Harold raised his hand. “Not a problem at all.” He glimpsed at Rachel and scanned their matching formal attire. “Sorry to disturb. You folks seem busy.”
“What can I do for you?”
“I was hoping you could look at something.”
Rand glanced between Libby and Rachel. Both seemed tired, and it was already nearing midnight.
“It’s about what’s been going on with Miss Georgia.”
“What about her?”
“Well, in the time since I last saw you, there’s been some interesting things happening on the security footage. Given what you do, I was hoping you could take a look. I’ve shown every member of the team, but no one can make any sense of it.”
“Paranormal activity?” Rand asked.
Harold winced. “I’d call it… unexplained.”
“In Georgia’s ward?”
“Not just there. All around the facility.”
“And when did it start?”
“A few nights after you were last here.”
After the cleansing, Rand thought.
He turned to Libby, who shrugged. “You should check that out, Dad.”
Rand dug into his pockets and handed his keys to Rachel. “You two take my car. I’ll grab a taxi.”
“Is everything okay?” Rachel asked again.
“I have to look into this. I’ll see you soon.” He kissed her, and before she could protest too much he followed Harold down the corridor.
“I apologize for interrupting whatever you folks were up to,” Harold said, “but I really do think you need to see this.”
16
Harold led the way down several long hallways at the back of the hospital, then onto an elevator down to basement level 2. All the doors down there required badge access, which Harold had.
“I’m sure it goes without saying,” Harold said. “But please keep this between you and me. The general public is not permitted in this area.”
“Already figured.”
They reached a double door with SECURITY plastered across.
“Wait here,” Harold whispered, then went inside, leaving Rand alone in the silent hallway, grey and dim.
The door opened again and Harold motioned for him to enter.
Inside was another security guard, who watched the many monitors, all showing the live streams from the cameras throughout the hospital. The man looked Rand up and down.
“This is the ghost guy I told you about, Jerry,” Harold said.
“Ah.” Jerry popped his gum. “Glad you’re here. Harold’s all stressed out, so maybe you can tell him he’s crazy.”
Harold waved his hand dismissively at his coworker, but smiled all the same.
They went into a smaller room on the other side of the main control panel, one filled with computers, metal shelves laden with boxes, and other equipment. A computer was set up on a workstation against the wall.
Harold shut the door behind them. “We can review the videos in here. Have a seat.”
Rand lowered himself into the black plastic chair in front of the computer. Harold pushed the button on the monitor and it came back to life.
“A few days after you left, some other staff started going on about weird experiences in their own departments. One nurse even quit over it. I spent my lunch hours down here reviewing the film, and turns out I found a few things. I spliced them together for the next time you came by.”
“Okay. Lay it on me.”
Harold leaned his heavy frame over Rand’s shoulder and used the mouse to click through some files saved in a separate folder.
The first video that Harold pulled up Rand recognized as the nurse station at the front of Georgia’s ward. The image was grey blue, soundless, with the time and date written on the bottom corner in white letters.
“You can follow Nica here,” Harold said, pointing to the nurse frozen in the frame. He clicked a button and the footage rolled.
Nica started at the nurse station, where she looked through papers and gathered them together. Then she set out down the hall, carrying her chart close to her chest. The camera angle switched over as soon as she walked out of frame. The colorful cartoon walls were greyed out by the footage’s default lens.
“Watch this,” Harold said.
The stream blurred. Static dotted the screen at the corners, but the camera continued recording. The picture was clear enough to see what happened next.
Nica’s body jerked backwards, as if pulled by a strong force. She whirled around, startled. When she saw no one there, she clutched her chart against her chest and hurried the rest of the way down the hall.
“Did you catch that?” Harold asked.
“Yeah.”
“It looked like something came up behind her and yanked her back.”
“Does that static normally happen?”
“I noticed that too,” Harold said. “And no, it doesn’t. These cameras record in high quality.”
That alarmed Rand. Spiritual activity had a tendency to interfere with electronic equipment. Since the glitches began right before Nica was grabbed, that was a bad sign.
“Is there more?”
“Oh boy.” Harold shook his head and clicked a few times to load more footage. In the next video, it showed a normal square, carpeted room.
Rand noted the time in the bottom of the screen. Four o’clock in the morning.
“This is the play room in one of the wards,” Harold told him. “Obviously, none of the children are allowed in there at four, and there are no volunteers at that time.”
“Right.”
The seconds ticked away in the corner of the screen. The closet door opened by itself, painfully slow, as if blown by the slightest of breezes. Then it came to a halt, completely agape.
Static appeared again, causing the entire picture to blank out in zigzags of white and grey. When the video settled, the image had changed.
The contents of the closet had been thrown all over the floor. Game pieces were strewn about, play money covered the carpet like confetti, and the boxes that contained them scattered. It was a huge mess. According to the time on the tape, it had only taken a few seconds for the closet to be ransacked.
And, of course, there was no perpetrator caught on video.
