“Hello,” she said in calm encouraging tones, “my name is Truth Jourdemayne. And you are … ?”
“Winter.” The woman’s voice was a husky croak. “Winter Musgrave.” She stared over Truth’s shoulder at Dylan, amber eyes wide.
“I’m Dylan Palmer,” Dylan said, coming into the room. Truth walked over to the table, and Dylan closed the door again, shutting out the noise of the people going back and forth in the hall outside.
“Won’t you sit down, Ms. Musgrave, and tell us what we can do for you?” Truth said.
Winter Musgrave laughed; the sound came out almost as a wail.
“I need help,” she said. “And not that kind! I’ve been—” she broke off. “No. You’ll never believe me then—why should you? I don’t believe me—don’t you understand? I don’t believe me—I don’t care—all I want to do is stop it!”
She’d begun to pace, walking back and forth in front of the row of books, her voice rising as she spoke until she was almost shouting.
Dylan looked quizzically toward Truth. Both of them had been forced to baby-sit their share of cranks while waiting for the campus police to remove them—was this another? Truth frowned and shook her head a fraction, and sat down at the table.
“First you have to tell us what is troubling you,” Truth said with gentle firmness.
Winter paused in her pacing and whirled to face Truth. As she did, two of the cased magazine sets fell off the shelf behind her; she jumped away from them, looking first at them and then back at Truth as if she expected at any moment to be accused of something.
“I’m not crazy. Don’t you understand? I’m not crazy—that’s the whole problem—I’m not!”
“Okay,” said Dylan, not moving from his watchful post beside the door, “you’re not crazy. But you are going to have to tell us what you want.”
Truth watched the woman gather herself together with an effort. “I want it to stop,” she said, her voice nearly a whisper. “I want it to stop before someone gets hurt.”
THEY COULDN’T HELP her, Winter realized with numb despair—and even if they could, she’d been a fool to believe that anyone would listen past the point where she told them about Fall River. “That’s all I want,” she repeated plaintively. “For it to stop.”
“What is it that you want to stop?” the dark-haired woman seated at the table—Truth—asked her.
Winter stared at her doubtfully. She’d expected someone older—and, frankly, male—when she’d come demanding to speak with one of the Institute’s researchers. This Dylan Palmer, in his work shirt, jeans, and earring, wasn’t quite what she’d had in mind either, whether he said he was a doctor or not. Someone in a suit, maybe—someone with authority.
The authority to cast out demons.
“Do you—could you—I need to know …” The words trembled on the tip of her tongue, but she could not bring herself to say them. “Can you tell if someone’s possessed?” she finally choked out.
Blessedly, neither of them laughed.
“Possessed by a devil?” Truth asked, as calmly as if she were discussing the price of a new bond issue. “Why don’t you sit down, Ms. Musgrave?”
Dylan walked around the table and pulled out a chair for her. Winter sank into it, feeling drained of all strength by the effort it had taken to ask that question. She could be sane, and these things could still be happening—if she were possessed. It did not even occur to her to consider how desperate she must be to entertain this possibility.
“Now,” Truth Jourdemayne said, “start from the beginning.”
Winter hesitated. She’d always been a very private person—even when the catchphrase of the eighties was “Do you want to talk about it?” Winter never had. Talk frightened her; it made her feel too vulnerable. Even now she didn’t want to talk. She wanted someone to wave a magic wand and make the problem go away. But they couldn’t. Not until she told them what it was.
“Things … happen,” Winter began, but even to her that sounded inadequate. She waited, but the woman across the table provided no helpful questions, and finally Winter went on. “To me—no, around me. These—things—happen, and I don’t have any control over them; I’m not doing them—” she didn’t think she was; how could she do things like that to helpless animals; how could anyone? “—but I can’t stop them, either.”
“What kind of things?” Truth asked, her voice still calm.
