Poltergeist

by James Kahn

  Bremer noticed her notice it. “Striking painting, isn’t it? Just a copy, of course. It’s titled The Nightmare, by Fuseli. People used to think dreams were visitations—by devils, angels, incubi, whatever. We know better, now, of course.” He spoke with a secure arrogance that was comforting.

  “Well.” Diane relaxed a little. “Where do we go from here?”

  “We can set up some dates in the future for EEG recording, a few psychological screening tests—TAT, MMPI, and so on. For right now, though, why don’t we just have Carol Anne tell me what some of these dreams have been about?” He scrunched down to Carol Anne’s level. “Can you tell me some of your dreams, Carol Anne? I’d really like to know.”

  Carol Anne became shy, looked in her lap, looked at her mother, giggled, looked at her mother again.

  “Go ahead, Carol Anne, stop being so silly. Tell Dr. Bremer, just like you tell me and Daddy. Tell him the one about the orange bird.”

  Maternal sanction seemed to do the trick. Carol Anne’s eyes got wide, as she started to remember all of her dream-people.

  “The fire-man?” She looked at her mother. Diane nodded, and Carol Anne turned toward Bremer. “He’s not really a man, he’s really a bird, but really he’s made of fire.”

  “Uh huh, and what does he do in your dream?”

  “Oh, he flies, and he’s orange. And sometimes he carries me, but he doesn’t burn. Sometimes I fall off, though.”

  “What happens then?”

  “I fall. Then the shadow-man laughs and tries to catch me, but I never let him, ’cuz of his teeth, so he flies away too.”

  “Have you had that dream more than once?”

  She nodded.

  “Tell me another one.”

  “I don’t like the one about the star-man—he’s too loud.” Carol Anne made a disapproving face. “But I like the tree-man part a lot, except when the fire-man burns him up. That makes me sad. That’s when everyone starts crying.”

  “Who’s everyone?”

  “All the people in the funny clothes like in Gramma’s . . . scrapbook.” She smiled up at her mother; Diane smiled back.

  Bremer continued to coax her. Carol Anne went on to describe an elaborate dream world of good and bad creatures—beings shaped like flames, like leaves, like star clusters, like darkness. The creatures played with her, chased her, ignored her, threatened her. And there was something else—something she wouldn’t talk about. Something that made her stop talking.

  At the end of the hour, Dr. Bremer sat back with a look of contemplative satisfaction. “Well, I think we’ve covered a lot of ground this time. I’d like you to make an appointment for, oh, a few days from now, we can get the testing started at that time.”

  “Well . . . what do you think?” Diane felt perplexed, but hopeful.

  “I think she’ll come along just fine.” He smiled broadly. “Over the course of the next couple weeks we’ll differentiate these episodes, characterize them—true somnambulism versus auto-hypnosis, or epilepsy . . .”

  “Epilepsy!”

  “Please, don’t be alarmed. I don’t think this is epilepsy, but we’ll find out for sure. And even on the off chance it is, Mrs. Freeling, chances are we can completely control it with medications.” He wore his earnest face again.

  “Well . . . thank you,” Diane said a little breathlessly as she stood to go. “Say thank you, Carol Anne.”

  “Thank you,” she peeped.

  “Thank you, young lady,” said the doctor. “You have the most interesting dreams.”

  When Diane got home, she made both of them lunch. She wasn’t certain how she felt about Bremer’s pronouncements—the session had left her both depressed and excited—but at least she was doing something. That was the main thing. Carol Anne was getting help.

  She spent the next hour cleaning up the bedroom. Shards of glass covered the floor where pictures had fallen and shattered. White flakes from the acoustic ceiling stuck to the rug in patches, already settling into the pile.

  And E. Buzz was no help. The shaggy golden retriever seemed convinced that he and Diane were playing a fantastic game of Run-around-behind-Diane-and-try-to-Eat-Her-Shoe-When-She-Was-Bending-Over-and-Then-Run-Away-and-Then-Do-It-Again. Diane was playing a good game, but E. Buzz was winning.

