Perception Read online

  Perception

  Apparition Investigations, Book 1

  Eliza Lainn

  Perception

  Book One of the Apparition Investigations Series

  Copyright © 2018 by Eliza Lainn

  www.elizalainn.com

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or bay any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations for review purposes.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  ***

  Dear Reader,

  Thanks for picking up Perception, Book One of the Apparition Investigations Series. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it! My love for all things creepy and fantastical inspired this story, drawing elements from a myriad of diverse sources. And I wish to also give a special thanks to the people backing me up along the way. You know who you are. Go ahead and give yourself a pat on the back!

  Please enjoy Perception.

  ***

  Chapter One

  "You do realize we haven't moved off this couch in the last four hours?"

  "Not true," Bronte said, clicking through the end credits of Grey's Anatomy and onto the next episode. She tossed the PlayStation controller onto the ottoman/coffee table in front of us, narrowly missing her fairy-tale books and flower vase vignette. "Two episodes ago, you grabbed us cokes from the fridge. Thirty minutes into the previous episode, I stood up, stretched out my left leg because it went to sleep, and then sat back down. So we have moved off the couch. Some."

  "Ah. I stand corrected."

  She nodded. "As you were."

  The recap from the previous few episodes flashed across the 32-inch flat screen across the far wall. As if we hadn't just seen all those moments hours earlier.

  My eyes roamed above the screen to the world map tapestry hanging above it. As it always did, my eyes focused on the splotches marring the map. Bronte thought they were part of the tapestry's charm. I thought they looked exactly like the state of New Jersey, just flipped around, and that the artist had been from New Jersey and this was all a clever ploy by the New Jersian to bolster the reputation of New Jersey. Bronte didn't believe me.

  The familiar jingle signaling another episode chimed from the screen. Then Meredith Grey's voice floated over a fly-over of Seattle, drawing another parallel between surgical skills and life at large.

  As it did.

  In.

  Every.

  Episode.

  "Shoot me now," I grumbled.

  Bronte grabbed one of the couch pillows and flung it at me. With eight pillows on the couch, we usually had some to spare besides the ones we cocooned ourselves with whenever we binged like this.

  It smacked me on the top of the head before plopping off onto the ground beside me.

  "We're in season nine," she said. "More than halfway through."

  "This was fun at the beginning."

  "It's fun now."

  "Liar."

  "Maybe."

  "I've forgotten what other TV shows even talk about."

  "There are no other TV shows outside of Grey's."

  "That can't be right." I looked over at her, a mock serious expression on my face. "Is that right? I can't remember a time before. Was there a time before?"

  "There has always been Grey's."

  A chill went through me, rocking my core so violently I sat up with the shivers.

  Bronte glanced at me, then frowned. "You want me to turn the heat up? Get a blanket?"

  I fell back into my spot. "No need. It's gone."

  She sat still for a moment. Then she reached forward, grabbed the controller, and paused the show. "It happens a lot, doesn't it? The chills?"

  "I'm always cold. You know that."

  She shook her head. "No, not getting cold, or running colder than normal, but the chills. My dad used to say it's whenever someone walks over your grave–that's when you get chills like that."

  "That doesn't even make sense."

  "It happens a lot though. Me included."

  She was right, of course. I'd noticed them too. The sudden shuddering seizing, then gone. A second, maybe two, then it passes like it'd never happened to begin with.

  But I hadn't been able to find a cause. We didn't always walk under a vent when it happened, though sometimes we did. We didn't catch a whiff of chilly air coming in through the cracks around our windows from the hasty construction. Driving, West Texas wind wasn't always sneaking in through the front door. It was a fairly new apartment, so there shouldn't be any drafts from holes or rotting beams. And I wasn't scientific enough to try and discover the cause, even though I had noticed how weird it was.

  So I did what any sane person would do when met with something unexplainable and odd: I ignored it outwardly. I didn't voice aloud how I felt that same chill some weekday mornings, exactly at the last minute when I needed to get up for work, and that it had saved me from oversleeping a few times. I didn't tell my roommate that I felt it when I was alone in the apartment, crying over sad books. And I was certainly not about to mention that it seemed to happen more frequently when I played The Legend of Zelda video game series more than any other.

  Letting those thoughts worm around in the back of my mind was one thing. Spreading them like a disease by voicing them aloud was something else. If I said them, if I shared them, if I gave them form–even in the form of spoken words–then they'd be real. They could spread.

  I wasn't about to let that happen.

  "Really, Charlotte, I never noticed."

  She scowled at the use of her real name. Bronte had started as a nickname when we first met–we'd bonded over our general love of books after being introduced through a mutual friend, Rose. It had caught on, and in the thirteen years since then, it had spread to the point where nearly everyone called her Bronte now.

  "Really, Stella, you never noticed?"

  "Really, Charlotte, I never noticed," I repeated, leaning forward and pressing the play button.

  Still scowling, she grabbed a pillow and hugged it to her chest, turning her attention back to the show. For a few minutes, she looked at the screen. Then she whispered, "I keep thinking I see things. Out of the corner of my eye."

