S.T. Rogers's Blog, page 9

This was surely Hell. And if Hell existed, wasn’t it reasonable to think that Heaven existed as...

This was surely Hell. And if Hell existed, wasn’t it reasonable to think that Heaven existed as well? If Hell was here, then all of the mythos of the church could reasonably be trusted to exist alongside it, a promise kept. 

The rolling hills were lush and green, the sky was blue with cottony white clouds, and the sun was...

The rolling hills were lush and green, the sky was blue with cottony white clouds, and the sun was high above them, shining down warmly. The colors kept getting brighter, and John and Rachel cried and laughed and hugged each other tightly. The colors became so bright that they could barely see and their laughing bounced in their ears and became nearly uncontrollable. They rolled on the ground and every inch of their skin felt alive and connected and everything around them evolved until it became a blissful white. 

“You’ve done horrible things, but you can still change. God’s forgiveness is an unbelievable...

“You’ve done horrible things, but you can still change. God’s forgiveness is an unbelievable thing.” 

“You have to give yourself up to God. Everyone who repents and gives their heart to God will be...

“You have to give yourself up to God. Everyone who repents and gives their heart to God will be saved. Everyone. Even you.” 

Hell is a lot worse than a lake of fire.

Hell is a lot worse than a lake of fire.

God loves you, and God is great. But He is terrible, too. Don’t make Him be terrible to you.

God loves you, and God is great. But He is terrible, too. Don’t make Him be terrible to you.

Math Scores

The year that the ghost of Mr. Paulo Sandoval appeared in the Prescott Tamarind Middle School bathroom, washing his hands and murmuring to himself about how he would never be able to grade all of his Algebra papers in one weekend, was a curious year.             It was curious not only because there had been a teacher’s strike in September, extending the summer two heavenly weeks. And it was not curious simply because there were three new teachers, one of them an attractive young lady who looked like she could have been in Middle School herself, Ms Denton. And though it was a wonder to the school at large how Robby Pound managed to convince Dawn Singer to go steady with him, this was not the biggest conundrum. Everyone was focused on those baffling math scores.            It has become a stereotype that boys are better at math than girls. This assertion may or may not be true, and there has been no reconciling of national or worldwide statistics consulted to bare these results out, but if one were to look at the last three years of grading from Prescott Tamarind Middle School one would find that the girls know their stuff. In fact, scoring well at mathematics had become a point of pride for the ladies of P.T.            The Math Club, possibly a male-dominated group in other schools, was filled with girls at P.T. Middle School. Suzanne McComber was the president and she tolerated no less than three boys among the two dozen members of her club. They ruled the state in competitions and six of their members had gone on to specialty high schools after their eighth grade year. The boys could sing baritone and possibly throw a dodge ball harder, but the girls knew their equations.             How then, did this miraculous turnaround happen? Out of seventy-three boys in Prescott Tamarind Middle School—forty-two split between two classes in the 7th grade and thirty-one in one large 8th grade class—seventy-one of them received A’s during the first nine week grading period. Most of them scored well in the 95th percentile and a jaw-dropping thirty boys didn’t miss a question all quarter, receiving 100% for their mathematics classes. And the two who didn’t do well? Dan Haberstein had been out sick for most of the quarter and taken his tests from home: C+. And nasty Rich Kellerman who spent more time in detention than he did in class just didn’t fill out the tests: F.            