“I never do anything stupid,” I said.
He gave me a very unconvinced glare.
“You be careful, too,” I said.
He left with Peter and didn’t look back.
Right. Time to get to work. No sense worrying about him yet.
Chapter 16
Gary, still recovering, went to sleep. Jules had been making phone calls, about a dozen by my count, and the conversations ranged from merely odd to outright bizarre. He’d been saying things like, “Yeah, but this isn’t localized like the Enfield Poltergeist. I’m talking about free-ranging activities linked to a specific person. You’ve never seen a similar case?” and “But EMF readings aren’t a reliable indicator of psychic hostility.” Finally, he said something that made sense to me: “Professor, I’m telling you, there was a fucking humanoid shape standing in the flames and laughing at us! No, it wasn’t a guy in an asbestos suit!”
So. Jules’s contacts weren’t panning out so much.
Tina and I had been engrossed in Internet research on two different laptops. I’d been learning a lot about hauntings, demonic possession, hoaxes, and the people who talk about them. It was like a religion: No amount of proof seemed able to sway the absolute skeptics or the absolute believers.
Typing in a phrase like “demonic communication” got about a quarter of a million hits. After looking at a dozen sites, my eyes started to glaze over. The tones varied from wild belief to scientific skepticism. But a phrase kept jumping out at me, something that none of the Paradox crew had mentioned yet.
I leaned back, stared at the screen a good long time, and finally asked, “What do you guys think about trance mediums?”
Tina didn’t say anything. Jules peered over the screen of his own laptop.
“Theory or practice?” he said.
I shrugged. “Both.”
He leaned back in his chair. “The theory is that certain people have the ability to channel spirits directly. They go into a trance, and any ~in presence at a haunted location can speak through them. In practice, it tends to be bollocks. It’s too hard to verify and too easy to fake. The charlatans have built up this image of it being really dangerous, so they use it as a way to get a good scare out of people.”
“So it’s not real?” I said.
“It’s real,” Tina said. “Just very rare.”
“Do you think it’s something we could use to learn more about this thing?” I said.
“No, I don’t think so,” Tina said quickly.
Jules blinked at Tina. “Wait a minute. Tina. What do you know about trance mediums? It’s not actually something... I mean you don’t have any experience with it. Do you?”
She smiled. “It’s almost gratifying that you’re taking me seriously now.”
“Can you really do it?” Jules said.
Her hesitation, and the way her gaze darted nervously between us was enough of an answer. She couldn’t come right out and say no.
“Oh, my God, Tina, this is incredible. We’ve got to get a tape of this. If we can show what the real thing looks like and maybe find a way to demonstrate how the fakes—”
“No,” she shook her head. “I want to help, really I do, but this—the Ouija board is one thing, but actually channeling it directly... it is dangerous. I’ve never wanted to get that close. It’s better having something like the board between me and the phenomenon.”
A lead, any lead, was too good to give up. I said, “But Tina, if you could contact it directly—”
Tina said, “This thing has killed. If I let it inside me—could we even stop it?”
“Or maybe we could stop it from killing again,” I said.
“If you could talk to it, directly, through me,” Tina said. “What would you say?”
Good question. “I’d want to find out where it came from, what it wants, and what I need to do to convince it to go away. However it was sent here, there has to be a way to send it back again. If it’s sentient, I have to be able to reason with it.” That was my idealism talking again.
Tina took a deep breath. “The reason I’ve kept quiet all this time about what I can do is because in a way, even when this stuff works, it’s still all parlor tricks. The only people who are really interested are the ones who want to exploit it, or desperate people messed up with grief, like Peter. They treat it like a psychic hotline they can call up whenever they want. When really, I don’t understand what’s going on most of the time.”
“I’m just asking you to try.”
“Gary wouldn’t go for it,” Tina said.
“We’ll tell him it’s an experiment,” Jules said.
Tina leaned back and studied the ceiling. Communing with the beyond, maybe. I wondered for a moment what it would be like to be her. Did she hear voices all the time? Some of the time? Was it like listening to a faint radio, like she only tuned in to distant spirits, or did they speak to her directly, loudly? How did a person live with something like that?
How annoyed would she be if I asked her all these questions?
Rubbing her face, she leaned forward and let out a sigh. A weight seemed to settle on her, slumping her shoulders, pulling her lips into a frown. It made her look older, far different from her screen persona. It wasn’t fear or trepidation, I didn’t think. More like resignation.
“Here’s what we do. I call the shots. If it doesn’t feel right, we stop, no arguing. Got it?”
Jules and I nodded.
“Where are we going to do this?” I asked. “What can we burn down this time?”
She scowled at me. “Not here. We have to keep at least one place safe. Can we get into New Moon? It talked to us once, there.”
I shook my head. “If we try to get in before the investigators are done with it, it’ll screw up the insurance.”
“Then we go to Flint House,” she said.
“The house that kills people?” I might have shrieked a little.
“I figure the demon’ll know where to find us, it’s been there before.”
A combined sense of curiosity and inevitability drove us. We wanted to see what would happen. We also didn’t have a whole lot of other options.
Well, there was always running away. Except we had no guarantee the thing wouldn’t follow us. Which was also the problem with me letting it go ahead and get me. Self-sacrifice was all well and good if you could guarantee that it would actually stop the attacks. Wouldn’t we all feel stupid if I let it kill me and it just kept attacking? Not that I’d be feeling much of anything at all. Or maybe I would, and that was another problem with this whole life-after-death concept.
I’d also kind of missed the moment when I stopped being able to run away. I had too much to protect now.
Being proactive was better than being morbid. So I helped Tina and the others set up another séance at Flint House. Jules summoned the Paradox PI camera crew, which arrived with the equipment van to set up the usual array of cameras, microphones, and gear.
“You guys really like getting your footage,” I said. “You’ll probably get a whole season’s worth of episodes out of this.”
“At this point, our production schedule is already screwed up beyond repair. We’re doing this for science,” Jules said. “Maybe we can get some hard, incontrovertible measurements. This is for posterity.”
Almost made me feel like we were doing something noble.
“But it wouldn’t hurt to get a good episode out of this,” Tina called from the other room, where she was setting up another camera. “If I’m going to do this for science I want some good screen time out of it.”
Noble and commercially viable. I could go for that.
I’d made up another batch of the blood-and-ruin potion. I should come up with a better name for it, like “Eau de Ick.”
“Don’t put it around the house,” Tina ordered when she saw it.
“Why not? I don’t want anything to burn down again.”
“We want this thing to be able to get in so we can talk to it. That can’t happen if you use that crap. But you know, keep it around. Just in case.”