been a couple of kids trespassing and playing around, inadvertently opening a gateway.”
Another part of the report mentioned the tests the investigators performed and the measurements they took before the investigation was aborted. Most of the group’s equipment malfunctioned early on—flashlights with fresh batteries stopped working near the portal, only to “fix” themselves later on. Two digital cameras did the same. A film camera appeared to work, but the resulting negatives were blank. The tape inside an analog recorder snapped.
“Kind of like my phone,” I said to Tim as we read.
But some of the equipment worked long enough to produce results. A digital recorder picked up a hiss which had caused some debate among the society members—some wanted to consider it EVP, but the majority disagreed because no discernable voices could be heard in the static.A sample of the sound was available for download; it sounded like a radio stuck between stations. “Digital enhancement of the hiss does not reveal any real hint of EVP, or electronic voice phenomena,” the report noted. “In a ‘normal’ haunting, we would expect to find evidence of EVP. The lack of recognizable EVP was one factor that led us to believe the entities encountered in the Ramsay Court property were not human in origin, but were instead entering our world through some sort of portal located within the house.” The investigators also recorded elevated magnetic fields and noticeable temperature fluctuations in several rooms.
The team members agreed that the entities in the Ramsay Court property were unlike anything they’d encountered before. One member was so spooked that she dropped out of the society after the investigation and refused to discuss her experience or contribute to the account.
“Oh man,” Tim said when he finished reading. “This is too cool.”
“Are you kidding? You’re scared of Buster, but you think a hell gate is cool.”
“I’m not scared of Buster anymore.”
“Then why do you always make me lead the way around the apartment?”
He scowled a little. “Come on! Demonic rituals opening up portals of evil? Maybe something like that’s going on in our school right now!”
I frowned. “It’s not cool at all. This is why people shouldn’t play around with things they don’t understand.” The idea was making me more and more uncomfortable. I remembered Mom explaining when I was little that people who didn’t really believe in ghosts and whatever were the most likely to stir up trouble with things like Ouija boards and séances. Even with friendly, harmless ghosts, you had to know what you were doing.
“Maybe Coach Lucifer’s behind the whole thing.”
“Whatever.” I didn’t want to think about Frucile holding some kind of midnight ritual in the locker room.
“I’m serious. You said everything seems to come out of the shower stalls, right? Think about it—if you were conducting a bloody ritual, you’d want to do it somewhere that would be easy to clean, right? You just turn on the water, and whoosh, the evidence goes right down the drain. You’d need one of those black light things they have on cop shows to see the residue.”
“And with a little bleach,” I mused, “even that would be gone.”
“So then why is it impossible that Coach Lucifer might be, I don’t know, holding sacrifices in there?”
“Because the idea is nuts.” In truth, it was starting to seem way more plausible than I wanted it to. “And just what do you think she’s sacrificing?”
“I dunno. Chickens? Stray cats? Students who forget their gym clothes?” Tim was getting way too into this theory. “We do get those announcements about runaways pretty regularly. Someone seems to disappear every few months, and we don’t always hear that they’ve been found. Maybe…”
“Maybe they just ran away,” I finished for him. “What would Frucile do with the bodies after these sacrifices? Stuff
them
down the