Speed Dating With the Dead (16 page)

Ann’s school years were a litany of academic awards and trips to the counselor, as she learned early on that intelligent, creative people were afforded more leeway and were more easily forgiven. Public education had little to do with children and everything to do with adults controlling, suppressing, and feeling good about themselves, so the prevailing wisdom was that any intelligent, creative kid was bound to be screwed up. And things would only get worse as that kid sought a slot in the real world, where only half of all drivers used their turn signals yet demanded air bags and other expensive safety gear for their vehicles.

By the time she attended North Carolina State University, she’d come to understand the delusions under which most people lived. Because they couldn’t accept the cold, hard facts of their lives, they concocted elaborate fantasies of religion and culture. They saw reality as somehow less inviting than a glorious heaven and harbored hope of better times ahead, even if that future could only come through the rite of passage known as “death.” And because most of them had made bad grades in science, all scientists were viewed with hostility and popular culture often painted them as crackpots, well-meaning but ultimately destructive subversives, or dispassionate observers of small things that didn’t matter.

Ann prided herself on being all three.

So when the paranormal fad started and even respected professional journals ventured into the field in an effort to publish something people would actually read, Ann took it as a tossing down of the gauntlet. Angels, Bigfoot, aliens, and conspiracy theories rarely depended upon objective measurements, but when hunters started buying high-tech equipment, the war was on. She was fully aware that debunking nonsense took away time and energy from real research, but if she could guide even a handful of people to their senses, then the human race ultimately logged an overall gain. For that was the real work of the scientist: to nudge the species just a little further along the path to enlightenment, truth, and understanding.

And, she had to admit, pissing off a flake gave her a serious case of damp squirmies.

“How’s my halo hanging?” Ann asked Duncan.

As usual after sex, Duncan was withdrawn and self-absorbed, his sweating head sunken into the pillow. Despite his verbal cockiness, he was sensitive about his performance, always trying to gauge the letter grade she would assign. She wasn’t as difficult to please as she acted, but figured playing with his ego would keep him rising to the challenge. Plus, when the inevitable day came that she needed to terminate the experiment, it would be easier to pour him down the sink.

“I saw it, Ann,” he said.

“You let a voodoo priestess put a picture in your head, boy. Power of suggestion.”

“It was creepy.”

“‘Creepy’? That’s hardly an objective description of a psychological experience.”

He rolled over, his eyes narrowed. “Damn it, Ann. I know your whole game is to get these people coming after you with torches and pitchforks, but I don’t know why you have to fight me, too.”

“Because I’m not sure whose side you’re on.”

“Reality isn’t a ‘side.’“

She reached for his bare belly and stroked the wiry hairs there, feeling him relax. She moved her fingers lower and he tensed. “We’re on the same team, boy.”

“The Vandooren Team.”

“The winners. Always stick with the winners.”

He exhaled heavily, his body responding to her touch. Brain chemicals aside, the manipulation of certain sensitive glands elicited a natural arousal response. People gave it names like “passion” and “love,” but the same response could be achieved in a frontal-lobotomy patient.

“You know how to run up the score,” he said.

“And don’t you forget it.” She gave him one final, alluring stroke, then released him and rolled out of bed, feeling his hungry eyes on her flesh. She turned away to hide her smile of triumph. “Almost midnight. Time to upload the images and let the show begin.”

She slipped into a black nightgown that was just flimsy enough to keep him distracted and crossed the room to the desk. The laptop and video gear was university property, state of the art, and Duncan’s ingenuity had allowed them to patch into SSI’s control-room monitors. The split screens showed the various hunts in progress, some operating with military efficiency and others scattered like a third-grade class field trip. She didn’t see her main target, Wayne Wilson, but a little more chum would help bloody the waters.

A group of six headed down the hall, led by the guy listed on the program as “The Roach.” He was decked out with enough gear to impress any armchair paranormalist, a walking advertisement for pseudoscience as sponsored by Radio Shack. If he shouted “Snake!” then no doubt his followers would jump.

