So Fell The Sparrow

by Katie Jennings

  Nellie let out a frustrated breath. “I’m going to get someone who can help. You’re in denial, but the house is not. It’s only going to get worse unless we do something.”

  “This is my house,” Grace reminded her. “Just what the hell do you think you’re going to do to it?”

  Nellie softened, reaching out to grasp Grace’s shoulder. “I know you’re grieving, child. I know you don’t want any of this, but that doesn’t change anything. I want you to be happy in this house, to stay as long as you can. If we don’t fix this, in time the house will not be habitable.”

  Grace wearily shook her head. “I’m going back to bed. I need to be alone.”

  Nellie let her hand fall lamely to her side. She nodded, saying nothing as Grace fled to the sanctuary of her bedroom.

  Once upstairs, Grace started to shut her bedroom door, only to pause when she heard footsteps directly outside in the hall. Exasperated, she threw back the door and leaned out of the doorway. “Nellie, I—”

  There was no one there. The hall was empty. Downstairs, she heard the front door click shut as Nellie left.

  Confused, she tried to rationalize how Nellie could have been right outside her bedroom and then out the front door in a matter of seconds. Had she even heard the old woman follow her up the stairs?

  “Who’s there?” she called out, assuming someone else must have come in. Silence met her question, which only made her doubt her sanity even more. Feeling ridiculous, she stepped back into the room, shut the door, and turned around.

  Her bedroom window was wide open. A tiny brown sparrow sat on the windowsill, eyeing her curiously. She blinked, struggling to remember if she’d opened the window earlier that morning. Shouldn’t she remember if she had?

  The sparrow fluttered outside, joining its companions in the trees. Grace let out a rush of breath and walked over to shut the window, closing the latch on it. She stared at the birds accusingly as if they’d left the window open and made the footsteps right outside her bedroom door.

  Because, as much as she wanted to deny it, she knew it hadn’t been Nellie.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Did you die in this room?”

  …we all did.

  “Were you tormented by the doctors, the nurses? Did they drive you to kill yourself? Or were you murdered by one of them?”

  Silence saturated the halls of the once great Bellhurst Institution, but what the human ear could not detect, Ian Black knew his digital recorder would. Haunted souls craved acknowledgement, and he was more than willing to listen. Given the strange events that had already happened that night, he had a gut feeling they’d captured some dynamite evidence. He couldn’t wait to review it once the investigation was over.

  Until then, he’d ask his questions of the lost souls and the damned that he knew remained in the old asylum. He could feel them, could sense their presence. It chilled his skin with goose bumps and lifted the hair on his arms. He felt like there were eyes on him, though he could see no one. Such was the magic of the supernatural.

  He was, by profession, a ghost hunter. A teenage obsession with horror flicks and haunted houses turned quickly into real life adventures with some truly frightening encounters. It was in his mid-twenties that he founded Great American Paranormal with his childhood best friend, leaving behind a career as a trained chef and focusing everything he had on investigating the paranormal. Now at thirty-one, it was everything to him. And by some stroke of either genius or luck, he had managed to capture worldwide interest in his investigations and offers for TV deals were being thrown his way.

  None of that mattered to him, though. At least not as much as his commitment to finding rock-solid evidence of life after death. He’d go to the ends of the earth for it, breaking down doors others were too afraid to touch, opening himself up to a world beyond his own.

  It wasn't just his job—it was his life.

  The temperature suddenly dropped several degrees in pockets of air around him. His Mel Meter showed fluctuations that were frankly impossible. Drastic and sudden temperature drops like that could only mean one thing. The ghosts had found him.

  “Dude, I feel that. Do you feel that?”

  Ian didn’t bother looking at his partner as he continued to walk down the hallway, holding his recorder in one hand and the Mel Meter in the other. “Yeah, man.”

  Alex Gallagher grinned toothily and shifted the professional-grade camcorder he held on his shoulder. He kept the lens focused on Ian, the world around him cast in the green glow of night vision. “Check out that doll on the floor to the left, missing its legs and shit. Creepy.”