Winter flinched away from the telling. “They’re … Look, I have to tell you: I’ve been in, in an institution. I had, oh, I guess they used to call it a nervous breakdown. But I’m not … I’m not crazy, you see? And if I am, why won’t somebody just tell me I’m crazy, okay? I could stand that. And not just go around all the time pretending everything’s great, everything’s fine, like this is some sort of skinned knee that’s going to get better if I just leave it alone for a while?”
She knew her voice was rising hysterically again. She couldn’t help it; every time she managed to stop being afraid even the littlest bit, the rage and frustration rose to the surface until it took all the self-control she had left not to merely scream wordlessly and lash out at everything that surrounded her.
“Why don’t you tell us why you came here, Ms. Musgrave?” Dylan Palmer said.
“Because you people are the ghostbusters, right? And that’s what I’m dealing with—something that walks through walls and does things that nobody can do. Following me, and I thought it was my fault, so I—But I’m not going to take the blame, not if It—So you’ve got to exorcise me, or whatever it is you do here, so I can get back to my life!”
She could not manage to stay in her chair; she got to her feet again and began to pace, choking on her fear and rage until her heart was a thick weight in her throat.
“Ghosts usually haunt places rather than people, Ms. Musgrave,” Dr. Palmer said calmly. “Why do you think you’re being haunted?”
Winter waited, but the dark-haired woman—Truth—didn’t say anything. But at least neither of them had laughed. A strange serenity seemed to radiate from Truth Jourdemayne, an intangible but real something that Winter could shelter beneath and draw strength from. She managed to halt her pacing and press both palms flat on the table. Finally she went on with her story.
“I’m staying in the old farmhouse a couple of miles out of Glastonbury. I went there after I got out of the sanatorium,” she added, half-defiantly.
Neither of the researchers spoke. Winter forced herself to go on, to go faster, to get to the end of her tale so she could know the worst.
“Things happened at Fall River, at—the sanatorium. Nobody accused me, but they didn’t have to. They never happened to anyone else. Things would disappear—little things, nothing of value—and show up later in weird places. My room had French windows that looked out onto one of the terraces; nobody could keep them locked; finally they nailed them shut. Nothing worked. The nails kept working loose.”
A confused and vivid memory surfaced; a collage of images: the aides ostentatiously removing their watches before they came into her room; accusations that she’d broken—oh, she couldn’t list the things; the coffeemaker in the rec room; the Coke machine; people blaming her, when she’d never touched the things.
“And there was something else, too—” but she still couldn’t bear to name it “—but when I left there, all of that stopped.”
“Completely?” Dr. Palmer asked.
“Yes. Although I’m not sure I would have noticed even if it continued, not with no one there to nag me—” She heard the whine of self-pity in her voice and stopped. “But then the one thing, the one particular thing, it’s started again and it’s worse, and I can’t be doing it—I can’t—not possibly … .”
She drew a shaking breath. Every nerve and muscle jangled with tension; it was an effort to keep her teeth from chattering.
“You have to tell us what it is that is troubling you, Ms. Musgrave,” Truth said gently, “and even so, we may not be able to help.”
“If you cannot help me I don’t know where else to go,” Winter said dully, “except to drive my car off the nearest cliff.” Except she couldn’t even do that, not after yesterday.
Winter took a deep breath and reached for the paper bag on the table. “Because of the—of the thing that happens, last night I tied myself to my bed. This morning when I got up every door and window in the house was wide open—and there was this.”
She upended the bag over the table and shook it. Out fell two hundred fifty feet of white cotton clothesline, neatly dismembered into three-inch lengths.
Both of the researchers from the Institute went very still, like hunting dogs who have just sighted game. Finally Dr. Palmer stepped over to the table and picked up one of the pieces.
“The cuts are very clean,” he said in a neutral voice.
“I couldn’t do that—not with a knife, or a pair of scissors, or a razor blade. You tell me what did that,” Winter said in a ragged whisper.
