Poltergeist (Greywalker, Book 2) Read online

  As in the original experiment, the PNU group had created a deliberately flawed and error-ridden biography, history, and even a portrait of their “ghost,” whom they’d named Celia Falwell. Naturally, Celia’s was a tragic story. Born in 1920, she had been a student at PNU in 1939 when World War II broke out in Europe. She was then nineteen years old, frivolous, headstrong, and engaged to a “wild” young man named James Baker Jansen—also entirely fictional—who was a civil aviation pilot. Desperate to get in on combat action, “Jimmy” had volunteered and gone to China to join up with Chennault’s Flying Tigers—even though a quick check of info on the Internet proved that the American Volunteer Group had included no nonmilitary pilots. He later transferred to the Army Air Corps and moved on to fight the Japanese in the air war over the Pacific.

  Idealistic and romantic, Celia—who had often flown with Jimmy—earned her own civil aviation license and left school altogether in May 1941 to volunteer with the Air Corps Ferrying Command, flying planes from the factories to the training fields and transshipment points. When the Ferrying Command became the WASPs, she stayed on, in spite of Jimmy’s objections. Celia never saw Jimmy again. She was killed in 1943 when the B-26 Marauder she was ferrying crashed on landing at MacDill Army Air Base in Tampa, Florida. The notorious “Widowmaker” bomber had claimed another victim, while, ironically, Jimmy—the combat fighter pilot—survived the war unscathed.

  Tuckman’s group had committed this story—flaws and all—to memory and concentrated on making Celia a real person in their minds. With the Philip experiments as a guide, the group made Celia the focus of their thoughts and attempted to create the right mental and emotional atmosphere to foster poltergeist phenomena they could attribute to her. They’d been successful from a very early stage—with the help of Mark and special equipment installed in the room. Now they were just trying to see how powerful the unaided phenomena could get. At least that’s what they thought.

  I glanced through the participant and staff dossiers—Tuckman had not included one for himself—trying to get an idea of what the group members were like, but they seemed very dry and bland on paper. I thought I might have better luck with the video, so I gathered the files and the disc and hauled them home where I could watch the disc while eating dinner.

  Chaos, my ferret, kept me company while I ate. She clambered around trying to find a way to snatch a mouthful of whatever I had and doing her war dance, hopping and chuckling and waving her bared teeth around, whenever she was thwarted—which was more often than not. She managed to dump my water glass twice and get halfway across the table towing a slice of bread backward by humps and jumps before I gave her something else to do.

  “OK, goofus,” I said, scooping her up and touching my nose to hers. “Enough of that. Jar time for you.” I’d discovered that she liked to crawl into a large mayonnaise jar I’d tried to put in the recycling bin. Putting the jar on the floor with one of her balls inside was guaranteed to keep her occupied for ten or fifteen minutes—an eternity in ferret terms—as she squirmed about, in and out, trying to catch the ball as the jar turned and rolled around the kitchen linoleum. If the ball escaped out the open end, she skittered after it, slipping and hopping across the slick floor until she caught the ball and returned it to the jar, wriggling her way inside and starting the whole show again. I smiled at her antics and finished my dinner while the first séance videos flickered across my TV screen.

  As I watched, occasional Grey blobs streaked through my living room and small objects fell off the bookshelves with or without the assistance of Chaos. I let the things lie and smacked the floaters aside with a mild irritation at the unusual level of activity. I put it down to the fact that since I was paying more attention to the Grey than usual, it was paying more attention to me.