Suzanne McComber knew a thing or two about adding and she knew this didn’t add up. She started watching the boys in her class, taking note of their studying habits and focus. She tapped into the girl-dominated Math club and quickly built a syndicate of little-girl-spies to keep an eye on their boy counterparts and figure out how the momentum had shifted so dramatically. The few boys in the Math Club were kicked to the curb and the meetings, which used to consist of equation races and Pin the Tail on the Cosine, became a hive of espionage. Two pieces of information were secured: the boys were not studying and the number of bathroom breaks during tests was through the roof.             Dan Haberstein was back in school this quarter, feeling much better, thank you, and his grades had dramatically risen from last period’s C+ to a near perfect 99% through three weeks of graded homework and one test. So Suzanne McComber could not help herself but follow Dan after he raised his hand and asked for the boy’s hallway pass during their Algebra II test. Dan was the fifth boy to request the pass during the test and Suzanne could swear that there was some type of underhanded communication occurring from the boys who had returned from the bathroom. After Dan exited, Suzanne raised her hand, secured the girl’s hallway pass, and tailed her suspect.             To her surprise, Dan Haberstein actually did make a line straight for the bathroom. She followed him to the crest of the doorway and leaned in to listen, the smells of urinal cakes and ammonia flooding her nose. No bathroom noises, she noticed, just some rustling of paper and then Dan’s quiet voice.             “Solve for X,” Dan said in a whisper. “2(x + 7) – 3(2x-4) = -18.”            Then, to Suzanne’s surprise, an adult voice spoke. “X equals 11!”            Suzanne was shocked. An adult helping the boys cheat! Who would do such a thing? It must be some horrible anti-feminist who couldn’t stand that the girls were so good at math. Mr. Palmer, perhaps. But it was over now. Suzanne had them dead to rights.             She heard Dan’s voice again, “Solve the following inequity: -20 < 4-2x.”            “12 < X,” the voice said without missing a beat.            Suzanne rushed in and yelled “Aha!”            The scene in the boy’s bathroom took the gust out of her accusation. Dan Haberstein stood in the center of the tiles with his Algebra test spread before him. There was a blue ghost washing his hands at the sink, clearly a repeater, whom she recognized as Mr. Sandoval, a math teacher who her sister had had three years prior. She remembered hearing that he died last summer.            “What’s…what’s going on here?” Suzanne asked.            “He knows all the answers,” Dan said, pointing to the ghost.             Suzanne was about to call Dan and all the boys of Prescott Tamarind Middle School cheats and let him know that she would be promptly turning them in. She opened her mouth and then paused. She looked at the ghostly figure, barely visible in the fluorescent lighting of the boy’s bathroom, and wrinkled her brow.            “John has mowed three lawns,” she said. “If he can mow two lawns per hour, which equations describes the number of lawns, m, he can complete after h, more hours?”            “m = 2h + 3,” Mr. Sandoval said, still washing his hands.            “Oh,” Suzanne said, looking at Dan, a little embarrassed. “Right.”

