As the Professor's assistant, it was my duty to perform whatever tasks he laid out for me. It was a simple enough arrangement, until he took me on my first investigation at a run-down house in South Entrance. The house at Grosvenor Lane showed me a brief glimpse of the world beyond, a world that exists with or without my blessing. But my investigations also revealed that the application of science to an ethereal plane is anything but straightforward.
The path of science is convoluted, as I discovered during the first Winter of my tenure with the Professor. There are people, upon whom we must rely, that would prefer to see our research into the paranormal abandoned. Politics and preconceptions are subtle barriers to the truth, more so than the elusive spirits we chase. The investigation at the Beaumaris House revealed to me a secret; the biggest threat to our scientific endeavours did not lie in old, creaky houses but in old, creaky minds.
Necessity forces us all to
make uncomfortable choices. The Professor, operating in such a
fringe discipline as Paranormology, bore a greater burden than
most. Every decision held the potential to bring his work, and the
budding field, into disrepute.
Our investigation at Hampton
Court taught me that there is more to ghost hunting than simply
recording and observing; a proper grasp of politics is just as
necessary as the ability to read a thermometer.
From the events this past
autumn, I am compelled to relate my perilous trial. The supposition
that darkness is merely the absence of light is both popular and
false, as those who practice the occult can
affirm.
In
the dark cellar of number thirteen Jolimont Street, a house the
Professor had assumed benign, I unwittingly brought forth an
ancient evil that first threatened our reputations, then our
souls.
Beyond the familiar and the safe lies the unknown, an infinite land of fear, doubt and confusion. An unforgiving town is no place to test wild emotions, yet that is exactly how I came to discover just how little I knew about my own thoughts and feelings. In Exeter, bustling and impersonal, my relationship with the Professor was strained under the weight of a malevolent entity and mysterious gypsy.
What we cannot see can, indeed, hurt us. Neither forgotten foes nor latent fears lose potency if ignored. A haunting, so perfectly reliable and unwavering, fed the Professor's obsession to his detriment. His health deteriorated. So did our relationship. During the darkest time of our investigations, from the most unexpected quarter, an old friend appears to leave her mark on our lives.
The out-of-doors haunting at Devon Cove presented its own unique problems, yet the cliff-tops, the wind and rain and lightning, and even the hostile townsfolk, all posed less of a problem than the conflict of the tormented ghost we hunted. Her anguish reminded us – the Professor, Milena, Felix and I – of the sobering reality that ghosts were once people.