Gethsemane Hall

by David Annandale

  “I did.”

  “What are you up to?”

  Gray smiled, animation coming back into his eyes. “What does it look like?”

  “A cynical mind might say you’re setting up teams to go at each other’s throats.”

  “Survivor: Haunted House?”

  “Very droll. I don’t want to have a cynical mind.”

  “I’ll admit that we’ll probably see some entertaining shouting matches.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you.”

  “Don’t worry. This isn’t just an elaborate practical joke. I’m not that bored with my own company already. I really do want to know what’s happening here.”

  “What do you think is going on?”

  A smile again, but tired, and maybe a bit frightened. “I think all of you are wrong.”

  Now the question he really wanted to ask. “What are you hoping for?”

  Gray didn’t answer. He turned to face the window again. He muttered a curse: “Hope.” Above his head, the reflections twitched violently. Outside, the moat was mirror-placid.

  chapter eleven

  scene settings

  They had dinner in the Great Hall. They sat at the monster table, in the evening light of spring, surrounded by the accumulated strata of history, and ate store-bought pizza. The meal was a sham. They were not eating together. They were consolidating alliances, probing for the weakness of enemies. The skeptics and the believers settled into their trenches. Each side made assumptions about the other and about their host. Gray watched the positioning, and it amused him, sometimes cutting through the tension that constricted his appetite. He made it through one slice of the pizza, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the night. It was the time of year when days were growing noticeably longer, but night still arrived. With the dark, it seemed, came revelations. He feared sleep. He wanted to run from the house. He needed, with even more strength, to stay in his home. He said very little.

  Pertwee said a lot. She was feeling defensive, so she went on the attack. She needled Crawford. She tried to use colleagues against him. But every Ph.D. she brought up was shot down as a discredited kook. Crawford never took any bait. He smiled a lot. He was polite. He drove her mad. He was exactly the sort of person she most wanted to have respect her and her research, and accept her as a peer. He was Nemesis. She finally said, “Can’t you concede at least that you are predisposed not to believe in spiritual manifestations, and that this bias could be skewing your results? Because your mind is committed to one perspective, you might miss or ignore contradictory data.”

  His smile didn’t falter. “Shouldn’t you concede exactly the same thing?” he asked. And when she couldn’t come up with the perfect response right away, he said, “Our experiments should complement each other nicely, then. Two closed minds attacking the same problem.” He turned back to his pizza.

  Pertwee knew she would find the perfect comeback sometime in the next eight hours, when trotting it out would be the worst kind of infantile irrelevance. She fumed. She didn’t think about the house at all.

  Corderman tried to be angrier on her behalf than he was, though he was ready to strike the moment he heard something really offensive. Getting his dander up might help with his nerves. It wasn’t that his faith was faltering. That was the problem. He and Pertwee had never overnighted in one of their sites before. Ghost-hunting was the big and important adventure, and he believed completely in what they were doing, but the cool factor had kept the research at the level of a game. He had played Dungeons and Dragons in his teens, and more lately a couple of MMORPGs had taken more nights from him than he would own up to Pertwee. He knew what it was to play obsessively. He knew what it was when games had more depth and heft than real life. He’d participated in live role-playing too. Ghost-hunting was the real deal, he understood this, but the experience was part of the gaming continuum. But a man had died here. He knew what Pertwee believed about that. He was just as incensed about the slander the papers had levelled at Gethsemane Hall. But. He was here, now. Night was coming, now. He’d seen his share of horror films, too. He was thinking quite a bit about the house.

  Sturghill listened to the duel between Crawford and Pertwee, chuckled a few times, but kept her powder dry. She was going to bury this New Age flake. Hers was the kind of thinking that had taken Adams down. Sturghill wasn’t going to reveal the stake up her sleeve before she plunged it into gullibility’s heart.

  Hudson tried to steer the conversation into lighter areas. He asked questions about families and interests. Everyone thought he was very nice. He wanted to know who these people were. He wanted to know if they were going to make things better or worse for his best friend. He was thinking about the house, but not about ghosts. The wrong combination of people could be just as poisonous.

