by Sonia Singh
The door burst open and Cody stomped into the room, cheeks flushed, breathing pronounced. Out of curiosity, Scott aimed the meter at the boy, but the readings were normal. So Cody wasn’t the spawn of Satan.
Scott had to check.
Cody continued to wheeze. “I’ve…heard,” he gasped, “some of the…strange noises too.”
A second witness to paranormal phenomena?
Any spookologist worth his salt would want to know more.
“You have? Describe the sounds for me,” Scott asked.
Cody stepped up to the wall, curled his hand into a fist, and started knocking. Then he curved his fingers into the plaster and began scraping the wall. Obviously enjoying himself, Cody changed from scraping to banging. Scott winced.
Despite the boy’s unnecessary roughness, he knew the re-creation was accurate. The sounds of hollow knocking and loud scratching, as if someone were trying to claw his way out from behind the wall, were classic signs of a haunting. Parapsychology 101.
Cody continued banging on the wall. “You can stop now,” Scott said. Cody ignored him and added kicking to his repertoire.
Scott checked the EMF meter again, just to make sure Cody hadn’t scared away a possible spirit.
The readings were still high.
The kicking and banging stopped. “Do you feel that?” Cody whispered.
The cold descended upon them.
Then came the goose bumps.
Each of the soft hairs on the back of Scott’s neck quivered and stood on end.
Friends and relatives frequently teased Scott, asking if he spent all his time in dusty old attics, chasing Casper.
He looked down at the EMF meter. The machine confirmed what he already knew.
Casper was here.
3
Coulter
Bitterroot, Idaho
Coulter Marshall figured the old saying applied to the giant in front of him. The man had fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.
Gritting his teeth, directing all his force to his right arm, Coulter pushed up as hard as he could. Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. He was losing and the jackasses in the bar were cheering.
The hulking figure of the man across the table from him effortlessly applied more pressure and signaled the bartender for another shot with his free arm.
Cocky bastard.
Coulter was now in considerable pain. But he needed the money. He needed warm weather. He needed to get the hell out of Idaho.
His arm was almost to the table. The hulk grinned and squeezed harder than he had to. Coulter clenched his jaw. The heavily tattooed, shaved-head son of a bitch—bless his heart—was trying to break the bones in his hand and having a good time doing it. Any moment now Coulter would be handicapped for life. Worse, he’d be out two hundred bucks.
Once again, he pondered the wisdom of his chosen career. Walking into dives like this and challenging the biggest, meanest wastes of skin to a feat of strength was not a well-paying gig. But Coulter didn’t have any other talents, other than being able to move shit with his mind.
Time to use the well-worn, tried-and-true, Marshall Method.
First, he had to find an object on or near the ugly beast. The man’s boots? Nah. What would he do, pull the laces tight? The snakeskin belt? He could try to cut off his air. And then he knew.
Coulter concentrated on the table between them. It wasn’t going to be hard. He was angry. It always worked best when he was angry.
He focused and felt the familiar pull as if some invisible magnet was drawing him in. Slowly, the table began to move. The Hulk looked down in surprise. No one else noticed, and Coulter wanted to keep it that way.
It would have been a damn sight easier, Coulter often reflected, if he could actually move people with his mind, but for some reason he could only control objects and not living things.
He had ventured into the local library once and discovered his ability was known as telekinesis. He also discovered that most scientists believed telekinesis, telepathy, and other so-called powers did not exist. Why the hell then, Coulter wondered, did scientists spend all that time thinking up names like telekinesis?
Meanwhile, focusing hard while fighting to keep his arm from touching the table was not the easiest task. The table moved up slightly into the air and shifted until one of the legs settled on the Hulk’s foot. He then concentrated hard—not enough to crack bone, but the crushing pain must have been intense.
The Hulk howled and loosened his grip. Coulter seized the advantage. He slammed the man’s meaty arm to the table. There was a hushed silence and then a roar from the crowd. Coulter released the table leg, and the pull in his gut disappeared.
The Hulk opened his mouth. “No! He didn’t win! My foot was—”
“The little guy really did it,” someone said.
In his defense, Coulter thought “little” a bit extreme. At twenty-six, he stood five feet, eleven inches tall with a narrow waist, thick golden hair, blue eyes, and, according to his mother, the face of an angel that hid the devil inside.
Coulter would easily pass muster anywhere else, but in this bar in the Idaho wilderness filled with bikers, survivalists, and lumberjacks, he seemed almost feminine…which now explained the uncomfortable incident with the miner in the urinal.
“He cheated,” the Hulk yelled. “Something happened to the table.”
Coulter swiped the wad of money off the table and widened his blue eyes innocently. “Prove it,” he said.
They never could.
Putting on his white Stetson, Coulter threw on his denim jacket and slipped out into the cold, dark night. He headed straight for the bus station.
4
Parapsychology Department
Mill University
Oakland, California
Mill University’s parapsychology department was housed in an old ivy-covered building on the edge of campus, tucked as far away from proper academia as possible. The building was so old that Scott thought the ivy was the only thing holding it up.
