Spirit Legacy (17 page)

“You’re dead,” I finished for him. I hated saying it out loud, but it had to be easier for me than it was for him.

“Yes,” he answered, as his calm face drooped into melancholy resignation.

“You’re a ghost.”

“Not right now. Right now I’m just my own consciousness, talking to your consciousness. I’m not taking any physical form. You’re just picturing me this way because you know this is what I look like. This is how I exist, most of the time.”

“And the rest of the time?”

“Sometimes I get lonely for people. When you’ve only got your own thoughts for company it can get pretty maddening.”

“I’ll bet.”

“That’s when I become visible. It’s not easy. It took me months to figure out how to do it. I gather enough energy to materialize and that’s when I can talk to people.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me what you were?” I asked, a little desperately. “It would have been so much easier if I’d known what you were. I told people about you, Evan. I’ve been trying to repair the damage for months.”

Evan hung his head. “I’m sorry. I never wanted to cause you trouble, Jess, honestly. It’s hard to explain, but all those times I talked to you, I wasn’t … completely aware of what was happening.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I’m like that—visible to people—I’m using all my energy to stay in a physical form. I don’t have any capacity left to remember that I’m only pretending to be alive. It’s like I’m concentrating so hard on imitating who I was, I forget what I am.”

“So when you were talking to me, you … forgot you were dead?” I couldn’t imagine being able to forget something like that. Then again, I couldn’t imagine being dead either.

“Yeah, I did. I couldn’t help going to the carnival one last time. I wanted to be a normal student again, hanging out in the gift shop and eating in the dining hall. And that night in the library, I saw your paper there and it—brought me back to that moment in my own life. I couldn’t resist the urge to go back to it, so I did.”

“Because you were lonely?”

“Yeah,” he answered. He leaned forward across the bed, his tone a little frantic. “I’m sorry, Jess. I didn’t mean to confuse you or … scare you. I know I shouldn’t try to relive things like that. But I just know—if I was still alive—that we would be … friends. I could recognize that as soon as I saw you. And I wanted to know what that would feel like. I’m just drawn to you, and I can’t explain why. You draw me in. Don’t be angry with me, okay?”

“I’m not angry, I promise,” I said.

He leaned back again and smiled, relieved.

“How could I be angry, really? That night, at the party ….”

Evan’s face darkened but he said nothing.

“I know what would have happened if you hadn’t been there. Thank you.”

“You don’t need to thank me.”

“Well, maybe you didn’t need to hear it, but I needed to say it.”

We were both silent for a moment. Then another one of my myriad questions burst from me. “So, have other people seen you before?”

“Yes,” he admitted sheepishly.

“A lot of people?”

“Maybe about twenty. None of them ever figured out what I was. I’d never talked to anyone before you, though.”

“Why not?” I asked in surprise.

“I don’t know. I guess it wasn’t enough … just to watch you.”

I shivered. I thought of all the times I’d seen him, and realized that he must have been near me much more than that. How many times had he been there, watching me like some kind of invisible companion? And yet, I couldn’t help thinking about who I would want to talk to if I were a ghost, and it wasn’t some random person I’d never met in life.

“What about your family?”

He shook his head desolately. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t leave the campus.”

“You mean you’re trapped here?” I had a vision of spectral shackles around his ankles.

“I don’t know how it works, but I can’t see anything outside the gates of the school. It’s like everything goes blurry after that and I don’t know where I am. I’ve tried to go home before, but I can’t find my way. I never get very far.” His voice was shrouded in carelessness. I wasn’t remotely fooled.

“That’s awful, Evan. I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “It’s probably better. If I saw them, I don’t know if I could stop myself from trying to talk to them. They’re having a tough enough time. I can’t go haunting them everywhere they go. They’ll never get over it.”

I slid slowly across the bed and sat next to him. I wanted to comfort him somehow. “I’m glad you spoke to me, Evan. Really. You’re right, about what you said before.”

“What did I say before?” he asked.

“I think in life we would have … connected.” I reached out tentatively and laid my hand on his. It didn’t feel cold anymore; it didn’t feel like anything. I couldn’t register any sensation at his touch. After all, this was only a dream.

