Poltergeist

by James Kahn

  They danced. At least, it looked like a dance. They touched, they parted, they spun, they entwined. The flame-creature chattered in some ethereal flame-language, like a burning wind; perhaps it was a song.

  They all stared at the scene, unutterably riveted. The room had become a stage for this inconceivable performance.

  Softly, Lesh spoke. “Tangina saw this.”

  Diane was dizzy with trying to grasp meanings. “These are Carol Anne’s dreams,” she puzzled. “Carol Anne’s dreams have come to life.”

  Lesh shook her head. “I think they were already alive when Carol Anne dreamed of them.”

  “What should we do?” Ryan pressed.

  “Do?” Lesh raised her brow. “What an arrogant thought.” She redirected her attention to the dancers.

  The flame-being changed colors, from orange to red to yellow to white, to blue-white, to green-white, to orange-white. His shape changed intermittently, too: now he resembled a wing, now a meteorite. Now a shower of flames. He talked in fire-babble to the darksome thing; the shadow-creature answered in shadow-laugh.

  And all during the dance, the green mist kept circling the floor—wandering aimlessly, settling in corners, redoubling on itself.

  The dance grew wilder. The fire blazed, the umbra darkened. The room was becoming febrile with excitement, when all at once the shadow snuffed out the whirling conflagration . . . and everything was dark and still and quiet—save the phosphorescent mist that oozed along the floor, and the heartless shadow-laughing of the shadow.

  But in a moment the quenchless flame-thing reerupted, just behind the lightless creature, and, throwing such an intense brightness, the fire almost defined a silhouette around the shadow, almost something like a shape revealed. At once, the two were off and reeling, though, mysterious as ever.

  “I wonder who does their choreography,” Ryan managed to joke. He said it to try to relieve his own tension. It only served to cue his next cause for dismay.

  With yet another flourish of tiny flashes near the ceiling, another creature materialized. Thick, solid, it looked arguably like the trunk of a gnarled tree. Dense, knobbly bark covered it from bottom, where it seemed to be growing out of the floor, to top, where it seemed to be growing into the ceiling. Half a dozen branches groped blindly into the room; ancient, garbled sounds hovered about its incrustations.

  Robbie screamed, certain this was his fearsome oak tree, returned to snag him again. Perhaps it was. In any case, the boy’s wail was cut short by the flame-creature, who broke from his shadow-partner to attack the tree.

  The flame-creature soared in and out among the branches, igniting them anew with each pass. The fire-song sounded full of anger, now, a sucking blast-furnace noise. The burning tree limbs writhed and moaned, and twisted and tore at their singed twigs. The flame flew in again, and embraced the trunk. Muffled groans issued from the tree; when finally it was able to break from the fire’s forced caress, it was seared black on one side, and smoking.

  The shadow raced forward and engulfed the smoke—absorbed it, claimed it for its own. The tree growled, then contorted, cracking the ceiling.

  The iridescent vapor still meandered on the floor.

  The stunned humans were by now far too rattled to speak, or even move.

  The tree, flame, and shadow continued their drama, toward what conclusion the stars, perhaps, knew.

  Marty made it safely into the bathroom at the end of the hall and huddled there, panting. That glistening green mist creeping all over was the last straw for him. No more. He was surprised he hadn’t already died of fright. This was carrying on-the-job training too far, as far as he was concerned. Green flashing fog, right. He would just stay exactly where he was for the rest of the night, say thank-you-very-much in the A.M., and write his memoirs on the plane home.

  He turned on the light, put the lid down on the john, and sat there until his breathing regularized. There, that was better. Strange noises filtered through from the living room, but he didn’t want to know what they were. He shut the bathroom door. And locked it.

  Now what? He looked around the small, clean room. White porcelain sink, white porcelain toilet, white semigloss walls, white tiled floor, white toilet paper, white Ivory soap, white ceiling fixture. On one wall hung a picture, a watercolor of red California poppies, framed and under glass. Over the sink was a wall mirror hiding a medicine cabinet—but Marty wasn’t about to look in any more mirrors tonight. He just smiled and sat, waiting for morning to arrive.

