Spookygirl - Paranormal Investigator (7 page)

So I grabbed my laptop and searched the Internet for paranormal investigation techniques.

Along with all kinds of warnings that I pretty much ignored, I found plenty of information about equipment. Unfortunately, I didn’t have access to things like digital thermometers or electromagnetic field detectors or fancy cameras. I did have the digital camera on my phone, though, and I also had an app for recording sound bites. I thought that would work well enough as a digital voice recorder. Photos might give me proof of spirit activity, and recordings could give me something called EVP—electronic voice phenomena. According to my reading, it seemed like ghostly noises that weren’t audible in person sometimes came through in recordings.

The trick would be finding a way to conduct the investigation at a time when the locker room wasn’t full of girls dressing for gym. For that, I’d have to be a little sneaky. Like I said, sometimes you’ve got to break a few rules when you’re dealing with ghosts.

The next morning in the locker room, I changed clothes as fast as possible, while the blood pounded in my ears and that horrible rage constricted around me. I slipped my phone into the pocket of my gym shorts, stuffed my regular clothes and bag into my locker, and skidded into the gym
at full speed. I wasn’t ready to go back in the locker room yet. I wasn’t, I wasn’t, I wasn’t. Maybe I’d just stay out here and…

Then I saw Coach Frucile and several students setting up a volleyball net. Hmm, which was worse: the wheezing evil in the locker room or volleyball?

Considering my habit of getting hit in the head by gym equipment, I figured it was a tie.

At least I lucked out—my team wasn’t among the first to play, so we sat on the bleachers and watched while two other teams struggled on the court. Coach Frucile was focused on the game, yelling out instructions and corrections and insults I assumed were supposed to be encouraging. She wasn’t paying any attention to the bleachers at all, so after a few minutes I was able to slide off my seat and slip out into the side hall. From there, I took a deep breath, steadied myself, and headed back into the locker room.

The thing swelled around me again immediately, all sorrow and anger and invisible darkness, a fog bank of unrest. It dripped out from the showers and filled the room, silent and creeping, as heavy and drifting as an approaching thunderstorm. Fighting against it, I pulled out my phone and started snapping photos of the room around me. I couldn’t see anything on my phone’s tiny screen, but later I
would transfer the pictures to my computer and blow them up to study them more closely.

The air pulsed, physically pushing me. Although everything looked still, I felt like I was fighting the winds of a hurricane. Hot spots turned into cold spots, then back again. I went from sweating to shivering.

The pressure in my head was starting to blur my vision again. I switched to the recorder app and tried to talk to the thing. According to what I’d read online, I was supposed to ask questions, then wait for answers that might not be audible until I played the recording back.

“Who are you?” I asked. I was yelling, but the blood pounding in my ears drowned out even the sound of my own voice. “What do you want? Is there something you need help with? Something that would let you move on?”

Then I looked down at the phone. Its screen was blank; it had turned off. I tried to turn it back on, but nothing happened. It was dead.

So much for getting EVP.

Suddenly something wrenched the phone from my fingers and flung it across the room, into the shower alcove. The overhead lights flickered, and unlocked locker doors began to open and slam shut repeatedly. A first aid kit bolted to the wall near Coach Frucile’s office shuddered and fell open, spilling bandages and antibacterial wipes
and disposable cold packs onto the floor. I pressed my back against the end of one bank of lockers.

“You can’t hurt me!” I yelled as invisible winds whipped around me, pulling at me, dragging me toward the alcove.

Then the thing’s intensity pulled back a little, just enough for me to notice Coach Frucile watching me from the doorway.

“Um,” I said, breathing hard.

“Forget your inhaler again?”

“Kind of.”

“Get back in here. Your team’s up. If I catch you leaving my class again, it’ll be a week of detention. Got it?”

“Got it,” I muttered. To tell the truth, I was so glad to get away from the thing that I almost welcomed the idea of volleyball—until I took my first ball to the forehead, anyway. I wondered how much of my encounter Coach Frucile had witnessed. Had she heard me yelling? Had she seen the lockers opening and shutting on their own? Had she wondered why the first aid kit’s contents were all over the floor? If she had, she gave no sign.

