A Babe in Ghostland

by Lisa Cach

  “And if it’s not ghosts? You will be looking for other explanations, won’t you?”

  “Yeah, of course. If we find something physically wrong with the house or the land it sits on, chances are it can be fixed.”

  “Good.” Case’s eye was caught by a battered yellow motorcycle helmet with wires dripping from its bottom. “And what’s that?”

  “That!” Eric picked it up, grinning. “This is my temporal lobe stimulator. The inspiration came from the work of Dr. Persinger, a neuroscientist up in Canada. He’s been pioneering the study of what happens when you apply electromagnetic pulse patterns to the temporal lobes.”

  Case remembered Eric talking about Persinger at the conference. “Ah. The scientist who makes you see God.”

  “The helmet may provide access to even more than that. Look at this thing,” he said, bringing it over to Case and showing him the inside of the helmet, either side of which was covered in metal bumps, wires trailing from them. “These are the electromagnets, which in turn will be hooked up to this”—he said, nudging a black box on the floor with his foot—“for power, and then that will be connected to my computer, where I adjust the intensity and the pattern of stimulation, depending on what results we’re getting.”

  “You won’t be getting any results,” Megan said, stepping into the room. “I’m not using it!”

  “I’ve refined it since you last used it. There won’t be any problems this time,” Eric said, undisturbed.

  “I don’t care what you’ve done to it,” she said. “I’m not letting that thing anywhere near me.”

  “Oh, don’t be stupid. It can’t hurt you—any more than it hurt you last time, if you’re honest about it.”

  Case put his hand on Megan’s shoulder and felt her trembling.

  “You think nothing happened last time?”

  “You got freaked out. It was the fault of the helmet, but nothing serious happened. I mean, it’s not like you were physically injured. It was like a bad drug trip, that’s all.”

  Megan shook her head. “No, it was much more than that.”

  Case squeezed her shoulder, and she looked at him, her eyes wide. “How about you tell me what happened?” he asked.

  She shuddered.

  “Megan? Tell me what happened.”

  “The helmet gave her the wrong type of stimulation,” Eric said. “She thought some sort of demon was attacking her.”

  “I didn’t think it,” Megan barked back.

  “Tell me,” Case repeated.

  “A woman phoned SPIRIT, asking if we could come investigate her house. She said that her two little girls, ages eight and ten, were being tormented at night by something, something that she herself had seen as a dark shadow in the hallway at night, and once in the corner of the girls’ room.”

  “First thing we did,” Eric interrupted, “was make sure there wasn’t a man living in the house, or even spending the nights. The woman hadn’t been seeing anyone since her divorce three years earlier; there were no male visitors to the house. Also, the bedroom was on the second floor, and the windows were locked. We knew it wasn’t a pedophile getting the girls.

  “The woman was religious, though. Superstitious as well. Lots of junk around the house for ‘good energy’ and ‘protective spirits.’ I’m always suspicious of that sort; they’re the most likely to interpret a bad dream as a visit from an evil spirit, or to think a ghost moved their car keys and that’s why they can’t find them. We went into the woman’s house thinking that she was misguided and had transferred her fears to her daughters.”

  Megan broke in, “But the moment I set foot inside the house for our preliminary interview, I no longer thought the woman was a nut. It felt wrong. Bad. That doesn’t always mean there’s something sentient and evil in a house. A house can feel terrible just because of an awkward layout and not enough windows, a lack of natural light, a traffic flow that goes contrary to human instinct, too low a ceiling. These things make people unhappy. They feel caged and uneasy.

  “But there was something in this house that I didn’t like. It was a feeling of something large and dark pressing down on you. Watching you. Waiting for its chance at you. The woman was genuinely frightened. She begged us to clear the house of spirits for her daughters’ sakes. She couldn’t afford to move, but staying in the house was destroying her children. She didn’t know what to do.

