“This?” he asked, tapping the manuscript with a finger. “They’re transcripts of some of the interviews I’ve done over the past few years.”

“For a new book?”

“Possibly. But mostly I’m trying to figure out something for myself. There’s been a real escalation in paranormal experiences over the past few years, and I’m trying to get a fix on when it started.”

“No kidding,” I said. “These days you can’t turn around without tripping over someone in this city who’s had at least one encounter with a ghost or a fairy or a monster or something.”

Christy smiled and shook his head. “No, it just seems that way.”

“Everybody we know has some weird experience or another.”

“That’s because people who have had these kinds of unusual experiences are drawn into each other’s peripheries—at least it happens to those of us who don’t manage to forget the experience. Sometimes I think it’s like a kind of magnetic attraction. If you’ve had one experience, it appears to automatically raise the possibility that you’ll have another. And just having one seems to bring you into the proximity of others who’ve had at least one, thereby raising the probability that you’ll both have another.”

I just looked at him.

“But most people,” he said, “go about their daily lives, oblivious—even after an experience.” He smiled. “Though sometimes they really have to work at not remembering.”

That was me, up to a couple of years ago when I finally had to give in and admit that all this weird stuff that kept intruding into my life was real.

“And you think it’s happening more often now?” I asked.

Christy nodded. “When I first started cataloguing the incidents, they were few and far between, and pretty hard to track down. But I’ve had it relatively easy. It was more difficult when the Professor got into it, because he started even earlier than I did.”

“And is it happening all over, or just here?”

“I don’t know for sure. I doubt that this is the only pocket of increased activity, but it’s definitely a lively one.”

“Hence the police department actually having a task force to deal with it.”

The fact that the Newford Police Department had a unit devoted to dealing with the paranormal wasn’t exactly common knowledge, but I knew, because both Christy and the Professor had been tapped as consultants for it.

“Hence—” Christy smiled at the word. “—indeed.”

“So what do you think is causing it?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“I do. Newford’s one of those rare places built on a nexus of time and spirit zones, which means the spiritworld rubs shoulders with this one more than it normally would otherwise.”