Presence

by J. Richard Jacobs

The woman in the hall, Daphne Winkle, was, well, large. She was not tall and not big, but large. She swayed slowly from side to side, alternately placing her considerable mass on one foot, then the other as if she feared falling through the typical tract house concrete slab floor.

“Oh, yes-s-s, I can feel it now,” she said. Her voice warbled lightly as she spoke and trailed off at the ends of her sentences as if she were running out of breath.

John Sills brought up the rear of the group of three; the large one who swayed, Daphne, his wife, Lucy, and he.

Uh-huh, right out of a high-school drama text, A Thousand Ways to Sound Mysterious; Method Twenty-something; Warble and Trail. Mercy.

Why had his wife dragged him in here, anyway? He should be attending to more important things, like running a much needed stretch-test on his new hammock, or making an estimate of the number of leaves he was not going to rake up this Fall. John Sills knew without doubt that rakes, lawnmowers, hoes, edgers, and whatnot, were the tools of the Devil…and so was all this nonsense promulgated by his wife’s nervous imaginings. Ghouls, goblins, and this woman, Daphne Winkle, vacillating in their downstairs hall like a great ocean liner. Overloaded barge?

“It’s here. I can feel it quite strongly now,” Daphne warbled and trailed.

How can she feel anything with her nerve endings pushed so far from her brain?

“There is a presence near the end of this hall,” she announced with some pride of accomplishment and pointed dramatically toward the guest linen closet and emergency bathroom that no one ever used. She rolled her head slowly as she spoke.

“Somewhere in this corridor there is an entity,” she continued. “This entity is disturbed…frustrated…frightened, maybe. It is longing to be released from the trap in which it is caught…struggling…in vain.”

“She’s…she’s describing me, Lucy,” John whispered.

“Quiet, John, this is important,” Lucy said.

“Ridiculous,” he said. “This woman’s almost as crazy as your idea to call that para-whatever-it-is outfit in the first place. Entities.”

“Shush, John. Don’t interrupt her concentration. Dr. Longwood told me she had to have total silence in order to pick up the vibrations. And that’s normal, Dear.”

“That’s normal?”

“No, John. Para-normal. That’s what you were trying to say. Paranormal. Dr. Longwood’s institute is involved in paranormal studies.”

“Right, Lucy…paranormal studies. How could I possibly have forgotten that?”

“That’s right, and stop being so snide. Now, be quiet.”

Daphne began inching her way down the hall. She stopped briefly here and there to sniff the air and wave her hands above her head, palms up. To John, she appeared to be a cross between a bulimic bloodhound and a three-hundred-pound ant in search of a huge sugar bowl for a snack.

Daphne stopped, threw back her head and arched her back with her eyes closed. She was standing near a picture of his mother-in-law, Glenda.

“It’s here,” she announced triumphantly. “The energy is strong near that picture.”

“Well, I’ll be…I should have known it was Glenda who was at the bottom of all this.”

“Oh, stop it, John. It couldn’t be my mother. She’s still alive and she lives on the other side of town. You know that.”

“Yeah, and it’s never stopped her from haunting me before, has it?”

“Sh-h-h!”

Daphne, her eyes still tightly closed, began to quiver and John bit his tongue…hard. It was not what he thought of as a picture of grace and beauty.

“There is something else here, too. I think it may be the entity’s conduit, although it feels too powerful for that. O-o-oh…the entity is angry. It’s very, very angry-y-y.”

“I’d be angry, too, if she were standing on my conduit.”

“John Sills, if you don’t stop…”

“It comes up through the floor…right here. Then it goes through the ceiling near that wall. Does your house have an attic?”

“No,” John said.

“Yes, it does. Don’t pay any attention to him, Daphne. He’s just embarrassed because he hasn’t cleaned it like I asked him to. Six months ago, wasn’t it, Dear?”

“I’ve been planning how to approach it, Lucy. I mean, we’re talking major project up there,” he replied, while looking at the floor and shuffling his feet.

“You haven’t even looked up there, have you?”

“Sure I have, Lucy. Last week…I think.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Sills,” Daphne said. “You wouldn’t be so concerned if you could see some of the attics I’ve had to investigate. Believe me, I’ve probably seen much worse. Why don’t you show me the attic, Mr. Sills?”

“See, John? It’s all right. Let’s go upstairs and you can be a good boy and pull down the ladder for Daphne.”

He hated it when Lucy took that tone with him. She sounded just like Glenda. The three of them went upstairs and into their future baby’s bedroom, painted and decorated in Disney fantasy style as Lucy had dictated.

“All right, John, pull down the ladder and let Daphne have a look.”

“Okay, but I don’t think this is such a good idea.”

John reached up and got a good grip on the stub of frayed rope hanging from the ceiling. Dust exploded in a cloud around it when he gave it a sharp tug. The ladder came down amid squeals of rusted, unused hinges protesting being pressed into service.