Academic stepchild or not, the department had the facilities to carry out cattle-call psychic testing, inviting anyone who believed he had an overdeveloped sixth sense to come in and be evaluated. That’s why Scott was there.
The Greta Evans case had been an easy one—barring the annoying, albeit useful, presence of her grandson, Cody. Greta had been thrilled with the news that her house was haunted. “Let Mimi Perkins have her brand-new living room set. I’ve got a real live ghost!” she’d crowed. Future clients, however, might not take too kindly to a ghostly roommate, especially a malevolent one. And there was only one way to cleanse the house of a spirit. Make contact. For that he would need a medium.
The building had the musty smell of an old library, and Scott’s steps echoed hollowly as he headed up to the second floor. His destination was the observation booth. He found Eddie there, seated and observing a test in progress. In his early fifties, short and squat, with a gruff manner and thick head of gray hair, Dr. Edward Mirza looked more like a bookie than a man who’d devoted his life to the study of the paranormal. “I’ve seen more psychic potential on Dionne Warwick’s network,” Eddie grumbled as Scott laughed and dropped down into the seat next to him.
Eddie shot him an appreciative look. “So you finally opened up your own firm? I knew that paper trading or dollar shuffling or whatever the hell you were doing in New York—”
“I was a stockbroker.”
“Whatever. I knew that crap wouldn’t last. This is your first love. Has been since you were a kid with a silver spoon up your butt. How’d your family take the news when you, ah, switched careers?”
Scott raised an eyebrow. “How do you think?”
Eddie grinned and cocked his head toward the glass partition. Scott leaned forward and viewed the test currently in progress. The candidate was a middle-aged woman with a thick black bun and a heavily made-up face. A casually dressed female grad student was conductin
g the interview.
“It’s routine to ask a few background questions first,” Eddie said. “Sometimes you can eliminate the crazies just from that.”
A fact Scott was well aware of. He was having a devil of a time trying to find psychics to employ in his firm. He’d combed the records of the ASPR (American Society for Psychical Research), the reports of well-known parapsychologists, and he’d compiled a record of every reported paranormal event in the known world dating back fifty years.
Unfortunately, most of the people he’d interviewed had leaned more toward the psychotic rather than the psychic.
Eddie raised the volume on the intercom, and the voices inside the testing room came through loud and clear.
“Madame Zola, when did you first realize you have psychic ability?” the grad student asked.
Madame Zola? If the madame could prove she had even a drop of Gypsy blood running through her veins, Scott would quit the firm, marry a woman named Bunny, and start spending Sundays at the country club.
Madame Zola answered, “When I was five and correctly predicted the neighbor’s cat, Dingleberry, would return home.”
“Interesting, and how did—”
“Then the world discovered my ability the day I predicted President Clinton would be assassinated.”
“Former President Clinton is very much alive.”
“He most certainly is not!” Madame Zola glared through thick gobs of mascara.
“Is too…”
“Clinton is dead. The Republicans put a curse on his head. And I’m the one who predicted it! Not Jeane Dixon! Me!”
The grad student closed the folder on her desk and smiled tightly. “Thank you, we’ll let you know.”
“Amateurs!” Madame Zola sniffed and exited the room with offended dignity.
Eddie turned to Scott. “You-know-who is going to be plenty pissed when she finds you here.”
“That’s a chance I’ll have to take. I had to ask you in person—”
Eddie drew in a sharp breath. “Too late.”
Scott turned to see a tall, statuesque redhead in an Armani suit heading toward them.
Dr. Vivica Bates.
The author of a number of commercially successful books on the paranormal, Vivica was considered an authority on psychic phenomena.
Scott considered her a blood-sucking she-bat from hell.
They’d first met back when Scott was a freshman at Stanford and Vivica had been invited by the university to deliver a lecture on parapsychology. Sitting in the darkened Clark Center auditorium, Scott had been thrilled to find someone as passionate about psychic phenomena as he was. With her stunning looks and vibrant coloring, the spotlight making her translucent skin glow, Vivica held him in thrall. Afterwards he asked her out for coffee. She insisted on Scotch. Their affair began that very night.
Alas, a few weeks later Scott discovered Vivica on her office desk under the dean of social sciences. It was quite obvious the two weren’t discussing the origins of psychokinesis. Scott ended the relationship on the spot. Vivica chided him for being melodramatic, and the dean struggled to zip up his pants.
Needless to say, the couple did not part on the healthiest of terms.
Vivica didn’t waste any time on pleasantries. “What the hell are you doing here, Wilder?”
Scott’s gaze was cool as it traveled the length of her figure. “Nice to see your hair grew back after that episode with the pyrokinetic.”
Vivica narrowed her eyes. “Could this visit be because of your so-called firm?” She reached into her jacket pocket and drew out a folded newspaper clipping.
Scott recognized it as the ad he’d placed in the Chronicle. “What have you been doing? Carrying that thing around in the hopes you’d run into me?”
Ignoring him, she began to read. “‘The Cold Spot: Paranormal Investigations Firm.’ The Cold Spot? How childishly clever.”
Eddie thumped Scott on the shoulder and laughed. “I like it.”
