Murmurs in the Walls: The Tour
Episode II
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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 I: The Call, Judith was tasked with investigating reports of a haunted house in rural Kentucky.
“My main concern is that I won’t be able to function effectively either as a paranormal investigator or as a psychic.” The fresh new green of budding trees, their skeletal branches still letting sunlight peek through their canopy, arched over Judith’s car as she wound her way down the rural highway. In a few months, the forest floor would be darkened by the thick-leafed trees blocking out the sun. But in early spring everything was bright and exploratory, peeking through the soil, tentatively unfolding from its winter sleep. Judith typically didn’t focus a significant portion of her attention on the slow growth of spring, but even she found her eyes drawn to the delicate flashes of pink and purple blossoms dotting roadside bushes and the shocks of crocuses and daffodils that heralded a new season.
“What’s the difference between them?” Tim’s voice crackled through her car speaker.
“A psychic is supposed to pick up psychic impressions while hopefully letting as little outside information as possible influence the accuracy of the readings. That’s why I try not to learn details prior to doing a psychic reading. It’s easy for my own preconceptions to warp my impressions and decrease reliability.”
“Is that a you thing, or do all psychics focus on that?”
“Worthwhile psychics try to mitigate bias,” Judith said, raising her voice over the whoosh of air that rushed through the cracked passenger window. She wouldn’t roll it down more than a few inches for fear that Orwell would try to stick his head through, which could put him in danger of injury. But he seemed content to poke his nose through to reach the open air, his tongue lolling with delight at the wind ruffling his fur.
“Sounds like psychic snobbery to me,” Tim said.
Though Judith could hear the smile in his voice, she had a responsibility to defend the importance of unbiased accuracy in her field; it was a matter of principle. It wasn’t that she needed to talk to Tim, by any means, or was stalling their goodbye. “I’ll admit that I fall more on the academic end of the spectrum in terms of psychics, but anyone who is accepting money to do psychic work should have at least a basic respect for data and accuracy. But this is all tangential. You asked about the difference between psychics and paranormal investigators. As I said, psychics gather impressions that hopefully provide useful, unbiased information. Paranormal investigators also strive to be unbiased, but they focus on investigating the potential causes of reported paranormal phenomena and determining if there is a possible natural explanation. It’s actually counterproductive to get psychic impressions at the outset of a new case because they can bias the investigator in favor of paranormal explanations. And it’s counterproductive for a psychic to know too much about the alleged paranormal activity prior to doing a reading because it can warp the way she interprets the psychic impressions.”
“That’s a conundrum,” Tim said. “But, I have to say, investigation sounds right up your alley.”
“I just have to treat it like a case study. Talk to the owners, visit the property, leave no stone unturned regarding possible natural explanations. Then, once I have an acceptable amount of baseline data, I can be more open to psychic impressions. The difficulty will be mitigating my own bias.”
“How long will it take, this whole process?”
“I’ll only be there for a few hours today,” Judith said. “Long enough to do an interview and tour the property. Depending on what I find, it’s likely that I’ll make at least one or two return visits to do further investigation. I took a half day from work, but I’ll need to be back in Lexington before sunset.”
“Don’t push it if it starts to get dark. You can always call me.”
Judith squeezed the steering wheel. She knew she could always call him. She frequently wanted to call him, as she had today under the pretext of informing him that she would be near McFerrin. But should she be calling him? She still hadn’t given him an answer to his question. And, as Constance had lectured her on numerous occasions, she needed to be aware of how other people might perceive her actions. Judith had created more than one uncomfortable situation for herself by being too black-and-white and utilitarian with her relationships, such as with Todd, her Differential Equations study partner who had misinterpreted her frequent messages as romantic interest. Or insecure, needy Augie Lyons, who had broken up with her after hearing her phone conversation with a coworker and realizing that she spoke to her work colleagues in exactly the same way that she spoke to him.
But somehow her aloofness didn’t seem to affect Tim. He was teasing, playful in a way that disconcerted her, and he seemed to find her data-driven mindset endearing. Which was strange, to say the least.
Surely there must be something wrong with a person who could find her – prickly, scientific Judith Temple – endearing.
Judith followed her GPS to a dirt driveway that stretched back from the road, leading into a stand of trees. A few small homes, sagging and dingy, sat along the country highway, and a few mobile homes stood just across the street from her destination. Beside one of the mobile homes stood a gap-toothed, heavyset woman, her eyes fixed on Judith’s car. As Judith slowed and switched on her turn signal, she started to pull her gaze away from the woman, then paused. Where before there had been no one, now two more women – one elderly, with tight gray curls and flaky pastry skin, and one middle-aged, wearing an old-fashioned dress and apron, heavy rubber boots, and a bandana around her hair, stood, their faces staring intently at her.
