Murmurs in the Walls: The Diagnosis
Episode V
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Murmurs in the Walls is a serial paranormal mystery novella featuring Judith Temple, psychic detective. This is Season 3 of Case Files of a Psychic Detective.
While Murmurs in the Walls can be read as a standalone story, you may appreciate the characters and their interactions more if you are familiar with Judith’s previous adventures, Down in the Holler and Beasts of the Field.
Season 1, Down in the Holler, is now behind a paywall but will soon be available in paperback and e-book. Season 2, Beasts of the Field, is currently free to read! Click here to read Beasts of the Field.
← In Episode IV: The Meatloaf, Judith did a psychic reading on the house and hosted a dinner party that was full of surprises.
“Has all of the…activity occurred in this house, or have you experienced it in other locations as well?” Judith stared across the chipped coffee table at Kortney.
From the corner of her eye, Judith could see into the kitchen, where Brian squirmed in his seat, his attention more focused on eavesdropping than on completing his homework
“I never noticed no movin’ objects at other houses we lived in,” Kortney said. “Cold spots and creepy feelin’s, now I get those most everywhere. But I ain’t never seen stuff fall off shelves or fly across the room like it’s been doin’ here.”
“How long have you been living here, exactly?”
“Round ’bout six months, I think. Almost seven, maybe.”
Judith jotted a quick note. “And when did you first notice objects moving?”
“Well, for a good while I thought it was just Brian bein’ careless or leavin’ messes. But I think I first started to wonder about it round four months ago.”
“Did anything else in your life change four months ago?”
Kortney’s face pinched in a thoughtful frown, her bright green eyeshadow glimmering in the harsh lamplight. Judith did not have a natural affinity for identifying what clothes or colors would look flattering on different people, but in her nearly lifelong quest to dress the part of someone who others would take seriously, she had come to find that certain aspects of fashion were quantifiable enough to swerve nearly into the realm of science. Specific physical characteristics could determine whether loose or tailored clothing better suited a person. Flattering colors were largely dependent on the precise shade of skin, hair, and eyes. Over the years, Judith had learned enough to identify the particular, scientific style choices that helped her to appear put-together, well-dressed, and efficient, and what caused someone like Kortney to need the advice of a personal stylist. While everything about Kortney, from her face to her arms to her feet, was soft and rounded, she kept her hair in a severe, straight bob and dressed in clothing that would better fit a teenager who hadn’t yet developed curves. Though her skin coloring was warm and olive-toned, she dyed her hair an icy platinum blonde and pasted sparkly green eyeshadow on her lids.
Judith knew that giving unsolicited advice was not the best way to win friends and influence people, but if Kortney ever expressed interest in physique-based style theories or skin tone color palettes, Judith had a wealth of data and information to provide.
“Nothin’ happened that would affect the house,” Kortney said, refocusing Judith’s attention. “I mean, it was pretty close to the beginnin’ of the spring semester for Brian, and he had to switch to a new school. But that wouldn’t have no effect on no spirits or nothin’.”
Judith rolled her pen between her fingers and double-checked her list of questions for Kortney. “How has Brian been doing in school?”
“He’s a real smart cookie,” Kortney said, though a wary hitch crept into her voice.
“Has he ever had disciplinary issues?”
Kortney made a noise that stalled somewhere between a scoff and a chuckle. “Every mom of every little boy I know has gotten a call from the school sometime or another. Little boys just ain’t meant to sit still for eight hours a day.”
“Are you saying that he has had disciplinary issues?”
“No bullyin’ or talkin’ back or nothin’. Just harmless stuff like messin’ with lightbulbs ’n smartboards ’n computers ’n stuff.”
Judith’s hand paused mid-note. “What do you mean messing with?”
“Oh, like a coupla weeks ago he got in trouble ’cause he broke the smartboard.”
“Did not!” came Brian’s indignant voice from the kitchen.
“You finished with your homework?” Kortney called back.
There was a pause. “No. But I didn’t do nothin’ to no smartboard.”
“Finish your homework.”
“But I can’t focus!” Brian said, his voice rising to a whine.
“Then go to your room.”
“But I wanna hear whatchy’all are sayin’!”
“Homework first.” Kortney opened her eyes wide at Brian, her eyebrows raised in warning.
“What happened to the lightbulbs and computers?” Judith said.
Kortney turned back to Judith. “They tell me he’s been playin’ pranks, messin’ with stuff. Brand new lightbulbs goin’ out when he’s the classroom monitor, computers malfunctionin’. Don’t know where he coulda learned to do that stuff, but he’s already better’n me at anythin’ technological.”
