Poltergeist

by James Kahn

  “Carol Anne!” Diane screamed again. “Oh God!”

  Steve began pounding the wall.

  “You fucking bastard, she’s just a baby!” Diane groaned in a failing voice.

  “Mommy! Mommy!”

  “Help her!” Diane screamed at Lesh now. “Can’t you hear what’s happening? For the love of God, help her!”

  Before Lesh could say a word, the sound of small, soft footsteps ran across the ceiling and down the wall. Two lamps on the table against the wall overturned, smashing to pieces on the floor.

  Right away, slow, colossal footfalls boomed over the same path in pursuit—across the ceiling, down the wall. The table broke in half, was crushed to pieces. The house shook with the rumble of these steps.

  Suddenly a warm gust of wind raced over Diane, blowing her hair wildly around, whooshing through her clothes. Her eyes sprang open wide, her mouth dropped—she let out a long peal of sound; raw emotion, a primal combination of joy and horror. Then she whispered: “She just moved through me. My God, I felt her. I can smell her. It feels like she went through my soul!”

  She ran over to. Steve and pulled him to her. “Smell my clothes. Here. It’s her. It’s her all over me.”

  He brought the tail of her shirt up to his nose and inhaled. Tears filled his eyes. “It is Carol Anne. My God, I can’t believe it.”

  The giant, pursuing footsteps grew louder now, moving this way and that across the room, up the walls, knocking over chairs and breaking pictures: as if searching, fruitlessly. Everyone in the room faced the loathesome sounds—the heavy feet, the sickening grunts—when suddenly a terrifically foul smell filled the air. The smell of rotting, of death. A moment later, there was an implosion—almost the sound of thunder, almost the horror of suffocation. The impact was tremendous, blowing everyone backward, as a force like a tornado passed through each of them, and out the picture window. The window cracked in a dozen places.

  All at once, the room was quiet.

  “Carol Anne?” Diane wheezed.

  Unremitting quiet.

  “Steve? She doesn’t answer.”

  “She’s safe, I think. For now.”

  Diane sat on the floor, shaking as if she herself were the lost child. “How much longer will this continue?”

  Her son crawled over and put his arms around her, to comfort her. “Don’t worry, Mom. We’ll find Carol Anne. She’s prob’ly at Gramma’s. Maybe we should look for her there. Don’t cry,” What had just happened was almost the scariest thing to Robbie—to see his mother failing to cope.

  Dr. Lesh stood and walked to the pile of artifacts that had sprinkled to the floor. She picked up an antique brooch. “Have you ever heard of the term ‘teleportation’?” she asked the others.

  No one was exactly listening to her, but she continued speaking, more or less rhetorically. “I’ve read of it, of course—there was that case report only last month, in the Journal of Parapsychology, of that carpenter’s tools which kept disappearing from his shed, to be seen settling to the ground outside his kitchen window much later. The literature is full of such anecdotes. But this is the first time I’ve ever witnessed the phenomenon.” She blinked her eyes several times, then closed them, hefting the trinket in amazement. “I am moved,” she whispered.

  Robbie tilted his head like a curious puppy. “Is it sort of like when Mr. Spock beams up Captain Kirk on ‘Star Trek’?”

  Lesh smiled with her eyes. “Very much like that, Robbie.” Her expression glazed over momentarily as certain connections were made, concepts formulated. She turned to Steve. “Where exactly do you suppose Carol Anne was playing before she vanished from sight?”

  “Her bedroom closet. And she wasn’t playing.”

  “Let’s go up there.” Her face glittered with anticipation.

  Steve shrugged. “The closet door won’t let you in if it doesn’t want to.”

  “We’ll just see about that.” Dr. Lesh raised her eyebrows and arched her head at what sounded to her suspiciously like a challenge. Then, with the others straggling behind, she headed for the staircase.

  As they neared the corner to the hall, they heard an agonizing scream. A moment later, Marty was rolling down the stairs. They rushed up to find him slumped against the bottom step, breathing deeply, holding his side. Dr. Lesh ran over to him.

  “What happened?”

  “I was just about to check out the locked bedroom when . . . I don’t know . . . something took a bite out of me.”

