by Sergio Gomez
He considered this for a second. Gav would’ve said both if he were here, but the camping trip was a few days out, and Fred didn’t want to stash a bunch of weed and shrooms in his bedroom until then. Not that his parents would snoop around when he wasn’t home or anything like that, it just didn’t sit well in his mind.
“Just weed,” Fred said. Anyway, if Gavin insisted on it, he’d come pay Fletch another visit.
“How much do you need?”
“An ounce.”
“Whoa! You having a party or something?”
“Sort of,” Fred said. “A party in the woods.”
Fletcher’s eyes lit up. “A camping trip?”
“Yeah.”
“Where at?”
Fred shrugged. He pulled out his cellphone and started searching through his messages from Gavin. “Not sure. Believe it or not, Gav planned this whole thing. We’re going a day after he comes back from upstate.”
“Rad, man.” Fletcher took another sip of his drink and considered things.
While he was doing that, Fred found the name of the cabin they were going to. “We’re going to this place called Lakewood Cabin. Ever heard of it?”
Fletcher shook his head. “Nope.”
Fred opened up the website link and read a phrase off the banner webpage. “The most secluded cabin in Pennsylvania.”
“Talk about a good party spot, huh?” Fletcher laughed. “Hey, what do you say if I come? I’ll bring the weed free of charge, just for letting me tag along.”
“Wow, Fletch, that’d be awesome. The more the merrier and all that shit. Isn’t it kind of sudden for you, though?”
“Nah. I can get some of my buddies to housekeep while I’m gone.”
“Okay, then. Yeah, man, I think it’ll be a good time.” Fred didn’t add that less than an hour ago he’d been arguing with Gavin about not going…
“Since you’re here already, you want to smoke a little?” Fletcher jutted his chin out to a bong on the table between them. It had some sort of Chinese dragon on it, with gold characters all over it.
“Thought you’d never ask, Fletch,” Fred said to him.
“You know I always got you, man,” Fletcher said, switching the drink for the bong in his hands. Before getting it ready, he asked, “You sure you don’t want a drink?”
“Nah, that’s alright.”
“Saving your partying for the camping trip?”
Fred laughed. “Not really. Just not in the mood.”
Fletcher started the bong while they caught up. It’d been a while since they’d hung out, and Fred wasn’t sure if it was the weed or what, but when he returned home later that night, he felt better about everything. The stressful day at the computer shop seemed so long ago that it wasn’t weighing on him anymore. He even got some studying done and was looking forward to crushing finals week.
Before his brain went off for the night, he realized the pot had nothing to do with this new mood—and everything to do with the upcoming camping trip. A week away from suburban life surrounded by nature with plenty of food, drinks, and music by a campfire sounded like just the thing he needed after this semester of hell. And the cherry on top of it all would be that if things went the way he planned, Noelle would be there with him.
When he finally went to sleep, there was a smile on his face.
Chapter 4
Molly was sitting by the window, watching the light drizzle splash against the glass. Her laptop was open on the desk in the corner of the hotel room, with her headphones sitting next to it. She’d been editing the footage of the meeting with Andy Cameron for the last hour and a half or so, and now she was growing weary.
She looked down at the slender watch on her wrist and saw it was almost midnight. Her stomach grumbled, and in her mind, she saw Emeril putting down the hundred-dollar bill on Andy’s desk. All she had for dinner tonight was a yogurt topped with some granola because she was trying to keep their costs down, and here Emeril was throwing money around like they were on the Cohen Brothers’ budget.
It was nights like these that made her regret choosing this profession. Her father, a hard ass military guy who’d become a criminal defense lawyer after getting out of the Marines, had wanted her to follow in his own footsteps.
Being a rebellious twenty-one year old at the time when she was applying for law schools, Molly never bothered to open their response letters. Instead, she’d decided to take all the money she saved while working at the local campus bar and travel around the country vlogging her experiences on YouTube.
She worked wacky jobs for money, slept in her car most nights, and lived off canned beans and jerky for about a year and a half. A year into it was when she met Emeril at a bar in Florida.
He approached her because he saw her talking into the camera at one of the tables and asked her what she was doing. At first, she thought it was just an old man hitting on her. Molly was no stranger to that—not that she was going to win any beauty pageants, but she was a thin blond at a bar by herself, which was usually enough for her to garner attention from drunken men.
But the more she talked to him, the more she realized he had no interest in her sexually. Even now that they were four years into making documentaries together, she wasn’t sure Emeril was sexual at all. He never talked about past relationships or a marriage or anything like that. He was all about his research. It was kind of odd, like he was some sort of asexual alien or something, but she tried not to think about it too much.
That night they met, he told her he was a paranormal investigator. Molly started out thinking it was funny and played it up for the vlog audience, but Emeril didn’t play along. He was adamant and stern about his beliefs in the supernatural, told her he was convinced that there was no way the five senses humans had could discover everything this planet had to offer. Emeril invited her to come with him to an abandoned house not far from the bar they were in.
Molly thought she was sniffing out some sort of trap to get in her pants, or maybe even worse—maybe this strange old man was planning to murder her. But Emeril didn’t push it on her, just gave her his number and went back to drinking his scotch.
