Sinister Entity (5 page)

She was disappointed that she didn’t get any disembodied voices or EVPs. She asked the EB for its name about a dozen times, but came up empty.
Damn.
She needed that name.
 

During her short tenure as a paranormal explorer, she’d discovered a welcome side effect to her curiosity. If people were at the end of their rope and just wanted a haunting to stop, Jessica could, somehow, put an end to it. How and why it worked was still a mystery to her, but she suspected it had a lot to do with what happened to her when she was little.
 

Before her eyes started to cross, Jessica took a break, grabbed a Gatorade from the fridge, talked to Eve for a bit about going shopping tomorrow for the dresses they’d need for a cousin’s wedding in the fall, and headed back to her room. Swedey had already replied to her email and was busy at work on the changes to the site. Man, he was quick.
 

She wondered what he was like in person. All she knew about him she got from texts, emails, the occasional phone call and his website. He stayed off social media, preferring to keep the details of his private life to himself. In that regard, they were kindred spirits.
 

Now was as good a time as any to go through the website’s inbox.
 

“Crazy, looney, horny, demented, oh, that’s a maybe,” she said as she scanned the subject lines and filed them into various folders to be read or deleted later.
 

She stopped at one that read,
I WOULD LIKE TO ARRANGE A MEETING

“Obviously lonely, possibly demented, definitely delusional.”

Before she could cast it to the deleted file, she accidentally hit the wrong key and opened it.
 

Hello Ms. Backman. My name is Eddie Daniel Home. I was wondering if I could possibly meet with you some day, in the public place of your choice and with as many people as you feel comfortable bringing. I’m in the process of moving to New York from Durham, North Carolina, where I’ve spent the majority of the past year at the Rhine Research Center.

Jessica read the rest, and went back to the beginning to read it again.
 

Ms. Backman
. How the hell did he know her name? She’d always been careful to the point of total paranoia with the website. She only referred to herself as the
EB Explorer
. There was never mention of her real name.
 

Eddie Daniel Home. There was something familiar about his name. She knew full well what the Rhine Research Center was about.
 

Intrigue and concern did a two-step in her head.
 

She printed the email, posted it on the whiteboard above her desk and went back to reviewing the audio recordings. Her clients were more important at the moment than a meeting request from someone she may or may not have known.
 

Her voice filled the headphones.
 

“My name is Jessica. What’s yours?”

She amped up the volume, hoping for a reply.
 

Chapter Eight

Eddie Home kicked the door open to his apartment while juggling a pizza box in one hand and a shopping bag in the other. His car keys, dangling from his mouth, were dropped with a flick of his head onto the kitchen counter with a heavy clang. He put the pizza box on the stovetop and plopped the bag onto the kitchen table, his bladder aching. A tiny avalanche of books slid out of the bag as it tipped to one side.
 

On the way to the bathroom, he stopped at his laptop that he’d left perched on the arm of the easy chair he’d found at a nearby garage sale and powered it up. By the time he was finished with his pit-stop, his email was polling for new messages.
 

“Come on, bring me good news.”

In a way, Eddie was glad that his abilities had their limitations. He couldn’t imagine how mundane life would be if he could know every event before it happened, read every thought, foretell every move. A life without anticipation, wonder, hope and even confusion just wouldn’t be a life worth living.
 

Only one new email came through—a quick message from his mother who was an entire country away and living the renewed life of a happy divorcee. He’d read her email later, once he’d had a chance to eat, digest and mentally prepare himself. Only God knew what she was into now, or even worse, who. After discovering his father’s lifetime of affairs, she had ceremoniously kicked him to the curb and was going through boyfriends like a high school cheerleader. Eddie was happy that
she
was finally happy, but he really didn’t need any details about her blossoming love life.
 

Conversely, since the divorce, his father was, for the first time in over twenty years,
not
seeing someone and wallowing in his misery. The Home House of Dysfunction was yet another reason he took the scholarship from The Rhine to attend Duke and move three thousand miles away. The year before he’d left for Duke had been an absolute nightmare and one he would like to forget. Jesus, the fighting was epic. Both made vain attempts to recruit him to their side, even resorting to bribery. How many kids were given hotel money on prom night by their parents? Just thinking about it gave birth to an incessant pounding in his temples.
 

There’d been enough other things that caused his head to ache. Connecting with spirits could be unpleasant. Parental jockeying for position far exceeded psychic brain strain.
 

He made a mental note to call his dad after he emailed his mother. Eddie often wondered if his father’s prolonged depression was brought on by the divorce or the rapid decline of his own psychic abilities. Was this a glimpse at his own fate? The thought kept him awake many nights.
 

He grabbed a slice of pepperoni pizza and a paper towel and sat at the table to go through the books he had purchased at a used bookstore on Fordham Road that specialized in, of all things, New Age
and
mystery paperbacks. His one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx was a short bus ride from the various shops that dotted the multicultural landscape of Fordham Road. He’d never experienced anything like it. His first week there, he’d sampled cuisine from Jamaica, India, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Morocco until his stomach, unaccustomed to the assault of different spices and sauces, threw up the white flag. Hence the pizza, made with a chewy, thick crust that laid waste to anything he’d ever had before in North Carolina or back home in San Francisco.
 