  He began to tap his fingers against the side of the bowl. He hummed a little tune. Queer sounds crept under the door; he hummed louder. It seemed to be getting chilly; there was a draft, or something. He pulled his collar up around his neck, then went back to tapping out a rhythm on the porcelain. Oops—he tapped his index finger against something sticky on the edge of the toilet. Nice going, Marty, right on target. He touched his finger to his thumb to get a better feel: very sticky. With a sickly smile, he brought his hand up to his face, to see what the stuff was.

  His hand was melting.

  He jumped back so hard he knocked the top off the tank of the toilet; it clattered to the floor. With primal horror, he stared at his hands: both were melting slowly, the fingers elongating, the skin dripping, waxen, puddling on the tile. Marty began to pant again. He slid off the toilet seat and landed, with a bump, on the linoleum.

  Wild-eyed, he swiveled his head, looking from corner to corner for a clue to his predicament. No clues. Eerily, his forearms began to stretch, as if they were made of putty. Longer, and thinner; three times their normal length, so that when he rested his knuckles on the floor beside him, his elbows stuck high in the air, higher than his head, almost like huge spider legs.

  That gave him a momentary horrific image, and he looked down—but no, he was not a spider.

  Yet he did feel . . . strange. Sort of . . . powerful, actually. Totally alert, mind speeding along like a razor, like he’d just done half a gram of coke. Marty smiled slyly, brought his knees up to his chest, leaned back against the wall. He wasn’t certain, but it sure felt like he was getting bigger. Maybe a lot bigger. He heard the seam of his pants rip down the back. He smiled again. A well of saliva brimmed over his lower lip, drooled in a long string down to the floor, collected there in a pool. He bent his head down and licked the spittle off the floor. That was easy, for his neck had become longer, and angled forward somewhat, and his jaws protruded a bit, in a kind of snout. So it was easy to lean down and lick up the spit. Easy, and he liked it.

  His shirt tore open. This made Marty laugh, but only a hissing sound came out. He delighted in the sound. Khhhhhhhh. He expanded again; his clothes fell off in shreds. They thought they could hide him in clothes, the fools. They would soon see their folly. He would show them his face.

  He looked around the room. What did he want? Something. He lifted the toilet lid beside him with his four-inch talons. He lowered his head into the bowl and lapped a few times. No, something else.

  He looked up at the mirror on the wall. Rage suddenly roared through him like a flash fire: he hated mirrors. With a single movement, he rose and smashed the glass with the back of his reptilian hand. It shattered into pieces, shards flying everywhere. He breathed heavily a minute, then picked up one of the larger slivers and ate it. The glass was good.

  Marty ate all the medicine bottles in the cabinet. He tore the picture off the wall, ate pieces of the picture. He felt better now. He scratched himself, vaguely excited. Noises from the front of the house attracted his attention. He pulled the bathroom door open without bothering to unlock it, and walked his hobbling walk down the hall toward the living room.

  In the living room, the flame and shadow circled the tree, while the people watched, enrapt. All at once, a low snarling sound attracted everyone’s attention to the hallway: in the darkness there, a figure was approaching.

  The tree, flame, and shadow beings saw it at the same time—and appeared to go into a frenzy. The flame leap
ed into the shadow, and was gone; the shadow engulfed the tree, which disappeared; and then the shadow sailed up the stairwell, and vanished . . . into the shadows.

  Lesh and the others stared at the hallway, where the shape was coming closer. It rapidly emerged into the half-light of the television glare: there, naked, slobbering, waddling like an orangutan . . . was Marty. Back from metamorphosis.

  Marty stopped when he reached the group, stood erect, and looked confused. “Why’s everyone staring at me?” he demanded.

  Before anyone could give an answer, something magnificent happened—the most magnificent happening of all this strange and awefull night. A woman appeared on the stairs.

  The apparition of a woman. Tall, graceful, in a majestic turn-of-the-century gown, she floated down the stairs, surrounded by twenty hovering, gleaming lights. Magnificent because she was so beautiful; though none could exactly have described her face, and her eyes were dark as another time. Magnificent because she was so real—just who were bold might have reached out and touched her; though none were so bold. Magnificent, because she was a ghost.