  Meacham asked questions, too. She established herself as a terrific listener. She lived up to her training. She did her job well. When she asked Pertwee about her work, she did so without sarcasm. When Pertwee answered briefly, cautiously, Meacham asked follow-up questions. It didn’t take much before Pertwee was opening up and going on at length. This was where the training really made the difference. It would have been easy to glaze over. Meacham forced herself to listen, to absorb the information as if it weren’t raving bullshit, because this wasn’t a situation where it would be useful, yet, to have enemies. Come out of here with a debunking report from Crawford but Pertwee softened up? Sweet. Meacham had a few thoughts about the house during the meal. She was looking forward to exploring its age. The experiments might be fun, before she had to marshal her arguments. A bit of a holiday in luxury.

  There were other thoughts in the Hall. They circled the diners. They calculated. They carried a gospel.

  The meal ended. The diners parted. They retired to their rooms, to plan campaigns and to prepare for the night. Pertwee went for a stroll before bed. An evening constitutional. She wanted to walk the sacred grounds and be touched by them, be revitalized by them. She wanted to walk them alone, away from the siege of hostility inside, and away from Corderman’s tense chivalry. Over dinner, he had been poised for the right provocation and the right dose of courage to rise up in righteous wrath. His cues hadn’t come, thank God. Her credibility with this crowd was zero, as things stood. She would fight for better, and she would do so under whatever rules the opposing team imposed on her. What she didn’t need was Corderman’s puppy histrionics plunging her standing into the negative figures.

  She breathed deeply, clearing her head, purging tension. She crunched across the gravel, walking away from the gatehouse tower. A small flight of stone steps lured her through an open iron gate and into a walled garden. The brickwork on the inside was overgrown with ivy and moss. The garden was laid out along rigid lines. The rectangular paving stones framed a rectangular pond with a clutch of reeds growing at each corner. A small marble Cupid pranced on a rock island in the centre of the pond. In the moonlight, Cupid had a pale glow. Wings and limbs, body and face, he was white and cold. Pertwee smiled at him. She felt the enclosure of the walls and was comforted. She spread her arms in a stretch that turned into a benediction. She smiled her thanks and greeting to the spirits of the Hall.

  She noticed a darker rectangular patch in the far wall. At first she thought it was a shadow, but there was no source for it. She approached. In the corner, the walls did not meet. They gave way to hedge, and there was a narrow passage. Pertwee walked through and found herself in another walled garden. I found a secret, she thought and giggled. The stone walls here were almost bare, except in one corner where there was a luxuriance of peonies and valerian. There was a pond here, too. It was smaller, circular, and the water was pea-soup stagnant. Pertwee walked the perimeter of the garden, delighting in a storybook shiver. No one else knows about this, she thought. This is something the Hall has given to me. Alone.

  The moon went out.

  Cloud cover. She knew that had to be it. But the loss of light was so sudden. Flick of a switch, a
nd she was in darkness. Alone. An afterimage of peonies shone on her retina, then faded. She didn’t have a flashlight. She couldn’t see. She looked up, expecting to see the moon as a faint smear behind clouds. The sky was black as isolation. Pertwee tried to laugh at the anxiety she felt rising. The sound came out as a choked gasp. Wait it out, she thought. A minute or two, and we’re off. The minutes passed. The blackness remained pure. It was as if it were wrapped around her head, a snake-coil shroud.

  She took a cautious step, reaching out with her hands. All she had to do was get to the wall, feel her way around it, reach the entrance to the secret garden. If she could do that, she felt against all reason, there would be light when she reached the other garden. That’s silly, she tried to tell herself. She didn’t listen. She hunted the wall. Her fingers brushed nothing but air. She took another step. The scuffing noise against the pavement was harsh. Another step. She couldn’t be far from the wall. The garden wasn’t more than ten yards across, and there was that pond in the middle. Still no wall. She moved her foot forward again, and as it came down, it touched emptiness. She almost lost her balance. She stepped back. All right, she thought. You were moving toward the pond. Turn around. She did. Wall is this way. She stepped, and her foot hit nothing again. She froze. She didn’t see how she could have turned three-sixty and be facing the pond again. But she must have. Disorientation in the dark. She lowered herself to her knees. She reached forward. Her hand dropped below knee level, wanted to keep going into the void. That’s the pond, she thought. She reached behind.