  “There were children that were patients here, too,” Ian said, repulsed by the thought. “Left here to rot by their families.”

  “The world was a cruel place back then.”

  Ian glanced over his shoulder with a dark grin. “Still is.”

  Alex nodded, panning the camera to the doll as Ian checked the EMF readings surrounding it.

  When Ian didn’t get anything out of the ordinary, he turned away and continued to ask questions aloud to whatever spirits may be present. “Why were you sent here? Did your family abandon you?”

  Alex scratched his shoulder blade, feeling uncomfortable in his own skin. It was a common side effect for him whenever the air chilled and quieted to an impossible void of nothingness. He wanted to scratch his nose, but fought back the urge in order to keep the camera steady. They were trying to get some good footage to show the TV producers, and the last thing he wanted was to drop the camera because of an itchy nose.

  Thinking of being on TV got his blood pumping with excitement. He was dying to take Great American Paranormal to the next level, and he knew that they were good enough to make some serious waves in the paranormal community. Hell, they already were. Paranormal groups all over the country emulated what he and Ian showcased on their popular YouTube channel. It was only a matter of time before they had the whole country—the entire world—watching them hunt down ghosts.

  Plus, they made a good team. Ian was practically his brother; his best friend since they were kids growing up in Seattle. Where Ian was the more intensely-serious-brooding one, Alex liked to think of himself as the wildly-intelligent-and-nerdy-but-still-good-looking sidekick with a heart of gold. How could that not make great television?

  The chills that ran up his arms began to dissipate, signaling the end of their encounter. He ran a free hand through his sandy blond hair, his grass-green eyes landing on Ian. “I think they’ve moved on. Where to next?”

  “I want to check out the old infirmary. Nancy said that’s where she saw the shadow figure.” Ian took the next right and made his way into the asylum’s hospital wing, his eyes well-adjusted to the darkness as the hour approached two a.m. He deftly avoided the debris littering the grimy linoleum floor, his ears perked for any sound.

  “Remember what that old guy said?” Alex asked, dodging an ancient typewriter that lay mangled in his path. “About patients who misbehaved having their teeth ripped out in that dental chair? We need to find it and do an EVP session.”

  Before Ian could reply, a resounding crash of something heavy and metallic penetrated the silent darkness in echoing waves.

  “Holy shit!” Alex cried out, the camera shaking as he faced the direction of the crash. “What the hell was that?”

  “I don’t know.” Ian faced the camera, his adrenaline pumping hot with the thrill of the hunt. “Let’s go find out.”

  Alex let out an unsteady laugh, embracing the rush. “Great American Paranormal: investigating unexplained crashes and bangs since 2007.”

  Ian brushed back his dark, shoulder length hair. “Somebody’s gotta do it.”

  They hurried toward the hospital wing, bursting through the doors and into a high-ceilinged room lined with broken beds and tattered sheets. Wide windows covered one wall, though the cloud cover outside prevented any moonlight from shining through.

  In the center of the dilapidated room sat
a large metal chair, the legs mangled and the backrest bent over the seat. The dirt that layered the floor surrounding it was marred, as though the chair had recently scraped over it.

  Alex froze. “Dude, that chair wasn’t there before.”

  “No, it was in the back corner, I remember,” Ian recalled, approaching the chair cautiously. “Something must have thrown it across the room.”

  “No fucking way.” Alex focused the camera on the chair and the disturbed floor around it. “Let me check the static camera I set up in here.”

  While Ian continued to inspect the chair, Alex raced over to the camera set up on a tripod in the corner of the room. He immediately let out a loud curse and seriously considered kicking the equipment. “The battery’s dead!”

  Ian looked up from the chair. “How is that possible? It was a brand-new battery.”

  Alex grunted with frustration as he examined the camera with a flashlight. “Whatever it was that threw that chair must have drained the energy out of this battery and used it as fuel.”