  The previous manifestations were wondrous, to be sure, but so bizarre, so essentially unnameable, as to be more hallucinatory than not, in the minds of the observers. Already, Lesh was wondering to herself: Did that just happen? Was it real?

  But this woman—this was simply a truth. She was here. And the gravity of her sheer presence was overpowering.

  She walked—or rather, wafted—among them, now. The scintillations around her moved wherever she moved, testing the air, drifting away from time to time, then returning to her. After-images—except that they were fore-images—preceded the woman each time she glided somewhere, as if she were somehow being led by her own flow.

  Her ectoplasmic arms stretched out, periodically, into long, thin tendrils that reached across the room to test various objects, to palpate, to sense, and then withdraw back to her sides. She was constantly extending herself in that way, in fact—sometimes actually dissolving momentarily, to reconstitute a second later with a swirling, regathering of smoke.

  So real, so haunting. They all watched her gauzy form move from chair to camera to curtain, and not a one of them didn’t hope to be so touched. Each felt thrilled, enthralled, and not a little struck by magic.

  Motionless, they stood, as the woman wandered. Then, as they watched, she paused: the ephemeral blue-green mist that formed her seemed to congeal; her head enlarged, her eyes grew blacker; lips pulled back in demon snarl; arms rose up—and, as they watched, it seemed that something beastly welled within her, started to emerge. Chill fear settled in their hearts.

  The room got colder. Everyone turned in different directions to see what was happening, when all of a sudden every light bulb in the place came on. The lights grew brighter each second, quickly reaching an intensity that was blinding, impossible to bear. Everyone in the room covered their eyes. Marty was screaming again. Electrical smoke filled the air; sparks crackled. The whine of audio feedback rose rapidly to overload volume.

  “Smells like a short!” Steve cried out.

  “It’s going to explode!”

  The frequency of the feedback reached a horrendously high pitch, intensely loud, until, cathartically, an enormous BOOM rolled through the house; the misty spirit, along with all the glimmering lights, got vehemently sucked up into the bilocation point, and once more all was quiet, all was dark. The episode was over.

  Dr. Lesh broke the silence. “Roll the tape back.” Her voice was tense, controlled.

  Ryan hit the rewind switches on the VTRs as the others felt themselves for signs of injury, and slowly collected around the monitors. Marty sat where he was, naked on the floor, hyperventilating, but otherwise appearing well and unharmed.

  “I think it recorded,” Ryan muttered, as he fiddled with various switches and buttons. “I think we got one on tape. Yes. Yes! We got it recorded!”

  The two monitors played back their videotapes simultaneously—one a visible spectrum, one a special lens that had captured part of the infrared range and played it back on thermographic tape.

  Everyone watched the monitors closely. Neither tape demonstrated the flame-creature, the shadow-thing, or the tree-being. They just weren’t there. Neither was the turquoise mist, nor the vapor, nor the smoke. What was there, though, was miraculous. What was there, was people.

  Sheer, diaphanous forms, walking slowly down the stairs. At the same speed, and in the same places that the mist had gone, so these ghost-people walked. And in the center of each chest, a light glowed—in the same positions as the lights had been flashing and glowing in the mist, when the thing had first oozed its way downstairs.

  All kinds of people walked this vapor trail. An old man, bent and weary. A little girl—not Carol Anne—looked around as if she were lost, as if she didn’t even see the old man. Aimlessly, she wandered around the living room.

  All at once, four more manifestations appeared on the screen. Large, grisly men, dressed in burlap coats, floppy hats, and riding boots, huddled in one corner, facing away from the camera. A woman walked on-screen, dressed like a flapper of the twenties. She moved this way and that, as if looking for a door, tears streaming down her face.

  Several more people appeared now: an infant, crunched up in a ball and screaming silently; two bloody toughs, repeatedly stabbing each other with knives; an old woman in a wedding dress.

  People of all ages and descriptions floated dreamily across the picture tube. Lost, directionless, these sad spectres followed the same path as the smoky ectoplasm had done earlier. Restless ghosts.

