Free Aftersight by Brian Mercer

acquaintance. As you can hear from my voice, I'm not from around here."
    "Tommy's visitin' from England."
    "When I heard they were going to let Tyson in to investigate Plymouth Plantation, I couldn't pack my bags fast enough."
    "Tommy's got these gadgets, basically sophisticated cameras, that'll allow us to see in the dark."
    "They do plenty more than that. In essence, they can see a broader range of the light spectrum than one can with the naked human eye. They use infrared, ultraviolet, thermal, and electromagnetic scans to give us the full picture of what's happening. They've even got advanced motion and vibration detection capabilities."
    "We've got the main house and a few of the outbuildin's covered with equipment," I explained. "A cockroach can't fart in there without us knowin' about it."
    I guided Rex toward the mansion's back porch. "That over there was once the stable. As you can see, it's been fixed up and given a new coat of paint, but it still looks like it did in old photographs taken in the 1880s. A Union army soldier is sometimes spotted in there. Seems like he's guardin' somethin'. He spoke to a gardener once. That was José's last day on the job, I can tell you that."
    My cowboy boots thumped heavily on the wooden steps leading up to the back stoop. I collapsed on a bench there and removed them. "Take off your shoes. Our job tonight is to move around as quiet and careful as possible so's not to screw with the equipment. This is how it works. We find a perch, set there as still as possible. You want to use this, this, and this," I pointed to my eyes, ears, and nose, "without using this," I jabbed at my mouth. "It's like deer huntin'. The slightest change could be important, so be ready to stretch out all your senses."
    I spoke into my headset. "Travis, we're goin' in for a baseline."
    "Copy that."
    The screen door moaned open. All the lights in the house was off but the barest outline was visible in the faint gleam from the naked windows. The space opened into a mudroom and, beyond, a small but professional-grade kitchen. We padded through it into the main corridor, pausing to let our eyes adjust to the darkness. The house was completely quiet, but there was a sense of it shrugging in answer to our presence, like the subtle shift of mortar and wood seams.
    "Most of the paranormal activity these days," I explained in the barest whisper, "takes place in the old part of the house, not those two back wings, which was added after the Pendleton sisters passed on. Agnes and Ruby was in their eighties when they died. Neither of them got married or even had a beau, from what I understand, so all their lives they only had each other.
    "They had gotten too old to take care of boarders, so they was alone here in this big house. Agnes was the older one. She was kind of sickly toward the end, so she couldn't travel very well. It was Ruby who left her alone to go to Jackson to attend their cousin's funeral, leaving Agnes behind. When she was in Jackson she twisted up her ankle so had to stay with her grandnieces a few days longer than she'd planned. They didn't have a telephone here at Plymouth, but Ruby called around to the market which made deliveries here a few times a week to get a message to Agnes.
    "Ruby didn't hear about what happened until she came home about a week later. Turns out Agnes took a tumble down the stairs and broke her hip. No one was around to hear her call out for help and she laid there in her own blood and filth for almost three days before she died. It was the grocery boy who discovered her body and called in the police. By the time Ruby got back, the mess had been cleaned and the body had been hauled away, which left old Ruby here in this big ol' house all by herself."
    I skated across the hardwood floor in my stocking feet. The floorboards shifted and creaked under my weight. The old furniture was still there, all of it true to the period, and in the dim light it seemed as if we might be