David Golemon - The Supernaturals

The Summer Place incident had never been planned as a ploy to gain monetary stability, nor self-serving notoriety. It had been a chance to prove to the world that parapsychology was a science and not just a topic for ridicule at university social functions.

The long, difficult fall had taken Kennedy from the well-funded psychology department of USC to a moderate Behavioral Psych position at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. He was there only because he had gone to school with Lamar’s Science Chair, Harrison Lumley, a million years before. An old dorm room pal, Lumley used to sell methamphetamine for spending money and take speed to assist with his finals. Harrison Lumley was everyone’s pal at one time or another.

Now he was here at Lamar, relegated with a broken heart and shattered spirit to quoting Freud instead of voicing his own research on the science of the mind and paranormal.

Kennedy stood at six foot three and had a narrative voice that commanded attention from a generation of kids that cared for nothing other than their iPods and cell phones. He had long before moved the classroom’s clock to the wall behind him, so that he would not notice the minute and hour hands that never seemed to move.

Kennedy was hiding from the world; hiding from the questions that he couldn’t answer without going back in his mind to that night at Summer Place. Most would have thought he would be eager to clear his name and prove his science, but he was not. He had come to this place to hide and have his nightmares about a house that transcended the realities of the physical world. A world he had once thought he knew well enough to teach to young minds.

Anyway, just what would a grown man say to explain such a fear as his? A grown man who once thought that the monster under the bed was dispelled by age and the advent of the electric light, only to be proven wrong. Age and light had nothing to do with mentally ousting those demons; Kennedy knew now that the thing under the bed was very much a real threat.

He had even tried to explain the night in question once. When Harrison Lumley offered him the position at Lamar, Kennedy felt the need to tell his friend what had happened, to explain he wasn’t what the newspapers and television shows said he was. He had failed miserably in his attempt to explain the unexplainable, just as he had failed to explain it properly to the police in Pennsylvania. Just reliving that night with his friend, he nearly had a mental breakdown. Gabriel thanked God everyday that Harrison had known him when he had been considered a brilliant — if a little misguided — clinical psychologist on his way to the top.

Beaumont, Texas was a good place to hide for the remainder of your life. People did not care about the stuff they talked about in the larger cities. As long as the Lamar Cardinals and the Dallas Cowboys were winning, and the bottom didn’t fall out of the oil market, Lamar University couldn’t give a damn about Kennedy, or his lost student, Warren Miller.

“So, where do we stand to this point?” Kennedy asked with his back to his large class. “Freud never said that most issues of the human consciousness could be traced to a mean daddy or unloving mama. He didn’t say that it must have been Uncle Bob that molested you when you were seven, that made you climb the bell tower and shoot thirty-five people on the street.” He paused for the laughter from his first year students, as he turned away from the blackboard and faced them. “What he did say was people are built like we build cars: parts are added to the mind as you go through life. Good parts, bad parts, and sometimes the human thought process produces what the auto industry calls a lemon. Everything we read, see and experience is placed into that human mind, but how it is processed, stored, maintained and then acted upon is the real work of clinical psychology.”

The buzzer sounded and the students started to rise and leave for the weekend. Kennedy felt as if he himself was the student who could not wait to get the hell out of this environment. As Kennedy placed his study guide and papers into his briefcase, he looked up. Since that night at Summer Place, he had been sensitive to the feeling of being watched. Still, he almost didn’t see the woman sitting at the rear of the class, hidden well in the theater-style seating. He reached down to his desktop, picked up his wire-rimmed glasses and put them on and then looked again. The woman was blonde and had her hair cut short. Kennedy didn’t recognize her, so he continued to put his papers away.

“I’m not doing any outside tutoring this semester, sorry.”

The woman did not respond. She sat quietly and watched the professor until he looked up once more. He studied her a moment and then frowned.

“No,” he said as he closed his briefcase and secured its latches. “I don’t speak with newspapers, television people, or ladies’ sewing circles.”

“Well, I don’t work for a newspaper, and I haven’t sewn anything since summer camp twenty years ago. So I guess that leaves me guilty of television,” the blonde woman said. She stood and slowly made her way down the slight incline of rowed seating.

Kennedy looked at his watch. “Listen, I don’t even have the time it would take to say no again. I have to—”

“Go home to your apartment, eat a Swanson’s frozen dinner and stare at the walls?” She placed her case on his desk.

“Actually, it’s a Marie Callender’s Salisbury Steak frozen dinner. I have distinguishing taste.” He lifted his briefcase and turned away. “And it’s not the walls I stare at, it’s Jeopardy . This week is Tournament of Champions week, so, I gotta go.”

“You may not remember, but I wrote to you, and called. Boy, did I call.”

Kennedy took a few steps away and then stopped. His head dipped in exasperation.

“I just want…” He paused, turning so the woman could see his face, “to be left alone. I have nothing to offer anyone, and I will never allow someone like you to make money from me saying anything about Summer Place. I owe it to my kids — to one of them in particular.”

“We’re going back into Summer Place, Professor. We’re going on Halloween night for a live broadcast.”

Kennedy closed his eyes and turned away, walking toward the door at the side of his teaching podium. His knuckles were white from his tight grasp on the briefcase handle.

“Halloween…That’s a selling point for sponsors,” he said, not even affording her a look. “I wish you luck, Miss. Now, as I particularly like Salisbury steak, I’ll be saying goodbye.”

“This is your chance, Professor. A chance to let the world know what happened.”

Kennedy continued walking without looking back. The door opened and then closed.

“Damn it!” she said, and slapped her hand on her case.

Kennedy watched the microwave dinner rotate through the double-paned glass, his eyes fixed but not at all focused. Kelly Delaphoy had guessed correctly — a Swanson frozen chicken fried steak twirled in front of him. He couldn’t afford the luxury of Marie Callender’s. Though he stared at the spinning dinner, his eyes were seeing the bright yellow house with the white trim and manicured grass, the ornate and meticulously carved wood of the interior. The white walls of the billiard room and the gleaming water of the pool.

He was so intent on his memories that he jumped when the bell went off. He shook his head and popped the small door open, but when the smell of the meal hit his nostrils, he frowned and slammed the door again without removing the dinner. He rummaged in the cabinet above the sink until he found the small bottle of Tennessee whiskey. He spun the cap and let it fall to the floor, and then poured a small shot into a milk-stained glass that his hand found in the sink. He lifted it to his mouth and then hesitated. The sharp smell of the alcohol hit him directly in the face and he let the small glass crash back into the sink. He leaned over and threw up his lunch, on top of the broken glass and dirty dishes.