An ache bloomed behind Judith’s right eye socket, shooting into the back of her skull, and she stopped the car in the empty road and ground the heel of her palm into her eye.
The sharp, stabbing tip of the pain faded until it was more butter knife than ice pick, and Judith lowered her hand and opened her eyes. Then she jerked back with a gasp, adrenaline rushing through her in a shock of heat and cold.
The three women were still there, and now more – a young man in overalls, his hair slicked down and parted deep on the side; an old man in a ragged suit and tie; a thick-stomached coal miner, his face smeared with black dirt; a teenage girl with sickly pale skin and jutting cheekbones – all clustered around Judith’s car, leaning down to peek in the windows, pressing closer, jostling for space.
Judith wrangled with her quick, gasping breaths, her hands clutching the steering wheel. Apparently it had been a while since the nearby dead had come across someone who could see them.
Straightening her shoulders, Judith slowly moved forward. The crowd drifted aside as she turned her car onto the bumpy road, but their plodding figures trailed behind her in a procession.
Her car jostled along the uneven driveway, hedged by unkempt bushes and vines that snaked up and overpowered the wire fencing that separated the property from its neighbors. Checking in the rearview mirror, Judith saw the group, still following her, their fixed gazes single-minded. Trying to ignore the dull headache blooming in her forehead, Judith turned her gaze forward again. Then at last, around a bend, she came upon a house.
Casting a heavy shadow on the ground, wide-limbed trees huddled around the blood-red home, with its flecked and weathered paint. Grass tangled with weeds in the yard, swaying nearly high enough to cover Judith’s car tires.
Closing her eyes, Judith took a breath. Then, climbing out of the car and onto the gravel driveway, she turned around to face the procession.
“My name is Judith Temple,” she said to the crowd, hoping that the family inside the house couldn’t hear her. “Yes, I can see you. Yes, I can communicate with you. But I’ve been asked to come to this house to do a very specific job, and I need to complete it before I spend time doing anything else. I’m willing to stay and have a conversation with each of you, but please wait until I’ve finished what I came here to do.”
Eyes wide, the people of the motley group shuffled their feet and kept their sights on Judith. They stayed clustered in the driveway, not one of them setting foot on the knee-high grass surrounding the property.
“Thank you. I’ll be back.” Judith nodded, then turned toward the house.
“How long have you been living here?”
“Oh, ’bout six months. Me ’n my boyfriend split, and I wanted to find a new house.” The woman in front of Judith wore garish, glittery green eyeshadow that clashed with the cheap dyed-blonde of her hair. But aside from her severe, rod-straight hair and bright makeup, everything about her, from her full lips to her rounded cheeks to her plump fingers, was soft, more in the style of Baroque painting than modern Kentucky. “We wanted to find a new house,” Kortney Pickens corrected herself, putting her arm around her son with a squeeze. “Didn’t wanna be livin’ with those memories no more, did we?”
Brian Pickens didn’t answer his mother but instead stared with wide, incisive eyes at Judith and tongue-panting, tail-wagging Orwell. Judith wasn’t particularly adept at estimating children’s ages, but Brian seemed a year or two more mature than Sean, her sister Constance’s oldest boy, which would make Brian about ten or eleven.
“Are you an exorcist?” Brian asked, his head tilted so that his russet hair caught a beam of sunshine, seeming to set his locks ablaze. “Do you talk to ghosts ’n demons ’n stuff?”
“Brian!” his mother frowned, nudging him. “Don’t go talkin’ ’bout demons.”
“No, I’m not an exorcist.” Reaching for her wallet, Judith pulled out one of her psychic detective business cards – which she kept in a separate pocket from her software development business cards, considering that there was little overlap in the market between her primary work vocation and her obscure side hustle – and handed it to Brian. “On this case I’m working in the capacity of a paranormal investigator, which means that I listen to the reports you and your mother have about this property and then investigate potential causes behind the phenomena, whether natural or paranormal.”
“This says ‘p-sigh-chick detective.’”
“Psychic detective.”
“What’s that?”
“A psychic is someone who has the ability to utilize extrasensory perception in any of its various forms,” Judith said. “A psychic detective uses that ability to provide insight into problems, questions, or crimes.”
“Do you catch criminals?”