It wasn’t until the next night that she called him back. For some reason, the encounter with him had stuck in her mind. The sincerity of his belief in the supernatural was like nothing she’d ever heard, but he didn’t come off as some batshit crazy person. It was more like he had a staunch belief in this, more like a highly religious person who truly believed they were on a path God put them on.
Emeril had picked up on the first ring, and they’d arranged to meet at the same bar they met at the night before. From there, Emeril drove them to the abandoned, supposedly haunted Truman house. On the drive there, he told Molly all about the legend of the house.
The story went that a man had caught his wife in bed with another man. In an act of rage, he went down to the basement, grabbed his double-barrel shotgun and gunned down the pair while they were having sex in the master bedroom. Still blinded by rage, the man drowned his two children in the bathtub.
Supposedly, at specific hours of the night, you could hear the faint sound of the shotgun blast going off. In the bathroom, you were supposed to be able to hear the ghosts of the children splashing in the bathtub, struggling to get out from underneath their father’s hold.
Molly found rational explanations for all of that during their visits. The sound of the ghost shotgun blast could have easily been the loose window pane banging against the side of the house when the wind blew. The splashing could be attributed to water leaking through the walls from the side of the roof, seeing how there were plenty of leaks in the ceiling.
Even though there seemed to be a rational explanation for the rumors, Molly was fascinated when Emeril walked her through the house. He was like some sort of tour guide showing her mind’s eye the possibility of another world layered over top of their own.
She uploaded the vlog, and the next few days she saw her YouTube subscriptions
almost double. The vlog of the paranormal investigation was a huge hit, and she called Emeril back and proposed the idea of them making a full-length documentary. She emailed him a breakdown of the ad revenue and how much she would be making on the vlog by herself. She told him that with his help, she could turn her channel into something bigger.
That was the hook, line, and sinker for Emeril, and the beginning of their documentary series. Emeril brought the knowledge, interviewing skills, and investigation, while Molly did all the camera work and editing. Together they were the Paranormal Talk channel on YouTube.
But what the cameras didn’t show were the shrinking bank account numbers between revenue checks, the camera/computer repair bills, and the shitty hotel rooms that smelled of cheap cigarettes, and nights of going to sleep hungry like she was tonight.
A knock on her hotel room stirred her out of her thoughts. She turned away from the water streaked window and went over to the door. Molly didn’t bother asking who it was, because it could have only been one person.
She opened the door, and Emeril stood on the other side. The top of his chauffeur hat and the tips of the hair poking out from underneath it were wet from the rain. He held a brown paper bag that was dotted with water. A strong smell of cilantro and tortillas wafted from it.
“I brought you a burrito from the restaurant next door,” he said, holding up the takeout bag. “A peace offering, if you will.”
“For what?”
“For not consulting you about giving Andy Cameron money for the information.”
“That’s…alright, Emeril.” She felt like a big jerk now that he’d gone out into the rain to get her food.
“Are you saying you don’t want it?”
Molly grabbed the bag from his grip and shook her head. “No, no. I’m not saying that at all.”
They went into the room. Molly pushed her laptop and headphones to a corner of the desk, and they ate their burritos on it.
“How was the interview? Did you get a proper angle?” Emeril asked.
“It’s OK. It’ll work.” Molly took a big bite of her burrito, realizing she was hungrier than she thought. “My biggest concern is that he was hard to hear sometimes, so I’ll have to pipe up the volume on some of his responses.”
Emeril nodded in approval, then changed the subject. “On my way to get these burritos—if you can call these burritos—I had an interesting phone call.”
“About what? And with who?”
“The bar owner over at the Green Lizard Tavern. About our friend Mister Harold Buckley.”
“And?”
“And, he told me Mister Buckley wasn’t in, but that I should try again tomorrow. He said there’s a good chance he’ll be there. Said the guy comes in every other night.”
“How far is this place from here?”
“A little over forty minutes.”
Molly finished off her burrito, crumpled the tinfoil wrap, and threw it in the wastebasket. “Guess we’ll be putting a bunch of miles on the old Subaru out here, huh?”
Everything out here seemed to be spread out far apart, with either barren fields or dense trees between the places where people lived.
“Indeed,” he said. “Hopefully she’ll hold up.”
Emeril finished his burrito and threw the foil into the trashcan with hers, then he got up. “Well, I’ll leave you to edit or whatever it is you had planned for the rest of the night.”
“It’s almost midnight, Emeril,” Molly said, flashing the face of her watch at him.
“Ah,” Emeril said. “Well, it’s almost ghoul and goblin o’clock.”
They’d walked through the room, and Emeril was standing out in the hotel corridor. Molly was at the door. She rolled her eyes, and closing the door she said, “Good night, Emeril.”
“Good night,” he said to her before the door shut.
Chapter 5
There was a knock at Martin Barter’s office door. He always hated disruptions when he was working on the schedule, especially in the summer when so many of the hotel maids needed days off.
But he painted on his best smile when Joey Schmitt, the kitchen manager, came into his office and slumped into the chair in front of him. The collar of his shirt had a ring of sweat around it, and his hair was all disheveled.
