The Little Black Box Read online

  The Little Black Box

  K.J. Gillenwater

  First Kindle Edition, 2009

  Copyright 2018 by K. J. Gillenwater

  Cover art design by The Cover Collection

  http://www.thecovercollection.com/

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in any form, in whole or in part, without written permission from the author.

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  When thoughts can kill.

  After the suspicious suicides of several student test subjects, Paula Crenshaw, research assistant in Paranormal Sciences at Blackridge University and budding telekinetic, suspects they may be connected to a little black box designed to read auras. Professor Jonas Pritchard, the head of the department and renowned paranormal expert, doesn't believe his precious experiment could be causing students to drop like flies.

  Haunted by memories of a childhood accident, which she believes she caused with her untamed psychic abilities, Paula finds herself lured to the black box and its mysteries. But when her best friend, Lark, comes close to death after her encounter with the black box, Paula realizes her investigation might endanger the people she loves most. As the suicides stack up, she convinces her fellow researcher, Will Littlejohn, to help her solve the mystery. The closer they get to the truth behind who might be financially backing the project and why, the more dangerous—and deadly—it becomes.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  A piercing pain in Craig Peter’s head threatened to split his skull apart. His eyes watered, and he held back a scream.

  When was the stupid light going to shut off?

  The small black box sat on the table in front of him—a nondescript thing with a light on top and a switch. To believe a little piece of plastic, wires and circuitry could be the cause of so much misery would make his frat brothers laugh.

  Pain jabbed in the back of his head like a needle. It grew stronger, sharper, more agonizing each second.

  Did he really care at this point if he messed up his chances for all that money?

  Five minutes ago he’d felt fine, even though he’d wedged himself into this tiny, cold room in the frat house basement for more than an hour. He’d finished his journal entry for the day and waited patiently for the little black box to turn off.

  Then, whammo, headache from hell...

  The pain grew to the size of a nuclear explosion. The green indicator light on top of the black plastic cube flashed, which meant he could leave soon. It should stop in a few minutes, and the readings would end.

  He needed a couple of aspirin—no, a couple of eight-hundred milligram ibuprofen. Now.

  Craig doubled over when a particularly sharp jab pierced him.

  “Damn!”

  What was going on with his head?

  The contact number.

  If he had any questions or needed any help, he was supposed to call the number. Every day for the past three days, Craig had experienced headaches when using the box, but never a headache so unbearable. A definite reason to call for help.

  The phone number was printed in the agreement he’d signed.

  Where the hell did he put that dumb piece of paper?

  The vicious pain wouldn’t let up and blurred his vision.

  He needed some pain relief now. Or maybe a couple shots of tequila. That might numb it. He could look for the phone number later.

  Craig stumbled and reached blindly for the door. He clutched his head, as if that could somehow stop whatever the box was doing to his brain.

  When he touched the doorknob, the intense ache disappeared. From jabbing, nightmarish pain, to nothing. Calm, blissful, nothing.

  Craig slumped against the cinderblock wall.

  Thank God.

  He couldn’t have lasted another minute.

  His gaze fell on the box. The light on it had gone dark.

  Fear clenched his gut. He took a deep breath.

  That crazy box. He wasn’t going to be afraid of a damn box.

  He grabbed his journal and fumbled through the pages until he found a folded-up piece of paper.

  The contact number and a name: Paula Crenshaw.

  Whoever this Paula chick was, he’d give her a piece of his mind. There were never any warnings about the study causing headaches. Who knew what kind of damage the freaky little thing might be doing to his brain?

  Craig’s gaze settled on the box once more, and a chill ran over him. At least he was done with another session down here in this dank room. His last session. No way would he go through that crap again for a few hundred bucks. Even if it meant he had to sell his game system to pay for the trip.

  Craig yanked the plug out of the wall and headed for the door. He pulled the chain above his head, and the bright, white light of a bare bulb snapped off.

  Behind him, in the dark, the little black box whirred and clicked. Whirred and clicked.

  Chapter Two

  Paula Crenshaw sat behind the steering wheel, her car parked in the faculty lot. She rubbed her temples and took a couple of deep breaths. “You can do this. You can do this.”

  Deep inside, she didn’t know if she could really ‘do this.’ The faking it. The pretending. She walked through life as if she were like everyone else. She got up for work, squeezed in classes and study time, shopped at the supermarket, pumped gas. Nobody was the wiser. She had a smile plastered on her face at the appropriate times. She learned how to blend in. Give the appearance of ‘fine.’

  But that wasn’t the truth. And every year that went by, instead of getting easier—as she hoped it would—it had gotten harder.

