Poltergeist

by James Kahn

  “Mommy . . .” repeated the voice. There was no doubt about it. The voice was Carol Anne’s. But where, in God’s name, was she hiding?

  “I’m here, baby! Oh God, baby, I’m here!” Diane wept hysterically, stumbling around the room in circles.

  Almost catatonic, Robbie walked back to the television. “Mommy. Over here.”

  Diane looked at her son and froze. Her face contorted with foreknowledge. Gray shapes moved fleetingly across the television screen, indistinct blurs; and then the voice came again, Carol Anne’s voice, distorted uncannily through the noise of the blue-white static: “I can’t see you, Mommy. Mommy. Where are you?”

  Staring at the television with greater comprehension than she could tolerate, Diane was overcome by a choking nausea; a falling, as if into madness. Her eyes rolled back, and she lost consciousness.

  CHAPTER 3

  Tangina Barrons was fifty-two, on the plump side, bespectacled; tended to dress in floral chiffons, and ordinarily wore her thin hair up in a tight bun. For most of her life, she’d had dreams. Special dreams.

  As a child they had taken the form of nightmares. Pavor nocturnis, the doctor called it—night terror. She would be pulled from sleep each night with a moan of horror on her lips, moaning until her mother or her sister shook her awake. When they asked her what the dream had been about, she never remembered—there was only a black amnesia, deathly, opaque.

  Around the age of ten, she stopped having the dreams. That development was met with great relief by Tangina and her family. She went through a quiescent period for a couple years—a happy time for her. Then, when she was twelve, her parents died in a train wreck—and Tangina dreamed about the wreck the night it happened. From then on, she found she was prescient.

  She dreamed things before they happened—or at least, as they happened. Frequently, the dreams concerned people she knew, though not always. She became extremely close to her sister during the following years, as they were shuttled from orphanage to foster home, and much of Tangina’s second sight revolved around that beloved sibling. The second sight was alternately a gift and a curse, at first—these glimpses of the future, or of the displaced Now—but gradually Tangina simply learned to take it for granted. Some people could hear in higher registers than other people. Tangina took her second sight for what it was: that she could see in higher registers.

  It was only during the last ten years or so, however, that she began having knowledge of other worlds. Not actually other planets in the universe, she thought—though for all she knew, they might be—but more like other dimensions, other planes of existence, other levels of spirit, somehow disjunct from this mortal coil. And just like those of her early childhood, these dreams scared her.

  Not always, but usually. They involved running, more often than not. Either she herself was running, or her sister was, or some unknown unfortunate. What was chasing was less clear still: forms without shape, usually; gloating presences, shades of meaning.

  The dreams were unsettling, at best, and Tangina would just as soon have seen them disappear. But they didn’t. In fact, they lingered in the corners of her consciousness even during waking, at times. These were states of special perception visions, nothing less. They allowed her, among other things, to “read” people in ways that were invisible to most—read their souls, their multiplicities of spirit.

  Since it was an ability over which she had no control, Tangina decided, in the end, to make use of it—to help people, if she could. She became a reluctant clairvoyant.

  Reluctant, because the episodes of vision left her so drained, and because once she opened one of her special doors, she couldn’t close it again at will: once she tried to see, she had to see, whether she wanted to or not. There was no eye-closing, and she couldn’t leave, once the show started.

  Consequently, Tangina was at the end of her tether. Ten years of witnessing and isolating other people’s horrors and losses had almost burned her out. She’d been hired by frantic parents to find missing children, by stumped police departments to find disemboweled corpses, by grieving widows to contact lost loves. But they couldn’t pay her enough to do that anymore—she wanted an end to it. She could no longer turn it off.

  And moreover, it was getting worse. For many weeks, now, she’d been having dreams that stole her sleep, left her tired and sweating in the morning. They were precognitive, of that she was certain—unfortunately, they slipped from her consciousness within seconds of awakening.

