by J. R. Rain
Seemed like the ghost-hunting business was a lot like the religion business, so maybe we were in the right place after all.
“They weren’t figments of your imagination,” Ellen said.
“I have strict control over my imagination. In other words, nothing goes on in there that I don’t want to go on. For instance, I am now imagining you fully naked and my EMF meter is going berserk.”
“Put that twitching needle back in your pants,” she said. “There’s someone coming.”
“Now turn around,” I said.
“What?”
“I’m talking to the imagination. Ah, very good. Okay, you may get dressed now.”
“You are too much, Monty.”
I heard the footsteps now. Someone was hurrying down the tiled hallway, materializing before us from the darkness. Now, if this was a ghost, then we were in business. This I could see and hear. And smell. The aroma of whiskey and cigarettes came before him like a bar-stool hurricane.
The figure turned out to be a short man with a surprisingly large waist. “Surprisingly” because he was moving so quickly, as the added girth apparently gave him no trouble at all, a man grown comfortable in his own elastic skin. He was wearing a short suit with a red-and-white striped tie that hung below his zipper. His sweating face was a beacon in the darkness. I checked my watch. Dr. Stevens was right on time.
The professor approached my wife first, as most men do, instantly attracted to her disarming smile and lithe figure. Or perhaps attracted to that thing that had pulled me in, the X Factor.
That unknown something she possessed. That special energy she radiated whether she knew it or not. The look in her eyes that promised all men amusement and good times, even if she never intended to deliver.
And with me, luckily, she delivered.
Sometimes twice a night, and occasionally three, if we were sleeping in the next morning.
“Hi,” said the little man, his voice booming along the hallways. If there were any ghosts, they would have scattered like frightened fish, assuming they could hear or respond to air vibrations. He reached out a very large hand, which was disproportionate to his body. In the world of Tolkien, he would have wielded a battle axe and sported very hairy toes. “Ellen and Monty?”
“That’s us,” I said. “She’s Ellen.”
He grinned. “That was my next question.”
He wiped some sweat away with the back of his hand. The night was cool enough that Ellen was wearing a sweater. Then again, she often wore sweaters even on warm summer evenings. This was not a warm summer evening. This was early February. But this was also Southern California, where there were only two seasons: Oscar season and everything else. “Perhaps we should talk in my office,” he said.
After we had followed him through a series of twists and turns and into a large office, making small talk about the state budget cuts that had curtailed higher education, he closed the door behind us after giving the hallway a quick check. Ellen and I sat before him at his spacious desk.
He sat back and looked at us. “We have a problem,” he said simply. “And we need some help.”
Chapter Two
He lowered his voice an octave, as if afraid a student might overhear. “And you are the ghost hunters?”
“We prefer to call ourselves paranormal investigators, Dr. Stevens,” I said.
“Yes, of course. I didn’t mean to offend.” He paused and took us both in, the hint of a smile still stamped on his jovial face. “I’ve never met ghost hunters before.”
I was about to object to the reference again when my wife leaned forward and placed a digital audio recorder on his desk. She clicked it on and a red dot of light appeared. “9:17 p.m., February 11, Dr. Stevens’ office,” she said, projecting for the benefit of the recording. She nodded at the professor and returned to a conversational tone. “You mentioned hearing some strange noises, Dr. Stevens?”
The joviality left his face, replaced with something closer to exhaustion. “Either way, right?” he laughed, his voice booming. He looked nervously at the recorder.
“Actually, we investigate strange occurrences and attempt to identify the sources,” I said. “Much of our work is in eliminating all rational physical explanations, and only then do we consider the possibility of something more. But so far there’s never been something more.”
“Tell us about the ghost,” my wife said, cutting off my serious scientific explanation of our task.
“I never said we had a ghost,” said the little man, looking up startled. “We just have had some strange, you know, occurrences.”
“Of course,” she said. “I didn’t mean to unnerve you.”
But my wife never said “ghost” unless she was sure there was a ghost. She’d always had more faith than me, but I also trusted that she had a more refined sense of the sublime. Myself, I tried to give the moment some academic distance before I got all caught up in hysteria.
We were sitting in the president’s office. There were some fairly impressive plaques and degrees placed precisely on the wall behind his desk, and some other certificates with ornate writing scattered around the room. I noticed that one of his plaques was askew. Just one. The others were in perfect uniform precision.
It didn’t fit the world of Dr. Stevens. I have often come across many things that didn’t make sense. For my wife, however, it all made perfect sense. Sometimes I wished I had her outlook. Sometimes. And sometimes her outlook scared the hell out of me.