He looked down at my hand in surprise and then raised his eyes to my face. An inexpressibly sorrowful shadow passed over his face and he closed his eyes for a moment. I started to pull my hand away.

“I’m sorry, Evan. I didn’t mean to upset—”

“—No,” he replied, opening his eyes. His fingers laced through mine and grasped them tightly. The shadow had passed. “Don’t apologize. It’s okay. It’s just hard to think about.”

“What is?”

“What it could have been like. With us. If I were still alive.”

We sat again in silence, both looking down at our interlocked fingers.

“Evan?”

“Hmm?”

“Are there many of you here? Spirits, I mean? I’ve seen a few others, but ….”

His voice was unexpectedly harsh as he responded. “Yeah. Yeah, there are lots of
us
. It seems to have gotten much more crowded lately.”

“Lately?”

“Ever since you got here.”

“Why? Why is that?”

“I have no idea.”

“Do you think … do you think you’re only drawn to me for the same reason they are?” I asked. I couldn’t hide the sadness in my voice.

“No,” he said immediately. “It’s not just the pull you have on us. I feel that too, just like they do, but there’s something else. I meant what I said, Jess. We would have connected in life.”

We smiled at each other. I could feel my color rising and changed the subject.

“So, it’s crowded. But it can’t be everyone who’s ever died here. I mean, not everybody becomes a ghost, do they?”

“No. From what they tell me, most people don’t stay behind.”

“Why are you still here?” I didn’t know if it was a rude question to ask, but I wanted to know the answer so badly.

The response burst from him, his tone pleading, “I don’t know! I’m not supposed to be. Somehow I missed the moment I was supposed to—I don’t know what it was! I just remember I could feel a pulling, and part of me wanted to go, but part of me didn’t.” His voice was rising now. He raked a frantic hand through his hair. “Everything was telling me to just let go and follow whatever it was that was taking me away, but that little part of me just kept clinging on, and then, just as I decided I was going to let go … it had passed. I missed it.”

He looked at me with such desperation that I couldn’t help myself. I flung my arms around him. He went stiff with surprise, but then he responded, wrapping his arms around my back, winding one of his shaking hands into my hair. I could almost feel him.
Let this be real, please let this be real!
It was all I’d wanted from the first time he’d locked me with those eyes. I grasped tighter, willing myself to feel the solidness of his body, the wetness of his tears as they slid from his cheek to my neck. I grabbed his face between my hands and lifted his face so that it was an inch from mine. I could feel my intent cross with burning intensity into his eyes.

“We won’t be able to feel it,” he croaked.

“Yes, we will,” I whispered fiercely.

He crushed his lips to mine. As he kissed me, my heart thumped wildly. My veins seemed to lift beneath my skin, fighting their way toward the surface. My breath was gone and my ears were ringing. The ringing got louder and louder. The sound was drowning me and I couldn’t breathe as I struggled to hold onto him. He was slipping away and the noise was unbearable.

“JESSICA! WAKE UP!”

My eyes flew open and I gasped as my lungs inflated. I actually felt myself land on the bed with a forcible thump. As though I had just resurfaced from deep under water, I gulped the warm air in the room, my lips tingling and cold. The ringing noise continued, deafening me as I fought for breath.

“JESSICA!” Two hands grabbed the front of my sweatshirt and shook me roughly. I focused my eyes in the dark. It was Tia, and she looked positively terrified.

“You were floating!” she yelled over the ringing.

“I … what?” I could barely hear her. I felt feverish. What the
hell
was that ringing?

“You were floating in the air two feet above your bed, for goodness sake!” she repeated as she hoisted me out of the bed onto shaking legs. I still felt unsteady from lack of breath. “Get your shoes on, we have to go!”

“What? Why? What the hell is that noise?”

“It’s the fire alarm! Someone pulled it, probably some drunk idiot—can you walk?” She was practically holding me up.

I steadied myself on my own feet and slipped into my sneakers. “I’m fine. Let’s go.”

