“Oh, wow. I’m picking up some definite energy in here. Temperature’s all over the place.”
“I just took a bath,” I said, by way of explanation.
“In the sink?” Kim asked.
I hoped my cheeks didn’t blaze red on the camera’s screen.
“What about you two?” I tightened the belt on my robe and sat down at the writing desk facing the bay window.
“Ghost hunting,” they answered in unison.
Ghosts. I tried this word on for size. Everything about what had just taken place in my room defied the connotation of gauzy, diaphanous bodies.
If it had taken place.
“Is this place supposed to be haunted?” I hoped my question contained the right proportion of casual interest.
“Nope,” Dean answered. “Just a hunch we had.”
“All the popular places are usually mobbed. Is it just you?” Kim tucked the video camera into a bag fastened across her chest and withdrew a Polaroid from a holster on her hip. A flash lit up the bathroom before the iconic snap and mechanical whine announced a photo sliding out like a cheese single. Kim took the white border in two fingers and waved the picture at the ceiling before tucking it into the pocket of her shirt.
“Is what just me?” In the quiet of my office, I had grown accustomed to observing small mannerisms, subtle shifts in facial expression and body language to discover meaning my clients themselves often didn’t know lived behind their words. Talking to someone whose face was obscured by gadgets and whose attention ricocheted from wall to wall like a rubber ball proved especially disorienting.
“Do you have a husband?” Dean asked, clearly following Kim’s line of logic better than I had. I wondered if they were a couple.
“Not exactly. Yes. Well, no. Kind of?” Many answers to a question for which no single one felt appropriate.
Kim and Dean exchanged a look through the lenses of their respective devices.
“I came here alone. Sort of a…retreat.” Which handy term sounded much more sane than fleeing my crumbling life with the speed of a greased cheetah.
“Looks like whatever was here did the same.” Kim frowned at a fresh Polaroid in her hand. “Check this out.”
Dean pushed night vision glasses up to the top of his head to reveal his own glasses beneath. His pale face bore the pink outline of a scuba diver having just surfaced and shed his goggles.
“I don’t see anything,” Dean said.
“Exactly. Compare this to the one we took in the hall when…when uh—” she stopped, brows furrowed, eyes narrowed at me. “Who are you?”
“Matilda. Dr. Matilda Schmidt.” Saying this out loud felt like invoking a mantra. A simple phrase to make me feel somehow more real, more stable.
“Kim Thorne. And that’s Dean Barger,” she said, nodding in Dean’s direction. “You’re not named after your mother.” Kim tucked a shiny lock of hair behind her ear and handed me one of the photos.
I couldn’t reconcile the action with her words. “I’m sorry?”
“Nothing. Look here.” She traced twin scribbles of light through the photo in my hands. “See that?”
I nodded.
“This is the picture we took right before we followed the energy surge on the EMF meter to your room. Two distinct patterns. See the way they merge and separate? It’s almost like they’re following you.”
“That happens sometimes.” Dean leaned close enough to make me believe that my earlier run-ins with him hadn’t been the result of any purposeful discourtesy on his part. He simply had no concept of personal space. “Sometimes spirits can be really territorial. Sometimes they’re attracted to specific people.”
My mind flashed back to the cleaver sailing through the air and lodging in Gaybeard’s chest with that awful hollow sound moments before he buried his face in Crixus’s crotch. “No kidding,” I snorted.
Dean looked not at me, but around me. “Did you see or hear anything in here? It might have been subtle. A shadow, a whisper. Are you a medium?”
Something had started gnawing a corridor through my insides. A feeling that started with my room’s miraculous restoration to order and increased with every second spent in Kim and Dean’s presence. “I don’t see what my clothing size has to do—”
“He means a psychic medium,” Kim explained. “What kind of doctor are you?”
“I’m a psychologist. And I hate to be rude, but—”
“So you know all about this stuff then. Apparitional experiences, precognition and telepathy, reincarnation…” Dean’s voice was subsumed by the buzzing gathering volume in my head.
