Donn's Hill

by Caryn Larrinaga

  My stomach tightened up into a little rock. Ever since my first night in this apartment, most of my brain had been certain I was dreaming when I saw the man in my bathroom. It was just a nightmare, I’d told myself, brought on by stress and grief. But every once in a while, when the pipes started grumbling, I wondered if it had been something more. I couldn’t back it up with any logical argument. It was just a feeling, deep down in the bottom of my gut, that the man was a real person and that the clanging pipes were like Jacob Marley and his chains in A Christmas Carol. Right this second, with the pipes banging away, all parties in my head agreed that a ghost in the bathroom was quite plausible. My palms began to sweat.

  “I don’t know if I can handle that.” I felt terrible as the words came out of my mouth.

  Kit leapt up from the window seat. “Oh, no. Not cool. Come on, Mac. After everything I did for you yesterday, you owe me. You said so yourself.” She stood up and crossed the room, her hands clasped in front of her face in supplication, and changed tactics from the hard sell to straight begging. “You have to help us. We’re a super-small crew, and we’re on a deadline. I know it sounds scary, but I promise, it’s not that bad. We edit the show to make it seem a lot crazier than it really is. And if you get scared or feel weird, you can totally bail. I’ll understand. But please, please try.”

  I looked into her huge, dark eyes and the guilty feeling inside my stomach swelled to critical mass. She’d helped me out so much and hadn’t even asked for gas money in return. Besides, even if there was a ghost in my bathroom, that didn’t mean there’d be one at the library.

  Striker jumped down from the bed and stretched out her forelegs, digging her claws into the rug. I stared at her, remembering the way she’d come to my defense in my nightmare. It was silly, but I felt safer with her around. She had slept on my pillow the night before, like a tiny living dream catcher, protecting my head.

  I swallowed. “Okay. I’ll help. But I’m bringing Striker.”

  This place doesn’t look haunted.

  I stood on the sidewalk outside of the Grimshaw Public Library. The building was certainly old, probably built in the late-nineteenth or early-twentieth century. In the morning sunlight, the square brick structure with tall, white-trimmed windows exuded a friendly, welcoming air.

  I’d expected a dilapidated, abandoned place. One that looked menacing and dark even in the brightest hour of the day, with weatherworn shutters hanging off gaping, glassless windows. In my mind, any place that was likely to be haunted should look like a place where you might contract tetanus.

  Beside the library, laughing children ran amok on a large playground. Striker sat at my feet and watched them, her tail flicking lazily back and forth. I got the feeling she wanted to join in the chase.

  “Hey, Mac.” Kit called to me from the van. “Help me with these cases.”

  I walked back over to her and picked up a black hard-shell case in each hand. Striker trailed after us as we headed up the front steps to the main entrance, where Kit’s father was talking to another man.

  Mr. Dyedov looked like a much taller version of his daughter, with the same brown eyes and round face. He towered over us all, and his broad shoulders and wire-framed glasses made him look like a linebacker turned librarian.

  “Call me Yuri,” he’d insisted in a heavy Russian accent when we’d shaken hands back at Primrose House.

  On the ride down to Grimshaw, he had kept me amused, telling me wild stories about being the history teacher at Donn’s Hill High School, which was his regular day job. He had me laughing so hard that I gasped for breath, clutching my sides as he told me about three students who all plagiarized the same historically inaccurate essay about the Revolutionary War.

  “They all turned in papers with several paragraphs extolling the bravery of the trained monkeys who fought at the Battles of Lexington and Concord.”

  “Did they really think that was true?”

  Yuri shook his head. “None of them had bothered to read the whole thing. They found it online, skimmed the first few pages, printed it off, and turned it in. Only two of them seemed ashamed of cheating. The third was furious that he got grifted. Apparently, he’d actually paid for his copy.”

  Everyone in the van had laughed except for Mark, the cameraman. I hadn’t heard him speak a word since a mumbled, “Hey,” when Kit had introduced us. He had a mop of curly red hair and a narrow, freckled face that never seemed to smile. Even as we unloaded the van and approached the library, he wore a deep scowl.

