Poltergeist

by James Kahn

  And then it stopped.

  All was silent once again. The lightless void, the infinity out of time.

  “Carol Anne,” Tangina called weakly. She floated at her farthest reaches. It would be a long time before she got home.

  “It went away,” came Carol Anne’s voice, quivering with relief. “I’m alone again.”

  “Are you near the light, child?”

  “I’m near it, but I won’t go in. I promise.” She began to cry.

  “Don’t even look at it, Carol Anne. Don’t worry, child. We’ll have you home soon.”

  The little girl continued to cry. Tangina’s strength was gone, though; she could do nothing more. Limply, she floated, letting the magnet of her body exert its warm attraction.

  For a time, there was nothing. Then, for a while, a brilliant vortex took hold of her, spun her slowly at first, then faster and faster, into its center, spinning, screeching, approaching the speed of light, until at the last photon’s-breadth away, it whipped her out again, into the ether.

  Once, two presences fought over her—part of her was shredded in the process—but the two nonsubstances became entangled with each other, and Tangina floated free, while they reveled and tossed in their own mutual agonies.

  There were many ways into a place, and many ways out. Tangina knew she’d been touched by great evil as she’d guided Carol Anne to temporary safety; this evil clung to her, and made the ways out labyrinthine, cluttered with decay. But virtue had touched her, too, and not so long ago. She trusted the sureness of his hand to lead her back to the fleshly form that had so lately housed her soul.

  For a long and delicate instant she floated, without intention, in the void.

  Finally, she was aware of something calling her, something on another plane. Voices. A jumble of cries.

  She felt a tingling, as of a sleeping limb regaining its circulation, the pins and needles of returning sensation. It was a characteristic feeling. It meant she was back in her body.

  She opened her eyes. There was a hubbub of activity around her: nurses running all over, doctors calling out orders, medical students looking on in dismay or fascination. She closed her eyes again.

  “She’s alive!” someone yelled. “I just saw her open her eyes!”

  “Get that I.V. started anyway!”

  “Doyle, draw some bloods!”

  “She’s got a pulse again—thready, but it’s there!”

  “Somebody check her pupils.”

  Tangina felt somebody pull open her eyelids; then a bright light was shoved into her face. She knocked it away with her hand. “Get that light out of my eyes,” she rasped. She was too tired for this nonsense.

  “Hey, she’s okay,” somebody laughed.

  “All right, everybody, show’s over. Let’s get her back in bed.”

  Tangina felt eight hands lift her off the floor, carry her unevenly for several steps, and set her down on a bed. She opened her eyes once more to see several people milling around now—one was drawing blood from her arm, one was starting an intravenous line, one was taping electrodes to her chest, taking an electrocardiogram.

  Dr. Berman stepped into her field of vision. “You gave us quite a scare,” he smiled reassuringly. “We came in on rounds, and for a second, there, it looked as if you weren’t breathing.”

  Tangina wished he would go away. She was simply too exhausted to deal with this earnest young man’s expectations and fears. Matters of greater moment depended on her full attention; she needed rest now, to prepare. Yet she knew this sentiment to be grossly unfair—in all likelihood, it was this earnest young man’s expectations and fears that had brought her back at all, had guided her, even seduced her back into her body, that she might regather her forces, to try once more to save the girl. Well. Later, she would thank him.

  In any case, Dr. Berman kept talking, enunciating every syllable loudly and with exaggerated facial movement, as if Tangina were deaf or retarded. “Everything is fine, now, though. You just had a little temporary slowing of the heart—it’s not dangerous—now everything is back to normal.”

  She closed her eyes again, courting bitter sleep—for nothing was back to normal, and danger panted at the door.

  CHAPTER 7

  Martha Lesh sat uncomfortably at the end of a large oval conference table, picking at her cuticles as people began to filter into the room and take chairs. The conference room was big, with two closed-circuit television sets suspended from the ceiling at one end, a modern green blackboard along the side wall, a 16-mm movie screen at the back. Thirty wooden chairs surrounded the table. By the time Martha began her presentation, most were filled.

