by M. Verano
“What?” said Mom.
“That . . . noise. Don’t you hear it? Some kind of buzzing—”
“Oh,” I said. “You hear that too? I thought I was the only one.” The strange noise from Logan’s room. I only occasionally notice it anymore, but that’s not because it stopped. It’s just become so ever-present that I tune it out these days, except when it gets really bad, or when I stop and focus on it. Which I try not to do.
Pops turned to the kids and said something in that strange language. They both stared at him blankly. “Arthur,” he said in English, “take the kids outside.”
“What?” said Arthur. “You sure?”
Pops only nodded, and Arthur shrugged and herded the kids toward the front door. Pops began his prayer again, his voice a little unsteady at first but gaining strength as he went. When he finished, he rang the bell again and began to sing in a rich, deep baritone. I’d closed my eyes to focus on the beautiful sound when I felt the vibration picking up, becoming more intense. Like the day of Logan’s seizure, I could feel it building in my bones, my blood, twisting my organs. I opened my eyes to look at the old man, and I could see from the pinched expression on his face that he felt it too.
Then at that moment, the strange noise was drowned by the sound of every cell phone in the room going off. Or . . . not drowned, exactly. The ringtones and vibrations almost felt like they were ringing in sympathy with the buzzing crescendo.
“What the hell?” said Arthur as he grabbed the phone from his pocket. “I just turned this thing off.”
The noise stopped suddenly. Not just the phones—the buzzing had stopped too, and an eerie stillness replaced it. Then Arthur’s phone beeped twice, and we all jumped. Arthur picked it up and furrowed his brow at the screen. “That’s weird,” he said. “Pops, did you text me earlier? We’ve been together all day . . .”
“It’s okay,” said Mom. “Phones do that sometimes in this house. It happens to all of us.”
For a moment, Pops just stared at her. Then he grabbed his bell and made for the door, moving much faster than he had seemed capable of earlier. I followed him out to the porch. “Wait,” I called. “Where are you going?”
He was talking to Arthur. “Get the kids, we’re leaving.”
“You can’t just go,” I protested. “We need you. I thought you said you could help.”
Pops turned and looked me in the eye, his countenance dark and fearful. “There’s something really wrong here.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I was trying to tell you. And you said—”
“I know what I said. Listen, I’ve been by this house loads of times. I’ve even been in it, back when it housed a businessman’s association. It was fine then. But something has changed. There is something very bad here.” He started down the stairs.
“Pops,” said Arthur, “you came all this way, can’t you just—”
The old man turned sharply. “No. This is outside my power. Most of the time people complain their house is haunted, and it’s nothing. They get a bad feeling, maybe some dreams. I say a few words, and it goes away. That’s not going to work here. This is bigger.”
“What am I supposed to do, then?” I said.
“Beats me,” replied the old man. “You’re in trouble.”
THURSDAY, JUNE 11, 10:00 A.M.
Looks like the fly experiment is officially over. Also, not sure if Mom will ever speak to me again.
She caught me murdering the rest of the flies with my history textbook. I tried to explain to her that it was for science, and that there was a good chance they would all come back to life in a few minutes, but she didn’t want to hear it.
THURSDAY, JUNE 11, 4:00 P.M.
I made Chloe meet me downtown for coffee today. I had to tell her what Arthur’s grandfather had said. I don’t know what I was expecting. I think I was hoping for reassurance. I think I imagined her making a big joke out of it, laughing at the idea that I would fall for some old man’s bogeyman story. Or that she would delve into the gothness of it, and become fascinated and obsessed and excited about the idea of anything legitimately supernatural, from beyond the grave. That would have been okay too, because if she was excited about it, then it couldn’t really be that scary, could it?
But she didn’t do either of those things. Instead she was silent for a long moment, looking at me with wide brown eyes, and with that look fixed on her face—the problem-solving one. Gradually her brows knotted as she focused more and more intensely on the problem. Then, just as I was starting to get seriously freaked out, she spoke.
“You have to talk to Raph.”
I wasn’t expecting that. “Right,” I said. “Because that went so well the last couple of times.”
“I’m serious, Paige. He knows something. Don’t you see it? He’s been hiding something from us this whole time. Something to do with his research project, with those boxes you saw, with that pamphlet you showed me, getting kicked out of school . . . What’s his secret?”
At first I wanted to scoff. Weird as he was, something about Raph had always struck me as quite harmless. Sure, he had some stuff he didn’t like to talk about, but who doesn’t? But then I remembered . . .
“Dr. Clyde,” I said. Chloe looked at me in confusion. “My shrink. She said something about Raph during my last session. Told me to stay away from him. And Raph said the same thing. Do you think he might have been one of her patients?”
“Not unlikely. It’s a small town. I know three people who have been to see her. But if he is . . .”
“What?”
“Don’t you see what that means? It means she knows stuff. It means he has told her stuff, stuff that he wouldn’t tell anyone else. And now she’s telling you to stay away from him.”
I took a moment to absorb this.
“Paige,” she said, “you have to go talk to him.”
“Actually, doesn’t it sound like I should stay as far away from him as possible?”
