Gethsemane Hall (2 page)

“Meaning what?”

“Did you know Pete Adams?” Now the twinkle in Korda’s eye promised nothing good.

“Never heard of the man. Should I have?”

“Not really. Just curious. He was small fry in the Directorate of Science and Technology.”

“Was?”

“Was. He was also, in his spare time, a ghost hunter. I ask you. That had better have been an interest that developed
after
he was recruited. Anyway, he was on vacation while Geneva was melting down, and what do you suppose he did for his holiday? I’ll tell you what he did. He rented himself a haunted mansion in England, is what he did. Set up a whack of equipment, is what he did. Threw himself off the roof, is what he did. Generated a shitload of bad publicity and paperwork nightmares for me, is what he did.”

Meacham was having difficulty processing. “Sounds like a fruitcake.”

“But a public one. The British press is all over him. They love this stuff.”

“How did they find out he was Agency?”

“His mother.”

“His
mother
?”

Korda nodded, rolled his eyes. “She’s blaming us. Cover-up, murder, secret ops, the usual thing.”

“So?”

“So we defuse by going public. An investigation will be made into his death.”

“By me.”

“By you.”

She shook her head. “How exactly is becoming tabloid fodder going to reduce my visibility?
Spook Hunts Spooks
. You know that’s what will happen.”

Korda was all happy Buddha. “Pretty much. Lots of entertainment, and if the investigation gets his mother to shut up, it will be harmless and the right kind of distraction. Try to keep the profile down, if you can. But even if you can’t, you being mixed up with ghosts makes for a much sexier story than a tangential connection to Chapel. See where this is going?”

“An inoculation.”

“Good for you.” Korda lost his smile and turned serious. “I do want to know why he died. There have been enough bad scandals to last us a decade or three. If this wasn’t just suicide, I want to know what kind of a missile is heading our way before it hits. Am I clear? Do this right, Lou. Screw up, and I feed you to the hounds.”

Patrick Hudson watched Gray’s face. He looked for a crack in the stone. Right now, he’d take just about any kind of animation, but he didn’t want to see the anger again. It frightened him, because in it he saw more than the common rage of bereavement — he saw a core of hatred. That rattled him. It looked like a turning away. “This is the worst time for you to be alone,” he insisted. “I’m going to deny your request.”

Gray turned to him, his lips pressed into a razor line, the edged cousin to a smile. “I thought you said God was with me.” Sarcasm. Anger. Hatred. “So I guess I’m not alone.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Oh? You mean I
am
alone?”

Hudson took a step back. There had been plenty of nights in refugee camps, when they were exhausted from physical labour and the mental anguish, when he and Gray had played theological games. Gray, always more tentative in his faith, always needing reassurance, especially when surrounded by darkness and war, would try to catch Hudson out in contradictions and paradoxes. Hudson enjoyed the game. He knew Gray wasn’t really trying to blast a hole through his beliefs. He was instead looking for answers, waiting for his objections to be shot down, hoping that Hudson would buttress his own convictions. Now, though, Gray’s tone was different. Now, he was playing for keeps.

Hudson tried to come at him from the side. “Richard,” he said, “we have just spent months and months and months with people who have lost every last one of their relatives, who have seen their wives and husbands and sons and daughters and parents raped and tortured and murdered. And do you know what was probably the single biggest thing that sustained me during that time?” He waited, but Gray didn’t answer. He simply stared, and Hudson felt his words lose their strength, turn brittle and shallow. He forged on. “It was their faith,” he said. “If anyone in the world had a right to give up, to be angry with God, or to give up even on the mere idea that there
is
a God, it was them. And they didn’t. They kept going, thanks to that belief.” He waited again.

Gray continued to stare back. He barely blinked. Gradually, the focus of his gaze shifted from Hudson to a point past his shoulder and a universe away. “Did I say I didn’t believe anymore? I don’t think I did.”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know. I may believe in a cruel God. That would make sense, wouldn’t you say?”

Hudson wouldn’t. The cold implacability of Gray’s logic washed over him and sucked colour from the world.

Gray shrugged. He began to leave but then frowned. He looked back down the drive to the Hall. Hudson saw him concentrate, saw his face clear of grief for the first time since the news of his loss. In its place were puzzlement and something that looked like fascinated disgust. Then Gray shook his head. The grief and the resentment returned. He walked off. Hudson hesitated before following. He knew his duty was to stay with his friend. But now he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to hear what Gray might say. Along his fortifications that held doubt at bay, he had found a hairline crack.

