Chapter 15

The whole point of all the “never have I ever” rigmarole we’d just gone through was to shut Jibben up. But now we all wanted his story. And so, naturally, we let all those awkward questions and answers go totally to waste and allowed him to speak.

“We moved into the house when I was thirteen. I remember it well because it was my birthday, and my parents claimed the house was my birthday present. Obviously, they’d just been too busy and preoccupied to shop for a gift. But a boy that age gets a real charge out of thinking the place belongs to him—even if that house turns out to have a second mortgage on it and is essentially worthless….” He twitched a few times, then fell silent.

Alisha, being the sensationalist junkie she was, couldn’t let Jibben leave it at that. “Was it a spooky old Victorian with boards on the windows? A gnarly tree out front with a swing that moves by itself? A scary basement full of a dead kid’s toys and a bunch of broken dolls with eyes that just stare right through you?”

Jibben blinked. “No, none of that. It was a 1960s split level with an avocado green kitchen and wall-to-wall shag carpeting.”

Alisha shuddered. “Well, that’s nearly as bad.”

Jibben said, “I had a funny feeling about the house, but I just chalked it up to my excitement. It was my house, after all—at least as far as I was concerned. Of course I was excited. But soon enough, strange things began to happen. At first, it was just small things, like finding my homework slid down behind my desk, or coming across an open door that I was sure I’d closed. Nothing too out of the ordinary, but enough to make me feel uneasy. Then, it got worse.”

He took a deep, shuddering breath and his eye gave a spasm that made the rest of us wince.

“Keys started going missing. It was as if the house didn’t want us to leave.”

“I take it back,” Alisha said. “The shag carpet wasn’t the scariest part of the story.”

Jibben seemed surprised. “You believe me?”

“Why wouldn’t I? Stuff like that happens on Psychic Mysteries all the time.” When Jibben scoffed, Alisha plowed ahead. “No, hear me out. New house. Just moved. Stressful situation. And you were thirteen—an adolescent. Just the right age for a poltergeist to attach itself to you.”

And just the same age I’d first spotted a transparent guy in a bloody hockey jersey staring at me through the window of my junior high social studies class.

Alisha leaned forward, her eyes wide with excitement, asking, “What did you do?”

Jibben shrugged. “What could I do? I was just a kid. I tried to tell my parents what was going on, but they didn’t believe me. They said I was just having nightmares.”

He’d likely dodged a bullet. After all, my foster father Harold hadn’t necessarily believed some bloody guy was peeping into my classroom, but he definitely thought something was wrong with me. The resulting trip to Dr. Kleinman ended up with me never seeing him or Mama Brill again…and moving into a new house of my own.

And no one tried to bullshit me into thinking it was my birthday present.

“The experience left a mark on me, to be sure,” Jibben said. “It would be a few years before the Ganzfeld Reports came out—before any hard evidence existed. And by then I’d made it my life’s work to prove the unprovable. Unfortunately…I’ve never been able to document a poltergeist. In fact, there’s not a bit of mediumship evidence to support their existence.”

He cut his eyes to me, as if hoping I might contradict him. A new finding of some kind, a twist on an existing theory. But all of my work was right there on the FPMP servers for anyone with proper clearance to see—not counting the stuff I got up to with Jacob, obviously, but everything that happened on the clock. So, Jibben would be just as up to date on any new findings on nonphysical entities as I was.

“This is a discussion for another time,” Jacob said, since it was his job as ranking agent to handle the scene—and although Jibben was talking in vagaries, things were getting too close to classified for comfort.

So, of course, Alisha was having none of it. “Another time? Like when? Ain’t like we got nothing better to do than sit around and tell our ghost stories.”

Smooth operator that he was, Jacob took the opportunity to turn things around on her. “Well, then, how about you take a turn?”

“All right,” she said loftily—and grabbed the emergency lantern to cast an uplight on her face as she settled in for a dramatic ghost story. “Picture this: a crummy old apartment complex, you know the type, where the walls are covered in graffiti and folks mind their own business.

“I was up past my bedtime, reading, when I heard footsteps coming from the apartment upstairs. Nothing strange about that—you hear all kinds of stuff in those kinds of places. But they were so damn loud—like Frankenstein was up there stomping around in his platform shoes. I was hoping it was a one-time thing, but it happened the next night, and the next.

“Always at midnight.

“I was scared to tell Momma, of course—’cause I wasn’t supposed to be up that late. But eventually, I got so sick of the noise, I went and got her at 11:55 and had her sit in my room and listen. And sure enough, soon as midnight hit, the stomping started up again.”

She paused for effect, her gaze steady on the rest of the group. “So, you know what my momma did? She got fed up and went flying upstairs to tell them to shut the hell up. But when she got there, the apartment was empty. No people, no furniture. Nothing.”

We sat with that story for a long moment, then Jibben said, “But…the door was unlocked?”

“I dunno. I guess it must’ve been.”

“So someone could have been walking around up there. You said yourself, it was an apartment complex. Other people lived there. It wasn’t as if you had a single-family home and observed inexplicable noises coming from the attic. And the fact that it happened on a routine makes it more likely that it was tied to some other event—a person coming home from work, for instance. Or even an OCD sufferer performing some sort of ritual—”

“It figures,” Alisha snapped. “I heard out your story, gave you the benefit of the doubt and everything. But then I tell you mine, and suddenly I’m making it all up.”