  “Maybe it was trying to get our attention.” Ian glared around the room, letting the adrenaline take over. “You wanted us in here, didn’t you? Now we’re here. Show yourself! Throw this chair again. Use my energy!”

  Alex abandoned the dead camera and returned to filming Ian, biting his lower lip anxiously as he looked around the darkened room. Although he didn’t hear anything, he sensed a sudden humming of electricity along his skin. He gritted his teeth in a hard smile. “It’s here, buddy.”

  “I know.” Ian held his arms out, welcoming the same sensation. In his right hand, he held his digital recorder. “Did you kill people here? Were you one of the sick, twisted motherfuckers that hurt innocent children?”

  …can’t kill what does not live.

  “Why don’t you hurt me? If you’re so tough, lift that chair and smash it over my head.” Ian eyed the chair in challenge, willing it to move. “C’mon!”

  In that instant, he both heard and felt an ominous, otherworldly whisper rush at him from behind. He jumped and whirled around, eyes wide as he scanned the darkness. “Did you hear that?”

  “Nope. What was it?” Alex asked, still filming as he walked closer. “A voice?”

  “A whisper.” Ian shook off an icy chill, feeling suddenly lightheaded. He swayed, gripping his head with both hands.

  “Dude, you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Ian assured him. “Just drained.”

  “You did tell it to use your energy,” Alex joked, patting his friend on the back. “C’mon, let’s go find that dental chair.”

  Ian nodded, glancing back at the broken metal chair as they left the room. He tried to make sense of what the voice had said to him. He could have sworn it said the word doctor…

  * * *

  Hours later, they left the abandoned asylum and embraced the morning sun.

  “I could use a big stack of pancakes and a mountain of bacon right about now,” Alex announced cheerfully, suppressing a yawn. They wandered to their black utility van with its large lime green and orange Great American Paranormal sign on the side and opened the back door. “Better yet, sausage wrapped with pancakes wrapped with bacon, covered in syrup with a side of fruit. Gotta stay healthy.”

  “You act like that fruit will save your arteries.”

  “Since when do you care about my arteries?”

  Ian shrugged. “I don’t.”

  “Good. Because we’re going to Denny’s after we drop this stuff off at the hotel.”

  “I want to go over the recording from the hospital wing, see if I can make out what that voice said,” Ian said before he skirted around to the front of the van and climbed into the driver’s seat.

  Alex sighed as he slammed the back door shut and slid into the passenger seat. “You’re gonna make me wait to eat? After a ten-hour investigation?”

  “Yep.” Ian shot a look at his friend. “You’ll live.”

  Alex reached into the backseat and grabbed a half-eaten bag of nacho cheese Doritos. “You’re lucky I have a stash.”

  “You’re lucky I don’t leave your ass here,” Ian grunted as he pulled onto the lonely, tree-lined road that served as the entrance to the asylum.

  “That’s not a very nice way to talk to your best friend.” Alex grinned before shoving a handful of chips into his mouth. In between chews and crunches he smiled again. “You wouldn’t have even gotten into ghost hunting if it wasn’t for me. It was my hobby first.”

  “Keep playing that card, see where it gets you.” Ian chuckled, his anticipation building. “I think we caught something good last night.”

  Alex nodded and fought back another yawn. “Dude, that chair…talk about freaky.”

  “Something wanted our attention.” Ian’s hands clenched on the steering wheel. “It wanted to speak to us. That’s why I have to listen to that recording. I need to know.”

  Alex tossed the empty chip bag into the backseat. “We will. I have a feeling it’s going to change things big time for us. Voices like that don’t get captured very often.”

  Ian nodded. “Those TV producers wanted more proof of what we can do. I think this will be a good start.”

  Half an hour later, they settled into their cramped hotel room and broke out Alex’s laptop. They brought up the recording and skipped ahead to the time they were in the hospital. Ian preferred listening to EVPs through the speakers versus on the device itself as it came through much clearer. He wanted his first impression of whatever they caught to be perfect.

