splinters in his throat.
“You can bring me back. My father can help you. We can be a family again.”
“That’s not possible. They turn into these demons called Gakis. They have to be put down.”
“Not always,” she said.
“Do I need to bring you a spreadsheet of probabilities?” Hank asked. The little joke helped to slow his tears. “I am a mathematician you know.”
The ghostly projection of Hank’s dead wife smiled at him. “Not every spirit summoned turns into that. Some remain as they were prior to the summoning, prior to death.”
“It's not natural, Michelle. No matter how much this hurts, it's natural. It's supposed to be painful.”
“That’s what people thought when they used leaches for brain surgery. Pain can be managed, physical and emotional.”
Hank sighed and closed his eyes. When he opened them, the vision was still there.
“Think of your son,” she said. “Our son.”
“How exactly do we go back to being a normal family after this, assuming I could pull it off? How does that work?”
“We’ll figure it out together, like we always did. Like soulmates do.”
Michelle’s figure crept closer to the surface of the mirror, her body floated forward until it occupied the entire opening. She put a palm up to the glass and looked at Hank beneath her scraggly bangs. He raised a hand and put it on the mirror against her palm on the other side. An electrical pulse, like a jolt from a live wire, shot through his fingers, up his arm and into his shoulder.
“Summon me. We can be a family again.”
“I’ll try,” he said through choking sobs. “I’ll try.”
Hank closed his eyes. He did not see the blank, black marbles that replaced Michelle’s eyes. He couldn’t see the sneer spreading across her face.
When Hank opened his eyes, he was staring back at his own face, his right palm pressing against the reflection of his right palm. He glanced around the room and decided it was time to get back to bed before he spoke to another figment of his imagination.
Chapter 24
Hank couldn’t find much in the official history of the Warner and Swasey Observatory. A quick internet search returned the usual dry facts.
The telescope was built in 1919 by Worchester R. Warner and Ambrose Sweeney, the owners of the Warner and Swasey Company, who made telescopes. The owners eventually served as trustees for the Case School of Applied Science. The university commissioned the firm of Walker and Weeks to build in East Cleveland on Taylor Road. It housed a 24-inch Burrell Schmidt telescope that would eventually be relocated to Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.
By 1950, Case Western Reserve University realized increasing light pollution from the city of Cleveland was making it impossible for accurate observations and research. In 1980, the last telescope was relocated and the observatory was sold in 1983. After several bankruptcies and foreclosures, the Warner and Swasey Observatory was abandoned. It sits in disrepair today and is often the site of vandalism, drug dealing and other illicit activities.
Hank cracked his knuckles and looked around Noble Library through bloodshot eyes. Other than a few patrons and one woman behind the circulation desk, the place was empty. Hank didn’t think many people came to the library late on a Tuesday night deep inside of October.
Fred was on him about helping with the leaf collection in the backyard and he couldn’t remember the last time he sat and had a conversation with Corey. Hank still could not be certain whether Michelle spoke to him through the mirror or in a dream. His mind continued to churn, sometimes the mental energy spilling over into an evening spent alone at the library.
Hank remembered the text he entered into the search bar a few months ago and typed it again. The same result came back and this time Hank decided to read the article.
The Warner and Swasey Observatory: Portal to the Land of the Dead? What the mainstream media won’t tell you is happening in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
Based on the grammar and punctuation, Hank guessed the blogger was most likely a teenager who spent too much time watching old horror movies. He skimmed through the first part of the post about the excitement around the next Comic Con and Goth gathering before his eyes caught something of interest.
The first murder took place in 1984. Just like Orwell, right? Heights police covered it up, said there was some gang shooting on the street but that’s not what some of the people living on Taylor Road said. They said a private party was inside the observatory, and not kids drinking or nothing like that. We interviewed one guy and this is what he said:
“Saw a bunch of folks going in there. Most had their heads covered but I couldn’t tell if they was robes or not. Probably some Satanists if you ask me. Being near Halloween and kinda a cool night, I didn’t think nothing of it. I mentioned it to my wife and she told me to stop bein’ such a Nosy Nellie. She’s always nagging at me about looking out the window and nebbing in other people’s business. Isn’t that what the neighborhood watch is supposed to do?
“The darker it got, the easier it was to tell they had candles in there and again I suspected Satan or witchcraft, maybe. I wouldn’ta been surprised to hear some of that heavy metal music coming out, too. About an hour passed and that’s when things got weird. I saw a flash inside, like someone was taking pictures, but it was too bright to be a camera. There was this rumbling too, felt like someone started a chainsaw and left it idling on my living room floor. I coulda sworn I heard screams coming from inside and I was about to call the cops when it all stopped.
“My wife, she said I best mind my own business and she went to bed, but I kept watching. Seen two guys come out of the front door and a few more followed. The ones coming out last looked like they was carrying a stretcher but it had something over it. I could see an arm dangling from underneath and when they turned to go down the hill toward Lake View Cemetery, I seen it clear as a bell. Wasn’t no human arm. It was long, thin and kinda blue. Mighta even been an alien they had killed in there.
“The next morning I seen the murder on the news, something about a gang fight. I told my wife they got it all wrong. There was something else happening in that observatory and it didn’t have nothing to do with drugs or gangs.”
Just another government conspiracy, I’m sure. The guy who we interviewed said he didn’t want to be identified but that what he said was 100 percent true. And this is just the first record we have of paranormal activity in the old observatory.
Hank scrolled through a few inline advertisements and
hit the next link to turn the virtual page. He picked up where the article left off.
Through most of the 1990s and into the 2000s, residents of Cleveland Heights have been reporting occurrences at the old, abandoned observatory. Reports of strange lights and people moving through the grounds and toward the cemetery fueled the mystery. In 2010, one gentleman was out walking his dog when he saw flashes of light coming from inside. He was able to get some grainy cell phone pics, but it's enough to convince us something else is going on in there. Could it be witchcraft? Devil worship? A government conspiracy? We don’t know. What we do know is the police and leadership in Cleveland Heights are not telling us everything.
Something is happening at the Warner and Swasey Observatory and whatever is happening is also spilling into Lake View Cemetery. We’ll be posting more here as things come to light. Make sure you use our contact page if you have any information about the observatory or the cemetery. We’d love to hear from you.
The bottom of the page was filled with ads for tarot cards and candles. Hank closed the window and leaned back in his chair. He looked around the room and only the librarian at the circulation desk looked back. She glanced up at the clock on the wall and then back to Hank. Even though she couldn’t hear him from across the room, he spoke.
“All right, all right. Librarians are so damn fussy.”
He stood and walked toward the front door where leaves battered the glass like a silent battalion. The street lights cast an orange glow on the parking lot, Hank’s truck the lone vehicle parked in the middle of the asphalt slab.
“Have a good evening,” he said to the librarian as he approached.
“For your future reference, sir. We close at nine-thirty.”
“Thank you,” he said.
The librarian rolled her eyes and followed him to the door.
She turned the lock and looked at him through the glass with a tired smile.