  The same images played on the infrared monitor, though they registered in wildly different colors on the screen, recording temperatures as well as wavelengths. They were cold, these phantasms.

  Rarely did a manifestation make contact with any other—they didn’t even seem to be aware that the others existed. Some even stared directly at the camera, without showing evidence that they knew it was there. A young man approached the lens, and evaporated.

  The spirit-woman entered the screen. Where twenty lights had encircled her before, now were twenty souls, faint attendant spirits who accompanied their ghostly mistress like a ghostly court. The spirit-woman moved among her minions, queenly, graciously aloof; even on tape, a dazzling spectre.

  Almost whimsically, she stared out of the monitor; floated closer, filled the picture; paused; came closer, still, until the whole screen darkened, turned black. The murky image of the woman shifted shape within the darkness, horribly transformed: two bright glowing spots appeared, then pulled back: they were eyes. Eyes in the center of a lightless, shapeless head—shapeless, but vile. Gradually the head resolved itself until it could be dimly seen, though still the shape was difficult to gauge. For it was the grinning face of rank chaos, horror incarnate. Madness embodied.

  And beyond it, in the background, its shadow: the shadow of the Beast.

  Marty held his breath as he stared at the image, for this was the thing he briefly had become.

  Diane grabbed Robbie, covered his eyes, and screamed—continuously, uncontrollably: a sound from the bottom of the pit.

  Steve stepped in forcibly between Diane and the monitor, preventing her from seeing that from which she could not look away.

  “That thing is in there with my baby!” Diane wailed. “That thing! That thing!”

  Dr. Lesh continued staring at the screen, an expression of total despair on her face. “My God,” she whispered to herself. “There are hundreds.”

  Steve wrapped his strong arms around Diane, enfolding her, until her screams became sobs, and finally subsided into muffled chokes. Gently, he stroked the back of her head. Then he stooped to pick up Robbie, standing beside him, and included the boy in the tight, long embrace.

  Lesh and her assistants looked on in silence. The tape ended. All was quiet.

  For a minute, nobody moved. Then Dr. Lesh roused herself, crossed over to the videotape recorders, removed the t
apes, put them in her briefcase. And locked it.

  CHAPTER 6

  A brilliant morning sun blazed through the kitchen window, falling in parallelogram patches over the linoleum floor. The day was already warm; the night was gone.

  Robbie walked into the kitchen with a big sigh, all dressed in clean clothes, his hair still wet from combing. “I’m ready,” he called.

  “Tell Gramma to call the very second you walk in,” Diane instructed him, as she wiped her hands dry on the dish towel.

  “Taxi’s here,” Steve shouted from the hall.

  Diane squatted down and straightened Robbie’s collar. “Now don’t be scared of the taxi man; he’s a friend of Daddy’s and mine.”

  “I’m eight years old, gimme a break.” Robbie was getting a little annoyed about all this fussing. Ghosts were one thing—a taxi ride to his grandmother’s, he could handle.

  “That’s what I like to hear,” boomed Steve, entering from the hallway. “Let’s move out! You’re about to have yourself a real adventure.”

  “I don’t need no more adventure. I need to get some sleep.”

  They walked together to the front door. There Robbie picked up a small, eight-year-old-sized suitcase in one hand, and, in the other, a leash with E. Buzz on the end of it.

  Robbie exited the doorway. Steve moved to follow, to help with the bag, but the boy waved him off. “I can do it myself. ’Bye.”

  “ ’Bye, sweetheart,” Diane called from the entrance way. “Call us.” She held on to her tears as child and dog climbed into the taxi. E. Buzz barked. The cab pulled away from the curb.

  Steve went into the living room to talk to Ryan. Diane went back into the kitchen. Sitting at the table was Dr. Lesh, sorting through the collection of trinkets and paraphernalia that had materialized in mid-air the evening before. Brooches, stickpins, cameos, hair combs, brass buttons, cuff links, teeth, bones, coins, and lockets. Like fossilized remains, they gave intimations of long-dead lives. Physical shadows of the past.

  “This cameo,” said Dr. Lesh, holding it up to the light, “one hundred years old.”