The Ghost Haunter by Martin Roy Hill
This story originally appeared in Alien Dimensions #13
Okay, first, I’ll do an establishing shot, I tell myself. An exterior shot of the ship showing the crumpled landing gear, the shattered windows of the bridge compartment. Oh, and the engine, too. What the hell could have done that?
“This is the SS New Tokyo Maru,” I say, beginning my intro. “For twenty years she plied the interplanetary trade routes, hauling cargo and passengers from Earth to the moon, to the Mars colony and beyond. Two years ago, after making her last port call at the Titan colony, she simply disappeared. No distress call received; no debris found. Then five months ago, a survey party searching for new mineral deposits in a remote, mountainous region of Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede, found the wreckage of the New Tokyo Maru, her cargo hold empty and no sign of her crew.”
Okay, now I’ll zoom in to show the open hatch and darkened passageway.
“Ever since,” I continue, “every person who has set foot on the Maru—crash investigators to salvage parties—have reported eerie happenings, everything from strange noises to spectral manifestations of former crew members. My name is Ron Archer and I’m a paranormal investigator. I’ve hunted ghosts on every colonized planet and moon in the system. Tonight, I’m doing something different. I’m leaving my investigation team—Gerard, Julie, and Tim—behind on our own ship, the Spectral Searcher, while I do something no one has ever done—explore the New Tokyo Maru by myself. Only me and whatever—or whoever—still walks the decks of this mysterious derelict.”
That’s laying it on a little thick, Archer, I tell myself. Whatever. As I told my team when they tried to stop me from investigating the Maru alone, we need to boost our ratings. There are too many paranormal shows airing in the system these days. We have to do something big to grab the viewers, or we’ll all end up doing some local cable show on some backwater lunar colony.
I step into the dark shadow of the hatch, relying on my quad-vid recorder and its four cameras—normal light, night vision, infrared, and full spectrum—to show me where to step. The sensitive microphone attached to my pressure suit picks up the sound of my boots on the steel deck plates. In Ganymede’s atmosphere, the steps sound muffled and distant. Even so, the confused flashing of my sound direction indicator lights show my footfalls are echoing off the metal walls of the passageway. I stop for a moment and let the lights settle. That’s going to make things more difficult, I tell myself.
I move forward again, find the main passageway to the bridge, and turn in that direction. The bridge should be sixteen meters ahead, according to the ship schematics I studied, just past an intersecting passageway leading to the sickbay and galley. “This is the main passageway fore and aft,” I say, starting my narration. Then I see it. In the night vision section of my split screen, I watch a shadow dart from my right to my left. It’s there in the infrared and full-spectrum sections, too. The microphone’s directional lights flash this way and that way. For a moment, I’m frozen in place. Then I shake myself loose, and race forward and aim the cameras down the passageway.
Nothing. The night vision and full-spectrum screens show only the crumpled bulkheads, the infrared only cold metal.
“This is incredible,” I say. “I’m only a few feet into this mysterious derelict and we’ve already captured our first apparition—a shadowy figure darting from one side of a hallway to another. Remarkable! What other spectral events can we expect to see?”
I keep heading toward the bridge, the control center of the cargo ship. There I find a compartment gutted by salvagers, the control panels now pocked with empty holes where the electronics once blinked. The quad-vid shows no anomalies. I take out the electro-magnetic frequency detector and run it over the panels. Nothing, just what I would expect. “There is no electricity in the ship,” I explain for those who will watch the show, “so there should be no electro-magnetic fields—or EMF—to record. But spirits are believed to give off EMF, so if this little baby goes off, we’ve caught a ghost.” I place the EMF detector on a control panel.
I set the quad-vid so it focuses on as much of the bridge as I can get with the wide-angle, then sit in what I guess is the captain’s chair, pulling the EVP recorder from my leg pocket.
“This is my electronic voice phenomenon scanner,” I say for the benefit of my viewers. “Unlike the mike attached to my suit, this recorder picks up sounds—voices—not only at frequencies we hear, but also those below and above the range of human hearing. You know how cats seem to hear things you can’t? Well, this little baby can pick up what they hear, records it, and sends it to a receiver so I can hear it in my headset in real time.”
