~5.3~

Two women stood in front of one of the iron gates. One of them was a college-age girl with light brown hair and a powder blue tote bag, in which she had a digital camcorder, a battered copy of the architectural magazine, and print outs from websites with names like “Haunted America”.

She hadn’t been able to find a lot of information about strange things in Jericho on the web, and most of what was there was on amateur websites that were rarely updated and poorly designed… the most popular urban legend site didn’t mention it once.

“So this is it?” the woman asked her guide, a somewhat older woman with dark hair.

“Yeah, this is it,” she said. She gave the iron gate a push and it swung slightly inward. “Lock’s busted. Building’s empty.”

“Are you coming in?”

“No,” she said. “There’s nothing in there I need right now. I don’t go poking around dead spots for fun.”

“Dead spots?” the girl asked.

“Yeah… you ever play ping pong?”

“A little, in college. There was a table in the basement of the dorm.”

“An old one?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Was it all warped and cracked?”

“Yeah,” she said. “There was this one spot that if the ball hit, it wouldn’t bounce right, it would just kind of… stop, and then roll off to the side.”

“A dead spot,” the woman said. “You get those in older tables. Ping pong’s a game of physics… predictable interactions of cause and effect. Then the table starts to warp, and you get spots where the assumptions that normally govern the game stop working. Dead spots.”

Just for a second, the cold night seemed to run a little colder.

“Are… are you coming in?” the girl asked.

“Nah,” the woman said. “If you’re smart, you won’t stick around too long, either. This city’s been getting weird lately. Restless and weird.”

“Yeah, that’s why I’m here,” the girl said. “I actually like weird things.”

“Well, bless your heart.”