“Do you want to figure out what’s going on in your house, or don’t you? He’s got the answer. I’m sure of it.”
I shook my head, uncomfortable with this plan. “He always changes the subject. He doesn’t like to talk about certain things, and . . . well, shouldn’t I respect that?”
Chloe looked at me seriously. “We’re not talking about a gambling problem, or his sex life. This is not the time for being polite. You heard the old man yourself—there is something sinister in your house. Something beyond our understanding, maybe beyond anyone’s. And Raph could have the key. You have to talk to him.”
FRIDAY, JUNE 12, 8:22 A.M.
Well, I put together a few more pieces of the puzzle last night.
Seeing how nervous and unconvinced I was during our coffee date, Chloe offered to come with me to Raph’s place—perhaps to lend moral support, or more likely because she was afraid I’d chicken out. But I told her no. I love Chloe, but she has a way about her . . . You only have to see her status at school to know that she has a tendency to rub some people the wrong way. And Raph was hypersensitive under the best of circumstances. With people deliberately pushing at the things he had walled off and forbidden us to talk about . . . I had a feeling the situation could be volatile.
After dinner I steeled myself and headed down to the basement with no idea which version of Raph to expect. When he opened the door, I checked his face for clues. He seemed more calm, less manic than he had last time . . . and he didn’t kick me out right away, which I took as a good sign. But stepping closer, I noticed his eyes were rimmed with red, and as he closed the door behind me, he wiped his nose on the back of his hand.
“Allergies?” I said.
“What?” said Raph. “Oh yeah. Spring’s the worst. All that cottonwood fluff in the air . . .”
I stood in the middle of the room, looking around for any clue to what Raph knew. Any clue that would let me get out of there and mollify Chloe, without having to actually speak and reveal my mission. The apartment was not
as crazy looking as it had been with the boxes everywhere, but it also didn’t look as spic and span as it had the last time I had been here. Instead it bore the signs of a more typical college-age kid: dirty dishes in the sink, mail and magazines heaped on various surfaces, a lamp askew, a rug corner flipped up. Or was it more than that? Was this typical post-adolescent slovenliness, or the incipient signs of depression? For example, a plant that my mom had given him had fallen from a window ledge and broken on the floor, but he’d made no effort to sweep up the dirt. And the teakettle he had been so excited about last time I saw him was on the floor next to the couch, knocked over on its side.
I looked up at Raph again and saw suspicion in his eyes. I think the way I was looking around his apartment was making him nervous. “Look,” he said, “do you need anything? Because I was just . . .” He trailed off, like he was hoping I would take the hint, but with Chloe in the back of my mind, I pushed forward.
“You were just what?” I said.
“Huh?” he tried, stalling for time. “I was busy. This isn’t the best time, Paige, but maybe—”
“Busy with what?” Raph just stared at me. “You’re not taking classes, you don’t have a job, you don’t seem to have any friends other than my mom and me. What exactly are you doing tonight that can’t be interrupted?”
Raph swallowed. “I thought I told you,” he said. “When someone—”
“When someone changes the subject, when someone makes it clear that they don’t want to talk about something, you let it drop, right? Well, I’m not letting it drop this time. I’m sorry, Raph, but I need answers. Logan’s been to the hospital twice now. The electronics in the house are going haywire. Total strangers are terrified of the place. This isn’t a joke anymore, and it’s not something you can just keep to yourself, because you’re not the only one affected.”
Raph sat down at the counter. “I didn’t realize it had gotten that bad.”
“You know something,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on. Tell me what you know.”
“How much have you figured out?”
He was deflecting, of course, and I felt a flare of rage at him for continuing to be so evasive when he knew what we were facing. He was as bad as Dr. Clyde, in his way. But I took a deep breath and calmed myself. At least he was acknowledging that there was something to know. This was progress, and if he was willing to go this far, I might get him to go further.
“I know you saw Dr. Clyde,” I began, wondering what danger there might be in bluffing. “I know she thinks you’re dangerous. And I know . . .”
“What?”
His direct question was making me all too aware of how little I did know. “Something about that pamphlet! That cult. Pronoica. It’s tied in with all this somehow.”
“Anything else?”
I shook my head, relieved that none of what I said was so off base it would close him off. He scrubbed a hand roughly through his hair.
“I did see Dr. Clyde. I was her patient for almost a year.”
“What happened? She said you were cured?”
Raph laughed dryly. “You have a lot to learn about shrinks. No. I stopped going. Maybe I believed I was cured, or maybe I just wanted to be. No, that’s not it. I believed I was sick, and that was all I needed to know. That solved all my problems.”
“You’re doing it again. Talking in riddles.”
“Risk you take when you ask people stuff they don’t want to tell you.”
“It’s the morgue, isn’t it? You told us it wasn’t haunted to throw us off the track, but there’s something going on that has to do with—”
“The morgue isn’t haunted. It has nothing to do with the morgue.”
I sat down across from him. “Why don’t you just start at the beginning? Why did you leave school?”
Raph shook his head. “That wasn’t the beginning. Not by a long ways. You’re asking the wrong questions, Paige.”