We stumbled down the staircase and out the front door, jostled amidst the crowd of grumbling, sleepy students. The clock tower on Wiltshire Hall read 2:15. We were herded out onto the grass where we waited, shivering, to be let back in. Several guys next to us were shoving each other around and laughing loudly. They smelled like a brewery floor.

Tia was staring at me, still shaken. “What happened?” she murmured in my ear.

I led her away from the crowd to a vacant patch of grass under a massive pine tree. I sank into a sitting position beneath it and she knelt down next to me. I explained about the dream. When I told her about the kiss, she gave a sharp intake of breath, but didn’t interrupt me. I felt a pang of guilt and hoped that Evan wouldn’t mind that I’d told someone. It suddenly felt very private.

“When he kissed you … was that right at the end of the dream?” she asked.

“Yeah, just before I woke up. We were still kissing when …” Realization hit me. “Did you say I was
floating
?”

“Yes!” Tia hissed. She glanced around to make sure no one could hear her. “The alarm started sounding and I woke up. It scared the life out of me. I looked over and I couldn’t believe you were still asleep. I started shouting your name to wake you, but I couldn’t. You seemed to be talking in your sleep. And then suddenly you just … stopped breathing.”

I gaped at her. I thought back to the breathless drowning feeling I’d experienced.

“Your lips were turning blue and your back was arching right off the bed and then … you just lifted up, blanket and everything. I freaked out, I ran over and grabbed you and shook you. That’s when you woke up.” Tia’s voice broke and shuddered with a barely repressed sob.

“It’s okay, Tia. It’s okay, I’m fine,” I put a comforting arm around her.

“I thought you were dying,” she choked.

I just sat with her, rubbing her back until she calmed down. Sirens were sounding and colored lights flashed carnival bright across the lawn. People were starting to get impatient, jeering at the firefighters and cops for keeping us out of our beds.

“Hey! So who is Hannah?” Tia turned on me, panic obliterated by epiphany.

“What?”

“You were talking to him! You must have asked him who Hannah was! What did he say?”

I felt my heart drop to the vicinity of my knees. I couldn’t believe it. He’d been right there, answering all of my questions and I hadn’t asked him the one thing I’d been dying to know for months. My face flushed in shame and I couldn’t bring myself to meet Tia’s eye.

“I didn’t ask him,” I answered in a small voice.

“You can’t be serious! What do you mean you didn’t ask him?” she demanded.

“Well, I … just didn’t think of it. It all happened so fast, and all of a sudden we were kissing ….”

Tia dropped her head into her hands. Her voice came muffled from between her fingers, like she was talking to a toddler. “Jessica. You haven’t seen him in months. We’ve spent countless hours with virtually nothing to go on but a first name, trying to find out what this ghost could possibly want from you. And you ‘just didn’t think of it’?”

“It was a dream!” my voice grew louder and more defensive, as the weight of my mistake sank in. “I don’t think I had any control over what I was saying or what he was saying. It all just … happened.”

Tia took a deep breath but seemed to accept my explanation. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Sorry I snapped at you. I was just hoping you would have found out more, that’s all. I guess you’ll have another chance soon enough, at the investigation.”

I nodded and we fell into silence. I knew that I had lied to Tia, just a little. It
was
only a dream; Evan had told me as much. But it wasn’t like a typical dream, where I was just along for the ride, drifting wherever my subconscious wanted to take me. I’d been able to think clearly, to make choices. I had to admit that I’d really blown an important opportunity. I resolved that it wouldn’t happen again. I knew what the first question was that I needed to ask Evan, if I ever got to see him again. My lips still tingled where they had met his. And there was
that
to discuss too.

As I gazed over the crowd, something drew my eye to our window. Tia’s striped curtain was swaying slightly. Beside it, barely distinguishable at first from the shadows around it, a figure loomed, a solitary hand pressed to the glass.

Evan looked down on me, his face a mask of sorrow. I gazed back until his form melted away again into the darkness.

Chapter 13—Mixing Mediums

Chapter 13—Mixing Mediums

T
he night of the paranormal investigation
had finally arrived. I’d been watching the clock for what I was fairly sure was five or six years as the hour hand crawled toward 10:30 with agonizing sluggishness. Finally I decided to abandon my unread book, and started to get ready.

