The Dark Read online

  “We’re going out,” she called back over her shoulder.

  She took Peter Lee to a corner pub a couple of streets away.

  “Sorry about that,” she said as they walked toward it. “Had to get away. I’ve heard more intelligent noises coming out of a colostomy bag.”

  The pub was city-center cod-Victorian in an authentic Victorian shell, open at both ends and filled with a lunchtime business crowd. She managed to catch someone’s eye and got herself a pint of Jennings and the grapefruit juice that Peter Lee had asked for.

  “Is that all you drink?” she said as she put the glasses down on the halfa-table that he’d managed to bag while she was at the bar.

  “In the middle of the day, it is,” he said. “Anything stronger puts me to sleep.”

  “Me too,” she said, and knocked back a third of the beer in one go. “God,” she said when she’d set the glass down again, “I just don’t know what to do with him. All those years, he was like a giant to me. Now it’s like …”

  Whoa. She was beginning to hear how she must be sounding.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’ve got your career on the line. You don’t want to be hearing my problems.”

  Peter Lee shrugged. “Sokay,” he said.

  “What do you make of all that, though? How can an educated person even start to entertain such a notion?”

  “Sometimes it takes an educated person to know enough to say, ‘I don’t know.’”

  She looked at him, eyebrows raised. “That’s deep,” she said, suddenly realizing that thanks to the beer, she was getting the first warning signals from a low-down and dangerous-feeling belch.

  Peter Lee started picking the ice out of his grapefruit juice and dropping it into the ashtray.

  “I had a strange experience of my own once,” he said.

  Which he then went on to tell her about.

  MIRANDA WOKE UP on the sofa in the ballroom-sized lounge a few hours later, living proof that she and daytime drinking were necessary strangers. Her head felt bad, in the way that fruit goes bad. Soft, rotten, ready to split.

  She went up to the bathroom to look for some aspirin. It was a room that she rarely saw when she visited, having a bathroom of her own on the attic level. When she opened the door of the wall cabinet, it was to find all of her mother’s toiletries lined up on the shelves. The bottles, the lotions, the perfumed bath cubes that people bought each other as presents but no one ever used. The home-color kit, the highlighting shampoo, the lavender talcum powder.

  She knew that most of her mother’s clothes were in the wardrobes, still. He’d told her as much. He was waiting until the time felt right to let them go, he said.

  She found some soluble aspirin, but nothing to dissolve them in. On her way down to the kitchen, she was vaguely aware that something was different, without immediately being certain of what … and then she realized that not only was the enormous speaker gone from the landing, but also the wiring that had hung down the stairwell. All removed. Various cameras and other ghost-busting items appeared to have been stripped out as well.

  That brightened her, a little.

  In the kitchen, sipping from a clean glass out of the dishwasher, she picked up Yvonne Lord’s magazine and leafed through it until she found the page of readers’ letters to Rita the Psychic. The first was from a woman whose husband had died and who was now being visited regularly by a pigeon that stood on her bedroom windowsill and tapped at the glass with its beak. Could this be my husband, Rita, the reader wanted to know, returning with a message for me? Yes, replied Psychic Rita, I believe it almost certainly is, which caused Miranda to blow soluble aspirin down her nose.

  The phone started ringing then, and she was still choking when she picked up the receiver. It was a real effort just to manage “Hello?”

  “You’re awake, then,” she heard Peter Lee’s voice say.

  “What makes you think I was asleep?”

  “The sounds you were making when I left you at the house.”

  “Did you move some of the gear back to the lab?”

  “We’re not at the lab,” he said. “Are you fit to drive? There’s something going on here that you maybe need to see.”

  IT WAS A suburban Close of modern houses, none of them more than ten years old. They’d been crammed onto the available land like penguins on a rock. Each had a one-car garage and a driveway and an immaculate Brazilian strip of garden, and the convenience of being able to step straight out of your front door and into your neighbor’s face.

  The horseshoe-end of the Close had turning space for one car, and there were seven non-resident vehicles in it with their wheels up on the pavement. The biggest of these was a white university service van. There was no mistaking the house Miranda needed; the kids from the department were all over it.

  She parked the car as near as she could. Two of them were up ladders, fixing plastic blackout sheeting over the upper-story windows. Down below them she recognized one of the graduate students hooking up a heavy-duty generator cable between the house and the van. Others were stepping over it with boxes, taking care not to trip. Some of the boxes looked familiar.

  Miranda followed the students in. No one challenged her. The front door was pinned back, the house opened up to the world as if for surgery. A boy in the hallway was fixing up an array of six Pentax cameras in a framework. She heard her father’s voice somewhere upstairs saying, Check the walls for buried wires. Anything that conducts. Start at the manifestation point and work outward.

  Hard to tell for sure from down here, but it sounded as if he was enjoying his evening.

  The stairs were impassible for the moment and so she made her way through the house, looking for someone she might recognize. She found Peter Lee in the glazed conservatory on the back of the building. The invading party had taken over the space, and Peter Lee was setting up a command center here. At this moment, he was down on the floor trying to link up four portable TVs with the outputs of four separate video recorders, which in turn had to be matched with switchable input from somewhere near a dozen cameras.