“So am I understanding correctly,” Judith began, weighing her words, “that Brian is being accused of affecting objects, technological or otherwise, though he claims that he has done nothing to them?”
“Well, yeah.” Kortney shifted in her seat. “But he’s a prankster. This ain’t the first time he’s messed around in class. I think he’s bored ’cause the schoolwork comes easy to him. Got myself a real smart boy, here.”
“Ms. Pickens –”
“Kortney.”
“Kortney, I think I may have an answer to the phenomena you’ve been experiencing.”
Kortney’s face was guarded, her eyes narrowed. “You ain’t gonna tell me the HVAC’s blowin’ stuff off the shelves, are ya?”
“No, that is a highly unlikely scenario, in terms of causing objects to move the way I witnessed last time. I realize that he still has homework to do, but perhaps Brian should be here for this discussion.”
“This got somethin’ to do with Brian?” Kortney said.
In a rush of eager footsteps, Brian materialized in the living room and leapt onto the couch beside his mother.
With two pairs of eyes, one lined with uncertain anxiety and the other wide with excitement, fixed on her, Judith took a tense breath and pressed her hands together in her lap. “You may recall from my previous visits that I listed a number of different causes for the phenomena you’ve experienced. Most were, I believe, due to natural causes. Faulty wiring and uneven heating and cooling and the like. But this house does have several hauntings – or place memories, to be more specific – associated with it, which are the likely cause behind the man Brian regularly sees in his room. Based on my research and the information you’ve provided, I suspect that the moving objects also have a paranormal cause.”
“A ghost?” Brian said in an awestruck whisper.
Judith dug her fingernails into her palm. This part could go off the rails very quickly if she wasn’t careful. “Are you at all familiar with the term poltergeist?”
“You mean, like, a demon?” Kortney said. She was suddenly still, rigid as a frightened hare.
“No. Poltergeist is a rather misleading term. In German it translates roughly to ‘noisy ghost’, but the current understanding of poltergeist activity has nothing to do with ghosts at all. Do you know what psychokinesis is?”
The whites of Kortney’s wide eyes completely surrounded the warm brown of her irises as she shook her head no.
“Is that when you tell people stuff inside their heads without talking out loud?” Brian said, pulling his feet up to kneel on the couch.
“What you’re describing is telepathy. Psychokinesis is the ability to move objects through mental rather than physical effort. One type of psychokinesis is known as recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, or RSPK, and this is thought to be the actual origin of what are usually termed ‘poltergeist cases.’”
“What’s RSPK?” Brian’s voice was animated, his body jittering with excitement, while Kortney grew only more quiet and still.
“As the name suggests, RSPK refers to psychokinesis that is recurrent and unintentional on the part of the agent, the person causing the objects to move. RSPK tends to manifest during the preteen or teenage years, often as a result of emotional stress. Most cases center around a young person within a few years of the onset of puberty and are characterized by exactly what you have witnessed in your own home: objects flying across the room or falling from shelves, appliances breaking or blowing fuses unexpectedly. In the known documented cases, the agent does not have conscious control of the phenomena.”
“Then how do they do it?” The springs of the secondhand couch groaned under Brian’s jittery bouncing.
“In many cases, the agent is going through some form of stress or difficulty at the time,” Judith said, fixing a careful eye on Kortney’s face. Reading facial expressions was not one of her strong suits, but she wanted to catch any telltale information that Kortney’s paper-white face might reveal. “Life changes, difficult family dynamics, a lack of attention, for example. The most current theories suggest that the stressors activate latent psychokinetic abilities, causing objects to move or break in the agent’s vicinity.”
“Are you saying –” Kortney broke off, fumbling for words. She seemed hardly to notice Brian’s incessant bouncing as he jostled the couch. “Are you saying it’s – Brian? He’s doing this?”
“He is nearing puberty,” Judith said. “And most RSPK cases occur within a few years of the onset of puberty. Based on my investigation, I think that Brian being the agent is the most likely explanation.”
“So I’m the one doin’ it?” Brian leapt off the couch and darted up to Judith. “But I’m not tryin’ to. Could I do it for real if I tried?”
“That aspect of poltergeist cases is not as well understood. For most poltergeist agents, the RSPK eventually quiets and disappears without recurring throughout the person’s life. There are researchers who study willful psychokinesis, which you could pursue if you’re interested. But I think it would be more fruitful to focus on calming the current exhibition of RSPK.” Judith turned to Kortney. “What life factors do you think might be affecting Brian’s stress levels?”
Kortney’s eyes jerked up to Judith’s, slowly focusing as though from a great distance. “Sorry, you – what did you say?”
