Spookygirl - Paranormal Investigator

by Jill Baguchinsky

  “It’s like a thousand degrees here.” I stood still and stared into the alcove. A dark, almost palpable misery emanated from within, wrapping around me. It pulled at me and made me want to weep along with it.

  But no—whatever this was, it couldn’t have me. I thought of my mom and summoned up strength I didn’t know I had, and I stepped away from the showers and pulled myself together. After a few seconds, I put the dead thermometer away, trading it for the digital recorder, which recorded for about thirty seconds before it, too, went dark. I also took a few quick shots with my digital camera, including one pointing directly into the shower alcove. Then I shoved everything back in my bag—Tim said he’d stick my things in his locker until fifth period—grabbed the first aid kit, and sprinted to the track. I figured I’d been gone for no more than fifteen minutes, tops.

  “What took you so long?” Coach Frucile asked, but she didn’t wait for an answer. Her concern and attention were still focused on Christy’s knee, which was turning an almost pretty shade of purple.

  I couldn’t concentrate for the rest of the day. Even drawing class was torture, despite the fact that we were finally studying portraiture. Because of all my funeral home practice over the summer, I was looking forward to this unit. Plus, Mr. Connelly had chosen Cherry Cheerleader to serve as our model that day. Cherry looked really uncomfortable as Mr. Connelly described the principles of facial proportion and symmetry and pointed out all the ways her features didn’t match the classical ideals. Any other day, Tim and I would’ve snickered endlessly as the various imperfections of one of our least favorite classmates were outlined. Today, though, we were both too antsy to savor the moment.

  I did happen to notice, however, that Dead Dirk was there—he sat on an empty bench with a translucent blue drawing board balanced on his lap. He looked as if he were drawing Cherry right along with everyone else.

  While I worked on my own drawing, I took a moment now and then to enjoy Head Jock’s attempt at Cherry’s portrait. He mixed up a few proportions and gave her a round face with tiny pig eyes and a monstrous, bulbous forehead. Then, as if he were drawing caricatures at a theme park, he added a tiny stick figure body with giant, lopsided boobs. His fellow jocks chuckled until Cherry lost her patience and stomped over from her perch in front of the class. When she saw Head Jock’s drawing, she lost it and screamed.

  “Babe, it’s funny!” Head Jock said.

  “Model, please!” Mr. Connelly clapped his hands the way he always did when he wanted someone’s attention. “We don’t want to move around and disrupt everyone’s concentration, do we?”

  Cherry appeared as though she very much wanted to disrupt something on Head Jock. If looks could kill, he might’ve ended up just as dead as Dirk.

  Mr. Connelly continued. “Remember, Cherry, your grade for today depends on how well you follow directions as a model. Everyone’s work depends on you.”

  Cherry whipped around and stalked back to the front of the room, where she sat fuming.

  I raised my hand. “Mr. Connelly? Could you tell Cherry to stop scowling like that? She has a lot more wrinkles on her forehead when she makes that face, and the change is messing up my portrait.”

  “If you please, Cherry,” Mr. Connelly said. “Try a more neutral expression.”

  Cherry’s eyes shot a few daggers at me before she relaxed her face, her expression reverting to its usual blankness.

  That afternoon, Tim came home on the bus with me and we went up to my room to analyze the results of the investigation. While we waited for my computer to boot up and the photos to upload, I called Buster in to demonstrate some of the other instruments for Tim.

  Tim still wasn’t too sure how to coexist with Buster, and Buster dealt with this the way a cat deals with a dog person—Tim was his new favorite. He pranked Tim at every opportunity. My pillows or stuffed animals went flying without warning at Tim’s head, and the television kept clicking on (and off) at full volume. Sometimes Tim whirled around as if he’d been tapped on the shoulder, but there was never anyone—anyone visible, anyway—behind him. It was enough to make anyone jumpy, so I usually intervened and threatened Buster with the crate, at which point he would retreat to another part of the apartment to sulk and wail.