  Marty’s story frightened Robbie inordinately. His teeth began to chatter. “You got bit?”

  “That, or the most physical delusion ever recorded.”

  Dr. Lesh became immediately clinical, a look of educated concern molding her features. “Roll up your shirt. Lets have a look.”

  Diane turned on the hall light as Marty untucked his shirt and pulled it up to his chest. Everyone crowded around to look.

  Purple, angry bruises fanned out from a long row of tooth marks that wrapped entirely around Marty’s flank, from back to belly—as if some strange, horrible creature with a twelve-inch-wide jaw had tried to take a big chomp out of his side.

  Robbie reached out, gingerly touched the mark of the beast. “Wow.”

  Dr. Lesh examined the bite, then looked tentatively up the half-lit flight of stairs. She considered a moment, straightened up, and rubbed her hands together like a cruise director. “Let’s everybody spend the night down here.”

  Steve had had enough. “Honey, I want you and Robbie to come with me. We’ll sleep in town, and tomorrow . . .”

  “I’m not leaving Carol Anne.” Diane’s response was firm and quick.

  Robbie looked fearfully from father to mother to doctor to overbite. “I don’t want to stay here anymore. This place bites.” He remembered his clown in the backyard, too, and held his finger.

  “You take Robbie into town,” Diane said to Steve.

  “No way. I’m not leaving you alone in this house.”

  It was a precarious combination of strain, love, and fear, tipping this interaction near the brink. Delicately, Dr. Lesh extricated herself from its midst and returned to the living room. She had a natural gift for defusing tensions, so with a grand flourish she bent over, grabbed the apron of the couch, and pulled: it folded out raucously into a large convertible bed. “Blankets, pillow, sheets,” she called out. “Let’s have a slumber party.”

  CHAPTER 5

  There was a slightly forced jollity to the rest of the evening’s preparations and activity. More bedding and pillows were brought down from the master bedroom; Mr. Pizza delivered two large ones, half onions and peppers, half sausage; everyone helped Robbie knock off his homework. It was like a little city under seige.

  The machinery was repositioned, rechecked, recalibrated. Ryan suggested they tell ghost stories, but nobody laughed. E. Buzz started acting weird—tail between his legs, whining, walking in circles. He accidentally almost knocked over one of the camera tripods. To forestall any mishaps, Diane put him out back, tied to his doghouse.

  Night settled down in earnest.

  Diane and Robbie curled up together in the convertible bed. Steve slouched fitfully in his long reclining chair, exhausted, but unable to sleep. The television was still tuned to snow.

  Dr. Lesh looked over Marty’s shoulder as he zeroed the oscilloscope, tested the electro-hygrometer. She could feel her pulse beating in her temple. This was all too strange.

  She walked, like a sentry on her appointed rounds, into the hallway, where Ryan sat in a big easy chair facing the staircase and upper story. He was engrossed in aiming one of the television cameras and two special-wavelength cameras directly up the stairs. Martha tapped him on the shoulder, and he nearly jumped out of his skin.

  Ryan spoke forcefully, though in whispers, so as not to disturb the valiant efforts of those trying to sleep. “Jesus, my heart!”

  “Shhh!” Dr. Lesh admonished. Then, smiling, conspiratorial: “More thrills than grading papers, woul
dn’t you say?”

  Ryan wagged his finger at her in false bravado. “I can leave here anytime, you know This isn’t the army, and you’re not my mother.”

  “If push comes to shove, I bet I’ll beat you out the door.” Dr. Lesh winked. She regarded the monitors: “Any movement out of those things?”

  “There’s been some random ionization flux. I’d like to make sure it’s not caused by humidity coming from structure leakage—but I’m not going up there to find out.”

  “Galileo would have gone up to find out. Newton would have gone up.”

  “So go up.”

  She looked up the dark, inverted stairwell, then back at Ryan. Sternly she whispered, “This isn’t the army, and you’re not my mother . . .”

  Ryan smiled. Marty walked up. “You know,” said Ryan, “something’s going on in this house way beyond all the creaking doors and cold spots we’ve investigated before.”

