Kat Richardson: Poltergeist

With the door closed, I thought I was safe enough to drop my guard and step into the Grey to take a different look around. I got comfortable, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath—this part still weirded me out and I needed to brace myself before full immersion in the Grey.

Even sitting, I had a moment of vertigo as I pushed across the barrier into the Grey, feeling the sudden burden of exertion and an unusual sensation of weight. I opened my eyes to the cold and the foggy light of the Grey, filled with the shapes and shadows of things long gone hanging in an endless mist-world. I could hear the mutterings of Grey things and the thrum of the grid. Room twelve was still there, dim under the swirl of the Grey and as shadowy as if it were the ghost world, instead. The table in front of me was hung with a drapery of overlapping shapes so various and complicated I couldn't make them out. Among them a few swirls in the fog glowed with red, blue, and green traceries, and a crowd of half-formed human shapes seemed to press toward the table. They were unrecognizable, having no faces or details, only fog creatures that had no gleam of life. They weren't ghosts, but the habit-worn impressions left in the Grey by live people doing the same thing in the same spot over and over.

A harsh yellow glow emanated from under the table. I looked, then crawled forward, pressing between the chilly shapes. A globe of pale yellow energy pulsed brighter and dimmer in a slow breathing rhythm. The thing was beneath the exact center of the table, about the size of a basketball hovering over the floor. It was difficult to keep in focus as I crept near. I was panting a bit as I worked to hold my equilibrium against the two worlds—normal and paranormal—that pulled on me.

Closer, the ball of energy wasn't an even glow, but a jumble of gleaming threads like a living scribble made by a giant child. I staggered a little on my hands and knees, tossed off balance by the writhing view. Bits of history, mist-things passing through me, and shifting layers of Grey made me dizzy for a moment and I tumbled forward, getting a shock of ice and fire as my head and shoulder punched into the loose knot of Grey light and energy. I pulled myself back from the cold/hot sensation that had whipped through me and rested on my haunches, unsettled by the eerie feel of the thing in front of me. I wiped at my face, trying to remove the cobwebby sensation of it.

I peered at the ball of energy, narrowing my concentration further. The mist thinned, leaving more of the grid exposed as I burrowed deeper into the Grey. I could see that gleaming threads spun out of the yellow ball and crawled away over the room, like creepers gone wild across an old brick wall. The room was thick with them; they twisted together, finally, into the energy shaft from the grid that stabbed through the window. Even the mirror wall was scrawled with them, though less thickly than the rest of the room. I turned my head with care, the worlds slipping over each other like half a dozen old black-and-white films projected at the same time on a stained screen, but I couldn't see any reason for the energy vines. They were static, not growing or moving, yet they were throbbing with some imminent coil, producing a nerve-scraping whine.

I yanked myself back from the Grey, feeling the jerk and twist of the transition throughout my chest and spine. I kept my head down and gulped in air that tasted of dirt and dust until the sensations of nausea and pressure passed. I crawled from beneath the table and got back to my feet, my arms and legs a little shaky as I did so. I hadn't expected to feel so worn out. I checked my watch and thought I'd lost some time, somehow. Working in the Grey is tiring and takes concentration, but this was disproportionate for the duration I'd been in there, even though I wasn't sure how long that was. I'd left Tuckman's office almost an hour earlier and the walk to St. John Hall had taken no more than ten minutes. Time passed oddly in the Grey, but I'd never just lost so much while I was fully immersed in it before. I'd have to ask Mara what was going on, when I had the chance.

I leaned against the doorframe, getting my equilibrium back and letting my breathing return to normal. I peered through the corner of my eye into the Grey and took one last glance around. The glowing vines, the knotted ball of energy all had the air of something poised, waiting. I disliked it and felt a ripple of disquiet run down my back.

I left the séance room and went into the observation room. It was even less enlightening. Through the glass, one corner of the main room near the door was a bit obscured, but the rest of the room was in view—only the room itself, however. I could barely see any sign of the Grey from inside the booth—just some of the strongest concentrations of light as dim gleams, nothing of the ghostly shapes or finer energy strands. In the booth, monitors, recorders of various kinds, switches, and black boxes with mysterious acronyms stenciled on the cases were arrayed neatly on or under the counters. There was no sign of wires or other rigging I would have expected, although there were controls for the room lights and for "ambient sound." I would have loved to have a baseline reading of the room, but I didn't dare touch the switches. I'd get it from Tuckman, later.

I wondered why the Grey was all but invisible from inside the booth and if the double-thick panes of mirrored glass were somehow filtering it out. I'd noticed before that glass sometimes held the Grey at bay, or made it harder to see at least, but this seemed more filtered than usual. I was getting curious about the number of Grey oddities in this set of rooms. In the absence of a greater authority, I was the expert on the scene, but I didn't know enough to guess why things seemed… off.

I checked and double-checked, but there was nothing more to find. At least not at that moment. I gave it up and headed for my office to go through the files Tuckman had given me. I wanted some idea of their contents before the session on Wednesday.

In my tiny office in Pioneer Square, I stretched out in my chair and skimmed through Tuckman's files. I didn't have the time to dig into the details—I just wanted an overview of the project and the people involved in it. File information indicated the group had been working together since January and having remarkable success. There were two layers to the experiment: the official goal of creating and controlling a «poltergeist» through the power of the human mind, which the participants were made aware of; and the deeper goal—which Tuckman kept between himself, his assistant, and Mark Lupoldi—of studying the group's reactions, interactions, and evolution when their increasingly outrageous goals met with success. They had followed the protocols, such as they were, of the Philip experiments conducted by the Canadian group New Horizons in the 1970s. Tuckman's group at PNU jumped past the Canadian experiments' mis-starts and improved upon the techniques a bit with modern technology, mechanical and objective observation and recording, and the help of specialists in illusion and misdirection. An appendix explained the function parameters of the equipment in technical terms I couldn't decipher: leverage, nanometers per second, air resistance, impedance, induction, and so on.

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.