by Hunter Shea
It had been a couple of weeks since the incident in her closet, but Selena couldn’t shake her fear and Rita’s concern grew worse and worse. Selena had barely been sleeping, and it was taking its toll on her. She looked like someone who had narrowly survived a terrible accident and couldn’t recover from the horror she’d seen. She spent her days in a silent fog, unable to even enjoy any time spent out of the house, too terrified to sleep.
Rita remembered the small prescription she had gotten a year ago when she herself went through a bout of insomnia, though for a very different reason. It took a lot of convincing to get Selena to take the sleeping pill, but she relented when Rita said, “Honey, if you take this, you’ll sleep through the night no matter what happens. Remember when you were little and so afraid of the wind that you would make yourself fall asleep early on nights when we had a big storm coming? You’ll also feel a lot better in the morning once you’ve had a good night’s sleep in you.”
My poor angel, what can I say or do to make this all go away? Rita thought as she closed the door.
She was certain there was a ghost in the house, unlike Greg, even though he had seen the thing that looked like Selena. What she couldn’t understand was why now? They had lived in this house since Selena was born and nothing strange had ever happened. What triggered this thing that had insinuated itself into their lives like a cancer cell? And what would it take to convince Greg that this was real?
Rita, and her whole family for that matter, had grown up believing in ghosts. Both of her parents claimed to have seen at least one in their lives—her mother coming across the see-through phantom of a woman wearing an old frock in the basement of a hotel where she was working as a maid the summer after her senior year in high school, and her father claiming that the spirit of his grandmother had visited him in his bed on three separate occasions, all preceding major events in his life. She wished they were alive to talk to because she needed a sympathetic ear. With each passing day without a sighting, a blessing in itself, Greg became more and more convinced that it was just their imaginations, nothing more.
Greg was out playing pool with Joey Pinto tonight. They met once a month and alternated between pool and bowling. She was pissed off that he could just go out with his buddy when everyone else in the house was walking on eggshells, jumping at every odd noise.
She put a kettle of water on to make tea and sat at the kitchen table, staring into the well-lit living room. Almost every light was on in the house, and it would stay that way until it was time to go up to bed. She jumped out of her chair when, a few minutes later, the kettle started to whistle.
With shaking hands, she poured the hot water into her cup, wondering if she should take a sleeping pill herself.
Jessica walked groggily into the kitchen. Her hair was a Medusa’s nest and she was still in the Anthrax shirt she had worn at the McCammons’ house the night before. Liam was devouring a bowl of cereal and chugging orange juice from the carton. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, breakfast in the Backman/Powers house.
“If your mom catches you doing that, you’re dead,” she warned him as she poured coffee grounds into the coffee maker’s filter.
“Mom’s out food shopping. Have a rough night with your new boyfriend?”
A Cheerio ring popped out of his mouth when he grinned.
“You’re lucky I’m too tired to wipe the floor with you.”
She put two slices of bread in the toaster and laid three strips of bacon on a plate and popped it in the microwave. Tim and Kristen and the kids had all arrived at their home a little before ten o’clock. Jessica had called them ahead of time and told them it was all over. There were hugs all around and Kristen even shed a few tears. Eddie’s shoulder nearly popped out of its socket when Tim couldn’t stop shaking his hand, pumping his arm as if he were drawing water from a well.
“I can feel that it’s gone, you know?” Kristen had said. “The house feels…empty. I don’t know how to describe it.”
“It’s full again, now that your family is here and happy,” Jess had said.
After declining money for her services, and Tim had offered a considerable amount, she and Eddie got into their Jeeps and headed to their separate homes, with a promise to be in touch in a couple of days. They both needed time to recover.
And now, the day after banishing the meanest poltergeist-like EB one could come across, she was back to sparring with Liam. It was funny. No matter how great or strange your accomplishments, life carried on. In a way, it was comforting.
She said to Liam, “By the way, what makes you think I was with a guy?”
“I’m not deaf. I do hear you and Mom talk. So, how did things work out? Is he what he says he is?”
Jessica sipped her coffee, black, no sugar, and replied, “I’m amazed to say it, but yes, he does have some ability. It really came in handy.”
That ability probably saved my life, she thought.
“It figures. Some dude comes out of nowhere and gets to go with you and I’m still stuck here.”
“Where you belong.”
“Whatever. I’m going upstairs to take a nap.”
“But you just woke up.”
“I was up all night gaming. I gotta get my rest so I can start all over again tonight.”
Sulking, Liam tramped back up to his room. Jess knew that he was working on his mother behind the scenes to get her to allow him to go with Jess on at least one investigation. He had a better chance getting Disney World to open its doors for free for the rest of eternity. What had happened to all of them in Alaska was a vivid memory for Eve and Jessica, one they could never forget. Liam had been a baby at the time, and they had kept the truth from him for good reason.
Because Jessica remembered the things in the cabin when she was six. How they led to her father making the ultimate sacrifice, and how she had held his heavy head in her tiny, trembling hands as he breathed his last.
