Chapter 31

“Hold on,” Jibben said. “Before we let our imaginations run away with us, bear in mind that when I removed Alisha’s saline drip, it was still half full, and these are likely our own footprints.”

Occam might have agreed that Jibben’s idea was a sensible one…had the IV bag not been over by the bathroom.

Jacob, meanwhile, was looking intently at the rotational fan gizmo. Tell the guy not to do something, and sure enough, it’s the very next thing he does. Lucky for him no one else was paying attention to him trying to move something with his mind. I flashed a hand through his line of sight to get his attention, and he looked at me, startled. Though not chagrined.

Of course not.

But then he exonerated himself by saying, “What if there was more saline somewhere in the shipment and we didn’t get it all the first time around?”

They’d packed up everything, right down to the welcome mat, so why not additional saline?

We sifted through the junk, and eventually we came upon a bunch of plastic two-gallon containers—all of them crusty and long-ago dried up.

Alisha crossed her arms and let out a dramatic sigh. “Do I really gotta be the one to say it?” All eyes turned to her. “Fine. It’s Dr. Hinman. Y’all threw shade on him and he blew up the damn light. And you’re not using any of his stuff for real, like you’re supposed to. You’re just screwing around with it like a bunch of kids playing with toys.”

If Luther Hinman was haunting his gear, he could save us all a lot of trouble by showing himself and telling me what the hell he was hoping to accomplish. Then again, being dead never made anyone rational if they weren’t that way to begin with.

Plus, if Hinman’s whole focus was proving telekinesis, maybe he’d never given much thought to ghosts. Back in his time, the whole talents-and-levels framework didn’t exist—and mediums were just as likely as not to be charlatans looking to scam a quick buck from a grieving relative.

Maybe this whole time he’d been trying to communicate in the only way he knew how.

By moving stuff.

“We weren’t screwing around,” I said—partly to Alisha, partly to anyone else who might be listening. “We were trying out the equipment with an open mind.”

“Do I keep an open mind when I come home and find Kelvin using my good plates like a Frisbee? Hell, no. If you want to try it all out, then use it the way it was supposed to be used.”

“A valid point,” Jibben agreed. “However, we don’t know the particulars of the experiments.”

Alisha groaned. “You got Dr. Hinman’s whole damn office, all the way down to his paper clips. You mean to say nothing here’s gonna tell you how it was all done?”

We got to work combing through the shipment. It was a lot of stuff, and without the emergency lantern, it was slow going. Whereas before we were looking for gear, this time we were looking for paperwork. And since Hinman’s whole operation was pre-digital, there were reams to go through. Most of it was unremarkable—financials, inventories, tedious blue-bar reports—but then Jacob turned up a series of heavy, cloth-bound registers that were specifically used for recording the experiments.

We pored over them as best we could in the flickering light. Alisha and Jibben scanned random registers for the saline tank. Jacob and I went chronological and started at the beginning.

Luther Hinman’s telekinesis journey began with a ping pong ball. According to his notes, it was the perfect ratio of mass to weight to make “psychic energy transference” visible to the naked eye.

Unfortunately, they also tended to roll away for normal physical reasons too, so he started building environments to constrain the motion.

Critics might’ve called it pseudoscience, but seeing how he controlled for every possible detail—heck, seeing the experiments themselves—I thought his methods were a lot better than locking a shivering, exhausted kid in a room all night with a dead woman’s wig.

“It’s pretty benign,” Jacob said, and I realized that while I was casting myself in the role of the lab rat, he’d steeled himself to bear witness to some horrible experiments that could have been inflicted on his grandmother—things she did in the spirit of “patriotism” that she took with her to the grave.

It was a relief not to find anything like that here. Our situation was psychologically damaging enough as it was.

According to the records, things really picked up when Gordon Tertz joined the Argus team. With limited funds to entice potential subjects, he and Hinman did most of their experimenting on each other. Tertz seemed to have potential—though his big claim to fame was making the ping pong ball that was dropped by an automated claw bounce in a specific direction. They tried rolling the ball in patterns and coaxing it through a maze, without any luck.

Maybe TKs were better at redirecting force than creating it?

Anyway, one of their experiments involved floating the ball on the surface of water instead of rolling it. That yielded nothing—nothing except the idea of putting salt in the water.

“We found something,” Jacob said, and Jibben and Alisha crowded around.

