Speed Dating With the Dead by Scott Nicholson Page B

sitting here beside me and you two are bitch-slapping?” Ann said.
    “What is it?” said the hunchback. “A demon?”
    “There’s a ghost here,” Baldy said. “I can sense it.”
    Gelbaugh snorted in derision.
    “Shh,” Wayne said. “You’re contaminating the evidence.”
    “Never mind,” Ann said. “Whatever it is, it left.”
    “I felt the mattress sag when it sat down,” Duncan said.
    “Are you still with us?” Wayne said, hoping the rest of the hunts had a better mix of personalities. An investigation was difficult enough for a trained team of hunters to collect any useful data, but it was nearly impossible for a group of strangers.
    “Yes,” Gelbaugh said. “I am.”
    “What’s with you?” Baldy said in the dark.
    “Nothing’s with me. In fact, I am utterly alone. Despite your collective wishful thinking.”
    “Sorry, folks,” Wayne said to the others.
    “Bummer,” Duncan said.
    “What is it?” asked the hunchback.
    “A party crasher,” Baldy said.
    “They call it ‘pragmatist’ where I come from,” Gelbaugh said.
    Wayne was mentally charting his course across the dark room to the light switch when a thunking sound was followed by a brittle crash.
    “Who did that?” Ann said.
    Gelbaugh flicked on a pen light and the small, bright beam settled on a shattered lamp that had fallen from a bedside table. “Well, I’m way over here, so it wasn’t me. Which of you is playing ‘Poltergeist’?”
    Gelbaugh’s beam bounced from face to face, each of them grim, before fixing onto Wayne’s. He squinted against it, annoyed at the damage.
    “I didn’t touch it,” Ann, who was the closest, said.
    “Ladies and gentlemen and all you dead people,” Gelbaugh boomed. “Honesty is the best policy. If you broke this, just admit it and be forgiven. Don’t carry the sin with you.”
    “Stuff it, Gelbaugh,” Wayne said, flipping the light switch and exploding the room into painful brightness. After the hushed, almost sacred atmosphere of minutes before, the space now seemed desecrated and cramped. The occupants, besides Gelbaugh, began rising and stretching, the elderly ladies confused by it all.
    “Investigation ends at 6:44 due to human interference,” Wayne said into the recorder before shutting it off.
    “Come on,” Gelbaugh said. “Don’t tell me you can’t stand up to someone poking a stick at your invisible friends. That’s hardly sporting.”
    “We paid good money for ghosts,” Baldy said to Wayne. Ann and Duncan had already left the room.
    “We’ll get you on another hunt,” Wayne said, collecting the largest shards of the lamp.
    After the group exited, Baldy grumbling aloud, Wayne faced off with Gelbaugh. “You’ve made your point, now stay out of the way.”
    “You should work on your technique,” Gelbaugh replied. “Take some acting lessons.”
    “Some of us have to fake it, but you’re a natural-born asshole.”
    Gelbaugh laughed. “Will the last one leaving please turn out the lights?”
    The room went dark.
    “Nice trick,” Gelbaugh said. “Too bad your audience is gone.”
    Wayne, ten feet from the light switch, said nothing. He stood there with the yellow orb of light burning its blurred images behind his eyelids—along with a face, yawning black mouth and vacant eyes riding behind the glow like a red scream.
    It was a face he’d kissed and loved and married once, long ago.
    It wasn’t so pretty these days.

 
     
    Chapter 13
     
    The Roach was down on demons.
    Raised a Catholic, he’d first sensed evil at the hands of a priest, who had touched him in ways that made him sick and tingly all at the same time. Nothing too overt, nothing that would have merited a civil suit in the “Pope Versus Lawyers” landscape of the 1990’s, but enough to instill an unsettling view of sacred rituals.
    During puberty, he’d felt the shadow latch on him as he’d explored the natural wonders of masturbation. Figuring it for a textbook case of guilt, he’d