Gethsemane Hall (12 page)

“Ms. Pertwee’s gadget will sound an alarm if it detects a change in the field. Am I right?” Pertwee nodded. “You put the meter down in the place that’s supposed to be haunted, and then you wait. When the ghost walks by, the machine hollers.” Pertwee made a face but didn’t contradict. Crawford continued. “I’m interested in the mean strength of the field in different areas and the variances within those locations.”

“Let’s see if I follow,” Gray said. “Say a fluctuation occurs. Anna’s conclusion is that a presence caused the fluctuation. Yours is that the fluctuation caused the perception of a presence. Is that about right?”

They both nodded but were eyeing him warily.

“Isn’t this chicken and egg?” he asked. “Couldn’t a ghost cause the field to change, which makes someone experience another kind of ghost?” He raised his eyebrows in holy innocence. Meacham started laughing.

“It isn’t that simple,” Pertwee protested.

“She’s right,” Crawford said.

“Look what you’ve done.” Sturghill was laughing too. “You made them agree. You,” she stabbed a finger at Gray, “are bad.”

He was. And he was having fun. When had he last been able to say that? “Tell me about the other toys,” he said. Crawford and Pertwee didn’t react. “I’ll be good now,” he promised.

They took him through the rest. Light level tricorder, air temperature and movement probes, motion sensors, sound recorders, microphones, cameras, camcorders. Then there was the helmet. “What,” Meacham asked, “the hell is this?” She hefted it. It looked like a yellow motorcycle helmet with wires running out of the top and sides. It had a bulky black visor, from which dangled a USB cable.

“That,” Crawford said, “is my ghost machine. Let me set it up.” He grabbed his laptop and another machine Gray didn’t recognize. It resembled a desktop computer’s tower. Crawford led them all into the Great Hall. He hooked up the laptop and the helmet to the third machine. “This is a magnetic field generator,” he said. “Sit down,” he told Meacham. He placed the helmet on her head. “We’ll do this the first time without the visuals.”

“Should I close my eyes?”

“Up to you. It doesn’t matter. Comfortable? Good.” He turned on the generator, then tapped at the laptop. “Here we go. What I’m doing is bathing your brain with weak magnetic waves.”

“How long before I develop a tumour?”

“It’s harmless. Just relax. If I could have everyone else stay quiet, too? Thank you.”

Meacham settled into her chair. Gray watched her stare into the middle distance. Her eyes began to glaze over. After a few minutes, she opened her mouth; Gray thought to say that she was bored and had had enough. Then her eyes snapped wide. She grunted, and jerked her head around to the right. She brushed at her shoulder as if fighting something. She jumped out of the chair and yanked the helmet off. “Jesus Electric
Fuck
!” she yelled.

Crawford retrieved the helmet from her. “I take it you experienced something.”

“I’ll say I did. Holy
Mother
.” She had her arms wrapped tightly around herself. Her face was chalky. “You could have warned me.”

“What happened?” Gray asked.

“Something came up behind me. I could feel its breath on my neck. Then it grabbed my shoulder.” She shook her head. “It was
strong
.”

Crawford was looking pleased. Gray asked him, “And this is normal?”

“The experience varies from person to person,” he said. “Some subjects don’t report much of anything, but the most common experience is a very convincing sensation of some kind of presence. The feeling of being touched or grabbed isn’t unusual.”

“How does it work?” Hudson asked.

Crawford hesitated. “Father,” he began.

“I’m not ordained,” Hudson corrected.

“Oh. Sorry. I was under the impression that —”

“A common mistake,” Gray reassured him. “Patrick has that air, doesn’t he?”

“Just so you understand,” Crawford told Hudson, “that I’m not saying this as a specific attack on your faith.”

“I don’t follow.”

“The helmet stimulates the temporal lobes. It creates an electrical event not unlike an epileptic seizure, but without the nastiness. The theory is that mystical experiences, visions of God or ghosts, and so forth, are actually the result of these events. A lot of seers and mystics were epileptic, so the correlation is there. In other words, the presence of an Other, a presence beyond the self, is entirely an invention of the brain.”

“That’s rather a bleak vision,” Hudson commented.

Crawford shrugged then lifted the helmet with one hand. “Maybe. But it works.”