  At half-time Diane sat on the floor against the dresser and had a smoke. E. Buzz lay on the bed, but Diane was too worn out to yell him off. Then as she was finishing her Virginia Slim, something funny happened. E. Buzz sat right up on the bed, faced the wall, and growled. Growled at nothing.

  “E. Buzz, whatever are you up to now?”

  The dog bared his teeth, kept growling.

  Diane got up and walked over to the wall the retriever was so concerned with. Nothing there. Just the blank wall above the headboard, still carrying its five-year-old, dirty white paint job, not a . . . wait, there was something new. A spot, high on the wall; more a stain, the size of a quarter. Brownish—it looked almost textured. She touched it: no residue, but when she sniffed her finger, it had a cloying, musty smell. The dog barked, and backed away.

  Diane tried to rub the stain off with a damp cloth, but it wouldn’t come. She tried Ajax on a sponge, and then vinegar with a brush. She couldn’t remove the stain; she couldn’t even lighten it. E. Buzz watched the entire operation with suspicion.

  Suddenly the dog changed his stance, though without apparent reason. Still staring at the spot on the wall, he stopped growling and began to wag his tail. He sat up, and extended his paw to be shaken. He jumped to the floor, barked twice, rolled over, and sat in place, his tail wagging; his eyes were bright, fixed to the wall.

  Diane stared at this remarkable display, totally nonplussed. “E. Buzz, what has gotten into you?”

  Her own words made her vaguely uncomfortable, though, so she refrained from further comment. E. Buzz ran from the room.

  She followed the dog downstairs to the kitchen. By the time she got there, he was barking vociferously at one of the kitchen chairs, which was leaning precariously on two legs against the dishwasher. Beneath it, on the floor, was an overturned open bottle of strawberry preserves.

  “Carol Anne!” Diane shouted.

  The little girl emerged from the pantry.

  “Did you spill that jelly on the floor, young lady?” her mother demanded.

  Carol Anne shook her head.

  To Diane, lying was the worst sin. And between the mess in the bedroom, the dog acting up, this jam on the floor, the unwanted pool . . . her nerves were stretched thin. So she grabbed Carol Anne by the arm, and gave the child a good swift swat on the rear. Tears filled the girl’s eyes.

  “Don’t you ever try to cover up with lies,” Diane scolded. “Lying is much worse than spilled jelly.”

  She stormed into the broom closet and got a sponge mop to clean up the mess. When she came back into the kitchen a moment later, though, she let the mop clatter to the floor and, for just a second, she lost her breath.

  All six kitchen chairs were piled in a neat pyramid atop the table, reaching clear up to the ceiling. Carol Anne stood motionless beside the sink, right where Diane had just left her. Her eyes were wide with wonder.

  Diane looked from Carol Anne to the chairs, and back again. “The TV people?” she asked quietly.

  Carol Anne nodded tentatively: she didn’t want to be accused of lying again. “Uh huh,” she said.

  Diane tried to remain calm, to keep the tremor out of her voice. She knew the thing a child feared most was fear in a parent. “Can you see them, sweetheart?”

  “Uh uh,” Carol Anne whispered. She could see her mother was upset, but was uncertain why. Maybe the television people should be spanked.

  “Are you afraid?” Diane asked.

  “Uh uh,” Carol Anne answered quickly. She had learned her lesson: she would not lie.

  Diane relied on what she saw as a fund of natural wisdom in her little girl—she relied on it, and took many cues from the child’s reactions. So: if Caro
l Anne wasn’t scared now, Diane felt that was probably pretty good evidence why she shouldn’t be scared.

  “Okay, sweetheart, Mommy’s going to put the chairs back, and then we’ll see if we can talk to the TV people. Okay?”

  Carol Anne nodded and smiled. It was a game, after all.

  E. Buzz walked in carefully, sniffed the floor, growled, then ran outside with his tail down and ears flat back.

  “And here we have the guest bathroom.” Steve smiled invitingly.

  Mr. and Mrs. Laird each peeked into the spotless, barren cubicle, then accompanied Steve into the spotless, barren kitchen.

  “You live in this area yourself, I understand,” Mr. Laird commented.

  “Absolutely,” nodded Steve. “We were the first family to move in. In fact, this property we’re looking at now is the identical design to my own home.”