  But when I needed to demonstrate how something like an EMF reader worked in the presence of the paranormal, Buster was useful to have around. Luckily, the reader turned on and worked perfectly now that it was away from the locker room. I showed Tim the readout’s fluctuations as Buster moved about.

  “How come Buster doesn’t make it malfunction like the thing in the locker room did?”

  Truthfully, I didn’t know, but I was getting there. “Well, I don’t think there are rules to any of this. There’s no normal. No two ghosts are going to behave exactly the same, so maybe they all manipulate energy in different ways.” It was as good an explanation as any.

  I tossed Buster’s squeaky toy to send him on his way, then started looking through the notes Tim had taken in the locker room. “Look at these EMF readings—31.3 near the showers! That’s ten points higher than anything I’ve gotten from Buster. It was hot over there, too—probably at least ten or fifteen degrees warmer than out in the hall.” Okay, so maybe that estimate was a slight exaggeration, but it wasn’t like I’d been able to take any readings with the dead thermometer. I pulled it out and turned it on; unlike the EMF reader, it still wasn’t working.

  Then I checked the photos. At least this time the images were actually there. I opened each JPEG on my laptop, blowing up the photos so they took up the entire screen. One by one, we inspected them for signs of anything paranormal. Each showed several orbs, little glowing balls of light that were common in photos containing supernatural activity. One of the last shots—one I’d taken of the shower alcove—showed a veil of bright white mist settled over the stalls.

  “What the hell is that?” Tim said.

  “I think it’s ecto-mist,” I said, although I’d never seen a really good example before and wasn’t exactly sure what it was. “And see? It’s only in the showers. It doesn’t show up in any of the other pictures.” I pointed to the screen. “That’s what I sense when I’m in the locker room. That misty stuff gets around me and starts strangling me. I can feel it.”

  I’d also managed to get a single sound file before the digital recorder had gone dead. Using a program I’d downloaded from a ghost-hunting website, I manipulated the MP3 file, cleaning it up and eliminating as much of the ambient static as possible. I fiddled with the software’s settings, then let the recording play on a loop.

  “Did you hear that?” Tim asked, after we’d listened several times.

  I shook my head; I didn’t hear a thing.

  “It starts around the seven-second mark.” He turned up the volume on my laptop.

  Now I could hear something if I really concentrated. It sounded like a whisper, gruff and garbled and almost inaudible. It hissed through the speakers, the undertone of a threat. It creeped me out, but I wasn’t sure if the sound itself was responsible for the way my heart rate suddenly rabbited, or if I was reacting to what seemed to be its very eerie source. Was that the thing in the locker room talking?

  What was it telling me?

  “Let me try something,” I said, plugging a pair of headphones into the laptop and listening through those. Eliminating the hiss of the speakers made the sound clearer and louder, and now I thought I could make out some distinct words.

  “You…” the thing whispered. “You know…”

  I held my breath, allowing the sound to loop over and over.

  “You know…You can. No…Don’t. She…” The voice paused, then hissed something else that I couldn’t make out at first. It sounded like the name of a street, which made no sense. First Street? I didn’t think Palmetto Crossing even had a First Street.

  Then I began to hear the other sounds. The wails. Garbled, choking howls. Even quieter than the whisper, they cried in the background, a thousand mi
series.

  I yanked the headphones out of my ears and threw them onto the keyboard. “That’s enough.”

  Then Tim took a listen. “‘You can? No, don’t?’” he repeated after a minute. “What’s that mean?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t make out all of it.” I also couldn’t stop shaking. “Can you hear the wailing in the background?”

  He listened a little longer. “I hear…something, I guess. But what does it think you can do?”

  I totally didn’t want my mind to go there, but I couldn’t help thinking about Tim’s theory—that secret rituals were being held in the shower alcove, and that Coach Frucile was somehow involved.

  “Maybe I’m next.”

  “Next for what?”

  “It was your idea in the first place. Maybe this thing wants me as the next sacrifice.”

  For a long moment, we just stared at each other. I knew it was a ridiculous theory, but sometimes the what-ifs echo a lot louder in your mind than common sense.