  Kit and I reached Yuri, who introduced us to the heavyset, balding man beside him.

  “Everyone, this is the chief librarian, Mr. Bayer,” he said.

  “Welcome, welcome.” Mr. Bayer shook all our hands in turn. “I’m so glad you’re doing a piece on our beautiful library.” His eyes shone, and his face was flushed.

  “Great to be here,” Yuri said.

  Mr. Bayer stopped when he reached me. His eyes fell onto Striker, who sat at my feet. “I’m sorry, but we don’t allow animals in the library,” he told me.

  Crap. I should’ve known this would happen. I didn’t dare lock her in the van all day; it would get too hot. I looked down at her as panic built in my chest. I had no idea what to do. Could I sit under a tree with her for a few hours? Could I stuff her under my shirt, smuggle her onto a bus and head home?

  Kit came to the rescue.

  “This is no ordinary cat, Mr. Bayer,” she said. “She’s the most important piece of equipment we have.”

  “Oh?” Mr. Bayer raised his bushy eyebrows.

  Kit gave a solemn nod. “Oh, yes. Cats are attuned to the spirit world. They can even pick up on a disturbance before an EMF meter can.”

  “She won’t do any damage,” I added, rushing to add a little truth to Kit’s deception.

  Mr. Bayer looked down at Striker, his eyes full of doubt.

  Yuri jumped in as well. “If we can’t bring her in, we’ll have to cancel filming. If we do that, I’m not sure the feature on your library will be able to air this season.”

  I stared at him. Was Yuri really willing to risk losing the chance to shoot at this library for me? We’d only just met. Instant kindness to strangers must have been a trait that ran in the Dyedov family. My heart swelled, and I held my breath, waiting to see if the librarian would call Yuri’s bluff.

  Mr. Bayer looked pained. Then he sighed. “All right. I’ll allow it.”

  As my shoulders sank back down to their usual height, Mr. Bayer turned on his heel and unlocked the great wooden doors of the library. While making a mental note to hug Kit and Yuri later, I followed the crew into the building. Striker strutted at my side.

  The interior was breathtaking. We stood in a wide lobby with a grand staircase curving up to the second floor. Behind it, the library opened up into a spacious, glass-roofed atrium. The first floor was filled with tall reddish-brown cherry wood bookshelves, and the upper gallery appeared to house areas for reading and studying. The entire building was warm and well-lit—nothing like the spooky old library I’d imagined.

  “This way, Mr. Dyedov,” Mr. Bayer said. “I’ll take you to the archives.”

  Mark followed them down a hallway, but Kit motioned for me to go with her instead.

  “That was some quick thinking,” I told her as we carried the gear up the stairs. “How did you come up with that so fast?”

  “I didn’t make it up,” she said. “All animals have a closer connection to the paranormal than humans do.”

  We reached the top of the stairs and set the equipment cases on a long mahogany table near a window.

  “They do?” I asked.

  “There’s a reason the old stories have witches running around with black cats at their sides. All animals are tuned in to the paranormal, but cats and crows have it the strongest. We filmed a séance once at the Afterlife Festival a few years back, and there was a cat there. The medium, Gabrielle—”

  “Gabrielle from the bookstore?”
/>   “Yeah. You know her?”

  I nodded. “I met her yesterday. She knew my mom.”

  Kit’s round face lit up. She looked almost triumphant. “That’s right. You said your mom used to go to séances. That makes sense. Anyway, Gabrielle explained after the séance that cats and crows can see the spirit world in a way we’ll never be able to and can interact with it on a level we can’t even comprehend.”

  I looked at Striker. She was standing on the table with her paws on the window, watching a few blue jays swoop by outside. She was muttering a staccato “mek-eh-eh-eh-eh” at them. In that moment, she seemed like an ordinary cat, but I remembered the way she’d beaten me to every destination when I first arrived in town. It was as if she’d known where I was going to end up.

