The Last Days of Jack Sparks (16 page)

All fair enough, and mildly amusing, but triggering a pop culture phenomenon doesn’t advance my investigation. By now, several people have noticed the boiler room plug socket and messaged me about it. Depending on my mood, I’ll either reply, ‘Wow, thanks!’ or ‘I posted about this days ago, jackass.’

I hope the Hollywood Paranormals’ experiment will shed light on why I saw Maria Corvi in Hong Kong, but somehow I doubt it. My main objective is to glean their intel on the video, then serve my time on their nine-day project across two weeks. The Harold Experiment was quite a sceptical affair, in that it sought an alternative explanation for ghostly sightings – namely the human mind’s potential ability to conjure up a ‘ghost’. We’ll soon see if that’s possible. You can probably guess where my bet would go.

Astral Way and his Hollywood Paranormals could be about to hand me the biggest lead on this YouTube video since my plug socket epiphany. But let me tell you: if they intend to take me for an idiot, there’ll be hell to pay.

Noon the next day, I find Astral wedged into a booth at the Sunset Boulevard branch of Mel’s Drive-In. It’s a small West Coast chain of fifties-style diners specialising in ‘home-style cooking’. Each table boasts a mini jukebox.

Social media means never having to wonder how new contacts will look. Astral looks exactly as he does on YouTube, Tsu, Facebook, Google+, Gaggle, Goodreads, Pinterest, Kwakker, Reddit, Switcha Pitcha, Spring.me, Skype, Ello, HelloYou, Zoosk, Whatsapp, Wikipedia, WordPress, Quora, Kik, Uplike, MySpace, MyLife, MSN, Blogspot, Badoo, Bebo, Academia.edu, About.me, App.net, Itsmy, Instagram, Influenster, Twitter, Tumblr, Telegram, TripAdvisor, Flickr, Flixster, Friendster, Foursquare, Line, Last.fm, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, StumbleUpon, Streetlife, Spotify, Slated, VaVaVoom, Viber, Vimeo, Vine, Vig, Classmates, Match, PlentyOfFish, OkCupid, eHarmony, ChristianMingle and no doubt Tinder and/or Grindr. He’s a disproportionately confident six-foot hippy, with bold red shades propped up on his head. A late-twenties lummox, maybe five years away from being winched out of his bedroom to the nearest hospital. He wears a red baseball shirt with the number forty on it, unbuttoned to showcase a tangle of silver charms and medallions, not to mention a tantalising hint of side-boob. Big black shorts, with a wallet chain that could strangle a rhino. When he waddles to the restroom later, I’ll notice how a thick, sweaty ponytail of dirt-blond hair clings to his back.

As I walk up, the guy’s cold blue eyes flick from his phone to me. I say hello and offer a hand for him to shake. He doesn’t shake back, so I scoot into the other side of the booth and match his death stare, second for weird second.

For a moment, I think he’s going to slump forward on to the table with a knife handle sticking out of his back, as people do in movies when you meet them in a public place having been promised key information.

‘I’m waiting,’ he says.

Like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, he says, ‘I’m waiting for an apology.’

Damn you, Maria Corvi and whoever made the YouTube video, for conspiring to make me meet this oaf.

‘What exactly do I have to apologise for?’

‘Y’know, other reporters would have jumped at the chance of joining us for this experiment. But you blew me off for the longest frickin’ time.’

Pushing that unsavoury mental image aside, I tell him, ‘I’m not a reporter: I’m an author. I’m also a broadcaster.’

He half laughs, half grunts. ‘Who isn’t?’

‘Why didn’t you invite one of
those
reporters, anyway? Why nip at
my
heels?’

‘This was a real bad idea,’ he growls, looking disgusted with me, with himself.

‘Listen,’ I say, employing tact solely because he hasn’t told me yet where the video was shot. ‘Took a while, but now I’m interested, okay? Here I am. Interested and also hungry.’ With that, I offer his last chance of a handshake from Jack Sparks.

He relents and grips me with a clammy paw, tight enough to make joints pop.

‘Thank God for that,’ I say, withdrawing the hand and picking up the lunch menu, scanning the beers. ‘So where was the video shot?’

‘What made you change your mind about joining us?’ he asks, still not happy. ‘The video info? Not the experiment, or our status?’ This man’s ego just won’t quit. I feed him some flannel about how his experiment will be perfect for the book. Astral obviously knows about the Italian exorcism – social media means never having to bring anyone up to speed – but I’m not about to tell him how the Great Hong Kong Corvi Mystery influenced my LA trip.