  She stood over him for a while, watching without being noticed, and then to get his attention, said, “When did all this get underway?”

  He looked up, squinting with one eye because of the bright tungsten working light behind her shoulder.

  “While you were sleeping,” he said. “We brought all the gear from the house and a vanload more from the lab.” Then he grinned. “Duncan Dalby’s going to hit the roof.”

  “Nobody seems worried.”

  “It’s a ghost-hunt!” he said”

  She gave up on Peter Lee and moved back into the main part of the house, where her father was now in the hallway. As soon as he spotted her, he broke off his conversation and said, “Miranda! Don’t just stand there, make yourself useful.”

  Someone bumped past her with a laser printer.

  “Doing what?” she said.

  “Help Mrs. Lord with the coffee.”

  As she took a breath to tell him what she thought of that idea, there was an approving chorus of voices from all the rooms around her. So instead of responding, she clamped her lips shut and went through into the kitchen.

  By late evening, everything was in place. Video cameras were tested and running. The house had a complete new nervous system and a brain room to drive it. Devices in the upstairs rooms ranged from a state-of-the-art ion cloud detector to an array of cheap motion sensors from the home security section of a DIY store. Spot-temperature observation, infrared profiling, electromagnetic field detection … in the midst of directing the installation, Doctor Hood had taken the time to liaise with anxious or indignant neighbors out in the Close. She’d heard him soothe them, reassure them, convince them that the work here was crucial and without any attendant dangers to the surrounding property … .

  And all without ever once mentioning the “g” word.

  Everyone gathered in the sitting room to hear Mrs. Lord tell her stor
y once again and to discuss a strategy for the evening’s observations. It had been impossible for Miranda to get a head count before this, because everyone had been constantly on the move and there had been some people who’d turned up with gear, worked for a while, and then hadn’t been seen again.

  Now she counted nine, including Peter Lee and three of the graduate students she’d met back at the physics department. All listened intently as Yvonne Lord went through the story that Miranda had heard earlier on in the day. Miranda had the worst spot, right at the back of the crowd, almost pushed out into the hallway, trying to see over everybody’s heads.

  When Yvonne Lord’s story was done, Hood sent her upstairs to take a Valium and get herself ready for bed before the cameras went live. Once she was out of earshot, he opened the matter up for discussion.

  Someone said, “What if we’re looking at something purely psychological?”

  “You mean, is it only in her imagination?” Doctor Hood said. “That’s entirely possible, but we’re not going to start with a conclusion and then cherrypick our evidence to fit. I know that’s a bit radical for this profession, but let’s give it a try for once. As long as ghosts wear clothes, I’m inclined to be convinced that the psychological is a major element. But let’s not be closed to the possibility of the actual existence of some underlying physical trigger here. So-called spirit photographs often show a ball of fog where a live observer sees a human form. That factor alone is of serious interest to me.”

  Everyone was assigned to a post. Nobody said as much out loud, but Miranda’s role was to keep out of the way. Yasmin, the medical technician, went up to attach a pulse monitor to Mrs. Lord, and on returning, gave Doctor Hood the go-ahead to send all the cameras and monitoring equipment live.

  Miranda felt herself prickle all over as the ghost house went on-line.

  EVERYONE FELL SILENT and tried to settle. There was no way of knowing how long they’d have to wait for something to happen. Maybe nothing would. Maybe their presence would be enough to upset the conditions that had caused the phenomenon. Or maybe ghosts just didn’t like a crowd. As far as was possible, they’d confined their wiring and mess to the downstairs rooms and kept the upstairs looking normal. That meant a lot of gear hidden behind furniture, in the loft, and even in the wall cavity.

  Under these bizarre conditions, artificially relaxed by the Valium, Yvonne Lord had undertaken to lie in her own bed with a pulse meter taped to one hand and a signaling device adapted from a Playstation joystick in the other, and in that unnatural state to wait for her dead husband to make his nightly appearance.

  In a creaky cane chair at the back of the conservatory, Miranda let out a long breath and felt much of her energy following it. Her main view was of the backs of her father and Peter Lee, watching over all the monitors and readouts, observing, tweaking, calibrating, swapping theories in the lowest of low voices.

  Looked at from any angle, it was a joke, wasn’t it? Spook-hunting was for the oddball, the damaged, the credulous. Bobble-hat people. Not bright kids like these.

  And yet …

  Under more normal academic circumstances, under the tutelage of the world-famous Doctor Hood, these same bright kids would be exercising their intellects in the search for and study of dark matter. And what was dark matter? Miranda was no scientist but she was a scientist’s daughter, and knew that her father’s regular field of study involved a material of unknown composition that had never been seen, measured, nor even proven to exist, and yet was reckoned to comprise more than ninety percent of the known universe. The strongest argument for its existence was that without it, the heavens would fall. Spiral galaxies would fly apart, and the light from distant stars would bend without reason.