  That made the experience even more frustrating—the fact that she remembered the dreams for scant moments, but then lost them like water through a sieve during the brief time it took her to wake fully, leaving her damp with memory.

  Nor was that even the worst of it. Things, objects in her room—and she was not certain of any of this, which made it worse still—were moving. Not moving unmistakably or visibly, but each morning Tangina was aware, or thought she was aware, of something in one spot in the room, which the previous evening had been in another spot. A chair, moved out a bit from the wall; a book, shifted from table to dresser.

  Psychokinesis was one thing she’d never experienced before. Not that she disbelieved in it; only, if this was it, the experience was new to her. But the incidents were so vague, so vaguely unsettling—she wondered if she could be losing her mind. Nothing, she’d come to learn—not even insanity—was impossible.

  Her days were filled with premonition and dread. She wondered at the import of every encounter. Was the mailman’s song a portent? The scrap of paper that caught on her shoe, a token? Her world had become a place of foreboding; it gave her no rest.

  Since her resolve was to give up augury and divination insofar as she could, she tried to suppress the episodes with sleeping pills. For a time, that worked. Her dreams became less frequent, less tormenting. As the medication accumulated in her system, though, she started feeling chronically tired, perpetually drugged. One day she almost stepped in front of a truck, accidentally. She stopped the pills.

  The dreams returned with a vengeance. They took over her life, became the nebulous center of a troubled existence.

  She decided to approach the problem head-on—to seek the night-visions directly, and deal with them face to face. She decided to “scry.”

  Scrying was the art of crystal gazing, a technique Tangina, like thousands of seers before her, had perfected as a medium through which to achieve an altered state of consciousness. Not that a crystal ball was necessary per se—any reflective or refractive surface would do. The crystal ball was merely a visual point around which the visionary could gather his or her consciousness—as a means of dissociating, or discorporating, or becoming otherwise entranced.

  So that is what Tangina did, to try to recapture her dreams. She doused the lights in her apartment—she lived alone, now—sat on the floor of her bedroom, lit a single candle, placed her crystal before it, stared into the dancing point of light.

  Her respirations grew shallow; the world around her faded; she melded with the light in the glass. And, as she had so often before, found herself on a different plane, in a different dimension.

  It was steamy here, in this rift of the universe. Indistinct. Shapeless horrors tracked her, hovering in the fog. Nothing was clear enough to confront.

  Tangina tried to rise above the steaminess, but was prevented by a numbness that pressed down on her at each attempt. She delved into it, but it grew thicker; movement became difficult.

  Something grew near her; she could not sense what it was. She ran, almost without volition—she neither wanted to stop, nor did she get the feeling that she was able to. There were no limits to the place she was in, yet she felt smothered by its closeness.

  She chased a dim figure; it eluded her. Mist filled her: the mist was chill, and alive, and created a diffuse hopelessness about all things. It sustained itself on her life force, and even grew stronger, at her expense. Her spirit began to dwindle under its nameless breath.

  Tangina retur
ned to her body. Totally exhausted now, and no wiser for all her trials, she was at a loss as to how to proceed. She’d tried doctors, faith healers, potions, and priests. No one could rid her of her uninvited dreams. So, as a last resort, she turned to the Psychic Society.

  Not a last resort because she doubted the members’ abilities—though some people there, to be sure, were con artists and showmen—but because she’d vowed to stay away from other psychics, as a way of reinforcing her own resolution to close off that part of her life.

  She showed up at the Society’s monthly meeting with no thought in mind other than to talk to a few old friends, to see if anyone had any ideas about how to solve her problem. To her surprise, there was a guest speaker that night—Dr. Martha Lesh, a scientist from the university, talking about her research in parapsychology.

  Scientists, on the whole, didn’t interest Tangina. She had no stake in proving her abilities to anyone—rather, she felt the opposite, at the present. Still, this Lesh seemed to be a kind soul—Tangina read the aura easily—and after the lecture, the two women gravitated to each other fairly quickly.

