Read Online Poltergeist by James Kahn - Free Book Online Page A

running, more often than not. Either she herself was running, or her sister was, or some unknown unfortunate. What was chasing was less clear still: forms without shape, usually; gloating presences, shades of meaning.
    The dreams were unsettling, at best, and Tangina would just as soon have seen them disappear. But they didn’t. In fact, they lingered in the corners of her consciousness even during waking, at times. These were states of special perception visions, nothing less. They allowed her, among other things, to “read” people in ways that were invisible to most—read their souls, their multiplicities of spirit.
    Since it was an ability over which she had no control, Tangina decided, in the end, to make use of it—to help people, if she could. She became a reluctant clairvoyant.
    Reluctant, because the episodes of vision left her so drained, and because once she opened one of her special doors, she couldn’t close it again at will: once she tried to see, she had to see, whether she wanted to or not. There was no eye-closing, and she couldn’t leave, once the show started.
    Consequently, Tangina was at the end of her tether. Ten years of witnessing and isolating other people’s horrors and losses had almost burned her out. She’d been hired by frantic parents to find missing children, by stumped police departments to find disemboweled corpses, by grieving widows to contact lost loves. But they couldn’t pay her enough to do that anymore—she wanted an end to it. She could no longer turn it off.
    And moreover, it was getting worse. For many weeks, now, she’d been having dreams that stole her sleep, left her tired and sweating in the morning. They were precognitive, of that she was certain—unfortunately, they slipped from her consciousness within seconds of awakening.
    That made the experience even more frustrating—the fact that she remembered the dreams for scant moments, but then lost them like water through a sieve during the brief time it took her to wake fully, leaving her damp with memory.
    Nor was that even the worst of it. Things, objects in her room—and she was not certain of any of this, which made it worse still—were moving. Not moving unmistakably or visibly, but each morning Tangina was aware, or thought she was aware, of something in one spot in the room, which the previous evening had been in another spot. A chair, moved out a bit from the wall; a book, shifted from table to dresser.
    Psychokinesis was one thing she’d never experienced before. Not that she disbelieved in it; only, if this was it, the experience was new to her. But the incidents were so vague, so vaguely unsettling—she wondered if she could be losing her mind. Nothing, she’d come to learn—not even insanity—was impossible.
    Her days were filled with premonition and dread. She wondered at the import of every encounter. Was the mailman’s song a portent? The scrap of paper that caught on her shoe, a token? Her world had become a place of foreboding; it gave her no rest.
    Since her resolve was to give up augury and divination insofar as she could, she tried to suppress the episodes with sleeping pills. For a time, that worked. Her dreams became less frequent, less tormenting. As the medication accumulated in her system, though, she started feeling chronically tired, perpetually drugged. One day she almost stepped in front of a truck, accidentally. She stopped the pills.
    The dreams returned with a vengeance. They took over her life, became the nebulous center of a troubled existence.
    She decided to approach the problem head-on—to seek the night-visions directly, and deal with them face to face. She decided to “scry.”
    Scrying was the art of crystal gazing, a technique Tangina, like thousands of seers before her, had perfected as a medium through which to achieve an altered state of consciousness. Not that a crystal ball was necessary per se —any reflective or refractive surface would do. The crystal ball