Vinnie De Soth and the Sorority Poltergeist
The campus rumour was that Delta Kappa Pi sorority house was haunted, and by more than the usual track and field team visitors.
The old wood and shingle building was one of the original dwellings on the Paradopolis U. campus, one of the few not to have been torn down by more efficient and more soulless concrete boxes in the name of progress. When Vinnie De Soth arrived through the light mist and stared up at the lamplit frontage he had an unpleasant feeling that he was posing for an Exorcist poster.
“Thanks for coming along,” he said to Tandi 3000, a stunning blonde in bright red leather. “It’s not professional for a male investigator to go into an all-girl lodging house alone. Or safe.”
“I’ll protect you from the bad girls,” Tandi assured him. “I promised Liu Xi when you asked her to fix up a chaperone.” The beautiful sexbot winked at him. “Think of me as a poacher turned gamekeeper.”
“If it’s okay with you I’ll just keep my eyes averted as much as possible,” Vinnie replied.
The third member of Vinnie’s party had no problem looking at pretty girls. “Wow, you really are as wound up as they say you are,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! admitted. “I mean even Xander allowed himself to crack a smile once in a while.” The wired wonder thought a bit more. “Admittedly, that was usually when he’s manipulated us into the deep doo-doo, but still…”
“I can smile,” Vinnie objected. “I often smile. Recreationally. Spontaneously. It’s just that this haunting is a serious business. Blood messages on mirrors. Small fires. High end poltergeist activity.”
“If it is a haunting,” Tandi noted. “I’m not at all sure I believe in the supernatural.”
Vinnie looked disbelievingly at the woman-shaped robot designed for erotic pleasure. “You don’t believe in weird stuff?”
“Hey, Tandi’s right to keep an open mind,” CSFB! argued. “I guess an open mind comes with the territory for a former sexbot. But we might be facing a Scooby-Doo scenario here, where the villain dresses up in a mask and costume to scare the babes.”
“Although I think Flapjack is working at the Lair Mansion tonight,” noted Tandi thoughtfully.
“There’s always the possibility of fraud or human malice,” agreed Vinnie. “Although some poltergeists do seem to influence humans to help them carry out their tricks too. Sometimes children have been caught in the act of hurling an object or scrawling a message and then everyone thinks the case is solved, even if a dozen other impossible-to-explain things have happened before that.”
Tandi looked up at the sorority house. “This isn’t going to be dangerous, is it?” she wondered. “Poltergeists can’t affect robots?”
Vinnie De Soth patted his bag of tools. “I don’t know that artificial lifeforms are any more or less vulnerable than any other kind. We still don’t really know what poltergeists are. There are plenty of suggestions, but nobody’s sure.”
“But they attack through fuzzy TV signals,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! added, drawing upon his copious knowledge of movie trivia. “Kind of like a McCain campaign ad.”
“Poltergeist is German for noisy ghost,” Tandi noted. “Yes, I was programmed with German for strict discipline.”
“They’re disembodied spirits or forces,” Vinnie summarised. “They’re often associated with adolescent children, especially those with emotional difficulties. They make noises, hurl objects, sometimes materialise things. More infrequently they set fires, like the one here at Delta Kappa Pi, or communicate with residents of the house. Sometimes they manifest personalities.”
“And how do you deal with them?” Tandi ventured. This was all an alien world to her.
“Well, I find out what they want and try to lay them to rest,” the exorcist-for-hire explained. “Or failing that I psychically nuke them.”
“We know what this one will want,” CSFB! interrupted. “It’ll all be to do with the old Native American burial ground and the séance that the girls played about with after they drunkenly ran over the old man with the hook for a hand and buried him in a shallow grave before he got over having prom night sex with his sister.”
Vinnie began to have second thoughts about calling in an avatar of chaos.
“Perhaps we should go inside and ask questions?” Tandi suggested diplomatically.
“Maybe I should check out the showers?” suggested CSFB! “If I was a poltergeist that’s where I’d be hanging out.”
“Let’s save that one for reserve,” Vinnie answered, heading up to the porch. “Maybe we could just head inside and find out what the situation is so far?”
An invisible force picked him up and hurled him across the lawn.
“Or we could try the back door,” he added.
***
“Okay, here’s a list of things I can’t do,” Tandi announced to Vinnie. “I can’t detect temperature changes or humidity variations. Well, not unless they’re in a person pressed flesh to flesh against me, and I don’t really think that’ll help track down your ghost. I can’t see beyond the usual spectrum. I can’t tape stuff and play it back later. That’s the Sexbot 7500 that the FBI commissioned. I can’t hear better than humans, although I think I listen pretty good. And if we end up fighting a huge demon from hell I’m no stronger or more agile than any human athlete, although I will admit to being double jointed.”
“Okay,” Vinnie replied. “But you can plug that video camera into the wall socket there, right?”
CrazySugarFreakBoy! was prowling round the ground floor of the sorority. “You know I was really hoping for more girls in fluffy towels,” he admitted. “It doesn’t seem right without girls in fluffy towels.”
“This isn’t a slasher flick,” Vinnie pointed out. “At least I hope not.”
