by Hunter Shea
He knocked on Dr. Froemer’s door.
He heard the doctor’s muffled voice shout, “I said I’m not hungry. Now please, take your lunch and stop worrying about me. I’ll eat only when I need to, not just because the clock says I have to eat lunch at half past noon.”
Eddie eased the door open. “I hate to disappoint you, but I have no intention of getting you lunch.”
Dr. Froemer pushed his glasses to the top of his head and smiled. His gaunt frame was lost amidst the plush leather chair. He had a trio of large textbooks perched on his bony lap and struggled to keep them from slipping.
“I’m so glad you stopped by, Eddie. I’m sorry about all that. You know how Danielle is always trying to force feed me. I thought she was coming back for round three.”
Eddie sat opposite the doctor. “I think she got the hint. She was nowhere to be seen when I walked in.”
“Hardest part about coming to work here. Everyone loves to eat.” One of the books dropped onto the floor and when he went to retrieve it, the other two fell as well. Eddie went over, picked them up and put them on his desk.
Dr. Froemer gave him a quizzical look.
“I’m a little hung over today. It’s best to do my light levitating manually,” Eddie said with a short laugh.
“Yes, I suppose you’ve done your share. It’s a damn shame you’re taking leave of us. Is there anything I can do to convince you to stay?”
Eddie smiled. “I appreciate all you’ve done for me and despite how I may have reacted at times, I did enjoy this past year. I learned more about myself than I ever thought possible, which is all the more reason to leave now. Everything’s been about me. It’s time I went and thought about someone else for a change.”
“You know, your father said the same thing to me when we had him here thirty years ago. What a talent. I wish there was a way to go back and work with your great-grandfather, D.D. Home. Like you, he absolutely vexed anyone who attempted to debunk his abilities. Did you know that Arthur Conan Doyle befriended him and was his biggest supporter?”
“I sure do,” Eddie replied. It was a point of pride in the Home family that they were connected to such a legendary figure. Stories were passed down from one generation to the next. D.D. Home came out of the explosive spiritualist movement of the late 1800s. He spent decades bewitching and bewildering lay and professional people alike with a seemingly endless store of preternatural abilities. His faculties ran the gamut from ESP to levitation and talking to the dead. Every top scientist of the day had studied him. Not a single person had ever found anything that would lead them to believe his powers were anything but real. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a man whose interest in the paranormal was quite prodigious, found in D.D. Home the embodiment of truths greater than any known to man.
Dr. Froemer huffed. “Of course you do. Never mind an old man who tends to tell the same stories over and over again. Your great-grandfather was the gold standard in parapsychology.” He raised a thin finger at him. “But you, you have all the potential to be the platinum.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Eddie protested, embarrassed by the doctor’s sense of his worth.
“So, what’s her name?”
Eddie shook his head, confused. “What do you mean?”
Dr. Froemer laughed. “Men your age don’t make big moves unless there’s a woman involved. It’s what keeps the species alive.” A mischievous light danced behind his eyes.
Eddie reached into his back pocket and placed a printout on the desk. “And people say I’m the psychic.”
“What’s this?”
“The girl.”
Dr. Froemer read the article. It had been posted by a now defunct paranormal team in Washington State. It described an entire Alaskan town disappearing seemingly overnight. There were rumors of multiple deaths. The catalyst may or may not have been an amateur ghost hunter and his family. It was one of the great, under-the-radar paranormal mysteries of the past twenty years. Four supposedly went to Alaska, and three made it out. One of them was a young girl. She should be just about twenty now.
“I take it you know this girl?” Dr. Froemer said.
“Never met her before. But I do have a very strong feeling that she needs my help.”
The doctor arched an eyebrow. “If you never met her and there’s no mention of her name that I can see in this article, how do you expect to find her?”
Eddie re-folded the paper and put it back in his pocket. He said, “Her father told me. He’s the one that didn’t make it out alive.”
Chapter Seven
Jessica had two things to do on her checklist today. First, she had to look through the email inbox linked to her website and talk to Tom Mannerheim, her eccentric Swedish web developer who preferred to be called Swedey, about some minor changes she needed done. Then she had to sit down to do an evidence review of everything she had recorded at the McCammon house. There were hours and hours of video and audio to sift through. She always worried that the equipment would fail at the critical moment, which it sometimes did, so she wanted to get her ass in gear.
She was glad she had decided not to take any summer classes during the break this year. All set to graduate Hofstra this time next year, she wanted to devote herself full time to the business her father had created. Her ultimate plan was to take it to the next level.
School had always been easy for her, graduating South Side High School, Rockville Centre’s best school, two years ahead of schedule. Being younger than her classmates made it hard to really fit in, but her eyes were always set on college and beyond. She made it into Hofstra’s Honors College and was happily two semesters away from getting her B.S. in anthropology. Her goal was to pursue graduate studies in archaeology. Her obsession with the dead spanned the scope of the scientific and paranormal worlds. When she told Eve in the spring that she was going to abstain from summer classes for the first time since she’d started high school, Eve gave her full blessing.