TRUTH PICKED UP one of the pieces of line. The severed ends were as neat and crisp and compressed as the end of a filter-tip cigarette. Only something very sharp, wielded with great force, could make a cut like that. She pulled several more of the short pieces toward her and lined them up side by side. Each piece was the same length as all the others. Exactly.
She glanced at Dylan. His face was expressionless, but she could tell he was excited. The symptoms as Winter Musgrave described them were almost a synopsis of a classic textbook case of poltergeist possession: doors and windows mysteriously locked or open, apportation of small objects, and instances of whimsical and nearly impossible vandalism.
But the woman bringing these complaints was too old by at least two decades to be a traditional focus for a poltergeist, and the typical pranks of a “noisy spirit,” while annoying, couldn’t be enough on their own to bring an adult woman to such a fever-pitch of terror.
“Why did you tie yourself to the bed, Ms. Musgrave?” Truth asked again.
“Do you think I’m crazy?” the woman demanded fiercely. Her eyes blazed fever-bright with desperation, and Truth sensed the swirling currents of raw emotion which were the only things keeping her on her feet now.
“No,” Truth said, glancing toward Dylan again. He was generally much more charitable in his assessments of people and their motives than she was, but he was also scrupulous in his judgments of matters touching on the psychic realm. If Dylan did not feel that the paranormal was involved he’d have no hesitation about saying so.
He nodded almost imperceptibly. He agreed, then, with Truth’s preliminary assessment.
“Neither of us thinks you’re crazy, Ms. Musgrave—just frightened. I will not make any promises, but it is possible that we can help.”
The chestnut-haired woman across the table sagged wearily into her chair again. “I keep finding these animals,” she said in a flat, exhausted voice. “Dead. Torn to shreds. Dropped on my doorstep like something the cat might drag home—only I don’t have a cat. And I don’t think even a cat would … Anyway. Pigeons. Squirrels. Mice. Some other kind of bird. And yesterday it started again. And this morning there was—oh, God, I think it was a raccoon or something. In the kitchen. In the kitchen.” She dropped her head into her hands.
“I think,” Dylan said, gently so as not to startle the woman across the table, “that you could use a hot drink. A cup of tea would be in order, I think, and then you can tell us the whole story start to finish.”
DR. PALMER LEFT the room, leaving the door slightly ajar. Truth Jourdemayne looked at Winter.
“Have you ever read anything about the paranormal, Ms. Musgrave?” Truth asked.
“Please. Call me Winter.” She said it with faint reluctance—Winter loathed false Intimacy—but so far these people hadn’t said she was crazy, so she at least owed them the use of her name. “And no, I haven’t. Hocus-pocus bores me: Steven Spielberg and Uri Geller and all that stuff.”
“That isn’t quite what I was thinking of,” Truth said, smiling to blunt the rebuke. “Well, to put it as simply as possible, it sounds to both Dylan—Dr. Palmer—and me as if the problem you’re describing may fit into one of the rather broad categories established to describe paranormal events.”
“Aren’t you going to run some tests before coming up with that one?” Winter snapped. The woman across from her shook her head, not seeming offended in the least by the question.
“Unfortunately, one of the problems with these psychic abilities is that they tend to come and go as they please—and like cats, they don’t respond well to being shown off for the neighbors. Anyone who says he can produce psychic phenomena on demand is probably a fraud.”
“So even if you tested me, you wouldn’t find anything,” Winter offered grudgingly.
“Probably not,” Truth admitted. “Still, we’d appreciate it if you’d let us run our standard battery of screening tests on you—”
“Screening? Why? Do you think I’m making this up?” Winter said, suspicious again.
“Screening,” Truth repeated firmly, “to find out if you demonstrate any other potentials than this poltergeist you seem to have. It’s rare to find a psychic only showing one ability—precogs will also exhibit clairvoyance; telepaths, telekinesis … .”
“I’m not a psychic,” Winter protested. “You said poltergeist—isn’t that a ghost? I told you I was haunted!”
