“He’s laughing at your drawing,” I told Head Jock when Dirk leaned over his drawing bench and guffawed at Head Jock’s lopsided attempt at a still life in charcoal.
Dirk gave me a misty blue glare. “Freakin’ quit it, will you?”
“Yeah, right,” said Head Jock, but he glanced nervously over his shoulder anyway. “If you really can see dead people, tell me what my grandpa’s first name was.”
It was one of the dumbest ghost-related demands I’d ever heard. I wasn’t psychic—unless Head Jock’s dead grandfather was following him around and happened to introduce himself, there was no way I could know his name. Still, I figured Head Jock was trying to mess with me, so I took a guess and went with the obvious. “Your grandpa’s not dead.”
Head Jock’s left eye twitched amusingly. “How’d you know?”
I rolled my eyes. “Dirk told me.”
“Spookygirl,” Head Jock muttered, returning to his still life. On the paper in front of him, a pitcher drooped hopelessly next to an apple that looked more like a horribly damaged internal organ. A kidney, maybe.
“Hey.” Dead Dirk vanished from next to Head Jock’s bench and reappeared next to me. The temperature around us dropped a few degrees. It wasn’t really noticeable unless you knew a ghost was nearby—nothing like what happened when Buster was around. “How come you keep doing that?”
Crap. I hated moments like this, when ghosts wanted to chitchat in public. I’d more than learned my lesson in the hall with Henry on the first day of school.
“Not a good time,” I muttered, trying not to move my mouth.
“Did you say something?” Tim muttered back.
I shook my head.
Dirk didn’t give up. “I’m serious. Why do you keep telling my friends I’m still here?”
“Uh, because you are,” I said. “Why do you care?”
“It’s freaking them out.”
“Well, they deserve it. They’re jerks.”
“Yeah, but…” Dead Dirk didn’t have an argument for that, so he scowled at me, called me Spookygirl, and disappeared. That was rich—being called spooky by a freakin’ ghost. Pot, meet kettle.
Tim poked me in the arm with his charcoal, leaving a black smudge near my elbow. “You were talking to someone. And it got a little cold. Was that a ghost? Was it Dirk Reynolds?”
“Yeah.” I went back to drawing my pitcher and apple—which, unlike Head Jock’s, actually looked like a pitcher and an apple. “He wasn’t the sharpest crayon in the box, was he?”
“He didn’t need to be.” Tim had traded his striped arm warmers for a set of leather wrist cuffs, and he wore what looked like a cheap black dog collar around his neck. The sunglasses he’d forgotten the first day of school were perched on top of his head—he’d tried a few times to keep them on during class, but Mr. Connelly insisted otherwise. Tim squinted (when he remembered to) as the early afternoon sunlight poured through the windows. “Dirk was a star athlete,” he went on. “He set, like, a million records when he played for Palmetto.”
“Even though he was only a junior when he died?”
“Yeah. The senior players hated him for it.”
“And how’d he die? A car wreck?”
“Yeah. He was drinking at a party, and he tried to drive home. Why?”
“That sucks.”
I’d thought maybe he was secretly murdered by a football rival. It would explain why he was still hanging around. But no, he was just another tragic high school movie-of-the-week cliché. “Then why is he still hanging around with these clowns?”
Tim shrugged. “These guys were freshmen then. They idolized Dirk. Maybe he still wants adoring fans.”
That was just shallow enough to make sense.
“Six minutes until the bell,” Mr. Connelly said. “Let’s wrap it up, people.”
After finishing my drawing, I glanced up to where Head Jock continued to struggle with his still life. The lopsided pitcher now looked like an abstract dead fish, and the kidney-apple had exploded. It hit me that Head Jock was probably having about as much fun getting his art requirement out of the way as I was having with my gym requirement.
Well, it was only fair.
At home that afternoon, Tim watched as I dumped my gym clothes out of my bag and smoothed them out so they’d look okay in the morning.
“Why don’t you just leave those in your locker?” he asked.
I’d never told him about any of the locker-room stuff, but he’d helped me out with a little of Dirk’s history, so maybe he’d know some elements of Palmetto High history as well. “This is gonna sound weird, but are there any school legends or rumors about something terrible happening in the girls’ locker room?”
“You mean besides those awful gym clothes?” He poked at the yellow-and-green monstrosities on my bed.
“I’m serious.” I told him about what I’d experienced, and why I couldn’t go back.
“I’ve never heard about anything. What do you think it is? I mean, if a bunch of girls got stabbed to death in there or something, you’d think people would know.”
“It feels like something like that,” I sighed. “Or something worse.”
We spent the next hour searching online for old news articles about Palmetto High and murders, but we didn’t find anything.
“Maybe it was covered up,” Tim suggested. “Maybe nobody knows it ever happened.”
I shuddered.
“This thing really bothers you, doesn’t it?”
I wanted to get defensive and say no, but I guessed my habit of changing clothes in the bathroom made the truth pretty obvious.
“Yeah. That’s not usually the case, but this is so different from anything I’ve ever felt. I can’t believe nobody else notices it.”
