"We're all set, how are you doing, Jamie... over," Jacob said over the handheld radio.
Jamie picked the radio up, Jacob's voice sounding tiny and scratchy with even a little static making it hard to understand him.
"I'm fine," Jamie replied after depressing the talk button, "Everything's set up and I've got my coffee so I'm happy."
"Don't forget over... over," Jacob's tiny voice said.
Jamie rolled her eyes and sat the radio down beside her sleeping bag. She was sitting with her back against the wall at the intersection of three hallways that formed a T, an old counter covered in discarded folders, stray papers, and the skeleton of an old desk lamp all that was left of a nurse's call station that had served this floor. The three lamps she had set up earlier cut through the darkness and chased the shadows a little ways down each hallway while dust motes filled the air as they drifted through the beams of light.
She glared at the radio on the floor beside her a moment and wondered how her boyfriend had ended up in the basement with Rocky while she was stuck up on the top floor of an abandoned and supposedly haunted insane asylum all by herself. She sniffed and looked away while pushing her overly large tortoiseshell glasses farther up her button nose.
"Asshole," Jamie said under her breath and glanced down each hallway.
The hallways were a maze with old, rusted bedframes, wheeled gurneys, piles of debris and garbage that clogged them all the way to the far ends. Half the ceiling tiles had fallen to the floor which left gaping black holes scattered along the ceilings as well as the inky, open maws of doors every six feet along both walls. It was easy to imagine half seen shapes darting back out of sight or hear the tread of a soft footstep in one of those rooms.
Jamie checked her instruments, the dozen infrared beams that she had set up along the halls, the three EMF detectors, the digital thermometers, voice box recorders and the two cameras that were sitting on the nurse's station beside her. One of those cameras was a low light IR camera, the other a high resolution digital camcorder, both slowly rotating every three minutes in a hundred and eighty degree arch.
After doublechecking all her equipment Jamie leaned back and picked up her thermos to take a sip of coffee before settling in for a long and boring night.
This would make the eighteenth time she had gone out with Jacob on one of his paranormal investigations. The eighteenth time that absolutely nothing was going to happen.
She sighed and glanced down at the radio. It wasn't that Jacob was unattractive, he was tall and slim with dark hair and broad shoulders, it was just...
It had been over two months since they had made love. She had always heard that it was the girls that lost interest in sex, but not this time. Not her. She wanted to make love, would be happy to have sex every damn day and still wanted Jacob to fuck her like he used to when they had first met. But nothing she did could distract him from this crap with his ghosts and shit. Not walking around their apartment naked, not trying to give him a blowjob and getting rebuffed... repeatedly!... not even trying to watch porn with him and trying to masturbate with him since she knew he was still watching Xhamster and jerked off fucking constantly!
She just couldn't figure it out and it was frustrating, infuriating, and driving her away from...
The EMF detector on the south hallway went off. The bar of LED's that started green on the left and went to yellow, orange and finally red on the right spiked all the way into the red. Jamie glanced down at it and then down the hallway. The occasional stray EMF reading wasn't unusual and after a moment she leaned back against the wall when the meter returned to green.
She wondered if Jacob was seeing someone else again for the hundredth time but had no idea where he'd find the time. He worked from home and any free time he had was devoted to his paranormal research which left absolutely no time for him...
The sound of metal scraping against metal sent a shiver down Jamie's back like fingernails on a blackboard and she glanced up quickly to catch what looked like a darker shadow against the inky blackness pull back into one of the rooms along the center hallway. The EMF detector again spiked into the red, strobing from left to right repeatedly before spiking and holding steady with all the LED's illuminated red.
Jamie's heart was beating hard in her chest as she peered down the center hallway, the EMF detector suddenly going back to a single green LED. Jamie knew the psychology, she majored in Psych and had written countless papers on the phenomena.
The human psyche when placed in a situation of sensory deprivation became easily susceptible to suggestions.
And abandoned building in the middle of the night, very little light, almost no sound. A stray gust of wind blowing against a shutter became sinister, the brain would begin playing tricks with the shadows within shadows in a creepy garbage filled hallway, filling in the blanks with phantoms conjured from her own mind.
But she also still cared for Jacob and knew he'd want her to go through the motions so she took out the hand held voice recorder.
"Is anyone there?" Jamie asked in a calm, steady soprano, "Can you hear me?"
Nothing registered on any of the instruments, the only sound what might have been the scurrying of a small animal somewhere on the same floor.
"If you can hear me, make yourself known," Jamie said a bit unenthusiastically, "Tell me your name."
Jamie waited and then jumped when the digital thermometer in the center hallway beeped and showed a drop of nearly ten degrees. She stared at the thermometer for several seconds in consternation and then glanced down the hallway.
What ever this was, it wasn't her imagination.
"Tell me your name," Jamie repeated, "Were you a patient here at the hospital?"
The EMF detector suddenly spiked again, the red LED's glaring up at Jamie who stared down in surprise. Suddenly there was a loud crash that caused Jamie to scream and look up in time to see one of the metal gurneys now laying on its side with one of the casters spinning in the air.
"Crap!" Jamie yelled and tried to calm her racing heart.
Nothing like this had ever happened to her before and it certainly wasn't her imagination! She grabbed at the radio and held it to her mouth with trembling hands.
"Jacob, you there?" she asked.
She waited and after several seconds glared down at the radio. She double checked that she was depressing the talk button and held it up to her lips again.
"Jacob?" Jamie said with a trembling voice, "Jacob, answer god damn it!"
There was nothing but silence from the radio and Jamie had to resist throwing it across the room. Jacob insisted that they leave their phones in the car just in case that would interfere with the EMF detectors so the radio was the only way she had of contacting him.
Jamie glanced at the EMF detector which was once again lit with only a single green LED, the digital thermometer already five degrees warmer and still slowly climbing back to normal ambient temperature.
Jamie took a deep breath and laughed at how silly she was being. A single gust of wind could have caused that rusted metal on metal sound, lowered the temperature and very well could have blown over the old gurney.
Well, it could have.
"Who ever you were I guess you're gone now," Jamie said with a shake of her head, "Hell, maybe I should have asked you to fuck me, I might have gotten more action from you than Jacob!"
She grinned at her own joke and shook her head.
"BOO!"
