Polters: The Polter Series

By William X. Adams

Clay, a young Portland photographer, devastated by the recent murder of his girlfriend, Lane, boards a midnight ferry across the river to Bardonia, a town full of the city's recently deceased, called Polters. The residents there  are in chaos since their way forward, the train station, is blocked by a reactionary gang. As he searches for Lane in the land of the dead, he meets Ella, a Polter, and is horrified at feeling attracted to a dead person, but together they liberate the station, restoring the Polters' path to destiny. On the fog-shrouded platform, he must decide whether to go with Ella to wherever Polters go, or return to ordinary life and mourn for Lane. Polters is about the reality of death and  love, with plenty of action on both sides of the silent  river that separates them.  

 

Editorial Reviews and Prizes

"Polters is captivating from the very first page…an action-packed and very fast-paced read suitable for fans of thrillers, crime drama, sci-fi, and romance with an element of the supernatural."  –Readers' Favorite Reviewer

An inventive mystery set in the land between the living and the dead… clever, and the world of Bardonia is fresh and vividly presented. The writing is clean with a consistent voice and… explores deeper themes effectively. –BookLife Prize Reviewer

 

Short-listed for the 2023 Cygnus Prize  (Chantireviews.com)

 

Speculative fiction at its best, interweaving imagined realities with strong action, heart, and humor. --Editorial Reviewer

 

Indie-BRAG Gold Medallion Winner

 

A highly entertaining and engrossing science fiction novel with a ghostly theme... The romance adds another layer, making this work seem poetic in a way…You begin to feel drawn to the characters, as if you want to become part of their lives and find out what happens to them…This is one of those books you'd love to see made into a film. For a good read that you will remember for a long time to come, "Polters…" –Reader Views Reviewer

 

Tagline

Polters are a kind of ghost: like us but more dead.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PsiFiBooks.com
• Release date: Mar 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798987776124

Book preview

Polters

William X. Adams

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www.psifibooks.com

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons is coincidental.

Psi-Fi Books

Copyright 2023 by William X. Adams

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

License Note

THIS EBOOK IS LICENSED for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and it was not purchased for your use only, then please visit your favorite ebook retailer to purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

ISBN: 979-8-9877761-2-4

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my writing colleagues at RAW Salon. I am particularly grateful for thoughtful feedback from colleague Alice Ritscherle and for expert proofreading by Sky Wallace.  

Table of Contents

Crime Scene

Anomaly

Lane Cunningham

Ghost in the Cellar

Ghost Talk

Press Conference

See You in Church

The Meeting

Clay’s Report

Harmony Grove

The Crossing

Threats

SEBO

Tarbin

PDX Riverboat

Smoking Gun

The Ask

Tarbin Watching

Tarbin's Demand

Break-in

Elvira Madigan

Jawbone Ridge

Chopper

Tarbin's Grief

Huxley House

Three Pilgrims

Rindi Station

Not a Houseboat

Home Invasion

The Price

Rat Talk

Funeral

Church of Rindi

The Team

Battle Plan

Garlic Vs. Lemon

The Fight for the Station

Last Train to Rindi

In Loving Memory

Coffee with Hopwood

McBenjamins

The Conveyer

A Deal With Pericles

The Vision

Gotcha

The World Turns

Ghost Rider

Pencil Boat

Union Station

Loving Mozart

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About the Author

Crime Scene

Clay parked his Subaru a block from the crime scene, where flashing police vehicles lit up the street. A yellow ambulance waited ominously at the curb. Portland police put on a big show for a homicide. Every officer who showed up could enter an unimpeachable homicide investigation assist on their daily report.

Clay hoisted his equipment bag onto his shoulder and walked the sidewalk opposite the house. He stopped and raised his camera to frame the modest bungalow. If police and yellow crime-scene ribbon hadn't surrounded it, you'd hardly notice it. It was dug into a gentle slope with a trimmed lawn in a quiet northeast neighborhood. A charming Tudor, it had two dormers on its steep roof, a field-stone chimney, and an arched front door. The cottage radiated country charm, a popular style in the 1930s though that was seventy years before Clay was born. Even now though, it looked nostalgically romantic to him. His camera's screen said 6:25 am.