“Well, maybe you’re more sensitive than most people. And you’ve told me ghosts get more active when you’re around, so maybe it only happens when you’re in the room.”
“Lucky me. But what about Coach Frucile? She spends more time in there than anyone. Her office is in there! How can she just sit there and not go nuts?”
Tim’s eyes widened. “Maybe she knows about it, but it doesn’t go after her.”
“What? It’s like her very own Buster or something?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she was in on the murders and everything. Maybe she’s at the center of the whole thing!”
“I doubt it,” I said, but then I thought about the coldness in Coach Frucile’s eyes.
“Let’s look her up. What’s her first name?”
“Um…” I dug through the pile of papers on my desk, looking for the class syllabus Coach Frucile had distributed on the first day of school; it included contact information like her full name and office phone number. “Lilith.”
“And how do you spell Frucile?” He typed as I spelled. Then he sat back and studied her name in the search bar.
“You’re supposed to hit return for the search to work,” I said drily.
“Shut up. There’s something…Don’t you see anything weird about her name?”
“Not really.”
“Frucile. It just sounds weird. And look, if you rearrange the letters…” He typed another word beside Frucile in the search box. Lucifer.
“What are you trying to say?”
“That your gym teacher’s evil?”
“We already established that. Her name could be Mother Teresa and she’d still be evil.”
“But don’t you think it’s strange? And look at her first name. Lilith. Lilith was a demon in a couple of ancient mythologies. She drank blood.”
“Why am I not surprised you know that? Whatever, I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.”
“But you don’t know that.” Tim continued. “What kinds of things do you feel in the locker room? Maybe we’d be better off researching what you’re experiencing.”
That was good paranormal-investigation reasoning, and I wished I’d thought of it. I started describing what I’d felt, and Tim
typed the words into the search box. The list we ended up with included evil presence, threatening, haunted, heat, cold, and things moving by themselves. When he hit search, the first site on the list of results was that of a paranormal investigation society in Oregon. Their archives included an account of a reported haunting that turned out to be something else entirely; after investigating, the society’s members suspected they were dealing with a portal of evil. “If there’s such a thing as Hell,” the report said, “we just found its servants’ entrance.”
The possibility traced down my spine like an icy finger.
“Did your parents ever investigate anything like this?” Tim asked.
“I don’t know. Dad won’t talk about any of it. But Mom used to tell me she was never really afraid during investigations, and this sounds like it would scare anyone.”
The report, which identified the investigated property as a building on Ramsay Court in an unspecified city, described elements that were all too familiar—hot and cold spots, objects moving on their own, a heavy and overwhelming sense of doom. After cutting short their initial visit, the investigators refused to go back; they recommended the property owners seek help from religious groups or experienced psychics. “The entities entering and leaving through the portal were demonic in nature, and more powerful than we were equipped to measure or deal with,” the report summarized.
The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like the girls’ locker room was as appropriate a place as any for a hell gate.
The report also explained that the Ramsay Court property had been abandoned for years; inside, the investigators found evidence of possible demonic rituals, including “black candles, symbols drawn on the walls and floor, drops of what appeared to be dried blood. It may have been an organized ritual meant to create a doorway or call forth a demon. Or it may have been a couple of kids trespassing and playing around, inadvertently opening a gateway.”
Another part of the report mentioned the tests the investigators performed and the measurements they took before the investigation was aborted. Most of the group’s equipment malfunctioned early on—flashlights with fresh batteries stopped working near the portal, only to “fix” themselves later on. Two digital cameras did the same. A film camera appeared to work, but the resulting negatives were blank. The tape inside an analog recorder snapped.
“Kind of like my phone,” I said to Tim as we read.
But some of the equipment worked long enough to produce results. A digital recorder picked up a hiss which had caused some debate among the society members—some wanted to consider it EVP, but the majority disagreed because no discernable voices could be heard in the static. A sample of the sound was available for download; it sounded like a radio stuck between stations. “Digital enhancement of the hiss does not reveal any real hint of EVP, or electronic voice phenomena,” the report noted. “In a ‘normal’ haunting, we would expect to find evidence of EVP. The lack of recognizable EVP was one factor that led us to believe the entities encountered in the Ramsay Court property were not human in origin, but were instead entering our world through some sort of portal located within the house.” The investigators also recorded elevated magnetic fields and noticeable temperature fluctuations in several rooms.
The team members agreed that the entities in the Ramsay Court property were unlike anything they’d encountered before. One member was so spooked that she dropped out of the society after the investigation and refused to discuss her experience or contribute to the account.
“Oh man,” Tim said when he finished reading. “This is too cool.”
“Are you kidding? You’re scared of Buster, but you think a hell gate is cool.”
“I’m not scared of Buster anymore.”
“Then why do you always make me lead the way around the apartment?”
He scowled a little. “Come on! Demonic rituals opening up portals of evil? Maybe something like that’s going on in our school right now!”
I frowned. “It’s not cool at all. This is why people shouldn’t play around with things they don’t understand.” The idea was making me more and more uncomfortable. I remembered Mom explaining when I was little that people who didn’t really believe in ghosts and whatever were the most likely to stir up trouble with things like Ouija boards and séances. Even with friendly, harmless ghosts, you had to know what you were doing.