With every word, I felt myself shrinking away from them. Even in today’s more diverse and accepting field, parapsychology still remained psychology’s equivalent of the uncle who got drunk and hit on his nephew’s wife at the family reunion.
I didn’t want to have this conversation. I didn’t want to get pulled into whatever this was.
I wanted to get on my phone and call Julie. I wanted unoccupied space and time to process what had just happened. I wanted to run Crixus over with my Prius for disappearing again.
“We were gonna get some dinner at the Salty Duck,” Kim announced, steering the camera toward me and snapping a photo. “You should come with us.”
I blinked blue swirls out of my vision. “It’s been kind of a weird day,” I said. “I’m thinking I might just grab something quick a little later.”
“Come on,” Kim urged. “It’s a secondary sighting location. Last summer when we were here, one of the waitresses got locked in the bathroom. It was incredible.”
“That’s terrible. How can you—”
“By a ghost, she means,” Dean added, as if this would be enough to transform Kim’s previous statement from terrifying to tempting. “And they have a great blackened chicken.”
“I’m sure it’s lovely.” I was standing now, shifting my weight and glancing toward the door in the universal posture of polite dismissal. “But I’m mostly vegan.”
Kim blinked at me, fanning herself with the Polaroid. “How can you be mostly vegan?”
“Cheese,” I said. “And sometimes butter.” Both appetites having been wakened by a certain hit man who had wakened a couple others in our time together.
“That would make you a vegetarian,” Dean piped in. “Vegetarians can—”
Kim’s gasp sucked what little calm I had cultivated right out of my chest.
“What? What is it?” Dean’s wild mane of curls bobbed over Kim’s shoulder. “Holy effing cats!” He looked up from the photo and squinted at me, blinked, lifted his glasses up by their frames and lowered them again.
I didn’t look over my shoulder. I didn’t ask what they saw.
When the photo fluttered from Kim’s hands and landed at my feet, my gaze sank to it. My own startled face stared up at me, surrounded by a glowing miasma of shifting blue orbs.
*****
Over a steaming pot of crabs, Kim and Dean decided a séance to be the only acceptable course of action.
“No,” I said, selecting a crab whose vacant gaze reminded me just a little of the look on Crixus’s face when I’d caught him in the supply closet with Julie. “Out of the question.” I brought the wooden mallet down on his claw with a satisfying crunch.
Bits of shell skittered off the table to the floor.
“That’s the way, lass!” A hearty clap on the back nearly caused me to cough up my own esophagus. “Show that paltry picaroon who be boss!”
Under normal circumstances, having my shoulder groped by someone whose plosives resulted in a saliva shower wouldn’t have been high on the list of ways to pass a Friday night. Given this afternoon’s adventures, I was grateful of the assurance that the occupants at the next table were probably alive.
I gave the Crixus-crab another whack as a show of solidarity.
A hearty chorus of “yarrrs!” rose from the restaurant’s costumed patrons, who were—I decided after the third flaming grog pre
ssed on me by a winking rake in tight breeches—not all that bad.
“You’re just trying to crack it,” Dean instructed, delivering a far more civilized tap to his own crustacean. “Not punish him for the sins of all mankind.”
“Vegans don’t eat crab.” Kim forked a new potato into her basket and dusted it with the house seasoning set out on each of the Salty Duck’s tables along with bibs and rolls of brown paper towels.
“Neither do I,” I said. “The crab and I are simply resolving some personal issues.” Following Dean’s example, I worked a disk of cartilage free of the claw and, using my fork, pushed the meat out in a solid white lump. Drawn butter dripped down my chin as the sweet, succulent meat brought the sea’s salty kiss to my tongue.
I shrugged at Kim’s raised eyebrow. “It would have been a shame to waste it after all that effort.”
“A séance is the best way to find out if any of the spirits following you want to communicate.” Dean twisted the last leg off his crab and aligned it with others he had set in a neat row on his plate. For one absurd moment, I half expected them to start kicking, Rockettes style.
