Yeah, I thought. Shoot it. The giant squid looked as if it were listening-it wasn’t making any more attempts at snagging me, or at throwing anything. I stood rooted to the spot in the hall-not because I was scared stiff, but because my legs weren’t working. I jerked at them a few times, but I was locked in place!
What is up with this?!
“What is it you see?” Boo said and I heard her moving in the house.
“It looks like…”
A giant freakin’ squid. A huge, bulbous octopus with more than eight tentacles. A larger than life Cousteau nightmare. A-
“It looks like a woman.”
Blink. No-it looks like a-
Oh, no. I turned my upper body since my lower half wasn’t budging. It felt as though I had ice shackles around my ankles. Herb and Randall were looking at the monitor and then up at me.
At me!
“It is a woman,” Randall said in voice full of excitement. “And she’s wearing… bunny slippers?”
Damnit.
Boo and her partner appeared at the opposite end of the hall near the front door. The light from her monitor illuminated her face, exaggerating her features. “Where is this woman ghost?”
“Right there,” Randall pointed directly at me. “You can’t see her?”
Boo looked up from her monitor and squinted down the hall. “No. She’s not showing up on the camera.”
Well, thank goodness for small favors. I was already panicked enough to know I showed up on the thermal imager.
I paused in my erratic thoughts as Randall and Herb started a rather hesitant walk down the hall in my direction. If I’m incorporeal, which means I’m without a warm body, how is it I show up on a thermal imager? Do I look all blue?
“What is it doing?” Herb said. “It looks like it’s… looking at us.”
“Nah,” Randall said in a soft voice. “It doesn’t even know we’re here.”
A movement in the den caught my eye, and I looked back at Squidward long enough to see several tentacles slither out down the hall in either direction toward the ghost hunters.
I watched in morbid fascination (while trying to make my legs move) as the glowing, whitish limbs wound down the hall toward the unsuspecting and evidently unseeing people. One tentacle reached out for Randall’s monitor.
“Look out!” I shouted.
Well, he heard me, but not fast enough to prevent the monitor from bashing up into his face. I heard a crunch and knew the force had done some damage to his nose. He fell back against the wall and was on the floor in seconds.
I heard a yell to my left and turned in time to see Boo’s camera fly out of her hands and bean her partner in the side of his head.
“Ron! I’m so sorry, that wasn’t me. It was that ghost woman.” Boo yelled out.
Me? I did not do that. And I could argue this out loud with both her and Randall. But at that moment I felt as well as heard a low growl. It seemed to come from the floor and up through my ankles.
I looked back into the den door in front of me. The huge squid was gone, and I got the distinct impression it was below me now.
And coming up through the floor under my feet. Now, I didn’t know if this was a bad thing, but it couldn’t be good. If the tentacles around my ankles had had such a nasty effect, I did not want to stick around and see what the entirety of the creature did if its body swallowed my incorporeal one.
So I did the only thing any respectable astral presence would do.
I got the hell out of there.
In truth, I concentrated on my silver cord, the one that anchored my spirit to my body, and I followed it back, leaving the squid, and SPRITE, far behind.
What I didn’t mention was what a really bad idea this little trick was.
Traveling back into my body this way, instead of easing back as I normally did, caused a great deal of stress on the physical. Meaning when I slammed back into my body (there’s an interesting velocity that picks up along the silver cord), it hurts.
Mom said it looked as though I’d been shocked with a couple of those paddle things the doctors use to restart the heart. It actually felt a lot worse than it looked. The only way I can describe it from a physical standpoint is to imagine your blood replaced with liquid fire.
Acid. Everything burns.
The immediate reaction lasts maybe about two minutes, and then I’m usually a jelly lump on the floor catching my breath. The burning-that lasts a lot longer. Ouch.
I managed to stay on top of the little single bed I’d set up in my office for my traveling jaunts. Usually I fell off when I used my cord. I opened my eyes. I focused on my ceiling and concentrated on my breathing.
In. Out. In. Out.
Ow, ow, ow.
I could imagine my blood as the sparkling, crackling fire, and my veins were the fuse melting away as it grew closer to my heart.
The pain subsided, and a dull ache in the back of my head surged forward. I groaned out loud and lay very still for a while. I caught the front LCD face of the clock beside my desktop computer. Three seventeen in the morning.
Time for a nice glass of water, vitamins and-
Holy Mary Mother Of God!
I’d sat up slowly, and my black leggings had pulled up to my knees as well. My ankles were black and blue. Literally, black and blue! It looked as if someone had hammered on them with a meat mallet. I touched them tenderly (ouch!) and sucked air in between my teeth.
So-could I stand on them?
I tried and promptly landed on the Pergo floor, knees and elbows first. It wasn’t that I couldn’t put weight on them-well, okay, I couldn’t. It hurt too much, and tears instantly sprang to my eyes. I am not afraid of crying. At least not by myself.
This was the first physical manifestation I’d seen of something that happened while I was traveling, and I didn’t know if I’d done something permanent.
My purse lay in a heap on the floor a few inches away, and I reached in for my cell. No bars left. Curse me and my inability to remember to plug the damned thing in.
Well, to find out what I could about the present owners of that house, the Brentwoods, I simply learned what SPRITE knew-which was plastered all over the article in Creative Loafing the next morning. Elderly couple, just moved here from Florida, escaping the hurricanes, wanting to find a place to retire and make a life after spending years traveling. No children. All their money was tied up in the house.
And the previous owners? Now, that’s the strange part. The Smiths had a single child, a daughter, who now was an almost grandmother. Daughter was born in 1960. But if she’d created a poltergeist back in her puberty years, would it have lived this long?
Something in my gut told me not so. According to what Rhonda had told me on my newly charged phone, these things remained, but without something feeding it, the thing would linger in a weakened state. So why was it so absolutely all-fired creepy now?
There was a gear missing in this mechanism for disaster, and me with my hobbled ankles wasn’t sure what it was, or how to find it, or even how to fix it once I did. I’d spent the entire afternoon on the couch surfing the web and Googling all over the place.
I set my iBook on the coffee table and decided it was time to test my ankles and the just-over-the-top lovely braces my mom had brought over at lunch. Time because hydraulic pressure was going to pop my bladder and send me shooting straight up into the cat lady’s condo above me.
I scooted forward, put my feet beneath me, and with a deep breath, stood straight up-and stayed there.
Interesting. Pursing my lips, I took a few steps away from my couch around my coffee table. I could feel the bruises on my ankles, but they didn’t hurt. Not like they had earlier. Was I already healed? Wow… was this a super new power?