  I looked back at Kit. “I believe it. How did the cat act at the séance?”

  “It was spooky,” she said. “There was this lady who was trying to reach her mother’s spirit. Everyone was sitting around the table, holding hands and focusing their energy. The cat started purring loudly—really, really loudly—and then Gabrielle said the woman’s mother had arrived. It was weird. It was like this lady had a conversation through Gabrielle—like Gabrielle was just a telephone the woman was using to call up her mom for a chat. After the woman’s mother left, the lady started crying, and the cat jumped onto her lap and just sat there, purring away until she calmed down.”

  I thought back to Striker’s behavior after my nightmare about the man in the bathroom. She’d done exactly the same thing, and it had worked. The purring had slowed my breathing and heart rate until I relaxed.

  “That wasn’t the weirdest thing, though.” Kit was pulling cameras and other equipment out of the black cases as she spoke. “After that, there was a guy who was trying to reach his brother. Out of nowhere, the cat arched its back and started howling, and then it jumped on the guy’s arm. He let go of the person’s hand next to him and broke the connection. Gabrielle said it meant the spirit they were calling was angry, and it would’ve been really bad if they actually contacted it.”

  I shivered. “So the cat knew to stop the séance.”

  “Yeah. Freaky, right? Hey, help me do the first sweep.”

  Kit handed me a small rectangular object. It was made of tan plastic and had a clear window that showed a fine needle over a numbered arch. The display looked a little like a tachometer on the dashboard of a car. The label read scale: 0 to 5 mg.

  “What is this?” I asked, turning the thing over. The back was blank.

  “An EMF meter.”

  I stared at her, waiting for her to elaborate.

  “Electromagnetic fields,” she translated. “You know how compasses point north? They can do that because of electrons in the atmosphere. Electrical devices put them off too—TVs, phones, dishwashers. Anything that runs on electrical current has one.”

  What she was saying rang a bell deep in the recesses of my memory, where everything from high-school science class was stored. “So what do they have to do with ghosts?”

  “It’s pretty common in hauntings for a spirit to cause a spike in the EMF level of the room. But most of the time a high EMF reading just means there’s a short in an electrical outlet or something. The tricky thing is, sometimes being exposed to high levels of EMFs can cause hallucinations and paranoia. We investigated a reported haunting once and instead of finding a ghost, we found dangerously high EMF levels. Turned out the homeowner just needed to replace some wiring, and he hallucinated the whole thing.”

  “That must be sort of disappointing.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. We still helped him. Being exposed to high EMFs for a long time can cause some serious health issues. It’s a type of radiation.”

  “So what’s a dangerous level?”

  “According to the EPA, it’s 2.5 milligauss. See the needle there?” She pointed to the EMF meter’s display window, where the needle rested at zero. “Once you turn the meter on, it’ll start moving. You’ll notice the levels can fluctuate a lot in a building, even when you just take a few steps. What we’re going to do first is record some baseline levels of EMF up here. It’s pretty boring stuff, but it has to be done.”

  Kit handed me a clipboard with a sketch of the second floor, overlaid with a grid. Each row was labeled with a letter and each column with a number. She pointed to the corner where we were standing, which was labeled “A1.”

  “Start here and walk around the whole floor. Jot down the EMF level in each of these sectors. That’s going to be what we call the ‘baseline.’ If we get spikes later from paranormal activity, we’ll be able to compare it to the earlier measurements.”

  I switched on the meter and stood next to the table for a moment, looking at the gauge. The needle wagged back and forth a few times then settled at the 0.5 mark. I noted the reading on the page and moved on. Striker jumped down from the table and followed me, sniffing at stains in the carpet and rubbing her jaw along stout table legs as we made our way around the second floor. I felt like a member of an away team on Star Trek, armed with a tricorder and looking for signs of alien life. A few times the needle spiked upward, and my heart gonged, but both times I noticed an old electrical outlet nearby.

  “This is a little more scientific than I expected,” I told Striker. I’d thought Kit and her dad would go into this intent on setting traps to find the ghost because they believed there was one, but it seemed they were trying to rule out other possibilities first.

