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.