  “We can call the cops,” Tim said finally.

  “And tell them what? The police won’t do anything based on some weird EMF readings and a tip from a couple of high school students.”

  “If something as illegal as human sacrifice is going on—”

  “Okay. Enough.” We were totally getting carried away. “We’re just being stupid. My gym coach is not slicing and dicing students in the shower alcove after hours. It’s just not happening, okay? Look, it’s already mid-October. I’ll keep wearing my gym clothes to school and changing in the bathroom until the semester ends, and then I’ll never go near the locker room again. Problem solved. Whatever’s in there can stay in there and fester; I don’t care.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah.” I didn’t know what else he expected me to do—pull a Ghostbusters jumpsuit out of my closet and strap some lights and sirens on Dad’s hearse, maybe? I did wish I had someone I could talk to about it, but I didn’t, and that was that. “It’s fine. Let’s just drop it.” To punctuate my ruling, I reached over and deleted the sound file. “We’re just hearing weird things in the static. So let’s talk about something else.”

  Tim looked uncertain, but he did let it go. “Well…We could talk about Halloween, I guess.”

  “What about Halloween?” It was still two weeks away, and I hadn’t even thought about it yet. Between getting settled with Dad and starting school and finding Mom’s stuff and investigating the locker-room entity, my mind had been on other stuff.

  Tim continued. “It’s just that some of us were talking about going over to that cemetery on Longview, and, you know, hanging out, and Isobel was wondering if maybe you’d come, too.” He spoke in such a practiced, nonchalant way that I knew he’d been dying to bring up the subject.

  Hanging out in a cemetery on Halloween. It’s sad when you have to try that hard to be a little spooky. Besides, the Longview Road Cemetery was hardly scary. It didn’t even have interesting headstones; it was just row upon row of modern marble plaques set into the ground. I looked skeptically at Tim.

  “Isobel was hoping we could, you know…”

  “Spit it out, Timmy.”

  He glared at me a little, but at least it stopped his stuttering. I loved calling him Timmy when he annoyed me, and when he managed to annoy me, it usually had something to do with the goths. Aside from the few times I’d passed them in the hall, I’d been avoiding Tim’s friends. Isobel just had too much of an attitude. Like I said, when you have to try that hard to be spooky…

  “Isobel wants to have a séance in the cemetery,” he said. “She wants you to lead it.”

  “No way, Tim!” Ugh, hadn’t he been paying any attention at all when we read about the Ramsay Court investigation? “This is exactly the kind of stupid crap that causes issues like the ones in the Ramsay Court house. Idiots fooling around with things they don’t understand.”

  “But you’re not an idiot, and you do understand this stuff. You could keep it from getting dangerous.”

  “I barely understand any of it. I don’t know anything about séances.”

  “You wouldn’t need to. Just make them think you’re doing one. We’re all going either way, and…I’m kind of scared of what might happen if Isobel tries to lead the séance herself. I told her I’d ask you. Actually, I kind of told her I’d already asked you, and you said yes, so…” He gave me his best puppy-dog eyes; his smudged eyeliner made him look even more woeful.

  Defeated, I gave him a look of doom. “Fine. Okay. I’ll do it. But if they start doing stupid crap like trying to invoke demons or anything, I’m out of there.”

  I wondered briefly how it would look for Dad’s business if his daughter got caught trespassing in a cemetery on Halloween night, but it didn’t matter. After all, I didn’t intend to get caught.

  And I’d have to not get caught twice, since I intended to drop by the cemetery the night before Halloween to do a little negotiating with the locals.

  After Tim left, I sat staring at my laptop for a long time. I thought about the thing in the locker room, and how Mom might’ve handled it.

  Mom would never just throw out evidence. She would analyze it and catalog it. If it turned out to be false proof, she would note that as well, but she wouldn’t just disregard it.

  I dragged the sound file out of the recycling bin on my desktop and dropped it and the JPEGs into a folder I named Locker-Room Investigation. Then I wrote up a brief account of the investigation and saved that in the same folder. At least I thought I could rule out an actual hell gate, since I’d gotten that EVP. But if this was something else…what was it?