I managed to find my phone when I reluctantly returned to the locker room to change after class. Despite having been tossed around, it worked just fine once I got it out of the locker room. None of the photos or recordings I’d gotten were on the memory card, though.

After that, I started going to school in my gym
clothes, with my regular clothes crammed into my messenger bag. When first period ended, I changed in the bathroom. Anything to avoid the locker room. I felt unsafe in there.

Drawing was better, since I had Tim to talk to. But Head Jock (technically Jake Bartle, though I preferred my own nickname for him) and his minions were still upset about the Dirk thing, so they looked for any excuse to give me a hard time.

They had even started calling me “Spookygirl.” I suppose it could have been worse—Spookygirl sounded kind of cool, like a superhero name. And at least it kept the jocks from picking on Tim, which had apparently been the status quo before my arrival. I even encouraged the attention, reporting on Dirk’s activities whenever he was spooking around.

“He’s laughing at your drawing,” I told Head Jock when Dirk leaned over his drawing bench and guffawed at Head Jock’s lopsided attempt at a still life in charcoal.

Dirk gave me a misty blue glare. “Freakin’ quit it, will you?”

“Yeah, right,” said Head Jock, but he glanced nervously over his shoulder anyway. “If you really can see dead people, tell me what my grandpa’s first name was.”

It was one of the dumbest ghost-related demands I’d ever heard. I wasn’t psychic—unless Head Jock’s dead
grandfather was following him around and happened to introduce himself, there was no way I could know his name. Still, I figured Head Jock was trying to mess with me, so I took a guess and went with the obvious. “Your grandpa’s not dead.”

Head Jock’s left eye twitched amusingly. “How’d you know?”

I rolled my eyes. “Dirk told me.”

“Spookygirl,” Head Jock muttered, returning to his still life. On the paper in front of him, a pitcher drooped hopelessly next to an apple that looked more like a horribly damaged internal organ. A kidney, maybe.

“Hey.” Dead Dirk vanished from next to Head Jock’s bench and reappeared next to me. The temperature around us dropped a few degrees. It wasn’t really noticeable unless you knew a ghost was nearby—nothing like what happened when Buster was around. “How come you keep doing that?”

Crap. I hated moments like this, when ghosts wanted to chitchat in public. I’d more than learned my lesson in the hall with Henry on the first day of school.

“Not a good time,” I muttered, trying not to move my mouth.

“Did you say something?” Tim muttered back.

I shook my head.

Dirk didn’t give up. “I’m serious. Why do you keep telling my friends I’m still here?”

“Uh, because you
are
,” I said. “Why do you care?”

“It’s freaking them out.”

“Well, they deserve it. They’re jerks.”

“Yeah, but…” Dead Dirk didn’t have an argument for that, so he scowled at me, called me Spookygirl, and disappeared. That was rich—being called spooky by a freakin’ ghost. Pot, meet kettle.

Tim poked me in the arm with his charcoal, leaving a black smudge near my elbow. “You
were
talking to someone. And it got a little cold. Was that a ghost? Was it Dirk Reynolds?”

“Yeah.” I went back to drawing my pitcher and apple—which, unlike Head Jock’s, actually looked like a pitcher and an apple. “He wasn’t the sharpest crayon in the box, was he?”

“He didn’t need to be.” Tim had traded his striped arm warmers for a set of leather wrist cuffs, and he wore what looked like a cheap black dog collar around his neck. The sunglasses he’d forgotten the first day of school were perched on top of his head—he’d tried a few times to keep them on during class, but Mr. Connelly insisted otherwise. Tim squinted (when he remembered to) as the early afternoon sunlight poured through the windows. “Dirk
was a star athlete,” he went on. “He set, like, a million records when he played for Palmetto.”

“Even though he was only a junior when he died?”

“Yeah. The senior players hated him for it.”

“And how’d he die? A car wreck?”

“Yeah. He was drinking at a party, and he tried to drive home. Why?”

“That sucks.”

I’d thought maybe he was secretly murdered by a football rival. It would explain why he was still hanging around. But no, he was just another tragic high school movie-of-the-week cliché. “Then why is he still hanging around with these clowns?”

