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"So, does it look haunted to you?"
"It's not haunted."
"Not even by the spirit of bad seventies decor?"
It wasn't as if I was expecting a different answer from Strand, but there was something off about the hotel room. Maybe not off in a supernatural way, but in that way you get in neglected places that used to be nice. From the street, you could see that the Rivoli had been a beautiful hotel at some point, but now it was run-down and definitely creepy. The wallpaper didn't look like it had been replaced in forty years, and the less said about the carpet, the better.
"Come on. This is obviously a publicity stunt - why else would anyone want to stay here?"
I had to admit he had a point. There was no way I would have been there if the Black Tapes hadn't brought me. We were there investigating an authentic Pacific Northwest ghost story - no demons, no Apocalyptic symphonies, not even any upside down faces. It went like this: back in the thirties, a gangster's moll and his top lieutenant carried on an affair behind his back, always meeting in their favourite room at the Rivoli. When the boss found out and had his employee killed, the woman came here and shot herself. Ever since then, strange events have been reported there. Electronic devices failing, patches of cold air, mysterious noises, the water in the shower turning suddenly icy, all the usual ghost story stuff. Various investigators had looked into the incidents over the years, but nobody had managed to find out anything conclusive. I guess that at some point in the seventies somebody had tried to take everyone's minds off what happened with some renovations. Not that it had worked - the owner told me that they'd had to stop renting the room because there had been too many complaints.
"Notice that the story doesn't even have any names attached to it? It's obviously made up."
"So why investigate it at all?"
"There's still value in definitively disproving fake stories - even blatant fakes. I don't think this is ever going to make a Black Tape, though."
To be honest, it was a relief to be investigating something that didn't have anything to do with any of that. Something more like what I thought I'd be doing when I first got interested in Strand's work.
After being contacted by the Rivoli's owner, we'd agreed to spend the night - or, rather, I had agreed, and then asked Strand if he wanted to come along. I was a little surprised when he said yes, but not in a bad way. The owner had offered to let us stay for free, so all we had to do was move in Strand's equipment and see if anything happened.
We spent about half an hour setting up ghost hunting equipment - or, rather, equipment for hunting fake ghosts. For all the time I'd spent with Strand, I hadn't seen him do a lot of this kind of thing, and it was pretty interesting. He explained all the sensors and recorders to me as we went. It was already after ten when we checked in - the front counter was staffed all night long, and apparently all the spooky stuff was meant to happen after midnight - but we still had an hour to kill before the spirits, if any, arrived
"So, do we just ... wait?" I asked.
"Well, you can try and get some sleep, if you want."
"I'm not sure I want the bed," I said after I sat down on it. "What if they have bed bugs?"
"Can't say I'd be surprised."
"Is this reverse psychology?"
"Believe me, I do not want the bed."
In the end, we both stayed up. It wasn't like I'd been getting a lot of sleep lately anyway. I ended up pacing and checking my phone while Strand answered e-mails on his laptop - or tried to, because to nobody's surprise the Wi-Fi was awful. It was raining outside - not exactly unusual for Portland - and I could hear it drumming on the windows.
"You know," I said after Strand finally gave up and shut his laptop down, "if I was going to haunt a hotel room for eternity, this is not the one I would choose."
"I can't think of any hotel room I'd be happy to be stuck in for a month, let alone the best part of a century."
"I don't know, that Honeymoon suite seemed pretty nice, if it wasn't for the cultists who double-booked it." I immediately realized that I'd brought up a potentially painful subject, and tried to quickly move on. "So if you were going to haunt somewhere, what would it be?"
Strand chuckled. "I like to think that if there were an afterlife, I'd have better things to do than stay in one place and annoy the living."
"But if you had to choose?"
"The UBC library," he said, without any hesitation.
"Really?"
"Yes. I used to love it there, when I was a student. They have one of the largest research libraries in Canada, so I'd never be bored. Especially if ghosts were allowed to take out inter-library loans." He paused for a moment. "How about you?"
"Oh, knowing me, I'd get stuck at Pacific Northwest Studios for the rest of time. I'd just hang around annoying Nic and trying to convince people I finally found proof ghosts exist."
"I'm sure you could think of something more productive to do with your time than that."
"Do you think we get a choice? If there really is a ghost here, it might not be something she decided to do."
"But why would she stay here? It's not as if the story even says that this is where her lover died."
"Maybe she's just waiting for him to come back."
"After all this time? Even if ghosts existed, I'd have a hard time believing that."
"You don't think that love can last that long?"
"Love, maybe. But nobody waits forever."
The conversation was obviously moving into dangerous waters again, so I was happy to change the subject. "Hey, do you think it's getting colder?"
"That often happens at night. Especially in Portland."
He might have been right, but outside it hadn't been cold enough for my breath to mist in the air.
"No, really," I said, wrapping my arms around myself. "It's colder now than it was thirty seconds ago."
"I don't think a rundown hotel having broken heating is exactly proof of the supernatural."
"I still think we should check on the thermostat."
That was when the power went out.
I have to admit, I may have - not exactly screamed, but certainly squeaked. I put out a hand and touched the nearest wall, which was icy under my hands.
"Do you have a flashlight?" I said.