The detectives teased him about having outdoor photos in his reports. Hey, Clay, when you're done with your vacation pictures, you want to come in and do the crime scene? They made fun, but the bureau called him when they had a serious case like a homicide. They knew he was thorough and wouldn't get in the way of the investigation. He was only a contractor, and the teasing reminded him of his subordinate status, but it also said he was accepted, so he tolerated it, actually enjoyed it.

He stepped onto the porch and stopped to inspect the smashed glass panel to the right of the door. He took multiple shots of the broken glass and the shards on the wood deck. He pushed the door and stepped in.

Frank Baxter, a senior detective with PPB, looked up, waved him over, then dropped his hand to point to blood at the edge of the carpet, meaning, don’t step there. Clay nodded but stayed near the door.

He put down his shoulder bag and withdrew a blue plastic pouch containing a fresh white bunny suit. The thick paper outerwear kit included a whole-body jumpsuit, a face mask, latex gloves, and elasticized paper booties. With the hood up and the white mask over his nose, he lacked only long ears and puffy tail.

Grabbing his camera bag again, he stepped out of the foyer into the living room and saw the body, white male, early fifties, face up, eyes open, on the carpet, in palm-tree-dotted pajamas with a large brown blood stain on the chest. A revolver lay near one hand.

Detective Baxter, also in a white bunny suit, began a brief walk-through with Clay. Baxter showed kitchen drawers and cupboard doors standing half open, and in a bedroom down the hall, dresser drawers pulled out, the contents dumped onto the floor. Clay would have to photograph it all and then go upstairs, too.

Looks like a burglary gone bad, Baxter said. Start with the gun so we can see if it was fired.

Clay nodded and walked over to face the shocked stare of the corpse.

He worked fast but not hurriedly, taking two sets of pictures of each situation. The first set was with his Canon DSLR. He shot wide for context, close for detail, and three-sixty wrap-around as if he were a real estate agent. Never mind the corpse. Notice the cozy front room!

He framed every shot with care because there would be no editing later. Lawyers, judges, and juries need assurance that no crime-scene picture has been altered or processed in any way. Defense attorneys had people who would detect even the slightest manipulation of a photo. Every pixel had to come directly from God's own photons.

He shot the sequence a second time with his other camera, the QIS. He couldn't use those pictures in his report because its mathematically computed photographs, while highly detailed, were processed, worthless in a court of law.

By 7:30, he was done with the entry, the gun, and the corpse. The ground floor was swarming with bunnies bagging evidence, extracting samples, and dusting for prints. He moved on to the kitchen and upstairs bedrooms. At nine o'clock, he found Baxter near the kitchen doorway.

I got everything, Clay said. I’m going to do a little more outside before I go.

Birds and flowers? Baxter said without smiling.

Yeah. The guy could have been pecked to death by a woodpecker.

Baxter didn’t respond.

Do you know who he is?

Ross Fielding, politician. This is his house.

The name sounds familiar.

He was on the Planning Council. You probably saw him in the news. He was the holdout blocking re-zoning of the old Congruity College site.

I remember that, Clay said. The campus is near where I live. Developers want to make it into high-density housing. There’s your motive right there.

You watch too much TV, Redding. This is a 10-62 B-and-E with confrontation, Baxter said, looking out over the living room.

Clay shrugged the strap of his equipment bag. He wasn’t going to argue with the lead detective.

Wait. We missed something.

Baxter turned to follow Clay’s gaze. Clay was already moving into the kitchen.

Behind that trash canister next to the stove, Clay said. There's a little half-door in the wall. See? The edge of the door follows a seam in the wainscoting.

That would go down to a closed-off coal cellar. We found a crawlspace entrance from the garage. Didn’t see this.

Did you go in?

We shined lights in from the garage. It’s a cement room, ten by twelve, old coal furnace. What used to be the coal chute is a small window on the north side at ground level.

I should check it to have complete the coverage of the scene.

Waste of time. The crime’s in the living room.

Five minutes.

Suit yourself. Baxter turned and walked back to monitor the activity in the front room.

Clay removed the tall chrome trash canister. The door had a finger space near the top right side. He pulled. The door squeaked outward, scraping the floor tile. A dank, moldy smell filled his nostrils. He peered down steep, well-worn wooden steps fading into darkness. The narrow passage didn't have a light switch on either wall.

