SEVEN YEARS AGO

The track played silently on Helina's computer. She adjusted the volume, and turned her subwoofer so that it pointed directly at Liv, then sat back and closed her eyes.

After a few minutes, she spoke, using her psychologist voice. "How do you feel, Liv?"

On Helina's computer screen, a thin, neon green line moved up and down upon a grid—proof that they were being exposed to a frequency their eardrums couldn't quite detect. Liv imagined soundwaves slapping against her skin, sinking in, vibrating bones and sinews and organs. Her arms tickled like centipedes had been set loose on them.

"I feel like you should stop that track before it gives me a panic attack."

"See?" Helina said, pausing the track. "It works."

"I'm not a newbie, Helina. I've studied infrasound. It makes eyes vibrate and skin crawl."

"Did you know filmmakers have used it on movie soundtracks to up the creep factor?"

"Yep." Friday the 13th, The Birds, Paranormal Activity, to name a few. Eraserhead utilized sound just above that threshold. "Damned unsettling too."

"This track I played for you." Helina pointed to the frozen sound wave. "It's specifically 18.98 Hertz."

Liv knew where this was going. "I figured."

"You know what is speculated about that frequency in particular? The ghost frequency?"

"It's literally right in the name." Annoyed as she was that Helina was treating this conversation like it was a pop quiz, Liv played along. "Some people think that a spectral world can be accessed—heard or even viewed when they're exposed to the ghost frequency. It's an interesting theory."

"Do you think that theory can be proven?"

Liv turned onto her back, staring at the ceiling of the dorm she'd been sharing with Helina ever since Amanda secured a place at her sorority house. Helina was a much better roommate and possibly the best friend Liv had ever had, save for her sister. If she could make one tiny criticism, however, it would be that Helina latched onto impossible to prove ideas at the worst possible time. She'd never let go, no matter how many midterms they were supposed to study for, or how many clients they had lined up.

"People have tried. And many claimed to have had experiences linked to it. But all it gives me is anxiety, Helina. As for proving it..."

Helina scratched at a scab on the back of her hand. She'd scraped it against a rusty nail while working their last gig. Three stitches and a tetanus shot later and it had just about healed. "You've never really tried to prove it, though, have you?"

"It's not at the top of my to do list." Liv pulled her blanket over her as much for a sense of security as for warmth. Having Helina's damned infrasound reverberating into her brain made Liv want to curl into a ball and call it a day. "We've got a new client to meet in a half hour."

Helina sighed. "I love what we do, don't get me wrong. But it has its limits. Our equipment is subpar, most of the people who claim to have hauntings don't know a haunting from a draft, and we have yet to find real proof of anything. I'm beginning to think those shows with professional paranormal investigators are all faked."

"That's because they are all faked," Liv said, suppressing an eyeroll to avoid offending her friend. "If the spirit world was so easily accessible that any clown with an EMF meter could prove its existence, there wouldn't be a skeptic left on the planet."

"That's what I'm saying though." Helina reached into her duffle bag and pulled out their very own EMF meter. "We use one. It's not even an expensive model. Does that make us the clowns?"

"No, we approach our job from a scientific angle. We're researchers, not clueless television personalities." Having recently declared a major in data science, Liv saw no need to treat supernatural experiences differently from any other scientific inquiry. Many things, before humanity had figured them out, appeared mysterious and impossible. Ghosts and otherworldly realms were just waiting for someone like her or Helina to prove them to be fact rather than speculatory.

"A frequency is science, isn't it?"

"It is." Liv used to think 18.98 held promise. Maybe was even the key. "But no one's ever proved that the physical sensations the ghost frequency triggers are anything more than that."

Helina spun around in her chair, leaning forward in her typical space invader style. She placed a hand on her friend's shoulder. "Then why are you so afraid of it?"

Despite her desire to stay in bed, Liv threw off the covers. Helina rolled her chair back to her side of the room.

"We'd better get going," Liv said. "Can we talk about this later?"

#

Their newest client, the aunt of Liv's biology professor, lived half a mile from campus.

"She's a new age type," Dr. Bowman had said when he'd approached Liv about meeting his aunt. "She's convinced her home is haunted with the ghost of the man who used to own it before her. I grew up hearing stories about footsteps and wailing. Never experienced any of that myself. Although there was one time..."

When Liv had pressed him for details, Dr. Bowman had politely refused to elaborate. "I want you to go in without bias. Hear what you hear, see what you see. Mainly, I want you to put Auntie Pam's mind at ease."

Placating potential witnesses to hauntings wasn't Liv's goal, but she'd nodded anyways. She'd do her best.

Now, sitting next to Helina on Pam Bowman's purple settee, it struck Liv that Pam's mind had no need of being eased.

"Larry is a wonderful companion," Pam said to them. "It's not a traditional arrangement, but it works for us."

"And Larry is...?" Helina asked.

"My ghost, of course." Pam nodded towards the sitting room's entryway. "He's here now, if you'd like to introduce yourselves."

"That's..." Liv struggled for words. She made a mental note to ask whether Dr. Bowman might need to schedule his aunt a trip to the neurologist.