Tim shrugged. “These guys were freshmen then. They idolized Dirk. Maybe he still wants adoring fans.”

That was just shallow enough to make sense.

“Six minutes until the bell,” Mr. Connelly said. “Let’s wrap it up, people.”

After finishing my drawing, I glanced up to where Head Jock continued to struggle with his still life. The lopsided pitcher now looked like an abstract dead fish, and the kidney-apple had exploded. It hit me that Head Jock was probably having about as much fun getting his art requirement out of the way as I was having with my gym requirement.

Well, it was only fair.

At home that afternoon, Tim watched as I dumped my gym clothes out of my bag and smoothed them out so they’d look okay in the morning.

“Why don’t you just leave those in your locker?” he asked.

I’d never told him about any of the locker-room stuff, but he’d helped me out with a little of Dirk’s history, so maybe he’d know some elements of Palmetto High history as well. “This is gonna sound weird, but are there any school legends or rumors about something terrible happening in the girls’ locker room?”

“You mean besides those awful gym clothes?” He poked at the yellow-and-green monstrosities on my bed.

“I’m serious.” I told him about what I’d experienced, and why I couldn’t go back.

“I’ve never heard about anything. What do you think it is? I mean, if a bunch of girls got stabbed to death in there or something, you’d think people would know.”

“It feels like something like that,” I sighed. “Or something worse.”

We spent the next hour searching online for old news articles about Palmetto High and murders, but we didn’t find anything.

“Maybe it was covered up,” Tim suggested. “Maybe nobody knows it ever happened.”

I shuddered.

“This thing really bothers you, doesn’t it?”

I wanted to get defensive and say no, but I guessed my habit of changing clothes in the bathroom made the truth pretty obvious.

“Yeah. That’s not usually the case, but this is so different from anything I’ve ever felt. I can’t believe nobody else notices it.”

“Well, maybe you’re more sensitive than most people. And you’ve told me ghosts get more active when you’re around, so maybe it only happens when you’re in the room.”

“Lucky me. But what about Coach Frucile? She spends more time in there than anyone. Her office is in there! How can she just sit there and not go nuts?”

Tim’s eyes widened. “Maybe she knows about it, but it doesn’t go after her.”

“What? It’s like her very own Buster or something?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she was in on the murders and everything. Maybe she’s at the center of the whole thing!”

“I doubt it,” I said, but then I thought about the coldness in Coach Frucile’s eyes.

“Let’s look her up. What’s her first name?”

“Um…” I dug through the pile of papers on my desk, looking for the class syllabus Coach Frucile had distributed on the first day of school; it included contact information like her full name and office phone number. “Lilith.”

“And how do you spell Frucile?” He typed as I spelled. Then he sat back and studied her name in the search bar.

“You’re supposed to hit return for the search to work,” I said drily.

“Shut up. There’s something…Don’t you see anything weird about her name?”

“Not really.”

“Frucile. It just sounds weird. And look, if you rearrange the letters…” He typed another word beside Frucile in the search box. Lucifer.

“What are you trying to say?”

“That your gym teacher’s evil?”

“We already established that. Her name could be Mother Teresa and she’d still be evil.”

“But don’t you think it’s strange? And look at her first name. Lilith. Lilith was a demon in a couple of ancient mythologies. She drank blood.”

“Why am I not surprised you know that? Whatever, I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.”

“But you don’t know that.” Tim continued. “What kinds of things do you feel in the locker room? Maybe we’d be better off researching what you’re experiencing.”

That was good paranormal-investigation reasoning, and I wished I’d thought of it. I started describing what I’d felt, and Tim typed the words into the search box. The
list we ended up with included
evil presence, threatening, haunted, heat, cold
, and
things moving by themselves
. When he hit search, the first site on the list of results was that of a paranormal investigation society in Oregon. Their archives included an account of a reported haunting that turned out to be something else entirely; after investigating, the society’s members suspected they were dealing with a portal of evil. “If there’s such a thing as Hell,” the report said, “we just found its servants’ entrance.”

The possibility traced down my spine like an icy finger.

“Did your parents ever investigate anything like this?” Tim asked.