by E. E. Holmes
I had no idea what that something would be, but finally I was talking to someone who could really help me to understand, to find answers. And, perhaps best of all, he was someone who didn’t treat my story with disbelief or fright.
“Okay, I think I’ve interrogated you for long enough,” Pierce said at last. He was looking at me with concern; did I look that much like hell? “Are you sleeping?” he asked.
“No, not that well. I’m having a lot of nightmares.”
“And do these nightmares have anything to do with Evan?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “And … others I think.”
“Others?”
“Mm-hm. Other spirits, I think. Nothing as intense or clear as Evan or Peter, just voices and weird shapes, stuff like that.”
“I see. Interesting.” That was definitely one of his favorite words. “When did these dreams start?”
I squirmed uncomfortably. “Over the summer. The night my mom died.”
We sat in silence for a while. I kept my eyes on my hands, watching myself pick away my nail polish, avoiding Pierce’s gaze. Finally, Pierce stood up and went over to a shelf behind his desk. He pulled a book off almost immediately; he obviously knew his book collections well—I could respect that. He handed me the book. It had no title and when I flipped it open it was ….
“Blank,” I murmured, as a little wave of disappointment and déjà vu rolled over me at the thought of my mother’s blank little mystery book.
“Not for long, I hope. I think you should record everything you can in it. Every dream, any encounter, with as much detail as you can recall. And keep sketching, of course. It will help me to track your patterns as a medium and maybe give us a little insight into who may be contacting you and why.”
“Is there usually a specific reason for spirits to contact the living?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. Not a universal reason, mind you. Remember, spirits used to be people, as unique and varied as people are. Their reasons for contacting the living are just as varied, but we can generalize enough to say that spirits who are still here on earth are discontented for one reason or another. Either they don’t know they are dead, or they do and they want to do something about it. Some just seem to crave human interaction. Others are looking for help.
The word “help” exploded in my brain. I flew over to my bag so quickly that Pierce leapt out of his chair.
“What? What is it?” he cried.
“You just made me remember something! When I saw Evan, I didn’t just talk to him. He left me a message!” I dumped my bag out onto the floor in my haste to find what I was looking for. Finally I dug it out and ran over to Pierce, flipping pages frantically.
“Hamlet?” he asked.
“This is what I was writing my paper on. It was sitting on my desk that night. He picked it up and wrote in it.”
Pierce’s eyes went wide. “He wrote in it? You mean you had actual physical manipulation of objects when you ….”
“Yeah, whatever, he picked it up off the desk, along with my pen and wrote in it. He told me it was his phone number, but when I looked at it later, I found this.” I found the page and pointed it out to Pierce.
Pierce looked like I’d handed him the holy grail of paranormal evidence.
“But this isn’t ink,” he practically whispered, running his fingers just above the surface of the page, as though afraid to touch it. “I can’t tell what it is.” He was holding it comically close to his face.
“I know, I thought that too. It sort of looks like it was just burned into the texture of the paper, no indents or anything.”
“Jess, could I borrow this? I have a couple of chemistry buds I would like to have run some tests on it.”
I hesitated. “Um, I don’t know. Would it destroy the book?”
“Destroy this book? Are you insane? Do you seriously think I would let anything happen to this book?” Pierce looked thoroughly offended.
I cracked a smile. “No, I guess not. Okay, go ahead. As long as I can get it back.”
“You have my word, Ballard. Undamaged and intact,” Pierce promised with a gesture like the scout’s honor. The thought of him as a boy scout made me smile even wider.
“What?” he asked with narrowing eyes as I grinned at him.
“Oh, nothing. I’m just … really glad that you’re helping me,” I said. “Thank you, professor.”
“Thank you for coming to me, Ballard. I don’t know how much help I’ll be, but damn it, I’m going to try.” He held out a hand.
I took it and gave it a good shake. “One last question.”
“Shoot.”
“This spirit antenna thing. Any chance it will just … go away?”
Pierce’s smile faded away. “I don’t think so, kid.”
12
SWEETER DREAMS
I WAITED ANXIOUSLY AT THE BACK OF THE LECTURE HALL until class cleared out. It had been almost a month since I’d given Pierce my copy of Hamlet, and I was starting to get anxious. Finally at the start of class that day he’d caught my eye, pulled the book discreetly from his brief case, and nodded. In my anticipation I heard and comprehended exactly nothing that he taught us in class that day.
It wasn’t just that I wanted to know what his “chemistry buds” had found; I also wanted the book back in my possession. I hadn’t seen Evan at all since our encounter in the alleyway, and I was starting to go through this odd bout of withdrawal. I kept torturing myself with questions that there was no way to get answers for. Why hadn’t he shown himself again? Was he scared or angry with me because of what I’d told him?
I looked for him everywhere, my breath catching at every possible sighting. The appearance of a tall dark-haired figure from across the room would send my heart pounding into my throat.
A turn.
A closer look.
