The Coldwater Haunting

by Michael Richan

  “Imagine how this will feel to your little boy…”

  The thing inside him suddenly energized, tearing him up, slicing at him like a motorized blade, ripping up his organs and causing his entire frame to shake. Holes were cut open through his flesh and warm blood poured out, coating his body. It went deeper, causing excruciating pain, churning up his liver and kidneys, his intestines, and finally landing at the bottom of his torso where it spun like the blades of a blender, slicing him until he had nothing left inside but a soup of gore.

  Why am I not dying? he thought. I should be dead.

  At that moment he saw the faint eyes of Ezra, just feet from him, small grey orbs dimly floating in the air. They moved and shifted, but seemed lifeless, like doll eyes. Desperate, Ron tried to reach out toward them, hoping he might grab onto something and find some means of defense, but his arms were unresponsive; they hung at his sides like tubes of meat, swinging as he shook, unable to execute the commands his brain was sending.

  Then, just as quickly as it had entered him, the invader retreated, pulling out through his mouth. The icy fingers around his neck released, and he took in a breath, grateful that he still had lungs with which to breathe.

  Light fell in from behind, illuminating the scant furniture in the room. Fading in front of him was Ezra; the grey eyes were inside a head that was translucent, looking as though it was made of dark glass, reflecting small patches of light from the door. Another second, and the figure was gone.

  A hand at the back of his shirt tugged on him, pulling him out until he was standing in the hallway.

  Tom reached for the door and shut it, then grabbed him by the shoulders, spinning him around until he could stare him in the eyes.

  “I do hope you’ll reconsider the red. I really think it would make things pop.” He smiled and let go.

  Ron turned to look over the railing into the living room below. The house seemed peaceful and silent, a jarring contrast to the bizarre horror he’d just experienced in the bedroom.

  When he turned back, Tom was gone.

  “Fuck me,” Ron muttered, making his way to the stairs. The buzz of whatever had drugged him still coursed through his system, but now he felt functional, able to think and move.

  Exhausted, he checked the time and saw it was past ten. What had seemed like a twenty minute visit from Tom had actually lasted several hours.

  As he checked the doors, preparing for bed, he thought about Ezra, wondering what the night might have in store. He knew he should be afraid; it was clear that fear was what Tom and Ezra wanted. Yet, the same part of his personality that prioritized rational thought – the stubborn part that refused to let go of normality despite the obviously non-normal things around him – that same part resisted giving in to the fear. Just knowing that they wanted him to be afraid was enough to make him reject it.

  He made his way upstairs. As he passed the closed door to the bedroom where he met Ezra, he stopped. “Sorry, but I normally leave this room open,” he said aloud, as though he was informing the ghosts. He reached for the door handle and pushed it inward. Faint moonlight appeared on the floor, falling in through the windows. He turned on the overhead fixture for a moment, looking over the room, seeing nothing unusual, nothing that would hint at the painful, frightening encounter he’d participated in just minutes before. Satisfied, he turned off the light and left the door open, then walked down the hallway toward the master bedroom, looking over the banister into the living room below as he went.

  Ten minutes later, after his nightly routines, he was under the covers with the lights out, looking up at the ceiling. The house was insanely quiet, and he could hear little pops and creaks as it cooled down.

  When will it start? he wondered, straining his ears, waiting.

  He rolled to his side. Now, with one ear pressed into the pillow and the other perched upward, he heard it – faint, almost not really there.

  Thump.

  Overhead, something in the attic. How it always seemed to start.

  Then, almost so imperceptible as to not even be there, the slow plod of steps on wood.

  They’re coming up the stairs, he thought. Like Ezra said.

  He sat up, and the sound stopped. Waiting, he realized the loudest thing he could hear was his breathing. He held his breath for a moment, straining to listen, looking at the locked doors at the other end of the bedroom, wondering if they had any chance of keeping them out once they – whatever they were – reached the top.

  Nothing. No sound.

  He reclined, his head back on the pillow. He closed his eyes, hoping he might fall asleep.

  Thump. Thump.

  He’s fucking with me, Ron thought. The steps on the stairs will go on, but nothing will ever arrive. He wants me to be scared, to throw in the towel on this place and leave.

  Thump…thump. It was rhythmic, perfectly timed to mimic a slow ascension. Perfectly designed to scare.

  He realized his heart was beating rapidly. It does work, he thought. It does scare.