“I have worked with several police departments and sheriff’s departments, including in McFerrin County, to help find clues.”
“McFerrin County’s just a little ways away from here,” Kortney whispered to Brian.
“Do you catch murderers ’n stuff?” Brian’s brown eyes lit with morbid fascination. His hands clutched the bottom of his seat, and his feet kicked back and forth under his chair – he was so like Constance’s boys, Judith’s nephews, in his unconcealed zeal.
Judith could respect zeal. Propriety had never been a sufficient motive to convince her to feign interest in anything that was useless to her, but if something caught her attention, she became obsessive.
And yet at Brian’s question, Judith’s skin grew colder, her heartbeat rushing faster. Metal glinting in moonlight, its sharp-edged point hurtling toward her from the darkness –
“I have worked murder cases, yes.” Judith shoved the memory down.
“Does your dog help you?” Brian said. “Can I pet him?”
“Yes, you may pet him. He’s not dangerous. Now, Ms. Pickens –”
“Kortney.”
“Kortney, if you could explain the phenomena you’ve witnessed, then I –”
There was a muffled thump from across the room. Judith craned her neck, looking for the cause, as Kortney frowned at her son.
“Brian, you gotta make sure you put the books back right. Don’t leave ’em hangin’ off the side of the shelf, or they’ll fall off. Go pick that up.”
“Mom, I didn’t do nothin’ –”
“Go pick it up now.”
“I’m pettin’ the dog,” Brian muttered. With a faint huff, he stood and slumped toward the bookshelf and the book that lay, spine splayed, on the carpet.
“Kids,” Kortney said with a shrug.
“Ms. Pi– Kortney, could you tell me about the phenomena you’ve witnessed?”
“Oh, all kindsa stuff. We got lights flickering, cold spots that never warm up. We got this one room makes you dizzy soon as you walk in. And Brian’s been sleepin’ in my room ’cause he gets freaked out by his room.”
“What is it that frightens him?”
“There’s a guy who shows up in my room at night,” Brian said as he plopped himself back down on the floor and reached toward Orwell, who nudged his head forward into Brian’s hand.
“I beg your pardon?” Judith said.
“He shows up in my room.”
“Does he come at the same time every night?”
“When I’m tryin’a go to sleep. He says some stuff about boxes, and he looks really mean.”
“Boxes?” Judith cocked her head.
“Yeah, somethin’ about how there ain’t enough boxes.”
“Does he say the same thing every time?”
“Yeah. Then he opens his eyes really big like he’s seein’ a monster or somethin’.”
“Does he ever respond to you or address you directly?”
“He just talks ’bout boxes,” Brian said.
Judith scrawled in her notebook: Potential haunting. In practice, she preferred the term place memory because it was more descriptive and neutral, rather than being associated with restless spirits. But haunting was one word and had fewer letters, so today she could set aside its linguistic ambiguity in favor of efficiency. “Anything else?”
“Stuff –” Kortney hesitated for a moment as though deliberating over her words. “Stuff moves around sometimes, or it’s not where I left it.”
“You do live in a house with a child,” Judith said, though she dutifully included the claim in her notes.
“Yeah, I mean, it does tend to happen when Brian is home, but – it’s just weird, that’s all.”
“Weird how?”
“The things that move, it’s not always stuff I think Brian could get to. Stuff on high shelves and whatnot.”
“I’ll look into it,” Judith said. “Is there anything else?”
“There’s a real bad smell sometimes.” Brian rubbed his fingers along Orwell’s belly with great enthusiasm as the massive dog flopped on the floor, legs in the air. “Like sulphur.”
Judith raised her eyebrows. “How do you know what sulphur smells like?”
“’Cause it smells like rotten eggs. My friend Dean from school – he’s in Mrs. Moore’s class, and I’m in Ms. Hildebrand’s class, but we play assassins together at recess – he watched a scary movie about demons, and whenever the demon came people smelled sulphur.”
“Have you smelled anything…sulphurous?” Judith said to Kortney.
“There is a rotten egg smell sometimes. But just kinda, like, whiffs now and then.”
In her notebook, Judith scrawled sulphur smell – natural gas leak?
Brian bounced slightly on his knees. “Maybe the guy who shows up in my room is a demon, and sometimes we can see him and sometimes we can’t, but even if we can’t, there’s the nasty smell, so we can always know when he’s watching us –”
“Brian,” Kortney snapped. “Let the lady talk.”
“After the interview, the next step in an investigation is a tour of the property,” Judith said, “so that I can have a clearer understanding of exactly where in the house you’re experiencing the phenomena.”