“Let me try,” Gray said. He sat down.

Crawford settled the helmet on his head and lowered the visor. “We’ll try the other function, if you’re interested.”

“What is it?” Gray couldn’t see a thing.

“Not every instance of haunting can be put down to magnetic field fluctuations,” Crawford explained.

“Oh, so you admit that much,” Pertwee said.

Crawford ignored her. “The mind is infinitely suggestible. When it encounters environments that tradition says are haunted, it will often
make
them haunted. When you step from a bright, sunny day to a dank, dark tomb, for instance, the contrast can predispose you toward certain experiences.”

“In other words,” Gray said, “it’s all in our minds.”

“Pretty much. Now, having told you all this, I’ve gone and sabotaged the effectiveness of the experiment. Magic isn’t effective when you know how it works.”

“Tell that to Penn and Teller,” Sturghill said.

“What I’m going to do is trigger a virtual environment from the laptop. You’re going to be moving through a setting that I control, with the idea of creating an effect along the lines of what Louise just experienced. Ready?”

“Go ahead.”

He heard Crawford click away at his keys, and then other sounds took over. He heard a steady drip of water, each
ploc
echoing in a huge space. Wind was a sullen moan in the background. The helmet, he realized, had built-in speakers, and they were full surround. He felt the reality of the world before he could see it. The darkness gave way to gloom. He was in a great hall several orders of magnitude beyond the one at Gethsemane Hall. This one belonged to a fantasy version of a medieval castle. There were massive stone pillars rising immense heights to Gothic vaults. Torches in sconces along the walls created pools of brighter light, but the corners of the hall were a harsh black. The image filled his vision and didn’t cut off at the periphery. Gray moved his head, and the perspective shifted. He looked up, and he was staring at the roof. The level of detail was very convincing, though the visuals were the hoariest clichés. “
Très
spooky,” he said. If Crawford responded, Gray couldn’t hear him. The torches began to go out. Still a cliché, and Gray had guessed that that would be the next event. But the dimming of the light was completely convincing. The shadows spread out from the corners, reaching for him. In spite of himself, he wanted to move away from the dark, and he found that he was. He hadn’t been in the virtual castle for more than a minute, and it was already feeling like a real place. The wind picked up, walloping the outside walls with a huge gust, and he thought, just for a second, that he felt a draft on his arm.

The last of the torches winked out. Darkness rushed to meet him, and he recoiled. Then he saw a lighter patch to the right. It wasn’t so much illumination as a splotch of grey. He rushed toward it, just to be able to see anything at all. It was a doorway opening onto a winding stone staircase. He could just make out the steps. He started down. He noticed now that he could hear the echoes of his heels. There was another blast of wind outside, and again, he thought he felt a draft, this time against his face. He saw humidity coating the walls. If he reached out, he thought he might feel the roughness and wetness of the stone. He didn’t try. It seemed to him that the detail and reality of the environment were becoming more emphatic every second he was here.

He reached the bottom of the staircase. “Jesus,” he whispered when he saw where he had arrived. He was standing at the entrance to the Gethsemane Hall crypt. The recreation was perfect. There was no detail missing, nothing that differed from the real thing, except that the source of the grey light was the southwest recess. He moved into the room. He had trouble speaking. “How ...” he began. He started over. “How did you do the modelling so quickly?” Still no answer from Crawford. He was alone. He stayed away from the centre of the crypt, but as he passed by, he felt the cold. Goddamn it, he
felt
it, an icy stab on his arm. He broke out in goose flesh. He looked down and noticed now that he could see himself, and that he was wearing the same clothes as in the real world. What kind of power was Crawford packing in that equipment of his? He hadn’t realized this kind of simulation was possible. Now that he had moved out of the hackneyed castle of the upper floor, there was no longer anything artificial about the world he was moving through.

The recess had changed. Its rear wall had collapsed, revealing a hole that plunged straight down. Its bottom was obscured by the light, which was a pulsing, twitching grey. He stared at the movement. He was mesmerized and revolted. His heart began to beat with the rhythm of the light. He’d had enough. He took a step backward. Hands of shivering mist shot out of the hole and grabbed his arms. He resisted. They tugged him. They ignored his struggles and hauled him towards the lip of the hole. He tried to shake them off, but they had him by the elbows, and all he could do was flap his hands. He moaned. He lost his balance and fell towards the grey. It grinned. He screamed.

