by E. E. Holmes
“Well, I was staring at the sheet for a while and just when I was about to give up, I thought that the black of the sheet looked blue for a second. So, I just wrote down ‘blue.’ I thought maybe the object or something on it might be blue,” Sam said.
Pierce squinted at him. “I see. Interesting. And you, Miss Ballard?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t go up.” My voice cracked like a prepubescent boy’s. Very smooth.
Pierce’s features were marred for just a moment by something … disappointment? Then he walked away. He approached the chair and placed his hand on the black fabric. “Have we all solidified our thoughts?”
Everyone nodded eagerly, eyes glued to the sheet.
“Very well, then. I will reveal what is really under the sheet and we can discuss if your findings were in any way accurate.”
He paused for another moment, clearly enjoying the building anticipation. Finally, he drew the sheet away, revealing first the feet, then the ruffled dress, then the chipped porcelain features of a china doll.
The whole room erupted into conversation. Some people were eagerly comparing their notes to what they saw in front of them. Others were consulting neighbors. I was trying my damnedest not to vomit.
I’d known what would be under that cloth, but somehow that didn’t lessen the shock of actually seeing it there; if anything, it intensified it. The doll was clearly very old, like something you would find on a dusty shelf in an antique shop. The braided blonde hair was matted on top, the plaits sticking out stiffly above the shoulders. The face had faded pink lips and rosy cheeks painted on. The nose had a chip on the end of it and the glass eyes stared vacantly out over the eager audience. Her wrinkled satin frock was lacy and ….
“Blue!” Sam whispered, pointing unnecessarily at the doll. “Hey, the dress is blue! That’s pretty cool, huh?”
“What? Oh, yeah! Good job!” I tried to sound excited rather than how I really felt: seriously disturbed.
Sam’s eyes widened as he remembered what I was hoping he would somehow miraculously forget. “Hey, you wrote the word ‘doll’! You guessed what it was! Whoa, Jess, that is so weird.” He didn’t sound freaked out, thank God. Just impressed.
I played it off as best I could. “Lucky guess. More than just luck, actually. It was the angle I had from over here. I could sort of make out the shape of the feet under the sheet.”
He bought it. “Oh. But still, it could have been lots of things with a shape like that. You can read my fortune any day.”
“I see pain in your future,” I replied in a mystical voice. Then I stomped on his foot.
I tried to distract myself by listening as other people shared their findings with the class. A surprising number of people had sensed something correct about the doll. One other person in the class had guessed what the object actually was, though she admitted she had pictured a rag doll, not a porcelain one. Five others had sensed it was a kind of toy. No less than ten different people had written down something about seeing a face or a pair of eyes, though most of them had thought it might be a photograph or a painting. Another handful had sensed that whatever it was, it belonged to a child. The overall level of accuracy was impressive, even to Pierce, who addressed us again when we’d all finished sharing.
“Excellent, everyone, thank you. I hope this exercise has gone a little way to help prove our theory about the existence of a sixth sense. It is imprecise, no doubt, and though we have done what we can to remove the variables, there are the ever-present factors of coincidence and pure dumb luck to contend with as well—assuming of course that you believe in luck or coincidence.”
Sarah raised her hand. “Professor Pierce, where did you get the doll?”
“My wife and I found her in the eaves of our house when we renovated it. She dates back to the late 1800’s.”
After a twenty minute lecture on the properties of energy fields, Pierce dismissed the class. As Sam and I worked our way toward the door, I came to a decision. I couldn’t quiet the curiosity burning inside me. I had to know if my encounter with Lydia had any basis in truth.
I waited until we made it into the hallway, and then doubled back, telling Sam I’d forgotten my sketchbook. Sam had to get to his next class, so he went ahead without me.
§
Pierce was still in the lecture hall, wrapping the doll in bubble wrap and packing it away carefully in a shoebox.
“Professor? Could I talk to you for a minute?”
Pierce looked up. He didn’t look surprised to see me. “Sure, Ballard. What can I do for you?”
I took a deep breath. “I think you already know this, but I didn’t tell you the truth before about not writing anything down during the exercise.”
“Yes, I did know that. I was watching you during the exercise. I knew something had happened.”
“Why were you watching me?”
Pierce put down the shoebox and folded his arms across his chest. “Ballard, you told me you needed to take this class to help you understand things. That makes me assume that something of a paranormal or psychic nature has happened to you. It was under this assumption that I agreed to sign you into this class. Was my assumption correct?”
There was no point in denying it. “Yes.”
“You can understand, then, why I might be more interested in your responses to these kinds of experiments than in those from the rest of the class.”
“Yeah, I guess I can.”
“Okay, then. You came here for help. I want to help you. But I can’t if you don’t trust me enough to tell me what’s going on.”
The man had a point. Why the hell was I even here if I wasn’t going to take advantage of the potential help staring me in the face? This wasn’t like telling Hildebrand. Here was someone who would believe me—maybe the only person who would believe me. Decision made, I nodded my head.
