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De
“So you don’t do ghosts,” Andie said. Damn.
“I’m well versed in general psychic phenomena.” De
“That must be disappointing. I-”
“Not really. It stands to reason. Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler showed that skepticism suppresses psychic abilities.” De
“So you don’t think they exist,” Andie said. “The thing is-”
“I would doubt they exist except for one thing: Every culture has ghosts.” De
Andie frowned. “I don’t see-”
“Every culture in every mille
“Yeah,” Andie said. “I know.”
De
“And a week ago, you’d have been right,” Andie said.
“But now you think you have a ghost,” De
At the other end of the long table, Kelly jerked her head toward them, away from her conference with Southie. “What?”
“All we have for breakfast is toast,” Andie said, and caught Alice watching her, looking interested.
“We have cereal,” Alice said. “And French toast, which I will not eat.”
“And cereal,” Andie called down to Kelly, and then she looked at Alice. “Are you finished with your pizza?”
Alice shook her head.
“Then keep eating.” Andie turned back to De
“Oh, they exist,” De
“All of them?”
“There four kinds. Like the Beatles.” He heh-hehed again, but Andie was getting used to it now.
“Of course there are,” Andie said, thinking, I had to get an academic who thinks he’s a comedian.
“The most common is the crisis apparition. It appears once within twelve hours of a death or coma or whatever the crisis is.”
“Appears. Like…”
“Like a ghost.” De
“Telepathy. For real,” Andie said.
“As real as we can test for, but yes, for real. Crisis apparitions are well documented with anecdotal evidence and fit with what we know of telepathy. They’re often just voices, not really an apparition at all.”
Andie was pretty sure they hadn’t lost anybody in the last twelve hours, so she said, “We don’t have those here.”
“Then there’s the haunting,” De
Andie thought of May, dancing at the foot of her bed every night. “That kind. Are they dangerous?”
“They’re not even a ‘they.’ The theory is that it’s just leftover energy from some cataclysmic event like a murder. The way you can smell perfume in a room after somebody has left, you can see the energy in the room after the catastrophe has passed.” De
“Catastrophe,” she said. Archer House was definitely the kind of place that had catastrophes. Still… “I don’t think it’s that kind. At least one of them is more than perfume. We have conversations.”
“Then there are apparitions of the living,” De
“No,” Andie said. “This one is dead. Let’s go back to that second one again. I think that’s the one we have.”
“Really,” De
“It’s really pretty calm here,” Andie said. Aside from the ghost.
“-because you have an angry teenager,” De
“Carter?” Andie said, looking down the table at him.
Carter caught her staring and rolled his eyes, probably at how uncool she was, but possibly about what a pain in the ass Kelly was being since she was trying to talk to him across the table.
Andie turned back to De
De
“Carter doesn’t do involuntary. We don’t have a poltergeist. So, the haunting. Is that common?”
“Oh, yes,” De
“Okay,” Andie said. “How did they get rid of their ghost?”
De
“Oh. Well, nobody’s having an affair here.” Andie thought of May. “Although the ghost I talk to is all in favor of it.”
De
“Yes,” Andie said, taking the plunge into crazy. “Either that or I’ve dreamed it. I think Alice’s aunt talks with me. I think she sits with Alice at night in the rocking chair at the foot of her bed. Or it might be the woman out at the pond who was looking at Alice. I’m not sure. This is all really new to me.”
“Alice?” De
Alice looked up when she heard her name and stared back long enough that De
Andie nodded, keeping her voice low. “The housekeeper thinks the ghost that sits with her is somebody who died a hundred years ago. I’ve only seen that one once by the pond, and really, she could have been anybody, a real person in fancy dress. Although why anybody would dress up and hang around a pond is beyond me.”
De
“The one by the pond, yes. And the one in my room.”
De
“No,” Andie said. “Sometimes I have a cup of tea at night with a shot of brandy, but I hadn’t been drinking when I saw the woman at the pond. Look, you just said there are hauntings-”
“I said that was a classification,” De
“But you said poltergeists-”
“The other three kinds of ghosts aren’t ghosts at all in the popular sense of the word. They’re projections, telepathy or telekinesis, from living people or from people who have just died and are making the transition from one life to the next. They’re ephemeral. The kind of haunting you’re talking about lasts. On anecdotal evidence it can last for centuries, but it’s completely unsubstantiated. The others all have been shown to be real and explainable, but the haunting is folklore or fraud.”