“Go ahead. Let’s see what we have,” Tad said. “Use the company credit card.”
Hank went over to Tad’s desk and opened the right side drawer. He pulled out a card sheathed in what looked like an RFID protective case. He returned to his desk and, a few moments later, called us over to join him. On his screen was the original floorplan of the Spit & Whistle.
I leaned in. “Can you bring up the basement?”
“Sure thing,” Hank said, tapping away at the keys. A moment later the floorplan appeared. The blueprints had been translated into an easier-to-read black and white format, and I followed the stairs down, then looked along the wall to where the secret room was located. Only it wasn’t there.
“That’s odd. It should be right there,” I said, pointing to the area of the wall in which it had been found.
“Well, there are three possibilities. One, they forgot to add it in. Two, they chose not to add it in—why give away the existence of a secret room? That would mean it wasn’t so secret after all. The third possibility is that the room was added on later.” Hank glanced up at me as I stood over his shoulder, leaning down to peer at the screen. “What’s your instinct tell you?”
I paused, trying to tune in. I brought up the image of the room in my mind, focusing on it. Nothing. I tried harder, trying to open up to the energy I had felt.
Zap.
I stumbled back, startled by the sudden shock that raced through my body. It wasn’t a pleasant one, either. “Crap!”
“What happened?” Caitlin reached out to steady me and frowned as her hand touched my arm. “You’re…staticky.”
“I feel staticky,” I said. “And a little bit on the fried side. I just got shocked like I touched a live wire. I was trying to open up to the energy I felt in that secret room and boom, crash. Lightning. Anyway, my hunch? Is that it was added after the original build.”
“I think you’re right,” Hank said, pointing to the basement wall. “This looks like a firm outer wall, and unless the owner had a good reason to hide something, chances were the secret room was dug out by a later owner.”
“Can you find the list of owners? I’d like to have something to take with me when I go talk to Charles again.” I hated to just go in empty-handed and ask him to do all the leg work for me. “By the way, is there something I can offer to pay him for his help? I am interrupting his day, after all.”
Tad frowned. “I usually try to avoid that—it gives the chance for someone to insinuate we paid for doctored information. He doesn’t have to help, and you can take him pastries or whatever else he might like,” he added. “We don’t want to compromise any information we get, in case our reputation is ever brought into question.” He paused. “Are you all right? Whatever shocked you—do you think you were touching a wire or something?”
I shook my head. “I’m okay, just a little rattled. And no, I wasn’t touching a wire. The psychic jolt came from whatever’s in that room. It managed to reach out all the way from the pub to give me a good shaking. I like Louise enough that I’m worried about her now.”
“Then we’ll do what we can to evict its ass.” Tad brought me over a chair and, even though I didn’t really need it, I accepted it graciously.
“All right, I have a list of names,” Hank said, bringing up another document. “I found a list of the owners of the Spit & Whistle. I don’t recognize any of them, but I’m going to run them through the database we’ve built up of town inhabitants and we’ll see what matches—if any—we get. This will take a little while. I have to enter them one at a time and set up the perimeters of what we’re looking for.”
We went back to our desks. I put on my headphones and plugged in the digital recorder, ready to transcribe the meeting. As I placed my fingers on the keyboard, a woman suddenly shrieked so loud that I almost fell out of my chair. I whirled around, whipping off my headphones.
“Are you okay—” I started to ask Caitlin, but then realized she was standing at Tad’s desk, talking to him. They both looked at me, frowning.
“What?” she asked.
“Did you just… You didn’t scream?”
She shook her head. “No, I didn’t.”
I looked back at the recorder, then rewound it. “You might want to listen to this,” I said, unplugging my headphones so that the audio could be heard by everybody. I turned it on and waited. A moment later, the shriek filled the room, and I could hear myself talking to Louise beneath the noise. Neither of us responded to the scream. Turning off the recorder, I said, “We didn’t hear that while we were talking.”
‘You captured an EVP,” Hank said, jumping up. He looked delighted. “An electronic voice phenomenon. Are there any more on the recording?”
“I don’t know. I just started listening to it. But I can guarantee you—we didn’t hear the shriek in the room.” I stared at the recorder, grateful that I had taken notes by hand, like Hank had suggested. It was hard to hear what we were saying below the echoing scream.
Hank looked like a kid in a candy shop. “I wish I could transcribe it—if you hear anything else, let me know. And if you don’t mind, I’ll give it a listen after you’re done.”
“Knock yourself out. I wish you could transcribe it too,” I said, hesitant as I picked up my headphones again. I was ready to suggest that he take over but he already had a task at hand, and I decided that if there was something else on the tape, I wanted to know about it.
As I did my best to transcribe our conversation—noting the times and places of the EVP using the “Sidenotes” version of the word processing program—I found myself immersed in the discussion. I had been trying to keep my senses open as well as note what Louise had said, along with my impressions, that I hadn’t fully been listening to her story. Now, it drew me in, and I wondered just how many of the other owners had dealt with the same issues. Of course, she had done more renovation on the building than most of the others, hence opening up more of the ghostly activity, but the fact remained that this case was filled with activity.
I was about a third of the way through the tape when the next EVP session happened. We were discussing events in the kitchen when I heard a sudden clanging that sounded like a dozen pot lids rattling against the pots. I knew that hadn’t happened while I was there, but now, I could barely hear a word we were saying over the racket. Then, I heard a deep laugh and a crash, and then another scream.
Taking a deep breath, I paused the recorder and pulled off my headphones again. “Hank, you want to hear this?”
He hurried over, along with Tad and Caitlin. I replayed the section for them.
“We were in the kitchen at that point, and while there was some background noise, this wasn’t part of it.” I told them what she had said about the knife flying across the room at her.
“We’re talking dangerous territory here,” Tad said. “Do you think it might be a demon masquerading as a ghost?”
“I don’t know, especially around the secret door. I keep flashing back to the Amityville horror, though that secret room was actually a storage space under the stairs. But this was definitely a full hidden room that had been bricked up at some point. When they redid the plumbing and broke through the brick to get to the inner walls, the contractors found it. There was nothing in it, and it had been painted a faint lilac color, but it’s still creepy as fuck, and the only thing I wanted to do was to get out of there.”