I put the EVP scanner on the console next to the EMF detector, sit back in the captain’s chair, and start my session.
“My name is Ron, and I’m here to talk to the spirits who still inhabit this ship.” I pause to listen to the EVP receiver for any response. Nothing. “Can you tell me what happened to this ship and its crew?”
I sit quietly for a while, letting the derelict and its spirits choose their own moment for making contact. Outside the bridge windows, Ganymede’s landscape is gray and dusty. A small sand storm is starting to blow this way.
My thoughts go where they always do when I sit alone during an investigation. What would it be like to be a ghost, I wonder, walking some long-forgotten derelict, repeating over and over some mundane action you took during your life? Do they even realize they’re dead? Do they know what they’re doing? Do they get lonely? Is this what people call the afterlife? Is it heaven . . . or hell? I force the thoughts from my head, because the possible answers scare me more than anything else does.
The EMF meter begins lighting up, its digit screen showing electro-magnetic jumps. “Look at this,” I say for the viewers, grab the quad-vid, and focus it on the read-out. “There is no electricity in this wreck. Salvagers have scavenged everything electronic. There is no reason for—”
The sound of scraping metal fills my headset. The sound detector points to the right and I turn in time to see the hatch door swinging close. I rush to the door and open it. It’s too heavy to be moved by Ganymede’s weak wind. I point the quad-vid down the passageway. There is motion on the monitor, a shadowy figure moving across the intersection of the two passageways, exactly where I saw it earlier. The EVP recorder screeches something in my ears that turns my spine to ice.
“Fol-low.”
Grabbing the rest of my gear, I rush from the bridge into the passageway, and take the turn to port. There’s nothing on my vid screens except cold, dead metal. At the end of the hall there’s a ladder leading to the next deck below. As I approach, the full spectrum camera picks up a dull, blue glow emanating from the next deck.
“Incredible,” I say for the benefit of the viewers. “Can you see this? Can . . . you . . . believe . . . this!”
I close on the ladder and abruptly stop. Someone’s talking. I turn the quad-vid toward me, at arm’s length, and tap the side of my helmet.
“I can’t make out the words,” I say aloud, “but I definitely hear several people talking. And the sound director points forward, toward the ladder.”
Three quick steps bring me to the ladder, and the talking fades. The blue glow dissipates as I descend the ladder. It leads me to a tight kitchen. In the middle is a small table and benches, bolted to the floor plate. Empty shelves and spaces that once held cooking and refrigeration equipment stare back at me. Otherwise, the kitchen is empty.
“This was the ship’s galley,” I say, “where the crew would spend its off time eating, drinking, maybe playing card games. Could those voices be the dead crewmen who once flew this ship from one interplanetary port to the next?”
I make a slow scan of the galley with the quad-vid. In my mind’s eye, I imagine the dead crew walking aimlessly through hatchways, along empty passageways, down ladders leading nowhere in particular. My spine grows cold with the thought. My stomach lurches. What kind of fate would that be?
“Yours.”
The word, picked up by the EVP scanner, bursts into my headset, jolting me out of my morbid thoughts. The EMF meter flashes, its digital numbers ticking higher and higher.
“Yours?” I say aloud.
“Here,” comes the answer.
Then another voice: “Fool.”
“Fool? Are you calling me a fool? Why?”
“Still . . . doesn’t . . . know.”
“Know what?” I ask. “Know what happened to this ship and the crew—to you? No, I don’t. No one does. Tell me!”
Silence. Then the EMF meter flashes again and a voice says, “Leave . . . him.”
A loud bang rings in my headset. I’m facing aft, and I see the galley’s aft hatch swing open as if recoiling after being slammed shut. The lights of the EMF meter go dark.
I dash across the galley and pull the door open.
“This door is heavy even in the reduced gravity of Ganymede,” I say for the viewers. “Yet it slammed shut on its own. Or did it?”
My words are simply masking the fear eating my insides. I have never felt this kind of . . . dread. I want to leave this wreck, return to the Spectral Searcher, and just fly away. But something tells me I can’t. I have to stay, I tell myself, pushing the fear away. We need to boost our ratings.
