Poltergeist

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?”

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

Ben sighed. "Not Ts, 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. "Donwa

"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 Bu

"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—Ke

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 a

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 ru

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.