We paged through, finding iteration after iteration of the Saline Transference Environment. They tried ping pong balls. They tried feathers. They tried balsa wood and sponges and ball bearings. They even tried fish—though those were quickly abandoned as having too many variables to control for.

Eventually, they tried lots of test subjects, too—college kids and minimum wage workers who were willing to trade their evenings for five bucks and a couple of slices of pizza. But Gordon Tertz was the only one who showed any promise.

In the end, Hinman theorized that the motion itself wouldn’t necessarily take place in the solution—the saline was just a vehicle to amplify the telekinetic force.

That’s when they came up with the Rotational Indicator. It hadn’t been made to just sit on a table—it was supposed to be used in the saline. The weighted base would anchor the device, while the long stem kept the propeller out of the water.

Jibben said, “We have access to everything we need to recreate the experiment.”

Whether or not that would appease the late Hinman was anyone’s guess. But it beat just sitting in containment and waiting for our flashlight bulbs to explode.

We had ample amounts of fresh saline, thanks to the sensory deprivation tank down the hall. Once upon a time, Dr. K had offered to let me take it for a spin. At the thought of being sealed into a freaking coffin full of saltwater, I’d refused—so colorfully, he’d never offered again.

While Jibben and Jacob figured out how to transport the fluid, Alisha and I assembled the rest of the gear, following the diagram to the millimeter. (Good thing Alisha knew what all those little ticks and lines on the ruler meant.) The room was silent, filled only with the soft sound of our focused work, though once the fish tank was on its usual folding table, the mechanical stopwatch was wound up, and the Rotational Indicator was in place, there wasn’t a whole lot else for us to do.

Alisha nudged the fan with her fingertip and gave it a little spin. “I wish I could see Kelvin throwing my good plates across the backyard right now. I might not even whoop his ass.”

And I wished I could watch Clayton roll his eyes as if whatever I’d just said was the dumbest thing ever known to man.

I’d always thought of putting up with Clayton as the cost of marrying a man with a family. Frankly, I’d considered myself lucky I was just gaining a nephew and not a stepson. Especially now that he’d given up soccer to pursue the trumpet—though while the instrument was way more obnoxious, the amount of times I’d need to travel to Wisconsin to watch the kid perform were blessedly few.

I swallowed past a lump in my throat, wishing I was in my car, cruising up the 90 with Jacob at my side.

The sound of many wheels coming down the hall brought me back to the present—Jibben on his office chair, and Jacob pushing a handcart holding a bunch of five-gallon buckets. Jibben used something called a hydrometer—even more convoluted than a ruler—and futzed with the dilution of the saline until he was happy with the numbers.

Soon, even by the paltry light of a couple of flashlight beams, we had Hinman’s experiment set up to the T.

We all fell silent, watching.

The propeller did nothing.

Jibben said, “I suppose it’s not enough to just set up the experiment. We need to run it. And since Agent Bayne theorizes that I’m the one who needs to be tested…” he rolled up the sleeve of his unbandaged arm. A bit of broken glass clinked out. “Let’s begin.”

Standing gingerly on one leg, he stuck his arm into the saline—and hissed. “Apparently I’ve got some cuts I wasn’t aware of.”

I’d wager he was plenty aware now.

So as not to potentially contaminate the experiment, Jacob and Alisha headed for the hall. I stood by with the stopwatch.

The propeller did more nothing.

“Time,” I said.

As Jacob and Alisha filed back into the room, Jibben pulled his arm out of the solution and dunked it into a bucket of clear water. “Don’t be so surprised at the results,” he told me. “I’ve never scored anything other than average on a psych test—and our current methods are a lot more sophisticated than this.”

I’d felt the zap when my white light hit him, but it wasn’t worth arguing. The less involved in telekinetics I got, the better.

“Hold up,” Alisha said. “Y’all need to see this.” She had a ledger open on one of the upended crates, and she motioned us over. “This other book takes up where the last one ended—and they added something more to the setup.”

I read over her shoulder and puzzled over a pair of lines, a plus or minus, and some numbers.

Jibben scanned the page, twitched, and said, “What they added was an electrical current.”

I took back the thought about Camp Hell. Maybe I’d been locked in that room all night while they showed me the dead woman’s wig over and over, but at least no one was shocking me while they did it.

Now the saline tank seemed less like a benign experiment and more like a torture device.

And as dread dawned and we all turned to look at it….

The propeller did a lazy rotation.