So, I keep moving, stepping through the hatch into the passageway. Deep inside the bowels of the wreck where the weak sunlight and the glow from Jupiter doesn’t seep, it is much darker. Without the slimmest natural light, the night vision screen goes dark. I switch on the infrared projector and the screen blossoms back to life, showing a long corridor with doorways on either side. I tell myself I know this is the crew quarters from viewing the ship schematics, but it is so familiar, like I’ve been here before. I wave the EMF detector, but it registers nothing.
Keep moving, I tell myself. Stop thinking and observe. I’ve got a show to produce. At the end of the passageway, another ladder way leads down to the next deck. As I get closer, my quad-vid picks up another bluish glow. As I stare at the screen, my insides turn cold again. The EMF detector starts flashing again. I can’t move. Nonsense, I tell myself. Nevertheless, I nervously clear my throat before I can speak again.
“Look at that,” I say, again for the viewers. “Again, a mysterious blue glow seems to beckon me into another compartment. Where are they—these spirits of a dead crew—leading me to?”
But I do know where I’m going. The cargo bay. I tell myself I know this because of the ship schematics I spent hours poring over, but . . . now I’m not sure. My breathing is so heavy it’s all I can hear in my helmet. I near the ladder and my equipment picks up voices— indistinguishable words—coming from the cargo bay. The glow dissipates, becoming paler and lighter as I reach the ladder, but the voices become stronger. Some are angry, some fearful. One stands out, commanding. I step onto the first rung, and the voices stop. The EMF detector stops flashing.
I start to say something for the viewers, but my boot misses the rung and the next thing I know I’m falling. I twist in mid-air and land on my back, feeling a hard crack. With the wind knocked out of me, I lie there staring at the quad-vid screen. In the infrared view, I see the figure of a man looking down at me.
The EVP recorder screeches and a voice asks, “Remembering?”
The figure dissolves, and I get to my feet slowly. It seems to take great effort, even in the low gravity. My breathing is hard as I steady myself and pan the quad-vid around the cargo bay. The loading hatch is open, and a pale light leaks in, casting deep shadows inside the bay. Against the bulkheads stand empty lockers that once held the space suits used by the crew. “These empty lockers indicate . . . the final fate of the New Tokyo Maru’s crew,” I say, having to catch my breath between words. “The crash investigators say . . . the crew must have perished . . . after trying to hike to safety . . . after the crash landing. It was a last desperate attempt . . . attempt at survival. And it failed. Their bodies . . . never found. Buried, mostly likely . . . by a lunar sand storm.”
The EVP and the EMF both light up, and a very distinct voice comes through my head set.
“Think . . . about . . . it.”
“Think about it?” I ask. “Think about . . . what?
Then another voice.
“Fool . . .”
I venture deeper into the hold, my hands shaking so hard I can’t get a steady picture as I pan the quad-vid. All I see on the four screens are the three bulkheads of the empty hold and discarded dunnage. The fourth bulkhead is the open loading hatch.
“Through this . . . open loading hatch,” I say for the viewers, “crash investigators . . . believe the crew . . . left for their fatal walk . . . into oblivion.” It’s getting harder to talk now, harder to breathe. “The investigation . . . never determined . . . what happened to . . . the New Tokyo . . . Maru’s cargo. How did it disap—”
I can’t complete the sentence. My head is foggy, my thoughts slowing to crawl. I look at the oxygen gauge on my wrist and realize the problem. The fall from the ladder damaged my life support pack and I am losing air. Just like the crew of the New Tokyo Maru, I am slowly suffocating.
“Accept . . . it.”
The EMF and EVP detectors are flashing again, but the voice seems in my head, not coming from the EVP headset.
“Accept?” I say. “No. . . I . . .”
“Accept . . . it!”
Another voice, stronger, commanding. It rings through my head as if the speaker were standing next to me shouting. I turn, first one way, then the other. Then, I see them, not with the night vision, the infrared, or the full-spectrum cameras, but with my own eyes. Five men in unkempt merchant fleet uniforms, their faces pale and drawn. The collar of the one closest to me bears the insignia of the ship’s captain. It’s his voice shattering the fog in my brain.