  It was a joint committee meeting, called by Dr. Lesh expressly to have her tapes seen and to be heard out. Members of the Human Research Committee, the Parapsychology Committee, the Psychiatry Department, and a smattering of medical students were present. Consequently, vis-a-vis parapsychology in general, this collection of professionals included believers, half-believers, nonbelievers, and antibelievers.

  It was a formidable ensemble; Martha was uncertain of her approach. A few of them were already looking at their watches.

  “I called you all here on this rather short notice because of data I’ve collected during the past two days which is . . . striking. So striking, I hardly know what to think, let alone how to proceed.” She paused, looking for an encouraging glance from the assembled group; but there was none. She stood, and began to pace off her nervous energy as she continued speaking.

  “Most of you are familiar with the basic form my research has been taking—hypnosis of paired subjects, suggestion of specific dreams to one, open-ended dreams to the other, then having blind independent judges try to match transcripts of one subject’s dreams to the other subject—to look for any correspondence which might suggest telepathic, or otherwise paranormal transfer of information from one dreamer to the other. As some of you know, my results have been quite promising in a few instances, more equivocal in others. A number of weeks ago, I began working with Subject T, a self-proclaimed, though putatively reluctant, psychic. Approximately sixty-five hours ago, our investigations took a troubling turn.

  “We’d been tracing the frequency of her ponto-geniculo-occipital electrical activity as it correlated with observed psychic phenomena, when suddenly—in the lab that night—her PGO area started discharging out of control—unlike anything any of us had ever seen. Simultaneously, the Subject began speaking in the voice of a small child—apparently while she was dreaming. My colleague, Dr. Ryan Mitchell, noted, rather astutely, that the frequency of the brain wave in question varied according to the Subject’s position—specifically, when she faced a certain direction, the electrical spikes observed were much more active. The analogy we’ll refer back to, in this regard, will be to a receiving antenna which sustains maximal reception when aimed specifically at the source of transmission.”

  “Did I hear that correctly?” interrupted Dr. Hoffman, from the Medical School. “Are you suggesting this woman’s brain was receiving messages that you were able to pick up on your EEG?” His voice was thick with derision.

  “At the moment, I’m not suggesting anything. I’m merely presenting the data, as we gathered it, chronologically. When I am finished speaking—” she emphasized the last two words “—I will welcome any suggestions, postulations, or courses of action anyone can offer.”

  Hoffman nodded in token apology, like a naughty boy caught making faces at the teacher. Lesh continued.

  “Because of requests made by the Subject, and because this turn of events was so novel and unanticipated, we modified the remainder of the experiment—turning it into its own, new, pilot study—in the following way.

  “On the next night, we placed the Subject, myself, and two assistants in a mobile unit with EEG and telemetric capabilities, and began driving in whatever direction resulted in an increase of the type of electrical brain-wave activity in the Subject that I have just described—as if she were, i
n fact, a receiving unit we were using to home in on a transmitter.”

  Hoffman rolled his eyes to the ceiling. Lesh ignored him. “We arrived, in the morning, at the home of a suburban couple who appeared deeply troubled. They asked for our help. Subject T was in a state of exhaustion, so at this point I had my assistants bring her back here, to the hospital, while I remained with the family we’d contacted.

  “During the interview which followed, they expressed to me the belief that their house had become inhabited by something like a poltergeist.”

  At this, Hoffman stood, smiled, looked pointedly at the clock on the wall. “If you’ll excuse me, I have a one o’clock that I really mustn’t be late for.” He departed, followed by one of his junior faculty and two medical students.

  Lesh waited until they were gone before continuing. “A poltergeist, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is a ‘noisy, or rattling spirit.’ Mr. and Mrs. F described to me episodes in which pictures had fallen from the walls, winds had blown in closed rooms, knocks had been heard, lights flashed, and so on. However, most disturbing to them, understandably, was the fact that their five-year-old daughter had disappeared. And more upsetting still was the fact that they could hear her—in the television set.

