He nodded, inhaled. “I...I heard a girl. She said my name.”
“Your name?”
He nodded. I was about to make a crack about the ghost maybe saying it in Latin, in English, or in Martian, but I knew enough to hold my tongue.
Stevens was looking at my wife. His eyes searched her face. She radiated calm and strength and he latched onto it. Ignoring me, which was smart.
“Tell me about it,” Ellen said.
He did. He had been in this very office two nights before, working late. He had heard voices outside his office door and assumed it was the janitorial staff. But the voices didn’t go away. And then he heard a scream. Loud and piercing, and right outside his door.
He had jumped and rushed to the door, and was dismayed to discover that he was alone in the hallway. And that’s when he recalled all those reports of disembodied voices.
“You said you heard your name,” I said.
He flicked his eyes toward me. There was sweat on his face. “Yes. As I was standing in the hallway, I was aware that the temperature was rapidly dropping. As if the air conditioning had been turned on full blast.”
I had heard many stories of hauntings. I had been a private investigator for a dozen years, a business built on lies but one where the paychecks came through facts. The paranormal investigations evolved after meeting my wife. She was psychic, spiritual, metaphysical, you name it. She told me she saw things, heard things, sensed things, and I believed her.
I believed her because my wife was not a liar, not just because I was in love with her. It’s just that I never saw anything. And the president’s story was a fairly common one, but I was not prepared for what came next.
“I lied,” he said. “It was more than a voice.”
“I know,” said my wife. “Tell us what you saw.”
His hands were shaking and my wife let go of his wrist and took both his hands in her own. Tears filled the corner of his eyes. Sweat slipped down his cheek. His face was vermillion.
“I was unnerved. Scared. I thought I was losing my mind. Hell, I still think so.”
“She was in this room,” said my wife.
The president nodded, mouth open, awed. “Yes, she was. How do you know?”
“Because she’s here now.”
Chapter Three
“I hate it when you do that,” I said.
Dr. Stevens jerked his hands from my wife’s grip and snapped alert, and I could have sworn some of his graying hair also raised in alarm. “Is she kidding?”
“No,” I said. “My wife doesn’t kid about ghosts.”
Ellen stood slowly. One of her knees popped. Middle age is hell, old age will probably be worse, and after that...well, we’ll all find out when we get there.
Ellen sidestepped to the left, her gaze fixed firmly in one shadowy corner of the president’s office occupied by a bookshelf, a floor lamp, and an old unlocked briefcase.
“Who’s here?” Stevens asked. He was watching my wife between nervous blinks. He had also pushed his chair back, in the opposite direction from the far corner of the room. I don’t think he noticed he had done so, although his chair gave another little fart. His forehead was creased in a frown.
“A girl,” said my wife. She moved very slowly, so as not to disturb the atmosphere.
Step. Pause. She eased around the desk.
I stared into the corner of the room and saw nothing except what was there. Damn my wife and her paranormal gifts. Still, I knew my job, and I went ahead and removed the digital Elph from the inside of my coat pocket and snapped ten pictures before my wife made it to the edge of the desk. Some purists believe only silver emulsion on film can detect supernatural substance, but most modern paranormal investigators go for convenience.
But I left the flash off, because most of the orbs that got amateurs so hot and bothered were the result of dust or lens flare.
Stevens looked from Ellen to the corner of the room, then back to my wife. Then the corner of the room. There his eyes stayed. He also now sensed something was up, and he had the awareness to hold his breath.
Ellen reached out a hand and I took another picture. She rolled her fingers gently in the air is if playing in smoke.
“It’s okay,” Ellen whispered soothingly, as if coaxing an injured dog from beneath the porch. “We’re not going to hurt you.”
I didn’t want to rummage in my canvas sack and cause a commotion, so I left the EMF, spot thermometer, and the FLIR thermal imager alone. We also had an infrared video camera and night-vision goggles packed away, stuff we’d have deployed if we’d had time to set up. But sometimes ghosts don’t care about making a big production out of their dance across the stage.
Ellen knelt, which led me to assume the ghost was small or else cowering in the corner. Or maybe it was standing waist-deep in the floor. None of the rules really applied, one of the things that bugged the hell out of me about this line of work.
“What’s your name?” my wife asked.
I glanced at the audio recorder to make sure it was still running. We’ve had times when it clicked off and on by itself, though we kept all the equipment regularly tested by our buddy Frankie, an MIT drop-out who had a genius-level I.Q. but was more interested in flower gardening. Frankie had the hots for my wife, which wasn’t unusual, except Frankie’s chances were lower than average since my wife didn’t swing both ways.
Stevens finally took a gulp of air, and it almost sounded like a hiccup. If we’d been expecting an encounter, as with some of those legendary ghosts who kept to a certain schedule, then we could have trained Stevens on the basics of social interaction with the dead. As it was, we just had to hope he’d keep his cool.
“It’s okay, honey,” Ellen said, still stroking the air. “Don’t be afraid.”
Like we were the scary ones. But maybe we were as unnatural to them, peering back into this hard world with our sharp edges and pain, as they were to us. Such thinking bled over into the realm of brandy by the fireside, though, and philosophy alone had never trapped a ghost in a glass jar.
