Poltergeist

I put down money for my breakfast—the waitress had forgotten to charge for Ken's coffee—and picked up my still-strange cell phone. I thought I might be able to catch a few more of Tuckman's group at home now and I was pleased I didn't have to waste time going back to my office. Eventually I'd have to get in some background research on this lot—Stahlqvist and Ken both left me wanting to dig, and who knew what I'd get from the others? — but since all offices were closed, I'd do better spending the small grace period Solis had given me interviewing the principals than grubbing Internet records.

I made calls and was able to catch up to most of the rest of the group and schedule time to talk before Tuesday. I wondered why I hadn't gotten a cell phone long ago.

Patricia Railsback—the harried and unhappy housewife at the séance sessions—met me at the Harbor Steps play yard under a sky that threatened rain, but hadn't yet produced any. Her hair was pulled back into a hasty ponytail that left her made-up face strangely naked and let too much light fall onto the stains of sleeplessness under her eyes. No amount of makeup could hide her expression of pinched dissatisfaction and frustration. She hunched her shoulders under her fashionable wool jacket and stared into the small play yard wedged between two of the complex's four towers.

Three children rollicked over the climbing equipment and kicked clouds of cedar bark into restless wakes whenever they touched ground. Greenery dripped from overhead galleries and orange beams ru

I looked over the shrieking, giggling mayhem. The kids were playing some elaborate game of climbing and jumping. "Which one's yours?" I asked.

She sighed. "All of them—Ethan, Ha

Ha

Patricia rolled her eyes. "Damn it," she muttered under her breath. "OK, I'm sorry," she called back. "You guys just play carefully, now, OK? Ghosts can fly but you can't, so no jumping around. And no throwing and blaming it on the ghost.”

A careless "OK, Mom" came back, but the kids were already back in motion.

I gave her a sideways look and spotted a bright yellow gleam around her head. "Your kids know about the project?”

"Oh, God. . yeah. Sort of." Her mouth turned down as she spoke and her vowels seemed to spill out the corners. "It's not like you can miss the stupid thing with their dad gone all the time. It's their best little playmate—most kids have imaginary invisible friends, mine have an honest-to-goodness poltergeist to play with.”

"Are you certain this is Celia at work?”

She rolled her eyes and shook her head. "What else would it be? It's not like I have any other life outside my home, my kids, and this project.”

Bitterness spilled out with every flooding word. She felt abused by life—although I thought that for a woman with no college degree and no apparent skills or charm, she hadn't done too badly in a socioeconomic sense. I wondered if her whining was bred from her husband's constant absence or the other way around. Half a life led in the shadows of a successful man to whom she no longer felt more than a mechanical duty might lead to many things. Yet she would not break from him, except to join this insane project. She was on the fence about the whole thing—life, family, project.

She'd been a drama major in high school—a bit of a drama queen to my mind—and that seemed to have been the high point of her life. I got the idea she resented the children who kept her tied to her gilded cage and that she wanted attention from someone, anyone—preferably male—and the project had seemed like a place to get it. But it wasn't working out so well. She didn't fit in with the younger members or the older members, and the only person she'd ever had a reasonable conversation with was Mark, whom she'd driven home once when his bike had a flat tire. She didn't really like any of the rest of them, though she wouldn't say so. But she did believe that their poltergeist was real, that they'd made things move and caused the knocks and light flickers through their own power of the mind. She didn't see any contradiction in the idea that everyone else was hateful, yet they somehow worked together.

As she babbled on, bemoaning her life, I glanced at the three kids who had sat down on the ground with a pile of cedar chips and leaves and were tossing them up one at a time. Once in a while, one of the leaves or chips would make a sudden shift to the side and the kids giggled. What were they doing? I peered at them through the Grey and could see a scribbled yellow shape, continuously shifting, stabbed randomly with silvery shards, hovering around them and moving the wood and leaves. Patricia noticed I'd stopped listening and looked at the children also, her yellow thread stretching toward the unca

"What are they doing?" I asked.

She threw her hands into the air. "Who knows? They're kids!" She balled her fists on her hips and shouted. "Hey, stop that! You're getting dirty!”

I took a step closer to the kids and their Grey companion, but as they turned to look at Patricia, they saw me moving toward them. The kids jumped up, dusting at their clothes, and the yellow shape imploded with a muffled bang that sounded a lot like the table raps from the recordings and left a weird ringing in my head. I frowned and peered harder at the kids, but there was only the thi

I looked back at her. She was making a big-eyed face at her kids, oblivious to what had just happened in the Grey. "Well? You have another fifteen minutes before we have to go upstairs and get cleaned up to see Daddy. Better make the most of it.”

The children jumped up and scurried back to the business of playing on the jungle gym. We went back to talking.

Patricia didn't believe the phenomena were being faked. She became defensive when I asked if she'd ever experienced anything like it before and I had the strong impression she was lying. Pecking at her a bit, I got her to admit she'd had some "odd experiences" as a teenager, but she wouldn't go into detail. I wouldn't have been surprised to learn she'd been the focus of a classic poltergeist haunting—emotional whirlwinds leading to increasingly bizarre events in a bid for attention, a self-justifying sense of persecution. Before I could broach the subject, though, she looked at her watch and turned away from me with her shoulders hunched.

"I have to go." She called out, "C'mon, you three! Time's up! Gotta get cleaned up for Daddy!”

The kids sent up a collective whine, but they dragged themselves toward their mother. She began to herd them toward the nearest tower and its elevator, dismissing me with an absent flap of her hand.

I watched her go, then started to make my own way out to the sprawling hillside staircase for which the complex is named, past the brushed steel sculpture of pi and the tiers of waterfalls. I shook my head as I went down the steps toward Western.

I'd only gotten the bare bones of information out of her and never had a chance to ask if she'd had any further contact with Mark. A

While she might not be causing any of the phenomena herself— legitimately or not—it was possible she was putting in a bit of extra energy and boosting the effect of the rest of the group. She was the only one of the participants I'd seen so far who seemed to have daily contact with Celia—if the thing I'd glimpsed was, indeed, the group's construct, which seemed likely. It bred an odd feeling in me on sight and sent a flash of frost over my bones. The sudden lassitude that had fallen on me when it left bothered me and I wondered why it had happened. This ghost unsettled me more than most.