Kitty Raises Hell
Page 15

“What do you think we’ll find tonight?”
He blew out a breath and shook his head, a gesture indicating that all bets were off. “I hesitate to make any guesses.”
“You’re preempting us,” Jules complained at one point. “This isn’t going to air on our show for a month.”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “All my listeners are going to be dying to watch your show to see what this really looks like. Your ratings will triple.”
“You have that many listeners?” Gary said.
“Er... maybe?” Actually, I probably exaggerated a bit. The ratings of a cult radio show like mine didn’t amount to much against a popular cable show like theirs. But I knew after listening to all this, I’d want to watch the show.
Nothing happened. I had a schedule to keep. I could sit here and make observations, such as how much patience it took to be a real paranormal investigator, and prompt the crew for comments for maybe twenty minutes before this all become intolerably boring. So, before then, I’d head out to my own van and take a few calls to shake things up a little.
I was glancing at my watch, thinking, Just another minute , but Gary and I had been reduced to trading war stories. I had resisted bringing up my one and only ghostly encounter, because it was personal, and it wasn’t even a ghost, not the way they defined ghosts. When you sensed the spirit of your dead best friend hovering, looking out for you in times of crisis or uncertainty—that was just wishful thinking, wasn’t it? Even when a professional medium tells you it isn’t your imagination.
I wondered if they knew a way to summon T.J.’s ghost to tell Peter what had really happened to him. A good old-fashioned séance, like the kind Harry Houdini liked to debunk.
“You guys do séances, right?” I said. “I was just thinking about the Harry Houdini episode you did. Trying to contact him.”
The three exchanged glances, sharing an inside joke shorthand like I’d seen them do before. Brows raised, I waited for an explanation.
Gary said, “We don’t do traditional séances—”
“Depends on what you call traditional séances, there, mate,” Jules said.
“What if I want to talk to a specific dead person?” I said.
“Because you saw how well the Houdini episode worked out,” Tina said.
Jules leaned forward and pointed his hand like he was going to start an argument with Tina, who had a “bring it on” look in her eyes, but Gary gestured and they both calmed down.
“While there’ve been lots of documented incidents that suggest communication with the Other Side”—he really did say it like it had capital letters—“is possible, it’s not as simple as making a phone call.”
I said, “Oh, I don’t want to make a phone call, I just want—”
“Did you hear that?” Tina said, straightening, her eyes growing round.
We went silent, and a beat later, a noise came over the speakers, a series of thumps like a body rolling down the stairs. Everyone leaned toward the monitors. Jules cranked up the volume on a piece of equipment.
But I watched Tina. Because none of us had heard anything before she asked the question. There hadn’t been anything. So—had she heard it before it happened?
Matt came over my own headset, his voice tense, hushed. Scared, even. “That came through on the broadcast, Kitty. Everyone heard it.”
Okay. Cool. I didn’t say anything. I cringed inwardly at the silence, anathema on the radio. But this wasn’t a talk show anymore, this was drama, and we all waited to see what would happen next.
After a tense moment, the talking started.
“You recorded it?” Gary said.
Jules flipped a couple of switches, peering at the equipment through his glasses. “Yeah, of course.”
“There’s nothing on the cameras,” Tina said, checking all the monitors. “I was looking right at the staircase, there was nothing.”
“So nothing fell. Nothing’s out of place.” Another manic search of all the screens.
I asked Tina, “What did you hear?”
“What do you mean, what did I hear?” She pointed at the speaker. “That thudding. Like something falling over on the stairs. You all heard it.”
“No, I mean before you said anything. What did you hear that made you ask if we’d heard it? Because I know I have better hearing than anyone here, and I didn’t hear anything before you spoke.”
Now everyone was looking at her.
“Tina has good hearing,” Gary said after a moment.
“Not as good as mine,” I said, my smile a bit toothy. A bit lupine. “She’s not a werewolf.”
Gary said, “Tina? Did you actually hear it before it happened?”
The ratings hound in me was jumping up and down. Had I scooped a story here? Was I about to expose one of the Paradox PI crew as actually being paranormal herself? Clairvoyant or something? How cool would that be? I still needed to ask her about what she saw when she looked at me, at Ben.
But Tina was stricken, looking back and forth between her colleagues and shrinking as far as she could against the wall of the van.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I saw something on the monitors. Whatever made the noise, I must have seen it. We’ll go over the footage later. It’ll be there.”
But we’d all been looking at the monitors. Nobody saw anything.
“Can we talk about this later?” she said, almost shrill.
Another thumping came over the speakers, drawing us back to the task at hand. It sounded like the first noise, a rapid, arrhythmic series of hollow thumps, like something falling, or like a herd of children running downstairs.
“Shit,” Jules murmured. The hairs on the back of my head stood up. I quelled an instinct to run.
“Do random, unidentifiable noises like this happen often?” I whispered to Gary.
Slowly, he shook his head. “It never happens like this.”
It came louder, and closer, if that was possible, rattling the speakers. Still, nothing appeared on the monitors. No visible source in the house was producing the noises. In defiance of the laws of physics, these noises seemed to come from nowhere.
The thudding grew louder again, until the van started vibrating, like now the children were running on our roof. I could feel it in my bones.