“Let me guess,” Sturghill said. “Screams that chased each other around your rooms.” The two men nodded. Sturghill asked Crawford, “And your explanation is?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Magnetic fields don’t necessarily cover this, do they?”
“Well ...”
“I thought you were on the side of the skeptics,” Meacham said.
“I am.” She spoke to Crawford again. “Sorry, Jim. Just marking my territory a bit.”
He waved off the apology. “Fix me up so I can go back to sleep, and all is forgiven.”
“Would you mind explaining what you’re talking about?” Hudson asked, and Meacham seconded the motion.
“We all experienced the same thing. Probably at the same time. That’s the big mistake.”
“Whose?” Meacham asked.
“I’m not positive, but my money’s on Gray. He had the opportunity, even though I can’t figure the motive. So look. Louise, if you were the only one who heard the screams, this might be a bit more convincing. A bit. A big, loud noise audible to only one person is plenty mysterious. But all of us? With the same movement of sound? Too easy.” She paused.
Can’t take the theatre out of the girl, Meacham thought. “So?” she prompted and waited for the climax.
“Speakers,” Sturghill said. When Meacham looked around, she added, “In the walls, probably. Not that hard. I don’t need to tell you that. Set up a halfway decent surround sound system in each room, connect them all to a computer, load up your FreakyScreams.mp3 and presto. Instant house of horrors. Now, if I were running the show, I would have had the scream migrate from one room to the other. Have us chasing the sounds like Scooby and the gang. That would have been classic. Maybe he ran out of time.”
Hudson was shaking his head. “Richard was never one for practical jokes. Especially not recently. And when would he have had time to install the speakers? He would have had to do that before Pete Adams arrived, and Richard wouldn’t have had any reason to pull that kind of a prank.”
“I didn’t say this was a joke,” said Meacham. “This is too serious. Too involved. Way too much work.” She thought of the scream Adams had recorded.
“So why would he do it?” Hudson was sounding more and more upset. When no one answered at first, he turned a pleading gaze on each face, one after the other, looking for an ally.
When Meacham’s turn came, she said, “He’s your friend. You know him best. You tell us.”
Hudson shook his head, but Meacham thought there was uncertainty in his frown. “There’s no good reason....” he began and trailed off miserably.
“His might not be good ones,” Meacham said, prodding. Gray pulling some sort of crazy scare stunt was a messy explanation, and the papers would love it almost as much as real ghosts. But it was a kind of messy that would be short-lived and containable. She could work with it.
Hudson stared into the middle distance, thinking upsetting thoughts. He tried to rally. Meacham saluted him for his loyalty. “What about yesterday?” he demanded of Crawford. “What about what happened when he tried your helmet?”
Crawford’s tone was quiet, free of judgment, and devastating. “We only have his word he saw what he did.”
Hudson slumped down on the bed. “That wasn’t what you suggested yesterday.”
“I wasn’t hearing screams in my bedroom last night.” He looked at Sturghill. “Can you follow up on your theory?”
Sturghill was already off the bed and examining the walls. “Tricky. They’re well hidden. I can’t see any sign of recent work on this side.”
“Plenty of picture frames,” Meacham said.
“Yup. I’ll find the gear, but it might take a while. I also don’t need him breathing down my neck, suspecting what I’m up to. He could hide the evidence so I’ll never find it.”
Meacham nodded. “We’ll make sure you have some alone time.” She kept watching Hudson. He was looking more and more depressed, as if following a bleak but watertight logic. “What is it?” she asked him.
After a hesitation that went on so long Meacham didn’t think he was going to answer, Hudson said, “He was very angry after his wife and daughter died.” His voice was almost inaudible, the words so quiet they denied their own existence.
“That’s not surprising,” said Sturghill.
“Very angry with God,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “He used to be a man of great faith.”
“And he’s lost that faith?” Meacham asked.
