Poltergeist (8 page)

I drove down the hill to Pioneer Square and buried myself in work. I made phone calls, managing the usual cases that paid the rent and bills and hoped to forget about ghosts trapped in the morgue and unnamed corpses in cold steel drawers. I turned my mind to other problems and called the Danzigers. The phone rang twice and Mara answered.

"And how are you, Harper?" she asked, her Irish accent tumbling over the words like brook water on smooth stones. "We've not seen you in awhile.”

"I've been pretty busy," I hedged. I'd found their child a little harder to take lately and had, I admit, avoided them as a result. "I wanted to talk to Ben about an old ghost project and a few other things. Is he free today?”

"I'll ask him, shall I." She muffled the phone for a few moments before returning. Something was making a thumping and growling sound in the background. I had to concentrate to hear her. "Ben'll be here all day, he says. He's taking this term off to manage Brian while I've got the unholy course schedule, though how he'll survive it, I'm sure I don't know. Will you be dropping by, then?"

"I will. When's good?”

She snorted. "As well ask the wind. Come by if you like and if you hear pounding and screaming, walk on by and return later. I swear some wag had the right of it when he said boys should be put into barrels at birth and fed through the bunghole.”

My eyebrows went up. Voluntarily and adamantly childless, I'd always assumed that most parents were blissfully unaware of the horrors their little darlings could be. I would have to apologize to a few parents, though not my own—we'd burdened each other with enough mutual horror to call the deal even, by now.

"Okaaaaay…," I drawled.

Mara sighed. "Never mind me. Come when you can. You know you're always welcome and Ben'll relish a chance to chat up an adult who's not as shell-shocked as himself. I must fly—department meeting today with the head fossil, himself.”

"Thanks, Mara. Good luck with the fossil.”

She laughed her sudden whoop. "I'll need it!”

I'd put myself on the hook, but I'd manage. After all, I could leave anytime I wanted and not be arrested for child abandonment—Brian wasn't my kid.

Putting down the phone, I spent some time online trying to find information on faking a séance, but found little. I'd have to add that to my list of questions for Ben. I managed a few other details, then headed to the Danzigers' to get some background information on the Philip experiment that Tuckman had based his experiment on.

The Danzigers' house was in upper Queen Anne, just a short trip up the hill that looms over Seattle's famous Space Needle. In spite of the competition for parking spaces, there always seemed to be an empty one within twenty feet of the pale blue clapboard house. I wondered if Mara had put some kind of spell on the street or if it was just magic parking karma associated with the gentle glow of the Grey power nexus beneath the house. Whatever. I managed to park right in front.

I trotted up the steep stairs to the porch, where the door was flung open and a black-haired juggernaut ran full tilt into my knees, butting me with a head as hard as a meteorite while giggling and shrieking with glee.

"Whoa!" I staggered backward, hooking my elbow around a porch column so I wouldn't go cannoning off the platform and tumble into the rosebushes below. The grab converted my backward momentum to a turn and I pivoted against the stair rail as Brian Danziger tripped and flopped down onto his belly at the top of the steps.

I caught a glimmer of a ghost near the open door and jerked my head up. Albert. The resident specter had materialized in a thin, incomplete column just inside the house. One corner of his mouth twitched in what I took to be a smile; then he vanished as Brian began to howl. Having no siblings, Brian appeared to have found a substitute tormentor/punching bag in the incorporeal person of the dead guy in the attic.

Quick, heavy footfalls preceded the appearance of Ben Danziger. "Brian!
Mein
Gott
, was
jetzt
?’

"Papa!" the little boy yodeled, rolling onto his back and holding out his arms.

Ben stopped on the porch and blinked at me. "Oh. Hi, Harper. Did Brian butt you?”

I steadied myself and dusted at my trouser legs. "Nothing so soft as a butt. Call it a full-on ram.”