“When I came in that morning and I heard someone had thrown the board games all around, I checked the footage and this is what I found. They all thought it was one of the children, but there was no child on the tape. Even when it blanked out, no kid could have messed it up that fast and then gotten away and be lucky enough to do it right when the stream cut.”
“Exactly,” said Rand. “Did you bring this to the director’s attention?”
Harold shrugged. “No. Even though the staff said it was one of the kids, they don’t want to point fingers. And besides, the video clearly shows it isn’t the kids.”
Rand agreed. He’d seen enough paranormal activity caught on security cameras to know.
“I even checked the door that day,” Harold said. “It clicks in place when it’s closed, so it’s impossible for it to slip and open by itself. And if you were to open it just a fraction, then it stays put because the hinges are good.”
“I believe you,” Rand said.
The next piece of the stream showed Nica the nurse and one of the high school volunteers in the game room a few hours later, appraising the mess. They were talking, but none of the audio was captured.
After a lengthy discussion, the volunteer got down on her hands and knees and picked up the games, matching the pieces to the proper boards and sets and returning them to the closet.
“One more,” Harold said. He clicked a few more buttons and brought up another tape.
They were back over the nurse station. The time was 3:58 in the morning on a different night. The seconds ticked by and no one was around.
“Nica does rounds every so often to make sure everyone is still in bed and that all is good,” Harold said.
That must have been
what she was doing. Then the same static happened again on the screen. It blurred and blanked out for three seconds. Rand watched the clock.
When it was clear, the nurse’s station was a mess. Charts were on the ground. Papers had been thrown everywhere. Drawers were open and their contents—pens, paperclips, sticky notes, all over the floor. Keyboards had been yanked from their computers and tossed away. Chairs that had been behind the desk were now on the far side of the room on their sides.
It would have taken time to create such a huge mess, yet it was all done within a few lost moments on the video.
The seconds ticked by, and eventually Nica walked back into the frame. She stopped short, looking around and scratching at her head. Then she ran away and was gone for several minutes before she returned with a security guard, who also looked confused.
“That’s Keith,” Harold said. “Works nights. He later told me he couldn’t explain what happened, and that no one was there at all. Nica quit a few days later.”
As the footage rolled on, it showed Nica and Keith picking up the nurse’s station. It would take them the rest of the night, Rand knew.
Harold shut off the screen. “I’ll keep monitoring. But I have a feeling it’s only going to continue.”
“It will,” Rand said. “Thank you for showing this to me. This is exactly what I needed to see.”
“What happens now? I’m worried for Miss Georgia.”
“I am too. Now we deal with the problem. Don’t worry, I have a plan.”
“Is there any chance that this thing could… you know… hurt us?”
“Regardless, it’s best if we remove this spirit as fast as possible.”
Harold fixed him with a grim stare.
They returned to the main control room, where Jerry tapped at a game on his cell phone while the monitors streamed in front of him. It was the middle of the night, and there wasn’t much activity going on.
“I trust everything has been thoroughly debunked,” Jerry said without looking up.
“How I wish,” said Harold.
Something on the video feed caught Rand’s eye. Something that Jerry wasn’t paying attention to. “Is this live?”
“Yeah.” Jerry looked up for the first time. “Why?”
“Who’s this?”
Rand pointed to the monitor in the corner. It showed the lobby of the hospital, now empty at the late hour. A teenage boy sat on one of the benches in the center of the room.
“It’s a kid,” Jerry said.
Rand checked his watch. “At midnight?”
“Maybe he’s visiting?”
“No one else is in the lobby.”
The three men watched the feed in silence. The boy did not move. Not to scratch an itch, not to look around, seemingly not even to breathe. He was like a statue.
“What’s his deal?” Jerry said.
“Can you rewind this?” Rand asked. “To see how long he’s been sitting there?”
“Yeah. Hang on.” Jerry set his phone aside and clicked things on his control panel. He uploaded the feed to the screen right in front of him and rewound.
As the footage went backwards, the time stamp in the corner reversed. An hour ticked away, then two hours. The boy had not moved.
“What the hell?” Jerry said. He mashed his finger down on the button and the rewinding sped up.
The time rolled back to five o’clock in the afternoon, where the frame filled with visitors and staff leaving for the day. They all walked past the boy, none acknowledging his presence. Four o’clock, three o’clock, two o’clock.
Then, somewhere between two and one, the boy disappeared within the space of a single frame. No footage of him coming or going.
Jerry looked up at Rand. “What did I just see?”
“Harold, did that kid look like Thomas?”
“Hard to make out on the camera, but yeah, there’s definitely a resemblance.” The man shook his head. “You have to help us, Rand.”
Jerry busied himself rewinding and playing and analyzing the frames where Thomas disappeared, searching for any kind of rational explanation.
Rand knew he would not find one.