Her break from school work was filled with all-night vigils, reviewing notes and recordings, doing background investigations on people and places and making sure her website, fearnone.com, stayed current and did its job of attracting more and more visitors. The website had originally been her father’s, which he’d handled all on his own, and was used as a public library for all things strange and unexplained. Naturally, it died when her father passed away and she had to buy it back from its current owner when she decided to resurrect it a couple of years ago. Money was not an issue, but Jessica had a frugal streak a mile long. According to Aunt Eve, it was hereditary. At first, she tried to handle the website herself, but soon found it too much to keep up with.
This go around, she hired Swedey because she just didn’t have time to devote to developing and maintaining a website amidst a full college course load and weekly paranormal investigations. And unlike her father, who was into everything from aliens to monsters, she decided to stick with what she knew—ghosts, or what she called EBs, short for Energy Beings.
She knew full well that EBs existed and made it her mission to prove it to the world. Her experience in Alaska had forever changed the six-year-old Jessica. More than just her perceptions of the world had been altered that night. Jessica’s subsequent trips back to Alaska, on the spot where everything happened, brought back further proof that the dead did not, in fact, die.
“What are you up to?”
Her cousin Liam stood in her doorway holding a full bowl of chocolate ice cream. His brown hair hung over his eyes in a stringy mess. He was more like a brother than a cousin, and played the part of irritating little brother quite well when he wanted to.
“Just some work that has to be done. Today,” she replied.
Liam eyed the stacks of discs and equipment on her bed.
“Cool, evidence review. You know, the whole process could go a lot easier if you let me help you.”
“Your mom will kill me if I let you do that.”
“So, it’s not like I’m going t
o rush down and tell her I’m helping you. If I stayed in here and kept my bedroom door closed, she’d figure I was sleeping.”
Liam had just finished his freshman year of high school and told everyone he planned to set the all-time teenage sleep record during the summer. Eve was always making noise around him to get him up and out of the house. Most times, it didn’t work.
“I made a promise to your mother when I took this up that I would leave you out of it. Aside from her getting royally pissed at me, I’d be letting myself down. Ain’t gonna happen. Why don’t you call Steve and go to the mall or something?”
“Because I’m lazy and don’t feel like showering. Come on, Jess. What’s the big deal with looking at video? I see those people do it on those shows all the time and they don’t run screaming from the room.”
Jessica shot him a harsh look. “There are things on those tapes that you don’t need to see. I’m not one of those ghost shows on TV, all right? Now go before it gets ugly.”
“I forgot, you’re Jessica the Super Ghost Hunter. Oooo, scary,” he mocked with a mouth full of ice cream.
Jessica stood up and stared him down. “You don’t want me to walk over there, do you?”
Liam thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t feel like being your kickboxing punching bag today. Have fun with your review, Jessie-poo.”
She kicked the door shut when he turned to leave. Grunting to release her frustration, she turned on her laptop to send Swedey an email. She knew she was settled down when the heavy clacking of keys turned into quieter clicking.
Next, she plugged one of her twenty-six-inch monitors into her video camera and selected the file that was recorded in the living room, facing into the kitchen. The time marked on the file coincided with the moment the McCammon poltergeist, or what she thought had been a poltergeist, went into full-on crazy mode. The camera’s night vision gave everything a green and gray tint. It was always uncomfortable to watch herself. She could see every emotion as they played themselves out on her face and in her body language, and she often wasn’t happy with what she saw.
She, more than most, knew exactly what she was dealing with and her fear of EBs was minimal at best. Looking into the worst the unknown had to offer and walking away alive, yet deeply scarred, had a way of erasing your fears. But there it was, the first glimmer of terror as the kitchen drawer closed by itself. She could just make out the odd, rhythmic tapping on the walls. One tap, three taps, two taps. That had to mean something.
Jessica watched herself wrestle with her fight-or-flight response. Her father had suffered from crippling anxiety and she’d been told by more than one doctor that it could be hereditary. No matter how much bravery Jessica had in her head and heart, her body oftentimes betrayed her. It was her belief that the more she studied herself and her reactions, the more she could control them in the future.
The picture got fuzzy for a moment, and when it cleared, she saw that the couch was in a new position. Damn. The energy used to move the couch must have affected the camera. On the bright side, she could hear the couch legs scape against the floor.
She watched video for another four hours, cataloging events and when they happened. Intermittent bursts of static were a persistent problem and had caused her to miss key moments, like when the first picture frame flew from the shelf into the wall beside her. There might have been missing pieces, but there was enough to show the McCammons the severity of the situation and prove that they were not imagining things.
The level of activity had been increasing with each visit, the last one being a real shit storm. She had been so sure that by totally removing the family, the activity would have died down, as most poltergeist manifestations originated within the living. Not in this case. It got worse, which was a total surprise. She may not have had years of case work under her belt, but she had researched and had seen enough to know this flew in the face of conventional paranormal understanding.
There was a definite concern that the family could be hurt by flying debris, at the very least.
“You better find some answers,” she muttered.