  No paving stone here either. Only the drop. She toppled backward. She fell further than she should, and then she was embraced by liquid thick as muscle but ten times colder, and she knew she was alone. She paid the tribute and screamed.

  Lights on. The moon was back. The peonies nodded from the passage of a breeze that had just left. Pertwee was sitting on stone, two arm’s lengths from the pond. She stood and looked up. There were no clouds. The Milky Way, brighter than she’d ever seen it, shone its implacable age down.

  So she’d made contact. She rubbed her arms. She’d never experienced anything that strong before. She’d never been frightened. She shouldn’t have been, she decided. She hadn’t been harmed. She had received a message. It was up to her to decipher it, to understand what was being asked of her. “Thank you.” She said it like she meant it.

  She made her way back to the Hall, building a high palisade of rationalizations. And then she, like all the others, went to bed. She lost her fear. The air was fresh in Roseminster, and she went to sleep quickly. She wasn’t alone.

  Fast and deep sleepers all. Except for Gray. He lay awake, waiting. He was in the master bedroom. It took up the southwest corner of the first floor and was almost as big as the entire bedroom suite on the other side of the house. The bed was a four-poster monolith, the frame three hundred years old, and the mattress didn’t feel much more recent. Gray kept the bedside light on. He was pretending, for his own benefit, that he might want to read. The lamp cast a bright yellow aura around the bed. The shadows in the recesses of the room were darker for the contrast. Gray didn’t look at them. He closed his eyes and wondered why he refused every impulse to leave. He wondered why he was frightened. His room was a long way from the Old Chapel and the crypt. He wasn’t going near them, no fear. Gray turned over, facing into the lamp. Its light penetrated his lids, making him squint. There was still darkness leaking in. He didn’t want to meet its gaze.

  Gray did sleep. Like the rest, he did not wake until the morning. He did not wake rested. None of them did. Sleep came down that night like a judgment. Gethsemane Hall rolled its inhabitants over foam-capped waves. It had them struggling to break surface and breathe, but it always pushed their heads back under. Their lungs choked with thick, unconscious bile. They tangled sheets into sweat and knots. Their brows furrowed as their eyes shut tight against a greater darkness. The storm blasted the entire night, and it didn’t calm with the morning. Instead, it built up a momentum roar of rage, a wind that piled the breakers into rogue mountains, and the dreamless black smashed down on the sleepers, swamping them, driving them so far down into the deeps that survival instincts screamed and woke them up. They came to, gasping, eyes blind for a moment, still oil-slicked by the dark that had come with the night. When their eyes cleared, and they saw it was morning, all of them, skeptics and faithful, near-sobbed with the relief of being awake, and the night being over. They lay in their beds, exhausted, needing rest, but when they felt as if they might drop back to sleep, they jerked with apprehension and jumped up. Those who shared rooms exchanged a look, but didn’t ask, You too? because sometimes it is better to avoid confirmation.

  And then the day began.

  The equipment arrived after breakfast. They had foraged, bleary-eyed, in the kitchen for cereal and eggs. Gray gave Corderman some money and the keys to his car and sent him off to Tesco to lay in enough supplies for the duration. Corderman must have crossed the delivery truck coming in. As they began to unload the boxes, Crawford started to laugh. “Whose is whose?” he asked Pertwee.

  “Why,” she asked, “is it so surprising that I know a thing or two about science?”

  Crawford refused to be drawn in. “At least we should have a redundancy of data.”

  Gray looked over the devices piling up in the outer hall. He shared Crawford’s amusement. Identical means, opposite faiths. There’s a lesson aborning, he thought. “What are these?” he asked. Most of the devices were handhelds of one sort or another. They didn’t take up a lot of space on their own. It was the sheer number that filled the boxes, along with multiple tripods and a backup generator. The only differences between Crawford’s equipment and Pertwee’s were that it looked more expensive and there was a lot more duplication.