If Liam knew, would he ever ask to accompany her?
Then she thought of Eddie Home, and how her father had somehow nudged him to her, and the job they had done, together, last night. It warmed her chest to think that he was still watching over her.
“I love you mucho much,” she whispered. The kitchen was silent, but she knew he heard her.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Eddie Home’s cell rang while he was shelving a new case of vitamins. Over the past couple of days, he appreciated the fact that his job in the health food store required very little thought and was full of enough mindless routine that he could lose himself in its repetition.
He checked the display.
Jessica Backman.
After spending so much time and energy trying to find her, his reticence at answering her call was hard for him to reconcile. The events at the McCammon house had exhausted him beyond words. The entity in their house, Edwin Esposito, had scared him, too. Finding spirits had always been as easy for him as going next door to talk to a neighbor. He had never encountered the power and rage that emanated from the faux-poltergeist.
It turned out that angry Edwin had lived in the previous house that had been on the property in the early part of the 20th century. He had died in the basement while shoveling coal on a frigid winter night. Heart attack. Nothing extraordinary. Eddie still marveled at how much he could learn through sustained contact with a spirit, or as Jessica had taught him, EB.
True to the partial theory on poltergeists, it was the combined life energies of the McCammon girls that woke his spirit from its slumber. Now awake and confused by the new house, new family and completely new time period, he began to lash out, to try to make order of things, which explained the strange stacking of household items. Odds were, he would have kept things at that unsettling, yet innocuous level. Until Jessica arrived.
When Jessica had asked him what the regular tapping had meant, Eddie laughed.
“Turns out, it wasn’t Morse code at all. Old Edwin had a serious case of OCD. One of the manifestation
s of the disease was incessant tapping, but always in the same pattern. It must suck to die, only to have the same afflictions you had in life follow you to the hereafter,” he’d said.
Jessica had replied, “That’s a perfect case for instructing people, and myself, not to jump to conclusions. Wow. OCD. Never would have called that. Guess I can’t assume everything I see and hear is an attempt at communication.”
“That would be a big nope.”
What he didn’t mention to an exhausted Jessica was his burgeoning theory that if he was a communication line with the dead, she was a beacon, not just calling them forward, but imbuing them with an energy and purpose that was off the scale of human experience. Edwin Esposito’s shade not only drew strength from her, he also became incensed at her attempts to communicate with him because he knew her goal was to make him go away. And go away he did, thanks to whatever it was that she could do just by repeating his name.
In a way, she was dangerous.
He answered on the fourth ring. “Hey.”
“Are you home right now?” She sounded tense, but then he hadn’t known her long enough to tell if that was just her regular state of being. From what he’d seen so far, tense was her middle name.
“I’m at work, elbow deep in bottles of vitamin D. What’s up?”
“What time do you get out?”
Eddie checked his watch. “In about three hours.”
“Do you have Skype at home?”
“No, but I can download it. Why do you ask?”
“I have something I want to go over with you that I think you’ll appreciate.”
“You want to show me plans for a trip to Aruba?”
Jessica was silent, then said, “Funny. Call me when you’re ready and we’ll talk.”
The call was disconnected before he could reply. He finished putting out the vitamins, then went to the back room and crushed the box, throwing it on the pile to be dumped in the recycling bin. The rest of the day was spent cleaning out the trail mix bins and the fresh peanut butter maker. Three patrons got mad at him for denying them their ground peanut butter. He was tempted to ask them if they’d prefer dirty peanut butter, but opted to tune them out instead. His apartment didn’t come free and he needed food and gas money.
When his shift was over, he hung his green apron on a peg in the employee closet, waved goodbye to Edna, the night cashier, and took the six-block walk to his apartment. The streets were buzzing with activity and loud rap music seemed to blast from every fifth passing car. He stopped to get some Chinese food and ate it slowly at his small kitchen table while listening to talk radio. He considered doing a load of laundry, but decided the pile could wait another day or two.
It wasn’t until he’d been home for almost two hours before he realized that he was stalling his call to Jessica.
The top of his head was still sore, as if he’d been struck by a wooden cane and not internally by the psychic force of an angry spirit. Jessica Backman had a power that she barely knew about, much less could control. Odds were, if she kept on the path she was going, she’d end up hurt, just like her dad.
Just like her dad.
He turned on his computer, wrestling with himself to pick up the phone. He thought of Jessica the other night, suspended in the air, struggling to breathe, egging the poltergeist on so Eddie could swoop in and get that little kernel of information that she needed to use her own mysterious power. She could have died, and may have died trying, no hesitation.
He dialed her number.
“Do you have it loaded yet?” Jessica asked. She was chewing gum and filled any silences by popping it in his ear. He was beginning to gain a better understanding of her and felt she was doing it on purpose to grate on his nerves. Just another test. He ignored it and opened up the viewer.
“I’m in,” he said.
“Okay, hold on.” He could hear her typing and a few seconds later, they were face to face, in a manner of speaking. She offered him a smile and waved her fingers at the webcam.
She said, “See, isn’t it nicer to see my smiling face?”