“I thought you said you looked up there last week, John.”

“Well-l-l, maybe I meant to and then forgot. It was my bowling night and Fred was waiting for me. You know how it is when things get hectic like that.”

“No, John, I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me about it?”

While Lucy was engaged in boring him full of holes with her piercing stare, Daphne’s substantial bulk disappeared into the attic.

“Oh…my word…what a mess,” Daphne’s voice warbled and trailed from above them.

“I told you I didn’t think it was a good idea.”

“Sh-h-h! Let her do her work. We can talk about how you’re going to clean the attic, later.”

After some time, Daphne squeezed through the opening in the ceiling and descended a ladder that groaned painfully under the strain.

“It’s there, all right. It goes through the back corner of this room. Right over there…next to the duck, and right out through the roof. It’s incredibly powerful. This is a big one, and it’s not the entity’s conduit, either. This…this is something else…something different. Very powerful, whatever it is.”

“Where does it go after it leaves the roof?” John was holding back a snicker he desperately wanted to release.

“I have no idea, Mr. Sills,” Daphne responded dryly.

“Well, now that we know where it is,” Lucy said, looking apprehensively up the dusty ladder into the dark hole in the ceiling, “how do we get rid of it?”

“You’ll have to discuss that with Dr. Longwood, Mrs. Sills. My job is to find them, not to deal with them.”

“She’s a specialist,” John said under his breath. “I’ll bet it’s a union thing.”

---

A week went by and there had been no further mention of the thing at the end of the hall. Lucy had put up yellow tape—the kind the police use at crime scenes—at the end of the hall to keep anyone from going down there. John thought Lucy’s reaction was a little extreme but that maybe she had finally decided to forget about it. Maybe, he thought, life was going to get back to normal around there again. He relaxed. Then, Wednesday night, he went bowling with Fred and drank a good deal more than he should have.

The ride home from the bowling alley was a somber one for John. He had hurt his average with the first game, done serious damage to it in the second, and wreaked havoc during the third. It was some time before he spoke a word.

“You know, Fred, I don’t think I’ll be able to show my face at the lanes again,” John said. “ Not after a night like this one.”

“Yeah, tell me about it, buddy. That was pretty bad, man. I’ve never seen you get so loose before. But, in a way, it was worth it, huh?”

“It was?”

“Oh, yeah,” Fred said with a laugh. “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen a gutter ball tossed in someone else’s lane—and two lanes away at that, man. I mean, damn.”

“Don’t remind me. But…but did you get a good look at that guy’s face?”

“Yeah, that was worth a million bucks,” Fred said. Then the expression on his face turned dead, cold serious. “Listen, uh, John, I’ve been meaning to ask you something and now is as good a time as any.”

“Yeah? What’s that, Fred?”

“Who…who are all the strange people who’ve been hanging around your house the last couple of weeks?”

“Oh, them? They’re just some of, um, Lucy’s friends from the—no, that’s not true. If I tell you what’s really happening, will you promise not to laugh?”

“Sure, buddy mine. Scout’s honor.”

“Lucy hired some para-psycho-something outfit to get rid of our ghost, or entity, or whatever it is. Know what I mean?”

“Uh, no, John. I don’t know what you mean.”

“Okay, it’s like this—about three weeks ago Lucy wakes me up in the middle of the night because she—.”

“Hey, I’ve been trying to get my wife to do that for years. She says that if I want to get up, I should set the alarm. Can you beat that? Women.”

“Come on, Fred, this is serious.”

“That’s not?”

“I guess maybe it is, but not like this. Anyway, it’s about two in the morning and she says there’s somebody in the house. I grab my robe and baseball bat while I’m rolling out of bed—but…but she snatches my arm and says no, it’s not like that. She tells me it’s not a burglar. She says to me, ‘There’s something in the house—there’s a presence in the house.’”

“A presence is in the house?”

“Right. A presence.”

“Yeah? So…what’s a presence?”

“I don’t know, Fred. Dr. Longwood, he’s the guy Lucy hired, says it’s not a ghost like we normally think of them. He says it’s more like someone, or something is caught between our dimension and some other dimension. Now, do you know what I mean?”

“No, I don’t, and I don’t normally think of ghosts one way or another. Explain it to me, John.”

“Well, it’s sort of like a—aw, I can’t explain it. I guess I don’t know what I mean, either.”

Fred broke out in uncontrollable laughter that lasted until they turned the corner onto John’s street. There were two large vans parked in the driveway. Both of the vans were sporting weird looking antennae and large signs on their sides that announced they were from LIPS – The Longwood Institute of Paranormal Studies—Vortices Division.

“Now, there’s a good one, John,” Fred said quietly. “L-I-P-S—jeez.”

“Come on, Fred. It’s bad enough that they’re here. I don’t suppose there’s any way the neighbors won’t notice this.”