No Evan.
My excitement would quickly dissolve into irrational disappointment. And then I’d immediately start chastising myself. No, Jessica. We don’t want to see ghosts everywhere we go. We don’t want to be a freak, remember?
It should have been a convincing argument, but I remained stubbornly unconvinced.
In the meantime, the book wasn’t the only thing being experimented on. I spent a lot of my free time with Pierce in his office or in empty lecture halls, testing my abilities in a variety of ways. We tried two more aura memory tests. About one object, an old hairbrush, I was able to pick up nothing at all. Pierce nodded, though, as though he had expected nothing less. Then we tried a gold locket. The response was almost immediate. A woman’s voice popped into my head, claiming the trinket as her own. After only a few silent questions, I quickly opened my eyes and tried to mentally disconnect with a violent shiver.
“What happened that time?” Pierce asked.
“I just got screamed at.”
“By whom?”
“Her name was Mary, and she was really angry that you took her things out of her house.” I sounded more accusatory than I ever meant to sound, as though Mary’s feelings had intermingled with my own.
“Did she tell you anything else?”
“She said that ‘he’ gave it to her, and that she had promised him that she would hold on to it forever. She sounded really upset … like I was trying to steal it or something. It’s a locket, it’s got his hair in it,” I finished with a limp gesture toward the cloth, which did indeed reveal the locket beneath it.
Pierce looked grimly satisfied.
“So what’s with the face? Did I pass or what?” I asked.
“You’ve just confirmed what I’ve thought would be the case. The two objects that you’ve connected with were both owned by people who are now thought to be ghosts. Mary Dryden is a well-known inhabitant of the Dryden Inn in northern Vermont. The locket is on loan from a local historical museum there.” He picked up the locket and held it out to me.
I cringed away from it. “Ugh, no! Didn’t you hear me? There’s a dead guy’s hair in that locket!”
“So, I’m only picking up on objects owned by spirits who are still around?”
“Yes, that would appear to be the case.”
“Well,” I replied, shivering again, “if they want the activity at the Dryden Inn to calm down, I’d bring that locket back.”
Pierce had also suggested that I try again to make contact with a ghost other than Evan, but, coward that I was, I hadn’t quite gotten around to trying that one yet.
§
The cacophony of scraping chairs announced the end of class and promptly snapped me back into the present. I worked my way down the aisle as the last lingering students filtered out the door. Pierce pulled out the book and handed it to me with a kind of reluctance that only heightened my anticipation. I felt an odd sense of relief to feel its solid shape between my fingers again. I flipped automatically to the page with Evan’s message. It appeared entirely untampered with, exactly how I’d remembered it.
“That,” Pierce stated simply, “is quite a remarkable book, Ballard.”
“I know. But, why, exactly? Did they find anything?”
“Yep. The boys ran the regular battery of tests. No fingerprints on the book other than yours and mine. No visible impressions made by any sort of writing utensil, even on the microscopic level. The chemical make-up of the message itself is in no way different from the chemical make-up of the paper it’s written on. And remember how we thought it looked as though it had been burned in? No chemical remnants or evidence of any kind of burning. According to the chemical and physical analysis, that message does not exist.” Pierce finished cheerfully.
Speechless, I ran my fingers over the pages of my “remarkable book”.
“And that’s not all. Temperature measurements to the book itself turned up some pretty crazy shit, too. That book doesn’t absorb transferred heat!” he announced.
“And what exactly does that mean? Heat transferred from what?” I asked.
“Anything! You know how when you hold an object, it warms to your body temperature? Well, you could toss that book onto a blasting radiator, come back an hour later, and find it as cool as if you’d just pulled it off your bookshelf.”
I tried to focus on the way the book felt in my hand and I realized almost immediately that he was right. It remained cool to the touch, even where I’d been grasping it so tightly.
“Is any of that what you expected?” I asked.
“That’s just it, Ballard, I had no idea what to expect. In all my years of paranormal investigation I’ve never seen anything quite like this book. I’ve witnessed plenty of poltergeist activity involving inanimate objects, but testing on the objects afterwards found them to be totally unremarkable, indistinguishable from other objects of their kind. The poltergeist activity had no lasting, measurable effects on the objects, as far as we could tell. But this ….” Pierce just shook his head, apparently lacking the right words for what “this” was.
The book rested coolly in my hand.
“There’s one more thing, actually,” Pierce added excitedly, as though he’d only just remembered. He rifled through his briefcase and extracted a small stack of papers enclosed in a Ziploc bag. “The pièce-de-résistance!” he announced with a flourish, handing the bag to me. “These are some photocopies of the forms I was able to get my hands on. They’re all from campus records, filled out and signed by Evan before he died. I had a handwriting analysis done.”
I looked down at Evan’s living signature and listened to the blood pounding in my ears.