  The first segment on the video was unremarkable. Eight people sat around the table in the séance room I’d seen earlier, chatting and discussing “Celia.” They were self-conscious and, except for some false-positives, nothing much happened. By session three, Tuckman’s group had managed to make some knocks and the table had rocked a bit from side to side and scooted a short distance across the floor. The lights flickered on the colored light board and the overhead lamp swung. Nothing seemed out of the realm of mechanical fakery or very simple PK and I wondered how much the phenomena had changed since the early sessions. But, as I’d expected, I couldn’t see any Grey indicators on the video, so I couldn’t tell if they hadn’t had any Grey activity or if the recording just hadn’t been able to show it. The video wasn’t very good quality—hastily copied for me on the secretary’s computer from what was obviously not an original master to begin with. I’d have to judge their real ability by tomorrow’s session.

  I sighed, shook my head, and reached for the phone. I was going to need some help to understand the room’s mechanics. I paged Quinton and waited for him to call me back. He was a renaissance man of technology, though he didn’t seem to own a phone or a computer of his own. He could hack, kludge, or wing anything. He’d once installed an alarm system in a vampire’s car for me. No matter how bizarre Tuckman’s setup turned out to be, I doubted it would ever beat running a panic button into the spare tire well of a classic Camaro that sported two inches of dirt in the trunk.

  THREE

  It drizzled on Wednesday, the sky that homogeneous Seattle gray I from horizon to horizon that lasts from mid-October through the first of May. This is the weather some people claim induces suicide—difficult to credit when you consider Seattle’s death rate is lower than most US cities its size and its homicide rate equally small. I suspect it does contribute to our large number of bars, though.

  I’d decided to pack the ferret along for the investigation of the séance room since she was curiosity personified most of the time and good at finding small openings and hidden things—usually when I didn’t want her to—which could be useful.

  I spotted Quinton outside St. John Hall. He was standing under a tree near the doorway, wearing a full-length waxed drover’s coat and hat against the rain, though some had managed to get into his close-trimmed beard, somehow. His long brown hair was pulled back and tucked into his collar. He kept his coat on as we collected the keys and went upstairs.

  “What’s the setup?” he asked.

  “This group is trying to create psychokinetic phenomena in a series of monitored séances with a fake ghost. Some of what they get is caused by the sitters, but some of it is caused by the technicians in the booth and a ringer in the room. What I need to know is what equipment are they using, what does it do, and has any of this stuff been tampered with or added to.”

  “OK,” he replied, opening the door to room twelve.

  “Is it always like this?” Quinton asked, looking at the small room and its overload of furniture.

  “I’d assume so. It was this way yesterday.” Well, physically, at least.

  Quinton hung his coat up by the door while I put the ferret on her leash. Once harnessed, she scampered around, digging at the floor and looking for holes. I glanced around and noted that the ball of energy threads was hot and bright under the table—even hotter than the day before and grown to the size of a beach ball with an unpleasant, beach-wrack stink and streaks of red. The sound was now a buzzing howl. I pushed the Grey away and used a trick Mara had taught me, pulling the edge of the Grey around me and Chaos to make a shield between us and the pulsing thing under the table.

  Quinton walked around for a while, then stopped.

  “I’m going into the observation room for a minute. I’ll be right back,” he said.

  I could hear nothing but some creaking of the floorboards once he’d left the room, closing the door behind him. I guessed the room was pretty well soundproofed. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. Tuckman had gone to a lot of trouble with this room.

  Quinton returned and put a sensor wand against one of the walls. “Thought so—power switch for all of this is in the other room. Now that it’s on, I s
hould be able to find the toys.” He lay down on his back under the table, waving various devices at the furniture and rug, then began crawling around the rug itself, following some kind of invisible electronic spoor. I cut a glance into the Grey and saw that the ball of energy almost seemed to shy from him. He didn’t notice.

  Chaos discovered a shallow pit in the wall near the floorboards, obscured by the dark molding, and dug her claws into it, scrabbling and trying to make the hole big enough to crawl into. I went to see what she’d found.

  A series of holes had been made in the walls near the floor and hidden behind fine-mesh screen the same color as the dark molding. Chaos had managed to find a small tear in one bit of screen and rip it open. Behind the screen was a small speaker cone. Chaos and I crawled around the room’s perimeter and found a total of eight hidden speakers of several sizes. After a while, we ran into Quinton, who was now moving along the walls as well, waving his various sensors up and down the heavily plastered surfaces.