Ben folded his six-foot-plus frame, scooped up his son, and set him on his feet again. He held on to the collar of the two-year-old's shirt as Brian squirmed about and attempted to bolt off again. Ben fixed the boy with a blue stare that contained all the menace of a cotton ball.

"Brian, why did you butt Harper?”

"I’s a rhinerosserous!" shouted Brian, bouncing up and down and clapping his hands. "Graaaah! Graaaaaah!”

Ben sighed. "Not I’s,' Brian. 'I am.' 'I am a rhineross—' I mean, 'I am a rhinoceros.' “

Brian looked at his father with wide eyes and an open mouth; then he shouted again. "Yay, yay, yay! Daddy's a rhinerosserous, too!" Then he lowered his head and smacked it into Ben's shins.

Ben rolled his eyes. "Oh, Lord…No more Animal Planet for you. Now, let's go back inside.”

Brian scowled. "Donwanna!”

"But it's feeding time. There's cheese sandwiches for the rhinos today.”

The boy looked skeptical. "Wif pickles?”

"Yes, with pickles, and tomato soup.”

" 'Mato soup!" Brian cried, and charged into the house.

Ben watched him go, then looked at me. His black hair was wilder than ever, his face wan and thin under his curly beard, and the sockets of his eyes were drilled deeper into his skull than I remembered. "Welcome to the zoo," Ben said, waving me inside.

I followed him toward the kitchen. "When did the rhino phase kick in?”

"About a month ago, right after 'jaggywahr' and 'doggie.' They each lasted about a week. The rhino, however, shows no signs of imminent extinction." He heaved another fifty-pound sigh.

"Maybe it's just the company he keeps. Albert seems to egg him on.”

Ben frowned, shaking his head as he picked up a plate of sandwiches. "Albert. Sometimes I'm not so sure of Albert's benign nature. His impishness gets pretty mean-spirited once in a while.”

I suspected that Albert wasn't as nice as Ben gave him credit for. Even when he seemed helpful, he caused trouble. It wasn't easy to tell much, though. Albert didn't have an aura of any kind—just a body of Greyness he exposed or not as he pleased.

While Ben fed the rhino-boy cheddar-and-pickle sandwiches, which were devoured in snapping gulps more suited to a crocodile, I asked about the Philip project. The old didactic glow began to burn in Ben's eyes as he replied to me, while managing his offspring—so far as a normal human could manage the devil's own Energizer Bunny.

"Oh-ho-ho! The Philip experiments are the cold fusion of parapsychology," Ben stated. "Kind of the unholy grail of ghost enthusiasts. The group who did them said they were entirely scientific and reproducible. Other groups at the time claimed to have reproduced the effects, too. But the documentation has disappeared—newsletters, notes, even a sixteen-millimeter film documentary and a studio recording done by the CBC—and no one has been successful at re-creating the experiments since. Or at least not anyone respectable, with proper scientific processes and verification. But as you know, parapsychology isn't the respectable field it was in the 1970s.”

I refrained from saying it wasn't all that respectable then, either, and had only gotten less respect ever since.

"This group made an artificial poltergeist of some kind, right?" I prompted.

"Broadly speaking, yes." He paused to wipe tomato soup off Brian. "They were a self-selected group, led by a respected professor from the University of Toronto who was interested in ghosts and psychic powers, but he was also pretty skeptical—A. R. G. Owen was one of the guys who demonstrated that Uri Geller's spoon-bending wasn't caused by any kind of magic. He believed that the powers of the human mind—whether delusion, imagination, or psychic—were the mechanism for most of what gets attributed to ghosts and hauntings. That was pretty new stuff at the time, though the ideas of self-fulfilling expectation and conflation are now standard concepts in psychology.”

He waved one hand in the air as if clearing an invisible chalkboard. "Not the point, I know. Anyhow. So, the group started with the proposition that poltergeist activity was the result of the power of the human mind. They didn't believe in ghosts and they didn't set out to call one up. They were convinced that since physical poltergeist phenomena could be produced on a small scale by a single person, much bigger and more directed effects could be produced at will by a group who was focusing on producing them. They called it 'PK by committee'— essentially the idea that while the power of a single human mind might not be enough to move a heavy object alone, it should be easy for half a dozen minds together. They suggested that group expectation allowed them to work together toward the creation of phenomena that would otherwise be deemed impossible.”

