Spirit Legacy (18 page)

“Remember how we talked about energy in class?”

“Not likely to forget it, actually.”

“Right. Well, everything has energy, and many objects have electromagnetic energy that is measurable. That’s what the EMF detector does. Usually the kinds of things that have EMF readings are wiring, electronic devices, things like that. But there is a theory that ghosts use electromagnetic energy from the atmosphere around them in order to manifest themselves. The EMF detector can tell if there is a concentration of electromagnetic energy in an area. If we can’t trace it to any material source, then it could be a sign of paranormal activity.”

“And am I going to have to work one of these things?” I asked. “Because I inexplicably render most gadgets useless just by coming into contact with them. Kiss of death, I’m not kidding.”

Dan shifted his chair protectively toward his toys.

Pierce laughed and shook his head. “We’ll handle the equipment, don’t worry.”

“And what exactly am I supposed to handle?” I asked.

“You reel in the ghosts, girlie,” Oscar replied as he limped by.

This was what I was afraid of. Was I expected to deliver on some sort of macabre party trick? Pierce read my mind and cut in before I could respond.

“We haven’t really tested Ballard’s abilities as a medium yet. She hasn’t been aware of them long enough to thoroughly gauge them, or to understand how to get in tune with them. So she’s just going to be here as bait, so to speak. The ghosts—or this one at least—seem to be attracted to her without any real effort on her part. Her presence alone should be an advantage here.”

“We set the bait and see what bites. I like it!” Oscar cackled. Seriously, the fishing metaphors were
not
helping me separate him from Captain Ahab in my brain.

“So, then it’s just going to be luck, whether I walk into the right part of the library at the right time?” I asked. It sounded like we were leaving an awful lot up to chance.

“Well, by splitting up we’ll be able to cover more ground, have a better chance of tracking signs of activity. And the equipment will be our eyes and ears in even more locations. But still, I thought of that, so I asked Annabelle to join the group tonight. She’s coming from her shop, so she should be here any minute.”

A satisfied murmur went through the group of men, who obviously approved of this unexpected addition.

“Who’s Annabelle?” I asked.

“She’s a good friend of mine, a medium who lives locally. She’s got a pretty powerful sense, great for locating concentrations of energy,” Pierce said.

“When she hones in on a spot, there’s a damn good chance that we’ll get some action,” Iggy added. Oscar grunted his approval.

“She should be here any—” Pierce was interrupted by a sharp rap on the door. “And that’s probably her.”

Iggy got up and trotted out to let her in. He appeared moments later not with the expected Annabelle, but with….

“Sam!” I cried.

“Jess?” Sam looked even more shocked to see me than I felt to see him. For a moment we just stared at one another.

“Hey, Sam, what’s up?” Pierce asked sharply, rising from his seat.

Sam’s startled face snapped to Pierce’s and he seemed to recover. “Oh, Professor, you left these audio recorders in your office. These are the new ones that just came in. I figured you’d want to use them for the investigation,” Sam said as he handed Pierce a small cardboard box. His eyes kept flitting to me in confusion.

“Thanks, Sam, you’re right. I’d forgotten these had come in. I appreciate you running them over,” Pierce said.

“No problem. I’ll um … see you tomorrow, I guess,” Sam replied, still looking at me. I could feel my face reddening as I turned deliberately from his perplexed stare and feigned interest in a television monitor.

“Be up to my lab around 7:30 tomorrow morning at the latest. There’s going to be a lot of material to review, and I need everything set up and ready for analysis by noon,” Pierce said.

“Sure, no problem,” Sam agreed, and without another word to me, he turned on his heel and left.

Great. Yet another thing I was going to have to explain to Sam that had no logical explanation. Except the truth, of course, which was just about the least logical thing I could think of.

Just as Sam’s lanky figure disappeared around the corner, another figure took his place. It was a woman with familiar wild hair and a gypsy profile. The sight of her ejected me from my chair like an electric shock. “Oh, you have
got
to be kidding me!”

Only Dan seemed to have heard me. The rest of the team was up out of their seats to greet her. I just stood there, gaping. Annabelle was Madame Rabinski, the fortune teller from the carnival.

If my reaction was negative, it was nothing to hers. After flashing a wide toothy smile around the group of men, shaking hands and exchanging greetings, her eyes found me. As though I were a rabid pitbull instead of an aggravated co-ed, she stepped backwards at the sight of me and tried to shield herself with Iggy’s massive body. “What is this, David? What the hell is she doing here?” Annabelle shouted. Her expression was wild, and I momentarily forgot my annoyance as I realized that she was looking at me with unadulterated fear in her eyes.

