Silver Soul

Thanks to Doodlenood for his character Oliver Sterling.

I didn’t know what I was in for. I really didn’t.

I had come up with a novel method of visualizing especially small electromagnetic perturbations. A headset that lets you see when and where the EM field is different from the background. If you need it to, it can even use sound to let you keep track of a second band of frequencies. The Broad-Frequency Augmented Reality Meter. BF-ARM.

I had every intent to sell it as an industrial tool, there are a dozen industries in which something like that would be really useful. I just couldn’t get anyone to give it a chance.

All I had was a website, some cold calls, some demonstration videos. But they didn’t do me much good. I was willing to take any opportunity to get the thing over. And that opportunity landed, even if it wasn’t one I was expecting. Some bullshit ghost hunting show was after a new gadget to make spurious claims about.

Now, we all knew it wasn’t going to give them any actual evidence of ghosts. But they were willing to give me time to explain the BF-ARM in every episode. And present it as an established product that was already in common use. One that they were simply repurposing. That sounds like a win to me. Even if there wasn’t much chance that the people who’d buy it were the same ones watching that garbage. A foot in the door’s a foot in the door. And hey, it was fun to try and twist every little burst of noise or interference from the recording equipment or film crew as potential evidence of ghosts, without really saying it.

That changed when we were about to start filming at the Sterling House.

It was once a vacation home in the Green Mountains of Vermont, belonging to Conrad Haephestus Sterling. A canine who made his fortune in the field of specialized medical devices and treatments for anthromorph patients at the turn of the century. Though he never rose to the status of his human contemporaries, he was definitely one of, if not the wealthiest anthros of the time.

But for all that money, and for his remarkable brilliance in medical matters, he couldn’t save his eldest son, Oliver.

Oliver had passed in that very house, after wasting away to what we now refer to as Sterling Congenital Deficiency. A genetic condition which afflicts the muscle tissue of certain canines. It lies dormant for most of the patient’s life until around the age of 20. Then the body begins losing the ability to produce a crucial enzyme for muscle function. If it goes untreated, the sufferer’s whole body atrophies. They grow weaker and weaker, and eventually, even the heart simply loses the strength to pump enough blood.

In Oliver’s case, he went from being a perfectly healthy young man, poised to follow in his father’s footsteps, to a sickly, bedridden mess in just four months, to being dead in five. To this day, he holds the record for the fastest the condition has ever progressed. It typically takes two to three years.

Some allege that this was the product of desperate, unfounded treatments devised by Conrad. But it’s generally accepted that poor Oliver was simply unlucky.

Whatever the case, Conrad was so deeply aggrieved that he simply refused to accept that he had lost his son. He would speak about Oliver as if he were going to return someday, and even included provisions in his will to ensure Oliver would be provided for when he did, as well as pulling some strings to keep Oliver from being declared legally dead.
For the rest of his life, Conrad Sterling would devote all the time and money he could to developing a treatment for SCD.

Those efforts continued after Conrad himself had passed in 1968, and by 1975, his company, Sterling Medical had developed a drug that cured the disease entirely. Too little, too late.

In that time, the Sterling House was closed off. According to legend, Conrad would return, cloister himself away and speak to no one for hours upon hours, as if Oliver were still there.

Since Conrad’s passing, the house had been put into the hands of Sterling Medical’s charitable foundation, it’s been operated intermittently as a health retreat for the wealthy, then a museum honoring the accomplishments of anthro scientists, before finally becoming a tourist attraction, restored to its original state, which is where the film crew and I come in. Conrad’s occasional trips in memory of his son had long inspired rumors that Oliver’s ghost still haunted the house.

There were eight or so production staff, who rotated in and out so frequently, I never bothered getting to know them, they were hanging back, running the operation from outside the house. The foundation didn’t want all that equipment being lugged around and adjusted, potentially scratching the floors and bumping decorations.

As far as the audience would be concerned, the team consisted of five of us. Two were camera operators, First, a fat-ass human named Tom, who’d take any excuse to be moved to a different project, even if it was filming paint drying. He didn’t care much for the premise, and was never quite comfortable with the sheer dishonesty of the program.