“What life factors do you think might be affecting Brian’s stress levels?”
“Well, I don’t think – I mean, he-he’s a happy kid.”
“He can be a happy child and still have stressors in his life. Based on what you have told me, six months ago you ended a serious relationship and moved to a new house. Even if the outcome is positive, those are both stressors.”
“Not as stressful as stayin’ where we were.” At the sudden spike of venom in Kortney’s voice, Judith paused.
If Constance were here, she could have phrased the question in a way that wouldn’t have left room for thorny assumptions. Judith had had no intention of passing judgement on Kortney’s life choices or living situation, but it seemed that, yet again, there was a vacuum in her words or tone, a blank space which other people filled with nuance and supposition. Judith hadn’t been trying to imply anything. She didn’t imply things; she either said what she was thinking or elected not to speak.
“Then, had you stayed, Brian may have begun exhibiting RSPK sooner or to a more extreme degree.” Judith focused on keeping her tone level, her words precise, though she was aware that no amount of precision could completely prevent her intended meaning from twisting into inaccurate knots of misunderstanding somewhere between her mouth and the listener’s ears. “You might consider seeking counseling for Brian, or –” Judith broke off.
This was middle-of-nowhere Kentucky. Schools were required to provide counseling services to students who qualified for them, but if there was no proof that Brian’s stress was affecting his schoolwork, then he wouldn’t be eligible. Mental health services in coal country were few and far between, and Judith had a sense that asking about their health insurance situation would not help matters.
She had an unfortunate suspicion that counseling was not on the table.
“Let me consult with my colleague,” Judith said, “and I’ll get back to you. This is my first RSPK case, and he is more familiar than I am with techniques for reducing spontaneous psychokinesis. I would also like to look into the home’s previous owners to determine the source of the haunting – place memory, I mean – that has been disturbing Brian’s sleep. Are you available later this week?” Pulling out her phone, where she kept her detailed calendar, Judith looked up at Kortney, who was staring, blank-faced, at the coffee table.
Brian nudged her elbow. “Mom. Can she come back? Can Miss Judith come back?”
Kortney’s gaze lingered on Brian, a frantic fear creeping into her eyes. Then, so quickly that Judith wondered if she had imagined the strange, frightened look, Kortney’s face cleared, and she turned to Judith. “What did you say?”
“Can I come back later this week?”
“Yeah. Yes. Later this week. That should work fine.”
With a cursory goodbye, Judith stood to leave, and Brian padded after her toward the door.
“Is it really me? Like, all of it? Could I control it if I tried really hard? Could I make stuff move?”
Judith stepped through the door into the cool spring evening. “In the RSPK cases I’ve researched, I have not encountered one in which the living agent was able to harness and control the psychokinesis, but it is theoretically possible.”
“So I could move stuff with my mind, like Doctor Strange?”
“Who’s Doctor Strange?”
“The superhero!”
“Oh.” Judith fished her car keys from her purse as she made her way down the porch steps and across the wet spring grass to her car. “He’s a fictional character, then. I prefer to use nonfictional comparisons in cases like this, for clarity’s sake.”
As she spoke, an old brown sedan pulled down the driveway, plowing through Ernest Berry, who did not appear particularly perturbed at having his space invaded by a car. Ernest, in his farmer’s overalls, was one of Judith’s most consistent visitors on her trips to see Kortney and Brian. He’d seemed so quiet at first, but he kept coming back, talking more and more each time – about how he’d registered so eagerly for the draft in 1942, as soon as he’d turned eighteen, only for one man on the draft board to catch sight of a red, scaly patch of skin along the back of Ernest’s arm. And, just like that, the questions had started, his history of itchy, recurring swathes of dry skin unraveling before the board. Less than three months after a stamp had declared him unfit for military service, he’d been killed in a farm accident, thousands of miles away from any real battles. Decades later, Ernest still carried a smoggy cloud of shame with him; he still stooped with dejection. But he could talk Judith’s ear off about all the changes that had come through his little patch of farmland in the past century.
The brown sedan rumbled up to the house, stopping beside Judith’s silver car. A sudden, searing ache sliced into Judith’s forehead, forcing her to a standstill at the bottom of the porch steps. Swaying, her vision suddenly too sharp, too bright, she reached a hand back toward the house, blindly searching for support.
A sallow, dark-haired man, the first whisper of a beer gut pressing against his belt as he leaned against a bar counter, sticky with sloshed liquor
The sudden tipping of a scale – engaging to demeaning, indifferent to savage
Broken shards shrouded over, numbed by scar tissue, impervious
Bruised knuckles and words hurled like vomited glass, slicing and stabbing –
“Hey squirt.”
