Haunter 1: The Shadow of the Haunter

4. And the Demon in the Basement

Susan and Mike didn't say a word when they found small motion-activated cat balls in every single room, from the first-floor foyer to the third-floor study. I ignored the look they traded and offered no explanation.

After a whole month of living in Blotter Manor, I'd learned that even though the Blotters had their own parallel timeline, the space coordinates remained the same. The cat balls helped me keep from disturbing their routines, like walking into the east parlor while Lizzie was home-schooling the twins, or disturbing Joseph or Edward when they were reading in the library. This way, they only needed to move a hand near any of the balls to trigger the lights and let me know I was intruding in some way. At the same time, they used them to let me know if one of them joined me in a given room. Then the app would tell me who it was.

It was nice, getting together with them before dinner. By the end of August, I was almost getting used to the TV turning on by itself, whenever the twins felt like watching cartoons. However, they never revealed their presence openly if Susan and Mike were around. I didn't ask why they didn't like the housekeepers, considering the Collins had devoted their lives to the Manor. I didn't want to be nosy, and I didn't want to learn anything that might strain my relationship with the couple. Susan's relentless determination to keep control of things and treat me like a temporary nuisance already made it a little tense.

Meanwhile, since real life had become so strange and fascinating, I'd taken a rain check on trying to come up with a fictional plot to write. Instead, I started a journal to keep a record of my experiences interacting with the Blotters, starting on the day I'd first heard about the Manor. That alone would make a hell of a better story than anything my imagination could come up with.

Turned out I was right, even if I'm not sure I would've rather been wrong.

The speaking app did work better offline. Whenever I used it without disconnecting my phone from the internet, random words would keep popping up, messing up any conversation I tried to have with the Blotters. But smartphones are meant to be connected twenty-four/seven, and mine soon started threatening to stop working if I didn't download the necessary updates. I ended up ordering a tablet, that would stay offline and keep my channel of communication with them open and clean.

Picture my surprise one late September afternoon, when I came back from my walk to the Quabbin and found the tablet open on a text document that read: "I can use this. J."

"What!?" I cried. "Joseph? You here?"

"Yes," the app replied.

"You wrote this? That's awesome! I had no idea you guys could use a touchpad!"

"Hard."

"You mean it takes you a lot of energy?"

"Yes."

"Okay, let me look into it. Maybe I can find a way to make it easier to use."

"Good."

"Picture that! We could drop the Tarzan speech and actually talk!"

"Finally," he replied, making me laugh.

I spent a couple of hours trying different apps until I found one that offered the customization options I was looking for. It was meant for people with speech problems and allowed me to add the more frequently used words in bars around the main screen, to save time. When a sentence was complete, tapping the speaker icon made a TTS voice read it aloud. The best feat was that it would generate a bar with the most used nouns by the user, to keep them at hand.

And while at it, I came across another ghost-hunting app that promised to get more than one word at a time, maybe even complete short sentences. None of them were free, but I reminded myself I wasn't poor anymore and bought both. After doing my best to customize them, I took the tablet to the east parlor but found nobody there. Of course, it was already dinner time.