The New Baby

I have no memory of how I got here, but that doesn’t bother me. My arms are weary, crisscrossed my chest, and my head wobbles like a buoy in the ocean. In the dim light of the bedroom, I can see only a few feet around me—the crib, the changing table, the painting of zoo animals, bright colors muted gray in the shadows. But mostly I watch my feet, naked at the end of my sweatpants, as they pace the floor. Four steps bring me to the edge of the room where there is a crack in the wooden panel wide enough for a crayon to fall through, then turn, and four steps brings me to the mirrored closet on the opposite side. Two things occur to me when I contemplate this eight-step journey: The first is that Abigail’s room is quite small. The second is that my body, reflected in the mirror on the closet, is glowing with blue, psychic energy.            I do not always look in the mirror. In fact, many nights, the sun rises while I still hold Abigail in my arms. But occasionally I do look into the mirror and during these instances I breathe in sharply and am certain that I have died. The vision makes me stand up straight, pulls my buoy of a head out of the water, and I must remember not to drop my infant child. As I straighten and stop in horror to observe my spiritual form in the mirror, the ghost keeps moving in its path, splits away from me, and takes her four steps back to the crack in the wood paneling on the other side of the room. This is the point where I realize it has happened again. I’ve been called out of my bed, hypnotized, possessed if you will, into walking with the ghost.
The loop ghost in Abigail’s room is my mother and this is why she has not been removed by a medium. Gerald and I inherited the house when my mother died and a few months after settling in she appeared in the guest bedroom, pacing to each wall, carrying, it can safely be assumed, an image of the infant me. I was happy to see her, to tell the truth. She had it rough with my father and the estrangement between the two of them brought she and I much closer than a regular mother and daughter. I knew she wouldn’t leave me after she died. It made me comfortable to have her there and when I was with child, Gerald and I decided that there would be no better room in the house to make a nursery than the one with the calming, motherly ghost pacing the hardwood floors.            Gerald works nights keeping watch over computer systems while the rest of the world sleeps. He doesn’t know, I’m afraid, how hard those first couple months with a newborn can be. Sleep is erratic and rare, totally at the whim of a senseless animal. Gerald leaves at ten o’clock P.M. and comes back home well after sunrise, usually at 8:30 or 9:00. I have no choice but to let him sleep when he gets home, he has to perform the same duties the following night.             Gerald does not know that Abigail is up every two or three hours wanting fed or changed or simply because she’s cranky. He doesn’t know that my mind has been in a fog over this schedule and everything seems a little less real, that the buzz in the back of my mind, low and consistent, has been growing louder so that often it is difficult for me to understand the meaning of words when someone is talking to me on the phone or when I’m watching television.Gerald does not know about the night that I sat up in bed, wide-eyed, watching the blue glow of my mother’s ghost ebb and wane across the walls of our bedroom. He does not know about the night I came to consciousness in the rocking chair in Abigail’s room, sitting on the edge of the seat watching my mother, without a clue as to how long I had been there. He does not know about the pacing I do with her, neither the first time it happened nor the nightly occurrences that I now can’t seem to stop. Gerald doesn’t know—and I can’t bring myself to tell him—that I have woken up and realized that I was carrying our baby in my arms.
Shadows broken in the yellow beams cast by the streetlight outside Abigail’s window have become my only companions. They are so familiar to me now, like a book reread. The lattice of black squares thrown by the bookshelves sits like owls in a tree. The thick mass at the foot of the changing table is a steady, dependable rock. The hawkish curve on the wall behind the rocking chair keeps watch over Abigail and I. They are our friends now, these shadows, our protectors as we walk the floor. We need these protectors.             It has occurred to me that I can no longer depend on Gerald. He has hurt me. I don’t know how it slipped my mind, but he has hurt me over and over again and I can’t let him hurt Abigail. I can’t allow her to be hit like he hits me, in the stomach and back so that our friends and relatives can’t see the damage. I can’t allow him to twist Abigail’s arms around her back until she screams out in pain. Gerald is sick, sadistic, diseased in his mind. I have to stay in this room and keep it as a fortress against him.
“What are you doing?”
“Have you slept?”
The sun is up and the shadows are gone, but I feel strong. Gerald is standing in the doorway to Abigail’s nursery. He wears a satchel over his shoulder. His hair is still combed nicely from work and the dark circles under his eyes are wrinkled in a question. I know he is thinking about hurting me. I keep walking, four steps to the crack in the floor, four steps to the mirrored closet.             “Hey,” he says. “Answer me, please. Have you been up all night?”            “Abigail can’t sleep,” I say, just so that he’ll leave us alone.            “What?” he asks.            “Abigail can’t sleep,” I say again, trying to keep my tone even so that he doesn’t fly into a rage. “The baby can’t sleep.”            “Sweetie,” he says walking forward with his arms out. “It’s Bethany.” He takes the baby from my arms and I finally stop walking. The ghost continues on, her arms still crisscrossed her chest, a blue baby still held there breathing quietly in its sleep. “The baby is Bethany. Yourname is Abigail.”            I look in Gerald’s eyes, confused for a moment. “I know…”            He pauses and cocks his head, looking at me sideways. “Chuck. The name’s Chuck. Nice to meet you.” He breaths out low in whistle. “I’m taking tomorrow off. You need a break. You need to get some sleep.”            I stumble into the hallway and he remains in the nursery, rocking the baby in his arms for a few moments and then laying her down in the crib, gingerly, as if she is made of thin glass.             He approaches me, putting his hand to my temple and brushing the hair back from my face. “I’m gonna hop in the shower. Go to bed. Get some sleep. I’m in charge of Bethany today.”            He kisses me on the cheek and smiles with a concerned look haunting his eyes. He turns and closes the bathroom door as the rushing sound of the shower fills the hallway. He won’t get away with this, that son of a bitch. He won’t ever touch Abigail again, I’ll see to that right now. I remove the knife from the spot I secured it earlier, underneath the mattress. It’s the one I use to chop vegetables and to separate the joints of chicken carcasses. I stomp into the bathroom and paint the place red.

