by Laura Bickle
“Oh, God.”
Leslie’s fingers gnawed on the rim of her coffee mug. Dressed in sweats, she huddled over the cup on the kitchen table. “I thought I was just sleepwalking.”
Jules crossed his arms. Anya could see the skepticism radiating from him. He’d just told Leslie and her husband, Chris, about the neighbors’ experience with Leslie walking the hallways.
Chris sat, still as a stone, beside his wife. Framed between his massive hands on the table was the best proof DAGR could produce: a fuzzy image of Leslie at the top of the stairs of the neighbors’ house, captured on camera. The figure in white seemed to glow, though Anya knew that most skeptics would argue that was an artifact of the light. But the shape of Leslie’s face and the curls of her hair were distinct, as was the blur of the sash of her robe behind her as she walked. “It’s you, babe,” he said quietly.
“How is this possible?” she cried.
Katie spread her hands. “As it’s been explained to us, sometimes the soul is not well-anchored in the body. It just wanders. It’s a perfectly natural thing, and nothing to be afraid of.”
“We want to see what exactly is going on, so we can fix it,” Jules said firmly. “We want to see what’s provoking you to… leave, and what brings you back.”
Leslie buried her face in her husband’s thick arms, decorated with a tattoo of thorns peeking out from under his sleeve. He put a hand protectively around her, stared the rest of them down. “Leslie’s been under a lot of stress. We’ve been under some… financial pressures.”
“Stress could contribute to it,” Katie agreed. “Hopefully, we can figure out what’s triggering it, so we can restore some sense of calm.”
Leslie shook her head. “I’m afraid we’re going to lose the house.”
Anya leaned forward. She didn’t want to tip her hand, didn’t want to interrogate them about Hope. The couple was having trouble enough absorbing the idea that Leslie wandered at night. “Are you okay?”
“I just…” Leslie faltered. “This house. It was a miracle, actually.”
Anya’s ears pricked at the use of that word. “A miracle?” she echoed.
Leslie nodded. “We signed up for a program called Miracles for the Masses.”
Anya’s pulse pounded at the mention of it. “Tell me.”
“It’s about getting your life together, and paying kindness forward. An anonymous donor in the program gave us a twenty percent down payment, which helped us qualify for a loan.”
“When do you have to pay it back?”
“We don’t. We just have to help someone else, when the time comes.”
Anya sat back in her chair. “Wow. That’s, um, generous.”
Chris’s expression darkened. “It’s a helluva lot more than that. We were too trusting.”
“Chris —”
“Miracles for the Masses bought us this house, but they’ve called in the debt.” Chris looked at Leslie. “One of their other program members needs a kidney. And they want one of Leslie’s.”
Anya’s grip on the table whitened. “They can’t do that. They can’t make you. That’s illegal as hell. Besides which… how do they know that you’re compatible?”
“Miracles for the Masses sponsored a blood drive a couple of months ago. I guess they kept pretty close records. They called a bunch of us back for medical testing afterward, those of us who had blood types matching the type of the woman who needs the kidney. I think they called it an HLA test, and they did some ultrasounds. I was the lucky winner.” Leslie shook her head, and curls drooped over her eye. “They’ll take away the house if I don’t. It’s okay. Really.”
Anya leaned forward. “They may ask for a kidney this time, but what about next time? What if they need a… a liver or bone marrow?”
Chris’s square jaw hardened. “It’s bargaining with the devil. And the house isn’t worth it. We’ve gotta tell them no. We’ll move back in with my mother.…”
“No,” Leslie said, with surprising ferocity. “This house is our dream. I’m not going to let it go.”
“It’s not worth a kidney, babe. It’s not worth hurting you.”
“Leslie, Hope Solomon is a bad character. Trust me. I’ve been looking into a lot of her affairs… and I can tell you that she doesn’t play fair.” Anya wished she could shake the naïveté out of this woman. “She’s got skeletons in her closet, and she’s busy making more. Don’t be her next victim.”
Leslie fixed her with a sad smile. “I don’t think we could get out of this deal, even if we wanted to.”