  The weekend had ended badly. Her brother had been angrier than ever. Nothing she did or said ever helped. In fact, the harder she tried to be the sister he wanted her to be, the more she scared herself. Sometimes it was smarter to hole up at home, talking to no one, focusing on anything but bad memories.

  Paula slammed her car door shut, tucked her keys in her coat pocket and headed toward her office in the research building. Work waited for her there, and she couldn’t afford to lose her newly acquired research assistant job. Despite her troubles and her fears, she couldn’t hide any longer. She’d hoped for a path to a solution through research. Blackridge University and its Paranormal Sciences department seemed like a good possibility. Everything she’d tried on her own had failed. Maybe Dr. Pritchard’s explorations of the unexplained would turn up a solution. And working within his radius put her in a good position to take advantage should one of his studies pan out.

  Paula Crenshaw hesitated outside her shared office. A shiver of dread rippled through her
.

  She switched on the light. The fluorescent bulb flickered and buzzed. The office contained two desks, two computers, two chairs, and a stained coffeemaker. Nothing more. Yet, the narrow walls closed in, as if they knew she wasn’t who she pretended to be. They knew her secret.

  Get a grip, Paula.

  Will would be here soon. Work would begin.

  Paula picked up her office phone and dialed her voicemail. She tucked the receiver under her chin and shucked off her sweater.

  You have twelve new messages.

  Why did she tell Professor Pritchard she wouldn’t mind being the point of contact for this project? A job she thought would give her more visibility in the department had only ended up causing a lot of headaches.

  She entered her four-digit password.

  Message one. Friday, October 16th. Six-o-seven p.m.

  “Hey, uh, this is number twenty-one. If I spilled coffee on my box, do I need a new one?”

  Hearing the voice on the phone chased away any remaining ghosts and made the shadows retreat. She could lose herself in the tediousness of her research position. Paula sighed, scribbled down the subject’s number, and wrote ‘tech support’ next to it.

  Message two. Friday, October 16th. Seven-fifteen p.m.

  “This is subject thirty-five. I can’t get the memory stick out of my box. I’m going to miss the drop-off deadline. Is that going to be a problem?”

  Paula wrote down his number and then ‘memory stick issue’ next to it. That was a question for tech support, too. She didn’t know much about the actual workings of the black boxes, but she could at least categorize the messages to some degree.

  She pressed a button to continue to the next.

  Message three. Friday, October 16th. Ten-thirty-seven p.m.

  “I want this goddamn box out of here. Got it? I quit. For a lousy five hundred bucks I don’t want you messing with my brain. I didn’t sign up for this.”

  Paula’s pen paused over her notebook. ‘Messing with his brain’? Who was this guy? He didn’t mention his subject number. Was sitting in front of a black box for thirty minutes every day really too much to ask? Since the guy didn’t bother leaving his number, there wasn’t much she could do about it.

  Besides, her main function as a research assistant in the Paranormal Sciences department was transcribing journal entries, not worrying about the people behind the numbers—that was someone else’s job.

  She wrote, ‘unknown subject wants to pull out,’ and then skipped to the next message.

  Hoping to combine two tasks at once, she set her office phone to speaker and flipped through the stack of journals on her desk.

  Message four. Saturday, October 17th. Two-forty-nine a.m.

  “Hey, baby, wanna have a good—”

  Paula pressed ‘delete message.’

  She deleted several more, which were unrelated to the Black Box Project, as her fellow researchers called it, and glanced up at her calendar. Five more weeks of this crap. Thanksgiving Break never seemed so far away.

  “Hey, Paula.”

  She looked up from the journal she’d been paging through.

  Will Littlejohn, wearing jeans one step away from threadbare and a faded green sweatshirt, lumbered into the tiny office they shared. He held up a printout from the local newspaper’s website. “Did you read the article today about the ghost at the hotel up in the mountains?” He heaved his overloaded backpack onto his desk.

  Paula raised a finger to silence him as the phone messages continued. She listened to the last one.

  Message twelve. Sunday, October 18th. Two-oh-five p.m.

  “Paula? It’s Peter.”

  Her gut clenched at the sound of her brother’s voice.

  “I tried your cell, but I think it must’ve been turned off. Anyway, I was just wondering why you didn’t show for Sunday dinner again. The twins were so disappointed. Carol made your favorite, chicken enchiladas. Call me.”

  Will lifted his eyebrows, sat down, and busied himself with something on his computer.

  Paula leaned back. The guilt she’d worked so hard at tamping down earlier washed over her in a flood. The fact Will had heard everything made it all the worse.

  End of messages. Would you like to change your greeting?

  She hung up the phone and stared at the journals in front of her.

  Will cleared his throat. “So, did you hear about that ghost sighting—?”