  Despite nobody knowing what it was or what it was made of, dark matter had to exist in some form, because otherwise certain phenomena lacked any rationale.

  Which of course had no parallel in anything that was going on here.

  She could hear Yvonne Lord’s breathing over an intercom-sized speaker on the main desk. Every now and again, there’d be a rustle of sheets as the woman shifted her position.

  Everyone waited, and nothing much happened.

  Miranda was looking at Peter Lee.

  I had a strange experience of my own once.

  He’d been walking home late one night, he’d told her. This had been some years before, when he’d been a second-year student. He’d had a lot on his mind and had only been vaguely aware of a figure walking ahead of him. When he thought about it later, he realized that the figure had been dressed in very old-fashioned garb, gaslight-era clothing, but the fact hadn’t struck him as anything remarkable at that moment. All that he’d registered was the presence of a man in front of him, heading in the same direction as himself.

  When the man reached the house where Peter Lee was living at the time, he stopped as if to enter. Peter Lee registered this, and took an interest. The gap between them was closing as Peter Lee approached. The man met his eyes, smiled … and then walked right through the closed and locked door.

  That was it, and that was how he’d told it. His only such experience, ever. The significant element to Peter Lee’s mind was not that he’d seen a ghost, but that the ghost had so obviously seen him.

  Miranda’s father was looking pensive.

  “Nothing much happening here,” he said. “Let’s run some juice through the wall. See if we can start something rolling.”

  Peter Lee got up and moved out of the conservatory and into the main part of the house. Yasmin the medic, half-hidden by monitor screens, said, “How do you record an observation when your observer’s asleep on the job?”

  “Already?” Doctor Hood said. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m on sound. Her pulse has slowed and she’s making z’s.”

  Miranda turned her attention toward the intercom speaker and, yes, she could hear a faint snoring coming out of it as well.

  “I don’t want her that relaxed,” Doctor Hood said.

  “Does she do Valium every night?” Miranda ventured. “Maybe the whole thing’s no more than a recurring dream.”

  “Ion surge,” someone said then, with an edge of excitement that everyone immediately picked up on. Other voices chipped in with further observations, some called through from the adjacent room.

  “I’m picking up an EM field by the wall.”

  “Temperature down two degrees.”

  Doctor Hood looked at all the TV monitors and switched cameras on a couple of them. Miranda looked over his shoulder and saw the same thing that he did. Nothing. Empty stairs, empty landing, empty bedroom apart from the half-visible figure of Yvonne Lord in one corner of a screen, nothing happening in the boxroom on the other side of the bedroom wall. All in grainy digicam nightshot vision, images magically pulled out of the darkness.

  “How closely did that coincide with the voltage?” Hood said.

  Peter Lee stuck his head around the door.

  “I hadn’t started the voltage yet,” he said.

  “High, high activity,” said the boy who’d reported the ion surge. “I’ve got levels jumping all over the place.”

  “Sound?”

  “Woman in a room breathing,” the girl said. “Slow breathing, slow pulse, same as before.”

  “Is she reacting to anything?”

  “Nope.”

  “Is she even aware?”

  “Doesn’t look like it. We’ve got an independent phenomenon. It isn’t coming from her.”

  Then there was a sound that made everybody gasp and jump at the same time as six Pentax cameras fired off all at once, and only inches from the room microphone. The switchblade sound of the shutters was followed by a chorus of motor drives as the film rolls advanced.

  On the monitors, there was nothing to see. Yvonne Lord stirred a little.

  Responding to movement within the range of their infrared trigger, the reset cameras fired off yet again.

  And still, in the room, there w
as nothing.

  Doctor Hood was on his feet. “For God’s sake, woman! What do you think we’re here for? Wake up and look!”

  “Live body on the stairs,” somebody said then. “Moving.”

  There was a whimper from one of the students nearby. A few heads turned in the direction of the hallway. Miranda realized that her fists were bunched up so tight that her nails were hurting her hands. Those all around her were focused on the work they had to do, but she could sense without looking that in this little chintzy house, on its quick-build middle-income suburban dormitory estate, there was a sudden and shared terror in the air. The theoretical had suddenly become all too real.

  She glanced at those students she could see from where she was seated. One was flushed, another bloodless, one was actually shaking.

  “Moving up or down?” Hood said.

  “Up.”

  Miranda said, “It’s Peter Lee.”

  She’d just spotted him on one of the screens, crossing the upper landing. As he entered the bedroom, he passed from one screen and onto another in a different part of the array. Grayed-out, featureless, and leaving a streaky trail of fading pixels as he moved, on the screens he looked as convincing a ghost as any spirit footage.

  “He’s compromising the experiment,” someone said.

  “Quiet, there,” Doctor Hood said. “Stick with your observations.”

  She saw Peter Lee cross the room and crouch by the bed, just his shoulder in shot and nothing visible at the wall where the apparitions were supposed to take place.

  “He’s talking,” the girl on sound reported.

  “Put it on the speaker?”