Tom’s counterpart was a wiry gray tabby cat, Adam. He also didn’t want to be there, for a totally different reason. He was superstitious and extremely savvy to horror movie tropes. He was always quick to remind us he’d be the first one out of the door if we ever found real ghosts.

In front of those cameras were the hosts. Twin brothers, Dalton and Darren. Foxes, of course. But they certainly didn’t fit the stereotype. These weren’t androgynous men at all. The both of them were exceptionally fit, having gotten their start in modelling and advertising, their ultimate intent being to pivot to selling supplements and ‘self help’ literature, and who knows what else within that sphere. They viewed the ghost hunting thing as a way to build an audience.

There was just one problem. They were unfortunate enough to have been born with patterns on their heads that very strongly resembled a balding human. Sometimes they’d color the white fur to match the orange, but most of the time, they’d just cover it up. Even going so far as to have custom baseball caps with cutouts for their ears in what should have been the front, just so they could wear them backwards. Only backwards.

And then, there was myself. Ryan McInnes. Human. 26. Master’s degree in Electronics Engineering. Nagged by regret that marketing skills took no place in that process. Reduced to playing the ‘Egon’ in this group of opportunistic misfits.

As usual, as soon as we were on the grounds of the Sterling House, Adam couldn’t help but reiterate “Man, if this one’s real. I’m fuckin’ outta here, man. I’m not here to get skewered poking around at some funny noise. I don’t get paid enough. You fuckers can deal with that.”

I tried to get him to give it a rest for once. “Come on. Even if there was a ghost here. We’d have no reason to believe it’d hurt us. People have been coming and going from this place for decades, and it’s not like it’s some abandoned shack, either. It’s still being managed by the same people as ever. If something was in the mood to be killing people, aside from this whole charade being redundant, we’d never be allowed to film here.”

If there was one thing Tom did enjoy about working with the crew, it was needling Adam, in this case, at my expense. “What if we’re the first ones to piss it off, smartass? What if he don’t like your fancy-pants headset?”

For a moment, I was worried that point would be enough to leave us with just one camera for this episode, but Adam had never actually made good on his promise to bail before, for a while, that appeared to hold true. It wouldn’t last, and he’d be the one who spooked the rest of the crew away, leaving me at the house on my own, but that comes later.

The twins knew better than to throw in with the squabbles the rest of us could have. To their credit, Dalton and Darren were all business. They only played insufferable assholes on TV,

The Sterling House wasn’t some grand manor, but by no means was it small, either. It was situated on a sizable plot of otherwise untouched natural land, nestled among low hills and ancient, weathered mountains. Despite having only two accessible levels, the wide gables and high peaked roof pushed the boundaries of what construction methods were capable of at the time.

Darren took the crew aside in the main hall to explain the floor plan to us, and what our itinerary would look like for this shoot. “Alright. Two floors. Four big ones down here on the bottom, Main hall, You are here. Establishing shots, lead-in, first chills.”

There was a narrow staircase off to one side, in addition to the large main staircase that led up to the second floor. Darren didn’t pay it any mind, and I had to know why. “What about Conrad’s walled-off old lab? Shouldn’t we play that up for Frankenstein points?”

“Nope.” Darren regretfully informs us. “Foundation doesn’t want us to draw attention to it. Thanks for reminding me, actually. We gotta keep that staircase outta frame. They got a bug up their asses about anything that makes ol’ Conrad look bad. Apparently it’s fulla mercury and shit down there, and they don’t want anyone trying to get in.”

That was news to Dalton, somehow. “Ah, fuck. First we can’t even entertain the theory that the old man put the kid outta his misery, then we can’t even dick around with the real hook? Why are we even here?”

“It’s an old creepy house in the middle of nowhere and a tragic story.” Darren wasn’t having the negativity. For being twins, they were almost never on the same wavelength. “It was either this, or another dirty old bar someone’s trying to turn into a tourist trap. We still have plenty to work with.”

That issue addressed, Darren continued with the gameplan. “On the left here, big dining room, huge kitchen behind it. Stills, B-roll. We’re not spending much time on either.

