“You shouldn’t fight because someone takes your ball, Davey,” she said.
“I know,” he replied.
“Next time, go tell the substitute,” she said.
“He won’t bother me anymore,” mumbled Davey.
“Pardon?” she asked, looking at the top of his head again.
“I said ‘I will,’” he said.
“Davey,” she said, “what are you going to to do the next time someone takes your ball?”
“I’ll go tell the substitute,” he replied without looking up.
“Thank you,” she said.
Melanie pulled into her driveway a little past four and pressed the button to open the garage door. Davey waited for his mom to pull into the garage.
“Have you decided about this summer?” she asked, slowing to get an answer before parking the car.
“About what?” he asked.
“If you’re going to do that baseball camp, I need to sign you up now,” she said. “Your coach won’t save your place forever if I don’t put up the money.”
“Can’t I just hang out at Paul’s house this summer?” he pleaded.
“We talked about that,” she reminded her son. “Paul’s family is going away for all of July and I’d rather have you at baseball camp than at daycare all day for a month.”
“It’s not baseball camp,” he corrected. “It’s catcher’s camp. They’ll probably do boring drills all day. That’s what Chuck Detmer says.”
“Chuck never even went to the camp,” said Melanie. “You know better than to listen to what he says. Besides, it’s only half the day. You can hang out with Chuck at daycare in the afternoons.” She stopped the car just outside the garage and wanted to extract a commitment from Davey before letting him out.
“Can’t I just go to camp in July then and hang out with Paul until he goes?” he asked.
“No, Davey,” said Melanie. “You have to be there for the whole camp. That’s what your coach said.”
“I won’t even get to see Paul this summer at all,” Davey whined.
Sensing resolution, Melanie pulled into the garage. “If it’s okay with Paul’s mom you can always go over to his house Friday at noon and spend the weekend together, either there or here.”
“Okay,” conceded Davey.
“I’ll sign you up in the morning then,” said Melanie.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mike
“I WANT A REAL EXPERIMENT this time,” Mike said to Gary and Katie. “So far we have no hard evidence, no proof, two uncontrolled encounters, and countless failures.”
The three sat in the van at the mall parking lot. Before letting Gary drive them to their destination, Mike had requested that they establish some ground rules for the evening.
“We’ve got some killer personal experiences,” argued Gary.
“That means nothing,” said Mike. “You know that.”
“How do you propose we control things?” asked Katie.
“How well do you know these people?” Mike asked Gary.
“Friends of friends,” said Gary. “I’ve been to their house for parties and stuff. Not terribly well.”
“Would they trust you alone in the house?” asked Mike.
“Sure, I guess so. I didn’t really ask them,” said Gary.
Mike spun in his seat and answered Katie. “I think we ask them to leave. That will help us avoid the situation we had last time, and keep everything more scientific. Then, I think we should run a full set of tests before we turn on the amplifier. We’ll get an accurate baseline of any activity and figure out exactly what we’re dealing with.”
“Sounds good,” said Katie. “But how do we prevent things from getting out of control like the last time?”
“Yeah,” said Gary.
“I noticed something both times we had a response,” explained Mike. “There seems to be a threshold, below which we see nothing. As soon as we crossed that threshold, we triggered some kind of feedback loop, where the entity was self-sustaining. Even removing the power source didn’t help. The entity still had enough energy to affect physical objects.”
“We need a negative source,” said Gary. “Like a control rod in a nuclear reactor.”
“Perhaps,” said Mike. “But we don’t have anything like that. I was thinking that we should at least try to establish the threshold and then creep up to that level, but not cross it.”
“Maybe my camera was working as the negative source,” offered Katie. “That thing in the water seemed to lose its grip when I took pictures, and the Loogaroo took off right after the picture of it.”
“You’re right about the river thing, but I’m not so sure about Loogaroo. She still fought us after the camera. She didn’t like fire,” Mike said. He trailed off, lost in thought for a second. “I wonder if we could create a wave that would cancel out the natural energy of a location. You know those headphones that you wear on an airplane?”
“Yes,” said Gary. “They sample the ambient noise and then cancel it by inverting the wave and broadcasting it back out. That only works if you have a single point where you’re trying to measure. You can cancel the noise for a point, like your ear, but anywhere outside that point is likely to just have twice as much noise.”
“That’s true,” said Mike. “We’d have to know exactly where the thing was going to be and then we might be able to focus negative energy right there.”
“Back to the camera,” Katie broke in. “Didn’t you guys say that the river creature let go right when it flashed? Maybe I just didn’t flash the Loogaroo enough.”
“It’s definitely something we can try,” said Mike. “We’re going to want pictures anyway. But we shouldn’t count on it just because of one observation.”
Katie crossed her arms.
“So we’re going to try to flirt with the threshold?” asked Gary.
“Yeah, I think so. And Katie will take pictures to see if that decreases the activity,” answered Mike.
“Let’s get going then, I told them we’d be there by eight,” said Gary.
“SO YOU BOTH FEEL like we have a full baseline?” asked Mike. They sat in the van outside a sprawling, nineteenth-century farmhouse with attached barn. The row of monitors and instruments measured various rooms of the house.
“I don’t get it,” said Katie.
“What do you mean?” asked Mike.
“We got a lot of video and audio of this place, but so what?”
“This is the normal activity without adding any energy,” said Mike. “I don’t understand what you’re asking.”
“We don’t know if we have anything or not,” said Katie. “You say these readings are just noise,” she said, waving at the equipment. “But how do we know that’s true? Any one of these spikes could be from something really interesting and unexplained, right?”
“It could be,” said Mike. “But you can see those same spikes anywhere. We’ve got readings like that from all over the place. These fields could be caused by faulty wiring or an appliance. This noise here,” he said, pointing at a line graph, “is likely a mouse moving in the walls.”
“So what are you trying to prove?” she asked.
“When we add an energy source we’re going to document any unnatural reaction,” said Mike. “If you’ve got a closed room and you add a space heater, you expect that room to get warmer, right?”
Katie nodded.
“Gary’s going to broadcast a certain energy at that basement, and we expect that we’ll just read that same energy here,” he pointed to a green dot moving across a scope. “But what we’ve seen is that we’ll actually get a decrease in that energy if there’s an entity there to absorb it.”