Gethsemane Hall Read Online Free PDF

headphones, played the computer’s recording back through the speakers. “You can hear someone say ‘no.’ Listen.” Static wind, aural clouds forming and dissolving, hypnotic. “ There ,” she said when the sound came. She stabbed a finger at the wave pattern. There was the smallest hiccup.
    “Let me hear it again,” Corderman said. He was excited now. He stared at the wave display during the playback, and this time his face lit up. “I heard it,” he said in happy awe. “I heard it.”
    Pertwee isolated the clip and saved it to their archive of EVP. She was feeling pretty good, too. Audio and visual phenomena coming at the same time. Explain that as lens glare. She went over the temperature readings. No dip. That was disappointing, but not conclusive. Cold spots didn’t always register except on the psychic level. She leaned back and judged the night well spent.
    Corderman was dancing in his seat. “We have something. We really have something.”
    “Maybe,” Pertwee qualified, even though she agreed.
    “What maybe? This is definitive.”
    “There were no fluctuations on the EMF Detector.”
    “That doesn’t mean we’re wrong. Spirits don’t have to disrupt the field.”
    “No, but consistency across the readings is always more impressive.”
    “To whom? To people who wouldn’t believe even if you captured a spirit and put it in a bottle?”
    Pertwee didn’t answer. He was right, but she couldn’t bring herself to let go of her fantasy of converting the skeptics. She wanted back into the community of science. She deserved it. She was rigorous in her work. She didn’t make sensational claims. She was even careful to a fault with her image. No unicorns, Birkenstocks, and unkempt hair to keep her locked in the flake compound. She followed fashion trends like a hawk, navigated the trade winds to maintain a look that married professional with flair. She had good skin, good hair. She did a good media face when she had to. But the backs remained turned to her.
    Corderman didn’t push things. He was ready to move on. “What next?” he asked.
    “Next you go home, and we both sleep.” We’ve earned the rest. We’ve done good work .
    “But is there anything else lined up?”
    “Nothing definite.” A couple of calls had come in that she wanted to follow up on, but nothing too exciting.
    “Because I was wondering ...” Corderman pointed at the Sun , dropped on the floor beside the outside door.
    Pertwee’s mood took a dive. She stood, walked over to the paper, and picked it up, handling it like toxic waste. She read the article again, thoroughly this time. Her lips were pressed into a stone line.
    “Is that steam coming out of your ears?” Corderman asked.
    Not funny. She kept reading. Despair fought with anger. This was the sort of giggle-piece that helped confine her research to the outer darkness, that prevented her work from ever being taken seriously. But that wasn’t the worst thing about the article. The worst was the slander of Gethsemane Hall. “Liars,” she muttered.
    Corderman looked uneasy. “I don’t know, Anna. Do they really make up deaths?”
    “I don’t mean about that. I mean about why it happened.” She understood why the reporter had run with the story the way he had. Ghost hunter visits haunted house, plunges from tower. Writes itself. Scary, killer ghosts were much sexier than the sometimes sad, sometimes happy, often melancholy souls she encountered. There had always been talk among ghost-hunters about angry or dangerous spirits. Pertwee had her doubts. She had never found any evidence of malevolence, and she put those beliefs down to the fears and perceptions of the observers. Ghost could be frightening, yes. That wasn’t their fault.
    But Gethsemane Hall. Of all the places to tar with a house-of-horrors brush. In the community, the house was legendary, and it was saintly, which was as it should be, given its original owner. The stories that had filtered out over