A Ghost Called Steinbeck

There were plenty of ghosts in the bookstore. The long expanses of dusty shelves brimming with novels and memoirs, poetry and essays, plays and histories, tended to attract ghosts like a magnet dropped into a bin of pins. The ghosts paged through large tombs off in the corner, they went in and out of the bathroom, checking to make sure they still had their purses, they silently ordered coffees again and again at the café, nodding their heads after their request and appearing once more at the end of the line. They shuffled down the aisles, their blue eyes scanning the spines as if each title were a sentence in one large story.            As the staff of a bookstore, we’d gotten used to the ghosts. We had all worked in one bookstore or another previously, so we knew what to expect on the first day. There were just more ghosts in bookstores than anywhere else. Take, for instance, the department store cattycorner to us with its huge sections of clothing and perfumes: Two ghosts.  The sporting goods store with the climbing wall and all the weight equipment? Six ghosts. The diner where they gave us free dessert if they knew we worked at the bookstore? Two waiter ghosts and three quiet, blue customers.  Our store had twenty-six individual hauntings.             As we said before, there was the bathroom lady, the coffee orderer, and a slew of aisle walkers. But there was also the little boy who played at the Thomas the Train table, the repeater who, over and over again, approached the customer service desk and asked if our store used to have a basement, and the former staff member who still wore his nametag and searched the history section, unable to find the World War II book for a customer who had left a decade earlier.            A ghostly UPS delivery man appeared just outside the receiving room door every day with a cart of books, a young kid handed out flyers protesting the Vietnam War which passed endlessly through people’s hands, and an old ghost with watery eyes browsed through a collectibles almanac, occasionally holding a coin up to the pages of the book to compare their likeness. The ghosts were fascinating, perhaps, if it was your first time in the store, but they were old hat to us. They blurred into the background as we helped the live customers and straightened the crooked books back into their alphabetical places. They became nothing more than another fixture, another poster on the wall of a famous book cover. All of them faded away with time, except, of course, for Steinbeck.            To be clear, this was not the ghost of John Steinbeck. Rather, it was an old grandfatherly man, broad of shoulder, with slicked hair and thick, blocky glasses. He was fat, yes, with big, pudgy fingers reminiscent of Babe Ruth or Santa Clause. He used these pudgy fingers to page through book after book of the cannon of John Steinbeck.            He was the only ghost in the store that could vocalize and if steel could be transformed into a sound, then that is what his voice sounded like. He read The Winter of our Discontent in its entirety and then set it down next to his chair, lifting Travels with Charlie from the stack next to him, opening to page one and booming out, “When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch.” Steinbeck sat ten feet outside the café, near the Crafts and Woodworking section and, naturally, we lingered there as we straightened the knitting and whittling books, letting the wise Americana wash over us as we worked.            This peaceful era of the bookstore did not go on forever. As with all occupations, the livelihoods of booksellers was eventually compromised by the false idol called Progress. It was decided by the world at large that books should be digitized rather than printed and kept on flat little panels rather than in large, dust-allergy-causing stores. And, fair is fair, we supposed, if the customer wanted to keep all of their books in a little computer rather than in their homes, who were we to complain?            It was announced, after a few dismal holiday seasons, that the old bookstore would finally be closing up shop. We started looking for work in a frenzy of worry, and some of us found things and some of us didn’t. There were smaller specialty bookstores still and there would always be libraries. Some of us had experience editing or copywriting and we went back to those jobs. A few of us took the layoff and traveled and a few of us fell into a depression and a loneliness that was damn hard to shake.            The ghosts didn’t know the difference. They still walked in and out of the bathroom, ordered their coffees, asked about that basement level that we never had. They kept browsing the sections even after we removed all the books to return to the publishers, like beams of light flying back to their maker at the end of the world.            We like to think Steinbeck knew what was going on. Either he knew, or it was a cosmic coincidence to be chuckled about for years to come. As we shut off the lights for the last time, we heard Steinbeck, reading with his steely voice towards the end of East of Eden boom out—louder than normal, mind you—“A man without words is a man without thought!” We nodded in appreciation, coughed lightly into our hands because something had stuck in our throats, and locked the double doors.