  “I felt bad for her, but after that preliminary interview, I knew that I didn’t want to go back.” She smiled wanly at Case. “Being able to sense the unseen doesn’t mean you’re not afraid of it. I didn’t know what it was in that house—human or nonhuman—but I did know that it would be attracted to me. If there is a presence in a place, it goes to the person best able to perceive it. It wants attention.” She paused. “I didn’t want it anywhere near me. I refused to go back.”

  “Which was unfair to that woman and her kids,” Eric said. “I mean, if those kids could endure it, then surely a grown woman with a talent for mediumship could face it. It would have gone against everything SPIRIT stands for not to try to help. I couldn’t have lived with myself.”

  Megan’s face betrayed subtle signs of disgust. She wasn’t buying Eric’s protestations of nobility.

  “So, you talked Megan into going back,” Case said to Eric.

  “Yeah. She has a generous heart. I knew she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she didn’t try to help those kids.”

  Megan glowered.

  Eric continued. “A few days later, our whole team went back for a full-scale investigation. The woman and her kids had gone to a friend’s house for the night. This was going to be the first really good test we’d have of the helmet. In my enthusiasm, I made some adjustments and forgot to tell Megan.”

  “You deliberately didn’t say anything.” She looked at Case. “He knew that I wouldn’t use it if I hadn’t first tried out the changes in a safe environment.”

  “I didn’t think anything bad would happen!”

  “Anyway,” Megan went on, “I was willing to use the helmet because I didn’t—and still don’t—have a very clear idea of how my abilities work. If the helmet was able to alter or magnify my abilities, then I might learn something about myself. I might learn something about just how real my abilities are.”

  “You don’t think they’re real?”

  “I’ve never been a hundred percent convinced that I have contact with the Other Side. There’s always a tiny part of me that follows Occam’s razor.”

  “That the simplest solution is the correct one?”

  She rocked her head from side to side. “That’s almost it, but that translation misses an important nuance. Occam’s razor says that you should employ no more assumptions, or entities, than necessary in looking for the solution to a question. For example, if you put a shallow dish of milk on the floor and the next morning it’s empty, you’d be employing Occam’s razor if you said that your cat drank it or that it evaporated, rather than claim that fairies drank it. Employing fairies in your solution requires adding an entity, or assuming that they exist, when you have no proof. Therefore, the other explanations are preferred.

  “So, in my case, it makes the most sense to say that I’m imagining what I ‘see.’ Or even saying that I somehow ‘pick up’ details about a dead person from the mind of someone living makes a better explanation than that I somehow pick up details about a dead person from a dead person himself. That last explanation requires two assumptions: that the dead still have an existence, and that I can get in tune with it.

  “I thought the helmet could somehow make the choice clearer. Was everything a hallucination, or was everything I saw real? I wanted to learn something about myself and wanted to learn something about the ‘reality’ of an existence beyond that which we see.”

  “We’d all tried using the helmet in neutral places,” Eric broke in. “Testing it out, seeing what it could do. I didn’t have any reason to think something would go wrong. Some people got a tripp
y feel from it, some got nothing, some people had an out-of-body experience. Megan usually just felt really relaxed.”

  “But that was when there were no entities around. It wasn’t someplace where children were being terrorized. And those test runs had been at settings a quarter the strength of what you threw at me that night!”

  “I’ve tried to explain to you a hundred times, I thought it was just some minor tweaking I’d done—”

  “Without warning me!”

  “I didn’t think anything was going to happen.”

  “Then why not tell me? Why didn’t you run some baseline tests to be sure there wasn’t something screwed up in your little invention, before sticking it on my head?”

  “Because I was excited about the entity and wanted to get on with it, and I didn’t think there’d be any problem.”

  Case looked with disapproval at Eric. He had been careless of Megan’s well-being, and that wasn’t how a man was supposed to behave toward any woman.

  “What happened when you put the helmet on?” Case asked her.

  “Nothing, at first. I was lying on a bed in the little girls’ room, lights out, SPIRIT’s night-vision and infrared cameras aimed at me while the rest of the crew watched the monitors in the kitchen. Everything was quiet. The helmet began its pulses, and I felt myself sinking into the same free-floating, relaxing oblivion as when I’d tried the helmet before.”