“Good, that’s a start. Maybe you can begin by showing me what you came up with in class today?” I pulled out my notebook, flipped it open to the day’s notes, and handed it to him. He scanned the page calmly, and then let out a low whistle. “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions about how you came up with this?” he asked. “Sure. Only if you don’t mind me asking you a few questions when you’re done.” I replied as I chewed on a fingernail.
“Yeah, I’ll bet you have questions, Ballard. Damn! I’d have some if I were you,” he muttered, more to himself than to me. Then he straightened up and tucked my sketchbook carefully under his arm. “Let’s go up to my office. There’s another class meeting in here shortly.”
I followed him in silence up to the fourth floor of Wiltshire. It wasn’t an awkward silence; we were both too lost in our own thoughts to bother with each other. When we got to his office, Pierce threw his bag into the corner and started rummaging through a filing cabinet.
“Have a seat, Ballard. And some coffee.” He gestured over to a coffee maker perched on a stack of files in the corner. The pot was full; he’d obviously left it on while he was gone. Trying not to think of the imminent fire that would someday engulf this entire office and its contents, I poured myself a cup and tossed a sugar into it. I took a sip and immediately started sputtering.
“Sorry, I like my coffee strong.”
“No kidding,” I choked, reaching for several more sugar packets. It was by far the strongest coffee I’d ever had, and I was a coffee girl. “Why do you even bother brewing it? Just eat the grounds, it’d be quicker.”
Pierce looked for a moment like he was seriously considering the idea before throwing himself into his chair and laying open a file. “Okay, Ballard. Tell me what happened.”
“Today?”
“Let’s start with today. We’ll move backward from there. Into the past is an appropriate direction when dealing with this kind of thing.”
“What was that, ghost humor?” I asked with a smirk.
Pierce just grinned and waited for me to start. I described to him in as much detail as I could exactly what had hap
pened during class. I told him about the voice, and about my hand seeming to draw without my realizing it. I tried to describe the quality of the voice, the way it sounded like it was coming through a badly tuned radio or a poor quality microphone. Pierce just listened intently and scribbled on his notepad.
“And then Sam sat down next to me, and I sort of … snapped out of it,” I finished.
“And you never saw anything? There was no visual of Lydia or the doll?” he asked. It seemed to be an important point.
I shook my head. “No, I never saw the doll. The only reason I knew it was a doll was because she told me. I couldn’t have told you what it looked like before you pulled the sheet off.”
Pierce jotted that down. He read it all over in quiet.
“Professor?”
“Mm-hmm?”
“Am I … right? About Lydia?”
Pierce looked up. “You sure as hell are.”
He extracted the file out from under his notepad and tossed it across the desk to me. It was full of papers, some recent, others very old and protected in plastic sleeves.
“That first one,” said Pierce, pointing, “is the deed to my house. As you can see, the family name is Tenningsbrook.”
I looked down. I found the surname of the original owners of the house along with their first names, William and Jane. The house was built in 1883. I flipped the document over. The second document was full of legal jargon that seemed to be about construction. It was dated ten years later.
“What’s this, a building permit?”
“The next page will explain,” Pierce said grimly.
I turned to the next page. It was the oldest newspaper article I’d ever seen. A quick scan of the emboldened headline made me gasp.
“It burned down!”
“Not completely, but yes, a large section of the house was destroyed. They had to obtain a permit from the town to reconstruct the damaged wing.”
I felt my throat going dry. I continued reading the article, and only a few sentences further my fears were confirmed.
“Lydia Tenningsbrook,” I whispered.
“She died in the fire. From what I can gather from the floor plans, her bedroom was in the wing that caught fire. By the time anyone was alerted to the blaze, it was already too late to reach her room. Her body was recovered the next morning.”
“There’s not a photograph of that in here, is there?” I practically squeaked.
“No, no, not of the body,” Pierce reassured me. “But there is a photograph in there that might interest you to take a look at. Just a few pages further.”
I flipped past an insurance claim notice and a death certificate that left me feeling nauseated before I reached it. It was a sepia-toned photograph that had faded even more with age. A dark-haired, mustached man in a black suit stood with his hand on the shoulder of a very serious but very pretty woman in a high-necked gown. Standing on the woman’s right, her pale little hands clasped demurely, was Lydia.
There was no name, of course, but I knew who it was. She was the very same little girl whose face had smiled back at me from my notebook page, though the face in this photo bore no smile. Just like every old photograph of children that I had ever seen, she looked abnormally still and serious for someone so young. The sight of her living face, and knowing she was dead, made me light-headed.
“As you can see, the resemblance between your drawing and the photo is uncanny,” Pierce said.
I couldn’t respond.
“Can I ask you a few more questions now?” Pierce inquired.
“Okay.” I closed the file more forcefully than I meant to and handed it back to him—I didn’t want to stare at that poor little dead girl any more.
“Do you remember if you saw Lydia at all? I mean, in your mind’s eye, did you picture her while she was talking to you?”
“No. The first time I ever saw her face was when Sam pointed it out on my paper.”
“I see, I see,” Pierce mumbled, scribbling some more. “And now, the crucial point: has anything like this ever happened before?”
I hesitated. “Well, not exactly like this.”
“Well, then tell me what did happen.”
“I, uh, met someone in the library who turned out to be dead.”