“Yeah, sure thing.” Kortney stood up, trailed by Brian, who was vibrating with excitement. “There’s – uh – not a whole lot to see. Not a real big house. But over here by the bookshelf, that’s one cold spot. There’s another one in my bedroom and in the hall. But here, I’ll show you the dizzy room.”
Kortney walked to a doorway in the small, cluttered kitchen. “This used to be a garage, but the guy who lived here before we did converted it to a spare room. But it’s – well, you’ll see.”
Kortney opened the door onto a room that certainly had the feel of a converted garage, with concrete floors, cold, drafty air, and a glare from the bright lightbulbs striving to compensate for the lack of windows and natural light. But there was a couch with colorful throw pillows, a television, a shaggy rug, beanbag chairs voluminous enough to cushion a fall from a multi-story building. Kortney had clearly gone to great lengths to transform the converted garage from a drafty man cave to a cozy TV room.
Judith stepped down two concrete steps into the room, and a moment later she stumbled to the side and leaned her hand against the wall.
Dizzy room indeed.
A disconcerting, unbalanced sensation hung like a prickling halo around Judith. The room seemed tilted, like the carnival funhouse through which Constance had dragged her when they were young. Judith, skinny and undersized and inching toward the painful outer edges of puberty, had trailed after her teenaged sister, beautiful and magnetic in her bubbly way, through the horrors of the “fun” house that had left her dizzy and overstimulated for two hours afterward.
But she couldn’t pinpoint what it was about the drafty room that gave her the same, nauseating sensation.
“Weird, right?” came Kortney’s voice behind her.
“Very.” Judith stepped further into the room, but the dizziness didn’t dissipate.
It seemed a normal room, a typical converted garage. There was no obvious, visible cause for the off-kilter feeling, but the sensation was undeniable. In the cases on which she’d consulted with Bob and in her own reading of paranormal investigation case studies, she’d never encountered this type of phenomenon. Perhaps she’d have to call Bob to brainstorm some possible explanations, although she had been hoping to avoid pestering him with questions.
One of the throw pillows suddenly tipped over, tumbling onto the shag carpet, and Judith stepped closer to scoop it up and return it to its place.
“You wanna see my room?” Brian said, bouncing on the balls of his feet as he ruffled Orwell’s fur.
“Let the lady look around, honey,” Kortney whispered.
“No, I’m ready to move on.” Judith turned back toward the door to the main house, keeping her hand on the wall as she walked. “It’s getting late, and I still have to drive back to Lexington tonight. When I come back this weekend, I’ll bring equipment to do a more thorough investigation.”
“My room’s this way!” Brian bolted down the hallway, with Orwell on his heels.
Torn between the curious instinct to keep up with the jittery boy and the awareness that she was an adult providing services in a professional capacity, Judith hurried after Brian in a brisk walk.
At Brian’s bedroom, Judith stopped inside the door. “If I’m going to hazard a guess, I’d say that you are a nautical enthusiast.”
“Huh? No, I like boats.”
Brian’s room was freshly painted an icy teal, like sunshine glinting through ridges of choppy waves, and covered with posters of ships. Pirate ships and galleons and aircraft carriers and submarines clustered together as in a crowded harbor, waiting to learn their destination. Every surface held at least one model boat, and on the small bookshelf against one wall were books of pirates and warships and naval battles and raft-building.
“When I come back this weekend, I’ll make sure to be in this room at the time you usually see this man,” Judith said, holding her hands on her hips as she looked around. A dull pain throbbed in her forehead, and she suspected that, if she were to let them through, psychic impressions would flood her mind. But not yet. Not today. She could let them through later, after she’d investigated. She had to do this by the book.
“He always shows up right here,” Brian said, placing himself in the center of the room. “And he says somethin’ like, ‘There ain’t enough boxes.’” Brian lowered his voice to a growl. “And then he says some words I ain’t allowed to say and calls somebody a liar. Then his eyes get big, and he disappears.”
“What time of day does this usually happen?” Judith pressed two fingers to her forehead to stave off the growing ache.
“Usually when I’m goin’a sleep.”
“And –” Judith squeezed her eyes shut, her train of thought interrupted by the sharpening pain. “And do you –”
She opened her eyes, and her muscles clenched with icy shock.
In front of her, where Brian had been a moment before, was a man.
Sandy hair, hollow cheeks, blotchy skin, a face too young for his bitter eyes that roved around the room, looking at things Judith couldn’t see. “You said sixteen. There ain’t sixteen boxes here.” Whirling to face the door, the man spat out a vile stream of words that Judith had never before heard in that precise combination, and at the acid in his voice Judith wanted to run, to put something between herself and this man. But her legs wouldn’t move.