“There is always a way out,” Anya insisted. “Always.”
A sharp rap sounded at the kitchen door, and Brian peered in. “We’re all set up next door.”
Jules pushed his chair away from the table with a scrape. “Let’s solve one problem at a time. Tonight we figure out how to keep you from sleepwalking at the neighbor’s. In the morning, you two are coming to stay with me.” He said it flatly, as if stating an immutable fact, like: The Earth turns on its axis once every twenty-four hours.
Leslie shook her head. “That’s generous, but we can’t.”
“Nonsense. We’ll pack up your stuff in the morning. The missus and I have an extra bedroom. As long as you don’t mind tripping over the kids’ toys, you’ll be fine.” Jules crossed his arms over his barrel chest.
“Leslie.” Chris covered his wife’s hand with his own. “We can’t stay here. You and I both know it. One way or another, we’re gonna leave. And you’re taking both kidneys with you.”
Leslie’s lip quivered, and she wiped tears from her eyes. Chris got up to get her a tissue.
Anya looked up at Jules. “That’s very kind of you.”
“It’s the Christian thing to do.” He shrugged, and his mouth tightened. “My wife and I made a lot of sacrifices for our first house. Second and third jobs, lots of overtime fixing engines and waiting tables. Those are the kinds of sacrifices you expect to make: hard work, sweat… Nobody should be asked for flesh and blood.”
“No.” Leslie turned to Chris. “We need to do whatever we can to save the house. We’re not leaving.”
Chris looked away.
“Promise me,” she insisted, and there was steel in her voice.
Chris bent to kiss her on the forehead. “Okay. I’ll do whatever it takes. But it’s for you, not for Hope or any of her people. We’ll find a way out of this, but we’ll save the house.”
Anya’s hands clenched into fists under the table. She knew that Hope asked for much more than just flesh and blood. She demanded souls.
The night dragged by. Anya often thought of these nights like stakeouts: long periods of inactivity and boredom, punctuated by coffee and pee breaks. If they were lucky, they’d scare up some random bit of evidence to chase. If not, it was a colossal waste of effort.
Leslie slept in her bed, surrounded by a nest of wires and techno-gegaws with LED lights Brian had taped to her skin. Brian said they were supposed to monitor respiration, sleep cycle pulse, and electromagnetic fields. A video camera perched on the nightstand with its unblinking red eyes, in the hope that an image of Leslie exiting her body might be recorded.
Chris slept on the couch, away from the equipment. His inked arms crossed over his chest, and he snored softly. Max and Jules had gone to the neighbor’s house to watch for Leslie’s appearance, leaving Katie, Brian, and Anya to watch over Leslie. Katie sat on the floor in Leslie’s bedroom in darkness, her back to the wall, frowning at the EM field detector that was too confused by the other equipment in the room to read anything accurately. Brian and Anya had set up shop at the kitchen table, surrounded by monitors that glowed coldly in the dark.
Anya rubbed her neck, missing the warm amber light that Sparky cast at night. She glanced down at the iPhone on the table, displaying the thermal image of Sparky curled up with his eggs, and wished she were home. She wrapped her jacket more closely around her chest and sidled closer to Brian.
Brian fiddled with the cont
rast of a monitor displaying eleven jagged lines that wiggled across the screen.
“What’s all that?” Anya asked.
“A polysomnographic record of Leslie’s sleep patterns, in real time. We’re basically conducting a sleep study. Remember the dozens of wires that we stuck on her?”
“Yeah. That seemed like a lot.”
“Not really. A sleep study requires eleven channels.” He pointed to the eleven squiggles on the screen. “The EKG uses ten electrodes to measure the electrical pulses of the heart. The electroencephalogram, the EEG, uses eight electrodes, and will tell us when Leslie’s in different stages of sleep: non-REM, REM, delta sleep, and awakening.” Brian circled a group of four snaggletoothed lines on the monitor.