  Before he could launch into a detailed retelling of his newest ghost story, Paula cut him off. “I don’t really have time to listen today, Will.” She opened a file on her computer and started to transcribe the journal entry in front of her.

  “Got a lot of work, huh? That’s all right. I just came by to pick up my notes and head to the library. I wasn’t going to hang around or anything.” He took a pushpin from the wall and stuck his newest story in an empty spot in his collage of articles and clippings. “You can read if for yourself if you want.” He grabbed a manila folder, shoved it in his backpack, and combed a hand through his shaggy, overgrown hair. “See you in the morning.” He gave her a casual wave. “I’ll bring the donuts, you bring the coffee?”

  Paula smiled at the reminder of their Tuesday morning ritual. He might be a scruffy, goofy oaf, but Will could be sweet when he wanted to be. “Columbian or French Roast?”

  “You choose. I like women with a take-charge attitude.” He winked and sailed out of the room, his worn-out sneakers clopping loudly on the tile floor.

  When she faced the glowing computer screen, however, her smile faded. Her brother’s message ran through her head. He would never understand why she didn’t come yesterday. When she lost control of her secret, she wasn’t safe to be around.

  “Knock, knock.” Professor Jonas Pritchard stood in the doorway wearing a white t-shirt, jeans, and a black sports jacket. If it weren’t for the tinge of gray on his sideburns, he could pass for a better-dressed version of the average college student.

  Paula’s stomach flip-flopped. Professor Pritchard never came to her office. Never.

  “Can I talk to you, Paula?”

  He knew her name?

  “What’s up, professor?” First-year grad students weren’t usually on a first-name basis with the professors, especially not the head of the department.

  “We’ve got a problem, and I was hoping you could investigate before the dean starts breathing down my neck. I’ve been correlating your transcripts with the hard data for one of our subjects, and something isn’t right here.”

  “What do you mean?” Paula’s role in the study was so limited, she didn’t know much about the output from the black box. In fact, she’d never even seen a machine up close. Her role was to type up the journals every day as they came in and turn it over to the lab assistants in Data Processing. They took the raw data from the little black boxes and compared them to the transcripts using some algorithm or other.

  Professor Pritchard leaned against the doorframe. “I need you to go to a subject’s place of residence and question him about some of his journal entries.” He leafed through a sheaf of papers.

  “Are we allowed to do that? I thought we were only supposed to identify subjects by their assigned numbers.”

  He looked up from the papers, his gaze piercing. “Are you questioning my judgment on this?”

  “No, but—”

  “I’m the head of the department. It’s my study. I think I’d know if any ethics were being breached.”

  Paula stumbled over her words. “I-I just didn’t want to jeopardize the project.”

  “Let me worry about the details.” Pritchard thumbed through the papers once more. “You got this position because I lost a very valued member of our team, and you were really the only one left in the graduate program who hadn’t found a position. But don’t think I couldn’t find someone to replace you, if necessary.”

  Paula felt her face flame red. “I want to be here. I didn’t mean to question anything. What is it you need m
e to do?”

  “I marked the particular entries that don’t correlate.” He handed her a stack of transcribed journal entries flagged with bright pink stickies. “It could be nothing—maybe the subject left on some electronic device—but I need you to find out for sure. If he hasn’t been living up to his end of the agreement, we need to know about it.”

  Each subject had to sign a release agreement stating he would be completely honest in his journal entries and would operate the black box only as instructed. Any violation of the agreement, and a subject would be kicked from the program.

  “Okay, what do I need to know?”

  “All the information you need is right here.” He handed her a sticky note with a name, a campus address, and a phone number.

  She looked at the paper and read the name scribbled across the top: Craig Peters. “When do you need all this back?”

  “This is a priority project.” He tucked the manila folder under his arm. “You have until tomorrow after the weekly status meeting to get back to me. I’ll have Minerva set aside some time around one. Don’t disappoint me, Paula. I’d hate to have to replace you in the middle of the study.”

  Paula read the sticky note.

  Subject 22. Craig Peters, senior. Omega Omicron house, 331 North Avenue. 723-5550.

  Ah, yes, Number 22. The adventurer. When he wasn’t drinking beer, he was rock climbing or snowboarding. His journal tagged him as the guy who was always one step away from a Life Flight trip to the E.R.

  Paula had never been to fraternity row before. She’d never had any reason to be there. Today was her lucky day.

  “Any variation on the agreement,” said the professor, “and I want to know about it.”

  “Got it.” Paula hoped she’d be able to satisfy the professor and find out what he wanted to know.

  He nodded and rapped twice on the door, as if cementing the agreement.

  Chapter Three

  Paula knocked on the door of the Omega Omicron house. It hadn’t been hard to find the right building, what with the three-foot red-and-gray Greek letters tacked to the side of the two-storey house.