“Who said there was a ghost in my office?”
“It’s pretty common knowledge. Lila was filling me in, but I had already heard it before.”
“She works for the ghost buster show—you know the one,” the elder Arkmanian said.
“Ghost Hunters? Yeah, I’ve heard of that. You guys really think the place is haunted?”
“Do you?” I asked. “After all, a previous tenant did die there.” My voice didn’t shake, though I’d feared it would.
Paul bit his lip in thought and glanced down at his keyboard. “I don’t know. Oh, hang on.” He made a few motions with his mouse and keyboard. Then he reached up and turned his monitor off, leaning back in his chair to get a better look at me. His father stared at the back of Paul’s head with his mouth agape. “OK, now that I’m not going to get killed by the first NPC that comes by, let’s talk.” He stood up and went into the living room, expecting us both to follow.
I did, but Sandros paused a moment in the dining room. “I’ll. get us some drinks, yeah?”
Paul started to wheel back around, saying, “Thanks, Dad, but I can get that—”
“No, no! You have a guest. I’ll get it. Sit down with the lady and talk. What do you want?”
“Oh. Umm. whiskey and Coke?” the son replied as if he wasn’t sure that was acceptable.
“Sure, no problem! You, young lady—what is your name, anyway?”
“It’s Harper. Coke would be fine, thank you.”
“All right then, Miss Harper. Coke it is.” He vanished through a swinging door to the kitchen before I could correct him. But in retrospect it was probably better if he didn’t notice I had the same last name as the man who’d died in Paul’s office space.
Paul gestured to an armchair by the tiny fireplace in the living room’s outside wall. “Please. ”
I took the seat, although it did put my back to the door and windows.
“So. ” Paul started.
“So, I’d like to take a look at your office during the evening hours. That’s the best time for judging if ghosts are around—when there aren’t so many live people around to disturb the indicators.”
“Indicators? How do you tell?” Paul asked, sitting down on the sofa across from me and leaning forward. He watched me with serious, earnest eyes, and I understood why the neighborhood couldn’t figure why he wasn’t dating someone. He had that gaze that makes the object feel they’re the most important person in the room. Cary had had that, damn him. I shoved that idea aside and carried on, my emotions about my dad stabilized by the chill of my most recent memory of Cary.
I winged it, based on past experience with poltergeists and Quinton’s ghost detector ideas. “Oh, air pressure, humidity, atmospheric charge. that sort of thing. And noise. You can hear ghosts on recordings sometimes.” I certainly wasn’t going to say I could see them.
“Really? What about temperature?”
I nodded. “That, too. Do you get cold spots? That might be a sign.”
“Oh. No,” he said, and blushed suddenly, dropping his eyes. “No it’s never cold in my office. That would be bad. I’m a chiropractor. Patients don’t feel comfortable if it’s cold. Cold makes the muscles tighten up and the patients get stressed and that’s just what you don’t want. Chiropractic aims to bring the whole body back in line, in harmony. Cold, unhappy patients don’t have harmonious bodies.”
He was babbling a little and I wondered why he’d gotten nervous. He looked uncomfortable and wiggled in his seat, casting his glance over his shoulder to search for his father. He was acting like a teenager on a date—
Oh. Right. This was the man who didn’t date. And he was all alone in a room with a woman who wasn’t a patient. He just wasn’t sure what to do with me. Oh, boy.
“Dr. Arkmanian,” I said, putting him back in his professional role—that seemed safer, “do you experience other phenomena? Things moving, changes in temperature, noises.?”
“Oh,” he replied, looking up again. “Yes, I do. But only in one area. It’s not widespread.”
“I see.”
Sandros came into the room with three tumblers clutched between his hands. “Here we are. Plain Coke for you, Miss Harper, and the spiked kind for us.”
I thanked him and looked back at Paul. “What part of your office is the phenomena confined to?”
“Treatment room two. It’s on the back wall, near the window.”
“Tell me what typically happens,” I suggested.
He sipped his drink and shifted his gaze aside, thinking. “Usually it starts with a hot spot near the wall. It moves around, but it always sticks close to the wall. After a while the air just gets unbearably warm and I have to open the window, even if it’s freezing outside. Then there’s a loud noise. The first time I heard it I thought there had been a car accident outside, but there wasn’t anything there. And then a sound like something really heavy being dropped on the floor—”
“Do your downstairs neighbors hear any of that?”
“No, and that’s kind of strange, because they always hear the real things falling over.”
“What things?”
“Oh. My towel cupboard fell over. It kept doing that. I even had it screwed to the floor for a while, but it still fell over. So I swapped it with a chair and now that falls over. Whatever’s in that spot next to the wall always falls over or falls down about ten seconds after the crashing noise and then the sound of something invisible falling down.”
“Have you tried leaving the space empty?”
“It’s a pretty small room. I did try that, but things kept getting shoved over there to get them out of the way. And the noises happened anyway, even when there was nothing in the area.”
That was a bit unusual.
“Is it the same noise every time?”
“Oh, yes. Identical. Like a car screeching to a violent halt, and then something being thrown on the floor.”
“Does it generally happen at the same time of day?”
“No. It’s not regular. It just. happens. It can be hard to work with. But it doesn’t happen very often and sometimes it doesn’t happen for weeks or months. Then it’ll happen a lot for a while, and then stop again. Not predictable at all. It’s been more active lately, so I’m hoping it will stop again soon.”
Sounded like Dad had been kicking up a fuss. I wondered what else he got up to, why I hadn’t been able to see him, and what Christelle was doing while all this went on. Except for my truncated conversation with Christelle, the office in the Grey had been silent.
“What other phenomena occur?” I asked, sticking to the immediate topic.
Paul thought and then shrugged. “Nothing. That’s the whole thing. Just the hot spot, the noises, and the things falling down.”
“Has anyone seen any shapes, unexplained shadows? Heard voices or other sounds in the area? Seen or thought they saw something move? Maybe in the dressing room mirror?”
He shook his head. “None of that. Just what I described.”
He didn’t take the prompt. A lot of people will say yes to such a list to make the investigator happy. It’s a trick of frauds and true believers to suggest phenomena and then claim the description came spontaneously from the witness. Some people don’t even realize they do it, so compelling is their desire for confirmation or justification. But it was strange that no one had observed any such manifestations; what Paul described and what I’d seen were more like half a haunting. It’s unusual for such strong phenomena to have no accompanying features like corner-of-the-eye visions or voices. The falling objects was classic, but it was pretty small beer compared to the sound and its increasing frequency.
“I’d like to see the room for myself,” I said.
Paul put down his drink and glanced at his father. Then he looked back at me. “We can go now, if you want. I can get back to the game later—the guild can do without me for a while.”