“Other side. We got a cozy little den. Fireplace, stocked bookshelves, fancy furniture. There’s a small personal library attached to the back of it, and an oversized patio that used to pull double duty, Mr. Sterling had a bunch of medicinal plants growing out there, and it’s also where he’d plop the boy to get his ‘prescribed’ sunlight and fresh air.”

“Let me guess.” Tom preempted the assignment. “I’ll be the one babysitting the IR and thermal cameras out there in the cold, while you assholes LARP in here, in the nice, bright, warm house. Sure. Fine by me.”

He wasn’t kidding. Tom detested the theatrics and technobabble that much. Getting to sit around, freezing his ass off looking for flickers, dust particles and camera noise was worth it in his mind to not have to listen to the rest of us pretending to be on edge.

Dalton didn’t let him rethink the decision. “Hey, you volunteered. No taking it back. Don’t bitch about it later.”

Satisfied with the delegation of duties, Darren continued the gameplan once again, but with an utterly exhausted look that made it clear he wasn’t in the mood for any further interruptions. “Upstairs, left to right again. Master Bedroom, they added a bathroom to it, all the way back in the health retreat days. Before that, this place was a lot more rustic. Almost all the electrical fixtures were later retrofits, too. Oh, and there’s a guest room directly across from it”

“In the middle, there’s a viewing room, with a huge window that looks out through the forest. Conrad did most of his personal writing there. I guess it was to help him keep track of time more than anything else. I get the feeling he knew he’d coop himself up downstairs if he didn’t do it that way.”

“Then, there’s the important one. The room Oliver actually died in. They haven’t let anyone other than the staff in there in decades. We’re getting special treatment, so don’t fuck it up.”

We all understood our assignments and went our separate ways.
Tom had the easiest part in the shoot. Most locations we filmed, he’d be lugging the IR and thermal equipment around, but since we’d have plenty of light for once, he didn’t have much to do but get everything calibrated and wait for the sun to start setting, which wouldn’t be too long.

Adam, on the other hand, was under time pressure. We needed daylight shots of the viewing room, Then after that, the guest room, dining room and kitchen. All that effort for filler. Then again, in this case, none of it was going to see the light of day anyway. ‘Prime Material’ or otherwise.

Darren remained in the entrance hall, rehearsing the introduction he’d be giving, pacing back and forth at different speeds, making tweaks to his delivery so small I couldn’t tell the difference.

Dalton wandered around the house with a microphone trying to find interesting and spooky sounds in the floorboards, doors and walls to foley together, before retiring to a quiet corner to mumble and wheeze out sounds into a cheap voice recorder to be passed off as ‘EVPs,’ Electronic Voice Phenomena. Total nonsense, but you couldn’t have a show like ours without them.

As for me, I had to find some especially interesting keys to jangle with the BF-ARM. I knew there’d be something to see with it. This was an old building, with functional wiring that was only slightly newer. There were extremely EM sources everywhere. In fact, I expected the challenge to be finding settings that didn’t make the trick embarrassingly obvious.

For a while, that’s exactly what I was faced with. Bright, flashing streaks up and down the walls, filtering out everything at multiples of 60 Hertz took care of that.

Then, it was just a matter of hoping the cacophony of commercial and amateur radio signals and background noise were being twisted by interference and various metallic objects into shapes that Darren and Dalton could pretend were humanoid figures.

To that end, I began exploring the house, starting with the den. A room characterized by accents of dark wood and subtly striped mauve wallpaper, which had no doubt been darkened some time ago by the emissions of the large fireplace recessed into the far wall, That fireplace was surrounded by a sparse half circle of chairs with velvet upholstery.
It was a very nice arrangement, if not a little fixated on the Sterlings’ themselves. The walls were almost exclusively adorned with painted portraits and primitive photographs of Conrad and his wife, and strangely, nothing of their second, third or fourth sons. And nothing of Oliver, save a single portrait above the fireplace.

I knew it had to have been one of the last contemporary images of Oliver, as he appeared to be withered, exhausted and altogether miserable in it. I had even considered that it might have been painted posthumously, his body propped up as a reference for the artist. But that didn’t seem to be in keeping with the profound level of denial that made the Sterlings’ story so compelling. Would Conrad have kept a permanent reminder of his son’s mortality on display here? If that were the case, why would he go to all that effort to prevent Oliver from being declared dead?