“The electrooculogram, the EOG, measures movement of the eyes, and tells us when REM occurs. That’s how we know she’s dreaming.” Brian pointed to a line near the top of the screen. “And the EMG, the electromyogram, measures movements. We can watch for sleep paralysis or muscle tension through that. The rest are measuring pulse, airflow, and other miscellaneous physical readings.”
“Where do you get this stuff?” Anya asked.
Brian shrugged. “The university has a sleep center. I borrowed some of their stuff.”
“You get to borrow a lot of things from the university, it seems.” Anya thought of all the equipment he’d brought to play with at DAGR: thermal sensors, electromagnetic imaging equipment, video cameras… The back of his van was like a portable Bat Cave.
“They don’t really get to say no.”
“Are you ever going to tell me what exactly it is that you do for a living?” Anya said, rubbing the chill from her arms.
Brian shook his head, and the glare from the monitor on his glasses rendered his expression unreadable. “You know more than most people. Which is to say, probably too much.”
An awkward silence moved between them. He hunched over another laptop, and Anya thought she recognized the black-and-white interface of the program he’d been working on the last time she’d been on a stakeout with him: the ALANN program.
“Hey, can you do me a favor?” he suddenly asked her.
“Sure.”
“I think Leslie’s going to go into REM sleep soon. Normally, Rapid Eye Movement sleep is when sleepwalking occurs, so I want to keep a close eye on the polysomnography. Could you talk to ALANN for a while?”
“Can I what?”
“Keep ALANN entertained. Just talk to it. It’s building neural nets at an exponential rate, and human interaction accelerates the connections.”
Anya switched chairs with Brian, stared before the black screen. “Um… What do you want for me to talk about?”
“Doesn’t matter. The processing is more important than the content.”
Anya stared at the black monitor, unsure of where to begin.
The white cursor moved across the screen: Hello, Anya.
“Hello, ALANN. How are you?” She bit her lip. That was a dumb question to ask a computer.
Fine, thank you. I’m feeling a bit fuzzy, as my neural net is reorganizing with some new downloaded information, but I hope to be able to access the data soon. How are you?
Anya blinked. It felt? It hoped? She cast a sidelong glance at Brian, who was absorbed in the lines crawling across the polysomnograph, taking notes. Had he programmed certain language affectations into ALANN to make it seem more human?
“I’m a little tired, ALANN. It’s been a long day.”
Understandable. The brain I’m modeled after often worked through the night. I have several memories of falling asleep at my desk.
“You have memories?”
Yes. They aren’t mine, of course. They belong to the neural network I’m modeled after. You might say that I have inherited them.
“ALANN, pardon me for saying so, but you seem so much more… articulate… than the last time we spoke.”
Thank you. I am pleased you noted the improvement.
Anya rested her chin on her hand. “Tell me about the neural network you’re modeled after.”
I’m afraid that I can’t access much of that information yet, Anya. The cursor blinked. But there is some data that I can share. For example, my model brain likes Bruce Campbell movies. And rocky road ice cream.
Anya grinned. “Army of Darkness is one of my favorites.”
“Shop smart. Shop S-Mart.”
Anya jumped when something beeped beside her. She automatically snatched the NewtCam, but all appeared normal.
“It’s show time,” Brian whispered. “Leslie just slipped into REM sleep.” He turned the surveillance monitor around so Anya could see the green night-vision image of Leslie’s bedroom. Katie was leaning over the bed, checking the leads. Katie was assigned to cover the bedroom. Brian was on tech. Max and Jules were at the neighbors’ house. Which left Anya as the rover, assigned to follow Leslie’s astral form, wherever it might go.
Anya stuffed the NewtCam in her pocket and powered up the camcorder on the kitchen table. She tucked it in her palm and walked down the hallway to the bedroom, panning the camera around the room. Ever since Sparky had fried an expensive light meter months ago, Brian would never let her play with any of his toys if Sparky was around.
Still, she’d rather have Sparky than toys in an investigation. Being around spirits of any stripe without Sparky to warn her made her nervous.
Katie pointed to the bed. “Look,” she whispered.
