Corpse in the Mirror [SAMPLE]

Chapter 4 - Complicated

        Richard never did get to show me what he’d wanted to show me that day in his apartment. But I had seen and sensed enough to know that there was more to this than he was telling me, or maybe was even aware of.

        And if my experiences last year taught me anything about the spirit world, it was this:

        Strange things don’t consistently happen to someone just because.

        There was always a reason. There was always a pattern.

        The lunch hour before our next SPRG meeting, I asked Richard if he wanted to mention the other things that had been happening to him to the group. But even though he’d already shown us his photos, he apparently still hadn’t decided if his experiences were really case-worthy... Which was why he’d wanted to talk to me first.

        “And we have talked,” I told him. “And I think we should tell them.”

        But he just shrugged, smiled, then whisked me away to the new burger joint that just opened on the street across the school, and asked me to dare him to eat their famous 6-inch-thick burger in three bites.

        Which he did.

        I guessed it was the burger that also kept him quiet during our walk back to campus. His digestive system sounded like it was now using up the energy he should’ve used for chewing.

        One great thing about our SPRG meetings was that our topics had gotten even more interesting this year; we were discussing some really important stuff.

        Eartha and Vanessa had approved five new members from the ones who signed up at our org booth during the Frosh Orientation, and although they came from different colleges and backgrounds, one thing I sensed they all had in common was a mixture of objective curiosity and just-enough fascination for the paranormal.

        Aris and Migs had been analyzing their copies of Richard’s photo files, and were currently in deep research mode, creating a database of verified ghost photographs throughout history.

        Migs even showed us a slideshow titled: “Things Commonly Mistaken As Ghost Photographs.”

        Along with obvious glitches like double exposures and moving subjects, he also showed us how common things like moisture, light reflections, specks of dust, and a phenomenon called “matrixing” (where our brain sometimes makes us “see something” when they’re actually just a bunch of objects aligned together that form a familiar shape—the same thing that happens when we seem to “see” shapes in the clouds) can make people think an image is paranormal, when it actually isn’t.

        His slideshow presentation was pretty cool, and for the first time I actually understood everything Migs talked about. It was definitely way better than his technical oral reports from last year.

        What was even more interesting was when Migs called on Eartha to demonstrate how ghost videos could also be faked, especially by someone with the right equipment and enough time on their hands.

        Eartha said these were techniques they learned in their video editing class: they can erase things they want to hide, add things they copied from somewhere else, and even add special effects if they had enough knowledge of computer animation.

        “A lot can be done with video editing nowadays,” Eartha said excitedly, as she showed us on the projector screen a time lapse video of how she edited a short “ghost clip” on her laptop.