His office was in a corner of the building. The blinds were shut, but had they been open he would have had a great view of Cal State Fullerton across the street. With practice, he probably would have been able to shoot rubber bands at that larger, better-funded campus.
His chair was studded leather. His desk was large enough to play ping pong on. Aside from our recorder, his desk was empty, save for a picture of a pretty but severe woman and a cute little girl. The picture was angled so that he could see it from his desk. I had to lean forward to see it.
“There have been noises,” he said, reluctantly. He had clasped his hands together. His thumbs twiddled briefly, and then stopped, then started again.
“What type of noises?” I asked. People tended to overdramatize such situations, but I could sympathize a little. Once upon a time, I had been a cold creature of logic, and then Ellen happened.
Stevens shifted, his leather seat emitting a slight farting squeak that we all ignored. I wondered if that was the mysterious noise of which he spoke.
He adjusted the picture of his family on his desk, and then wiped at imaginary dust on the mirror-like maple desktop. Too bad we weren’t getting paid by the hour. He shrugged, his face reddening a little with embarrassment or stress. “Screams. Wailing. Footsteps. Sobbing.”
I turned to my wife. “Sounds like our first date.”
Talk about a severe look. My wife said nothing—she didn’t have to, the look said plenty—and turned to Dr. Stevens. “Have you heard these noises yourself?”
“No. Well, not at first.”
We waited. The recorder was a two-gig Sony model, so we had all night. And most of the week.
“I have been hearing reports from others, mostly from the janitorial staff. They told me about some of the sounds, except they didn’t really hear them as words.”
“So you ignored them,” said Ellen.
“Yes. At first.” He spoke with a little of the pomposity earned by all those degrees. “Janitors are generally uneducated.”
“And that means they’re superstitious?” I said, a little annoyed. Elitism never sat well with me. “Like they dance around the mop bucket mumbling voodoo spells when you’re not looking?”
“Not at all,” he said. “In fact, it’s because they are uneducated that I came to believe them. Because they repeated the sounds they’d been hearing, and I recognized it was Latin.”
“Great Caesar’s ghost,” I said.
My wife jumped in before my sarcasm got rolling. �
�How long had the janitorial staff been reporting these strange voices?”
He shrugged. “A while. Ever since I’ve been here, really. I chalked it off to legend. Faith University started as a bible seminary during the Depression, and stories tend to pile up over the years, especially at an institution that encourages a belief in miracles.”
“And you mentioned that you hadn’t heard the noise at first.”
“True, not at first.” His petulance had been replaced by something else. He sucked in some air and looked at my wife. He held her gaze and something crossed between them. I saw it and sensed it. He was scared and was trying to hide it.
“Tell me about it,” said my wife. She reached out across the desk and touched his arm.
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.
Ghost College
is available at:
Kindle * Amazon UK * Paperback * Audio Book
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About the Authors:
Scott Nicholson is author of 17 books, including the bestselling Kindle thrillers Disintegration and The Red Church. He also portrays the comic book character The Digger and spends spare time revising his own epitaph.
Learn more at www.hauntedcomputer.com.
J.R. Rain is an ex-private investigator who now lives in a small house on a small island with his small do
g, Sadie, who has more energy than Robin Williams.
Please visit him at www.jrrain.com.
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VIEW OTHER KINDLE BOOKS BY
SCOTT NICHOLSON:
Novels
After #0: First Light
After #1: The Shock
After #2: The Echo
After #3: Milepost 291
After#4: Whiteout
Zapheads #1: Bone and Cinder (with Joshua Simcox)
The Scarecrow (Solom #1)
The Narrow Gate (Solom #2)
The Home
McFall
Creative Spirit
Disintegration
The Red Church
Speed Dating with the Dead
The Skull Ring
Drummer Boy
The Harvest
Kiss Me or Die
Liquid Fear
Chronic Fear
Cursed (with J.R. Rain)
Bad Blood (with J.R. Rain & H.T. Night)
Spider Web (with J.R. Rain)
Ghost College (with J.R. Rain)
The Vampire Club (with J.R. Rain)
Meat Camp (with J.T. Warren)
October Girls
Crime Beat
The Dead Love Longer
Fangs In Vain
Burial to Follow
Story Collections
Curtains
Flowers
Ashes
The First
Zombie Bits
Head Cases
Gateway Drug
Missing Pieces
These Things Happened
American Horror
Children’s Books
If I Were Your Monster (with Lee Davis)
Too Many Witches (with Lee Davis)
Ida Claire (with Lee Davis)
Duncan the Punkin (with Sergio Castro)
Bad Day for Balloons (with Sergio Castro)
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