Really? he thought. Portland was the first city in the world to have an electrical power grid in the 1880s, if he remembered right. He pulled his head out of the opening and scanned the walls around the little doorway. No switch.

He sighed and pulled out his phone, and turned on its flashlight. The light didn't reach the bottom of the stairs. He went in feet-first, on his butt, pulling his camera bag behind him, but he could stand as soon as he was on the other side of the wall. He tested each creaky stair with partial weight before trusting it and slowly descended into the gloom.

At the bottom, he stood in cold, damp, stagnant air. It was a small room, as Baxter had said. Spider webs filled the corners, floor to ceiling. The high, ground-level window, once the top of a coal chute, was painted black. He looked at the blotchy concrete floor and imagined a torrent of coal hurtling in from a truck outside. Somebody would have come down here every morning and shoveled coal into the hulking furnace. He visualized a tired, cold, grizzled man lifting a shovelful of anthracite into the maw of the beast. What a way to start your morning back in those days.

He looked at the black furnace, a fat iron cylinder with tentacles of thick pipes coming out of its rounded head. Four short legs made it look like a crouching beast, a monster with a grinning, grated mouth and a small, soot-blackened glass window. It was a cyclops, a monster that lived in the basement, the stuff of nightmares. They should have removed it when they remodeled, he thought. He shivered involuntarily, not from the chill.

Shining his light around the room, he noticed a small, wood-framed half-door at floor level on one wall. That would lead to the garage, but it was barely big enough for a person to pass through. No wonder Baxter hadn't entered the room from the garage.

He took the Canon out of his bag, adjusted the lens, and aimed at the beast. He shot with a blinding flash but knew it wouldn't be any good. He'd forgotten that the light from his phone brightened the air between him and the furnace and would throw off the camera's sensors. Reluctantly, he turned off the phone and slipped it into a pocket. In inky blackness, he aimed again to about where he had before. Another blinding blast filled his eyes with a high-contrast afterimage.

He felt for the phone and turned on the light again. Pointing it up, he saw ancient wood beams and braces. That would be the kitchen floor. He imagined blood dripping from Fielding's body through the floorboards, down into the dark room. He stepped back into the cold concrete wall, and a shudder went up his spine. He shook his head.

Snap out of it! he told himself. The dead man's in the living room, and I'm under the kitchen. The dank cellar was getting to his imagination. One more shot. He put the Canon in the bag and pulled out the QIS. It didn’t have a flash because it was designed to register photons directly on its sensitive detectors. Without his phone’s light on, would there be even ten photons down here? He doubted it.

He turned off the phone, put it on top of his bag, and stood in infinite blackness. He shot once, a quiet click. It would probably be too shaky. He shuffled back, leaned against the wall, and slid down until he sat on the cold, damp floor. It was creepy. He felt like he was underground, and if a shovelful of dirt had come down on him at that moment, he wouldn't have been too surprised. It’s like a tomb down here, he thought. He put his elbows on his knees and held the camera in a triangle of stability. He clicked.

Then he heard something. A rat? Snakes? Horrified, he struggled to his knees, holding the camera carefully. This was a bad idea, coming down to the cellar. That noise again. It wasn’t the scurrying of an animal. It was like a whisper, almost. It was like somebody speaking quietly in the next room, except there was no next room. He was ten feet underground. There it was again.

Clay, it said. The sound was muffled and distant, yet he was sure it was directed at him. Was somebody calling him from upstairs? He remained perfectly still on his knees and listened to the darkness. He could hear nothing from upstairs. A sound like heavy breathing was coming from down here. Was it his own? He held his breath and concentrated.

Cla-a-ay Red-ding. It was a low, slow, elongated voice.

He jumped. What? he yelled into the void, feeling rising panic. He could hear his blood thumping in his ears. With growing alarm, he scrambled to his feet and felt for his camera bag and phone. He tripped on the bag and fell forward. Instinctively, he pulled the camera into his belly like a football player about to take a tackle. He went down on his free hand, one knee, then an elbow, and his right hip. He rolled over on the damp floor and lay on his back, breathing heavily in the rank, moldy air.