“A poltergeist is not a ghost. The word itself is German, and means ‘noisy spirit,’” Truth began. “Today we often call it RSPK phenomena, for Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis. There’s a whole range of activity broadly classified as ‘poltergeist phenomena’—moving furniture, smashing dishes—oh, yes, and unlocking doors and windows as well—that seems to be being done by some malicious or mischievous entity; but as far as anyone seems to know, there is no ghost or spirit—Dylan would insist we call them ‘discarnate consciousness’—involved. Poltergeist activity usually centers on a person, not a place, and let me emphasize that all cases of poltergeist activity eventually stop—usually when the locus matures, because most of the loci of poltergeist activity are girls just entering puberty.”
There was a pause, while Winter digested what she’d just heard.
“But I’m not,” she said flatly.
Just then Dylan returned with the tea things on a tray and passed the cups around the table. The tea was hot and already sweetened; some odd-yet-pleasant herbal blend. Winter didn’t really want any, but at least holding the white stoneware mug gave her something to do with her hands. There were biscuits on a tray as well, giving the whole meeting an absurdly genteel air that somehow angered Winter.
“I agree that you’re older than most victims—tell me, was there a poltergeist in the family when you were a child?” Truth asked, holding her own cup.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Winter said shortly.
“RSPK is the most obvious explanation,” Dylan acknowledged, sipping his tea, “because it is random, irrational, and—it can’t be said too many times—not under the control of the person to which it is attached. It just seems to be a statistically random flare-up of psychism; which is why it affects ten times more girls than boys and generally occurs at puberty, when the entire body’s already in an uproar. Emotional stress also seems to be a factor, and you did say you’d been under psychiatric treatment?” he added casually.
“You do think I’m crazy! You think I’m doing this myself!”
“Ms. Musgrave—Winter—please—” Truth began, but as Winter went to set her mug down on the table it went spinning out of her hand, hurtling across the room to shatter against the wall beside Dylan’s head.
“And, of course, being the victim of a poltergeist can be very stressful itself,” Dylan finished calmly.
“I—I’m sorry,” Winter stammered. “I didn’t mean to throw it at you—it just slipped … .”
She looked from one face to the other, and saw they did not believe that she had thrown it at all.
&
nbsp; “All right,” Winter said harshly. Tears stung at the corners of her eyes, and she resented her weakness with all her heart. “You’ve convinced me. I’m haunted by a poltergeist. Now how do I get rid of it?”
“The most important thing to do is to eliminate stress from your daily routine as much as possible, and—unrealistic as it sounds—try not to let it worry you,” Truth said soothingly. “We can run a test series here, but that shouldn’t affect a poltergeist one way or the other, and as I say, there’s no documented cure. I can recommend some harmless herbal teas that may help; there’s a store in Glastonbury called Inquire Within that keeps several mixtures made up. Don’t be put off by their window display, the owner is more into herbs and crystals than black magic. I’d also suggest meditation, if you’re—”
“Meditation?” Winter said incredulously. “I tell you there’s this thing stalking my life across three states, killing animals and leaving them strewn around for me to find, and all you can suggest to do about it is to think happy thoughts?”
The tuning fork on the table began to hum faintly.
“What would you prefer—electroshock?” Truth snapped back. “Haven’t you been listening? All of this—nasty as it is, frightening as it is—is coming from you. A poltergeist is a sort of psychic seizure, and maybe they can find the part of your brain where it’s happening and burn it away, but there won’t be very much of you left afterward. The only thing you can do is minimize the damage, clean up after it, and try to find out why it’s happening.”
“I don’t want to know why it’s happening! I want it to stop!” Winter shrieked over the sound that suddenly filled the room: the buzzing, ringing, beeping cacophony of a dozen different warning bells. Her heart hammered until it seemed that her head would burst with its next beat, and once again she was trembling so hard her teeth chattered. She flung herself out of her chair and ran for the door, her only thought to escape before worse happened. Dylan Palmer grabbed her before she could reach it; she cried out and struck at him.
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