By the time she’d clicked up the projection program and sent her image of the Jilted Bride onto the wall in front of the group, Duncan had joined her.

“Ease back on the contrast,” he said. “It’ll look too solid otherwise.”

He took the mouse from her and manipulated the image so that it faded in. The image had been taken from a slide in the university’s Appalachian history collection, a silver daguerreotype whose iridescent coating made the woman appear even more ephemeral. The woman’s large, dark eyes and the bouquet in her slack fingers didn’t project the joy of a new bride. Instead, she looked like a teenager in the end stages of tuberculosis.

The image was barely visible when one of the group, a short woman dressed completely in black, pointed and exclaimed. Though the monitor system had no audio track, her lips clearly formed the word “Look.”

Duncan had edited the video clip so that the contrast fluctuated, creating the illusion of a ghost trying to flicker into existence. The resulting handiwork, as viewed through the spycam, was almost as good as the cinema tricks coming out of Disney and Pixar.

“Suckersss,” Ann said, with an exaggerated hiss.

“Check out The Roach,” Duncan said, pointing to the screen at the man fumbling with the equipment on his belt. “Looks like he’s having a panic attack.”

Ann chortled, surprised by the sound erupting from her throat. She was enjoying this far more than she thought she would.

“Who ya gonna call?” she sang, mauling the 1980s movie theme. “Roach
busters
!”

“What’s he got in his hand?”

Chapter 22

A hotel full of living, breathing demons, and a weakling like this comes along?

The Roach was almost annoyed that such a puny residual would dare show its face, sort of like a peg-legged pirate stumping onto the marble mezzanine at the royal ball. But you dealt with the entities as they came. It was all part of the training. It was all part of the War.

The hunters behind him were no good, too busy oohing and aahing and thinking about what they’d be blogging next week. The problem with paranormal tourism was that, when it came to crunch time, they tended to get in the way of the real work. But, like the demons, they were a necessary evil.

They made good bait.

The entity appeared to be the Jilted Bride, though the descriptions had varied over the decades before settling into an acceptably homogenized urban legend. And though the bride was already losing steam, failing to draw enough power to pose for a photo, The Roach wasn’t willing to let it go without a fight. So while the hunters behind him fumbled to bring their cameras and EMF meters to bear, he pulled a vial of holy water with all the deftness of a Wild West gunslinger.

He thumbed away the rubber stopper and sent a clear arc of water across the wall, flicking his wrist so the path of the water widened. If the spirit was a demon in disguise, it would piss and moan, and if it were merely a possessed puppet, it wouldn’t feel pain but should dissolve on contact.

The water splashed on the wall and carpet, and the bride stood there frozen, her face locked in the sick misery of her eternal death.

“Did you see that?” said a woman in black, Terry was her name, who’d been pestering him non-stop during the hunt. From the lack of hot water in the shower to overpriced Manhattans in the bar, she’d expressed her displeasure at every opportunity. And though she’d squealed with fear at the bride’s appearance, she now was pushing her way through the group, her jaw slack in rapture.

“Careful,” The Roach said.

Terry evaded The Roach and reached for the vanishing entity. “Don’t go.”

A man in cowboy boots, evidently her husband, rushed forward as well. “It’s a residual, honey.”

Ignoring him, the woman said to the spirit, “If you need to draw power, you can take it from me.”

The Roach had found ripe bait.
You’re lucky it’s not a demon.
That’s practically opening up the refrigerator door to your soul and letting Evil sample the buffet.

As the image faded away to nothing, the group of hunters broke into chatter.

“Did you see that?”

“What was it?

“I couldn’t get my damned camera to work–”

After the image had faded, one disturbing impression remained. For a flicker of a second, the Jilted Bride’s arm had been superimposed over Terry’s skin, as if Terry had penetrated the entity’s spirit stuff. And a sleeve of dust was visible in the air overhead. Maybe the phenomenon had tunneled out from a peculiar hole in the heavens, and the entity hadn’t been a demon after all.