“Stop it,” he muttered and began to follow.

Then he felt it, too. Barely more than a thread, but beckoning as a dry finger, he felt the need to turn back towards the Hall. He stared, waiting for a revelation. None came, but the tickle, the pull remained. He couldn’t see the Hall, but he felt its eyes on him. He snorted at the fancy.
Ridiculous
, he thought.

Ridiculous, the idea of an invisible entity watching him.

The thought was sour, the irony unwanted. He wrenched himself away from the gate and hurried to catch up with Gray.

a scientific investigation

“What is it?” Anna Pertwee asked. She knew there was something as soon as she descended from the van. Edgar Corderman, parked behind her, had his cowering puppy look.
Don’t hit me
, his face pleaded. She’d never hit him. She couldn’t imagine anyone getting physical with his baby face and angel-thin frame. But he drove her crazy when he went into pre-emptive grovelling. Those were the moments when she thought even Mother Theresa might have considered raising a hand or a sandal.

“Sorry, Anna.” Corderman winced at imaginary blows.

“Sorry for what? What did you do?”

“I forgot the film.”

Don’t close your eyes. Don’t roll them. Take that breath. Hold it. One, two, three ... Ten. Let it out.
When she spoke, her voice was calm, quiet, unthreatening, and she had her blood pressure under control. But the reprimand slipped out anyway. “I specifically asked you before we left —”

“I know, I know. I thought I had it, and what with packing all the equipment, I forgot to check, and ...”

Pertwee held up a hand. “It’s all right. Better we realized this now than later. I’ll go in and start setting up. You go down to the chemist’s and pick up a dozen rolls. Do you have enough money?”

Hesitation. “It didn’t even occur to me to —”

Breath. One, two, three ... Ten. Exhale
. She fished her wallet out of her purse. “Here,” she said. “And what speed are we buying?”

No hesitation. “Eight hundred. Or four hundred, if that’s the best they have.” Bright, quick answer, front-row student with the hand high in the air. And this was a man in the twilight of his twenties. Well. You worked with what you had. Corderman meant well and tried harder.

Pertwee gave him a smile. All is forgiven. “Off you go, then.” She watched his Volvo drive down the hill toward central Bexley.
Was I that young once?
she wondered. She hoped not. But there were fewer than ten years between them.

She opened the van’s side door and began to load up. Camcorder, tripod, and Electromagnetic Field Detector to start with. She adjusted the shoulder straps and looked at the house across the street. She didn’t feel as hopeful as she had when speaking to the woman yesterday over the phone. Whenham Avenue was pleasant, well-tended, quiet, the ideal London commuter satellite. The house was semi-detached and modern. The atmosphere was comfortable, not numinous. Doubts crowded in, but she tried to banish them.
Keep the mind open,
she reminded herself. Negativity would kill whatever chance there might be for contact. The spirits would run from her.
Chin up
, she thought and crossed the street.

Winnifred Tillingate opened the door before Pertwee could ring. She was tiny, in her late sixties, and had the bounce of a lifelong sportswoman. Her hair was cumulus-white, fine as air, and held down under a paisley scarf. Her smile was enormous and genuine. Pertwee saw no trace of charlatan. She began to feel better.

“I’m
so
glad you’ve come.” Winnifred beamed as she led Pertwee to the living room. “It is
so
nice to be taken seriously for once, especially by a member of the scientific community.”

Scientific community. Yes, well, er. Pertwee had her dreams, but she could tell Winnifred a thing or two about not being taken seriously. There was a time when she might have been a member of the community. She had her bachelor’s degree in astronomy. She’d begun her master’s. Then things had changed. She’d deviated, her former professors and classmates would say. Epiphany was her version. “Is there a room where the manifestations are strongest?” she asked.

Winnifred nodded like a bird. “Right here,” she said. “This very room.”

“Oh, good.” Pertwee looked around. Pictures of grandchildren in triptych frames. Old console TV. Lots of china collectibles. It was her mother’s home from five years ago, before the cancer had taken her for the last six months to the palliative care clinic. Then Winnifred sat down, and the flashback was complete. She was sitting in a high-backed wooden chair with padded arms. Before her was a round table in the form of a Norman shield. Victoria Pertwee’s table had been engraved with astrological signs, but it had been circular, and the chair was identical. It was what the elder Pertwee had always called a Medium Chair, and Anna felt a mix of melancholy and skepticism. Winnifred put her hands on the chair’s arms and closed her eyes. “They’re close,” she murmured. “I can tell.”