“Look,” I said. “I respect your opinions, and I can tell you’ve done considerable research on the subject matter, but one faulty Polaroid picture isn’t sufficient evidence to accept your theory wholesale.”
“You mean you don’t believe in ghosts.” Kim reached out and snagged a corn cob from the newspaper spread on the table. My esteem for her doubled as she baptized it in the drawn butter from the ramekin at the side of her plate.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t need to. You look like a skeptic.” If Kim noticed the butter dripping down toward her elbow, she gave no sign. I resisted the urge to reach out and dab at it.
“She does, doesn’t she?” Dean agreed.
“Exactly what does a skeptic look like?”
“Uptight,” Dean said.
“Sort of pinched and dubious,” Kim added.
“Pinched?” I repeated. “Dubious?”
“You sounded extra pinched just then.” Dean reached out and picked a bit of shell from my hair.
A familiar irritation burned at the back of my throat. In the past months, I had endured similar accusations from everyone ranging from hit men to leprechauns. “How am I supposed to sound when someone accuses me of being pinched and dubious?”
Another grog arrived at the table. “From the gentleman over there.”
I followed the waiter’s gaze to a middle-aged, balding pirate over by the oversized aquarium where sulky lobsters awaited to be ordered to their demise by leering patrons. The man winked and gave me a flirty wave, the effect being somewhat compromised by the crab leg clutched in his hand.
My smile felt more like a wince.
Kim’s appreciative gaze followed the breeches-clad buttocks of our waiter back toward the bar, an action I couldn’t begrudge her, as only a comparison to the perfect pair I had seen earlier prevented my doing the same.
She chewed an already red and raw cuticle.
“He’s cute,” I said, pushing the grog across the table to her. “You should talk to him.”
“Not a good idea.” Flame danced in Kim’s eyes, revealing the golden flecks embedded in the green like mineral veins in marble. She brought the drink to her lips and blew it out.
“Why not?”
“It’s exhausting,” she said. “Talking like this is bad enough. Talking to him would be worse.”
“Asperger’s?” I hadn’t been certain until I spoke it, though the signs had been accumulating against the perpetual therapist’s couch in my head like a snowdrift all evening. The lack of eye contact, repetitive behaviors, ignorance of social cues, delayed reaction to conversational stimuli.
“You knew that before now, but you didn’t want to say it.” Kim wiped her fingers on her napkin and resumed chewing her cuticle.
“Me too,” Dean added. “That’s how we met.”
“Group support?” Visions of my grad school summer internships rose up around me. The circle of cold metal chairs in a church basement, muddy coffee, and enough tension between the circle’s occupants to peel off a layer of skin. Moderating discussions of high-functioning autistic adults and those with Asperger’s syndrome together, the line between those two diagnoses being much thinner then than it had become in the years since.
“Asperger’s dating meet-up,” Kim corrected.
“Oh,” I said, searching the ether for some sign of a romantic connection between them that I might have overlooked. “I didn’t realize you two were…”
Dean blushed scarlet to the tips of his ears, the color clashing violently with the auburn curls growing cottony with exposure to the night’s settling humidity.
“We’re not,” Kim insisted. “We didn’t like each other, but we both liked ghost hunting.”
“Sharing mutual interests is a great foundation for a long-term connection,” I said, catching the slightest hint of hope in Dean’s eyes. “You’d be surprised how many relationships involving self-actualized individuals don’t—”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” Kim announced. “I want to talk about the séance.”
“I’d rather not.” I picked through the remaining shreds of crab with my fork and made a pile of shrapnel off to one side.
“You saw something.” This was the first time Kim’s eyes had locked onto mine for any length of time without scuttling away just as quickly. “You saw something, and you’re not telling.”
Looking into Kim’s earnest face, so devoid of any artifice or posturing, shamed me out of my own. “I’m not sure what I saw.”
There. That growing feeling of unease.