The way Astral orders food speaks of high maintenance. When it arrives, we’re talking about my SPOOKS List and I show him how it currently looks. ‘I cannot believe,’ he says, his mouth a heinous washing machine full of mashed bread, beef, cheese and pickle, ‘that you don’t have a fourth entry on that list. Not even the
possibility
that ghosts are real.’

I shrug a big so-what. He snorts and takes another bite before he’s swallowed his first. ‘Man. So you don’t think ghosts are even
possible
.’

‘What do you care?’ I say, chewing, my fingers and lips smeared with sauce. Blue cheese, orange buffalo. ‘Your experiment isn’t even about real ghosts, right? I’m interested in what the human brain’s capable of.’

He nods his ham-hock head. ‘Psychokinesis. That’s the process of using the mind to—’

‘To influence stuff without touching it,’ I cut in. ‘I’m not a total newb.’

‘So you’ll know what a thought form is too,’ Astral says.

As it happens, I do. A thought form, also known as a tulpa, is a non-physical entity created purely by thought. If it hadn’t been for Maria Corvi in my room, I would never have entertained this pie-in-the-sky madness. But now, I’ll confess to mild experimental curiosity. In the seventies, Astral tells me, when Professor Spence’s Toronto group created their own thought-form Harold, he started rapping on their table and moving it around.

‘So they made Harold up from scratch, right? And they thought he was a manifestation of their own psychokinesis. I haven’t read the whole book – did he ever actually appear?’

What I’m asking is, you slobbering hippo: did Harold ever materialise like, say, a thirteen-year-old girl in a hotel suite?

Astral places his ten-dollar behemoth burger down with both hands, shaking his head. ‘But hey, that was the seventies. When we put sharp modern minds together, who knows? We might see our ghost.’

‘Even if we do create a fake ghost, though, won’t that disprove the supernatural?’

Astral just keeps on shaking that head. ‘Psychokinetically produced entities and actual ghosts are not mutually exclusive. Why would they be?’

The Hollywood Paranormals met through social media six years ago, ‘united by the common goal of making scientific discoveries in the parapsychological realm’. A cursory glance at their YouTube channel, on which they regularly pose and preen at various investigation sites, suggests they were also united by the common goal of making names for themselves and bagging a cable TV series.

‘Thanks for watching. Please comment and subscribe. A’

The son and grandson of episcopal ministers up the coast in bullet-riddled Oakland, Astral claims to have seen three ‘spirits’ during the Hollywood Paranormals’ tenure – although of course none were captured on video. ‘Every damn time,’ he laments to me, ‘we were shooting in the wrong frickin’ direction. I feel like spirits are camera-shy. Maybe the camera really does capture souls, like some folk believe, so they run scared. Which makes
your
video very interesting to me.’

Astral believes the video genuine. ‘I’ve watched it a whole bunch of times. Our guy Pascal’s really into it too, as you’ll . . . Ah! The man himself.’

A short, smiley guy, his skin the colour of a latte, slides into the booth beside Astral. The French-Canadian’s round steel-rimmed specs cling to a smooth shaven head. He has a tablet tucked under one arm and looks excited, which may account for him being caked with sweat. I can see my face in his forehead.

As Pascal swipes at his screen, my anticipation grows: part of the Great Video Mystery is finally about to be solved. Astral gruffly reminds me that the Hollywood Paranormals ‘need to get full credit for this. You need to post the news straight after and promote us as agreed. You also need to—’

‘Yeah, all right, all right,’ I snap. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got first.’ I’m apprehensive, not least because the video’s provenance will dictate where my journey goes next. For all I know, it could have been made in some Mexican drug cartel war zone.

Pascal, bless him, launches a PowerPoint presentation.

Each of the slides consist of two pictures.

The first picture on each slide is a still from the video. A magnified close-up of some device on the basement wall. The second picture is a product page from a manufacturer’s website.

‘This junction box,’ Pascal says, indicating a still from the basement, ‘is the product of only one company.’ He points to the picture next to it: ‘Steinberg Appliances Inc., okay? You can see the logo in the video, right there. See? And this pressure gauge here is also the product of one company – Bloom & Bloom Pressure. Look real hard and you can just about see the logo back here in the still.’