  “They do all seem to have a sameness about them,” Mrs. Laird said a bit dubiously.

  “Well, there are four basic types, actually.” Steve felt a little on the defensive with this buyer; he wasn’t sure why. Something in her tone. “And we have extremely liberal building codes—very easy to build additions if you want.”

  They walked through the downstairs hall. Mrs. Laird tapped on the walls. “Sound like they’re hollow,” she muttered.

  “Let me show you the upstairs.” Steve tried to sound ingratiating as they started the climb.

  “Doesn’t look like many people live in this area yet,” Mr. Laird said in a rising voice.

  “No, this is the newest area of development—Phase Four. Believe me, it won’t be long, though, before Phase Four is just as populated as Phase One, down where I live—you won’t be able to tell ’em apart.”

  “I can hardly tell them apart now,” Mrs. Laird said under her breath.

  Steve took them into the master bedroom, opened the windows for them, showed them the view: quiet, rolling hills.

  “Smells like rain,” said Laird.

  “This way,” Steve replied. Down the hall, into the rear bedrooms. “At our place, we use this one for the kids’ room.”

  Mrs. Laird entered, tested the lights, opened the closet door. She nodded her first approval: “Big closets.”

  Dr. Martha Lesh sat in her lab at U.C. Irvine going over data. She was sixty-one years old and wore her hair tight, making her appear to be a severe woman, but she was not severe.

  She was actually rather warm, once her reserved facade was broken; yet here, in her laboratory, reserve was the face she maintained—everything seemed to run more efficiently because of it. She was used to manipulating environments with her manner, though: her training was in psychiatry, and she’d been a full professor for over ten years.

  Her interests had shifted over time, from traditional psychology to parapsychology, the study of paranormal phenomena—ESP, psychokinesis, precognition, reincarnation—it all fell under her purview now. Parapsychology was an umbrella field, encompassing things she believed, things she did not, things she redefined every time their subject arose. For example, she was convinced—had proved to herself in her experiments—that extrasensory perception was a real, if unelucidated, phenomenon: information transfer across some variety of electromagnetic field, at some unknown frequency and wavelength. Psychokinesis she had more difficulty with—to move physical objects at a distance required (to her way of thinking) a greater energy source than was demonstrable or even imaginable in the human mind. Still, she had not ruled PK out—her favorite quote was by the astronomer Fred Hoyle; The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine. Dr. Lesh had this quote taped to the wall over her desk.

  Even so, there were things she didn’t accept. She didn’t believe in reincarnation, for instance—for reincarnation necessarily postulated the migration of the soul, and Dr. Lesh didn’t believe in such a thing as a soul. She believed in science.

  But she also believed in people, and that softened her core. She viewed her research as investigation into human resources as much as inquiry, into the nature of the universe. “The scientist with the heart of gold,” Marty called her.

  Marty Lewandowski was the chief lab technician, busily tinkering with the electroencephalograph behind Dr. Lesh now. Marty was twenty-three, thought of himself as a cool dude, and didn’t believe in much of anything but his bi-monthly paycheck. Not that he disbelieved in Lesh’s experiments—he just didn’t really care all that much. It was a nice place to work, though—he was into all the electronics, the people were pretty mellow, the hours were fairly flexible, there were always lots of cute grad students floating around. And Martha was a real human being to work for.

  “Out of ink in Lead Eight, Doc,” he called to her back. “How should we interpret that?”

  “Just fill it—that’s in your job description, isn’t it?” She smiled without looking up from her papers. They enjoyed teasing each other

  “You going over the Tangina transcripts?” he asked.

  “Mm hmm. I think a real pattern is emerging, too—whenever she scores high on the psi tests, her EEG demonstrates a statistically significant preponderance of . . .”

  “Alpha waves, right?”

  “Yes, alpha, but we’ve known that more or less all along. What I see here—and much more so, now that I’m looking for it—is PGO activity. The ponto-geniculo-occipital spikes.”

  “Same as you see during REM sleep?”

  “Exactly—that’s what makes this finding even more exciting—it seems to suggest that psi phenomena may be related to the dreaming state—which is, of course, anecdotally, what people have always said.”