The Southern Agitator

Blacklist: 1. A list of persons under suspicion, disfavor, censure, ect: His record as an anarchist put him on the government’s blacklist. 2. A list drawn up by a labor union, containing the names of employers to be boycotted for unfair labor practices. 3. A house which, after an investigation by Agitators, has been made off-limits due to a dangerous haunting: There is a poltergeist in the house, so it was put on the blacklist.
They sat on the porch steps of 473 Holloway Street and talked about the ballgame from the night before. A two-seater porch swing went back and forth behind them, piloted by two ghosts, little girls, both of them under six. One had a ponytail sprouting from the back of her head and the other was styled with a short bob. They were blue and effervescent, sometimes difficult to see if the sun shone directly on them. But even when they weren’t visible, they gave up their location every few minutes with a burst of tinkling laughter.It was late in September—cold for this time of year—and Detroit was in a pennant race. The Tigers lost the previous night to the Indians, but it was a close game and Detroit had taken the three-game series which almost certainly would assure a spot in the wild card game. Lawrence drank a soda and burped occasionally under his breath while he talked about the different playoff teams Detroit might face in the coming weeks. Harry nodded in agreement to Lawrence’s assessments and stood up as he saw a long black car float towards 473 Holloway Street. Harry walked down the stairs and waved Lawrence to do the same. They shouldn’t appear so comfortable on the steps. It wasn’t as if they lived in this house.            So, the two Agitators waited on the sidewalk next to their equipment when Buzzy Miller emerged from the passenger side door of the car, wearing a tight blue shirt with a yellow tie, slim, dark pants, and shoes shined so meticulously that they reflected the muted September sun.             “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Miller,” Harry said, stepping forward and extending his hand.             The man took Harry’s hand loosely in his own while he peered at the house beyond. “Please, call me Buzzy,” he cooed, a strong Southern accent lengthening his words. He nodded at Lawrence and shook his hand as well before producing a set of small, round glasses with red rims.            “Why are the psychicvoltaics still out here?” Buzzy asked without looking at the flat, black glass panels stacked securely in the grass of the front yard.            Harry and Lawrence looked at one another.             “The ghost,” Harry said. “It started to become dangerous.”            Buzzy eyed at the two Agitators for the first time and smiled in a way that seemed deeply honest. “Well, that’s why we’re here, isn’t it, boys?” He looked back at the house and his face grew serious again. “Which one of you is the medium?”            “That would be me, sir,” Lawrence said, burping into his hand and holding the soda behind his back.              “And you are my technician?” Buzzy said to Harry, his hands now clasped at his waist.            “Yes, sir,” Harry said. “But I’ve been training in the Sciences as well. People say I have some talent.”            “You two were at least able to place the Psydometer, I suppose?” Buzzy asked.             “Yeah,” Lawrence said. “Harry had it set up before things started getting out of control.”            Buzzy walked up the steps and the two Agitators followed. He paused in front of the door and then turned to look at the porch swing. “Are these two lovelies involved in the Blacklisting investigation?”            “Uh, no,” Lawrence said, climbing the final step. “Separate haunting. Unrelated. They’re just repeaters.”            Buzzy stared at the little girls and then closed his eyes, breathing in deeply. Lawrence and Harry exchanged a look and Lawrence shrugged his shoulders.            “You’re sure about that?” Buzzy asked.            “Um, yeah,” Lawrence said. “Do you sense something different?”            Buzzy turned the doorknob. “Get the PsyV panels and bring them inside. If the power is good, this shouldn’t take very long.”            “The ghost…” Harry said.            “I’ll be just fine,” Buzzy assured him.            The two Agitators walked down the stairs silently to gather the rest of their equipment. Lawrence looked over his shoulder, and when it appeared that Buzzy Miller was fully inside the house, he commented. “A bit full of himself, isn’t he?”            “A little odd,” Harry said. “But he seems all right.”            “I guess,” Lawrence said, setting his soda on the sidewalk and lifting two PsyV panels, one in each hand, from the concrete. “He’s new in town. Probably thinks he has something to prove. He’ll settle down eventually.”            Harry didn’t answer and the two Agitators carried four PsyV panels up the stairs of the porch and tentatively through the front door. Inside, Buzzy knelt over the Psydometer and seemed to hardly be aware of the snarling and snapping ghost pinned to the wall behind him, most certainly kept there by a strong use of psychic force. The scene was impressive, but both Lawrence and Harry had experience with powerful mediums before. They were each schooled in the Labs out of Ridge Hollow and all of the world’s great mediums studied at that institution at one time or another. But still, this southerner was proving himself to be one cool customer.            The ghost, a Mr. Eugene Siegel, writhed in anguish against the far wall of the living room. The Blacklisting investigation was called only days after Mr. Siegel was found hanged from a fan fixture by his own hand in the dining room adjacent to the room they were currently in. Suicides often produced poltergeists and the Agitators were called almost out of protocol in the event of a suicide in order to, first, determine how dangerous the ghost was and, second, to measure the psychic power of the ghost with a mind towards setting up an energy site to capture the power emitting from the spirit.            