He did an internal body inventory. Bruised and sore, nothing broken. Camera okay. Cautiously, stealthily even, in case he was being watched, he felt for his bag. It was within reach, but the phone wasn't on it. Sweating, he groped the damp floor until his fingers finally touched smooth glass. The phone's light burst onto cobweb-laced ceiling joists above. He rose to his knees and swung the light around in fear. The giant cyclops stared at him.

Ack! he squawked as he jerked back.

He was shaken, and his hands were trembling. Somebody, something had called his name, unless he was going mad. Either possibility was terrifying.

I’m freaking out, he told himself. He put the camera in the equipment bag and stood, yanking the strap up to his shoulder. With the phone's light showing just a few feet ahead, he turned to the creaky wooden staircase and scrambled up in a half-crouch. At the top, he punched the wooden door open, slamming it loudly against the kitchen wall. He threw himself through the opening onto the kitchen floor and rolled into the room. He lay on his back, breathing hard.

What the hell, Redding. Baxter stood at the entrance to the kitchen.

Clay climbed to his feet, blinking at the light, wincing in pain but deliberately not moaning. He looked down at his black-smudged forensic suit. He looked like he’d been sweeping chimneys.

It’s dirty down there, he said weakly, not looking up.

What is it?

Coal furnace, pipes, spiders. Did you call my name just now?

What do you mean?

When I was down there. Did you call out to me?

I forgot all about you. I thought you’d gone until I heard that door bang open. What happened?

Nothing. Old coal cellar. I gotta go.

Clay walked past Baxter without saying another word and went to the patio door. Most of the forensic team was gone. He stepped out into the bright morning and breathed deeply of the sweet air. On the patio, he took off his filthy bunny suit and stuffed it into his bag.

Anomaly

Clay watched photos transfer from the cameras to his computer. He sat in a tiny guest bedroom that was his studio. The closed window blinds darkened the space for managing photos.

The Canon pictures appeared bright and colorful on his large monitor. He selected a sequence of shots he’d use in the forensic report. In a separate window, the black-and-white pictures from the QIS camera lined up.

He moved the color pictures around, arranging them according to the mental narrative that would be his report. If he was called to testify in court, he'd need to put words on the pictures, and the time to write those words was now before memory faded.

Not being able to use the QIS photos was annoying, but he understood why. Computational photography was highly processed, but all photos are processed. People had been sending rolls of Kodak film out to be processed for a hundred years, and nobody objected. Modern cameras automatically balance light and shadow, adjust brightness, correct colors, and auto-focus. Even phone cameras do it. How is that not processing? The court had an out-of-date idea of how photography worked. It bothered him, but it wasn't his job to educate judges.

He had to admit that the QIS pictures were more processed than expected. Its pictures were computed from photon-density distributions. There was no actual picture in the camera until the software created one from the data. He knew it was impossible to explain that to the court. Yes, it was a manufactured picture, but so are all photographs, in a sense.

The QIS pictures were extremely crisp. The camera recorded single photons, the individual particles of light. There is literally nothing to see smaller than a photon. It was a great camera, almost magical in what it could do. He'd paid a fortune for it, nearly five K to an unknown firm on eBay. It was a crazy, high-risk thing to do. He realized that now, in retrospect. He'd always been cautious, rational, and methodical in everything.

Buying the camera had been an impulsive act. He’d had to blow a year’s college tuition to pay for the camera, and consequently, he’d dropped out of Portland State to get a job as a photographer, something he always wanted to do anyway. His parents had been upset. You’re throwing away your future, they said. Photography is a future, he’d argued. Not the one you imagine, his father insisted. And maybe that had been the point, he realized now. He felt like saying, I don’t want your life as my future. But instead, he walked away, chastened but his mind unchanged.

The complacent life his parents lived was neither happy nor sad. It was nothing. His father had made a decent living as an engineer at Boeing in Seattle in the days, he said, when engineers were tallied by the acre in hangar-like halls. His mother wrote unpublishable poetry and hosted a book club. They wanted for nothing and were disturbed by nothing. Was that life's goal, nothingness? He worried that his college courses were leading him to the same place, to the land of bland. Photography, on the other hand, was exciting, life with eyes wide open. He chose that and bought the camera. Making rent would be a different problem.