Click. Blackout. And then the helmet was being removed from his head. He tumbled off the chair onto his hands and knees, gasping, his pulse an erratic snare drum. He was drenched in sweat. Hudson was at his side, trying to help him up. “Richard?” he asked. “My God, Richard, are you all right?”

Gray nodded, shook his head. He looked up at Crawford, who was holding the helmet and gazing at him with alarm. “Have you ever considered selling that to the film industry?” he croaked, desperate to reconnect with the mundane. “You would revolutionize horror movies. Make a mint, as long as there weren’t too many strokes in the audience.”

“Christ,” Meacham said. “If he came up with something worse than what I could imagine, I’m glad he didn’t run the movie for me.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” Crawford said. “I’ve never had a subject react as strongly as you did. If I’d know this would happen, I would never have —”

Gray waved off the apology. He staggered to his feet, leaning on Hudson’s arm. “Just tell me this. How did you create the setting that fast? It was incredible.”

Crawford looked puzzled. “I didn’t create it just now. My programming colleagues and I have been working on it for ages. It’s the kind of environment that is most suited to generating the effects we’re looking for.”

“I didn’t mean the castle. I meant the crypt.”

“The crypt?”

“The one here.”

They stared at each other for a moment, neither processing what the other was saying. “What,” Crawford asked, “exactly did you experience?”

Gray told him. He became aware of wide eyes around him. When he finished, he said, “I knew graphics were becoming incredibly realistic, but this ...”

Crawford said, “There is no simulation of the crypt in there.”

Gray felt his breathing going funny again. “But I saw —”

“How could there be?” Crawford asked. “I’d never seen anything of the Hall before yesterday. I’m not a programmer, and even if I were, nobody’s that fast, or that good.”

“So what happened?” Meacham asked.

“Maybe nothing to do with the machine,” Pertwee said. “Have you considered that?”

Gray was. His arms felt bruised from the grip of those hands. Pertwee sounded pleased and excited. He wondered if the event would seem so glamorous if she had been the one grabbed.

“I’m not one-hundred-per cent ready to make that conceptual leap yet,” Crawford said dryly. “I’m just speculating,” he told Gray, “but at a guess, I would say that your brain responded to the visual and aural stimulation in much the same way Lou’s did to the magnetic waves. I provided the stereotypical image of a haunted castle. Your subconscious took over and built a simulacrum of the crypt.”

“So I was in a dream state?”

“Or something very analogous. Yes, I think so. Has anything like this happened to you before?”

Gray thought about the dream in London. The chance of an empirical explanation hovered almost within reach. It was tantalizing. He distrusted it. He wanted it. He wanted to dismiss it. “Yes,” he said.

Crawford nodded. “It may be that you’re prone to the very condition the magnetic waves simulate.”

“I’m not epileptic.”

“Have you been tested?”

“No,” Gray admitted.

“I’m not diagnosing you. I’m just pointing out a possibility. In any case, I don’t think you should try the helmet again.”

“No fear.” Gray wouldn’t go near the thing again, even if Crawford held a gun to his head.

“I wouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the experience,” Pertwee said. “It might be a mistake to shrug it off as a hallucination.”

“Do you mean dangerous?” Gray asked her. He thought so, even if she didn’t.

“Of course not.” She was emphatic.

“The spirit world has never hurt anyone?”

She hesitated. “There’s some disagreement in the community over that issue,” she admitted. “But there’s no way anything here could be harmful. This is not a tainted house.” The hesitation had been momentary. She was vehement. “What I meant was that your vision might be important. It might have been a message.”

Gray snorted. “If it was a message, it wasn’t a friendly one. I don’t fancy being dragged down to the abyss, thank you. I ...” He trailed off, wondering all at once if Pertwee weren’t right. He thought about the recess in the crypt, an architectural loose end he had never been able to figure out. He thought about the cold spot that gathered strength with depth. He had been assuming that the crypt was the terminus, its force radiating up to the Old Chapel. He felt the force of those hands again. Their impulse was unambiguous.
Down
.