"We shouldn't need one. My laptop has battery backup. The power being off shouldn't affect it."
But it did. Strand tried to get the screen to come on, but it was dead. I pulled my phone out of my pocket, and that was the same, even though I'd had an almost full battery when I checked my e-mail a few minutes before.
"All right," I said, "this is definitely weird."
"I'm sure that there's a perfectly mundane explanation."
"What, like the hotel having an EMP generator lying around?"
"It's more plausible than ghosts."
As I tried to make my way over to the table without running into anything in the dark, I heard a noise coming from the bathroom. It sounded like a woman crying.
"Please tell me you can hear that," I said to Strand. For some reason, I felt like I had to whisper.
"Let's go and take a look," he said.
I guess that sensible people would have at least tried to leave the room at that point, but neither of us suggested it - to be honest, it didn't even occur to me, even though my heart was hammering and it felt like the bottom had dropped out of my stomach. With my hand on the wall as a guide, I made my way to the bathroom door.
I don't even know how to describe what I saw when I opened it. It wasn't anything like I imagined a ghost would be - a shadowy, transparent figure or a glowing ball of light. It was more like the quality of the darkness in the middle of the bathroom was different from the shadows around it. The sound of crying seemed to be coming out of the walls themselves.
"What is that?" I said in a loud stage whisper to Strand as he came up beside me.
"I don't -" he said, but he didn't get any further with whatever explanation he was going to give me.
I felt something take hold of me from the inside. I don't know how to describe the sensation any better - it was as if I was in my body, but not in control of it, like I was watching everything from a long way off. Whatever was inside the bathroom was gone, because it was inside me. On some level I knew that I should be terrified, but even my emotional reactions felt muted and distant.
Whatever it was that was currently in control of my head turned it to look at Strand - or, rather, to look at whatever was currently in Strand's body. I'd certainly seen him smile - sometimes - but he'd never looked at me like I was the most amazing thing he'd ever seen.
"I've missed you so much," he said. If nothing else had alerted me to what was happening, the strong New Jersey accent that he didn't have five minutes ago would have tipped me off.
"I know," I said back, and my voice was all wrong, too. It was like being in a dream. "I waited."
"It's all right, baby. I'm here now." Then he put his arms around me and kissed me, hard.
It didn't feel like a first kiss - because I guess it wasn't, for whatever was in my head right then. It felt like he'd kissed me before, many times, and knew this was going to be the last. It felt like it would go on forever.
And then I came back to myself, with Richard Strand's tongue in my mouth.
He must have recovered himself at about the same time, because he jumped away from me so fast he hit his head on the nearest wall.
"What WAS that?" I said. The lights flickered back on, which was a mixed blessing in the circumstances.
"I don't know."
I put a hand on the nearest wall, which was reassuringly solid and no longer freezing cold.
"So you don't have a completely non-supernatural explanation for why you kissed me?"
"I, uh ..."
That's when I burst out laughing. Maybe it had an hysterical edge to it, but the idea that this was what had finally rendered Richard Strand unable to come up with a mundane explanation was just too funny. Strand just looked at me awkwardly.
"Look," I said, taking pity on him, "whatever was happening seems to have stopped happening, and all our electronics are toast. Do you want to get out of here? I saw an all-night diner a couple of blocks away."
We didn't say much while we hastily packed up our stuff and fled into the night - we didn't bother to check out, maybe because neither of us wanted to have a conversation about whether we'd seen a ghost or not right now. The diner was almost as dilapidated as the Rivoli, but at least it had pie and coffee and didn't seem even slightly haunted.
"You have to admit that was not normal," I said, once we were sitting in a booth and the harsh fluorescent lights had made the whole thing seem even more like a dream. I was already wondering if it had been some kind of weird shared hallucination, not that I was going to offer that to Strand as an out.
"I'm sorry," Strand said. "I have no idea what came over me."
"Look - whatever that was, I'm not blaming you for it. I'm just saying, ghosts make more sense than you suddenly developing a New Jersey accent and deciding to make out with me in a hotel bathroom." To be honest, I was a lot more disturbed by the temporary possession than by the kissing, not that I was going to tell him that.
"Whatever happened in there ... I just wouldn't want it to change anything."
Strand and I have been through a lot together, one way and another. He hasn't always been honest with me, but I do get the sense that he's trying to change that. It meant a lot to me that he seemed to be more worried about what I thought of him than in what the hell had actually happened. That didn't mean that I was going to let it drop.
"So, do I finally get my million dollars now?"
"That was not proof of the supernatural. Besides, we've established that I don't actually have a million dollars."
"Well, there goes my plan to marry you for your money."
That actually raised a smile from Strand, albeit a shaky one. I drank my coffee, which was terrible, and ate the apple pie, which was delicious.
"Do you think she really waited in there all that time?" I said. Whatever had happened to us, I wanted an explanation for it. But if the Black Tapes had taught me anything it was that supernatural investigations were short on those. "Do you think they're both gone now? And why choose us? Other people had been in and out that room, for almost a century, but none of the stories mention anything like that happening."
"I don't believe in ghosts," Strand said.
"How about eternal love?"
He just gave me an unreadable look, and ordered us more pie.