  The significance of such instantaneous gravitation was not lost on Tangina, and intrigued her even more with the possibilities this doctor presented.

  “I think,” Tangina said right at the beginning, “you and I are already bound up together. We share the same path for a time.”

  Dr. Lesh smiled. “A common destiny?”

  “I shrink from words like destiny,” Tangina mused. “Except in Moby Dick. Call it, rather, a presage.”

  “It sounds ominous, I’m afraid.”

  Other members were milling around the two women, trading stories, drinking wine. They moved off to a corner.

  “Not necessarily ominous,” said Tangina. “But I do have dreams.”

  “So do we all.”

  “Not like mine. Mine are . . . prophetic.”

  “What do they prophesy?”

  “I don’t know. That’s part of the problem.”

  “And the other part?”

  “I can’t stop them. They won’t let me be.”

  “Have you had this problem before?” Lesh was becoming intrigued herself, by this arcane midget. She hadn’t known what to expect when the Society had invited her here to talk on her research. She’d come prepared for anything, though, so she certainly didn’t feel let down by Tangina’s approach.

  “I’ve had ESP most of my life—precognition, as well. I don’t want it anymore, though, Doctor. It takes too much out of me. I’ve done with warnings. Can you help me?”

  “I’m not certain exactly what you want of me.

  “It’s my dreams.”

  “Recurring dreams?”

  “Yes . . . at least, I think so. They seem to be the same, at any rate. I can’t remember them, you see—but I’m certain they’re portentous. Or at least, telepathic. However, I wish to be rid of them. Telepathy is my disease. If you can cure me—give me a remission, in any case—you may borrow them.”

  “Borrow them?” Lesh’s first reaction was amusement, but the woman with whom she spoke was not amused.

  “Yes. I’ll make it a proposal—that is the currency of the scientist, I believe. You may use me—study my brain, register my abilities, measure my prescience, borrow my dreams—only help me, if you can, to draw the curtains on my second sight. For I’m weary to the bone, of knowing.”

  Dr. Lesh was moved by this plea, but somewhat at a loss for response.

  Tangina smiled understandingly, and helped her. “You needn’t answer now. You don’t know me, of course, and I know you have committees and budgets to answer to. Believe me—I wouldn’t have approached you if I hadn’t been desperate.”

  Lesh was a bit defensive at the suggestion that she had to answer to a committee before she could make a research decision. “No, that’s not it—there are no committees to whom I am answerable in matters such as this. And I make the budgets in our lab . . .”

  “Well, then,” smiled Tangina. “As I indicated when we first met—our association was practically a foregone conclusion. I only hope it ends profitably for us both.” She extended her hand.

  With combined bewilderment and inevitability, Lesh shook hands with Tangina. “I’d be happy if it ended profitably for even one of us,” the older woman laughed. “And I don’t care which one, at this moment.” She shook her head then. “Oh dear, I think I’d better have another glass of wine.”

  So it was Tangina’s hope that if an explanation could be found for her condition, a cure could be found as well. It was Lesh’s hope that a condition could be found. They ran tests on Tangina, recorded her dreams, her brain waves, her receptivity to direct and to telepathic suggestion. By the third week, Dr. Lesh felt she was beginning to see a pattern emerge—the PGO activity she’d mentioned to Ryan.

  By the third week, Tangina was beginning to despair of ever finding respite from her nightmarish sleep. But she’d made an agreement with Dr. Lesh, and would follow it to its end, no matter how unrewarding she feared it was becoming.

  Consequently, she sat quietly in her nightgown now, as Marty meticulously glued electrodes to her scalp, each lead trailing a fine wire that plugged into the wall behind the bed in the observation room. The room was filled with monitoring equipment of every variety—television camera, magnometer, electrostatic locator, infrared camera, high- and low-frequency microphones, electrohygrometer—all pointed at the bed.

  “One day I’m gonna wake up fried to a crisp,” Tangina muttered to Marty.

  “At least we’ll get it on tape,” he replied lightly.