  “No shit,” Marty replied. “These denture marks in my side aren’t just chicken liver. Something tried to chow down on me up there.”

  “Did you photograph those, by the way?” Lesh asked Ryan.

  “Photos, tooth impressions, bacteriological cultures—we got the works.”

  Lesh nodded. “This certainly seems to be more than the average paranormal episode taking place here.”

  “You know, you people are like masters of understatement. I just hope you both get to meet the dude with the big mouth.”

  Lesh screwed up her mouth. “That voice source on the television . . . I wonder where it could be coming from.”

  “I still don’t think we can rule out the possibility of some kind of generator or transmitter being kept in the locked bedroom upstairs—I mean, maybe all that stuff we saw flying around was magnetized, and there’s a tremendous, spinning magnetic field in there generated by . . .”

  Lesh and Marty looked at Ryan with heads askew.

  “No, huh? Okay, the voice source on the television, then . . . the absence of a signal on a channel that is not receiving a broadcast is free to receive a lot of noise from all sorts of things like short-wave, CB . . .”

  “Solar disturbances,” came in Marty, “car-ignition sparking . . .”

  “Outer space,” Ryan whispered, making his eyes wide.

  Lesh harrumphed. “Now, you’ve been reading too much science fiction.”

  “What, are you kidding?” Ryan was incensed. “All this stuff happening to us personally, and you talk to me about science fiction? Signals from outer space being picked up by a receiving unit here is not so far out, you know. NASA has discs all over the planet just waiting for a signal. And were sending out signals to who knows where—so maybe who knows where would just rather broadcast on Channel 83 in Cuesta Verde than at Mount Palomar.”

  “And speaking of outer space,” Marty added, “what about black holes?”

  “What about them?” Lesh puckered her eyebrows with a look of skepticism bordering on lampoon.

  “What if these people had one in their own living room?”

  “Hey, that’s a thought,” nodded Ryan. “A tiny black hole, sucking up everything that gets too close—everything that crosses its event horizon—and sucking it into a totally different space-time continuum.”

  Ryan picked up one of the emerald brooches that had materialized earlier, held it to the light. “And then some stuff gets spit out the other side again, back into our boring old universe.”

  Lesh shook her head, unconvinced.

  Ryan looked at the spot near the ceiling where all the teleportations had taken place. “If that’s the way out . . . then somewhere else in this house, there’s a way in.” He looked up toward the locked bedroom.

  Lesh’s shoulders dropped an inch. “Too bad we don’t have a tool for measuring the curvature of time and space with us here.”

  Ryan nodded wistfully, and went back to adjusting his instruments.

  Time passed. The house seemed to be sleeping, just the way houses do at night. Dr. Lesh paced the floor to keep herself from dozing. Like the others, she had slept little for quite some time, and though she was still wired on adrenalin, she knew that if she sat still for too long, she could easily nod out now from sheer exhaustion—and she couldn’t afford to sleep just yet. Overextended as she was, she needed to extend herself only a little further to see this thing through.

  She felt how desperately the others needed sleep, though—Diane and Steve, especially. Perhaps she could give them at least a couple of hours peace. She walked over to the television console and turned it off, extinguishing the ghastly white light for the first time.

  A small, reedy voice spoke from the convertible bed. “Please. Leave it on.” It was Diane.

  Dr. Lesh smiled, turned the set back on, and walked over to the couch. Robbie was sleeping. Diane sat up on one elbow.

  She watched Dr. Lesh approach in the dim dark—and suddenly had an image of her favorite storybook grandmother, coming to wrap her in a comforter, sing her a sweet lullaby, rock her to luxurious sleep. She smiled back almost tearfully as the doctor sat down on the edge of the bed.

  Diane whispered, “When things get quiet like now, I can imagine how all this must look from your end. I’m really embarrassed.”

  “Oh, nonsense.” Lesh made a batting motion with her hand. “I’ll tell you what is embarrassing. My being here with you nice people. Parapsychology isn’t something you master in. There are no certificates of graduation, no license to practice. I’m a professional psychiatrist who spends most of her time these days engaged in this ghostly avocation—which makes me, I suppose, the most irresponsible sixty-one-year-old woman I know.”