The flaking red paint of the house, scraping against her hand, shimmered back into Judith’s vision. On unsteady feet, she turned, and before her was a sallow, dark-haired man, a hint of flab blooming above his belt.
Brian stood still, his face hard and unmoving as a statue, and the man, a faint redness rimming his eyes, gave the boy’s hair a quick, haphazard ruffle as he passed.
With an indifferent glance at Judith, the man strode up the porch steps and into the house.
Judith straightened herself, putting her full weight back on her feet. “Who is that?” she said in a low voice.
Brian shoved his hands in his pockets, his bright little face suddenly older. “Tucker. My mom’s new boyfriend.”
Judith enjoyed research, but even she had her limits. The national missing persons database was thorough, and she was impressed with the flexibility of their search engine. But, because she knew precious little about the man murdered in Brian’s bedroom, her search was hampered by ambiguity.
He’d been killed in Kentucky, obviously, but was he from Kentucky? Perhaps he’d driven in from Tennessee or West Virginia. His hair and clothing seemed to fit with styles prevalent in the 70s and 80s, but that was still a twenty-year stretch of time. He’d had sandy hair, but not all of the profiles in the database listed a hair color. Judith didn’t want to accidentally exclude the correct man from the list of matches. Better to keep the net wide.
This meant, unfortunately, an inordinate amount of time spent searching through profiles of missing persons. The redundant clicking was slowly killing her as she searched through the profiles, hoping for a flicker of recognition in the one of the photos.
There were so many faces – so many of them young and fresh and smiling in their photos. Judith did not have the best natural facial recognition skills, and the features began to swim together in a murky sea of eyes and ears and noses as Judith’s enthusiasm turned heavy and gray.
Was this how Tim felt whenever he glanced at his wall of photos, the bright images of Kentucky teenagers who were now dead from opioids or alcohol? Tim was so quick with a smile, but there was a heaviness on his shoulders that never quite went away.
When they’d met for coffee a few days before, Judith had been relieved and quite satisfied with herself for finishing her planned work tasks for the day early enough that she would not have to go back to her coworking space to face the knowing glances and snide questions of the pink-and-blue-haired woman whose name Judith was determined not to learn. Instead, she and Tim had made their way along one of the downtown walking trails, lost in conversation, until a sudden, forceful spattering of rain – which had not been in the forecast and for which Judith was not properly dressed – forced them to turn back.
Tim had given Judith his weathered, waterproof jacket and laughed at his rain-drenched shirt with a good humor that Judith never would have been able to conjure had she been the one who was soaked and bedraggled. He hadn’t asked again about dinner, but the question strained and stabbed at Judith’s mind, chafing against her anxiety and a rounder, warmer sensation with which she wasn’t as familiar –
Clicking through profile after profile, Judith searched each face for a hint of familiarity, trying to remember the set of the man’s jaw, the shape of his eyebrows, anything that could help her to be objective in her identification. Reflexively Judith moved her cursor to click over to the next profile, then stopped.
This one – he did have sandy hair. There was nothing in his face that immediately disqualified him as a possibility. He was smiling – that was certainly different than how he’d appeared in the last minutes of his life. And he was so young. The photo looked like a high school graduation photo, stiff and posed and professional, but the smile had a cheekiness to it, a bravado that someone, something must have quashed before the events Judith had witnessed.
Michael Christopher Reed
Judith leaned forward, squinting her eyes at the photo, trying to ascertain if her eyes were deceiving her. Could she have found him? She had clicked through dozens of profiles, but she was by no means near the end of her list.
Circumstances of Disappearance: Reed was last seen at home by his mother on November 8th, 1978.
The profile was sparse, with the only other information being that he had a scar over his left eyebrow.
Sitting back, Judith took a breath and picked up her pen.
Michael Christopher Reed.
She jotted a note, then steeled herself. There were still 57 missing persons cases in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia which she hadn’t yet checked. Unless she investigated every possibility, she couldn’t be sure that this Michael Christopher Reed was the man she’d seen, the man who’d been dead for nearly half a century.
Judith had plenty of faults, but leaving tasks undone was not one of them.
Flexing her hand, Judith moved on to the next profile.
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→ Keep reading! Episode VI: The Guru
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> What you’re describing is telekinesis.
Telepathy.
I literally just finished a rewatch of Doctor Strange today! It's a classic.
Oh, I don't like Tucker. At all.
As to the problem Judith identifies with her intended meaning getting twisted into inaccurate knots of misunderstanding between her and the listener's ears, yeah, yep, been there, done that, got the t-shirt, although I don't know that I've ever seen it identified so precisely before. Very nice!