“That’s not what anyone is saying,” Jibben insisted. “But Occam’s razor does suggest that the simplest explanation is also the most likely.”

“Yeah? I don’t know about him, but I’ll bet Luther Hinman wouldn’t be so quick to back you up. I was in a stressful situation, same as you. I was thirteen, same as you. And Luther Hinman always said that’s exactly when a poltergeist can latch on!”

Frankly, I wouldn’t put much stock in conclusions drawn by any of the pre-Ganzfeld psychic researchers, but I was in the unique position of seeing both sides of Alisha’s poltergeist situation. While my own psychic powers had reared their head at puberty, I’d never known a ghost to make enough noise to bother anyone but a medium. Alisha’s mom had heard it too, though. And while she might very well be psychic herself…the ex-cop in me was a lot more apt to believe that some idiot was just stomping around the upstairs apartment for reasons apparent only to them.

Hoping to smooth over the ill-will, Jacob said, “Even with all the recent advances in psychic research, there’s plenty they still don’t know. Was there anything else that led you to believe this was a poltergeist?”

But Alisha had decided the “old white dudes” were just humoring her now, and she put down the emergency lantern in a snit, crossed her arms, and glared pointedly at the wall.

Jacob sighed heavily and gave his forehead a swipe with the sleeve of the hazmat suit. By the dubious light of the emergency lantern, he was glistening. I stood up and said, “Now I gotta use the can—” hoping that Jacob would come along, and a brief walk with me down the hall would let him air out some.

But Alisha snapped out of her bad mood and said, “I’ll come with you.”

Well, what could I say to that—without looking like a total asshole, anyhow? I’d have to start limiting my trips to the bathroom, given the way my flashlight beam started flickering the second I turned it on. Luckily, once we were within eyeshot of the can, the flashlight rallied. I probably should’ve just come out and said I wanted to talk to my husband alone. But that might make the other two wonder what I had to say that couldn’t be said in front of them.

And I couldn’t have gone around announcing to the room in general that I wondered if Alisha was really a random delivery driver…or something more.

Alisha nodded at the bathroom door. “I’ll go first. Unless you need to go bad.”

I waved her off. “I just wanted some air. I’m not what you’d call a people person…and I wasn’t in the mood for a lecture on squandering our limited resources by taking an unnecessary walk.”

“I was thinking, anyway—this is a big place, there must be more than one washroom on this floor. Right?”

“I guess.”

“Maybe this one could be the official Ladies’ Room. You know. So I can leave out my tampons—”

“Yeah, say no more. Fine. It’s yours.”

As Alisha ducked into her own newly-christened private bathroom, I considered the slim possibility that she wasn’t lying. That she just happened to be in the thick of things when the power went out. That it was entirely random all this occurred while we were severely short-staffed. And that she actually did need to pee every half hour.

My current theory? We were being tested to see how strictly we’d adhere to emergency protocol in a dire situation, and she was doing some kind of reporting in the can…maybe on the phone that just so happened to work when the rest of ours were down.

But who was pulling her strings? That was the question.

If it was Laura Kim, Jacob would’ve caught wind of the plan in the Oversight Division. So it must be National. And I liked them even less than I liked the thought of being accosted by a surprise tampon.

The only comfort I took was that Jacob wasn’t the intended target, since no one could have predicted he’d turn around from the airport and come back. Frankly, since I could’ve done my lab walkthrough at any point during the day, I doubted I was the target, either.

That left Jibben under the microscope. Tough break for him. But I’d need to watch myself if I didn’t want to get caught up in whatever mess he was in.

At least my flashlight was holding up. It was nothing like the whopping 2-pound maglite bruising my hip, back when I walked a beat. This thing was hardly bigger than my palm. But for all that it rode along in my pocket as unobtrusively as a pack of gum, the LED bulb cast a pretty good light, and it’s helped me out of plenty of scrapes. But while I changed the battery on the regular, you never know. Sometimes you get a bad one right out of the package.

…as evidenced by the fact that it started flickering again two minutes later on our way back down the hall. But at least we were within sight of containment when it happened—and at least it was just a flicker, and not a total flashlight failure, since the door to that room was sealed so tightly, not even a hint of light could squeak out around it.

I quickly discovered that seal was doing Jacob no favors. He’d chucked off the clean suit, much to Jibben’s consternation, and was sweating through his polo shirt. I found the room stuffy, no doubt, but nothing I couldn’t handle—but Jacob has always run a lot hotter than me.

Lucky for him he had on those cargo shorts, and not a wool suit.

“The crates are fiberglass,” he was saying, “and they’re a good size. The lids are removable. So we stack them up at the foot of the emergency exit and walk across to the stairs.”

“What about Jibben’s leg?” I asked.

“I want no part of this,” he said. “Agent Marks outranks me. And if he insists on this fool’s errand—which may very well get him electrocuted—there’s nothing I can do to stop him. But unless he orders me to go, I’m staying put right where I am and waiting for rescue. Which we should all be doing.”

“You don’t have to come,” Jacob said. “I’ll send help.”

Jibben twitched, a sudden, awkward blink. “I’m sure it’s already on the way. Unless you plan on single-handedly restoring the power grid, forging your way out of here accomplishes nothing at all but putting you at risk.”

Well, that’s where Jibben was wrong. Because extricating himself from this mess would also bring Jacob one step closer to Clayton.