Oleander House: Bay City Paranormal Investigations, Book 1

eyes. “I’d go if I seriously thought Amy was in danger. I just can’t see it coming to that. You know what I mean?”
“I think I do.” Sam glanced toward the stairs, then back at Andre. “Hey, I’ve got an idea.”
Andre raised his eyebrows. “Yeah? Let’s hear it.”
“We’ve got this huge library here that we haven’t even looked through.” Sam waved a hand vaguely in the direction of the library behind him. “We’re both up, and I’m thinking you don’t feel like sleeping any more than I do. What say we dig through the library and see if we can come up with anything that might help us understand what’s been happening here? Maybe some of the previous owners left some books here that would be useful.”
Andre grinned. “It’s worth a shot. Let’s do it.”
Three hours later they lay sprawled on the library floor, surrounded by books and magazines. The library turned out to contain a great many scientific volumes, as well as several issues of an early 1970s parapsychology journal called The Boundary. A quick perusal of the magazine revealed a publication so close to the lunatic fringe as to be nearly useless. Andre guessed that the magazines must have belonged to Josephine Royce, the still-missing woman who’d been the last owner to experience paranormal phenomena in Oleander House. He’d figured they could gain insight into Josephine’s mindset by skimming the magazines.
Sam’s eyelids had begun to droop when Andre suddenly sat straight up and nudged his shoulder. “Listen to this,” Andre said, his voice tight with excitement. “It says here that an unusually strong electromagnetic field can cause temporal lobe hallucinations.”
“What book is that?” Sam asked, stifling a yawn. “And what the hell are temporal lobe hallucinations?”
Andre flipped the book over and squinted at the scuffed cover. “The book’s called The Mind and the Spirit. It’s about paranormal phenomena and the role that the human mind has to play in them.” He flipped through the first couple of pages. “The author has a dual doctorate in psychology and theoretical physics. Wow.”
Sam sat up and peered over Andre’s shoulder at the daunting string of titles behind the author’s name. “Pretty impressive. How old’s this book?”
“Not very. Copyright’s 1997.” Andre frowned. “A visitor must’ve left this here. The house was open to the public when this book was published.”
Sam leaned back on his hands. “You think that might be what’s going on? Hallucinations?”
“Maybe.” Andre snapped the book shut and set it on the floor. “I gotta say, that would be a load off my mind.”
“I hear you. And it makes sense, except for one thing.” Sam picked up an issue of The Boundary and idly flipped the pages. “Hallucinations don’t show up on film.”
Andre made an impatient noise. “Maybe there’s not really anything there at all. Maybe we’re all seeing things that aren’t there. Mass hallucination is possible. It’s a documented phenomenon.”
Sam almost laughed. The half-angry, half-pleading look on Andre’s face stopped him. “Maybe,” he said softly. “I sure would like that better than it being real.” That much was true, at least. Sam heartily wished he could believe the things he’d experienced were all in his mind.
Andre stood, yawned and stretched. “Think I’m gonna go grab a couple hours sleep before I have to face Amy again.”
Sam chuckled. “I bet she’s fierce when she gets on a crusade, huh?”
“You got that right,” Andre said with feeling. “She’ll calm down after I explain what I found, though. Hallucinations can’t hurt you as long as you remember they’re not real and just ignore them.”
Sam refrained from pointing out that whatever had bitten and killed that child had certainly been no hallucination. He figured Amy would make that quite clear. “I think I’ll stay up and look through some more of these copies of The Boundary .”
“Okay. See you in a few hours, I guess.”
“Yeah, see you.”
Andre shuffled off toward the stairs. Sam settled onto the sofa to scan the collection of magazines.
It was not relaxing reading. Even though The Boundary clearly was not a respectable scientific journal, some of the things Sam found there hit uncomfortably close to home. Especially the article, complete with lurid photos, about a girl who’d allegedly been shredded by an invisible attacker while having sex with her boyfriend. The boyfriend was