“Are we going to do a séance?” CSFB! persisted. “Can we call Whoopi Goldberg? Or Tom Hanks? Can I send April to get Tom Hanks over here in that captured Skunk flying saucer we have in the garage?”
“You know, I’m so glad you were recommended to me,” sighed Vinnie. “To think that I had my doubts.”
“Hey, Liu Xi’s seen me in action against all kinds of supernatural stuff,” CSFB! pointed out. “Speaking of Liu Xi, I was wondering if you’d got horizontal with her yet, only I’ve got this side bet with…”
“Liu Xi recommended Tandi,” Vinnie cut in hastily. “You were suggested to me by a young woman called Izzy.”
CSFB! stopped in mid-jabber. “You know Izzy? You can see Izzy?”
“Who’s Izzy?” wondered Tandi, looking around. “In fact where is everybody?”
“Izzy’s an old friend of CrazySugarFreakBoy!’s,” Vinnie answered diplomatically. “She sometimes helps lost spirits make it to the light, or to the ladder, or to the gates, or to the metaphor of their choice. And nobody’s here because I asked that the house be cleared tonight so we could check if the spirit still manifests when there’s none of the likely haunting subjects present.”
“And I bet there were plenty of volunteers to give the Pi girls a bed for the night,” surmised Tandi.
CSFB! jumped up and down experimentally on the floorboards of the living room. “We’ve been here nearly twenty minutes and there’s no army of the dead bursting up from the cellar to eat us,” he complained.
“Well drat,” said Vinnie.
Tandi helped the young occultist set up the rest of his equipment. “Perhaps you could tell us more about what’s been going on here?” she asked. “Liu Xi said you’d been called in by the student counsellor because of some spookiness.”
“I was. A few weeks ago the household was awoken by a heavy rattling on the roof. The general consensus was it was a joke from Rho Epsilon Zeta but it was never explained. Then there were some fall-outs amongst the girls when little objects went missing from one room and appeared in someone else’s. Then some rapping and foul smells, then some drenched sheets…”
“We already know what you’re going to say,” Tandi cut CSFB! off.
“Hey, I’m not Flapjack,” the wired wonder objected. “I’m not the one who brought the videocam.”
“Then the messages started, in marker pen, then smeared on mirrors with blood,” Vinnie went on. “Obscenities mainly, plus threats like ‘You will die’ or ‘I will take you’.”
“Did anyone analyse the blood?” CrazySugarFreakBoy! suggested. “because if we did…”
“Human,” Vinnie interrupted. “But no DNA match to anyone in the house.”
“What did the police say?” Tandi wondered. “By the way, I can’t hook up to the police computers either.”
“Yeah, I have that problem too,” admitted Vinnie. “The cops did come out here a few times, but they didn’t take it seriously until last night, when a bathroom mirror with a message on it shattered and put one of the girls in hospital.”
“See,” CSFB! called out, “I told you we needed to hit the showers. Although if you’ve sent the girls away that’s no fun at all.”
“I could take a shower if it helps,” Tandi offered.
“That won’t be necessary,” said Vinnie quickly. “Really.”
“It’d be no fun without April and an industrial-sized bottle of banana gel anyhow,” pointed out CrazySugarFreakBoy!. “So what is the plan? We’ve been here twenty minutes and apart from Vin getting tossed across the courtyard there’s not been any good FX at all. And even that was pretty lame, without any splatter or gore content.”
Vinnie looked around him. “Well, we need to find if there’s a locus to the manifestation other than one of the residents. We need to discover what triggered all of this. Then we need to discover the poltergeist’s motivation…”
“It’s a Stanislavski school spectre?” Tandi wondered.
“Of we could just go get some great big Ghostbusting Ecto-Guns and blow hell out of the place,” offered CSFB!. “I’m pretty sure Finny commissioned something from Enty for that kind of job. If we can only find a way through the layers of concrete Hatty had them buried under…”
“Let’s stick to the low-property-damage non-showering techniques of psychic investigation for now, shall we?” Vinnie suggested. “We’ve sealed the house both physically and spiritually, so now we conduct a room-by-room search and seek out any disharmonious vibrations.”
“Or we could read the bloody message on that mirror?” suggested Tandi. The sexbot moved over and read the text. “I’m pretty sure there’s a c in eviscerate,” she noted.
***
Vinnie rubbed his forehead. “You know, all the really cool supernatural investigators get really cool night horrors to investigate. Mothmen. Wendigos. Spooky Chinese spirits with unpronounceable names. What do I get?”
“The rest?” ventured Tandi. “What is it?”
“It’s a curse,” the young exorcist sighed. “Standard voudoun malediction, you can buy them on the streets in Haiti or New Orleans for about a dollar. Nobody takes them seriously.”
“You found a curse?” CSFB! asked, peering round the second floor girls bathroom. He peered curiously around the pink-tiled shower space, as if hoping that a co-ed or two had been left behind by accident. “Somebody cursed the showers?”
“Not exactly,” Vinnie sighed, disentangling his thaumaturgical theodolite from the lines of drying lingerie and trying a reading again. “Somebody cursed one of the girls, I’d say, but that curse passed from here and lodged in an item in this room. And then it got fed.”