“Just accept it and stop this crap!”
I stagger back, feeling for the ladder behind me. The dead crew draws closer, encircling me. One shakes his head before speaking in a gentler, softer voice.
“Stop running,” he says. “You can’t get away from it. None of us can.”
“Get . . . get away . . . from what?” I say.
He spreads his arms, palms up, an encompassing gesture that seems to include me.
“This,” he says. “Where we are. What we are.”
“What you are!” says the captain. “Accept it.”
I stare back at them. My mouth moves but nothing comes out. The quiet one steps closer and reaches for me but I jump back. My legs slip out from under me, and I tumble backwards. I grab the handrail of the ladder, pull myself up, and clamber up the rungs. As I reach the galley deck, I catch one final word. It too is muffled, indistinct. Yet I can still detect the sadness and resignation in the voice.
“Again . . .”
I run across the galley as fast as I can in my bulky suit, and climb the ladder to the main deck. I don’t care anymore about viewers, ghosts, or anything except getting the hell out of this god-forsaken wreck. My breaths come hard, like sucking air through a straw, and my heart hurts as it pounds in my chest.
I reach the main deck and move along the passageway toward the intersection that leads to the bridge and the main hatch. I turn right at the corner and head toward the entry hatch. The headset crackles with a woman’s voice. “Oh, my God,” it says.
I turn and behind me outside the bridge hatch, I see three more apparitions, now in spacesuits, looking at me, pointing cameras at me. I don’t understand. They are not the same spirits that confronted me in the cargo hold. And . . . they know my name.
“Ron!” A man’s voice now.
In their clumsy suits, they wave to me, beckoning me to come closer.
“Ron, it’s us,” the woman says in a familiar voice. “Us! You know us!”
“No!” I scream, and turn toward the main hatch and stumble as fast as I can to the opening. I have to get out of here, back to the Spectral Searcher and safety. I reach the hatch . . . and can go no further. My legs crumple and I collapse against the bulkhead. Fog covers my vision and my thoughts thicken and refuse to come. The last thing I see is the Spectral Searcher in the distance, too far, unreachable. The ship disappears behind the fog and darkness overcomes me.
#
The airlock hisses open and the three paranormal investigators step back into the Spectral Searcher.
“That was incredible,” Tim says.
“That . . . was Ron,” Julie adds, still dismayed.
“Damn right it was Ron,” says Gerard. “A full body apparition. Please tell me you caught him on vid?”
“Damn right I did,” says Tim. He holds up the screen from his quad-vid so Gerard and Julie can see. On the night vision, infrared, and full spectrum screens is a clear full-body image of a man in the same bulky spacesuit worn by the Spectral Searcher crew. The specter turns and fades as it moves down the passageway toward the main hatch.
“Damn,” says Gerard as he rushes to a console, snaps on a vid cam and begins recording an intro for their next show.
“It’s been two years since famed interplanetary paranormal investigator Ron Archer died in the wreck of the SS New Tokyo Maru,” he says, “investigating alone the notorious wreck many believe to be the most actively haunted derelict in the star system. Today, we, the surviving members of the Spectral Searcher team, came here to continue Ron’s search for the truth about the New Tokyo Maru.
“And here, in this infamous derelict, we learned that among the many souls who still walk the decks of the Maru is the spirit of our old friend and colleague, Ron. Without a doubt, we were able to record Ron’s full figure apparition on our quad-vid corder, in night vision, infrared, and full spectrum, as seen here.”
Gerard stops and cues up the video of his dead boss before continuing.
“In death, Ron has done what he couldn’t do in life—prove without a doubt that ghosts do, indeed, exist.”
The team members watch the video in silence. When it ends, only Julie speaks.
“What do you think it’s like for him?” she wonders in a hushed voice. “Being a spirit, I mean. Walking that wreck—maybe forever. Do you think Ron even knows he’s a ghost?”
#
. . . Okay, first, I’ll do an establishing shot, I tell myself. An exterior shot of the ship showing the crumpled landing gear, the shattered windows of the bridge compartment. Oh, and the engine, too. What the hell could have done that? . . .