The Fix Is In (Torus Intercession 4)

God.

The single bathroom was not attached to his bedroom, which, in my opinion, was horrible, and was essentially nothing more than a box. Stepping inside, I saw a shower stall with sliding glass doors to the left. Directly in front of me was a sink with a cabinet below it and a mirrored medicine cabinet above. To the right was the toilet, and mounted to the wall above it was the towel bar. There was not an inch of wasted space. Two of his would fit into my bathroom at home, but I’d renovated it to be what I needed since I was not a small guy.

Of course, there was no thermometer in the medicine cabinet or the one below the sink, where it should have been, so I left the bathroom and tried the shelves I’d noted earlier outside his bedroom, on either side of the hall. There was all kinds of gear, but no thermometer as far as I could tell.

“That’s a binary response device,” he said from behind me as I picked the thing up and moved it. I’ve never been a person who startles easily, so I wasn’t surprised he’d gotten up to come and see what I was doing. Having six brothers leaping out at me from around corners, behind doors, and from any shadow, since I was a child, had cured that real quick.

“What’s a binary whatever?”

“You can ask an entity a yes-or-no question, and either the green light lights up or the red one.”

“I see,” I answered, moving something familiar.

“That’s another ghost box, or some people call it a spirit box,” he explained with a yawn.

I turned to look at him and couldn’t help but think he looked like a specter himself, as he was still wrapped up in the blanket. “You should always have more than one on hand.”

“And what does it do?” I asked distractedly, still hoping to come across a handheld thermometer, the kind that resembled a plastic gun like I had at home.

“It scans radio frequencies so the entities can speak to you.”

“Which is what you thought it was doing that day in the forest when it was shot out of your hand.”

“Yes. Afterwards, Harold explained that the spirits in the woods were passing through on their way to someplace else, and if one of them did want to speak to me, they would have stopped and done so.”

“How?”

“Through Harold, of course. He doesn’t need a spirit box.”

“Of course not.”

“I’ve offered him a job a million times, but he said he’d rather have another root canal than come down off his mountain again. Once in the last thirty years was enough.”

I stopped and turned to him. “How old is Harold?”

He squinted a moment, thinking. “I want to say eighty-two, maybe eighty-three.”

“Okay,” I responded, returning to the task of hunting for a thermometer, moving some things aside, picking up others, crouching to check the lower shelves.

“That’s a voice recorder,” he apprised me, even though I knew what it was. “And that there”––he pointed, hand on my shoulder for balance––“is a video camera. We use a VHS one because it won’t disrupt the electromagnetic fields.”

I didn’t say a word. I didn’t want to debate electromagnetic anything with him or tell him that even us regular folks knew an old-school video camera when we saw one.

“I’m surprised that, with you being the seventh son of a seventh son, you don’t believe in spirits or the fae or anything at all.”

If he ever met my no-nonsense family, he’d understand. “I believe in what I can see or hear,” I told him, looking up at him. “How did you, a trained psychiatrist, ever get into this line of work?”

He shrugged, which looked funny from under the blanket. “I had people coming to me week after week, I was prescribing pills and talking to them, but it wasn’t fixing anything. It wasn’t helping, and then one day I had a woman show up who was certain I couldn’t help but she was there anyway. She came to satisfy her kids because they thought she was nuts. She told me that once she got a clean bill of psychiatric health, she was going to call a paranormal investigator.”

“But why would her kids think she was nuts? I mean, they knew her.”

“They thought that because she was getting older her mind was going.”

“That’s awful,” I assured him.

“Yes, I agree. She told me her oldest son thought maybe menopause had broken her or something. So stupid and uninformed. He completely disregarded the issues with the house.”

“My mother went through menopause, but it certainly didn’t do anything to her brain.”

“Exactly.”

“But what do you mean about her house?” I asked, standing up so he had to tip his head back to meet my gaze. “What issues did she have?”

“She said she was sure her home was haunted,” he revealed, stepping forward into me so he could lean. “Her priest had already been to see her and made certain it was not a diabolical infestation, so from that point on, she was convinced she was living through a haunting.”