She was disappointed that she didn’t get any disembodied voices or EVPs. She asked the EB for its name about a dozen times, but came up empty. Damn. She needed that name.
During her short tenure as a paranormal explorer, she’d discovered a welcome side effect to her curiosity. If people were at the end of their rope and just wanted a haunting to stop, Jessica could, somehow, put an end to it. How and why it worked was still a mystery to her, but she suspected it had a lot to do with what happened to her when she was little.
Before her eyes started to cross, Jessica took a break, grabbed a Gatorade from the fridge, talked to Eve for a bit about going shopping tomorrow for the dresses they’d need for a cousin’s wedding in the fall, and headed back to her room. Swedey had already replied to her email and was busy at work on the changes to the site. Man, he was quick.
She wondered what he was like in person. All she knew about him she got from texts, emails, the occasional phone call and his website. He stayed off social media, preferring to keep the details of his private life to himself. In that regard, they were kindred spirits.
Now was as good a time as any to go through the website’s inbox.
“Crazy, looney, horny, demented, oh, that’s a maybe,” she said as she scanned the subject lines and filed them into various folders to be read or deleted later.
She stopped at one that read, I WOULD LIKE TO ARRANGE A MEETING
“Obviously lonely, possibly demented, definitely delusional.”
Before she could cast it to the deleted file, she accidentally hit the wrong key and opened it.
Hello Ms. Backman. My name is Eddie Daniel Home. I was wondering if I could possibly meet with you some day, in the public place of your choice and with as many people as you feel comfortable bringing. I’m in the process of moving to New York from Durham, North Carolina, where I’ve spent the majority of the past year at the Rhine Research Center.
Jessica read the rest, and went back to the beginning to read it again.
Ms. Backman. How the hell did he know her name? She’d always been careful to the point of total paranoia with the website. She only referred to herself as the EB Explorer. There was never mention of her real name.
Eddie Daniel Home. There was something familiar about his name. She knew full well what the Rhine Research Center was about.
Intrigue and concern did a two-step in her head.
She printed the email, posted it on the whiteboard above her desk and went back to reviewing the audio recordings. Her clients were more important at the moment than a meeting request from someone she may or may not have known.
Her voice filled the headphones.
“My name is Jessica. What’s yours?”
She amped up the volume, hoping for a reply.
Chapter Eight
Eddie Home kicked the door open to his apartment while juggling a pizza box in one hand and a shopping bag in the other. His car keys, dangling from his mouth, were dropped with a flick of his head onto the kitchen counter with a heavy clang. He put the pizza box on the stovetop and plopped the bag onto the kitchen table, his bladder aching. A tiny avalanche of books slid out of the bag as it tipped to one side.
On the way to the bathroom, he stopped at his laptop that he’d left perched on the arm of the easy chair he’d found at a nearby garage sale and powered it up. By the time he was finished with his pit-stop, his email was polling for new messages.
“Come on, bring me good news.”
In a way, Eddie was glad that his abilities had their limitations. He couldn’t imagine how mundane life would be if he could know every event before it happened, read every thought, foretell every move. A life without anticipation, wonder, hope and even confusion just wouldn’t be a life worth living.
Only one new email came through—a quick message from his mother who was an entire country away and living t
he renewed life of a happy divorcee. He’d read her email later, once he’d had a chance to eat, digest and mentally prepare himself. Only God knew what she was into now, or even worse, who. After discovering his father’s lifetime of affairs, she had ceremoniously kicked him to the curb and was going through boyfriends like a high school cheerleader. Eddie was happy that she was finally happy, but he really didn’t need any details about her blossoming love life.
Conversely, since the divorce, his father was, for the first time in over twenty years, not seeing someone and wallowing in his misery. The Home House of Dysfunction was yet another reason he took the scholarship from The Rhine to attend Duke and move three thousand miles away. The year before he’d left for Duke had been an absolute nightmare and one he would like to forget. Jesus, the fighting was epic. Both made vain attempts to recruit him to their side, even resorting to bribery. How many kids were given hotel money on prom night by their parents? Just thinking about it gave birth to an incessant pounding in his temples.
There’d been enough other things that caused his head to ache. Connecting with spirits could be unpleasant. Parental jockeying for position far exceeded psychic brain strain.
He made a mental note to call his dad after he emailed his mother. Eddie often wondered if his father’s prolonged depression was brought on by the divorce or the rapid decline of his own psychic abilities. Was this a glimpse at his own fate? The thought kept him awake many nights.
He grabbed a slice of pepperoni pizza and a paper towel and sat at the table to go through the books he had purchased at a used bookstore on Fordham Road that specialized in, of all things, New Age and mystery paperbacks. His one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx was a short bus ride from the various shops that dotted the multicultural landscape of Fordham Road. He’d never experienced anything like it. His first week there, he’d sampled cuisine from Jamaica, India, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Morocco until his stomach, unaccustomed to the assault of different spices and sauces, threw up the white flag. Hence the pizza, made with a chewy, thick crust that laid waste to anything he’d ever had before in North Carolina or back home in San Francisco.
