Poltergeist (3 page)

It drizzled on Wednesday, the sky that homogeneous Seattle gray from horizon to horizon that lasts from mid-October through the first of May. This is the weather some people claim induces suicide—difficult to credit when you consider Seattle's death rate is lower than most US cities its size and its homicide rate equally small. I suspect it does contribute to our large number of bars, though.

I'd decided to pack the ferret along for the investigation of the séance room since she was curiosity personified most of the time and good at finding small openings and hidden things—usually when I didn't want her to—which could be useful.

I spotted Quinton outside St. John Hall. He was standing under a tree near the doorway, wearing a full-length waxed drover's coat and hat against the rain, though some had managed to get into his close-trimmed beard, somehow. His long brown hair was pulled back and tucked into his collar. He kept his coat on as we collected the keys and went upstairs.

"What's the setup?" he asked.

"This group is trying to create psychokinetic phenomena in a series of monitored séances with a fake ghost. Some of what they get is caused by the sitters, but some of it is caused by the technicians in the booth and a ringer in the room. What I need to know is what equipment are they using, what does it do, and has any of this stuff been tampered with or added to.”

"OK," he replied, opening the door to room twelve.

"Is it always like this?" Quinton asked, looking at the small room and its overload of furniture.

"I'd assume so. It was this way yesterday." Well, physically, at least.

Quinton hung his coat up by the door while I put the ferret on her leash. Once harnessed, she scampered around, digging at the floor and looking for holes. I glanced around and noted that the ball of energy threads was hot and bright under the table—even hotter than the day before and grown to the size of a beach ball with an unpleasant, beach-wrack stink and streaks of red. The sound was now a buzzing howl. I pushed the Grey away and used a trick Mara had taught me, pulling the edge of the Grey around me and Chaos to make a shield between us and the pulsing thing under the table.

Quinton walked around for a while, then stopped.

"I'm going into the observation room for a minute. I'll be right back," he said.

I could hear nothing but some creaking of the floorboards once he'd left the room, closing the door behind him. I guessed the room was pretty well soundproofed. I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was. Tuckman had gone to a lot of trouble with this room.

Quinton returned and put a sensor wand against one of the walls. "Thought so—power switch for all of this is in the other room. Now that it's on, I should be able to find the toys." He lay down on his back under the table, waving various devices at the furniture and rug, then began crawling around the rug itself, following some kind of invisible electronic spoor. I cut a glance into the Grey and saw that the ball of energy almost seemed to shy from him. He didn't notice.

Chaos discovered a shallow pit in the wall near the floorboards, obscured by the dark molding, and dug her claws into it, scrabbling and trying to make the hole big enough to crawl into. I went to see what she'd found.

A series of holes had been made in the walls near the floor and hidden behind fine-mesh screen the same color as the dark molding. Chaos had managed to find a small tear in one bit of screen and rip it open. Behind the screen was a small speaker cone. Chaos and I crawled around the room's perimeter and found a total of eight hidden speakers of several sizes. After a while, we ran into Quinton, who was now moving along the walls as well, waving his various sensors up and down the heavily plastered surfaces.

"What have you got?" he asked.

"Speakers. There's a whole bunch of them at floor level." I showed them to him as Chaos lost interest and attacked the rug, darting at the edge of the Grey, like a dog challenging the surf.

"Don't let her bite that rug too much," he cautioned. "It's got a lot of live wiring in it and she could get a shock." That wasn't all she'd get, but Chaos had had her run-ins with the Grey, too, and knew better than I when to head for cover.

"There are a bunch of plates and things on the bottom and on the floor under it, too," I said, moving my pet farther from the table.

"I figured there would be. I'll get to that in a minute.”

We looked at all of the speakers and Quinton ran some more tests of the walls before getting me to help him move the table and rug for another inspection. The ball of energy rolled around when we moved the table.

I followed the ferret around the room, though it appeared she was just taking a general tour now. Quinton stopped near the observation room mirror and looked around to catch my eye.

"Make some noise and move around. I'll be right back.”

I picked up Chaos and tried out a few old dance steps, muttering the words to "You Are My Lucky Star" to the ferret as I did.

Quinton returned, looking bemused, and grinned at me. "Keep that up for a while," he instructed as he repeated his crawling and waving, stopping a few times to take a spot reading of something in the walls or floor.

I'd faked my way through the first two numbers of
42nd Street
when Quinton called out again. "OK, you can stop." He was chuckling, but I didn't mind. I knew I was out of practice—and I never could sing worth a damn—but if you ask me to make frivolous noise and motion, Busby Berkeley dance numbers are the first thing that comes to my mind. I'd been dancing since I was eight due to my mother's ambition—pro since eleven—and the happily goofy routines were as natural to me as English.

At last, we sat down at the table. Chaos ran around on the table-top, snuffing the surface and chuckling to herself. I gave her a couple of treats to keep her busy.

"What have we got?" I asked.

"The room's pretty wired, but it all comes back into the booth. There's nothing here that's either run by a remote location or sending information to one. There's a lot of passive sensing that I couldn't pick up until there was something to send—that's why I needed you to move around and make noise. About half the monitoring equipment uses passive sensors so, in theory, they ought to be unobtrusive and largely immune to most interference. Most of it's built into the walls or furniture so it's out of the way and safe from knocks and rough handling. It's a nice setup—and pricey, 'cause the antenna and power technology on those subminiature units is pretty cutting-edge. Some of the stuff under the table is passive and remote sensing equipment, too, with slightly bigger antennas.