  She gave him a look, but before she could make a comeback, Dr. Lesh entered the room.

  “All set?” Dr. Lesh asked.

  “Last electrode.” Marty stood back and admired his handiwork. “I’ll go make an equipment check.” He left the room.

  “Well,” said Dr. Lesh, sitting down on a stool beside the bed. “How are you feeling tonight?”

  “Tingly,” Tangina replied. She lay back in bed. “What’s on tonight’s agenda?”

  “The same as last week, as far as you’re concerned. I’m going to hypnotize you, and suggest that you enter into your maximally receptive state. Then I’ll do the same with one of our other subjects—Rita—who we’ve had some success with in the past—and we’ll have Rita try to transmit her thoughts into your dreams during the night. During all of this, we’ll be monitoring your brain waves, measuring ambient room ionization, and so on—and then we’ll wake you up after each dream, and ask you to recount as much as you can remember into this tape recorder. Any questions?”

  “Are we getting anywhere?”

  Lesh smiled sympathetically. “Yes, I think we are. Truly. Tonight we’ll be tracking some specific functions that I think are beginning to correlate.”

  “Ah. Correlations.”

  “We are doing our best, you know.” Lesh felt a little deflated.

  Tangina just felt tired. “I’m afraid I’m as skeptical of all this as Ryan is of me.”

  “We must trust each other—it’s the only way this will work.”

  “Oh, I trust you,” Tangina assured her. “It’s your machines I don’t believe in.”

  They shared a brief, frustrated, but not-yet-hopeless glance, and settled down to the business at hand. “Well,” said Martha, “why don’t we get started?”

  Tangina closed her eyes lightly. Lesh dropped her voice to a monotone, and continued speaking. “Now I’m going to count from one to ten, and I want you to concentrate on the sound of my voice. And as I count higher, you’re going to let yourself become more and more deeply asleep, more relaxed, more receptive. And when I reach ten, you’ll be completely asleep, completely relaxed, completely asleep in the deepest, fullest sleep you’ve ever known, a deep dark sleep. Already, now, you’re aware only of the sound of my voice, only my voice, relaxing you and soothing you, letting you glide into sleep. One . . . starting to get sleepy now, just beginning to feel that sensation
wash over you, letting yourself follow the sound of my voice into deeper, darker sleep. Two . . . the higher I count, the deeper you can feel yourself going, now, floating deeper and deeper on the sound of my voice. Three . . .”

  Lesh, Marty, and Ryan sat quietly checking readings in the receiving room. Two television monitors showed Tangina and Rita, sleeping soundly in their respective rooms in different sections of the building. Marty fiddled with the Balance and Gain dials on the electroencephalograph, as twelve red pens scratched out Tangina’s brain waves onto the paper that slowly rolled from the machine into a pile on the floor. Lesh studied the tracings. Ryan ran sound checks, zeroed all the gauges.

  “How we doin’?”

  “Everything as planned. Tangina seems to be in, oh, looks like Stage II sleep now. Rita should be having her first Transmission Dream shortly.”

  “Transmission you hope.”

  “That’s what we’re here to find out.”

  “What’s the subject matter tonight?”

  “Let’s see,” said Dr. Lesh. “I told Rita first to dream about the merry-go-round at the circus, then her second dream will be about her puppy running away, and her third will involve a fight with a policeman. Tangina, of course, I just told to dream’ about whatever comes into her mind.”

  “Ah, but what a mind.”

  “I wish the Nobel committee could see us now.”

  “Now there you go, prejudging the experiments,” tempered Ryan. “This is empirical research. We observe, we record. If possible, we conclude.”

  Lesh rubbed her eyes. “I think I’m becoming solipsistic in my old age.”

  “What’s that?” Marty demanded suspiciously. He hated it when she used words he didn’t understand.

  “It is the theory that only the self exists, or can be proved to exist,” she explained. “Everything else, all this—the entire universe—is an invention of the self. Even you, my friend, are only one of my illusions. A ghost of my mind.”