As soon as I stood up, Tia threw her homework aside. “Jess, are you sure you want to do this?” She was positively dancing with anxiety, her feet flitting about beneath her as though independent of her control.

“No, I wouldn’t say I want to. But I do want some answers, and I don’t see how else we’re going to get them,” I said. But I wasn’t exactly telling the truth. A part of me, the part that wasn’t awash with skepticism or fear, did want to go—to see Evan again, no matter how strange the circumstances.

“At least let me come with you?” Tia asked.

“Ti, I have no idea what I’m supposed to do when I get there. I really don’t know how this works. What I do know is that Pierce takes it very seriously and I don’t think he’d appreciate my friends tagging along. Besides,” I looked up at her as I finished tying my sneaker, “you’d be scared out of your mind.”

“Oh, I know, you’re right. I’d probably pass out or throw up or something,” Tia said, flapping her hands helplessly. “I just hate the thought of you going by yourself.”

“I’m not going to be by myself,” I pointed out. “There’s going to be an entire professional investigative team there with me.”

“Oh, you know what I mean!”

“Just try to get some sleep, okay? I’ll wake you up in the morning when we’re all done.”

“Oh, yes, I’ll be sleeping like a baby, Jess!” Tia snapped. “Here, wait. Take this with you.”

She dropped Pierce’s tiny voice recorder into my outstretched hand.

“What do I need this for?” I asked.

“You said he wanted to review whatever you’d recorded on it, to look for evidence.”

“Yeah, but I haven’t even used it,” I said. I’d dropped it onto my desk and forgotten all about it.

Tia grinned a little guiltily.

“Wait a minute. Did
you
use it?” I asked.

“I couldn’t resist! It was sitting there, and it was so … scientific. I just ran it for a few hours on a few nights while you were sleeping.”

I pocketed the recorder, shaking my head. “I can’t believe you did my parapsychology homework.”

Tia smiled. “You know me and homework.”

I walked quickly across the campus, my head bent to the chill in the early April breeze. Even on the cusp of spring, the wind on the hill stayed stubbornly bitter. I kept the steps of the library in my sights and forced myself to march forward though everything, even the wind, seemed to be encouraging me in the other direction.

I’d made up my mind not to tell Pierce about my dream encounter with Evan. I felt guilty about it, because I knew that Evan had given me information about ghosts that Pierce would kill to know. After all that Pierce had done for me, I really did owe it to him to keep him in the loop. But I couldn’t make myself care about that when I thought about the privacy of the conversation, the intimacy of it. Didn’t I owe it to Evan to keep my mouth shut? After all, I’d told Tia and immediately regretted it. No, I wouldn’t tell Pierce, not yet anyway, and certainly not all of it.

The doors of the library were locked tightly. A boldly worded sign proclaimed that the floors were being waxed. The campus looked deserted, except for a pair of underdressed girls jogging hurriedly across the sidewalk. I could hear one complaining loudly about the library being closed.

“You’d think they’d wait until the summer to do that kind of stuff,” she said, clutching her books to her as though they might warm her. I wondered what kind of strings Pierce had to pull to get the library to close its venerable doors against even a single night of academic enlightenment; it wasn’t St. Matt’s style.

I pulled out my cell phone and called Pierce.

He answered after a single ring.
“You here, Ballard?”

“Yeah, I’m outside.”

“I’ll send Iggy to let you in. Anyone around?”

I glanced behind me. The two scorned studiers had vanished. “Nope.”

“Alright, hang tight, he’ll be right out.” He hung up immediately. His tone was brusque, but excited at the same time. I had a feeling I was about to see Pierce in his true element.

I bounced on the spot for a few seconds, trying to keep warm, until the shadowy form of Iggy appeared in the frosted glass surface of the doors, amorphous at first, then solidifying into the very defined shape of a very large man. There was the clinking of a key in a lock and the right-hand door opened.

