Orpheus - Haunting the Dead.pdf - Dice

HAUNTING THE DEAD
STEFAN PETRUCHA
something’s really going on. You were all invited as…
witnesses.”
“Proof?” Jobe asked. “It was a bunch of static.”
Kleck nodded toward his borrowed DVD burner. “I
recorded the broadcast, Einstein. Never commit to
memory what you can get from another source. Now we
play it back, frame-by-frame, and see if anything preternatural
pops up. I could have just copied it onto my
hard drive, I guess, but that puppy’s been acting up
lately.”
“So you wanted to photograph a ghost,” Bilka said.
“An admirable ambition.” Perhaps she meant it as a
joke, but it came across as genuine, flavored with a
flirtatious tone that made both Jobe and Shutty shoot
her a furrowed-brow glance.
“Tetya, my babushka, had a small, very old ivory
statue of the Virgin Mary. She thought the eyes would
follow her around the room and the mouth would
sometimes move, in prayer. My parents made fun of
her, but she always seemed more—what are the words?—
comfortable in her skin than my parents did. They were
very tense. I liked her and her statue a great deal. I
always wanted to see the eyes move, or hear it speak,
but I never did. So yes, I’m glad you brought me here
and I hope we get to see your ghost.”
“You’re welcome,” Kleck said. Shutty expected him
to be taken aback by the possibility that someone liked
him or anything he did, but there was no emotion in his
voice.
“What about the drugs?’ Shutty asked, more to
interrupt Bilka than anything else.
“It’s the stuff that, like, helps you see the dead,”
Tragic Alex blurted, as if he were a child who knew the
answer to the teacher’s question in school and couldn’t
possibly contain himself. Now that he’d started talking,
he was having a hard time remembering how to
stop. “Orpheus uses it on their agents, with Kundalini
yoga, so they can project themselves as ghosts. That
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