Whatever the case, that painting weighed on me. Made Oliver more real to me than he had been up to that point.

In that moment, he wasn’t just a tragic story anymore. He was a promising young man who had his life ripped away from him.

Gray fur, almost white. Ears that gently flopped forward, curling over themselves. Hair that was maybe only a shade or two darker than his body, brushed back into a peak that divided his head evenly, left longer in the back, tied up and tucked away discreetly behind him.
His snout met his face at a nearly 90 degree angle, eyes sunken with prominent dark circles below them. They were almost glazed over, staring at nothing in particular. Capped off with a subtle, tragic frown, It read as a serious effort to remain stoic, one that was nevertheless foiled by the magnitude of his quiet suffering.

I had also noticed, curiously, he was wearing a fairly heavy wool coat, with a ruffled white silk shirt just peeking out of it. That coat was noticeably too large on him. And even if it weren’t, it seemed like an unusual thing to be wearing while having his portrait painted. He wouldn’t have been outside.
It occurred to me that both of those observations could imply that Oliver had contracted some sort of illness on top of the final stages of SCD. He might have been experiencing an intense fever, and have lost a significant amount of weight in a short time, which would serve to explain his rapid deterioration without invoking foul play or rumors of a mercy killing.

I couldn’t help but feel like it was appropriate to speak to the portrait as Oliver’s father had allegedly made a habit of doing. “I’m sorry we’re making a spectacle of your pain, Oliver. I know you’re not here to see it, but you weren’t just some urban legend. You were here. The least I can do is make sure we’re telling people the truth.”

I knew that was foolish, but getting to feel a connection to a place and the people who inhabited it was something I hadn’t experienced the whole time I was working with the crew.

But, to be honest, it wasn’t totally selfless. There was a chance that I could’ve gotten on the Sterling Foundation’s good side by being the one to flip the narrative. And if I was on the Foundation’s good side, I’d be on the good side of Sterling Medical proper, too. And that would have meant I’d finally get the time of day to actually sell the BF-ARM to someone.

I moved on to inspect the patio. If nothing else, Tom’s equipment would give us interesting returns, and they’d be in one of the ‘Hero’ locations, which would be another plus.

Tom hadn’t quite finished setting up, and he wasn’t in any hurry, either, distracted by something or other on his phone. But not so distracted he’d miss the opportunity to give me a hard time.

“You find a real ghost with that thing yet, Einstein? It’d be nice if I could coast on the fifteen minutes of fame I’d get by association.”

“Nope, just some grandfathered in construction practices.” I replied.

At the same time, I glanced out over the lawn, towards the production van parked out front. “But it looks like there’s something promising over there!”

There was a mostly stationary and unusually clear oblong blob positioned almost exactly halfway between us and the van. “Nah, I’m just kidding. It’s probably just a hotspot from the van…”

“Or some radiation leaking from Conrad’s lab.” I joked.

“Radiation?” Tom didn’t catch on. He yanked the headset off of me and took a look at it himself. “Man, there’s nothin’ there. You’re just fuckin’ with me. Get the Hell outta here.”

I took the headset back, and sure enough, that blob was gone. Since it seemed to bother him, I had to set the record straight. “Well, there was really something there, but the radiation leak was a joke too. Ionizing particles are just about the only things I can’t see.”

As I went back inside, Tom muttered “I’m gonna end up with cancer for a damn TV show one of these days. Fuck.”

If I hadn’t planted that idea in his head, he might have stuck around with me after the others bailed. I might have regretted it if he hadn’t joined them.

A quick cursory search of the dining room and kitchen turned up nothing, as expected, but I did mention what I had seen on the patio to Adam, who was still dutifully panning over decorations on the walls at various angles and speeds.

“I think we’ve finally got a winner with this one.”

Adam’s ears perked up and he stopped what he was doing. “What? Like a real ghost? I-I ain’t falling for that.”