Mr. Siegel, the thick, twined rope used in his hanging still around his blue, glowing neck, struggled against Buzzy’s power and both Lawrence and Harry could feel the disturbance of the ghost’s aura like a strong undercurrent in the ocean, quietly plotting to pull them out to sea if they weren’t careful.             “We’re getting a 16.5 reading here,” Buzzy said, peering at the Psydometer, a tall black piece of instrumentation, thin, with a thick platform base and a round top, sprouting antenna. “Strong enough to warrant a Blacklist, I suppose, but nothing to write home about. We’re missing something. Did your Intel people give you anything good to work with?”            “Just the regular stuff for a suicide case, I guess,” Lawrence said. “He was an alcoholic, and into pills too, I think they said. Divorced. Unemployed. Y’know.”            “Did he have children?” Buzzy asked, still reading the numbers on the Psydometer as they undulated with the raging of Mr. Siegel.            “Yeah,” Lawrence said. “Lost them in the divorce.”            “Should we set up the panels?” Harry asked.            “Yes, please,” Buzzy said.            Lawrence and Harry once again lifted the panels and began walking towards the dining room.            “Set them up in this room,” Buzzy said.            The Agitators stopped in their tracks. “But he did the deed in the dining room,” Lawrence pointed out. “He was in the dining room when we first got here, too.”            “Yes,” Buzzy said, now turning to look at the restrained ghost. “But he’s not a repeater. And he’s not bound to one room or the other. Something tells me he’ll be spending more time in this room than the place of his death.”            And with this statement Buzzy turned and walked towards the boarded up windows facing the street. It was part of the procedure to secure the entire house when it was to be Blacklisted. It was dangerous for people to look inside at a serious haunting—it caused a risk for possession and mind control and all sorts of other awful things. So it was surprising when Buzzy produced a pocket knife and began prying off one of the boards.            “What are you doing?” Lawrence asked.            “Going on a hunch,” Buzzy said. “Using my brain, which I wish you two would have done before I got here.”            This statement silenced the two Agitators and after a brief pause they began setting up the panels in the living room as their superior had requested. Buzzy Miller jimmied and scratched at the nails that the two Agitators had spiked into the wall that morning while they positioned the PsyV panels strategically around the room. The three worked silently and the tension in the room overtook the dangerous aura protruding from Mr. Siegel so much so that Lawrence and Harry hardly felt it any longer. So, it was all the more shocking when Buzzy pulled out the last nail thereby removing the wooden blank from the window which, for reasons unknown to Lawrence and Harry, threw the ghost into a rage so powerful that Buzzy momentarily lost control.            The living room felt like a beach in a hurricane. Lawrence and Harry had just finished setting up the panels when they were bowled over by the immense wall of psychic power. They hunkered down on the floor, their hands over their heads, peeking through their fingers at the chaotic poltergeist as it flew to the center of the room. The ghost altered reality with its aura, causing wild hallucinations to spin about like untied balloons. Little snippets of Mr. Siegel’s life—a nun with a scowl and a ruler, a 73’ corvette wrecked into a tree, a young woman shaking her head and whispering “I’m so sorry, Gene” over and over again. But overwhelmingly, there was the image of two young girls, sometimes skipping rope, sometimes sleeping in a double bed together, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing. It was the two little girls from the porch swing and Mr. Siegel’s clear line of vision to them that Buzzy had created by removing the board from the window had caused this dangerous, nearly uncontrollable situation.            Then everything stopped.             “Whew,” Buzzy said, standing up, “How about that?”            The wind had ceased. Mr. Siegel was once more pushed to the opposite wall, snarling and snapping at the air, the noose whipping about his neck. The panels that the two Agitators had just set up were glowing hot orange. Buzzy knelt down once more by the Psydometer. “22.7. Now that’s a reading!”
Buzzy talked to Lawrence and Harry as he secured the front door. “I’m sorry, boys, but I’m going to recommend more training for each of you before your next deployment. Those girls were linked to Mr. Siegel. They were part of his haunting and not an individual haunting of their own. A professional medium needs to recognize these things. An Agitator needs to recognize these things.”            “Yes, sir,” both Lawrence and Harry muttered at the same time.            At the bottom of the stairs, Buzzy turned and shook each of their hands.             “Now, I’m new in town, as you know, and I’m staying in a hotel by myself until I can find some permanent accommodations. Could you boys tell me where there’s a good bar to watch the baseball game this evening?”            “You’re a Tigers fan?” Lawrence asked, skeptically.            Buzzy laughed. “Well, heck no. But I’ll bet those rascals are going to see Atlanta somewhere down the line.”            The three Agitators chatted pleasantly as they walked to the long black car in which Buzzy had arrived. Inside the house and completely forgotten, Mr. Siegel stared out the window at the two girls on the porch swing. He was confused and frightened and wanted with all his being to be able to reach the girls on the swing, to hold them in his arms, to hear them call him daddy and have them kiss his cheeks. He also wished that he had a drink to soothe the terrible anger that provided such a favorable reading on the Psydometer. But he could have neither of these things and he settled in to his long stay in purgatory.