“Who is it?” Stevens hissed a whisper, as if his courage were leaking.
Ellen frowned but continued with her gentle gestures, keeping a deliberate poise. “Sophia? Are you Sophia?”
“Goddamn!” Stevens exploded from his chair, sending it squealing backward to slam against the wall. A couple of his diplomas clattered to the floor, glass breaking in one of them. Stevens crunched the glass underfoot as he bolted for the door.
I took one last photograph as all hell broke loose, though my hand was moving so any image would likely be blurred. Those blurry images worked for amateurs, but to me they were just a waste of electrons.
Chapter Four
“That didn’t go so well,” I said.
Ellen scanned the room before letting out a sigh. “People shouldn’t cuss in a sacred institution.”
“All clear?”
“Deader than Bob Dole’s babymaker.”
“I don’t think that’s the kind of thing that should be uttered in a sacred institution, either.”
“She was here,” Ellen said, frustrated. “And I think I could have contacted her.”
“Dr. Stevens is a normie. Have a little compassion.”
“You’re lecturing me on compassion, Monty?”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “Consider this a bonus encounter. Let’s wrap this scene and start from scratch.”
Ellen closed her eyes and spoke in that spooky but slightly sexy monotone. “Subject appeared to be female, adolescent, maybe 10 or 11, wearing a Victorian-era frock with a pleated collar and ribbon-fringed bonnet, knee stockings, and buckled leather shoes. I received the impression of the name ‘Sophia,’ though no audible sound was detected. The encounter lasted approximately—”
I glanced at my watch. “Sixty-seven seconds.”
“—sixty-seven seconds before interruption by Dr. Stevens loudly vacating the premises. Noises near end of recording were made by his exit.
End recording, 9:26 p.m., February 11.”
I clicked off the Sony and joined Ellen near the corner of the room. “All those impressions just in that little bit of time?”
“A minute to us, but who knows how long it might have been for her? We have no idea how they perceive time, space, or consciousness.”
I shivered a little despite the warmth of the room. We among the living like to comfort ourselves with Earthly notions of the afterlife, with time just rolling along, ever forward, as we pluck harps and eat grapes and kiss the feet of the deity of our choice. We’re not as comfortable with the notion that maybe time can move backwards, or sideways, or maybe even not at all.
Suppose you got stuck somewhere in the past, in one of those terrible moments you were so glad was finally over? What if your soul got caught in a little loop, and there you were for all eternity, walking in on your cheating spouse, or hearing that cancer diagnosis, or watching the flames crawl toward you as the smoke filled your lungs?
Ellen knew how to scare me more than anything on Earth. She made up for it in other ways, though. One thing was for sure, I’d never die of boredom as long as she was around.
I flipped through the viewer on the camera, checking the thumbnails. They revealed nothing but Ellen and a dim corner, but we’d give them a closer inspection at home.
“I didn’t hear anything except the good doctor’s hundred-decibel freak-out,” I said. “Where did you get the name ‘Sophia’?”
“An impression, like everything else.”
Except you couldn’t jot that down in any science journal. Like the sixth sense, telepathy was just one of those things you accepted on faith. Unless you were on a shrink’s couch, in which case they called it “schizophrenia.” Ellen and I disagreed on several important principles, but staying away from shrinks was one we shared with equal enthusiasm.
“Should we set up the gear and hold a stakeout?” I asked.
She shook her head, her shoulder-length brown hair brushing fetchingly across her shoulders. “No, I think it’s a dead zone now. Dr. Stevens caused enough of a disturbance to spook every spirit within a hundred miles.”
“Are we done for the night?” I said, imagining a cozy book in bed, followed by other things.
“We’ve driven all this way, so we may as well scout out the place for future reference.”
I was afraid she’d say that, but it also made sense. Paranormal investigators, like urban explorers, Arctic sled-dog racers, and tornado chasers, knew the dangers of heading into uncharted territory.
We’d Googled up a map of the university’s floor design, including the original footprint of the old Spanish mission that had served as the original seminary. We didn’t find any records of how the property had changed hands from Catholics to non-denominational Christians, but that wasn’t unusual, since old deeds used landmarks such as oak trees and fence lines that had long been erased, and the few lawyers of the era had tricked up everything to suit themselves. We’d discovered an account of a late-1880’s earthquake that had leveled a portion of the existing structure, but that could be said of many places near the San Andreas fault.
By the time we’d packed up and scribbled our field notes in my little pocket notebook, it was after ten and the night classes had ended. We saw a couple of departing students but decided against questioning them. It would be disrespectful to stir up panic or incite ridicule. We were here by request of Dr. Stevens, and decorum required that we treat him with consideration as our host. And the guy who signed the check.
Even if he was a chicken-livered coward.
The hallways branched off in several directions, and the compact campus held two residence halls, a small recreation center, the obligatory meeting pavilion, and an angled, stained-glass entrance that gave it the aspect of a church. The bulletin boards were crammed with flyers offering service work and mission trips, and apparently the university practiced what it preached.