  Ryan walked in and sat down. “You’re not talkin’ about voodoo again, I hope,” he laughed, dumping his books on the table. Ryan Mitchell was one of Dr. Lesh’s grad students. He was bright, energetic, and opinionated. Like Lesh, he’d seen telepathy demonstrated in the lab; unlike her, he generally scoffed at all the rest—for its lack of hard evidence, for the fools and charlatans that glutted the field.

  But Ryan was no cynic, merely a skeptic. He maintained rigorous standards of proof, and all things that failed to meet these standards were highly suspect; were, in fact, unworthy, if not totally worthless. A priori, of all things he was skeptical. However, once a phenomenon did pass his discriminating evaluations, did not wither under his scrutiny, held strong under the eye of the impartial observer—then Ryan Mitchell believed, and would stand behind that belief against all onslaught.

  Unfortunately, most “proofs” of paranormal phenomena failed to meet his strict criteria.

  Ryan was convinced, for example, that Tangina was faking.

  “Marty was talking about ink,” said Dr. Lesh. “I was talking about Tangina’s EEG.”

  “I think we ought to cut her loose,” Ryan went on. “Really, Martha, she’s just jerkin’ our chain.”

  “I don’t think so, Ryan. For two reasons. One—I was just telling Marty—is that I’m starting to see a real pattern in her EEG. Here, look at these PGO spikes—they fire each time the transcript was positive for a behaviorally paranormal experience.” Ryan examined the tracings. Lesh continued. “The other reason I don’t think she’s faking is that she’s so upset. She hardly believes in some of these experiences herself—she’d certainly like to be rid of them, and furthermore, would never even have come to us if her sister hadn’t insisted she get ‘cured.’ No, I think Tangina’s the real thing.”

  “She’s the real thing, all right,” Ryan said sarcastically.

  “What’s up for tonight?” asked Marty.

  “Tonight we put it all together,” Lesh said, taking off her glasses, rubbing her eyes. “EEG monitoring, evoked potentials, electromagnetic field analysis, and visuals—first under hypnosis, then during sleep.”

  “Well—I think we’re wasting our time. But what the hell—it’s only my education.”

  “It’s only my life, Mr. Mitchell,” said Tangina from the doorway.

  There was a moment of uncomfor
table silence as the three scientists wondered how long she’d been standing there listening. This happened to Tangina not uncommonly, though—these uncomfortable silences. She was a dwarf.

  “Ryan meant no insult, Tangina,” Dr. Lesh intervened. “He was a born skeptic. It’s only his way of being . . . scientific.”

  “Frankly, doctors, I’m not interested in whether you believe in my powers or not—as long as you find a way to stop my dreams.”

  “We’ll do what we can,” Dr. Lesh said gently. “That’s all I can promise you.”

  Cumulus clouds were matting the sky once more as Steve drove home Monday evening. He hoped it wouldn’t be another screamer, as Sunday’s had been. They could all use a good night’s sleep tonight.

  He groaned as he swung the Country Squire around the last corner and pulled up to his driveway: three garbage cans blocked the entrance.

  “Kids,” he muttered, as he stopped the car, got out, and began to move the obstacles. Diane came running out the front door before he d cleared them off.

  “Hey, sugar,” he called out. “Guess who just bought P-4 237 . . .”

  “C’mere. Hurry,” she panted, grabbing his wrist.

  “Whoa, wait a sec, I’m parked in the street.” He’d never seen her like this. She looked pale and flushed at the same time.

  “Leave it. Come quick, before it stops again.”

  She pulled him at a trot into the house, down the hall, into the kitchen. Sweat covered her forehead; there was a sense of concentrated hysteria about her that Steve had never witnessed: she was right on the edge.

  “Babe, what is it, you look . . .”

  “Okay, okay . . . look. Okay. Now listen. Robbie and Dana are eating at the Sandersons—I’ve kept them out of it, but Carol Anne’s been in on it from the beginning, but Dana would just start to blab or get embarrassed and Robbie’d be up for the next three weeks sleeping on your side of the bed, and . . .”

  “Diane, put the brakes on, will you? Just sit down here a sec, and tell me . . .”