Kat Richardson - Vanished

“Oh. My towel cupboard fell over. It kept doing that. I even had it screwed to the floor for a while, but it still fell over. So I swapped it with a chair and now that falls over. Whatever’s in that spot next to the wall always falls over or falls down about ten seconds after the crashing noise and then the sound of something invisible falling down.”

“Have you tried leaving the space empty?”

“It’s a pretty small room. I did try that, but things kept getting shoved over there to get them out of the way. And the noises happened anyway, even when there was nothing in the area.”

That was a bit unusual.

“Is it the same noise every time?”

“Oh, yes. Identical. Like a car screeching to a violent halt, and then something being thrown on the floor.”

“Does it generally happen at the same time of day?”

“No. It’s not regular. It just. happens. It can be hard to work with. But it doesn’t happen very often and sometimes it doesn’t happen for weeks or months. Then it’ll happen a lot for a while, and then stop again. Not predictable at all. It’s been more active lately, so I’m hoping it will stop again soon.”

Sounded like Dad had been kicking up a fuss. I wondered what else he got up to, why I hadn’t been able to see him, and what Christelle was doing while all this went on. Except for my truncated conversation with Christelle, the office in the Grey had been silent.

“What other phenomena occur?” I asked, sticking to the immediate topic.

Paul thought and then shrugged. “Nothing. That’s the whole thing. Just the hot spot, the noises, and the things falling down.”

“Has anyone seen any shapes, unexplained shadows? Heard voices or other sounds in the area? Seen or thought they saw something move? Maybe in the dressing room mirror?”

He shook his head. “None of that. Just what I described.”

He didn’t take the prompt. A lot of people will say yes to such a list to make the investigator happy. It’s a trick of frauds and true believers to suggest phenomena and then claim the description came spontaneously from the witness. Some people don’t even realize they do it, so compelling is their desire for confirmation or justification. But it was strange that no one had observed any such manifestations; what Paul described and what I’d seen were more like half a haunting. It’s unusual for such strong phenomena to have no accompanying features like corner-of-the-eye visions or voices. The falling objects was classic, but it was pretty small beer compared to the sound and its increasing frequency.

“I’d like to see the room for myself,” I said.

Paul put down his drink and glanced at his father. Then he looked back at me. “We can go now, if you want. I can get back to the game later—the guild can do without me for a while.”

I thought Sandros’s jaw would detach and thump to the carpeted floor from shock along with his eyeballs, like something from a Depression-era Warner Brothers cartoon. “You want to go out? Now?”

Paul’s shoulders hunched a little and his eyes widened, as if he were much younger. “Yeah. Is that OK, Dad? It’s not that late, but I don’t want to leave you all by yourself if you don’t want—”

“No, no! I’m all right on my own. Go on, take the lady to the office.” Then he caught himself and added, “But no hanky-panky, right?” He shot a look at me and nodded with his brows raised.

“Right, Dad,” Paul replied, laughing.

I nodded, a little surprised myself. “It’s fine with me if you two don’t mind.”

We left our drinks on the table and headed outside again within moments. Sandros stayed behind, but he did watch us from the doorway, like a protective father.

Paul looked a little embarrassed but said nothing as we headed for his haunted office.

The real office was creepy at night, more so than its Grey counterpart. There were no windows except on the back wall that faced an alley, and the dance studio had closed for the day, leaving a hollow sound in the shadow-drenched space. The Grey was still uncharacteristically silent.

Paul Arkmanian unlocked the front door and we walked into his reception area. Ghostly walls made a mist maze in the current space. We walked deeper into the chiropractic office and I searched both the Grey and the normal for any helpful signs. I’d have to be alone in the treatment room long enough to slip into the right bit of the past. I began looking for opportunities to send Paul in another direction the moment we were past the front desk.

We passed through a spectral wall—the memory of the wall that had once divided my father’s office from his neighbor’s. I felt cold sweep over me as we stepped through and then a blast of heat as we stopped at the current door marked “2.” Paul glanced at me and then at the door.

“This is it. Are you sure you want to go in at night like this?” He glanced around and hunched his shoulders as if he were cold. “I never thought this was a spooky place before, but now it does seem haunted. I guess it’s just the light. ”

I shivered, feeling something tremble at the edge of the Grey, sending ripples through the thin, silvery world. I hoped that wasn’t what I thought. I looked at Paul and he seemed very far away, as if the mist of the Grey was a concave lens. Sweat formed in the small of my back from the strange heat coming out of the room.

“You might not want to go in with me. It might mess up the feel of the room to have two of us in there at once.”

“I’d feel funny about that. Can you leave the door open?”

What a pain. “Sure.” I’d have to maneuver into a place he couldn’t observe from the doorway before I tried to get into the layers of history. I took my phone out of my pocket and started into the room.

“What’s that for?”

“The cell phone antenna sometimes picks up electrical anomalies caused by ghosts. If I have the phone in the right mode, it will make noise when I’m near one.” Not entirely untrue but generally useless. Ditto using the tiny camera to catch the lingering Grey impressions of ghosts passing through the glass; the rice-grain-sized lens was too low-quality to capture any images worth the effort. I didn’t have any other props for my role as ghost hunter, but the phone would do if my line of fast talk was good enough.

Apparently it was, since Arkmanian nodded and stood back from the door to let me into the room. I stepped into my father’s old office and halted with a jerk as the heat hit in earnest—it was like being swatted with a flaming bat. Then I heard the noise, like a runaway train rushing toward me. The layers of time heaved and rippled, a storm-racked sea of history battering the walls of the room as the screeching sound of something huge bearing down grew louder and closer.

“That’s it! That’s the sound!” Paul cried out, twitching back a couple of steps.

I bolted sideways into the blind side of the doorway, putting out my hand for the cold, slicing edges of the temporaclines. One of them stabbed at my fingers with fiery knives. I was shocked: Usually temporaclines feel cold as sheets of ice to me. I reached for it and shoved the layers open, sliding into the slice of history.

The room—Dad’s personal office—hit me hard. It was a disaster of splattered blood and frenzy. Papers were thrown on the desk and strewn on the floor. Books, houseplants, furniture were all tossed about as if the room had been shaken by a giant hand and then drizzled with gore. The center of the room was nothing: a black void surrounded by a fence of flaming energy. Stars and lightning bolts of power shot through the space around the hole in history. Queasy and frightened, I walked toward it.