Then the man’s eyes widened, the cynical anger dropping from his face, and suddenly he was frightened and young, so young.
Judith followed his eyes. In the doorway of the small room was not Kortney Pickens but a man, moving, rushing forward. His dark hair was flecked with gray and the sleeves of his starched, collared shirt folded up around his elbows, revealing thick-haired forearms and a hand that clutched a long carving knife, a knife designed to slice through flesh.
From somewhere came a drum, thrumming in Judith’s skull. Her skin boiled and froze, but her feet stayed clamped to the ground, unable to move. A gash of pain burned along the scar that cut across where her neck met her shoulder, and she could see it again, a knife slashing through the darkness toward her –
The dark-haired man collided with the younger one, and there was a sickening slice, a squelch. The sandy-haired man’s quick yelp silenced abruptly, and he slumped forward.
The room seemed to shift, the floor unsteady beneath Judith.
Another wet squelch, and the sandy-haired man collapsed to the ground, wrenching in his futile last movements. The older man stood over him, his hand gripping a scarlet-soaked knife.
His mouth tight, the man turned his face toward the doorway, to someone Judith couldn’t see, and jerked his head toward the dying boy, issuing a silent order.
“Miss Psychic Lady?” A hand tugged at her arm. “Are you okay?”
With a start, Judith looked down.
There was Brian, head cocked, eyes vibrant with excitement. There was no body on the floor, no blood. No knife-wielding man with crimson hands.
Just a young boy’s bedroom filled with ships.
Judith dropped to the bed, her breath coming fast and hard. A wet nose nudged her hand, and Orwell’s warm, shaggy body leaned against her.
“You need some water?” came Kortney’s slow Kentucky drawl, more bemused than concerned. “Brian, go get a glass o’ water.”
“No, no, I’m fine,” Judith said as Brian started for the door. “I’m fine. I just – I saw your man. The one with the boxes.”
“You saw him? I didn’t see him! You saw him just now? You heard him talk about the boxes, right?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see him get scared right at the end?”
Judith fought to steady her shaking breath. “He did appear to be scared.”
“Why didn’t I see him?”
“Different people have different sensitivities to psychic impressions,” Judith said, standing. On shaking legs, she turned to Kortney. “I’ll be back on Saturday. I will bring more equipment, and in the meantime I’ll do research on the house’s history and previous owners. If you have any knowledge of previous owners, or if you are able to speak to any neighbors who have lived in the area for a significant period of time, that would be helpful.”
“You think the previous owners are hauntin’ the place?” Kortney’s eyes widened in an older, rounder echo of Brian’s excited stare. “I even asked the real estate agent if anybody ever died here, ’cause I’m real careful about stuff like that, and she swore up and down that nobody never died in this house.”
“Well,” Judith said, slipping through the door and tugging Orwell along. “I think she may have been mistaken.”
There was a faint crash behind her as she exited the room, but Judith didn’t pause to see its cause.
Judith strode through the house and bid a hasty goodbye to Brian and Kortney. At the earliest moment permitted by her shaky sense of etiquette, Judith escaped into the fresh air.
Outside, clouds gathered in the early evening glow, creating a dusky orange haze in the yard. Clustered around the edges of the yard was the same small crowd of mismatched people, watching her with expectant faces.
Judith glanced toward the house, where Brian and Kortney, a confused frown on her face, stood in the doorway. Trying not to be too conspicuous, Judith faced the group of people and pointed toward the main road.
Starting her car, Judith slowly navigated through the horde, inching up the long driveway. In the rearview mirror, she watched the people turn and follow her once more.
When she rounded a bend, out of sight of the house, Judith pulled her car onto the grass, parked, and climbed out.
“I’m on a tight schedule,” she said, facing the motley group. “Please keep your communications down to the basics for tonight. If you need to say more, then you can reach out again when I come back on Saturday. Now, everyone, please form a line.”
Thank you so much for stopping by the read Murmurs in the Walls! If you enjoyed this episode, please let me know with a like, comment, or restack!
→ Keep reading! Episode III: The Revelation
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The plot twist when the group turned out to be ghosts was perfect! Plus, only Judith could tell a group of ghosts to form a line 😂
This episode is top notch! Also, I love her compassion in speaking to the ghosts on the road, and the humour in that. It reminds me of Alison in "Ghosts" (the British version).