“Hey, Joey, what I can I do for you?” Martin said, closing the spreadsheet. Something told him this wasn’t going to be a quick conversation.
“So this morning I get a fuckin’ text from one of my cooks, tellin’ me he quits!”
That was bad news, but not really Martin’s concern. They could always find a replacement in this economy. “Okay…”
“Then I come into the kitchen, and guess what I see? Fuckin’ grease all over the damn place. Like the little asshole—pardon my French, Marty, I’m just pissed—put it into a bucket and threw it all over.”
“That’s awful,” Martin said, nodding. He already knew where this conversation was going.
“Think you can give me a hand, Marty?” Joey shook his head back and forth like there were gnats buzzing around his crown.
“Sure, I can send some of my staff to help you out.” Marty said.
Joey nodded, then his train of thought went elsewhere. “I can’t believe that little fuckin’ weasel. That’s the problem with young kids today—it’s not like back in the old days when we were growing up. Back when you would get a foot up your ass for this sort of stuff, ya know?”
“Yeah,” Martin said, despite that Martin was in his early thirties and Joey was at least in his mid-fifties. Sometimes it was easier to just agree with people.
Joey got out of the chair. “Anyway, enough of my bickerin’. You think something can be done before the breakfast rush?”
Martin glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was only six AM. The hotel kitchen wasn’t officially open until 7:30 AM. He’d have to call in his big gun for this one. “Yeah, I have the perfect guy for it. I just gotta call him on the walkie.”
“Okay, great,” Joey said, getting out of the chair. “I’ll meet you at the kitchen so you can check out the mess this prick left behind.”
As Joey headed out of the office, Martin heard him muttering “can’t believe it” and some more expletives.
Once he was sure the kitchen manager was out of the room and down the hallway, Martin burst out laughing. It was an unfortunate thing that happened to him, but Joey’s way of handling stress always amused Martin. Usually his reaction to situations was overdramatic, with too many f-bombs, but once Martin would see the mess in the kitchen, he’d realize in this case his reaction was perfectly called for.
Martin took the walkie-talkie that connected with the rest of the cleaning staff’s walkies. He hit the button on the side. “Hey, Ignacio, are you in yet?”
“Yes, boss.” The voice crackled through the speaker.
“Great. Can you meet me in my office? I have some extra work for you this morning.”
“Yes, boss,” was the response.
As it always was.
“See this shit? Unbelievable, huh Martin?” Joey said, a hand on his hip.
The two managers were standing between the fridges and the grill that made up the cooking area of the hotel kitchen. Towering behind them was the hotel janitor, Ignacio Calderon. A gargantuan man who was as wide as the two managers put together.
Joey hadn’t been exaggerating, as he sometimes was known to do. The young cook had left behind a big “fuck you” before quitting. Grease was splashed all over the area. It was on the counters, the floor, the crevices between the appliances, and so on. It was about two gallons of the stuff, and the worst part was that it had turned into a sticky, thick goo after cooling overnight.
“Yeah, I’m seeing it alright,” Martin sympathized.
“Think your guy can do it? In an hour or so?” Joey said, checking the watch on his wrist as if making sure that time hadn’t suddenly jumped ahead.
Martin turned to Ignacio. “What do you think, big guy? Thi
nk you can do it in an hour?”
Ignacio didn’t respond, because his mind was elsewhere…
The brown spots of grease were changing color before his eyes. First, a bright red. The color of roses, maybe, but the spots got darker the longer he stared at them.
Darker. Darker. Darker.
Until they were crimson. The same shade of red as drying blood.
Ignacio was no longer in the hotel kitchen. He was in Mexico now. In the house he grew up in until he was a teenager. His father was teaching him how to cook huevos con chorizo. Even though Ignacio was only six years old, he was already tall enough to tower over the stove.
Arturo Calderon was standing behind him, his hand over Ignacio’s hand holding the spoon they were using to scramble the eggs.
“Just like this, Mijo,” Arturo said, guiding his hand around the rim of the pan, then bringing it straight down through the puddle of runny eggs. “Keep doing that over and over until it starts to get fluffy. Entiendes?”
Ignacio nodded.
Arturo let his hand go and watched his son unsteadily make circles around the pan with the spoon. Ignacio kept looking over at him for approval.
“Bien, bien,” Arturo said, leaning against the countertop with his arms folded. “It’s important you know how to cook eggs, Ignacio. They’ll help you get stronger. You want to get stronger, don’t you?”
Ignacio could still feel his chin burning and pulsing from the punches the kid who beat him up after school had landed on him. They were going to turn into bruises tomorrow. He nodded to answer his father’s question.
Arturo clapped him on the shoulder, and was about to say something else, when Guicho Calderon—Arturo’s younger brother—came charging into the room. He was dragging an older teenage boy by the arm. The kid’s eyes were opened wide and wet with tears.
“I finally caught the pendejo,” Guicho said, forcing the kid into one of the metal chairs at the kitchen table.
Ignacio knew who the kid was from seeing him around the village. His name was Cristian Morales, nicknamed “Canguro” because when he got into fistfights at school, he danced around like a kangaroo.