  “You were so funny today—your hands were shaking a mile a minute.” Diane unexpectedly began to giggle, in relief and release. Martha’s emotions were identical; she, too, started laughing. Robbie woke up, rubbing his eyes—the two women shushed each other but continued to speak softly.

  “It isn’t over,” cautioned Lesh. “I’m perfectly terrified. It’s all these things we don’t understand. I feel like the proto-human, stepping out of the forest primeval and seeing the moon for the first time. Throwing rocks at it.”

  “You mean someday we’ll understand these things?”

  “When it is recognized for what it is. As any science. We don’t understand everything now—in fact, I’ve come to believe, over the years, that we understand virtually nothing, though most of my colleagues would take issue with that.”

  “And here I thought scientists understood it all.” Diane half smiled.

  “Understanding and sponsorship seem always to be one hundred years behind ridicule and doubt. Out of this experience, in this house, should we capture a high-resolution photograph of a genuine manifestation, Time magazine will still put us on the joke page.”

  Moonlight filtered through the closed curtain, casting cold lines along the floor. Steve shifted in his chair, trying to get comfortable. The house remained quiet, filled with shadow.

  Robbie sat up in bed. “If I got killed, would I come back as a ghost and get stuck in the house like my sister?”

  “Your sister isn’t dead, Robbie,” Diane instructed him simply.

  “If I got killed, could I visit her and show her how to get back here if you tied a rope around me and held it tight? Then somebody could come get me, and we could move somewhere else?”

  “Some people believe,” said Martha, “that when you die, your soul goes to heaven.”

  “When Grampa was dead, I looked at him on the hospital bed, and I was watchin’ real close, but nothing went up out of him.”

  “His soul was invisible, honey,” said Diane. She wiped a lock of hair off her son’s forehead. “You couldn’t see it going to the sky.”

  “How come Grampa isn’t on television with Carol Anne?”

  “I told you, Robbie—Carol Anne isn’t dead.”

  Dr. Lesh lowered herself to one elbow, so she was eye level with Robbie. “Some people believe that when you die,
there is a wonderful light. As bright as the sun, but it doesn’t hurt to look into it. All the answers to all the questions you want to know are inside that light. And when you walk to it . . . you become a part of it forever.”

  “But what about the invisible people who keep throwing our chairs around?”

  “Well, maybe some people, when they die, they don’t know they’re gone.”

  “They think they’re still alive?”

  “Maybe. Maybe they didn’t want to die. Maybe they weren’t ready. Maybe they’d hardly begun to live yet, or they lived a long, long time anyway, but wanted more life. They resist going into the light, no matter how hard the light wants them. They hang around, watch television, watch their friends grow up, feeling all unhappy or jealous—and those feelings are bad. They hurt. Then there are some people who just get lost on the way to the light—maybe they got sidetracked, or just curious about something else. They need someone to lead them there—to the light.”

  “So some people get angry and throw things around, like in my bedroom?”

  “That’s it. Just like in school. There are people who are nice to you. And people who are mean.

  “I got beat up once by three kids. They took my lunch money. Maybe they got hit by a truck and are upstairs right now.”

  Diane sighed with strong love and sadness for Robbie. She stroked the back of his head affectionately, then lay him down on the pillow. “Let’s get some shut-eye, waddaya say, partner?”

  Robbie sighed and closed his eyes. “Good night, Mom. G’night, doctor lady. G’night, Dad. G’night, E. Buzz.”

  Diane and Martha shared a warm look over the boy’s recumbent figure. Briefly he lifted his head once more, and looked at the silent white television screen. “G’night, Carol Anne.”

  Two hours went by. Steve, Diane, Robbie, even Martha Lesh drifted off to sleep. The two younger researchers remained awake, if not alert, at their respective stations, periodically glancing over the banks of monitors that surrounded them. Lulled by the electric hum.

  The rest of the house was preternaturally quiet. Occasionally, a breeze outside would rise up to rattle one of the windows, and the noises were so jarring, so unexpected, they made Ryan and Marty twitch wildly, then exchange nervous smiles and return to what they were doing.