Poltergeist by James Kahn Page B

possible, went on speaking.
    “What I meant to say was, there could be numerous explanations for the things we see happening here.”
    “Such as?”
    “Might be a poltergeist,” added Ryan. “Instead of your classic haunting, that is.”
    “There’s a difference?”
    Ryan felt completely dislocated. Here he was, a scientist, a man who believed in natural cause and effect, seriously entertaining notions of ghosts and goblins. Every few minutes he quietly reassured himself under his breath: “I saw what I saw. A scientist must objectively report what he sees. I saw what I saw.”
    Two bright flashes of light exploded soundlessly a few feet away. Out of nowhere.
    “Anybody see that?” Ryan looked quickly from face to face around the table. Could it be a group hallucination?
    “There’ll be two more in a few seconds,” smiled Diane. “They always travel in pairs.”
    Ryan sat speechless, his camera unattended around his neck. Martha nudged him and pointed to it. “Ryan,” she said.
    Ryan looked alert and began to fumble with the setting, just as two more flashes popped at the other end of the room.
    “Gotta be quicker than that around here,” Diane said affably.
    “It’s electrical,” Ryan commented, sniffing the air. “You can smell the charge.”
    “Are there any large power generators in the area?” Dr. Lesh asked.
    “Not that we know of.”
    “I just can’t imagine any power source that I’m familiar with producing any of the phenomena we witnessed upstairs,” Ryan insisted bleakly.
    “What are you saying?” Diane let a hint of doubt filter into her voice.
    “Martha, maybe we should bring Tangina back here,” Ryan went on.
    Lesh shook her head. “Later, maybe—if she gets her strength back—depending on what we find. For all we know at the moment, though, this could all be a function of some as yet uncharacterized electromagnetic field, which . . .”
    “Of course, of course . . . all I’m saying is she may be more qualified, de facto , to at least delineate . . .”
    “She’s my patient, first and foremost, Ryan. Primum non nocere . First, do no harm. That’s the basic law of medicine. If and when she gets over the trauma of this experience, I may bring her back here. Until then, it looks to me like we’re going to have more data to monitor here than we can even make a dent in analyzing by traditional means . . .”
    “What are you saying?” Diane interjected.
    “I’m going to call up our lab tech, Marty, right now, and have him bring over all our equipment. Cameras, field detectors, and so on . . . if it’s all right with you. We will investigate these matters fully and rigorously, and . . .”
    Diane touched Martha on the sleeve. “And you were saying about poltergeists . . .”
    Lesh paused, and smiled empathetically: she’d gotten a little carried away in front of these poor, needy people. “I was saying at one point, I think—or perhaps Ryan was saying—that poltergeists are generally associated with an individual. So the literature claims, at least. Whereas hauntings—in the general vernacular—seem to be connected with an area . . . a house, usually.”
    “Also,” Ryan added, “poltergeist disturbances are of fairly short duration. Perhaps a couple of months. Hauntings typically are said to go on for years.”
    Diane, who’d been following intently what the two said, suddenly grabbed Steve’s hand and pulled it to her; a chill settled on the table, and in her voice. “Are you telling me all this could just end at any time?”
    Martha tried to sound clinically detached. “Unless it’s a haunting. But as a rule—and again I must stress, this is only what I read in the published reports—but as a rule, there seems to be no living person around whom haunting incidents revolve.”
    “Then we don’t have much time, Dr. Lesh,” whispered Diane. “Because my daughter is alive somewhere in this house.”
    Dana sat at the lunch table at school, sipping on a