  Alex clicked the play button, and immediately Ian’s voice filled the room.

  “…one of the sick, twisted motherfuckers that hurt innocent children?”

  Alex began to say something, but Ian held his hand up as he caught the warped whisper of another voice. “Wait, play that back.”

  “Okay, one sec,” Alex skipped back a few seconds on the recording, bumped up the volume on the speakers, and hit play again.

  “…hurt innocent children?”

  “…can’t kill what does not live.”

  “Oh, shit,” Alex muttered, his hand tightening on the computer mouse. He looked up at Ian, their eyes meeting in a moment of brilliant discovery. “That was a—”

  “Class-A EVP,” Ian finished, slapping his partner on the back. “Make note of the time on that, then skip ahead to the voice I heard.”

  Alex did and when he hit the play button again, they both waited in anxious silence.

  Ian’s challenge to the spirit echoed out of the speakers. “C’mon!”

  There was a brief pause of absolute silence followed by a dark, raspy grumble. “Go to…the good doctor…”

  Ian sat down on the edge of the bed, hands clenched over his knees. He stared hard at the lines of sound waves on the computer screen. “Play it again.”

  Alex complied, and they listened to the voice three more times before turning it off. Alex looked to Ian curiously. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? The good doctor? You mean there was one that didn’t torture and kill little children?”

  “Maybe,” Ian replied thoughtfully, staring off into space.

  Alex shut his laptop and rose to his feet. “Either way, it’s an awesome piece of evidence. I’d say this means we deserve breakfast.”

  Ian rubbed his forehead, still brooding over the ominous voice. “Yeah, yeah. I know that stomach of yours is going to eat itself any minute.”

  “Damn right it is.” Alex forced Ian off the bed and dragged him to the door. “Don’t act like you’re not hungry, too.”

  Ian scowled but said nothing as they made their way to the van. Within the hour, they were in the restaurant digging into breakfast.

  Alex smiled happily as he forked up a bite of pancake and sausage. As he chewed, he eyed his partner across the table. “That food’s not gonna eat itself.”

  Ian looked up from toying with the scrambled eggs on his plate, his eyes distant and unfocused. “What?”

  Alex sighed. “D
ude, let it go for now, okay? We’ll do more work after we eat and get some sleep. You’re running on empty here.”

  Ian frowned and took a sip of his coffee. “You know how I am when I hear something like that. I can’t let it go until I make sense of it.”

  “What’s there to make sense of? It was most likely a residual voice, anyway. It’s not like it was telling you to actually go find the ‘good doctor.’”

  “What if it was, though?” Ian wondered, still working over the mystery in his head. “There’s no way a residual spirit caused that crash.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t the same one.”

  “No, it was too powerful. It was definitely the same spirit,” Ian said, his eyes lit with confidence. “We need to ask some more questions, look back into the history of the asylum. There must be some doctor there that tried to save the patients. Some doctor that has gone unrecognized all these years.”

  “Or we could just take our evidence and head on home,” Alex suggested, downing the last of his orange juice. Before Ian could reply, Alex’s cell phone rang. He glanced down at the caller-ID and answered with a grin. “You’ve reached Alex—dashing, courageous seeker of all things paranormal. We hunt ghosts so you don’t have to.”

  “You are such a moron.” Alex’s sister and Great American Paranormal manager, Cassie, laughed on the other line.

  Alex winked at Ian. “A damn handsome moron.”

  “Ew, dream on. Anyway, I have a new lead for you.”

  “Where are you sending us this time, little sis?”

  “Massachusetts. A woman out there called and said there’s an evil spirit haunting her house. She needs you guys to check it out, see what can be done about it.”

  Alex nodded to Ian. “Lady out in Massachusetts needs our help.”

  Ian grimaced. “No.”

  “Why not?” Alex asked. He didn’t wait for an answer before speaking back into the phone. “What happened to her?”

  “She says she’s seen shadow figures, an apparition of a little girl. She’s also been shoved by an invisible force and almost fell down a flight of stairs.”