“Maybe Coach Lucifer’s behind the whole thing.”
“Whatever.” I didn’t want to think about Frucile holding some kind of midnight ritual in the locker room.
“I’m serious. You said everything seems to come out of the shower stalls, right? Think about it—if you were conducting a bloody ritual, you’d want to do it somewhere that would be easy to clean, right? You just turn on the water, and whoosh, the evidence goes right down the drain. You’d need one of those black light things they have on cop shows to see the residue.”
“And with a little bleach,” I mused, “even that would be gone.”
“So then why is it impossible that Coach Lucifer might be, I don’t know, holding sacrifices in there?”
“Because the idea is nuts.” In truth, it was starting to seem way more plausible than I wanted it to. “And just what do you think she’s sacrificing?”
“I dunno. Chickens? Stray cats? Students who forget their gym clothes?” Tim was getting way too into this theory. “We do get those announcements about runaways pretty regularly. Someone seems to disappear every few months, and we don’t always hear that they’ve been found. Maybe…”
“Maybe they just ran away,” I finished for him. “What would Frucile do with the bodies after these sacrifices? Stuff them down the shower drains, too?”
“Okay, I was exaggerating. But something could be going on, and that’s why you were feeling all that weird stuff. You can’t still think the Frucile-Lucifer thing’s just a coincidence. The name’s obviously made up. Hey!” He stood up, excitedly. “Does your dad still have his old ghost hunting equipment?”
“I don’t know. I assume he got rid of it. He’s so not into that anymore.”
“You should find out. And if he still has it, maybe you can sneak some of it into the locker room and see if you find any magnetic fields, or those electric-phenom-thingies—”
“Electronic voice phenomena,” I said.
“Yeah, those.”
“The Ramsay Court investigators didn’t find any EVP.”
“Then if you get some, you’ll know you might be dealing with a haunting instead of a portal. Either way, holy crap. Palmetto just got a lot more interesting.”
“No way.” I shook my head. “I’m not going back in that room. That thing didn’t want me there.”
“Or maybe it did,” Tim said slowly. “You said it was pulling you toward the showers, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And Coach Frucile gave you a weird look after that.”
“She’s given me several weird looks.”
“So what if the thing in the locker room wants you? What if you’re the next sacrifice?”
“Tim, that’s so not funny.” Problem was, I wasn’t entirely sure he was trying to be funny at all.
The thought burrowed into the back of my mind and stayed there. What if he was on the right track, and the reason only I could feel the thing so strongly was because it was focusing on me? Staying out of the locker room seemed smarter than ever.
But one other thing kept bugging me. Mom wouldn’t have been scared of this. She might have seen it as a challenge, but she wouldn’t have run away. She would have researched and investigated until she figured out what was going on and put a stop to it. Which meant I had to do the same.
CHAPTER SIX
guinea pig poltergeist
Considering how Dad felt about anything ghost-related, I couldn’t very well just ask him about his old paranormal investigation equipment. Instead, I made a list of all the places in the apartment where he might’ve stashed it—and since the apartment
was small, my list was short. I didn’t dare snoop through his stuff while he was around, but whenever he was out chauffeuring corpses in the funeral home’s hearse, I hit one of the spots on the list.
I didn’t find anything in his closet or dresser, or in the storage bins under his bed. There was no equipment hidden in the hall closet or the television cabinet, either. I even searched my own room, hoping he might’ve stored the stuff in a forgotten corner of the closet back when he was using the room as his office. Nothing.
After I’d exhausted all the possibilities in the apartment, I redirected my hunt and started poking around downstairs. Nothing turned up in Dad’s office. I couldn’t get into one of the cabinets in the embalming room, so guiltily, I filched the key from Dad’s briefcase. All I found were jugs of chemicals. There was still the spare room to check, but it was empty except for a couple of coffins—all discontinued floor models. Dad intended to sell them off at a discount, but he hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
Coffins. Human-sized storage boxes, essentially. The very place to hide those mementos you’d rather forget about…
I couldn’t have thought of this a little sooner?
The coffins were dusty, and they showed assorted scratches and dents from the time they’d spent on display. Two were empty. But when I lifted the curved top half of the third coffin’s lid, I found some battered cardboard boxes taped shut and nestled on the faded satin. Robin had been scrawled on the top of each box, in thick black permanent ink, in Dad’s handwriting.
Okay, score. Even though the equipment had been Dad’s specialty, it made sense that he might have packed it away with the rest of his memories of Mom.
And tossed it all in a coffin. And people think I’m morbid.
I had to work fast. I expected Dad home within half an hour. That wasn’t enough time to go through the boxes, and I couldn’t let him find me snooping in the spare room. I wanted to grab all the boxes at once, but since there wasn’t enough space in my tiny bedroom to store them all, I’d have to settle for attacking them one at a time. I could sort through the first one, then trade it for another the next time Dad was out. I tucked a box under my arm, closed the coffin, and ran back up to the apartment.
Spookygirl - Paranormal Investigator Page 6