“Not in the sense of becoming atheist. I think, if anything, he might believe in God more than ever. But he hates Him now. He feels betrayed. He’s been acting out on his anger. Pulling funding from our organization. He wants revenge. I think ... I think ... if he made me question my own faith, he might feel he’d achieved some form of revenge.”
“What about the rest of us?” Sturghill asked.
“Anna has her own faith, and he’s not open to optimistic world-views right now. Plus she’s been on his case. You too,” he said to Meacham. “So nobbling her and you might be something that would give him satisfaction.”
“Which makes you and Kristine collateral damage,” Meacham told Crawford.
The theory sat over them all in silence for a few minutes. Meacham stood up and walked over to Hudson. She put a hand on his shoulder. “I guess you don’t really want to hear this,” she said, “but I think you might be right.”
Hudson didn’t look convinced by his own argument. “But why would he do that to Adams? He wasn’t angry then.”
“You must have seen plenty in Darfur to shake a man’s faith.”
“He wasn’t angry yet.”
“Are you sure?”
Hudson didn’t answer.
“Let us help you help him,” Meacham lied. If Gray was working a con, she’d pin him to the wall and leave him wriggling there for the jackals. She knew she would have some sleepless nights, though not over Gray. Enemies that fell in combat weren’t worthy of mourning. It was the desperation in Hudson’s eyes that would, she knew right now, bother her. She was setting up a betrayal. It was part of the job. The trashing of the innocent shouldn’t be, but Christ knew how often it was. And she would trash ten more of the guiltless if that shored up her explanation, dispelled the screams, and reaffirmed the world as it should be.
She decided she didn’t want company anymore. She yawned. “Thanks for dispelling the bogeyman, ladies and gents. If we’re going to flush him out in the morning, I need a bit more sleep.” She headed for the door.
“I’ll walk you back,” Crawford said, and was at her side before she could decline offer. “Keep the monsters at bay,” he joked.
“Thanks,” Meacham said, dry as sticks.
When they were out of earshot of the others, Crawford said, voice low, “The night before we came here, did you have a nightmare? I mean a sleep-destroying monster.”
“Why do you ask?” The dream was a void. The memory of its impact had lost some of its edge, but it could still draw blood.
“Kristine and I both did. I can’t remember the details, but it was a doozy.” Crawford’s face had the pinched look of a man wrestling with new and unwelcome uncertainty.
Meacham needed him focused. She would hoard the doubts, let them eat at her peace of mind for the sake of the agenda. Work to be done, folks. Narratives to be tidied up. “No,” she said. “Slept like a baby.” Fluttering in her gut. The bogeyman wasn’t so far away. The doubts went to work.
Pertwee had heard the screams. She and Corderman were up and had the lights on before the first cycle had finished. The next screams, hitting with the room lit, were worse, the monsters under the bed and in the closet not banished by the retreat of the dark. As the silence rang, they stared at each other from across the room. Corderman had been sleeping in the bed, Pertwee on a chesterfield. Corderman had wanted to be chivalrous, but Pertwee had insisted they flip a coin and take turns. Now she joined Corderman on the bed. His eyes were dan
cing around the room. He looked as if he wanted to be held as badly as she did.
“That wasn’t good,” Corderman whispered. “That was very, very not good.” He turned to Pertwee, pleading for the explanation that would make everything right again. “Why were they screaming? That wasn’t right.”
No, it wasn’t. Pertwee knew there were some tortured places in the world. She had studied some of them, though she hadn’t visited them herself. But Gethsemane Hall wasn’t of that number. It couldn’t be. “This is probably not what it seemed,” was what she came up with, and she knew how lame it sounded.
“What?” Corderman exploded. “What is it then? What’s the good thing that makes walls scream?”