It took Pierce’s startled response for me to realize that she was addressing him; I’d only ever heard him called by his last name.

“Annabelle, what … do you two know each other?” he asked.

Annabelle ignored the question and continued glaring at me. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” she demanded.

“I told you there was going to be another possible medium! That was the whole reason I wanted you here, remember? What the hell is wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with me? Why would you bring her into this?” Annabelle shot back, defensive enough to step out from behind Iggy, who looked just as lost as Pierce.

Pierce turned to me, eyebrows raised.

I found my voice, not to mention my own anger. “Yeah, we’ve met, actually. She was scamming people with tarot cards at the fall carnival.”

“
Scamming
people? How dare you—”

“—And she decided to try out some of her more theatrical tendencies on me while my roommate was getting her fortune told.” I made little quotation marks in the air, infusing my last two words with as much sarcasm as I could manage.

Annabelle opened her mouth to argue and then snapped it shut again. With her nose in the air, as though she was above addressing me again, she turned herself around to face Pierce.

“I did meet this girl at the carnival. And yes, I was giving tarot card readings, David, as you know I do. She entered my tent with her friend and completely disrupted the fields. I could hardly hear myself think.”

I snorted and rolled my eyes. She looked daggers at me.

“What do you mean?” Pierce asked. He had that familiar note of scholarly interest in his voice, the traitor.

“I
mean
, I couldn’t even pick up on the other girl. I was getting so many conflicting energies, so many life forces at once, that I couldn’t focus on a single life to read the cards for. I was getting readings that completely contradicted themselves.”

I noticed Neil perking up in interest, his pale eyes gleaming queerly.

Pierce frowned. “And you’re sure it was Jess that was causing—”

“—Yes, of course I’m sure!” Annabelle snapped. “She was all but pulsating with it! As soon as she’d left, the atmosphere was instantly cleared. I can still sense a very strong spiritual presence around her now! And it’s not pretty, David.”

Everyone was suddenly staring at me like I was something fascinating stuck to the bottom of a Petri dish.

“Professor, you’re not actually buying this, are you?” I asked, but couldn’t quite manage the proper tone of incredulity. My recent experiences were starting to give Annabelle’s words an eerie ring of truth.

“Well, I trust Annabelle, if that’s what you mean.” Pierce turned back to Annabelle, whose fiery hair was practically crackling with anger. “Annabelle, I know that strange things are happening with Jess. She does, too. That’s why she came to see me. That’s why we’ve been working together. There’s no point in running this investigation without her because she’s the reason we’re here.”

Annabelle’s eyes darted back and forth between me and Pierce, but she did not interrupt him.

“Now, if you don’t want to stay, that’s just fine. You can go, and I’m sorry if I’ve upset you. But it would be a big help to me if you stayed. Jess doesn’t understand her abilities yet, and I think you might be able to help; that you might even
want
to help, given what you’ve sensed about her.”

“Are you sure she’d accept the help of a
fraud
like me?” Annabelle sneered at me.

“I would think,” Pierce answered for me, “that she would accept the help of anyone who might be able to help her understand what’s happening to her.”

I opened my mouth to reply, but my supply of sarcasm and bitter retorts had dried up. A lot had changed since I’d first set eyes on Madame Rabinski and her battered tarot cards. Hell, my whole damn world had been turned upside down. And as much as I hated to admit it, my own personal experiences had become even less believable than any carnival trick. Did my old prejudices even make sense anymore? Could I really doubt Annabelle’s abilities after discovering my own? I felt myself deflate.

“You’re right, Professor,” I said quietly. I turned to Annabelle. “I’m sorry.”

Annabelle said nothing, but after a moment of tapping her foot and glaring, she took off her coat and threw it on a chair. “Well, who’s going to fill me in, then? Let’s get this show on the road.”

Oscar took this task on enthusiastically, launching into a description of everything they knew about Evan using Pierce’s familiar battered notebook. Iggy distracted me by requesting some data. He held up a couple of complex-looking gadgets.

“Will it hurt?” I asked

“Not unless you wrestle it away from him and beat yourself with it,” Dan said, not taking his eyes off his computer screens.

“Charming,” I muttered.

“Naw, they won’t even touch you. They only record the atmosphere around you,” Iggy promised.

He started running one of those EMF thingies up and down me like a security guard at an airport. His eyes widened as he stared at it and, with a low whistle he then recorded whatever it told him into a spreadsheet, noting the time and exact area of the building in which we were standing.

“What?” I asked nervously. “Is it bad?”

“You are a walking EMF magnet, kiddo. Off the charts,” Iggy said, looking at me like a long-anticipated Christmas gift. Then he picked up another item and held it up to show me.