“There wasn’t a whole lot to go on, of course. Your message isn’t very long, and usually, to get anything conclusive, they need a longer sample for comparison. But they did the best they could, and from what they had to work with they were able to determine that the handwriting in your book is consistent with Evan’s known handwriting. See how he joins certain letters together? And they particularly noticed the ‘H’s’,” Pierce pointed from the school forms to the message in Hamlet. In both instances, the H’s had been crossed in a single fluid motion that looked like a sideways “v”.
“Yeah, you’re right! It does look like the same person could have written it,” I said, tracing my fingers over the telltale “H’s” and then handing the student forms back to Pierce.
“It’s all promising evidence, Ballard. The best we could have hoped for, under the circumstances,” Pierce told me.
“Well, thanks for getting it checked out. And for getting it back to me in one piece. Is there anything special I should … um … do with it?” Now that the book had been proven so important, it seemed silly to just bring it home and toss it on my desk.
“Well, don’t lose it, whatever the hell you do,” Pierce grumbled, shooting a covetous look at the book. “Just … hold onto it. Carefully!”
Taking his words to heart, I wrapped the book gingerly in my scarf and nestled it into my messenger bag. Pierce appeared slightly mollified, as though he was now sure that I wasn’t going to start using it as a coaster or something.
“So any luck on tracking down the elusive Hannah?” Pierce asked as he packed up his own belongings.
I shook my head in chagrin. “Nothing. I’ve checked into every possible lead I could think of and they’ve all been dead ends. No family members, no classmates who knew him, nothing. And I can’t find out anything else about his childhood without stalking his family, and I’m sure the last thing they need is awkward questions that I don’t have any believable reason for asking. I’m starting to wonder if I’m looking in the right places.”
Pierce looked stumped. “Hmm. Where else is there to look?”
“Short of the yellow pages?”
“Well, you could try asking him yourself,” Pierce suggested. “Do you remember last week, the lecture on EVPs?”
“Of course,” I replied. I wasn’t likely to forget. Electronic voice phenomena, EVP for short, were voices that were captured on recording equipment, voices that were not heard by the human ear at the time they were recorded. Pierce had played several EVP sessions for us in class. The investigator conducting it, often Pierce himself, would ask questions hoping to elicit a response from spirits. Some of the “voices” captured had been pretty garbled and hard to make out, making the evidence pretty unconvincing. But others had very clearly spoken words that the entire class had been able to recognize. The most frightening one of all had been a harsh, male voice which, when Pierce asked, “Would you like us to leave you alone?” had responded unmistakably with, “Leave or I’ll kill you!” It was pretty impossible to explain away.
Pierce opened his briefcase and extracted a little black voice recorder, identical to the ones he’d shown us in class. It was no bigger than a cell phone.
“Why don’t you start fooling around with this, see if anything comes up?”
“What do you mean, fool around?”
“You know, let it run, ask questions, see if you get any responses.”
“I’m not sure if —”
“—I know you think he’s avoiding you. Maybe he is. But he’s drawn to you, Ballard, there’s no denying it. Even if he won’t show himself, he could still be hanging around, and this might be a way to find out.”
I stared at the little device doubtfully.
“Look, I’ll even analyze it for you. You don’t even have to listen to it, unless I find something relevant, okay?”
I took the recorder. “Okay.”
Pierce tossed his briefcase down and hopped up onto the desk, looking me square in the eye. “We may have another opportunity to make contact, too. Ballard, I don’t know what you’re going to think of this, but I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and I think I could get permission from the school if we keep it hush-hush.”
“Permission to …?”
“Conduct a paranormal inve
stigation of the library,” Pierce finished.
“Oh!” I don’t know what I was expecting him to say, but it definitely wasn’t that.
“What do you think? We could get my entire team together and run the whole gamut of equipment. Then we’ll bring you in and see if we can make any sort of contact.”
“What would I have to do?”
“In all likelihood, not a whole hell of a lot. Like I said, Evan is drawn to you, so it only makes sense to have you present for the investigation when the goal is to make contact with him. The right stimuli can work wonders when you are trying to instigate paranormal activity.”
“And I appear to be the right stimuli.”
“In this case, anyway. We haven’t had any other reports of him walking abroad, have we? We have to assume he’s only appeared to you. So, what do you think?”
“Will it work?”
“There are no guarantees, of course. A majority of paranormal investigations yield nothing. And when we do get something, most of it can be dismissed or explained away. Even some of our most compelling evidence is controversial at best. But wouldn’t it be worth a shot, especially if there’s a chance we can corroborate your story?”
I considered for a moment what it would feel like to have indisputable evidence of what I had experienced, to have others see what I had seen. There was no denying that the vindication would be sweet.
“Yeah, okay. Let’s do it.”
“Atta girl!” Pierce gave me a hearty slap to the shoulder blade that almost knocked me over. “I’ll start the ball rolling and let you know as soon as I have anything definite. I’ll have to do some serious ass-kissing, but it’ll be worth it.”
I had to agree. It would be.