  “What have you got?” he asked.

  “Speakers. There’s a whole bunch of them at floor level.” I showed them to him as Chaos lost interest and attacked the rug, darting at the edge of the Grey, like a dog challenging the surf.

  “Don’t let her bite that rug too much,” he cautioned. “It’s got a lot of live wiring in it and she could get a shock.” That wasn’t all she’d get, but Chaos had had her run-ins with the Grey, too, and knew better than I when to head for cover.

  “There are a bunch of plates and things on the bottom and on the floor under it, too,” I said, moving my pet farther from the table.

  “I figured there would be. I’ll get to that in a minute.”

  We looked at all of the speakers and Quinton ran some more tests of the walls before getting me to help him move the table and rug for another inspection. The ball of energy rolled around when we moved the table.

  I followed the ferret around the room, though it appeared she was just taking a general tour now. Quinton stopped near the observation room mirror and looked around to catch my eye.

  “Make some noise and move around. I’ll be right back.”

  I picked up Chaos and tried out a few old dance steps, muttering the words to “You Are My Lucky Star” to the ferret as I did.

  Quinton returned, looking bemused, and grinned at me. “Keep that up for a while,” he instructed as he repeated his crawling and waving, stopping a few times to take a spot reading of something in the walls or floor.

  I’d faked my way through the first two numbers of 42nd Street when Quinton called out again. “OK, you can stop.” He was chuckling, but I didn’t mind. I knew I was out of practice—and I never could sing worth a damn—but if you ask me to make frivolous noise and motion, Busby Berkeley dance numbers are the first thing that comes to my mind. I’d been dancing since I was eight due to my mother’s ambition—pro since eleven—and the happily goofy routines were as natural to me as English.

  At last, we sat down at the table. Chaos ran around on the tabletop, snuffing the surface and chuckling to herself. I gave her a couple of treats to keep her busy.

  “What have we got?” I asked.

  “The room’s pretty wired, but it all comes back into the booth. There’s nothing here that’s either run by a remote location or sending information to one. There’s a lot of passive sensing that I couldn’t pick up until there was something to send—that’s why I needed you to move around and make noise. About half the monitoring equipment uses passive sensors so, in theory, they ought to be unobtrusive and largely immune to most interference. Most of it’s built into the walls or furniture so it’s out of the way and safe from knocks and rough handling. It’s a nice setup—and pricey, ’cause the antenna and power technology on those subminiature units is pretty cutting-edge. Some of the stuff under the table is passive and remote sensing equipment, too, with slightly bigger antennas.

  “Beyond all that, there’s the active systems. This is the interesting part. Those speakers you found have a sister set of speakers in the crown molding. Now, I’m just guessing, because audio isn’t really my thing and I haven’t run numbers or made diagrams, but the positioning and type of speakers suggests to me that the room is one big sound cabinet. The speakers at the floor level don’t put out much sound per speaker, but their cumulative wattage, aimed as it is, would make the whole wooden floor one giant subwoofer—not a very well-tuned one, but sufficient for subaudible frequencies. When it’s firing and properly timed, the effect would be very disturbing, but you wouldn’t perceive it as sound. The people in the room might think it was an earthquake or they might just experience unexplained disquiet.”

  “That would probably be controlled by that console marked ‘ambient sound,’ ” I suggested.

  “Yeah. With the upper range speakers in the crown molding, the combined sound effects could be used to manipulate mood very effectively, or even to cause vibrations and knocking sounds in the floor and walls. Basically, they can ‘haunt’ the room with sound waves. Even at a low level, it would make people very suggestible. That’s just the walls and floor. Most of the furniture in the room is normal, but this table isn’t.”

  “I figured. Tell me about the table.”

