Every House is Haunted by Ian Rogers

Author:Ian Rogers
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781927469194
Publisher: ChiZine Publications
Published: 2012-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

2

They sat around the mahogany dining room table. No one said a word. They were all watching the psychic. They weren’t clasping hands, but Sally figured it was only a matter of time. The table was astringently bare under the glow of the single overhead light fixture. It made Sally think of old gangster movies, stool pigeons sitting in bleak interrogation rooms, while grizzled, chain-smoking cops paced back and forth.

The psychic stared around the table at them with dull, heavy-lidded eyes. She looked as if she were about to go into a trance . . . or maybe she was trying to remember if she unplugged the iron before she went out. Finally, she pulled a pen and a sheaf of blank paper out of a satchel bag on the floor next to her chair and placed them on the table before her.

“Clear your minds,” she intoned.

Sally thought, That shouldn’t take you very long, and the psychic’s head snapped back as if she had been slapped. She stared at Sally. Sally looked back with innocent surprise—an expression she had down pat. She practised it in front of the bathroom mirror in her apartment. A slight widening of the eyes, a rising of the eyebrows, a gentle tilt of the head. Oh, goodness, is something wrong?

Charles gave her a sidelong look and kicked her foot under the table. Sally couldn’t help it. She had an impish side to her personality that seemed to embody that age-old maxim, the one that said you can dress them up, but you can’t take them out. She liked to think that was part of the reason she had been recruited. Besides her other, less tangible qualities.

A slight breeze blew across the table and rustled the papers in front of the psychic. “The spirits are with us,” she said.

Or someone left a window open, Sally thought.

Charles was watching her intently. He shifted in his seat and the object in his pocket bumped against his groin. He groaned inwardly.

The psychic closed her eyes, picked up the pen, and began to draw a series of loops. When she came to the end of the page, she dropped down to the next line and began again, as neat and orderly as the copy from a teletype machine.

Sally had witnessed automatic writing on a few other occasions, and recognized this kind of behaviour. Drawing loops was a sort of psychic holding pattern; it was supposed to keep the writer in a trance-like state until they began to receive messages from The Other Side. The supernatural equivalent of a secretary taking dictation from her boss.

With her eyes still firmly shut, the psychic began to speak.

“I am addressing the entities residing in this house. If you are with us tonight, please give us a sign.”

The house was silent for a long moment. Then, from somewhere close by, there came a loud thump. It sounded as if something heavy—like a sandbag, for instance—had been dropped on the floor.

“Good,” the psychic said, satisfied. The pen in her hand continued to execute an endless series of barrel rolls.

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