The statement hung in the air for a solid minute before Pierce could respond.
“How do you know this person is dead?”
“Dean Finndale told me.”
“And how does Finndale know this person is dead?” Pierce asked.
“Because it was a student who died here last year. His name was Evan Corbett.”
Pierce’s eyes went wide. “You saw Evan Corbett here?”
I sat up straighter. “Did you know Evan?”
“No, I didn’t know him personally, but of course the news of his death was all over the campus. Lots of bad press for the school, as I recall, and if there’s one thing the administration hates, it’s bad press.” Pierce sounded a little bitter. I started to like him even more.
“Yeah. Well, anyway, I told my professor I’d talked to him, not realizing what he was. She flipped out and sent me to the dean and the dean sent me to a shrink. They both seemed to think I should keep my mouth shut and go on some behavioral meds.” It was my turn to sound bitter.
Pierce slammed his pen down on the table. A small pile of manila folders slid onto the floor, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Well, they should have sent you to me, damn it! Narrow-minded people, that’s the problem around here. Hush it all up, don’t rock the boat, label ‘em crazy and lock ‘em away.
It’s people like that who keep parapsychology on the outskirts of acceptable science. Doesn’t even occur to them that you might be telling the truth!” Pierce was raging now, but I was smiling. He looked over at me and stopped in his tracks. “Something funny?”
“No, nothing, it’s just—I wish I’d been able to say a little of that to the dean without getting expelled.”
Pierce’s smile looked a bit more like a grimace. “Yeah, I wish I could say it without getting fired. Same boat, I’m afraid.” He took a breath and sank into his seat again. “But, what’s done is done. They should have sent you to me, but they didn’t. No matter. You’re here now and we’ll do what we can.”
“Can I ask you a question now?” I asked.
“Of course. I can’t guarantee that I can answer it, but let’s give it a try.” He plunked his pencil down and drained his cup of steaming coffee without flinching.
“So … what’s wrong with me?”
“What would make you think that there’s anything wrong with you?” he asked.
I snorted. “Are you kidding me right now?”
“Ballard, there is nothing wrong with you. On the contrary, you have an ability that most people do not possess. It would appear that you are some sort of medium.”
“A medium? What exactly does that mean?” I had heard the word before, of course, but it only conjured up images of gypsy women in turbans waving their claws over crystal balls, like that ridiculous fortune teller at the carnival.
“It means that you seem to be a channel of sorts for communication between the living world and the spirit world,” Pierce explained.
“A channel?” I didn’t like the sound of it at all. “So I’m like some sort of … what, spirit telephone or something like that?”
Pierce cracked a smile. “Not exactly. Let’s make an analogy here. Think of yourself as having an extra antenna that most other people don’t have. Spirits are each on their own frequencies, ones that living people either can’t or won’t acknowledge. You have the ability, by focusing your antenna in the right way, to pick up on those frequencies and even understand them.”
That sounded a little more plausible, not to mention less frightening. “So where did I get this antenna? How come I have one and most other people don’t? And why did I only just start tuning in?”
“Now those are questions for which I have no answer at all.”
&nb
sp; “And do all mediums experience what I do?”
“No. In fact, every medium experiences these things differently. Just as our personalities and points of view change the way we experience everyday situations, the same is true of medium experiences.”
“So, the drawing thing?”
“Unusual, but not entirely unheard of. It’s called psychic drawing, and there are other psychic artists out there, although,” he stared again at my drawing of Lydia, “I’ve never seen anything from a psychic artist that was this detailed or accurate. Do you draw regularly?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I’ve drawn since I was little. I do it all the time.”
“And are your drawings usually this good?” Pierce asked.
“Um, I dunno. I guess so,” I admitted, a little embarrassed, but pleased. I pulled out my sketchbook and handed it to him. He flipped through it page by page, nodding as he did so.
“Yes, it looks like your usual style. Very detailed, very life-like, strong attention to shadow and light.” He saw my slightly surprised look, and explained, “I took an art class or two in my day. Believe me, it was a passion the world was better off without; I was terrible.”
We smiled at each other as he handed it back, and he waited until I put it safely away in my bag before he spoke again. “So, Ballard. The time that you saw Evan in the library, was that the first time you ever saw him?”
“No, and he hasn’t been the only one to seek me out.”
§
For the next hour I gave Pierce all the details of every encounter I’d ever had with Evan, as well as my visit from Peter Mulligan. I flipped through my sketchbook to show him the drawings I’d done, and also the documentation I had collected: Evan’s yearbook photo, the newspaper articles on Evan’s and Peter’s deaths. He bombarded me with questions and took furious notes. My initial hesitation to share with him had melted away, and now I was answering his questions with as much enthusiasm as he showed in asking them. There was something cathartic about getting all of these details out to someone, but it was more than that. When I was sitting there telling half-truths to Dr. Hildebrand, I’d only felt more nervous and self-conscious. In fact I’d been blatantly lying just so they wouldn’t haul out the straitjacket. Even confiding in Tia, I hadn’t had this same sense of freedom I felt now. Now with each word that I let escape my lips, with every question and answer, I was getting closer to the truth. This was a revelation that would lead to something, something concrete.
