Free Polterheist: An Esther Diamond Novel by Laura Resnick Page B

reached the bottom floor and the doors opened, I pressed the button to go back up to the fourth floor. A few moments later, we arrived there without incident. We exited the elevator, then turned around to look at it in bemusement.
    “I suppose a more valid test would be to ride it alone, when no one knows you’re there, the way Satsy did,” I mused.
    “I do have a theory.” Rick said hesitantly, “Uh, do you know why Satsy went down to the docks?”
    “I know it wasn’t just because he likes a guy named Lou,” I hedged.
    “Right. Well, he’s an imaginative person, a performance artiste, a creative . . . and he was under the influence of some pretty potent weed.” Rick smiled and admitted, “I’ve visited the docks a few times myself, Esther, and that is some really good shit they’re sharing down there.”
    “Did everyone know about this but me?” I wondered.
    “I think that maybe the elevator stopped or malfunctioned—maybe even because, without being aware of it, Satsy leaned against a bunch of buttons at once, which screwed with the electrical system.”
    “And then he imagined all the rest?” I shook my head. “You didn’t seen the condition his costume was in. There were scorch marks and places where it had been singed. It was a mess—even apart from all the smeared makeup.”
    Rick shrugged, unconvinced. “He was smoking on the docks. Maybe he got careless and burned a few holes in his costume.”
    “This was more than a couple of little spots from being careless while—”
    “Maybe he still had the joint with him when he freaked out in the elevator, and he set his own costume on fire by accident, without realizing what he’d done.” Rick added, “I’ve studied drug use in my psych courses, Esther, and there are instances of marijuana really messing with perceptions of reality. Also, it’s possible there was something added to that joint which Satsy didn’t know about—or that he knows about and hasn’t mentioned.”
    “Hmmm.”
    Satsy
was
imaginative. And his interest in the occult ensured that, in an overstimulated state, his brain could certainly cook up the images and sensations he had described to me. So I recognized that Rick’s theory was plausible.
    On the other hand, I certainly knew by now not to dismiss a tale like Satsy’s just because it sounded supernatural. My friendship with Max—Dr. Maximillian Zadok, a mage born in the seventeenth century and unquestionably the most unusual person I’ve ever met—has taught me that reality is much stranger than I ever imagined and that there are more things in it, Horatio, than were dreamt of in my philosophy.
    “But that’s just my theory. What’s yours?” Rick prodded invitingly, “What do you think happened?”
    “I have no idea,” I said shaking my head. “But I do know that I’m not getting on that freight elevator alone any time soon.”
    He smiled again. “Actually, I don’t think I will, either.”
    “And it bothers me that on the same morning that Satsy was terrified by a weird experience, this kid Jonathan was, too.”
    “Well, the boy’s episode is pretty easy to explain, don’t you think?” Rick’s take on that was very similar to what Miles had suggested: a frightened young child, lost in a setting that strongly suggested certain things to his imagination. Rick added some background about child psychology and how a very young brain interpreted sensory information, and it sounded convincing.
    “Yeah, maybe there really was only one weird incident here this morning,” I said. “The one Satsy had.” And since
that
experience had involved smoking some really good shit . . . I shrugged. Perhaps the bizarre events of the morning were indeed due to imaginative minds misinterpreting conventional experiences under the influence of stress or a psychoactive substance.
    Even so, I decided to be thorough. Mostly because of how terrified that nice little boy had been. “I think I’m going to check out