17
Rand’s eyelids dropped closed as he drove, head bobbing up and down as if his body was trying to force a shutdown. It was one thirty in the afternoon and he’d tossed and turned the night before, thoughts consumed with Georgia. He was fueled only by three cups of coffee and a desperation to help the Collins family.
He pulled his orange Jeep into the parking lot of the elementary school. Children filled the playground, playing soccer or basketball—all form and rules disregarded. Their collective shrill voices carried to where his Jeep idled.
The teachers on duty stood in a huddle near the fence—three women and one man. The man spotted him, said something to the group, and the others turned around. They knew Rand’s car. He was the only person in town who owned a bright orange Jeep.
Rand picked out Katie among the teachers. Her eyes lingered on him the longest.
Katie’s colleagues murmured to each other for a long time, casting sideways glances at him. Eventually, Katie broke away from the group and went through the gate in the chain-link fence that separated the playground from the parking lot.
She sauntered toward him, arms folded across her body, looking down at the pavement.
Rand rolled down the passenger window.
“What are you doing?” she whispered through clenched teeth. “You can’t just show up at my workplace. Especially an elementary school. That’s creepy.”
“Everyone over there knows who I am,” Rand said. “And that I’m not a predator.”
“Maybe not a predator towards kids, but you’re definitely a predator to me.” Her voice was icy.
“That’s a colder reception than I anticipated, I’ll admit,” Rand said. “But you know I wouldn’t come unless it was important. I need to talk to you.”
“About what?” she shot back. “What could there possibly be left for you and I to talk about?”
“Business,” he answered. “And business only. I’m hoping you’re able to let the personal stuff slide for now.”
“I can’t let the personal stuff slide, Rand. And our business is resolved.”
“Again, I told you I wouldn’t come unless I needed to, and I’m desperate. This isn’t about me. Can you sit?” He nodded toward the passenger seat.
“Your window is down, I can hear you just fine.”
“It would be better if you sat.”
Katie rolled her eyes, then opened the door and got into the car. The other teachers on duty watched them with unbroken gazes. None of the kids were paying them any attention at all.
“What’s this about?” Katie asked. She pushed up the sleeve on her purple sweater and checked her watch. “Recess ends in six minutes. You have three.”
“I’m involved in a case,” Rand said.
“You’re always involved in a case.”
“I need you for this one.”
Katie groaned. “Don’t tell me that.”
“Please. You’re the best there is.”
“I’m the only one there is.”
That was true. Katie held kind of a monopoly on the clairvoyant market in town.
“You know I wouldn’t call you if it wasn’t serious. It’s about a little girl. She’s fifteen years old.”
“I spend my day with ten-year-olds.”
“This one is sick. Very sick. Terminal, actually.”
Katie finally looked at him earnestly for the first time. “What do you mean?”
“Over at St. Mary’s. Her parents came to me after class, told me their daughter speaks to the ghost of a friend who passed away three months back. They weren’t sure if it was real or just her way of dealing with her situation, so they wanted me to get to the bottom of it. Got some EVP of her talking to the ghost, and it told her the day of her death.”
“Oh my God,” Katie said, her eyes growing wide. Like him,
she knew the gravity of asking a spirit about the hour of death. “That’s so terrible.”
“Here’s how it’s complicated. Her disease is terminal, and she could pass away at any time. So I don’t know if the spirit was talking about her illness or if he was going to do something to directly cause her death.”
“So it could be that no matter what you do, you still lose her,” Katie said.
“Exactly.” Rand sighed. That little detail hadn’t failed to gnaw at him in the back of his mind. “Anyway, I did a cleansing in the room and sent the ghost away. Figured I knew the spirit’s story—kid passed too early and he was hanging around, so I didn’t bother to call in a clairvoyant. But then, last night, the ghost came back and is upset. It attacked her in her hospital room. Held the doors closed and blew out her oxygen tanks. It’s not even isolated to her room anymore, either. It’s causing disruption in other areas of the hospital, too. I’ve seen the security footage.”
“And?” Katie asked, suddenly interested.
“The usual. It’s throwing stuff around in the middle of the night, knocking things over, making a big mess. You know, just trying to get attention. People notice it now, and if we don’t do something about it, then it’ll only get crazier.”
Katie let out a deep breath and settled in the seat. Her teacher colleagues murmured amongst each other, probably speculating on why Katie was talking so long to an ex-boyfriend—one they had no doubt heard so much about.
“I need to bring you in,” Rand said. “I want you to talk to him, find out exactly what he wants, because it seems I misjudged his desires. You can smooth-talk him into the afterlife, send him away, save this family loads of grief in this already difficult time for them, and then, after that… we can never see each other again, if that’s what you want.”
“Of course that’s what I want,” Katie shot back.
There was no code of conduct in the ghost-hunting business, but if Rand were to ever write one, he would mandate one never sleep with their clairvoyant.
Something about dealing with the supernatural had brought them closer over the years, and they had ended up in a relationship. Since they had worked together so often, that had inevitably ended up in disaster.
The Tenth Ward Page 10