Vivica rolled her eyes. “Of course you would, Mirza. Maybe Wilder here can make you up a T-shirt and matching baseball cap with the logo.”
“What’s the matter, Vivica?” Scott asked. “Afraid of a little competition?”
“Little being the operative word.” She crumpled up the clipping and flicked it with one long, manicured red nail, hitting the trash can dead center. She turned back to him, her green eyes flashing. “Oh, and if I catch you anywhere near my office or using any of the equipment, I’ll alert my friends at campus security. So do your socializing somewhere else.” She swept past the observation booth, into her office, and slammed the door.
“Well that went well,” Scott murmured.
Eddie sighed and shook his head. “Sorry about that, pal, but she’s head of the department.”
A moment later three men in dark suits, white shirts, and black ties came into the room.
Eddie lowered his voice. “Vivica’s minions.”
The minions weren’t alone. A pale sliver of a man huddled in their midst. As they passed by, the slight man turned and focused his gray eyes on Scott. It was like looking into a funhouse mirror, cold, metallic, twisted, and somehow wrong.
Scott shivered. “Who was that?”
“That, my friend, is Hans Morden—Vivica’s latest discovery. His psi readings are off the charts.”
Scott recalled the look in Hans’s gray eyes. “The man’s unstable. He and Vivica are welcome to each other.”
In the observation room another candidate was being interviewed. The grad student—looking worse for wear—was administering the Rhine test using a deck of Zener cards, twenty-five cards each imprinted with one of five symbols. She held up a card with the symbol of a star. “What am I seeing?”
The subject—a man with long, greasy hair and three hoop earrings in his left ear—cocked his head and scratched his armpit. “Sammy Sosa?”
“Once again, this is not a deck of baseball cards.”
“Ah…Babe Ruth?”
Scott ignored the clairvoyantly challenged hippie and turned to Eddie. “Remember that tidy sum I helped you make on the market? I need a favor…”
5
The Sunset Grill just off Union Square featured light jazz music, rose decor, an extensive wine list, and an open kitchen where patrons could watch the staff prepare their dinner—and presumably check that their entrée was not stepped in, spit on, or spiked with salmonella.
But in Anjali’s opinion, the best thing about the place was the atmosphere.
It had none.
Hard to do in a city drenched in history like San Francisco, where the haunted past was alive and well. She couldn’t imagine strolling through Athens, Rome, or Jerusalem, ancient cities still holding on to their ghosts, where even the buildings had moods. Tough on a telepath.
No, the Sunset Grill had no soul.
And she loved it.
Anjali took a sip of her cocktail and tried to ignore the disapproval etched into her older sister’s thin face.
“You do know how fattening vodka is, don’t you?” Zarina asked. “And tonic water is loaded with calories.”
“It’s good fat,” Anjali replied and took another sip.
The dinner wasn’t a social visit. Last year their father had accepted chairmanship of the math department at Tempe University, even though it meant relocating to Arizona and only a slight wage increase. Then again, their father would have relocated to Homer, Alaska, if it meant a slight wage increase.
So with their parents now living in another state, Zarina had assumed the role of parental substitute. Even though nobody had asked her to.
Her sister looked more disapproving than ever, so Anjali turned to her brother-in-law, Vijay. He was almost as thin as his wife, tended to blink excessively, and already had, at thirty-three, the hunched posture of an old man.
Vijay was currently blinking at his BlackBerry, typing rapidly with his thumbs. He had yet to touch the unsweetened decaffeinated iced tea Zarina had ordered for him.
Anjali wondered what kind of e-mails Vijay was getting that needed his immediate attention. The man was a podiatrist. Did somebody out there truly and desperately need his advice or opinion? Someone with toe deformities or an outbreak of fatal foot fungus?
“How’s the job search going?” Zarina asked.
Several weeks ago, Anjali’s job as a computer programmer at BayTech had been outsourced to India. The fact that her parents had immigrated to America seeking greater employment opportunities, and now, decades later, their daughter’s employment opportunities were being shipped off to India, was not lost on Anjali.
She found the irony astounding.
“I haven’t exactly been looking for a job,” she replied.
“Why not?”
“Because in San Jose you can’t throw a motherboard without hitting a programmer, and then having that programmer install an update and throw it back at you. Not to mention the competition coming from India, where programmers do your job in half the time for half the salary, and every rickshaw comes outfitted with a wireless Internet connection. Besides, computer programming isn’t as fulfilling as I thought it would be.”
Zarina frowned. “But what else are you going to do?”
What was she going to do?
Anjali was rounding thirty, without friends, without a significant other, and without any discernible talents. Sure, she could program, and then there was the whole ESP thing. Not that she was contemplating a career as a psychic.
She couldn’t read palms, tea leaves, or coffee grounds. She couldn’t tell the future, and she had doubts whether anyone really could. So what could she do? It wasn’t like there was a section on ESP in What Color Is Your Parachute?
Not even in the new edition!
She was a medium. She had a direct line to the spirit world. But so what? This wasn’t the Hollywood version. The thoughts and emotions of the dead came to her, but often they were so garbled, she couldn’t make head or tail of the experience.