“This is a thermal imaging camera. This part,” Iggy explained, holding out a device that looked like a little security camera with a handle, “is used to scan the room to measure temperatures of different objects. Then we can watch for temperature fluctuations here.” This time he showed me a little portable screen, black at the moment. “Watch this.”

He mashed a red button with his massive thumb and the screen flickered to life. It was one of the oddest images I’d ever seen. As Iggy panned the room with the little camera, the screen reflected it back, but in a crazy, psychedelic spectrum of colors.

“Trippy,” I said, watching the colors pulse and move.

“The colors represent the range of temperatures in the room,” Iggy said. “The blue end of the spectrum is cooler, and the temperature increases as the spectrum approaches red, which shows the hottest temperatures. People and other living things appear in red, because of the body heat, see? When we get an unexpected heat signature, we call that a hot spot.”

“And what does heat have to do with ghosts?” I asked.

“You’re in Pierce’s class, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, but he never mentioned anything about heat.”

“Sure, but I’ll bet he was yammerin’ on about energy,” Iggy said with another gap-toothed grin.

“Just a little,” I said.

“I don’t yammer, asshole!” Pierce shouted from across the room.

“Supersonic hearing, that one,” Neil muttered, rolling his oddly luminous eyes. I jumped at his voice; I hadn’t heard him approach us.

“Anyway,” Iggy plowed on, ignoring everyone else, “that means you’ve already heard the theory about spirits borrowing energy from their surroundings to manifest?”

“Yes.” Evan had taught me that much.

“Well, that energy can take many forms. Sometimes, it can be electrical energy, such as from wiring or batteries. Other times it can be thermal energy, or energy in the form of heat.” He tapped the glass of the screen again as he scanned the room and stopped on the strange colorful image of Dan sitting at command central. He appeared in red, which feathered to orange and yellow, as did many of the machines around him. “See? Living people have lots of thermal energy. So do electronics and lots of other things, besides. A spirit can sap that energy in order to show itself.”

I nodded my understanding, but suppressed a shiver. When I thought of the icy coldness of Evan’s touch, I couldn’t imagine heat having anything to do with it. I didn’t mention this to Iggy, however, and let him carry on with his thermal do-hickey.

Finally, our initial data was gathered and it was time to begin.

§

I could feel my nerves starting to jangle, like an out-of-tune piano some toddler was banging the hell out of. I gathered with the rest of the group, silhouetted in the slightly greenish glow of the night vision monitors. Pierce was reviewing everyone’s instructions.

“Okay, kids, here’s the deal. First of all, we need to remember that Jess has never done this before, so we need to explain everything, be explicit in our instructions, so she feels comfortable.”

Pierce nodded at me in a reassuring way. I smiled weakly.

“We’re splitting up into pairs so that no one is ever investigating alone. All pairs will keep in touch with one another using walkie-talkies. Don’t put it down anywhere, or you’ll be stuck without com and it will be harder to find you if you need … something,” Pierce edited. I was pretty sure he was going to say “help”.

Dan started tossing walkie-talkies around the circle. He did not throw one to me. Maybe he figured I wouldn’t be able to catch it.

Pierce deftly caught his radio and continued, “We’ll be covering as many floors of the library simultaneously as we can. Oscar and Neil, you take the basement. Iggy, you and Annabelle take the ground level starting in the main reading room. Jess and I will take the upper floor, including the stacks where the first sighting occurred. Dan will take the first shift at central command and watch the monitors. All suspicious hits, or anything Annabelle picks up on, should be radioed directly to me so we can get Jess over there as quickly as possible.”

For some reason, Annabelle glowered at me. Bristling, I glared right back at her. What the hell was that, some kind of medium jealousy? I bet she was usually the one they radioed for in these situations. Well, she was welcome to it. I opened my mouth to tell her so, but just as quickly as the expression had appeared, she neutralized it. She was now looking over at Pierce, who was addressing her.

“Annabelle, did Oscar go over the entire file on Evan Corbett?”

Annabelle nodded her mane regally.

“So, you know what you’re looking for?”

“Yes.”

“Great. And please remember everyone, we can’t rule out other spirit activity. This library is old and this is not the first reported sighting this campus has had, not by a long shot. Keep eyes and ears peeled and stay safe. Every group make sure to take along an audio recorder, thermal, and camcorder. Every team member should have a flashlight.”

Pierce handed a flashlight and the audio recorder to me. It was identical to the one he’d given me to test out EVPs in my dorm room, which reminded me that I still had the thing in my pocket.

“Oh, here, Professor. There’s some stuff for you to go through on this,” I told him, handing it over.

“Great! Do you think you got anything?” he asked, depositing it onto the tech table.