I flailed about, helplessly. “Fine, then. Start with the boxes. What was in those boxes? Why did you have them here in your apartment?”
“Getting warmer.”
“Your professor,” I said as a memory from one of our earlier conversations surfaced. “You were working on a project with him . . .”
Raph winced as if he had been slapped. He closed his eyes and didn’t open them for a long moment. “Hot yet?” I said. Raph opened his eyes and took a slow, unsteady breath. And indeed, he seemed to be sweating, though the room was as chilly as it had been earlier.
He checked his phone for the time. “Why don’t I just show you?” he said. I looked around the apartment, wondering what he had that he could show me, but he shook his head. “Not here.” He opened his front door and strode out into the chill night. I followed him.
We walked for blocks, heading toward downtown, but I still had no real idea where we going, just a pit of nervousness in my stomach. As we walked along quiet, treelined residential streets, the cottonwood fluff drifted down on us like a scene from a demented snow globe, and I was struck by the eerie sense that even the seasons had gotten out of joint. None of it made any sense. If my problem was in the house, what solution were we going to find anywhere else? But Raph was so touchy, I was afraid to harass him with more questions than I already had, afraid he would change his mind and head back, or do something even stranger.
Soon we were on the university campus. I had been there a few times to visit Mom in her office, or to see an exhibit at the student art center, but never at night. The dorms and fraternities were brightly lit, and sounds of laughter and camaraderie echoed from them, but we kept walking toward the main quad, which was surrounded by classroom buildings, and was silent and still this time of night. But Raph strode purposefully up the empty paths toward a hulking, modern building, which I realized was the library. There were lights on inside, but otherwise very little sign of life. I read the hours off the sign on the door, then checked my watch. “They’re only open another 20 minutes,” I said.
“Yes,” said Raph, and he opened the door. He gave only the briefest of glances toward the reception desk before moving swiftly toward the stairs and, taking them two at a time so that I panted to keep up, led me up to the fourth floor of the building, then through a maze of library stacks, administrative offices, and storage rooms until we at last reached our apparent destination. The room was filled with boxes, and after a moment’s confusion, I realized that they were the same boxes that had been in Raph’s apartment not too long ago.
“So this is where they went,” I marveled.
“This will tell you most of the story.”
The boxes were stacked floor to ceiling, and what labels there were were written in a code that was impenetrable to me. “Where do I begin?”
Raph scanned the room, obviously having something in mind. Then he picked a box from one of the precarious towers, carefully slid it apart from the others, and opened it. “Here,” he said, thrusting a slim booklet into my hands, then going back to rifling in the box. I flipped it open and read the title page. Your Spirit Power: with 20 lessons in how to find it and use it, it read. I opened it and skimmed through the text.
“What the hell is this stuff?” I said.
“This is our project,” said Raph. “This is Pronoica.”
The existence of the invisible power in every one of us is fast becoming common knowledge. This omnipresent spirit is the infinite source of all our needs. The invisible spirit of the God-Law lives in you every moment of the day, and is ever waiting for you to recognize that invisible though powerful presence. Please follow me very closely in these studies, for they are pregnant with Spiritual Power.
FRIDAY, JUNE 12, 11:15 A.M.
As Raph’s long, pale, nervous fingers sorted efficiently through the various documents in this and a few other boxes, he continued with his story, explaining how he had first come to work with his professor on the Pronoica project.
“I was a sophomore,” he said, “and I wasn’t even in his departme
nt. But I had heard things—that Montague Verano was a genius, that he was far too good for a school like this. Studied in England, and came here for . . . obscure reasons. I was intrigued.”
“And?”
“He was everything I’d been promised and more.” Raph smiled a private smile. “I was out of my element. I sat in the back of the class and didn’t say much. There were other students—seniors, history majors, even a couple of grad students auditing for fun—who were better than me, who stood out in class, who vied with each other for the chance to have even a brief conversation with the man. That was fine with me. I was happy to fly under the radar. I did all the readings, took notes, listened to what everyone else had to say, and felt lucky just to be there, even if no one noticed me.”
“But Verano did notice you.”
“He . . . took an interest. Called me in after the first paper, and said my work was outstanding. Well beyond his expectations. I was . . . surprised. Flattered. Then he asked me if I wanted to help him with a project he was working on. He said he got the sense that I could keep a secret. I told him I understood.”
“Pronoica?”
Raph nodded. “This wasn’t an ordinary history book Verano was writing,” he went on. “He had an idea—an obsession, you might call it—that Pronoica might be real. Everyone who had looked into it so far had dismissed it just the way you did: as a cult with a charlatan for a leader, who was only trading on people’s hopes and dreams to make himself a little cash. But Verano . . . he was convinced there was more to it than that. That maybe even Williamson himself hadn’t known what it was, the power he had stumbled into.”
“But why did it need to be secret?”
Raph glanced up at me, his eyebrows arched. “You kidding? It would have been career suicide if he’d told anyone what he was working on. This is academia, not some cable TV ghost-hunting show. He had to wait until he had the proof, the evidence he needed to convince the whole world, or they’d write him off as a kook and a crackpot.”