“Jess?” Iggy poked a heavily bearded face around the door frame. Did all of Pierce’s friends look like displaced hippies?

“Uh, yeah,” I said, trying to smile.

“Welcome to the party!” Iggy smiled back, revealing a large space between his front teeth. He pulled the door open and stepped back to let me in. He was every bit as big as his shadow had implied, at least six foot four, with broad shoulders and a very round stomach that was testing the elasticity limits of his Grateful Dead t-shirt. A worn purple bandana was tied around his head and several faded, greenish tattoos peeked out from under his sleeves. He wouldn’t have looked out of place at a biker joint, except that he was so obviously friendly.

“Thanks,” I said, as he held out a massive, callused paw for me to shake.

“So, you’re the ghost girl, huh?” Iggy asked as we walked past the circulation desk to the main reading room.

“Is that what they’re calling me now?”

“Naw, don’t worry, I’m just teasin’ ya. Pierce filled us in on the background of the investigation and all, and he told us you were gonna join us. Should be fun, huh?”

I just shrugged in response. The idea that this little adventure could be anything but terrifying or disappointing hadn’t really occurred to me—fun was about the furthest thing from my mind.

“So you’ve actually seen a full-body apparition, huh?” Iggy asked.

“Unfortunately, yes. Several times.”

“That’s wild, man! I hope that means we’ll get one tonight! I’ve only ever seen free-form stuff, and a few shadow forms, too.” Iggy was looking at me with totally undeserved admiration.

The library reading room looked like a high tech stake-out. Two of the large tables had been pushed together in the middle of the room and were buried in wires, laptops and a number of closed-circuit television monitors. They must have been using every outlet in the place; there were orange extension cords snaking out in every direction like the roots of some crazy technological tree. Lined up on a third table were a number of gadgets I couldn’t even identify. Pierce was leaning over the table, deep in conversation with a lanky younger guy. There were two other men setting up video cameras.

“Glad you could make it, Ballard!” Pierce said as he looked up. His eyes were aglow like a kid’s at Christmas.

“Well, there was a kegger at the dorm, but I decided to skip it,” I said.

“Good call. This is going to be way more fun than some drunken dorm party, I can guarantee you that!”

What was it with these guys and
fun
? It was like they didn’t even appreciate the fact that we were about to spend the night in the company of dead people—by choice.

“Let me introduce you to everyone, and then I can give you the low-down on the plan for tonight.” Pierce took me by the shoulder and started steering me around the room, introducing me to his group one by one. The youngest team member, the one Pierce had been talking to when I walked in, was Dan, a recent MIT grad who was only a few years older than I was. He sat stationed at the tech table, barely looking up when Pierce spoke. Instead, he gave a half-hearted flicking gesture over his shoulder that seemed simultaneously to say “hello” and “don’t bother me.” He wore dark-framed glasses and his hair had the disheveled appearance of one who had just rolled out of bed.

“Dan is our tech specialist. He coordinates our technological components and makes sure that everything is running smoothly from one central location. He has live feeds to all of our video cameras and audio hook-ups to all our team members while the investigation is going on. And this is Neil Caddigan.”

A slight man fumbling with the video camera looked up quickly and gave me an appraising glance which quickly jerked into a nervous smile. He extended a pale, blue-veined hand out to shake mine.

“Hi, Neil, nice to meet you.”

“Charmed, Ms. Ballard. Very interested to work with you tonight. Very interested, indeed.” Neil’s voice undulated forth on the wake of a very refined-sounding British accent. His protuberant eyes were a strange, milky-blue color, reminiscent of blindness. His stare made me uneasy; it had a vaguely hungry quality that was unsettling.

“Neil has just joined the team, while researching in the U.S. He’s a theologian and professor in London. He’s been working on a book about hauntings of former religious sites, and St. Matt’s used to be the site of a monastery. He’s also a demonologist,” Pierce said.

“You study …?”

“Demons. Yes, indeed,” Neil said with a little bow, his eyes never leaving mine. He didn’t seem to need to blink.