“That might have been a cry of mourning,” she said, and oh, she was ad-libbing, she was bullshitting as fast as she could speak, there wasn’t a single legitimate thought coming out of her mouth. “The spirits might be calling out to those who are alive and in pain, who are resisting the peace of the house.” Do you believe that? she thought. Do you believe the tiniest portion of that? No, but Corderman calmed down just a bit. That was good enough. If he bought in to the point that he wasn’t freaking out, then that would help her keep calm, too. Calm was the only way to examine the evidence, make a judgment. The screams couldn’t be a sign of hostile or tormented spirits. That flew in the face of everything she knew about the Hall. So the screams meant something else, and she could find out what that was only by being a scientist, not a shivering cavewoman.
Corderman had his breathing under control. “Sorry,” he said. “That scared the hell out of me.”
“Me too,” Pertwee admitted.
He looked at her. He wanted to be held. So did she. The impulse was natural, the need genuine. The problem was implications and consequences. She didn’t know if Corderman would read anything into the act. It was the chance he might that made her hesitate. They weren’t a couple. They couldn’t be. The integrity of their research, she felt, wouldn’t permit it. Not when credibility was such an elusive and rare fish. She didn’t want to be a couple. But she thought that Corderman might. She caught the way he looked at her sometimes. At those moments, she usually found an excuse to take off on her own or send him on an errand. He didn’t turn her crank.
(Who would, Anna? Maybe Jim Crawford, bullet-muscle body and heat-seeking logic? The god of credibility? Wouldn’t you just love to suck some of that academic capital right off him?)
But right now, she and Corderman were together in a room that had screamed. Right now, daylight was a long way off. Right now, old instincts and fears were calling the shots. So she held out her arms, and they leaned back on the bed, and they held each other. Just for now. Just for right now.
Gray hadn’t heard the screams. He didn’t wake from his dream. It was a dream of sound and motion, but no images. He was in a darkness of muscle. It shifted with a slow giant’s rhythm. He was caught in leviathan waves, and they ground him against an invisible shale of bones. They threw him down, dragged him out to sea, then smashed him again. His skin was being scoured off. So was his self. The undertow was an enormous force. It wasn’t temptation, because there was no question of resistance, but it had its own dark attraction. He might have swum towards it, if he’d had a choice. He didn’t. It pulled him, scraped him raw, and dragged him down, filling his lungs with the choking sweet taste of revenge.
Old man, you should be in bed, Roger Bellingham thought. What do you think you’re doing here? This is no place for an old man. Asleep is what you should be. At this time of the dawn, even old men, with their broken, reduced sleep, were resting. They were not standing in front of troubled gates. It was still full dark, the last moments of total despair before the horizon greyed with hope. He’d been standing at the gate of Gethsemane Hall for the last half-hour, since his too-old corpse had been dragged from bed and hauled down here by the tug. He heard footsteps behind him. He turned, saw John Porter. “And what brings you here?” he asked.
“Have to prepare the pub for the day ahead.”
This early? “A likely story.”
Porter shrugged an acknowledgement. “Do you have a better one?”
“Only the truth.” He didn’t elaborate. It wasn’t the sort of truth either liked to speak.
“Is it locked?” Porter asked.
“Yes.” He’d given the gate a good shake when he’d first arrived.
“Thank Christ.”
“You could ring.” Bellingham pointed to the call button. “He might let you in.”
Porter shuddered. “Don’t say things like that. For pity’s sake.” He stared at the button with horrified longing. “That wasn’t funny.” Bellingham could hear the cold sweat in his voice.
“No, it surely wasn’t. I’m sorry.” That was a vicious bastard thing to do, old man, just because you went through the same struggle. “Anyone else up and about?” he asked.
Porter nodded. “I saw plenty of lights on. Faces at the window. I think we’re the only ones out on the street.”
“We’ve had more to do with it. You were just there.”
“What about you?”
“I’ve been fighting it longest. Been on my mind a lot lately.”
After a minute, Porter said, “It’s getting worse, isn’t it?”
“It is.” This wouldn’t be their last vigil at the gate. They wouldn’t be lonely much longer, either. The good people of Roseminster might be able to bar their doors to themselves for the moment. If the tug grew much stronger, the current would catch them up.