Every second seemed to scoot me closer to that sunny day room where I had last seen my mother, deposited out of danger by Liam. The admission tightened my joints as if drawn inward by some internal crank.
Schizophrenia is genetic. A harmless phrase forever burned into my memory from the instant I had read it, a phrase that felt more like prophecy than potential outcome.
Every day, I helped my clients find the line separating what was real from the monsters manufactured by their own fear-driven thoughts. And here I was, unable to decide definitively if an entire conversation had unfolded only in my head.
A séance could, at least in theory, provide confirmation that it wasn’t just me. Which would have been much easier if a certain demigod weren’t MIA for the umpteenth time.
I needed Crixus here. Now. To tell me he had seen what I saw. To assure me that any other human being would have seen it too.
“That’s exactly why we need to have a séance,” Kim said. “If we can get the presence to communicate, we’ll be able to determine where the energy is originating from, and what its intentions are. How else do you expect to get rid of it?”
“Get rid of it?”
“Sure,” Dean said. “Usually when spirits follow a particular person, there’s something about that person they’re drawn to. Something familiar. Something they need.”
“Like pants?” The grog had loosened my tongue to the point of treacherous honesty.
“Pants?” Kim asked.
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
“Just give it five minutes,” Kim urged. “If you don’t want to keep going after that, we’ll stop. Easy as that.”
My mind strayed back to the blissful hours I spent lolling on the beach earlier this afternoon. If the séance could restore that state, it might be worth whatever attendant discomfort the experience promised.
“All right,” I said. “But I’m not using a Ouija board or anything like that.”
“Damn.” Dean leaned back and folded his arms. “I guess that means the virgin’s blood is a no go too.”
Even amid my irritation, I felt a little swell of pride on his behalf for such an appropriate application of sarcasm. “Save it for plan B,” I suggested.
“In case the séance doesn’t work?” Kim asked.
&
nbsp; I tipped the last fiery swallow of grog down my throat and motioned to our waiter for the check. “In case it does.”
*****
“You have to concentrate.” Kim’s face took on a witchy beauty in the flickering candlelight, her hair dark as a crow’s wing falling forward across her cheek.
“I am concentrating.” It was what I was concentrating on that was the problem.
We sat cross-legged in a circle on the bathroom floor in my room, Dean insisting this location had the strongest “energy.”
Unfortunately for me, it was energy of the “I can remember how Crixus’s hips felt on the insides of my thighs” variety. His body haunted this space and my memory of it.
“Do bathrooms have special significance for you?” The refection of flame danced across Dean’s glasses as he lifted his gaze from the camera in his lap.
I looked at him, not satisfied the answer I wanted to give was the truth.
If Crixus invaded this space with his presence, Liam occupied it with his absence. As the demigod had delighted in pointing out, it was in a motel bathroom where I had wrapped myself around the hit man, allowing the intersection of our weaknesses to bind us in mutual need.
Liam, at least, seemed willing to give me my space—whether I wanted it or not. Since moving my mother into a quiet, sunny assisted living center where security was tight and mental health professionals outnumbered the residents three-to-one, he had reentered the broad silence that seemed his constant companion.
“Why?” I asked, deciding to return a question with a question rather than an uncomfortable answer.
“You’re getting all hot,” Dean said, leaning over the device I came to know as an infrared camera, capable of detecting thermal images.
“I’m agitated,” I said. “I’m tired, my butt is going numb, and all I want is to curl up in my bed with a book and forget this whole day ever happened.”
“That could be good,” Kim pointed out. “They respond to strong feelings.”
“Look.” I grabbed the edge of the tub and dragged myself to my feet, the air currents from my movement setting the shadows dancing around us. “I’m not even sure there is a they. I think it’s time to accept that what happened earlier was just a fluke. I’m not sensitive, they are not following me, and pursuing this any further would just be a waste of time for everyone concerned.”
Unassailable: The Case Files of Dr. Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist #5 (The Case Files of Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist) Page 4