Gethsemane Hall Read Online Free PDF Page A

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