  “Oblivion?”

  “An aware sort of oblivion. It was a loss of a sense of self or individual identity. As if your bodily sensations are no longer coming to a unified whole to be processed but instead are happening in scattered elsewheres. It becomes nearly impossible to concentrate. You just disperse into the void, even your emotions feeling distant. It’s a little eerie but not at all unpleasant.

  “But then Eric turned up the power. And the feeling of peaceful floating ended, as did any sense of who or where I was. Everything was washed away by a tidal wave of anger and terror—a violent rage seeking destruction, but at the same time shot through with lightning bolts of fear. Whatever it was, it wanted to hurt something. I felt like I was part of that horrific angry darkness for an eternity.”

  “It wasn’t any more than a minute, though,” Eric said. “She started screaming, and we shut it off. She got freaked out, was all. She wasn’t hurt.”

  Megan was shaking her head. “It didn’t stop. The entity, whatever it was, had gotten inside me. It didn’t go away when the helmet was shut off. It was still there. In me.”

  Case felt a chill go down his neck. Megan’s eyes were haunted as she looked up at him.

  “That’s impossible, Megan,” Eric said. “It left a powerful imprint on your memory, that’s all.”

  “No, that thing got inside me, like an infection. I could feel it. I didn’t know what it wanted, and I didn’t want to wait to find out.”

  “What did you do?” Case asked.

  “I went home and holed up in my room and went through every paranormal book I had, looking for ways to get rid of it. Much like the Smithson sisters appear to have done here,” Megan said, inclining her head toward the library across the hall. “But nothing I tried worked. No Hail Marys, no holy water, no blessings from any of five dozen cultures, no burning sage. And all the time, I felt it roiling around in me, as if assessing its new tool.

  “Sometime well after dawn, I finally sat down in the center of my bed and put myself into a light trance state. One of my books suggested that dark entities cannot abide feelings of love and joy, so I concentrated on those emotions, thinking of my mother. How much she meant to me, how close we were, and how lucky I was to have her. And bit by bit, I felt the thing’s presence shrinking.

  “I must not have heard my mom knock on my door or call my name. But then I felt her hand on my shoulder, and all at once the dark presence was gone from me. I opened my eyes and saw Mom looking at me, worried.

  “Everything seemed okay at first. I took a nap, then joined her at the shop, and we had lunch together. She didn’t have much of an appetite at lunch and said she was tired. Remember when I told you about seeing the flicker?” she asked Case.

  He nodded, having a sick feeling where this story was headed.

  “I saw it then. A few months later, she finally went to the doctor for a checkup, and they found the cancer. They thought they’d been lucky and caught it early, but no matter what they did—surgery, chemotherapy, radiation—it never completely went away. It kept popping up again. It metastasized. And then it killed her.”

  Megan’s voice grew hoarse. “She was healthy up until that night I brought the entity home with me.”

  Case shook his head, his heart wrenching. “Megan, no. You aren’t blaming yourself for your mother’s cancer, are you?”

  Her eyes were filled with pain. “It saw that I cared about her, and it destroyed her.”

  The room fell silent. Megan sniffled.

  Case wrapped his arms around her, her slender body surprisingly soft as she allowed herself to be gathered into his embrace. “There’s no way this could be your fault,” he said softly into her hair, which smelled of jasmine. “If you’ve been carrying that thought around in your head since your mother got sick, you’ve got to release it.”

  “How can you know that thing didn’t do it to her?” Megan whispered, her voice creaking.

  “I don’t. But even if it did, it’s still not your fault. It would be the entity’s fault. Don’t play the ‘what if’ game with yourself. You’ll never win it.” He could feel the soft swell of her breasts pressed against him, and his body started to react. No! Think of Nixon, potatoes, the IRS long form! “And as harsh as this sounds, do you think your mother would have preferred that the entity stay with you and kill you?”