  I looked over at her.

  She kept staring straight ahead. "And when I turn to look at them, they're gone. Every time I think I see something, it's you I think I see. Or feel, I guess. You know how like you're standing in your room and you just know someone is standing in your doorway, even though you can't see the doorway? It's like that."

  "Why do you think it's me?"

  She shuddered. It wasn't a shiver, not one of the walking-over-your-grave ones. But a shudder, nonetheless. "Who else would it be? We're the only two here."

  I grabbed a pillow for myself and hugged it close.

  My mouth opened to tell her about the voices. The voices I laid awake at night, trying to convince myself were people outside or in the apartment below. Voices floating through paper-thin walls because they sounded distant. No, not distant, exactly, more like muffled. Less like being echoed through a long hallway and more like words whispered through a pillow.

  The front door burst open and we both jumped out of our seats.

  Rose barreled into the room, balancing a pizza box and a bottle of wine along with her laptop bag, winter coat, and purse. "Assistance?"

  Bronte and I shot forward, taking things from her until we'd unburied Rose from all the clutter. Her long, blonde hair was wavy today, held back by a bohemian scarf. Her sweat pants and two-sizes-too-big sweater let loose the scent of laundry
detergent as I peeled her out of her coat. "Laundry day?"

  "Yes," she purred, taking a whiff of her sleeve and letting out a pleasant sigh. "Nothing beats laundry day."

  Bronte took the pizza box and wine into the kitchen. She stowed the white wine for after dinner and grabbed some plates down from the cabinets. "We're on season nine," she called out as she helped herself to a slice.

  “Glad to see you’ve risen spectacularly to my binge challenge. Liking it, Stella?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  After we each grabbed our plates, we all returned to our places on the sofa. Bronte and I sat on it while Rose sat on the floor, her back propped up against it.

  I noticed Bronte wouldn't meet my eye as we resumed the show.

  She didn't bring it up after Rose left for the night, with a quick reminder about tomorrow's girls' night.

  We didn't breach the subject as we cleaned up the debris from dinner.

  But when we headed our separate ways for the night, she shivered as she headed for her bedroom. We both froze: me near the kitchen lights, her in her doorframe. For a moment, I thought she was going to turn to me.

  She didn't.

  And after a deep breath, she stepped into her room and shut the door.

  My hand hovered over the light. Then I flipped it and marched toward my bedroom door.

  In the dark, my ears caught the softest sigh floating through the stillness of the room. It spurned me on faster until I jumped into bed. Like a child, I yanked the covers over my head.

  "It's just people outside, walking their dogs," I whispered. “People outside. Just people.”

  But I seriously doubted it.

  ***

  "They're starting to figure it out," Oliver sighed, falling back onto the couch.

  Cyril watched as his friend's astral form fell slower than any real body would. Like a feather floating, Oliver drifted through the still air to settle on the couch. Not that the cushions gave under his weight–he didn't have any weight. Not anymore. Not for a long time.

  He never really understood why Oliver insisted on sitting on the furniture. They were ghosts. They could float. And their bodies didn't exactly tire either, if they did remain upright.

  His friend's phantom outline shone with the faintest light in the late-night darkness of the room. A vague outline of pale, ghostly white. Oliver moved so that he could rest his elbows on his knees, hanging his head, his fingers sliding through his hair to mess it up.

  If his friend stood now, he would be the picture of a crazed ghost portrayed in movies and on paper. Messy hair, wild eyes, trembling frame.

  Oliver was taking the overheard conversation between Bronte and Stella roughly. Especially Bronte's admissions of catching shadows in the corner of her eyes. Her fear, her uncertainty of those shadows had pierced straight through Oliver, forcing him to leave the room and retreat to Bronte's bedroom during the evening.

  Cyril had caught his friend's face as Oliver and Bronte accidentally brushed when she switched rooms afterward. When Bronte stiffened. When Stella froze.

  Bent over as his friend was now, he imagined it was the same face. The same agonized, tortured expression.

  He moved away from Stella's door, more toward the center of the living room. Still floating, he sat, but his body didn't fall toward the floor. His top half didn't even move. His legs just came up and he sat cross-legged nearly three feet above the ground.

  "Not yet. We still have time before they truly being to suspect."

  Oliver's head snapped up and he scowled at him. "The chills? Bronte is seeing things. Stella is hearing things. Us, Cyril. They're feeling, seeing and hearing us."

  Cyril felt a stab of annoyance. "And what would you like me to do about that?"

  Oliver scoffed. "Nothing."

  Anger rising, Cyril opened his mouth to snap back. But then he stopped, took in a deep breath, and let it out slowly.

  Not that it was an actual breath. He'd given up breathing more than one hundred years ago. But still, the actions of taking a breath calmed him down. "Sorry."

  Oliver sighed. "I just...I don't want what happened with Mrs. Rogers to happen again."

  "I know."

  "They're younger, Cyril," he said, an edge of concern creeping into his voice. "God, they're in their mid-twenties. The only saving grace with Mrs. Rogers was her age, so she died faster." He let out a bitter laugh as he said it. "She only had to spend the last six years of her life going crazy. If we do that to them–"

  "We won't."

