It was a very quick dinner. Everyone was shoving food down their throats so they could begin the investigation. Lydia and Hazel wanted to leave immediately to investigate the other ghost room, but the cook put her foot down.

  “I spend 4 hour cooking. Very short notice. Why you not eat? Kitchen close early, I wake up early for breakfast, must sleep now.”

  “The cook is right, everyone,” said James. “She did spend a lot of time cooking, and we didn’t give her much notice. My fault, it’s true, but it was very hard to find a good cook under the curfew conditions in the city. So please eat. Remember, it’s barely half past seven. You have the whole night ahead of you.”

  That settled everyone down. People started eating, but they were eating like kids who had been punished, like they could only watch TV after they had finished their vegetables.

  This made me a little sad because the food really was good. The cook, whose name I had already forgotten, had done wonders under the short time she had been given. So I took my time eating while everyone hurried.

  “Start speaking,” said Lydia to the manager. “What is this second dining room? Where could Royce have gone? Tell us all the details so we’re ready to start recording.”

  “Yes, about that,” said James. “There was an old dining room that was much bigger and was the original dining room for this hotel. It’s too large, and we didn’t have time to clean it, so we kept it closed. I will take you there after dinner, but be warned that it’s very filthy. We didn’t even have time to dust it.”

  “Is that the one second to last from the end?” asked Dr. Anand.

  “Yes, it is. How did you know?”

  “I placed some of my equipment there before we started. I had a hunch that room might be important.”

  Lydia looked at him with admiration. “Really? Did you place your equipment in all the rooms?”

  “Not all of them, no. I only arrived 10 minutes before you did. My sixth sense told me that particular room might be important, so that was the only one I placed my supernatural sensory equipment in.”

  I made a mental note of that. Why was Dr. Anand, a supposed scientist, talking about sixth sense? I thought his type was supposed to be logical and methodological. I suspected the real reason was that he knew something he didn’t want to share with the rest of us. That made me wonder. I put my doubts aside and listened to the rest of his conversation.

  Anand continued. “But if you want, after dinner, we can place your cameras and my equipment in every single room. I have plenty of my devices, but I’m afraid I didn’t bring enough cameras. I didn’t realize a hotel would be this big.”

  “That’s a great idea, and yes, I have more than enough cameras for even a hotel of this size. It is my full-time job, after all.”

  “I know,” said Dr Anand. “I follow your channel, although not regularly. I did watch the last haunted house episode – it was especially good. It didn’t make me wonder, though, why you never put cameras in the attic. That seemed like a perfect place for haunting.”

  Lydia beamed at him, for once, showing humanity.

  “Your intuition is very accurate, Dr. Anand. I’m impressed. Yes, I was also convinced the attic was haunted. Unfortunately, the owner didn’t give us permission. My cameraman and I had some suspicions that he had something illegal in there, maybe drugs. We tried to hint to him that we didn’t care, we weren’t the police, and he could remove anything he didn’t want, but he was obstinate. A shame though. I’m sure if he had put cameras in the attic, we would have found something.”

  “A shame, a real shame. The owners of this hotel, at least the new ones who bought this place from bankruptcy, have no such qualms. They were happy to let me place my equipment in any place I want, go to any room I want. So maybe this time we’ll have a proper investigation.”

  Anand and Lydia were the first to finish their dinner and they ran away almost immediately, completely ignoring the rest of us. I ate slowly. I had taken the vegan option due to previous health issues. The vegan sausage was excellent and tasted just like the real thing. There were fresh potatoes and vegetables on the side, and onion gravy that also looked like it had been freshly cooked, not just taken from the freezer. The food was delicious. Certainly one of the best I’d eaten since-- I couldn’t remember when. At least 7 years ago, when I had lost my mind.

  Lydia and Anand came back rushing to the room very excited.

  “Listen guys, we felt we had to share this with you,” Lydia said. “Dr. Anand’s equipment picked up a static discharge at the exact same time that Royce was attacked. Dr. Anand, can you explain what you found?”

  “Sure, my equipment measures things like, background radiation, electromagnetic waves in the area, as well as sound. You might be surprised to hear that even a hotel like this has some electromagnetic radiation all the time, as well as some radiation. Although it is very low, not enough to cause any harm.