I must have been staring, because Pierce felt the need to clarify as he led me away. “Obviously, there are many religious beliefs that can be called into question in a field like this. Theologians are sometimes drawn to paranormal investigation as a means of further researching what we can gather about the theory of life after death. Surely you can see the appeal.”

There was a sudden and insurmountable closing of my throat and I temporarily lost the ability to swallow, so I just nodded in response and tried to look calm. I didn’t fool Pierce in the least.

“Ballard, we don’t think there are any demons here. Seriously. Demon-free zone.”

I tried to breathe.

Lastly, Pierce introduced Oscar, who shook my hand so hard he nearly dislocated my arm. Oscar looked like he’d just leapt from the deck of a barnacled fishing vessel. His face was covered in white stubble, and his skin looked several sizes too big for him, hanging loose under his chin and at his elbows. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a wooden peg sticking out from the leg of his battered jeans. Captain of the S. S. Paranormal.

“Jesus, Piercey, she looks like she’s gonna yack. You sure she’s up for this?” Oscar asked, eyeing me beadily.

“She’ll be fine.” Pierce said.

“I’m fine,” I repeated, parrot-like.

“Oscar took me on my first paranormal investigation when I was a high school student. Bought me my first camcorder, helped me capture my first paranormal footage. We’ve been investigating together ever since.” Pierce slapped Oscar fondly on the shoulder blade. Oscar grinned, revealing a gold tooth. “He also happens to be a New England historian, so that comes in rather handy on the research end of things.”

“All kinds of sordid tidbits to dig up on this place. Had a field day with this one.” Oscar winked. I was intrigued in spite of myself. Sordid tidbits at St. Matt’s? It didn’t seem possible.

“Okay, okay, we’ll get to all of that. Let’s not taint the sensitive, alright?” Pierce said. Oscar merely shrugged and went back to his camera.

Pierce led me back to the tech table where we waited for everyone to finish with their set-up work and then, when all the team members had gathered, Pierce laid out the game plan.

“Okay, Ballard, here’s how this will work. This team has conducted quite a few paranormal investigations together and over time we’ve developed a system that we feel works fairly well to meet the challenges we’re most likely to face. First of all, besides our live investigators tonight, we’ve got quite a bit of surveillance going on.”

Pierce gestured to the television screens that were stacked like Tetris blocks on Dan’s tech table. “It’s important to back our personal experiences with visual and auditory evidence. That’s where all this technological shit comes in.”

“Technological shit? Is that an industry term?” I asked with a smirk.

Pierce chose to ignore me and went on, “So, the entire library has been rigged with HD video equipment, which has already begun recording. There are three cameras on each of the three floors of the library, positioned to cover as much area as possible.”

I studied the dim grey displays on the monitors. I could make out the main circulation desk in the bottommost corner, the central staircase, and the corridor outside the bathrooms on the basement level. I also recognized, with a start, the carrels in the back of the Russian literature section, where I’d spoken to Evan. The view sent a shiver down my spine. The rest of the videos were practically interchangeable, revealing cramped aisles of books bordered by nearly identical groupings of desks.

“The cameras will be running all night. Dan will be stationed here, running communication with the team and monitoring the surveillance equipment. If an unmanned area starts showing some activity, Dan can alert us and we can get a team over there. Anything that shows up on the monitors will be documented in our log book, to be examined later. Hopefully, if there’s anything to be seen, the cameras will catch it.”

At this point Dan sat up straighter in his chair, as though to emphasize the importance of his role in this whole process.

“The other members of the team will be breaking into pairs to investigate the library. Each pair will have its own equipment to work with. First, every group will carry an infrared camera, which will be used to visually document the experience. Since the audio on those cameras leaves much to be desired in the way of quality, each pair will also carry a wireless audio recorder, to pick up any sounds, voices, or other auditory phenomena they might encounter.

“Finally, each group will also carry an EMF detector. This will alert you to any electromagnetic anomalies in the atmosphere.”

“Sorry, you lost me at EMF. What exactly does that thing do?” I asked. Dan sighed dramatically. I shot him a nasty look, but otherwise ignored him. I couldn’t afford to feign understanding; what if someone handed me one of those things and expected me to know what to do with it?