“I thought you said that possession almost never happened,” Luke complained the next morning. We had debated waking him up the night before, but Liam said that the witch they’d used to remove possessions before insisted that it would work better on someone who was well rested. Besides, it didn’t seem like the spirit was causing any harm to Luke by being there - he’d been acting normal all night, and who new if this was even the first night he’d been possessed.
“I said that I never saw it,” I corrected him. “I’m guessing that it must happen more than I thought in this case.”
“I guess,” Luke huffed. Liam had called the witch earlier, and she had arranged to make a special trip out to Orlando to exorcise him and, more importantly, star in a new video. Liam made the call immediately, followed by both of them convincing me to point out what I saw on the camera. I knew it wasn’t going to appear on video for anyone else, but when in Rome. “I just don’t get why it happened to me.”
“You’re the one who’s got a ghost girlfriend!” reminded Liam. “It’s probably her, just hanging on, whispering ‘Oh, please, Luke, let’s take another stroll around the park!’”
Luke laughed brighter than I’d seen him laugh, although I wasn’t sure if it was from the stress or from Liam’s crappy joke. “As if I’d ever take a stroll around the park with her!”
“And just like that, we watch Luke get fully possessed and start strolling toward the walking trail,” Liam joked, holding up his hands as though he could see it.
Caitlin laughed, but reached out to gently swat Liam’s shoulder. “Don’t even joke about that - if he walks into the lake, we definitely won’t get the shot.”
“Thank you all for your support,” Luke said, sounding dejected despite the smile on his face. He flopped down on the couch in my room, still looking exhausted. I’m not sure how my bedroom ended up being the constant meeting room for all of us, but right at that moment, as I lay back on the plush mattress, I couldn’t really complain.
“Hey,” said Liam, “at least we got one good start to a video out of the night, which is more than I can say for the rest of the footage we got.”
“Did you go through it all by yourself again?” Caitlin asked, sounding disappointed, as though she’d told him many times to sleep after an investigation. Even I had told him to sleep after the investigation what felt like a hundred times.
“No, of course not!” he picked up his lukewarm coffee from the coffee bar and took a large sip, taking down the caffeine like it was oxygen. “Andi helped me look through it.”
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“Andromeda,” I reminded, holding up one hand, but that was about as much of an argument as I could make. Liam might have been used to living off caffeine for several nights in a row, but I sure wasn’t.
“You guys,” Caitlin said, sounding disappointed, at the same time as Luke said, “you’re sure you didn’t find anything else of interest?”
Liam shook his head, pointedly ignoring Caitlin. “She says that Grady didn’t even show up in any of our footage, so we’re just walking around talking to the air all night. But, for those of us who can’t see ghosts, there were definitely some interesting moments.” He clicked a couple of times and then flipped the screen to Luke.
“As much as I appreciate your work ethic,” Caitlin tried again, “you need to actually sleep between shoots or you’re going to totally burn out, and you know that’s been really going around on YouTube lately….”
“If I start to feel even the slightest bit burned out, I swear I will make a point to sleep after doing a ghost hunt,” he promised her. “But for now, I think Andi and I both get too wired from them to shut out eyes immediately afterward.”
“Speak for yourself,” I said, rolling onto my side to better face them. Liam winked at me.
“Whoa,” Luke said, interrupting us. Liam immediately pulled the screen back toward him. “Why didn’t you mention this?” He hit play, and his finger traced something across the screen.
“Whoa,” Liam echoed, and with a sigh, I pushed myself off the bed to see what they were excited about. “This changes everything, watch!”
On the screen, there was a still image of Luke and Liam in their chairs, clearly in the middle of talking about the history of the building. They pressed play and I watched, but there were no ghosts on the screen. I shook my head at them, and Liam clicked back and played the clip again. “Look here,” he said, tracing something on the screen. Where his finger moved, there wa, in fact a small shadow moving. Liam played it again and I watched Luke and Liam, trying to figure out if it was one of them, but neither of them seemed to be moving in that fashion.
“How odd,” I said, as they played the clip again for Caitlin.
“Oh my god,” she squealed. “We finally caught a ghost! I can’t believe it! No one’s going to believe it!”
“But that’s not a ghost,” I started, but her cheers overwhelmed mine, and soon, she, Luke, and Liam were talking about the sheer improbability of catching a ghost while they were just sitting there.
I grabbed the laptop off of Liam’s lap (other than looking at me curious for a moment, he put up no fight for it) and want back to the bed, playing and replaying that clip. There was undeniably something there, but it didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen. Even in the most distorted of spirits, there was still some sort of humanity to them, and they always looked solid to me. But this figure was transparent even to me, and while it had a vaguely humanoid figure, it didn’t give off the same sort of ghost vibes that the other spirits did.
I watched the video again, and it looked like the figure stopped for a second, making sure the camera was rolling, and then started walking again. It was the craziest thing - I don’t think I’d ever seen anything like it in my life, and that was something that I hadn’t been able to say for quite some time.
“If we add that as a secret snippet in the Peters Building video and then don’t call it out,” Luke suggested, “we could go back to it when the psychic gets here and say that’s what you saw. I mean, it looks like she looks at me, so maybe that spirit possessed me while we were talking.”
I shrugged. It was as likely a theory as any - possessions were rare, and so was whatever this thing is, so it might as well be both.
“Whatever it is, we’ll find out tomorrow when the witch gets here, Caitlin said, walking over and snapping the laptop closed. I didn’t fight her on it - I’d watched it enough times that watching it a few more wouldn’t make much of a difference. “For now, both Andi and Liam look like they’re about to fall over dead, so it’s managed appointed bedtime. Luke, you and I can work together and see if we can piece the rest of the video together with what Liam found before she gets here. Good night, you two.”