  Here’s the thing, at the exact same time that Royce vanished and appeared before us, a time I measured on my watch as 7:25, the radiation peaked. The radiation was as high as three x-ray machines going off at the same time, which almost never happens naturally, unless you’re standing inside a nuclear power station. The electromagnetic frequencies also went super high, so high that they damaged my machine. Look.”

  He showed us his machine which looked melted, like somebody had thrown it in the fire or put it inside a microwave.

  “The actual plastic has melted. This only happens when the radiation and the electromagnetic frequencies were so high that they started heating the plastic sheeting. This melted the internal circuits as well. Luckily, the data is stored on my laptop, but this equipment itself is completely gone. I have never seen anything like this in the 25 years that I’ve been researching the supernatural.”

  We were all duly impressed. Something had happened. I was glad that I hadn’t imagined the whole thing.

  Problem with being in my position was: I often saw and heard things that weren’t there and that nobody else could sense. Normally, I thought I was a crazy one, but today, thankfully, everyone was as crazy as me.

  “We’re going to place Dr. Anand’s equipment and my cameras in all the rooms now. Our plan is…”

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  “WAIT!” I said.

  Everyone turned to look at me. Lydia was giving me hard looks, like, who the hell did I think I was to interrupt her?

  “Considering that I was just attacked, perhaps we should slow down? Move in groups. Perhaps rushing this is a bad idea. Like James said, we still have the whole night.”

  An argument broke out about how to form the groups. Lydia, her cameraman, and Dr. Anand were obviously going to be in one group. They would be placing their equipment and scientific measurement machines in different rooms. James, the manager, offered to accompany them since he had the keys to all the rooms and, like he said, he was still legally responsible for our safety while we were guests in the hotel.

  Selena wanted to do a séance in the haunted dining room, which I thought was a really stupid idea, but I kept my mouth shut. Her sister was going to be with her, obviously, but no one else wanted to be there for the séance. I could guess most people were terrified of the idea, but only Hazel, the nice influencer, was brave enough to say so.

  “I think we should stick to at least three or four people in a group, never less than that. Hazel, Joey, that leads that leaves the two of you. What are your plans?”

  “Sorry guys,” said Hazel, “but this isn’t for me. After what happened to Royce. I’m not gonna risk it. I’m going to call it an early night. I’ll leave my cameras rolling in this room for anybody wants to watch, but I personally don’t want to be a part of this.”

  She was almost in tears. “Sorry everyone, but I thought this was just going to be fun and laughs. I didn’t realize there would be actual ghosts in the house. I never even believed them until tonight.”

  Selena reached forward and hugged her. “You okay, darling? No need to apologize. My sister doesn’t believe in the supernatural either. Although she is starting to believe tonight as well. You go into your room, darling, and you lock it from the inside.”

  Selena looked her in the eyes, dead straight, and repeated herself. “You lock yourself in, and you don’t trust anyone here, okay?”

  I wonder what she meant by: Don’t trust anyone here. Another thing to file for later.

  “Okay. Thanks for being so understanding.”

  It seemed she had a room on the ground floor. Everyone had rooms that they had been given access to before I had arrived. Hazel left a few minutes later.

  I turned to Joey, “You still haven’t told me your plans.”

  “I will go with Lydia and Anand. I need some of their footage as well. The TV channels are paying good money but they don’t want raw footage. They want me to edit it to make it short and catchy, and they also want me to do some commentary, TV news style. I know the sort of stuff these TV channels want. I’ll be spending most of a night writing the script and preparing what to say. I have my own cameras if Miss Lydia doesn’t want to share her footage with me.”

  “I am happy to share, just give a link to my channel at the bottom.”

  “Would be very glad to. So yeah, I’ll be staying with these two, and then I will be working here in the dining room on my laptop. We have a dozen cameras here, so I should be safe.”

  I wasn’t sure about that. “Okay, you come find me when you’re alone, Joey. Don’t stay alone if you don’t have to.”

  “He won’t be alone,” said Dr. Anand. “After we place the equipment, we’ll come back to this dining room. This is going to be our base of operations. Most of my equipment is controlled by my laptop; Lydia, I think, also controls her cameras remotely, so we will all sit here. There will be four of us, and we can watch each other’s back. The three of you look out for each other. Reminds me, Royce, make sure you take the keys to your room from James. The hotel has more than two dozen rooms, but only four or five were clean enough for us.”

