Kat Richardson - Poltergeist

It was strange to see Mark alive and well and sitting at the table with the group. He seemed a touch more solemn than the rest—more serious than I'd ever seen him at Old Possum's. Except for Mark's demeanor, nothing seemed odd about the early sessions.

I made a couple of notes and we worked through more of the early recordings. The group got more relaxed with one another and their methods over time. They chatted a bit before each session. I noticed that the middle-aged couple kept their backs to each other most of the time and that the housewife tended to scowl unless she was in conversation with the young, single men—then she got coquettish. In one session, the group talked about the recent start of baseball season. One of the young men asked if Celia liked baseball and they began discussing it, elaborating on their ghost.

The middle-aged woman—striking, blond, and buff even in a suit—broke in, impatiently: "Why don't we just ask her? Celia, did you enjoy baseball?"

The table jiggled side to side; then one loud rap was followed by a quieter second knock. Mark's eyes got very big.

We both leaned forward and peered at the screen. "Can you pause that?" I asked.

Quinton tapped the computer keyboard and the image froze.

"Back it up. I want to see what happened."

The event ran backward for an instant, then began crawling forward, frame by frame. The table rocked the same way Quinton had made it move on Wednesday. "That's the booth controls moving the table, isn't it?" I asked.

"Yeah. You can see the feet of the table rising the same way they did in the lab, and the infrared camera recorded the slight rise in temperature in the rug's coils," he confirmed. He advanced the frame a bit farther and we could see Mark's elbow flex off the edge of the table a little just as the first knock came. "The guy with the long hair did that."

I nodded. He advanced the picture. The group remained still. The second knock came. "But he didn't do that," I said.

Quinton studied the frame. "No, he didn't. I don't see anyone else moving, so the sound wasn't made by anyone at the table. And it sounds different. Let me take a look at that…"

He began typing and poking about in the files, using the mouse to select something from the recording's timeline. He dragged several jagged waveform bits off to the side of the screen and enlarged them. He typed a quick tag for each one.

"All right. Look at these and listen." He poked the machine and it began playing the knocks while it ran a red line over the waveforms.

"This is the knock the Indian guy made in the previous session." It had a large lump in front and a short tail and sounded sharp, deep, and wooden.

I glanced at Quinton. "Indian?"

"Well, he looks Indian to me—Asian Indian, not Native American Indian—though I guess he could be Arabic or Asian…"

I considered it and logged the identification in my mind. For some reason «Indian» hadn't even occurred to me as a tag for the bronze-skinned man with the puckish smile. No one on Tuckman's list had a name that sounded Indian, though.

Quinton drew me back to the knocks, pointing at the next waveform on the screen. "This is the one the long-haired guy just made— the first knock." It was blunter in front than the first one, but otherwise very similar in shape and tone.

"Now, this is the second knock." The waveform was shaped like a porpoise with a long, shallow slope before a bulging round shape that tailed off slowly to a sudden, short spike. It had a more hollow sound than the others and ended with a pop almost too short to notice.

Quinton moved the cursor down to another waveform on the screen. "This one I got from the comparison report file. It's labeled 'Celia'—which is the name of their 'ghost, right?"

"Yes."

Quinton made the last two waveforms larger. "They're not identical, but they're very similar. The length of the slope on the front is shorter in the comparison notes version and the decay at the end is a little shorter, too, but the basic shapes of the main waveforms are the same, right down to the sharp snap at the end."

"So that knock came from Celia."

Quinton nodded. "Yeah, I'd say that whatever Celia is, it made that noise."

I nibbled on my lower lip for a moment before asking, "Why are the two knocks different?"

"I'd guess that's caused by experience. The slope at the front is some kind of windup that you can't hear at normal volumes, but the mics picked it up under the table. And I'd guess that pop at the end is, basically, the shutdown—kind of like pulling the plug. As they got better at making the noise, they didn't need to wind up so long, or wait as long to pull the plug."

I considered that and agreed with Quinton's analysis, though I wasn't thinking in terms of switches and household wiring. "But what is the noise?" I thought aloud. "It's not some object hitting the table…"

Quinton nodded. "Yeah, it's not. Something hitting the table would have a similar waveform to the other two. In those two, the hard peak at the front is the actual impact of a fist or something on the wood and the rest of the envelope is the resonance and decay through the wood surface. The Celia knocks have that subaudible component in front of the impact on the wood, and their resonance and decay are different, more like they're happening in the wood rather than on or under it."

I cocked my head to the side and looked at him. "What could do that?"

He shrugged. "I don't know."

"Do you think… it actually could be a ghost?"

He looked hard at me and frowned. "You're serious."

"Yeah. What do you think?"

"I've seen enough weird stuff in this town that I wouldn't say it couldn't be a ghost, but I don't know."

I looked at the screen again and pointed at Mark. "The guy using the table tricks—the one with the long, dark hair—he died yesterday in a very nasty way."

Quinton looked at Mark's image, then back at me. "What are you getting at?"

"I'm not sure. This thing is giving me a bad feeling."

"Well, the guy's dead, so… yeah, I can understand that."

"Tuckman thinks someone is faking more phenomena than they're actually getting, but if that knock is real, then maybe they aren't. And if they aren't faking, what is going on? The stuff they did yesterday was a lot more impressive than this."

"You think it's real? Or do you think they faked it?"

"I just don't know."

"Well, let's see what else they can do, on camera, before you make up your mind." He resumed the session replay.

On the screen, Mark Lupoldi still looked surprised. The rest of the group just nodded. The female executive continued to question the ghost. "Did you go to the games with Jimmy?"

There was a long pause before a pair of hesitant knocks sounded.

I glanced at Quinton. He paused the replay and opened the sound window again. Expanded to a large size, the waveforms were easy to spot. Two porpoise shapes, closely connected nose to tail with only a single pop at the end of the pair.

"That's interesting," Quinton noted. "These are connected and the slope on the second one is shorter, even though there's a pause in the sound. Maybe it needs less energy to create another noise once it's started."

"And the pop comes only at the end of the whole message," I added.

"Can't be sure with such a small sample, but that looks like the case." He peered at the computer's status bar. "Damn. I have to go—I have to meet someone at eight."

"It's only six thirty," I protested.

"Yeah, but I have to do some prep and pick up some stuff first. But you know how to do this now. And I shouldn't be hanging around, compromising your client confidentiality any further."

He seemed a little uncomfortable, but I was reluctant to see him go. It was nice to talk to someone I didn't have to lie to or be wary of. My social life had never been exhausting, but since my fall into the Grey, it had become minuscule. I don't mind most of the time—being the prickly sort I am—but I go through fits of noticing the vacuum of social contact and regretting it. No surprise that this often coincided with phone calls from Will.