  “Not physically inside, you understand—but her voice, and sometimes a hazy image would appear when the set was tuned to the static of an ‘in-between’ channel. The higher UHF channels seemed to work best, they told me.

  “They were . . . distraught. I didn’t know what to think—but since I’d gone this far, I decided to follow it to its conclusion, whatever that was. So we set up equipment that night—TV cameras, ion flux analyzers, magnometers, infrared lenses, and so on. The armamentarium of my discipline. What we saw, and finally recorded, has given me pause—as I said, I hardly know what to think.

  “First, we examined the room in which the child was said to have disappeared—at least, we tried to examine it. Objects were moving inside it—flying about, actually—to such a great extent, we were unable to enter.

  “Next, Mrs. F communicated with her daughter—Carol Anne—through the television in the living room. We all heard the girl’s voice on the set—the same voice, incidentally, we’d heard Subject T speaking in the night before. The little girl said she saw a bright light; we advised her to stay away from it. More of this later.

  “Next we witnessed a series of materializations . . .” Here Dr. Lesh opened her briefcase and began passing around some of the artifacts that had manifested. “These items literally appeared in mid-air before us, and fell to the floor.” Some murmuring among the audience.

  “Then there was this.” She pulled several 8- x 10-inch blow-ups from her briefcase. “One of my assistants went upstairs at this point, to investigate the possibility of there being a covert transmitter in the house accounting for the voice we were hearing. While in the course of this investigation, the assistant had the acute and painful sensation of being bitten in the side . . .”

  “Did you say ‘bitten’?”

  “Bitten in the side, while there was, in fact, no visible cause for such a bite. Nonetheless, on examining him a few moments later, we found evidence of these tooth impressions, which we took photographs of—which I will distribute now.” Dr. Lesh passed around the photos of Marty’s flank. “As you can see, they appear to be made by a mandible which is approximately twelve inches at its greatest width. We took cultures of these tooth marks, as well, for both aerobic and anaerobic bacteria. As of this morning, nothing was growing on the aerobic plates. On the anaerobic media, two uncharacterizable forms grew briefly, developing small, unknown plaques, and then died within a few hours. Antigenic studies are now being undertaken. In addition, we gave the bite victim prophylactic tetanus toxoid immunization. We have, at this time, elected to withhold the antirabies vaccination series—even though I must say this bite appears to have been inflicted by a mammalian jaw of some kind—elected to withhold it at least temporarily, in the event that the animal can be found soon, and its rabies status evaluated.”

  People around the table looked over the pictures with various degrees of bafflement, disbelief, or nonchalance. Lesh moved on to the core of her presentation.

  “We then saw—all of us saw . . . creatures appear . . . unearthly apparitions whose nature I can hardly describe . . . I hesitate even to mention them, since we were unable to obtain any documentary evidence of their existence. Nonetheless, I do mention them, because I did see them.

  “There were three to appear first. As nearly as I can describe them, they resembled a flame, a shadow, and a tree. They interacted primarily with each other, in a fashion which I was incapable of understanding. My impression, though I am almost certainly anthropomorphizing, is that they were engaged in some sort of ritual dance. I have, quite honestly, very little conception of how long this episode lasted—I was, frankly, in a state of amazement.

  “And finally, while this was taking place in the living room, we actually did get to videotape perhaps the most bizarre events of all this bizarre episode.”

  Lesh doused the room lights, took out the two videotapes, and plugged each into a cassette beneath its respective monitor. Someone at the end of the table mumbled, “Film at eleven.”

  Lesh ran the tapes.

  When the tapes were finished, five more people left. There was a silence around the table. Finally, Dr. LeMay from the Psych Department spoke up, with a soft southern accent. “Martha, just what are you trying to say?”

  Lesh sat down, took off her glasses. “I wish I knew,” she smiled.

  LeMay went on, “Now, I’m prepared to believe an awful lot, but this . . .” he gestured to the televisions . . . “is a bit beyond the pale, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Quite beyond, I would say,” Martha nodded wearily.