  "–haunting them for the rest of their lives. God, I couldn't bear to watch them deteriorate like Mrs. Rogers. She moved twice in those last six years, Cyril. Nearly bankrupted her to do it and she didn't know, didn't realize–"

  "Oliver."

  "–her own children wanted to condemn her to the psychologists. We drove her mad, Cyril."

  Cyril floated through the air and landed on the sofa beside Oliver. "That's not how it's going to happen. Not again."

  Oliver's eyes flitted to Bronte's bedroom door. "A pocket watch. She bought a pocket watch and it killed her. And I thought how we died was bad."

  "They aren't going to be like Mrs. Rogers."

  His friend turned to look at him. "You can't know that."

  Sighing, Cyril glanced over his shoulder at Stella's door. "They've got each other, so that's something. They're more akin to dreamers, so that might help. They're stronger than Mrs. Rogers was. When it gets to the point that their perception of us is stronger, they'll be better able to handle...able to handle the fact–"

  "That they're haunted," Oliver whispered on a sigh.

  Chapter Two

  Cyril stuck his head through the pantry door. "You know, I am upset that we missed microwavable popcorn. How it smells? And when they drizzle that melted butter on top?" He let out a sigh as he leaned back.

  "But when they burn it?" Oliver shuddered from his spot on the sofa.

  "A point I will concede," Cyril allowed, thinking back to the first weeks of the girls in their new apartment. How the smell had lingered for weeks. How it wafted out every time they opened the microwave to this day. He drifted over to the refrigerator and stuck his head inside that instead. "I'm betting tacos. Tacos are a safe bet–they eat those things constantly. Add that to the list of things I wished I could have enjoyed before departing."

  Oliver didn't answer.

  "Ok, fine, if you want to bet tacos, you can. Maybe I'll go with those mini pizzas they make. All the ingredients are in here. Another safe bet, I think. Stella does love pizza."

  When his friend didn't answer, Cyril sighed. "Don't tell me you're not betting," he said, pulling his head out of the refrigerator. " You were the one who started Dinner Roulette after all and–what?"

  Oliver stood in the center of the living room, looking up at the ceiling, head tilted as if straining to hear something.

  "What is it?"

  "You don't–you don't hear that?"

  "Hear what?"

  "It's almost like...scratching."

  Cyril looked up at the ceiling. "Scratching?"

  Oliver spun around, his eyes fixed on the far ceiling corner, over the living room's book nook, the little alcove with two nestled chairs and stacks upon stacks of books.

  "Like a squirrel up on the roof or something?" Cyril asked. "Should we possess one of the girls' laptops again? Have them send maintenance over like we did when we noticed the deadbolt was loose?"

  "I don't think it's a squirrel."

  "Oh, bigger like a racoon then?"

  "I don't think–I don't think it's mortal."

  Cyril frowned and squinted up into the corner. "But I don't see anything."

  "I think I do."

  "But–but there's nothing there. It's not like we wouldn't be able to see others like us, right? We can see each other, surely we must be able to see other ghosts should they appear. Right?"

  He didn't answer.

  "Oliver?"

  "It's blurry, but Cy
ril, there's something there. It's–"

  Oliver flew backward as something invisible plowed into him. They phased through the wall, disappearing into Bronte's bedroom. A corner of the tapestry fluttered.

  Cyril flew after them, phasing through the closed bedroom door. Oliver was pressed up against the far wall–the boundary of the apartment. He struggled against something that had a hold of his throat.

  Cyril lunged. He smacked against whatever it was and wrapped his arms around it. Bracing his feet against the wall, he pushed off, pulling at the invisible thing in his arms. Oliver pushed against it.

  Then Cyril hear it. Monstrous snarling that reminded him of rabid wolves or provoked tigers. His grip loosened for a second and then he forced himself to tighten it.

  Oliver dropped to the floor. He rolled off to the side as Cyril pushed off. "Where is it?"

  "Off to the left. Up high–in the corner."

  Cyril turned to square up against what he couldn't see. "What the hell is it?"

  "I don't know. It's shaped like a human. I think." Oliver stood beside him and they backed away slowly.

  "You think?"

  "It's blurred. I just see the outline. But what grabbed me didn't feel human, Cyril."

  "How is that possible?"

  "I don't know."

  They phased through the wall and back-stepped back into the living room, moving through the television stand. "How do we get rid of it?"

  "How should I know?"

  "Well you can see it, can't you?"

  Another inhuman snarl pierced through the stillness of the room.

  "Move!" Oliver shouted, grabbing Cyril's arm and yanking him down. His head moved, watching as something Cyril couldn't see flew over them. It missed by inches, from the way Oliver ducked his head suddenly. Then he pulled him up, back onto his feet. "It's in Stella's room."

  "We need to get rid of it," Cyril barked, straining to see something, anything, moving through the wall, coming back into the living room. He couldn't see anything. Could barely hear the gurgling noises it made in the back of its throat.

  "I'm open to suggestions," Oliver snapped.