Most of the books were crime novels by Robert Parker, Robert Crais, Richard Stark and Elmore Leonard, along with a handful of paperbacks dealing with various forms of meditation. Dr. Froemer had introduced him to the practice as a way to not only hone his abilities, but also to strengthen them enough so he didn’t experience the same withering away of talent that almost every psychic eventually suffered. Daily meditation practice helped him in more ways than he’d ever dreamed it could.
 

After gobbling up three slices, he moved into the living room with one of the books, a yellow-paged, moldy-smelling text about transcendental meditation, and sat on the living room floor. The sun had set and an unexpected cool breeze drifted into his window.
 

His mind wandered and he recalled the very first time he had summoned the courage to speak to the dead. He’d been seeing spirits since he was a baby, but lived in terror of the daily visitations until he turned eight. On the night of his eighth birthday, his stomach filled with ice cream cake and cheese puffs, an old woman hovered over him as he lay in bed. Her long, gray hair fanned out around her deep-lined face as if she were floating in water. Her trembling, matchstick arms reached down to him, dangling inches before his face. His first reaction was to scream.
 

But no, he was eight now. It was time to stop being a baby.
 

Besides, she looked so sad, so lost. So he asked, “Are you lonely?”

The old woman’s face softened, and without moving her lips, he heard her say, “My son said he will see me on Tuesday.”

The question, the answer, both forged a connection that allowed him to see into her soul, to read her living past, and to know that her body was decaying in her living room chair, waiting for her son’s monthly visit.
 

It had terrified and fascinated him at the same time. In an instant, he knew her name and where she lived and he anxiously told his father the next day. She was local, and his father said the best thing to do was read the paper each day and see if he was right. In the meantime, if she appeared again, Eddie needed to tell her she was dead, and encourage her to move on. She would have to wait some time to see her son again.
 

Her death was noted in a very small column in the regional section of the paper three days later. And when she came to him, again hovering over his bed, he did as his father had told him. She nodded, and faded away.

His life had never been the same since.
 

Eddie read the first chapter while sitting on the floor with his back against the easy chair’s leg rest. Taking steady, slow breaths, he put the book down and assumed the lotus position.
 

He took his time, giving attention to the areas of stress in his body and releasing the tension, all the while breathing naturally, counting each breath to both focus and clear his mind of unwanted distractions. He continued until he lost count, the breaths taking over completely, bringing him into a deeper state of mind.
 

Feeling the nothing and everything that filled his earthbound vessel, he remained still, only his stomach moving in and out with each breath, his back and neck straight and hands atop one another in his lap. If there were noises outside, he didn’t notice them. He was where he needed to be.
 

Eddie nudged his mind to concentrate on the energy of the being that had first reached out to him six months ago. The contact then had been all too brief and fragile as gossamer thread. With great effort, he’d worked daily on strengthening the signal, each interaction fortifying the ethereal bond between them.
 

The need to find the girl was overwhelming. Everything in his psi-enhanced consciousness screamed that she needed his help. So did the spirit of the man that had found him in the transom between life and death.

He thought moving to New York would supercharge the signal, a means of hardwiring himself into the direct life source of his netherworld contact. He knew this particular spirit was torn between two entry points in the plane of the living, and communication was never easy. But he had guessed correctly that being here would improve their connection.
 

His breathing slowed as his heartbeat calmed, until they were on a one-to-one basis—a beat, flushing blood through his semi-dormant system, followed by a short breath, with long periods of stillness between each. To the casual observer, he would look the part of the upright corpse. His skin paled and not a single muscle so much as twitched.
 

It was a full hour before anything happened. Eddie’s conscious mind drifted in a sea of nihility, his hold on the here and now tethered by the thinnest of filaments. And then, unknown to even him, his lips began to move in whispered conversation. Disjointed words flowed from his lips, his physical body a dozen steps behind the flurry of activity occurring in his meditative mind.
 

His soft ramblings were the only sound in the apartment, weighed with the eerie undertones of a living haunt. It wasn’t until his shoulders slumped forward that he ceased speaking, slowly lowering his head into his hands so he could rub away the arctic chill that had enveloped his head. He rested a moment, regulating his breath so he could revive his slumbering senses.
 

Eddie rolled onto his hands and knees with a soft groan and pushed himself off the floor. Shivering, he walked into the bedroom, wincing from the pins and needles in his feet and legs, and wrapped himself in his comforter. He looked at the clock by his bedside.
 

Two hours. A new record.
 

But it was worth it.
 

After warming up, he went back to the living room and woke his sleeping laptop. He carried it with him to the kitchen and turned on the oven to continue warming himself up, despite the fact it was summer and all of the windows were closed. He opened his email and typed, not all of the words his own.
 

Chapter Nine

A week after Jessica’s last night at the McCammon house, she had completed reviewing all of the video and audio recordings and couldn’t wait to show Tim and Kristen McCammon everything she had caught. This was the tricky part of the job because she was never sure how the person living in the affected home would react. The last thing she wanted to do was scare them any more than they already were, especially with three young daughters who were jumping at every noise. She was a strong believer that knowledge was power. She needed to give them that strength, and rid them of the EB that was plaguing their home.
 

When her best friend Angela Bastiani once asked her if she went into a home looking to debunk the claims of the paranormal like all of the people on TV went about their business—and wasn’t that what made them so credible?—Jess had laughed.