An angel?
Angels were just as common as demons, but tended to be ineffectual. The Roach had learned never to count on them at Crunch Time.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” The Roach said. “I believe we’ve just had an encounter.”

“Anybody get a reading?”

“EMF was flat.”

“Her eyes were so sad.”

“We’ll corroborate this later,” he said. “Let’s get some baseline readings in case she comes back.”

Terry wiped at the water The Roach had spattered across the wall. She sniffed the substance on her finger.

“What’s this?” she asked, eyes narrowed in suspicion.

“Protection.”

“From what?”

“I hope none of us have to find out.”

Terry’s husband took her arm. “Let’s check our audio and see if we got any EVP’s.”

She shrugged away from his grasp. “I paid to be here and I didn’t come to see this clown play ‘Exorcist.’“

The rest of the group, whom The Roach figured was as tired of the woman’s complaints as he was, gathered close to hear the confrontation.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “SSI policy puts the safety of the hunters first.”

“Safety? From what? She didn’t exactly look like the Bell Witch.”

“I got a picture of an orb,” said an overweight man who leaned on a wooden cane, balancing precariously while he checked his viewfinder.

“Dust,” said another man. “I saw it swirling when you hit your flash.”

“No, it was energy,” Terry said. “I felt it.”

“Whatever it was, it’s gone now,” said a weasel-faced woman.

Oh, yeah? Then what’s watching us from the end of the hall?

The Roach’s original count of active demons was six, but it figured they would try for seven if possible. While the number “666” had gained infamy because of its purported role as the Mark of the Beast, scholars had traced old translations and found the number had been recorded in error. Besides, the Holy Bible was hardly more than a field guide for the surface struggle. The real battles waged outside the pages, in rare air and poisoned darkness. Seven was appropriate, a number of magic, mystery, and perfection.

“Where’s Artie?” a woman said. “He was right behind me a second ago.”

The Roach looked down both ends of the corridor and at the locked doors lining each side of the hall. A quick head count showed he had indeed lost a group member. He hoped Artie was sitting on the stool down at the bar, indulging in spirits of the liquid kind, but the energy in the ancient structure had grown palpably stronger, and The Roach wondered if a demon had taken Artie for a spin across the dance floor.

The Roach activated his two-way radio. “Digger, I got a Lost Boy.”

Cody’s static-filled voice came back, the signal saturated with noise so that the words were barely audible. “Digger’s a Lost Boy, too. What’s the prob?”

“We had a sighting and someone must have fled the scene.”

“He wasn’t scared,” said the woman. “He loves ghosts.”

The Roach nodded while ignoring her. Paranormal tourism had all the inherent risk factors of traditional outdoor adventuring, with the same fear response and endorphin rush. The Roach frowned upon speed dating with the dead, but he figured he could best serve on the front lines where the metaphysical bullets flew hot and fast. He’d learned long ago that just closing your eyes to a problem didn’t make it go away.

And there was wisdom in the old saying about being careful what you wish for.

Because he wished a demon would invade Terry and shut her bitching mouth.

Chapter 23

Violet wasn’t sure what was worse—that old bitch Janey Mays hovering everywhere like a vulture crossed with a hummingbird, or disappearing when things went to hell.

Violet had called Janey several times from the front desk since the mummified manager had called the front desk. No answer each time, and Wally Reams had knocked on her door to no avail. J.C. Henries from night shift had gone AWOL, one of the gas burners in the kitchen stove had flared and burned a cook’s arm, the hot water was on the blink, and two of the guests were complaining about children running up and down the halls. Despite the lie she’d told Digger, Violet was positive no children had checked in, since most of the rooms were taken up by the ghost-hunting crowd.

The customer’s always right, even when they’re assholes.

“You sure she reported a leak?” Violet asked Rhonda.

The girl gave a nod, bouncing her red pigtails and smacking her gum. “‘bout 25 minutes ago.”

“Doesn’t it seem weird? She expects someone to clean her ashtray the second she crushes the butt. You think she’d wait 25 minutes without chewing the whole maintenance crew a new pooper?”