  James appeared apologetic.

  “Unfortunately Royce, I didn’t have time to clean your room. It all happened so fast this afternoon. I had to rush to get our cook and then take her shopping because the hotel fridge was empty, seeing as the hotel has been empty for the last 25 years. I then had to clean this dining room and start cleaning the rooms, and I’m really sorry but I never got around to your room. I promise you before you go to sleep, I will have a clean and good enough room for you. If not, you can have mine.”

  “No problem.”

  Something told me we wouldn’t be getting much sleep tonight. Certainly not me.

  **

  The next hour or so passed really quickly. Before I knew it, it was almost nine.

  Lydia, Anand, and her cameraman had been really busy. With the help of James, they had placed their cameras and equipment in every single room. Even though I could hear James complaining that some of the rooms were too dirty to go in to, that didn’t stop them.

  The rooms were dusty though-- I could hear Anand coughing badly, and he had to take a hay fever medicine from Lydia.

  Selena sat quietly with me and her sister in the dining room. She was chanting something in what I believed was Nigerian.

  She finally opened her eyes and looked at me. “You have a question for me, Royce?”

  I did, but I didn’t know how to say it.

  “How did you know it was the dead who had attacked me? After all, it could have been anything.”

  She gave a short smile. “Who else could it be?”

  “I don’t know, aliens? Robbers? Or maybe I imagined the whole thing for attention, maybe I’m insane.”

  “Darling, there was a knife in your back.”

  “Yes, but it didn’t penetrate the skin. A crazy person could have jabbed himself with a knife.”

  She stared at me with a slightly condescending smile until I felt nervous.

  “You are acting like my sister. Why are you trying to ignore the evidence in front of your own eyes? It was the dead who attacked you. I know because I’ve been doing this for 25 years, like Dr. Anand. I know what the restless dead feel like; they’ve been screaming at me ever since I entered this hotel. Wait a minute, have you seen my TV show?”

  “I have.”

  “And what did you think of it?”

  “Ummm, it was nice.”

  She burst out laughing. “You think it was stupid, didn’t you? Go on, say it. You thought it was really stupid.”

  “Well, parts of it were.”

  “I know what parts you’re talking about, but I had no control over that. The producers decided that doing silly theatrics like moving the camera at an angle, using weird, coloured filters, and adding background noises would increase viewership; and it did, but it also made me look silly, and it was the reason my show got cancelled. I’m trying to fix that with my own show. None of that silliness. That’s why I brought my sister along. She may be a sceptic, but she’s grounded. Otherwise, we try to make the show as reasonable as we can.”

  “I see.”

  “The point I’m trying to make is that you saw my TV show and you thought I’m a fraud psychic who does silly things for TV; but that wasn’t me. This is me. I talk to the dead, the restless dead, the screaming dead, the angry dead, and I can sense them.

  I can sense that you have some sort of a connection with the hidden world, which is surprising because I thought I knew all the psychics in this country, at least the good ones. How come I’ve never heard of you?”

  “Ummm, I try to keep a low profile. Like you, I have been called crazy. After time, it gets tiring having to defend yourself all the time.”

  “It does. I understand where you’re coming from, but anyway, looks like our scientific friends are done. They’ve cleansed their fancy equipment and now coming back to this room. Looks like it’s time for a séance.”

  I got up and put a hand on her shoulders.

  “Selena, I trust that you are a genuine deal, I trust that you have actual psychic powers. But that worries me even more. Is doing a séance really a good idea? Will we be putting our heads in a hornet’s nest?”

  “Oh sweetie, but that is the whole idea. How else will Lydia get her 4 million views and I get my show off the ground? No, we are going to do a séance, and we are going to invite the ghost who attacked you to come and talk to me. You can stay here if you want.”

  “No. I am going with you.”

  I didn’t want to say it in case it came out as a boast, but Anand, Selena etc might have 25 years experience in the supernatural, but they were nothing more than dabblers. I had seen people ripped apart by things that came out of walls, I had fought shadows that cut your skin like a blade. I knew more about fighting the ghost world than all of them and their 4 million viewers combined.

  “I can protect you if it all goes wrong,” was all I said.

  “Good, then come on, we have some ghosts we need to chat to.”