"Of course, we would, right Liv?" Helina's enthusiasm filled the room, pushing Liv's hesitancy into a corner.

Fine then. This was a job. They would either discover independent proof that Larry existed, or they wouldn't. Pam's mental state was irrelevant to their mission.

She turned towards the empty doorway, put on a smile, and gave the dead air a wave. "Hi, I'm Liv."

They spent the next fifteen minutes asking Pam about the hauntings. Larry, she told them, was one of three ghosts who dwelled in her home. The others were a young boy of six or seven and a teenaged girl. The girl cried from time to time. Pam believed she'd been in love when she died of an illness, sticking around to wallow in self-pity over the life she'd been cheated out on. The boy was responsible for a lot of ambient noise—floorboards creaking, hands clapping against walls. He also liked to hide objects from her. Pam's glasses, the cat's food bowl, books—all would turn up in places Pam was sure she hadn't left them.

"Uh-huh," Liv said, still trying to keep an open mind. "I see."

"Sometimes, I forget where I put my phone," Helina said.

"Oh, I do too." Pam nodded. "But these are instances of a haunting, not an old lady's fading memory. It's the sort of thing Jeremy does. He gets bored, you see."

"Jeremy?" Liv wrote the name into her notebook. "He's the boy ghost."

"I don't know his real name. That's just what I call him."

"And Larry?" Helina asked. "Is that also a name you gave to the adult ghost?"

"No, that's the name that was in the papers. By that I mean the sale papers when I purchased the home—Estate of Larry Crosio, as well as the newspapers."

"Newspapers?"

"Larry was murdered." Pam opened a small file box she'd placed on the coffee table and the three of them peered into it. She brought out a weathered old newspaper with a date of April 11th, 1982 printed at the top.

"Man strangled at Maple Lane home," Helina read aloud. "Suspect at large."

Taking out her phone, she opened the camera app and took several pictures of the article to refer to later.

"It was right here in that doorway." Pam pointed again to the spot where she'd claimed Larry had been lurking. "That's where he died."

After the interview, Helina took some measurements with their EMF meter, focusing on a few key spots in the house that Pam claimed were most active—the doorway, the guest bedroom, the hallway next to the linen closet. Back in the sitting room, she jotted down several numbers while Liv stood in the doorway, wondering if Larry would make any indication that he existed. Nothing jumped out at her as unusual, only a slight vibration from a furnace working overtime in the basement directly below them.

"We'll come back," she said, pressing one of their business cards into Pam's hand. "I'll be in touch as soon as midterms are over. Until then, you've got our number and email."

Outside, the two friends parted ways, Helina to spend the evening with her boyfriend in his off-campus flat, and Liv to return to her dorm. An hour spent studying for a sociology exam, another hour inputting her notes from Pam's house into her laptop and examining the EMF data.

Jump in energy 6:52 PM, upstairs hallway, no other activity reported.

Worth a follow up investigation from between the hours of 10 pm and 1 am, the timeframe the client believes the supernatural presence is most profound.

Staring into space, Liv went over the parts of todays client meeting that she hadn't written down. The negative space in the doorway. She had stood there and felt for a presence. Something physical. Real sensations. Nothing had stood out besides the vibrations coming from the basement. A matter of mechanics, not proof of the paranormal, just like the beat of Helina's subwoofer.

"Why are you so afraid of it?" Helina's words ate at her.

She wasn't afraid, and that was something easy to prove it.

Liv tapped the play button, volume up. She ignored the needling in her mind that this was foolishness on multiple levels.

At first, there was nothing. She lay back in her bed and thought about furnaces chugging away in moldy basements, ghost children stealing prescription eyewear, her logic professor's ironically confusing syllabus, and an ominous cloud forming over her bed.

In her mind, Liv sprung up, ran out of her room and sought the comfort of other students as assurance that she had only dreamed this dark, suffocating cloud.

In reality, her fingers gripped her mattress, sweat bleeding into the bedsheets. She thought about screaming but there was no point. The cloud would absorb the sound. If she moved, it would manifest into a solid being, hold out its arms, bar her way, It would breathe poison into her lungs and when Helina returned to their room, she would find only the shell of Liv, her body dried out and arranged like a cornhusk doll.

The room shook—an earthquake only Liv could feel. She shut her eyes but the shaking grew worse, like she'd been put into a clothes dryer and set to tumble.

This is what it's like for us. The thought came from nowhere; it belonged to no one.

This is what it's like, it repeated. Keep going.

It was then that she remembered the ghost frequency playing on an endless loop. For how long? Minutes? Hours?

It took every bit of her willpower to reach beyond her bed to the table where the computer sat. She held her breath as she moved.

We don't want you to, the voice spoke, and this made Liv defiant.

"I want to," she answered, pressing the off button.

Liv's own private earthquake ended. The cloud dissipated.

It was never here. This never happened—these thoughts belonged to Liv. Her ownership of them comforted her. Whatever she thought had just happened would be no more than a vivid nightmare, come morning.

That was the first lie of several she chose to live with.