He was especially jumpy on this shoot, maybe he did feel something different. I tried to calm him down. “No, just a hotspot out on the lawn, but it was pretty clear. That’s going to be good footage, if it comes back.”

“It disappeared after you looked at it? Shit. That’s exactly what a ghost’d do.” My effort was in vain, he was more agitated than before. “Why’d you have to let it know you could see it? If you piss it off again, it’s gonna start throwin’ furniture at us or something, Or it’s gonna fly into that thing you’re wearing and take over your brain-”

He was spiraling over nothing, I had to put a stop to it. “Jesus Christ. Odds are it was just from the crew in the van messing around! They were right there. Just relax. Once I’m done with the walkthrough, I’ll see if I can get them to reproduce it. I’ll even let you see it for yourself, if you want.”

It placated him for the moment, but he stayed on edge. “God, that’s how it always goes. You say, ‘Ah it’s nothin’.’ Then bad shit starts happening and we all end up gray husks with our souls sucked out our buttholes or some shit... God, and this guy’d do that, too. I heard- I heard he was a fruit, and that’s why his dad killed ‘im. Can you believe that shit?”

I wasn’t going to get anywhere with Adam just by talking. He’d already convinced himself. I was just going to have to do what I said I was going to do and prove to him that it was all totally mundane.

I returned to the main hall and let Darren and Dalton know about the potential new wrinkle in the schedule, much to their frustration. “Adam’s spooked. Worse than usual. I’ll probably be able to get him to snap out of it, but I hope you have a backup plan ready.”

Darren blames me immediately. “Goddammit, you were fucking with him and went too far, didn’t you? We can’t afford this bullshit, Ryan. What’s wrong with you?”

I defended myself. “I just told him I actually got some promising readings. I even said they were probably from something in the van outside. I didn’t think he’d jump to us all getting killed in here like it’s some horror movie. Nothing I said had anything to do with an actual ghost. His head’s full of rumors about this place, and I bet that’s what’s bugging him out. I’ll handle it after I see what we’ve got to work with upstairs.”

Dalton wasn’t any more understanding. “You better. If Adam bails, we’ll need Tom to do everything, and that means he won’t be able to get our thermal and IR shots. We’ll have to find something else to fill that run time on the spot. And he’ll be pissed off, too.”

I wasn’t concerned with Tom’s potential frustration. He was always harmless.

I couldn’t help but flip a sarcastic remark back at them as I ascended the stairs. “It wouldn’t be the end of the world to miss out on those shots… But getting on Tom’s bad side? Now that’d be a nightmare. I’d be wishing there really was a ghost here. Much easier to deal with”

I started my scan of the upper level with the Master bedroom. Inside were furnishings much newer than much of the rest of the house. The original bedframe and dressers, and just about everything else in the room except the wallpaper and door were replaced.

My first instinct was to feel disappointed that we were going to miss out on yet another authentic part of the house. But I didn’t let that stop me from poring over everything with the ARM, on the off chance there’d be an even better amorphous shape for the joint masters of ceremony to go wild over.

Unfortunately, I found no such thing. For a moment, it appeared like I had. A slowly pulsing signal in a distinct band of frequencies was coming from inside of the far wall, almost like the beating of a heart.
After some poking around at the molding along the floor, a panel fell open where the signal originated. That panel was so flush with the wall, and so perfectly aligned with the rest of the wallpaper that I wouldn’t have been able to tell it was there if it weren’t for the hint I had inadvertently received.

In a sense, it was no wonder that the signal pulsed like a heart. It was coming from an oblong brass capsule with a gold pad on one side. I suspected it was a prototype for a long term test of a sort of primitive pacemaker. Or maybe a battery for an entirely artificial heart?

That it had been secreted away like that, and that it had functioned so long without outside intervention both suggested to me that whatever it was, it was likely powered by some radioactive source. Which, if it held true, meant that Conrad was either a serious pioneer in the field of radioactive materials, or that he had developed this device much later in his life, long after he had stepped back from an active role in his company.

In any case, as interesting as it was, I wasn’t going to risk putting both our cameramen even more on edge. I was just going to seal it back up and quietly let the Foundation know it was there once we finished filming.