“Not a chance, pal, and if they don’t notice it, I’ll be sure to fill them in for you.”

“Thanks for the lift, Fred—and the support. I’ll see you next week.”

“Yeah, John, if you’re not eaten up by your presence or locked up in a padded room. See you-oooOOOooo. LIPS—jeez.”

John knew Fred was going to milk this one for all it was worth and was glad he only had to see him on Wednesdays. The neighbors; they were around all the time. What could he tell them?

He reached the front door and was beginning to think things couldn’t get any worse when the local TV news van bounced over the curb onto his newly planted lawn. He ducked inside and locked the door.

Lucy immediately latched on to his arm and dragged him into the living room where several strangers were milling around, dragging cords behind them like long, black rat tails, and looking at strange instruments that glowed, ticked, and buzzed in their hands.

“Good news, Dear,” Lucy beamed. “Dr. Longwood has determined what that thing in the hall is. He says it’s a rip in the space-time continual that…”

An aging man in trifocals perched on a larger than normal nose stepped between them and placed his arms around their shoulders.

“That is a rift in the space-time continuum, Lucy. It’s like a fault line in space, John. Is it all right if I call you John, John?”

“Sure. Fine. Whatever you want. I guess the next thing we’ll have is a spacequake and that’ll be my fault, too. Sorry for the pun.”

“John Sills, you’ve been drinking, haven’t you?” Lucy said.

“Uh-huh.”

“I imagine something like that could happen, speaking hypothetically here, but it’s highly unlikely, John. I believe the rift is stable, but is open only from this side. There was a case similar to this in Canada some years back. We detect no emitted energy, so it is probably one-way. Of course, that is pure speculation on my part.”

“Of course it is. Pure speculation. What about the entity or whatever.”

“Probably someone or something that got trapped in the vortex. We’ll know a great deal more when the people from the university and the airbase arrive with their more specialized instrumentation.”

“University? Airbase? More instruments, here? What is all this and what do you mean by the rift being open?”

“You can think of it as a door, John. A door between our space and some other space—perhaps some other time, too. We think this door opens only one way. If we are right, things can pass from here to wherever or whenever there is, but not return. That is why we have to be extremely cautious. We don’t want to lose anyone in the rift.”

“Nonsense. This whole business is just so much…nonsense. You and your school, LIPS, are a bunch of nut cases and I want you all to leave my house…right now.”

“It’s out of our hands, John. The government is involved now and we can’t leave until this situation is resolved. You may believe what you wish about my school and myself, but there is an open door to somewhere or when in your hall. It appears your home is going to have to be quarantined until the rift closes, or moves.”

“What? That’s terrific. What does this quarantine mean to us? How long?”

“It means you will have to vacate your home until it is safe to return, and we have no idea how long that may be. It could be tomorrow, a thousand years, perhaps never.”

John slipped out from beneath Longwood’s arm and backed away a couple of steps.

“A thousand years is never, you moron—and I have a news flash for you. We are not leaving our home because some jerk, who calls his own school LIPS, thinks we have a rift in our hall.”

“What are you planning to do, John?” Lucy looked worried.

“Right now, I’m going to go to that bathroom to dispose of some beer.”

“But…but that’s at the other end of the hall, Dear.”

“I know.”

He dodged Longwood and two of his flunkies, broke free into the hall, then made a quick sprint to Glenda’s blank stare. Turning slowly, he looked back at the gathering at the other end of the hall and laughed.

Lucy was standing in front of the group. Her arms were held tightly against her sides and her hands were clenched into little fists. Her mouth was open like she was getting ready to scream and the others were frozen in what John thought must be shock at the realization that nothing had happened.

“See, Lucy,” he said. “I knew there wasn’t anything here. Longwood, you and your gang of nitwits can pack up your junk and get out of our house.”

Odd, none of them were moving. They just stood there at the end of the hall. He took a couple of steps in their direction and it seemed he hadn’t moved. He looked to his side and Glenda stared back at him from the same place she had been when he turned around. He tried running to the other end of the hall and Glenda was still there.

He reached out to touch the picture but, although he could see it, it wasn’t really there. The image was real enough, but his hand passed right through it. The group at the end of the hall hadn’t budged and Lucy’s mouth was still open. Something was…wrong. Something was very wrong.

“What’s…what’s going on here?” he yelled at the group gathered in a still-as-death knot at the end of the hall.

“Calm yourself, mate. Screaming will do you no good.”

The voice from behind startled him. He spun around. There on the floor sat a fellow in pajamas and slippers.

“Who the hell are you and what’s happening here?”

“Name’s McCawley. Bryan McCawley. As for what is happening, I only know what they told me and they probably told you nearly the same thing they did me when whatever this thing is passed through my place in…uh—getting hard to remember—oh, eighty-four it was. You didn’t listen to ’em either, eh?” Bryan McCawley said.