"Beyond all that, there's the active systems. This is the interesting part. Those speakers you found have a sister set of speakers in the crown molding. Now, I'm just guessing, because audio isn't really my thing and I haven't run numbers or made diagrams, but the positioning and type of speakers suggests to me that the room is one big sound cabinet. The speakers at the floor level don't put out much sound per speaker, but their cumulative wattage, aimed as it is, would make the whole wooden floor one giant subwoofer—not a very well-tuned one, but sufficient for subaudible frequencies. When it's firing and properly timed, the effect would be very disturbing, but you wouldn't perceive it as sound. The people in the room might think it was an earthquake or they might just experience unexplained disquiet.”

"That would probably be controlled by that console marked ‘ambient sound’," I suggested.

"Yeah. With the upper range speakers in the crown molding, the combined sound effects could be used to manipulate mood very effectively, or even to cause vibrations and knocking sounds in the floor and walls. Basically, they can 'haunt' the room with sound waves. Even at a low level, it would make people very suggestible. That's just the walls and floor. Most of the furniture in the room is normal, but this table isn't.”

"I figured. Tell me about the table.”

"It's not as heavy as it seems. It's only heavy enough to be awkward for a single person to lift. Now, one of the large black pads you found in the floor is an electrical induction feed hardwired directly into the booth through a cable that's hidden under the boards—there's a little panel of wood covering the channel cut in the floor for it. The rest are induction or magnetic plates. It's nicely done, very neat. But the feet of the table are metallic and the rug has enough electrical coil in it to induce a very mild magnetic field that would make the table seem to get lighter or heavier—and would also make it easier or harder to shove around. Selective activation of the coil in the rug and the magnetic plates in the floor could also make the table bounce up and down or rock side to side a little—it wouldn't be dramatic, but to someone who's already suggestible and wants to believe, it would be a pretty convincing poltergeist.

"I'd guess they keep the table 'heavy' most of the time to make movement seem more dramatic when it happens. The table is also wired through the legs, picking up electricity through the induction plates and feeding a grid of tiny electromagnets embedded in the tabletop from below. This is all concealed by a wood veneer thin enough to allow someone with a control to move a metallic object around on the surface without touching either the table or the object—it would be a little hard on people's electric watches, but who'd notice? Now, you couldn't make the table jump or become heavier or lighter while you did that, but it would be a pretty cool effect and would distract almost anyone from noticing that the table was a little lighter than usual. It's a nice setup for making a ghost. Most people couldn't afford it and it wouldn't be worthwhile to most stage magicians, since it requires control of the room. But it works great in a setting like this one.”

I scooped the ferret off the table as she attempted to jump down and stuffed her into my purse. She began digging around. "Just how much movement or noise could you get out of this equipment?" I asked.

"Nothing flashy—this is a subtle setup and it's supposed to create subtle effects. It's all based on the suggestibility of the people in the room," Quinton replied. "You could get some dramatic effects with some kind of mechanical rig, I imagine, but that's not my field. You'd need to talk to a stagehand or a magician for that. I'm not sure you could hide the mechanism, though. You want to take a look in the other room with me?”

"Sure." I stood up and followed him out of the séance room and into the observation room.

Quinton identified which monitors recorded what and identified the location of recording cameras and microphones; then he sat down and made the chandelier and side lamps in the other room flicker and the table jump and turn. The table was wobbly and jerky and moved very little, though it still moved enough to see and measure on the equipment. He ran through some sound combinations that made me cringe, hearing them through the speakers in the booth. If I hadn't known the source of it, I would have been squirming around in restless discomfort. I could see an occasional flare of red or yellow in the other room, but it didn't seem to be connected to the sound Quinton made. It woke the ferret, who abandoned my purse for Quinton's pocket.

He shut down the effects and reached into his pocket to pet Chaos. "Hey, stinky." He looked up at me, then cocked his head toward the room. "Tricky, huh?”

"Yeah," I replied. "Very tricky. What about the board of Christmas lights?”

"That's what it is—Christmas lights. It's plugged in, but there's no separate control for the board or the plug. It doesn't have any switch or controls on it, either. As far as I can see, it's there just to be there— maybe it's a control unit. I don't know.”

"So some of this stuff is here for legit purposes.”

"A lot of it. It happens that you can also manipulate some of it, but the recording and monitoring equipment is on the level and there are good reasons to have the sound and light manipulation capability. Now, the modifications to the table I can't see any purpose for except demonstrating fake table movements and sliding objects around, but the rest are solid.”

"Then, except for the table, this stuff is mostly meant to create a conducive mood for belief, not to fake phenomena.”

"Yeah. And to record the phenomena and associated conditions with a high degree of reliability. It's a good arrangement and the distances are so short there'd be little chance for signal loss or interference with the antennas from outside the room. It's a decent old brick building without a lot of iron framing to interfere electrically, but built solid enough to block a lot of outside sound and vibration.”

I sat and thought about that for a moment, until we were interrupted by a knock on the observation room door.

We looked at each other before I opened the door to find a young black man standing in the hall with a large manila envelope in his hand.

I looked at him. "Hi. Can I help you? Dr. Tuckman told me we'd be undisturbed here.”

His face was as unrevealing as an ebony mask and his tone was dismissive. "I don't intend to disturb you. Tuck told me to deliver these— assuming you're Harper Blaine—and since he knew you'd be here, I thought I'd come over early.”

This was not helpful and neither was his lofty attitude. "Yes, I'm Harper. Do you work for Tuckman?" I asked.

He rolled his eyes. "Yeah, I do. I'm his graduate assistant on the poltergeist project. Terril Dornier. Terry." He didn't offer me his hand or a smile, just held out the envelope.