So could Mother
, thought Pertwee. But she began to set up her equipment anyway. Victoria had been a fake. A real throwback to the spiritualism craze, knocking sounds, tinkling bells, rising table and all. Pertwee’s father, Charles, had been the technician behind his wife’s huckster. The act was old, but it drew in the nostalgic and the gullible, along with their money, by the boatload. The twist was that Victoria had actually
believed
. Not in her shows, but in her ability. As far as she was concerned, she really did speak with the dead, and Pertwee could remember real, private séances with her mother as far back as her toddler years.

She had spent her childhood with the reality of spirits as entrenched as that of Father Christmas. Both illusions had collapsed in adolescence. She had revolted against her mother’s ethereal dreamworld and her father’s fakery machine. Her cynicism propelled her through the sciences in school and university. She had run a mile from anything that smacked of spirituality. Then her parents had died, too soon, a year apart. Her father’s death had had her searching for comfort. Her mother’s had given it to her. Sitting by her bedside in the hospital, clutching her hands as they relaxed from the pain finally ended, Pertwee had seen,
seen,
a glow hover for three full seconds over Victoria’s head. All the old loves and beliefs had come flooding back. Father Christmas was real again, and Pertwee was going to prove it.

She’d been at it for eight years. She had photographic evidence, visible and infrared. She had Electronic Voice Phenomena recorded on tape and stored on her hard drive. She had records of ectoplasm, cold spots, and automatic writing. She had everything she needed to be convinced that her mother’s hopes were real, and that the comfort was real. But she had nothing that would make a skeptic listen to her. It was as if her five years of university had been wiped from history. Most of her friends from that period wouldn’t return her calls. The ones who still saw her would glaze over when she tried to talk ghosts, their smiles becoming equal parts polite and pained. She knew she should give up on them, but she didn’t. She had felt the touch. She had the evangelical calling. The science she used would be a tool of validation, not debunking.

“How long have you been sensitive?” she asked Winnifred.

“All my life, dear.”

“And have you been aware of spirits everywhere you’ve lived?”

“Oh, my heavens no. Only this house and my grandmother’s.”

That was promising. Pertwee felt her confidence grow as she headed out to the van for the rest of the equipment. Thermal scanner. Digital and 35mm cameras. Tape and digital recorders. Motion detectors. She hauled them all inside, and while she set the tools up around the room, she opened herself to the space. She sought its rhythms and those of its inhabitants.
I’m friendly
, she told them
. Feel free to speak with me
. She took her time, triple-checking every calibration, but also breathing in the atmosphere. When she was set up, she continued to walk around the room, learning its corners, reaching out and touching the shelves and knick-knacks, making the space her home, making herself a known quantity and not a stranger. After a half-hour, she was ready. This was when she was used to loading the cameras. If only she had film.

“Is that your assistant?” Winnifred had left her chair to be out of the way during the set-up, and now she was standing at the living room window.

Pertwee followed her gaze. Corderman was back. He had one leg out of the car, but he wasn’t making any further progress. He seemed engrossed by something on the passenger seat. Pertwee sighed. “I’m afraid it is,” she said, and went outside. “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked as she approached.

Corderman looked up. “Sorry. Just reading this.” He passed her the newspaper. It was the
Sun
, and the article, halfway through the tabloid, was headlined “
Ghosts Murder Spy in Devon.
” She scanned the piece, and when she read the words “
Gethsemane Hall,
” she said, “Oh, no.”

“That’s what I said.” Corderman nodded. “That’s just not right. They shouldn’t be writing things like that about that place.”

“No,” Pertwee agreed. “No, they shouldn’t.” She was growing angry, undoing all the good, calm work she’d done inside the house. She folded the paper and tossed it onto the back seat of the car. “We’ll think about that later,” she said. “Now is not the time. We have a job to do here. Focus, Edgar. Can you do that?”

“Yes.”

“Are you?”

“Yes. Yes.” He was emphatic, indignation forgotten. She could say this for Corderman: he switched gears quickly.