“You look better than I feel.”
“What’s wrong? Are you sick or something?”
She noted that his hair was a skewed mess and his eyes looked tight, pained. He couldn’t argue with her observation, seeing himself in a small window on the screen and wincing at his own image.
“Or something,” he replied. “Everything fine with you…you know…after the other night?”
Jessica rolled her eyes. “I was a little sore the day after, but it wasn’t anything some sleep and four Advil couldn’t cure. I haven’t even left the house yet because I figured I’d earned a little break. I got bored, so I started going through the inbox for my website. You’ll never guess what I came across.”
Eddie sat back in his chair, waiting. Jessica frowned.
“That was your cue to read my mind and tell me,” she said.
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“Oh. Well, it was worth a try.” Her face disappeared from the screen as she moved out of frame. She came back holding a stack of papers. “I get tons of emails every week, most of them with photo and video attachments. Everyone who ever took a picture with an orb in it thinks they captured a ghost and wants me to put it on the website. You know, all these cheap digital cameras are going to be the death of true ghost hunting. Too many lighting issues pop up with them. Anyway, I was looking through everything, deleting most, saving a few that I would pass on to my web guy, Swedey, to load onto the site, when I came across one that literally made my jaw drop.”
Eddie couldn’t imagine what it was that could shock Jessica.
“I got an email from a girl in New Hampshire who is totally freaked out. She said she and her family have been seeing something that is so rare, it’s beyond belief.”
Eddie leaned in closer to the computer screen. Jessica’s excitement was contagious.
“Well, what is it?” he asked.
“This girl—” she leafed through the pages, “—Selena Leigh, saw her doppelganger.”
“A doppelganger? Are you sure?”
“No shit. She’s one-hundred-percent sure. According to her, her father saw it on a separate occasion and her mother heard it one afternoon calling to her. Needless to say, she’s completely wigged out.”
Eddie exhaled, long and hard. “Wow. A doppelganger that’s been seen by the person it impersonates as well as other people. That’s just crazy.”
“I know. But I haven’t even gotten to the good part yet. She sent me a video that she recorded in her friend’s room. I think she was trying to convey just how serious and upset she was so I wouldn’t ignore her email or throw it on the deleted pyre, you know. I’m sending it over to you now.”
Eddie opened up his email and waited for her message to arrive. It took a half a minute before his incoming mail chime sounded.
“I won’t say a thing until it’s over,” Jessica said.
“Jess, if you feel this is valid, I believe you. I don’t need to see a video of a frightened girl.”
“Just watch it.”
Eddie double clicked the attachment and brought the video up to medium size. He could still see Jessica in the live video window. She had taken out a nail file and was working on her tips.
The video image was very clear, near HD quality, and showed a pretty girl, not much younger than Jessica, sitting before the camera. The only blemish on her good looks was the dark bags under her haunted eyes. The heads of two girls bobbed over her shoulders. One had chestnut skin and was exotic looking, must have been Latina, the other your typical teen goth, all pale makeup and facial piercings. It struck him odd that such a trio would even associate with one another. He wasn’t that far removed from high school himself and remembered the rule of non-intersecting social circles.
The pretty girl spoke, “Hello, my name is Selena Leigh. I hope you had a chance to read my email. I…I never even heard of a doppelganger before until my f
riend Crissy just told me about it.” The goth girl waved at the camera. “I saw this, uh, doppelganger that looked like me, well, kinda like me, just stranger, in my closet one night.”
She went on to describe the frightened mirror image of herself in the closet and how her father had thought he’d seen her in the garage a week before that. Selena had to stop a few times to hold back her tears, and her exotic friend passed her tissues to wipe her eyes.
No doubt about it, Eddie thought, this girl is unnerved. He had just seen that same haunted look in Tim McCammon’s eyes. It made him uncomfortable, seeing a young girl so afraid, pouring out her heart to a tiny camera in the hopes that a stranger on a website would come save her.
He noticed that Jessica had stopped filing her nails and was now watching him, watching the video. His eyes went back to Selena Leigh and her friends and her incredible story.
Just as the video was about to end, he saw something that made him squint at the screen. The video faded to black and he pulled the time bar back about ten seconds.
“Did you see it?” Jessica asked.
“Hold on.”
He pressed Play, watched it a second time, then pulled back again, pausing the video.
“No freakin’ way,” he murmured.
Behind the girls, by the window, something had appeared between flashes of lightning.
Selena’s doppelganger!
It watched them for a moment, its skin opaque, bordering on cadaverous, dressed in a knee-length, white nightgown. Then, as the flash of light from the storm outside dissipated, so did the apparition.
Neither Selena nor her friends had noticed it at the time and he assumed they didn’t when they played the video back.
He closed out the video and brought Jessica up to full screen.
“It’s real,” he said in a soft whisper.
Jessica nodded. “Can you take a few days off work?”
Eddie had to think for a moment. “I have three days off in a row starting Monday.”
“Good. Seabrook, New Hampshire is only about four hours away. I’ll drive.”