  “And wouldn’t you think it’s likely you’ve been hoaxed—probably by your Subject, in collusion with your Subject family? By magnets moving objects, and CB radio transmitters making voices on the tube, and holograms or mirror-projections accounting for what we just saw on your tapes? Don’t you think the most likely, most parsimonious explanation of all this is that it’s a wonderful, sophisticated magician’s illusion?”

  Lesh rubbed her eyes. “I would think so, if I hadn’t been there.”

  LeMay smiled—not unkindly—and rose. “Now I do have an appointment. And I thank you for your demonstration.” He, too, left, as well as a few more.

  “Well,” smiled Lesh, looking over the dwindling numbers. “This the hard core, then.” There were a few appreciative chuckles. Someone turned the lights back on.

  “We needn’t postulate poltergeists,” said Recht. “Perhaps the child is psychokinetic. She may be hiding, and producing these phenomena herself”

  “I don’t believe in psychokinesis,” countered Schaffer, across the table.

  “Well, I don’t believe in ghosts,” Recht answered irritably.

  “What was that business about the ‘light’ the girl mentioned?” one of the grad students asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Dr. Lesh shrugged. “The way she spoke of it, it reminded me of the light that people talk about who have had out-of-body experiences—people who have been close to death, or who have even died briefly, by our measure—in which they describe leaving their bodies, and seeing a ‘bright, waiting light,’ about which they feel a sense of well-being, or curiosity, or ‘blissful detachment.’ It was on the basis of those first-person accounts that I urged the little girl—wherever she was—to stay away from the light. I was afraid, in some way, it might mean death for her.”

  “Aren’t we getting a little far afield, here?” Dr. Wallace wondered. “I mean, going from hypnotic-state EEGs to psychokinesis to phantasms of the dead to out-of-body experiences . . . I mean—what are we about, here, today?”

  “Well, I don’t know about you, Wallace,” said Recht, “but I’m about ready for lunch.” He stood. “Thank you, Martha, it was fascinating. Please keep us posted.
” He left, in heated discussion with several others.

  When they’d all filed out, Lesh sat facing the one who remained. Dr. Anthony Farrow, her eighty-year-old mentor, professor emeritus in the Department of Psychiatry, smiled at her like a wizened sage.

  “Quite an ordeal.” He pursed his lips, shook his head.

  “And what did you think?” Martha asked.

  “In a word?”

  “In a word.”

  “Too graphic.” He jabbed his index finger on the table.

  “It was the episode as it occurred,” she insisted.

  “Perhaps.”

  “Oh, Tony . . . you, too?” Her spirit wilted visibly, as her last friendly support seemed to falter.

  “I so wish to accept what I saw,” he protested. “I’m only steps away from the old wooden bridge myself, you know. To believe that something exists on the other side would be like a warm light in the window.”

  “Perhaps if tendrils of ectoplasm were all that showed up?”

  “Better . . .” He nodded.

  “A smoky shape lasting merely an instant.” She drew her hand across her eyes, like a conjurer.

  “Even better.” He clapped.

  “Nothing on tape at all . . . only sounds, rappings, a sigh . . .”

  “They’d still be in here asking all sorts of questions now—and they’d want to go back with you to the house tonight. As it was, you gave them too much, Martha. Too much too soon.” Dr. Farrow wrinkled his face at the television screen. “Nothing was left to the imagination. This isn’t a science yet—it’s still a sideshow, and your troubadours were not in their makeup.”

  “And these? What do you make of these?” She swept her hand over the dozens of pieces of jewelry on the conference table. Farrow picked up a beautiful brooch, and held it to the light.

  “It’s the real McCoy; that’s one thing for certain. If they’re charlatans, they’re spending an awful lot of money on a silly trick.” He pinned the brooch on Lesh’s sweater, then picked up an antique ring and placed it on her finger. “Dear Martha. May we cross that bridge together some day? May all we believe be true. May we picnic in the clouds.”