"So they pretended there was a ghost doing these impossible things?”

"Not exactly. The experiments were based on PK research by two English psychologists—Kenneth Batcheldor and Colin Brookes-Smith—who'd both noted that PK phenomena occurred most reliably when the parties involved expected that it could happen but weren't actively trying to make it happen, and phenomena grew in strength and frequency when there was a personality to attribute them to. The people producing the phenomena had relieved themselves of conscious responsibility and blamed the movement of objects, table-rapping, noises, writing, electrical effects, and so on, on a personality outside themselves—a 'ghost.' Basically, once there's a personality to attribute the incidents to, it's easier to accept that they might happen. Then the people begin to expect that they
can
happen and
will
happen. And, of course, more things happen. It's self-reinforcing behavior. The big difference between the observations of Batcheldor and Brookes-Smith and the Philip project was that the participants created their ghost in advance and consciously—purposely—placed responsibility for phenomena on that constructed personality.”

Brian brandished his spoon, laughing and sending droplets of tomato soup flying. Then he belched, looked surprised, and laughed harder.

"OK, feeding time is over," Ben announced, standing up to remove Brian from the chair.

Brian tossed the spoon, splashed his hands into the dregs of the tomato soup, and smeared two wide orange streaks on his face. "Mud, mud, mud!" he chanted.

"You are one dirty rhino. You know what that means…" Ben slung the little boy under his arm like an oversized football. "Off to the watering hole with you!" He shot me an apologetic look as he carried the wiggling, giggling Brian off to the washroom.

While the sound of water running and splashing came from the bath, I carried Brian's plate and bowl to the sink, leaving Ben's untouched food where it was. The cozy country-style kitchen didn't display quite the gleam it used to have. Chasing after the rhino-boy seemed to be having a deep impact on the house as well as its occupants. They were all looking a bit more tired than usual—except for Brian.

The water cut off and a wet rhino-boy—his hair slicked up into a small horn over his forehead—charged past the kitchen door, followed by a large towel and Ben, thundering behind like the herd in pursuit. They were both laughing, although Ben was a bit out of breath.

Once Brian was netted in the towel and dried off, Ben tranquilized him with twenty minutes of TV and rolled the sleepy rhino-boy into bed for a nap. Ben gobbled down his sandwich as we headed up the stairs to his office in the attic.

He licked mustard off his thumb as he rooted through the stacks and boxes until he found a black, cloth-covered book. He handed it to me. The lime green print on the spine identified it as
Conjuring
Up Philip: An
Adventure in
Psychokinesis
,
by Iris M. Owen and Margaret Sparrow.

"That's the book about the experiments. Unfortunately, it was written for laymen and neither of the authors seems to have thought of including their original newsletter reports or any technical data in an appendix. That may be part of the reason there's been so little success re-creating the experiment.”

Ben threw himself down in the chair behind the desk and sprawled there, limp. Albert drizzled into view in a corner behind him.

I turned the book over in my hands, but didn't open it. "I don't understand Tuckman's angle," I said. "He's not interested in ghosts and he doesn't believe in them. He claims to be looking at the group's behavior in reaction to 'impossible' phenomena—something about the effect of group stresses and internal factors, how far they would give themselves permission to go while they believe they can make these things happen.”

Ben raised his eyebrows. "That's an interesting angle. The New Horizons group—the original experiment group—noted in passing that there were a lot of tensions among them, including some sexual tension. The group was very diverse—married and single, couples and non-couples, ages from twenty- to fifty-something. The more tension there was, the more phenomena they got. The book claims that the group was harmonious and happy most of the time, but Owen and Sparrow admit that things got more exciting when there were unresolved issues among the participants.”