He clicked open the QIS shot on his screen, showing broken glass next to the front door at the crime scene. It looked like somebody had smashed the window to reach in and unlock the door from the inside. That's what a burglar would do. He zoomed in and saw thick safety glass, hard to break. You weren’t going to pop it by banging your elbow on it. You’d have to bash your way in with a hammer or a big rock.

He zoomed in until he could see the fine, jagged edges of the hole in the glass. A burglar would have stretched to open the lock and likely gotten cut or had clothing torn. But he saw no blood or fiber, so he zoomed back out.

That’s when he saw the flicker of a black frame go by, maybe more than one. He increased the magnification again slowly to go back into the picture. Re-centering, he moved in very slowly until he could see a heavy woven fabric, like canvas, the threads greatly magnified. The remarkable thing was that the jagged edges of the broken glass had disappeared. The glass was smooth and shiny, not even cracked.

Zooming closer, he saw oval-shaped depressions appear in the fabric, one, two, then a dozen as the magnification increased. Then there was a frame where the glass was cracked, and several after that showed the hole with jagged edges. Continuing inward, he saw that the dark cloth had disappeared, and the sharp edges of broken glass looked just as in the other photos.

He looked at the sequence of shots again as if he were looking at individual frames of a movie, and in a way, he was. The QIS photon detectors sampled a thousand times a second. What changes in 1/1000th of a second? Not much. A bolt of lightning, but not much else, moves that fast at a human scale.

Every QIS photograph was a large set of potential photos, a potential mini-video over a very brief time. Usually, you only see the composite result, the photograph. But when you zoomed in and out slowly like this, you got weird results. He had just seen a time-lapse movie of somebody pounding a cloth over the glass until the glass broke. The fabric was probably to muffle the sound and protect from flying fragments of glass. It all made sense except for one detail.

How could his camera have pictures of the glass being broken? He had arrived on the scene at 6:25 am. The crime took place around midnight. How did this sequence of images get into his camera?

The only logical conclusion was that he had misinterpreted the information. He zoomed out to the top layer of the image and started zooming in again slowly, watching the magnification grow, keeping his eyes open for the problem section of the picture. He saw it and slowed down, going in carefully. He did that several times.

He was not wrong. Clearly, very obviously, unambiguously, the glass was being broken from the outside through a cloth. The pictures were clear and sharp. There was no mistaking what it was. He slumped back in his chair. What was going on? It couldn't possibly be what it was.

He sat straight and copied his files to cloud storage. Dazed, he rose and headed toward the kitchen.

He poked at a plate of rice and steamed tofu cubes, healthy food. The cubes stared back at him. They looked like building materials. He pushed the plate away. The fundamental problem is not the picture itself, he reasoned. No matter how tricky and complex, a camera cannot take photos of something it never saw. The only explanation was that the QIS had traveled back in time. And then took a picture of its choosing? Then took a taxi home? The logical answer was not logical.

Clay carried his dish to the sink and scraped it into a storage box. He opened the refrigerator and looked. Berries and yogurt, very healthy. Bread. Orange juice. He whumped the door shut and grabbed his jacket off a coat rack near the kitchen door.

Kouzina's was two blocks away. It shared a corner lot with a convenience store with iron bars in front of neon beer signs in the windows. Both buildings were on their last legs. They had sagging rooflines and mildew on their walls from water runoff. The adjoining lot was filled with a hulking, three-story structure clad in tan strand board, soon to be a multi-family. Kouzina's corner was clearly destined for redevelopment too, but meanwhile, he liked Greek food and went there often. It felt very neighborhoody.

Alex, the owner, waiter, and barkeep, set two lamb kebabs on long wooden skewers in front of him. They sizzled from the grill. The smell was intoxicating. Clay put down his mug of beer to admire the display. He was the only customer at the counter.

Now that’s food, Alex, he said. My compliments to the chef.

The chef is smoking a cigarette out back at the moment, Alex said, smiling. He was a corpulent man with a tree-trunk neck.

Kind of slow tonight, isn’t it? Clay said. A group of three people sat in a booth along the window.

Every night is slow nowadays. The only reason I’m still here is I own the lot and the Get-Go next door, which sells enough beer to pay the taxes.

I see developers are coming this way.

"I'd love to rebuild. All those new people are gonna want a place