Have Spacecat, Will Travel: And Other Tails by John Hartness (best color ebook reader .txt) 📗

every once in a while, I check out something that can’t be explained away with normal physics or shitty home maintenance, and that’s what I was looking into tonight.

The school was built on the site of the old National Guard Armory, in some weird kind of municipal land swap deal that built a new armory on the other side of town, and build this school here, right next to the middle school, so the buses could park right between the schools and load kids from both directions. It was kinda weird. Efficient, but weird.

I’d spent the better part of two days going over the place with my EMF meters, my IR cameras, my thermal imaging scanners, and every other kind of gadget and gizmo I had in my arsenal. All I had to show for my efforts was a bunch of dead nine-volt batteries, some squiggly lines on reports, and an overwhelming feeling that something in this school was really, really out of the ordinary.

So I was hiding out in the handicapped stall in a deserted women’s room in a high school at ten o’clock at night in a small town in South Carolina on a Saturday night, reading a thriller on my Kindle and questioning pretty much all of my life choices. Just like most weekends.

But, all shitty things must end, even Eddie’s shows, so after a couple of hours of reading time, I heard the last truck of ring gear roll away, and I got to work. Emergency lighting meant that I didn’t need a flashlight, so I left the bathroom and made my way to the library, where most of the paranormal activity had been centered.

I was called in by the Assistant Media Specialist, an older woman who was a holdover from the old school. She found me through a referral, which is how I get most of my business. I have a website, and a Facebook page, and even a Twitter account that I never use, but word of mouth is the best way for a guy in my line of work to get hired. I did a job a few years ago for a woman in the librarian’s church, and when weird shit started happening at the school, and nobody seemed interested in an explanation other than “you’re imagining things,” she called me in.

Most of the activity had been centered on the library, and it was all pretty innocuous. Books moving after the place was locked for the night, furniture out of place when people came in on Monday…all the sort of thing that could be chalked up to harmless mischief or people misremembering things.

Except for the messages. Mrs. Wargle, the librarian who hired me, started finding nastygrams left all over the library. Sweet, simple messages like “burn” and “thief.” That sort of thing. Again, stuff that could have been left behind by kids pulling pranks, but when I set up cameras with motion sensors to watch the library all night, nothing showed up on camera. But there was still a letter on the circulation desk the next morning that said, “Return to me.”

So something was definitely up, and my guess was a ghost. A pretty pissed-off ghost, too, if the messages were any indicator. And one with very nice penmanship. So either I was hunting a calligraphic specter, or I was about to unmask some serious Scooby-Doo level shit up in here.

I pushed open the door, which Mrs. Wargle said she’d leave open for me, and stepped into the site of my investigation. The library was cold, which was odd for April. It was sixty-five degrees outside, but I could see my breath in front of me as I passed the front desk.

I heard the whispers the second I crossed the threshold. Indistinct things, no words I could make out, just the kind of background murmuring that got under my skin and gave me goosebumps. There were only a few emergency lights on in the library, so I flipped on the overhead lights. The room had no exterior windows, so I wasn’t worried about anyone seeing the light from the outside, and I knew exactly how cheap Eddie was with his security, so the chances of an overzealous guard walking all the way down here from the gym were about as likely as Eddie putting his heavyweight title on me at next month’s show.

The room blazed to light, then snapped right back to gloom as the lights flipped back off. I turned to the switch, which was down. I stared at my hand, then flipped the switch up. Bright. I took my hand away from the wall and was plunged into darkness. I looked back, and the switch was down.

“Okay, this is just petty shit,” I grumbled, and flipped the switch again. This time I left my hand on the switch, at least until a wave of icy cold passed through it, chilling me to the bone and causing me to yank my hand back.

Dark. The lights switched out again, and this time I took the hint. Shaking the frost from my hand, I wiped it on my jeans, then stuck it under my arm to warm up my fingertips. I’ve experienced some cold spots before, but that was a whole new level. It felt like I shoved my hand into a bucket of ice water, only dry.

“What the actual fuck?” I asked the room, turning around in a circle to see if I could catch a glimpse of something. “Is there someone here?”

“Someone here…” My words came back to me, a sibilant echo in a higher pitch. Great. Not only had I found a real ghost, but it was mocking me.

“Do you need my help?”

“Heeeelp,” came the same eerie hiss.

“Who are you? Can you speak to me? Do you need help crossing over?” I usually try to avoid sounding like one of the ghost hunters on TV, but sometimes I can’t help it.

“Sssspeeeeak tooooo meeeee.” The hissing came from right behind me, but