  By the time I arrived back at the corner where I’d started, Kit had set up a video camera, another EMF meter, a digital thermometer, and an audio recorder.

  “Stand right there,” she said, pointing the camera at me. “I need to test the focus.”

  “Are you—um—that thing, it’s not recording now, is it?” As if in answer, a red light glowed to life on the side of the camera. “Oh, God.”

  I suddenly felt very hot, and had to wipe my sweaty hands off on the front of my shirt. Swallowing several times, I looked anywhere but at the lens.

  “Dude, what is wrong with you?” Kit leaned out from behind the camera. “You look like you’re in the middle of a sneeze or something.”

  “Great, thanks. Just shut it off, okay? Or point it at Striker.”

  “No way. This is too awkward. You’re going to be a YouTube celebrity.” She doubled over laughing. “Your face! It’s like all your muscles are panicking!”

  “For the love of…” I scooted to the side, stumbling as I tried to get out of the frame. “I didn’t sign up for this. I’m camera-shy, okay?”

  “What are your yearbook photos like?” Kit gasped between bouts of laughter. “How awful are they?”

  They were hideous, but I wasn’t about to admit it. I tried to yank her back on track. “I’m done with the baseline EMF readings. What’s next?”

  “Right. Back to work.” She cleared her throat and handed me one of the black cases. “There are three spots on this floor where sightings have consistently been reported, including this table here. We’re going to focus on those areas. I’ll take the high-activity area by the bathrooms. You take this equipment over to that window and set them up like they are here.”

  She pointed to a wide, circular window at the far end of the library. A cushioned bench sat below it. “We want the camera positioned so both the window and the bench are in the frame.”

  Striker followed me to the window, and I carefully set up the equipment on the floor. It took a few trips back to Kit’s table to double-check the way she’d hooked everything together, but I was eventually confident that I’d set the equipment up properly. I started recording and peered through the viewfinder, wanting to make sure I was framing the window and bench like Kit needed. I looked through the lens for a few extra moments, wondering if the camera was capturing something I couldn’t see with the naked eye.

  Something flashed by the window.

  I jumped back, jerking my head up and away from the camera. My heart pounded in my ear
s. Then I heard Striker chattering, “Mek-eh-eh-eh-eh,” and saw another flash as a blue jay sailed past outside.

  “Damn birds,” I muttered, feeling foolish. I walked over to the reading bench where Striker stood on her hind legs, her front paws pressed against the window, meowing at the birds. I stroked her back, and the repetitive motion helped slow my pulse. The camera and my duties forgotten, I sat down and leaned against the window. The playground was just outside, and I heard the shouts of children playing and the creaking of a swing set. The warmth from the sun felt good on my back, and the tartan-patterned cushion puffed up around me like a comfortable nest. I yawned and stretched my hands over my head. Striker gazed up at me, purring throatily.

  A young woman sat down on the bench beside us. Her long blond hair gleamed in the sunlight, and she wore a simple, brown, floor-length dress. Our eyes connected briefly, and she flashed me a timid smile before bowing her head over the open book in her hands. It felt very peaceful sitting there with her on this sunlit bench. I yawned again and reached a hand down to scratch Striker under her chin as my eyes began to close.

  A sudden beeping from the table startled me into full wakefulness. Striker bolted off the bench, darting under a nearby table, her tail as puffed as an old feather duster. I looked around; the woman was gone.

  “What’s that sound?” I asked Kit as she hurried over to me.

  “EMF spike,” she told me. She reached down and clicked a button on the reader, silencing it. “Whoa. Temperature drop too.”

  “What does that mean?” I got to my feet and joined her at the table.

  “Well, one of them alone wouldn’t mean much. But together…” She looked up at me, her brown eyes wide with excitement. “Did you feel anything? See anything?”

  “No, I was just sitting down for a second and petting Striker. Then that girl came—”

  “Girl? What girl?”

  “The blonde one. She was just here, sitting on the bench with me.”