“Different, too,” Porter said, and he sounded sick.
“Yes.” The tug had nothing to do with desire anymore. It had shed its disguises of curiosity and affection. It was pure rip tide, now. It was strong enough that it didn’t need to use their own impulses to draw them.
“Why?” Porter wondered. “Do you think it’s something they’re doing?”
The thought had occurred to Bellingham. The risk of making things worse was what had made him try to warn Pertwee off. But when he looked back, he realized that the strength had been growing before the ghost hunter had won her access to the Hall. “I doubt it.”
Porter sighed. “I’ve been sleeping worse since he moved back.”
“So have I.” Gray’s return was when Bellingham had felt the tug really pick up strength. But it had been building for a long time. Something about Gray might have sped things up, but they would be reaching this point sooner or later, whether the lord of the manor was present or not. The strength had been scary enough the night Pete Adams had died. High tide was coming.
“So what now?”
“We fight it as best we can for as long as we can.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know, John. I’d be happy to hear any suggestions.” His grip on his stick was growing slippery.
Dread moved through Roseminster. It had been present before, but as a background nag in the chest. It had been something to be ignored, something to be dealt with later. Dread had been put off, forced to content itself as low-grade anxiety. Now it snickered, cocky in its approaching triumph. It travelled in shadows, broke in through dreams, and entered homes on reptile feet. It was a movement in the corner of the eye. It was a sound that became inaudible when the ear strained for it. Most of all, it was the tug. The people of Roseminster felt it, knew it for what it was, feared it. They were on the edge of the maelstrom, and the spin was just picking up. They were still far from the centre, where the ships of their lives would be smashed on the rocks, but they were still too close, and it was too late to escape. Denial had failed them. Things would not take care of themselves. There was nothing to do but wait, while dread walked in on reptile feet and tightened its grip.
They gathered in the Great Hall, breakfast ignored, eager as Christmas morning. Crawford and Pertwee rushed to their laptops, and they both looked as if they’d found coal in their stockings. “What is it?” Meacham asked Crawford.
“Nothing,” he said, disgusted.
“I don’t get it.”
“Neither did the sensors. That’s the problem.” He and Pertwee raced each other to the crypt. Meacham and the others followed. Crawford picked up a sensor in the middle of the floor. He started to shake it, but kept his temper and pushed a button instead. A green light came on.
Sturghill and Corderman came down the stairs from the Old Chapel. They looked just as pissed and confused. “It’s all screwed up,” Sturghill said. “The sensor —”
“I know,” Crawford interrupted. “Did you check the batteries?”
“They’re fine.”
“So are ours,” Corderman said.
“Mind filling the rest of us in?” Meacham asked.
“Total waste of time,” Crawford answered, disgusted. “Something must have gone wrong with the sensors. That or ...” He stopped himself.
“Or what?” Gray asked.
“I don’t know.” But he did know, Meacham realized. One sensor failing could happen. Two, that was odd. All of them? Sabotage. Could Gray be that obvious about it?
She decided not to push the issue yet. Give Sturghill a chance to dig around. She nudged Crawford onto a slightly different path. “The sensors didn’t pick up anything at all? Did you forget to turn them on?”
“Oh, they were on, all right. But the readings are lunatic.”
“Exaggerated magnetic field fluctuation?” Gray asked.
Crawford shook his head. “According to my equipment, there is no magnetic field here at all. Which is ridiculous. Also impossible.”
“Same thing here,” Pertwee said.
“Have you encountered something like that before?” Hudson asked her.
“Never.”
“So you don’t see a spiritual influence at work.”
She hesitated. “No,” she said at last. “I’ve never heard of any such thing. I agree with Dr. Crawford. This makes no sense.” Meacham mentally saluted her for her rigour and honesty. The girl had some principles, after all. More than she could say for herself.
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