  I really needed someone to talk to. Not just about the locker room. About everything.

  I considered e-mailing the team that had done the Ramsay Court investigation, but their website made it pretty clear that they didn’t have time for questions from amateur investigators.

  That left me with just one other option—Sabrina Brightstar. I needed someone to guide me a little. Every time I thought about that hissing whisper in the recording, I felt more and more like I was in over my head.

  Mom’s address book didn’t list a phone number or an e-mail address for Sabrina, but it did give me her real name—Mildred Schwartz—and a mailing address in Orlando. Snail mail it was, then. I wrote her a letter explaining who I was and that I was trying to find some information about my mother. I’d have to mail it closer to school, though; I couldn’t leave the letter in our own street-side mailbox and risk Dad finding it. He’d freak if he knew who I was trying to contact.

  I’d first met Sabrina and the team’s fourth member, Bryan Chambers, at one of Mom and Dad’s team dinner parties. (Bryan was notorious for freaking out halfway through investigations and hiding in the car—I knew he wouldn’t be any help, so I hadn’t even bothered trying to find him.) I remembered Sabrina as an older woman with short, frizzy gray hair and big, square-shaped eyeglasses. Her face was thin and creased, and she wore blue eye shadow all the way up to her brows. She wore tunics over flowing skirts and ridiculous amounts of clanky jewelry. She claimed to be psychic, drank a lot of wine, talked too loudly, smoked in the bathroom, and insulted my father’s aura. She’d kind of scared me.

  I remembered asking Mom about Sabrina once after one of those dinner parties.

  “Why does she lie so much?” I’d asked Mom. I could tell Sabrina made a lot of stuff up. She embellished every story she told, trying to make herself sound like the awesomest person in the room.

  “She doesn’t lie, sweetie,” Mom said. “At least, she doesn’t mean to.” She lifted me onto the counter and leaned over so we were eye to eye. “Some people really want to be special, Violet, like you and I are special. Sabrina’s like that. She has her own abilities, but that’s not enough for her. She wants to be more like us, so she pretends sometimes. It’s not okay to make things up, but sometimes if you understand why someone’s doing it, you can cut them a little slack.”

  Mom was nice like th
at. She’d looked for the good in everyone. I wasn’t nearly so forgiving.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  séances and shiny things

  While I waited to hear back from Sabrina, I stayed far away from the locker room and made myself concentrate on other things, like this faux séance I’d been talked into doing.

  I’d need some supplies.

  My first stop was Lovely Lily’s, this store in the mall that sells supercheap, trendy costume jewelry and does ear piercing in the front window, as if watching people get holes punched in their lobes is some kind of free entertainment. In the clearance bin I found a couple of sparkly necklaces made from iridescent beads and bright silver-tone chain. They were hideous, but they’d do the trick.

  (I also bought this awesome pair of glow-in-the-dark skull earrings from the shop’s Halloween display, but those were just for me.)

  After that, I checked out the sale racks at Striped Skull, a dark, loud store that caters to the kind of goths and punks who hang out at suburban shopping malls. Okay, so I don’t like to admit it, but I kind of love Striped Skull, even if I hate being associated with most of its clientele. At least now I had an excuse to do a little browsing—after all, if I was going to associate with the goths, I had to look the part. I ended up with some purple-and-black-striped tights, and a black lace shirt that looked like spiderwebs. The store also had an impressive display of heavy black boots, but they were all way out of my price range. I’d have to remember them for my Christmas list.

  The night before Halloween, I put the beaded necklaces in my pocket and went downstairs to where Dad was about to embalm an old guy named Fred Whyte. While riding his three-wheeled bike to the supermarket, Fred had had an unfortunate encounter with a drunk driver in a pickup truck. Fred’s face needed a lot of rebuilding and a heck of a lot of death spackle.

  “I don’t know why people insist on an open casket in situations like this,” Dad said when I peeked in and asked how he was doing.