Colour me somewhat impressed. No one, not even me, thought of this stuff. Pascal goes on to link several more items seen on the basement walls to these same two manufacturers. Steinberg Appliances Inc. and Bloom & Bloom Pressure.

‘So what does all this mean?’ I ask, as we reach the umpteenth slide. Admirable though all the sleuthing is, I yearn for the big punchline.

Pascal and Astral look so pleased, they could just about fuck each other.

‘Both of these companies,’ says Pascal, ‘are real old-timers. They only fit their equipment in person, locally. They don’t franchise or even ship out. So—’

Astral leaps in to steal Pascal’s thunder, heavy on the gravitas. ‘These companies . . . only supply Los Angeles.’

‘Whoa,’ I say.

‘And not just that,’ adds Pascal quickly, ‘but they only supply one area.’

They exchange glances, then say it together on the count of three: ‘
Hollywood
.’

‘
Whoa
,’ I say.

While thinking,
Hmm, that’s quite the coincidence
.

It’s disconcerting that Dr J. Santoro looks like the smarmy one from
Die Hard
. The corporate weasel with the big white teeth, thick side-parted hair, and beard. The guy who ends up chewing a bullet. From the moment I lay eyes on Santoro, I pledge to myself that if he says anything like ‘Jack,
Booby
: I’m your white knight’, I will leave without further comment.

Dr Santoro does offer reassuring and orthodox elements you want from a psychiatrist. The sterile white-walled room, with few distractions except a box of tissues, some plastic cups, a water cooler and a bowl of wrapped peppermints. His voice is a Zen master’s. His suit and spectacles complete the picture. My chair doesn’t recline and is uncomfortable, with broad, flat wooden armrests. But I never liked the look of those horizontal shrink chairs that make you think ‘dentist’.

You know what’s less reassuring and orthodox about Dr Santoro’s office? The pit bull.

Sharon is a big grey pit bull terrier, with a splash of white on her chest and paws. She pants constantly, rolling out her tenderised meat carpet tongue. A cage sits in one corner of the room, in case a client dislikes dogs. This whole office, a small rented space in a nondescript Burbank building, reeks of Sharon.

Just as human bodies are ninety per cent water, so psychiatrists are ninety per cent ears. Santoro lets me talk for as long as I want. Which would normally suit me, but I’m mainly here for his input. It’s only fair to see what psychiatry, as a branch of science, reckons about how I came to believe I’d seen Maria Corvi that night in Hong Kong.

I also tell Santoro how, ever since Hong Kong, my brain has decided to lay a recurring dream on me.

I find it fascinating how the supernatural infiltrates your head, even when you reject such concepts. Just as cold germs go about their work, regardless of whether you believe in them.

Every night, I drive alone on some remote two-lane highway. The dash clock always reads 3.33 a.m., which mirrors the time in the real world. There is no moon.

This highway could be anywhere. Or at least, anywhere that ever plays host to thick mist which hangs as far as headlights can see. At times, this mist makes the tarmac and the grass verges appear white as snow.

Every night, I see the silhouette of a person up ahead. They’re standing in a hitch-hiker’s pose with one arm up.

Roaring closer, I see that this person is a smiling Maria Corvi. She’s a phantom much like the ‘ghost’ in the video, her transparency inconstant, in flux. She wears her blue smock as seen in Italy and Hong Kong.

Her eyes, fixed on me, are bright yellow and piercing.

Her hitch-hiker arm swings, loose as a scarecrow’s in the wind, to point off along the road ahead.

Each time she mouths the word ‘Enjoy’, she whispers it directly into my ear. Her breath curls against my eardrum.

In my rear-view mirror, Corvi shrinks steadily back into obscurity, still pointing, jaw working. The mist enshrouds her until it’s all I can see.

Dead girls in the rear-view mirror may appear more real than they are.

And when I focus back on the road ahead: shit! There’s Maria again. Standing in the middle of the lane, no more than two white lines away from my front bumper.

Bug-eyed and terrible, bleached white by the headlamps. Seeming to relish the prospect of fatal impact.

Every night, this makes me jump.

Every night, I wake before I hit her. Then I laugh it off and go back to sleep.

As is so often the way with shrinks, Dr Santoro seems most interested in what he perceives to be the root of the story. As I tell him what happened on Halloween, his forehead cracks with thought. ‘You say you became convinced Maria Corvi was purely an actress. By the end of the exorcism, I mean. How convinced were you, exactly? A hundred per cent?’