In the house, Winnifred was back in her chair. Pertwee made Corderman sit on his eagerness and walk around the room for a quarter of an hour. Then they loaded the cameras. Pertwee tied her hair back to keep it from straying into a lens. She opened her log book, noted time, temperature, and conditions. “Are you ready?” she asked Winnifred.

“I always am, dear. When the spirits call, I answer.”

“All right, then.” Pertwee fixed her eyes on a spot in the air halfway up to the ceiling. “To the spirits who are listening, I ask your permission to record your presence.” She waited ten seconds. She didn’t expect a positive response, but she wanted to leave room for a negative one. There was nothing. “Thank you,” she said. She turned back to Winnifred. “Shall we begin?”

The older woman smiled. She relaxed in her chair, and her eyes lost focus. Pertwee watched. The camcorder was running. She had one of the 35mm cameras in hand. Corderman had a digital. Those were more idiot-proof. Pertwee waited.

And there. The temperature dropped. She felt it. She
felt
it.

Before they left, Pertwee thanked the spirits. It was the least she could do.

She had a darkroom set up in her row house in Coulsdon South. It was a former bedroom. The house was small, but she lived alone, so there was plenty of room for the equipment. She and Corderman poured over the prints. They had snapped off three hundred shots over the course of the day. The digital pictures were disappointing, every one of them stuck in the mundane. Three of the 35mm shots, though, were looking promising. All three had been from late in the session. The first, which Pertwee had shot around sunset, showed a vaguely oval red discolouration around Winnifred. The other two, taken after nightfall, had small, bright lights pinpointing the air above Winnifred’s head.

“What do you think?” Corderman asked. “Ectoplasm?”

“These look more like spirit lights,” Pertwee said, pointing to the night shots. “This one,” tapping the red nimbus, “I’m not sure. An aura, maybe.” Maybe, and yet she knew the comments to expect if she showed the photographs to a skeptical audience. Dust on the lens. Light on the film. Glare. Not to mention that whatever authority pictures might once have had lay in ruins, thanks to Photoshop. “Let’s check the recordings,” she said.

They listened late into the night, each with headphones. Corderman handled the tapes, Pertwee the digital material. Pertwee heard hours of nothing, cranked high and turned into static, punctuated by the sounds of clicking equipment, shifting seats, a cough here and a sneeze there. Hoping for a miracle, she checked the times of the promising pictures. “Fast forward,” she told Corderman and read off the times. The search was easier on the computer. She scanned ahead, watching the display for spikes. Nothing clear stood out, but she turned the volume up still higher. She tried to shut down every sense but hearing.

There. In the midst of the white noise blizzard, she thought she heard a voice. “No,” it said. She rewound, listened again. There it was. “No.” She wasn’t making it up. She was sure the word was real. She opened her eyes and turned to Corderman. “Anything?” she asked.

He was frowning. “I’m not sure.” It was the sentence he used when he desperately wished he had something but didn’t.

“Come listen to this,” she said. He crossed the room, and they traded headphones. Pertwee played with the tape until she found the spot. Her digital recorder was more compact than it was hi-fi, and there was a lot less noise on the tape. The static was thinner. The voice should have been clearer. It wasn’t. But she heard it at the right moment, a faint but articulate denial, breaking surface just before going down and drowning.
No
. “So?” she said.

Corderman shook his head. “My hearing must be worse than yours.”

“Here.” She unplugged the headphones, played the computer’s recording back through the speakers. “You can hear someone say ‘no.’ Listen.” Static wind, aural clouds forming and dissolving, hypnotic. “
There
,” she said when the sound came. She stabbed a finger at the wave pattern. There was the smallest hiccup.

“Let me hear it again,” Corderman said. He was excited now. He stared at the wave display during the playback, and this time his face lit up. “I heard it,” he said in happy awe. “I heard it.”

Pertwee isolated the clip and saved it to their archive of EVP. She was feeling pretty good, too. Audio and visual phenomena coming at the same time. Explain that as lens glare. She went over the temperature readings. No dip. That was disappointing, but not conclusive. Cold spots didn’t always register except on the psychic level. She leaned back and judged the night well spent.

Corderman was dancing in his seat. “We have something. We really have something.”

“Maybe,” Pertwee qualified, even though she agreed.

“What maybe? This is definitive.”

“There were no fluctuations on the EMF Detector.”