  Megan shook her head against his shoulder.

  He had an almost unbearable urge to slide his hand down to her butt. He let it move down her back, over the ridge of her bra strap, and settle at the top of her hip. “She wouldn’t even have wanted it to stay with those little girls, would she?”

  “There should have been another way to get rid of it.”

  Case looked at Eric, who was watching them with an unreadable expression on his face. “Did you know all of this?”

  Eric’s face twitched. “Not really. And I don’t think anything followed Megan home. Her wearing the helmet had nothing to do with her mom getting sick.”

  “Did the haunting at that house stop?” Megan moved against Case, and he gritted his teeth, arching his back to get his erection out of contact. Don’t think about her breasts, don’t think about them, don’t!

  Eric didn’t respond, then tightened his lips and nodded. “But it could have been the placebo effect.”

  Case released Megan and picked up the helmet, holding it strategically in front of his crotch. “I don’t blame Megan for not wanting to wear this. I wouldn’t, either, in her shoes.”

  “But you can’t judge by what happened then!” Eric cried. “This is a completely different helmet. The electromagnetic pulse patterns are different. I have deliberate patterns this time, instead of the random crap I was throwing at her last time. I can get precisely the effect I want now. I’ve tested the thing on my own brain a hundred times, and I’m okay!”

  “You can’t know what effect you’ll get,” Megan said. “What it does to you is not what it’ll do to me.”

  “Look, I’ve tested it on dozens of people. That’s how I figured out the patterns to begin with. I know how to create fear, euphoria, know how to trigger childhood memories. I can make someone feel like they’re floating or like someone else is in the room with them. I even know how to give a guy a boner.”

  “What?” Case said.

  “Yeah, there’s one pattern that creates sexual arousal in people, male or female. It’s not strong, but it’s there. Makes you think about those people with their stories of alien abduction and all that probing, eh?”

  “But what you don’t know,” Megan said, “is whether that machi
ne opens up a doorway in the mind that something from the other side can step through.”

  “It hasn’t happened to anyone else.”

  “Have you tried it on anyone who had a sixth sense?”

  Eric set his jaw and glared at Megan. “A couple of the sensitives with SPIRIT tried it. Nothing happened.”

  “The ‘sensitives.’ Ah, yes. I remember the type,” Megan said dryly, then arched an eyebrow at Case. “Highly imaginative, emotionally unstable people. If you think I’m bad, you need to meet one of these pieces of work.”

  Case looked at Eric. “Do you think they have any ability, these sensitives?”

  Eric made a face. “Not really. It’s fun to watch them freak themselves out sometimes, though.” He laughed. “They make themselves sick with fear; you should see it when they faint. Only they’re pretty careful about it, making sure they have a safe place to fall.”

  Case felt a twist of dislike for the man. Had Eric been similarly amused while Megan was screaming in terror? “I don’t think she should use the helmet.”

  Megan shot him a look of gratitude and relief.

  “You can’t be serious. You can’t let what happened two years ago eliminate useful tools for us today! Christ, we’d never have airplanes or medicine or anything if people gave up after the first disastrous failures. Failure is part of the process!”

  “I think Megan’s made a good case for not wanting to be your guinea pig.”

  “I’m past the guinea pig stage! I wasn’t lying. I’ve used the thing on dozens of people, including myself. It’s safe. It’s way more controlled now. Besides, if we don’t use it, how the hell are we going to find out what’s haunting this place?”

  “We’ll do it the old-fashioned way,” Megan said. “We’ll have a regular séance and see what we discover. We’ll see what the monitors pick up through the night. And if we don’t pick up any information at all, then maybe—maybe—I’ll consider using the helmet.”

  “Are you sure, Megan?” Case asked. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I think we’ll get something tonight. But…” She trailed off. She sighed. “As much as I hate to admit it, it isn’t fair to shut off a possibility just because of one bad experience. If we don’t get anywhere without it, maybe we’ll have to try using it.”