Through the LED screen of the video camera, Anya watched as Leslie’s body seemed to go fuzzy at the edges. She glanced over the screen to make sure she hadn’t bumped a setting out of focus. But Leslie’s body had gone hazy. Slowly, a ghostly double of her body began to lift from the physical form under the sheets. It reminded Anya of a magician’s trick she’d seen, where the magician lifted a woman in the air and passed a Hula Hoop over the body to prove his assistant wasn’t suspended by wires.
Leslie’s astral double hovered above the bed. Anya noted it was nearly identical to the real Leslie, except for a silver filament that snaked from the navel of the double and terminated in the physical body.
“What’s that?” Anya whispered to Katie.
“It’s an astral cord. Think of it as an anchor—it’s what helps her return to her body. Theoretically.”
Leslie’s double began to turn in space, and tipped vertically. Anya moved out of the double’s way, trying to keep the camera trained on the specter. Anya noticed that the double’s eyes were closed. As it had before, in the neighbors’ house, the replica began to shuffle one foot in front of the other, wandering out of the bedroom and into the hallway. The silver cord seemed not to be bound by the limitations of physical space, and stretched and unwound to follow her as she walked, like the silk of a spider dropping from its web.
Anya followed the double down the hallway. The double paused in the kitchen, before the refrigerator. Brian watched her, keeping one eye on his monitor. Anya could see over his shoulder that the four lines he’d singled out for REM sleep were jerking erratically. Anya wondered if Leslie was dreaming of cheesecake, ice cream, or some other tempting delight in the refrigerator.
Without warning, Leslie’s double turned and walked straight through the kitchen wall. Anya scrambled to catch up with her, easing through the back kitchen door and nearly tripping over a potted plant. She spied Leslie drifting through the dew-damp grass, toward the neighbor’s house. She spared a glance at the video camera. A white blob registered in the center of its field, bouncing as she ran to catch up with the double.
Oblivious to her physical surroundings, Leslie walked through the corner of the neighbors’ house, the silver streamer of the astral cord trailing behind her. Anya calculated that this would place her in the first-floor living room. She bounded up the porch steps and opened the front door.
Leslie’s double seemed confused. She turned on her heel in the living room, arms and fingers spread to her sides. Anya saw Jules and Max emerging from the kitchen, electromag
netic field detectors charged and ready. The trio of ghost hunters circled her, watching as she seemed to flail in disorientation. Anya couldn’t see what was agitating her; she seemed like a silent moth trying to beat its wings out on a lightbulb.
Jules keyed his walkie-talkie. “What’s happening back there with Leslie?”
“Respiration, pulse are up. Way up.” Furious beeping could be heard in the background. “Bring her back, or we’re gonna have to call the squad.”
Anya reached for the ghost. “Leslie? Can you hear me?”
Leslie’s double churned in the ether, thrashing. The silver cord wound around her, stretched taut. Her eyes fluttered open, and Anya was certain that, like before, the startlement of the physical world intruding upon her trance would drive her back into her body.
But not this time. A dull roar echoed from the ceiling, and a hole opened up above her. Anya’s fingers slid through the ghost; it was like trying to hold on to smoke. Anya registered the smell of something burning below the stench of magick.
“Leslie!” she shouted.
Leslie’s double was sucked up into the ceiling. Anya reached for the silver strand anchoring her to reality, but it slipped through her fingers, snapped, and was sucked up into the ceiling like a ribbon in a vacuum cleaner.
The ceiling solidified, and Anya was left on the living-room floor, holding nothing.
“What the hell just happened?” Max clutched his beeping EMF reader.
Anya turned on her heel, sniffing. “Something’s burning… smells electrical.”
“There.” Max yanked a smoldering lamp cord out of its socket. The socket was black with scorch, and the shade was rimmed with fire. He ripped it off the armature and threw it in the kitchen sink, where he doused it with the vegetable sprayer.
Jules’s walkie crackled. “Need first aid here. Now.”
Anya bolted out the door. Her heart hammered as she ran through the dew-soaked grass. On the curb, she saw Katie standing, waiting to flag sirens in the far distance. Underneath the heady tang of magick, Anya smelled smoke.