The buildings were fairly contemporary, so there was little of the crumbling masonry, cobwebs, and wall sconces you’d expect in your average Edgar Allan Poe tale. But ghosts tended to stick with the layouts and geography of their era, which is why they often hung around their old stomping grounds even if, say, those grounds were now high-rise buildings or toxic waste dumps.
“Doesn’t look so spooky now,” I said.
“What were you expecting, some hooded guy chanting backwards Latin while burning a black candle?”
“That would have made the job easier. Then we’d know we have a prankster on our hands.”
One of our early cases had involved an allegedly haunted hotel. While the owner had welcomed the attendant publicity and figured our investigation would boost the hotel’s reputation, we ended up catching a bellboy who moved around objects in people’s locked rooms and had a few of the staff bellowing strange moans into the elevator shaft. Once we’d published our results, the hotel went back to its prior marketing platform of clean rooms at affordable prices.
“So you got a Victorian read on this Sophia of yours?”
“Judging from the fashions.”
“Okay, so she’s been dead, what, a century-and-a-half?”
“Give or take.”
“I thought this area was owned by Mexico back then.”
“In the mid-eighteenth century, California was turned over to the United States. Don’t you remember your California history from the fifth grade?”
“Not a word of it,” I said. “Except ‘Remember the Alamo.’”
She shook her head. “The land was, let’s say, redistributed to some wealthy real estate tycoons. The mission, prior to being abandoned, had been turned into an orphanage and school.”
“Could Sophia be a dead student?”
“Maybe. It’s too soon to tell.”
We came to an exit that led to a grassy commons, laid out with a circular path of bricks and landscaped shrubs. The two dorms were segregated by gender, as one would expect from a respectable Christian institution. We hadn’t secured permission for entry, and there were plenty enough mysteries behind those lighted rectangles, so we left the students alone for now.
Upon our return to the administrative wing, we found a man swabbing the floor, whistling “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas and slow-dancing with his mop. We were nearly upon him when he noticed us, and he pointed to the yellow folding sign that said “Caution Wet Floor.”
I mimed lifting away earphones and he got the message, turning off his iPod. “You people lost? Classes are over,” he said.
He was thirtyish, with dark circles under his eyes, one of those greasy-haired people who looked like they’d taken a hard left turn at “Opportunity.”
“We’re checking into reports of people hearing voices,” Ellen said.
He let his eyes crawl over her figure like a putrid tongue before answering. “You guys cops? ‘Cause you guys don’t look like no cops. Especially you.”
“We’re investigators,” I said, demanding his attention before he got really disgusting. I didn’t have any problem kicking his ass if I had to. I used to box back in my teens, part of my tough-guy training, and slugging assholes had been a favorite pastime of mine.
“Okay, cool it, dude. I get it. You’re a badass.”
I ignored him; mostly, because it was true. “Dr. Stevens said people say they’re hearing voices, and either we have an intruder, some people making stuff up, or something we can’t explain yet.”
“We don’t got no intruders,” he said. “Nothing’s getting stole around here.”
“Have you heard the voices?” Ellen asked. “Making strange sounds that are almost words but not quite?”
The lack of accusation in her voice must have swung him over, or maybe he wanted to ogle her a little more. Maybe he was tired of loving on his mop. “Yeah, all this ‘ess-kwat ooh-num’ stuff. Sounds like a man’s voice, yelling out, like a hip-hop preacher or something.”
“How often do you hear these voices?”
“Sure, things are tough out there,” I said, trying to be friendly, though I couldn’t fake it as well as Ellen.
“Has anything else unusual happened?” Ellen asked. “Do you ever feel the temperature suddenly change, or like someone has touched you when you’re alone?”
He narrowed his eyes. “Hey, I get it. Like ‘T.A.P.S.’ on TV, right? Ghost hunters!”
I launched into my spiel. “We’re not ghost hunters—”
“Yeah,” Ellen interrupted. “Ghost hunters.”
He looked around as if to make sure no superiors were around. “Well, sometimes I’ve seen stuff out of the corner of my eye, or I’ll be sweeping at three in the morning and get this weird feeling somebody’s watching me.”
I had a weird feeling that his weird feeling came from illicit substances, but Ellen was making plenty of headway without my input, so I let her work.
“Have you ever heard a young girl’s voice?” she asked.
He looked like he was considering a lie, but eventually said, “Nah. Just the preacher dude. Or maybe he’s an old teacher. Hard to tell. All them sounds are so creepy, I started wearing my headphones at night. I don’t hear nothing much lately but my tunes.”
“Thanks,” Ellen said.
I handed the guy a business card before we walked away. “In case you think of anything else.”
“Hey,” he yelled after us. “Don’t I get to be on TV?”
Chapter Five
We were at the Denny’s across the street when I got a phone call from Dr. Stevens. He apologized for his royal freak-out and went on to tell me that something had come over him. Some deep and primal fear had seized him and the next thing he knew he was standing in the parking lot, clutching his chest, gasping for air, certain he was going to have a heart attack. Now he felt like an idiot and just wanted to get the hell out of there.
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