  “This is the Trifield Natural EM Meter,” Pertwee said. It looked simple enough: a knob on the lower half, and an analogue gauge with three scales. “It detects very small fluctuations in electric, magnetic, and radio and microwave fields. I have to be careful because it’s sensitive enough to pick up fields generated by people or animals.”

  “It would be just awful to learn that positive findings are the result of mishandled equipment,” Crawford deadpanned. He showed Gray his variations on Pertwee’s theme. “These are the sensors,” he said. There were six of them. “They have three axes. A magnetic field has static and dynamic components, and these measure both. The data is sent here.” He tapped a laptop.

  “What’s the difference, besides expense?” Meacham asked.

  “Ms. Pertwee’s gadget will sound an alarm if it detects a change in the field. Am I right?” Pertwee nodded. “You put the meter down in the place that’s supposed to be haunted, and then you wait. When the ghost walks by, the machine hollers.” Pertwee made a face but didn’t contradict. Crawford continued. “I’m interested in the mean strength of the field in different areas and the variances within those locations.”

  “Let’s see if I follow,” Gray said. “Say a fluctuation occurs. Anna’s conclusion is that a presence caused the fluctuation. Yours is that the fluctuation caused the perception of a presence. Is that about right?”

  They both nodded but were eyeing him warily.

  “Isn’t this chicken and egg?” he asked. “Couldn’t a ghost cause the field to change, which makes someone experience another kind of ghost?” He raised his eyebrows in holy innocence. Meacham started laughing.

  “It isn’t that simple,” Pertwee protested.

  “She’s right,” Crawford said.

  “Look what you’ve done.” Sturghill was laughing too. “You made them agree. You,” she stabbed a finger at Gray, “are bad.”

  He was. And he was having fun. When had he last been able to say that? “Tell me about the other toys,” he said. Crawford and Pertwee didn’t react. “I’ll be good now,” he promised.

  They took him through the rest. Light level tricorder, air temperature and movement probes, motion sensors, sound recorders,
microphones, cameras, camcorders. Then there was the helmet. “What,” Meacham asked, “the hell is this?” She hefted it. It looked like a yellow motorcycle helmet with wires running out of the top and sides. It had a bulky black visor, from which dangled a USB cable.

  “That,” Crawford said, “is my ghost machine. Let me set it up.” He grabbed his laptop and another machine Gray didn’t recognize. It resembled a desktop computer’s tower. Crawford led them all into the Great Hall. He hooked up the laptop and the helmet to the third machine. “This is a magnetic field generator,” he said. “Sit down,” he told Meacham. He placed the helmet on her head. “We’ll do this the first time without the visuals.”

  “Should I close my eyes?”

  “Up to you. It doesn’t matter. Comfortable? Good.” He turned on the generator, then tapped at the laptop. “Here we go. What I’m doing is bathing your brain with weak magnetic waves.”

  “How long before I develop a tumour?”

  “It’s harmless. Just relax. If I could have everyone else stay quiet, too? Thank you.”

  Meacham settled into her chair. Gray watched her stare into the middle distance. Her eyes began to glaze over. After a few minutes, she opened her mouth; Gray thought to say that she was bored and had had enough. Then her eyes snapped wide. She grunted, and jerked her head around to the right. She brushed at her shoulder as if fighting something. She jumped out of the chair and yanked the helmet off. “Jesus Electric Fuck!” she yelled.

  Crawford retrieved the helmet from her. “I take it you experienced something.”

  “I’ll say I did. Holy Mother.” She had her arms wrapped tightly around herself. Her face was chalky. “You could have warned me.”

  “What happened?” Gray asked.

  “Something came up behind me. I could feel its breath on my neck. Then it grabbed my shoulder.” She shook her head. “It was strong.”

  Crawford was looking pleased. Gray asked him, “And this is normal?”