“Fed?” Tandi didn’t like the sound of that.
“Yes. A really minor curse, but it was nurtured so it grew. Now it’s blossomed into a full scale self-aware poltergeist phenomenon, and it’s still trying to carry out its original purpose by harming the Delta Kappa Pis.”
“Could it maybe get a spooky mask and maybe a scythe or bladed hand?” CrazySugarFreakBoy! suggested.
“What item?” Tandi wondered. “And how’s it been fed? Who’s been feeding it? And why?”
Vinnie sighed again. “That’s the cursed object,” he pointed. “Why me?”
“The plastic trash can?” CSFB! puzzled. “They’ve been feeding it trash?”
“It’s a sanitary towel disposal bin,” Tandi pointed out. “For tampons.”
“Blood sacrifices,” Vinnie said. “It was a blood curse to start with, probably cast on one of the girls as a joke, a game. And she basically… well, she got rid of the curse in her blood because it happened to, um, seep…”
“No need to paint a picture,” CSFB! noted. “Although sometimes if you dip…”
“Not. Relevant,” Vinnie said firmly. “Point is, the blood curse passed to the basket, and people kept on using the basket and feeding its power, and now…”
“We’ve got a mega-nasty haunted ectoplasmic tampon bin!” CSFB! grinned. “Oh please can I call Hatty in for this one? Or Nats?”
“Um, didn’t there used to be a door to this bathroom?” Tandi noticed. “And I don’t remember those shaving razors floating in the air by themselves like that.”
“And hey, look, the hairdryers are coiling towards us like snakes!” CSFB! enthused. “This is more like it!”
“It is,” agreed Vinnie. “We’re smack in the middle of a major poltergeist event, and now we know what its nature is it’s not going to allow us to leave alive.”
“But you’re a big-time exorcist and you can deal with this, right?” Tandi pointed out. “Right?”
“Well…” Vinnie squirmed. “If it had been anything but a strictly female problem… I mean, Whitney Darkness could have handled this in a heartbeat. As it is… No man can ever get rid of the curse of the PMS poltergeist...”
CSFB! dodged and bounced aside as the first rack of razors flew at him.
“As it is there was a reason I brought along Mr Foxglove,” admitted Vinnie de Soth.
“For the high level of banter?” Dream suggested, pinning some of the flying objects with deftly-sprayed silly string.
“Because this blood poltergeist is a manifestation of chaos,” Vinnie argued. “But frankly, I think it might be playing out of its league.”
“CrazySugarFreakBoy! is the very avatar of Chaos!” Tandi realised. “He’s the poster boy!”
“You mean I get to unleash chaos whoop-ass on this ghostie and show him what a real Trickster can do?” CSFB! grinned. “Wild chaos extreme?”
“Yes,” winced Vinnie. “Go for it.”
CrazySugarFreakBoy! gave him the thumbs up sigh and began peeling off his silly suit.
“Um…” Vinnie ventured.
“Yeah, I found out a while back that my silly suit helps me focus my chaos energies nowadays,” Dreamcatcher Kokopelli Foxglove explained. “Right now I don’t need focus. I need volume.”
Tandi professionally assessed CSFB!’s neon-glowing yellow body. “Not bad volume,” she appriaised.
“I need therapy,” Vinnie muttered.
“And I need to bounce!” CrazySugarFreakBoy! called. Anything that wasn’t already flying through the air was now shimmering across the room, skittering off walls, fencing with other objects. Cubicle doors slammed. Sinks and toilet bowls shattered. The water pipes wrenched free from the walls spraying water all over Tandi.
“Which of you did that?” demanded the sexbot in the wet t-shirt. “Come on, own up!”
Naked CrazySugarFreakBoy! wrestled with the Tampon Bin of Destruction.
Vinnie quietly cradled his head in his hands until it was all over.
***
“Thank you for all your help,” the leader of the Delta Kappa Pis told Vinnie, Tandi, and CSFB! “Which of you should we bill for the bathroom?”
“That would be Mr Jay Boaz, care of the Lair Legion,” Dream assured the girls. “Don’t worry. We’ve got trust funds coming out of the wazoo for this kind of thing. Same with the damage to the floors below and above. And what happened in the refectory. And the whole chandelier thing.”
“And what really happened?” another girl asked. “What caused that horrid haunting?”
“It’ll all be in my report,” Vinnie lied to her. “It’ll just take me a few days to type it up and post it to you. Honestly.”
“My main recommendation would be for a new sanitary disposal system,” Tandi told them. “Maybe something blessed by a bishop?”
“But otherwise, case closed,” CSFB! assured them. “I hope your hospitalised sister gets better soon, but this place is officially de-haunted. We nailed its spooky ass but good. Copyright infringement issues.”
Vinnie felt it was time to go before the campus authorities arrived to ask more questions. “Yes, it’s over,” he agreed. “Um, you know, CrazySugarFreakBoy!, it really would be okay for you to put your silly suit back on now.”
***
Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2008 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2008 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
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