  “It’s not as heavy as it seems. It’s only heavy enough to be awkward for a single person to lift. Now, one of the large black pads you found in the floor is an electrical induction feed hardwired directly into the booth through a cable that’s hidden under the boards—there’s a little panel of wood covering the channel cut in the floor for it. The rest are induction or magnetic plates. It’s nicely done, very neat. But the feet of the table are metallic and the rug has enough electrical coil in it to induce a very mild magnetic field that would make the table seem to get lighter or heavier—and would also make it easier or harder to shove around. Selective activation of the coil in the rug and the magnetic plates in the floor could also make the table bounce up and down or rock side to side a little—it wouldn’t be dramatic, but to someone who’s already suggestible and wants to believe, it would be a pretty convincing poltergeist.

  “I’d guess they keep the table ‘heavy’ most of the time to make movement seem more dramatic when it happens. The table is also wired through the legs, picking up electricity through the induction plates and feeding a grid of tiny electromagnets embedded in the tabletop from below. This is all concealed by a wood veneer thin enough to allow someone with a control to move a metallic object around on the surface without touching either the table or the object—it would be a little hard on people’s electric watches, but who’d notice? Now, you couldn’t make the table jump or become heavier or lighter while you did that, but it would be a pretty cool effect and would distract almost anyone from noticing that the table was a little lighter than usual. It’s a nice setup for making a ghost. Most people couldn’t afford it and it wouldn’t be worthwhile to most stage magicians, since it requires control of the room. But it works great in a setting like this one.”

  I scooped the ferret off the table as she attempted to jump down and stuffed her into my purse. She began digging around. “Just how much movement or noise could you get out of this equipment?” I asked.

  “Nothing flashy—this is a subtle setup and it’s supposed to create subtle effects. It’s all based on the suggestibility of the people in the room,” Quinton replied. “You could get some dramatic effects with some kind of mechanical rig, I imagine, but that’s not my field. You’d need to talk to a stagehand or a magician for that. I’m not sure you could hide the mechanism, though. You want to take a look in the other room with me?”

  “Sure.” I stood up and followed him out of the séance room and into the observation room.

  Quinton identified which monitors recorded what and identified the location of recording cameras and microphones; then he sat down and made the chandelier and side lamps in the other room flicker and the table jump and turn. The table was wobbly and jerky and moved very little, though it still moved enough to
see and measure on the equipment. He ran through some sound combinations that made me cringe, hearing them through the speakers in the booth. If I hadn’t known the source of it, I would have been squirming around in restless discomfort. I could see an occasional flare of red or yellow in the other room, but it didn’t seem to be connected to the sound Quinton made. It woke the ferret, who abandoned my purse for Quinton’s pocket.

  He shut down the effects and reached into his pocket to pet Chaos. “Hey, stinky.” He looked up at me, then cocked his head toward the room. “Tricky, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “Very tricky. What about the board of Christmas lights?”

  “That’s what it is—Christmas lights. It’s plugged in, but there’s no separate control for the board or the plug. It doesn’t have any switch or controls on it, either. As far as I can see, it’s there just to be there—maybe it’s a control unit. I don’t know.”

  “So some of this stuff is here for legit purposes.”

  “A lot of it. It happens that you can also manipulate some of it, but the recording and monitoring equipment is on the level and there are good reasons to have the sound and light manipulation capability. Now, the modifications to the table I can’t see any purpose for except demonstrating fake table movements and sliding objects around, but the rest are solid.”

  “Then, except for the table, this stuff is mostly meant to create a conducive mood for belief, not to fake phenomena.”

  “Yeah. And to record the phenomena and associated conditions with a high degree of reliability. It’s a good arrangement and the distances are so short there’d be little chance for signal loss or interference with the antennas from outside the room. It’s a decent old brick building without a lot of iron framing to interfere electrically, but built solid enough to block a lot of outside sound and vibration.”