  He reached for his earplugs and gave them a squeeze until they were thin enough to slip into his ears. As they sealed shut, the sound from the stairs faded away.

  Then, as he tried to fall asleep, he came to a decision.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “You’re gonna what?” Jake asked, almost choking on his coffee.

  “I’m gonna fight it,” Ron replied. “I’m spinning in circles, pretending it isn’t happening, spending all my time rationalizing something irrational. Meanwhile things are getting more and more fucked up. I’m tired of it. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. I have to take a different approach. It’s clear to me now that their goal is to scare me off my property, and that’s not going to happen.”

  “Well,” Jake replied, sipping more coffee. “I don’t know what to say. I’ve been trying to convince you for days now, so I guess I’m glad. Whatever happened to you last night, I’m happy it finally made you see the light.”

  “It put a face to it,” Ron replied. “Vague ghosts, fleeting images of things, all that seemed too unreal to take seriously. But actually meeting the person behind it, realizing his agenda…that’s something I can seize on. I can fight this fucker.”

  “Right, fight…” Jake said. “So, as you’ll recall, you’ve had two experts here already. Neither of them had any success.”

  “Experts?” Ron replied. “Don’t take this personally, Jake, but what is Freedom an expert at? Selling crystals and dreamcatchers at psychic fairs? And Terrell, he seems barely able to function at life. I can’t imagine his ghost tour business does very well, he doesn’t seem like the type who would make a success of something like that.”

  “Freedom does OK selling crystals,” Jake replied. “But, come to think of it, there were only a couple of other people on that ghost tour with us, so you might be right about Terrell.” He paused. “Then again, it was Port Angeles. Not going to draw a crowd.”

  “And by his own admission, he didn’t have much of ‘the gift’. He seemed more a student of it than someone who could command it. If it even exists.”

  “His mentor seemed to think something is definitely going on here.”

  “The same mentor who warned him not to become involved. Damned convenient. You don’t help, you can’t fail. How do we know his mentor knows jack shit? He might only be good at knowing a bad bet.”

  “OK, so you don’t like the people I involved. You have a better plan? You gonna round up better experts?”

  Ron checked the time. “The county building is open in fifteen minutes,” he said, grabbing his jacket. “I’m going to start there.”

  “The county?”

  “I’m gonna start with the assessor. I want every bit of info I can get about the history of this property, every little piece of paper, every scribbled note, every sideways thought. And after them, I’ll hit the recorder, the treasurer, and any other department that might have information. Then I’ll go
to the utilities people, and…”

  “OK, geez, I get it.”

  “You coming?”

  Jake grabbed his coffee. “Yeah. I’m not staying here alone, that’s for sure.”

  They left the house and drove along the small, overgrown driveway until they came to the dirt road that snaked down the mountain.

  “So, you really think the assessor is gonna know something that will solve things?” Jake asked, trying to sip coffee as the car bounced over potholes.

  “I’m gonna start there.”

  “Maybe I should try Terrell again. He said he was gonna keep researching. I could see if he’s uncovered anything new.”

  “Feel free, but that’s not my approach. There’s no sense in pursuing something I don’t really believe in. I’m going to start with facts, the facts that are public record. Whatever these things are, these entities in my house, around the property…for all the irrationality of their existence, there has to be a set of facts at the core of it that explains things.”

  Jake paused for a moment, thinking. Then he smiled as though he’d had some kind of a breakthrough. “You know, that’s absolutely true! Like Poltergeist!”

  “Poltergeist?”

  “You know, the movie. There’s all kinds of weird, scary ghost shit going on, but when you get to the base of it, the fact is that asshole moved the headstones but not the bodies. That caused everything.”

  “Which, presumably, you fix by correcting the facts,” Ron replied. “You move the bodies the way they were supposed to be moved in the first place, and the problem is solved. Right?”

  “Presumably. I don’t remember if the sequel dealt with that or not.”

  “So, if my approach works, I just need to find a set of facts that needs correcting. I don’t need a bunch of mumbo jumbo. Facts are something I can deal with.”

  “Yeah. Now that you mention it, all the ghost experts they brought in didn’t help anything! It took the dad digging up the tidbit about the housing development and what that asshole had done.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Then again, in The Exorcist, the fact at the base of it was that the little girl really was possessed. The priest died.”

  “Yeah, but Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair survived just fine.”

  “Doesn’t that make Terrell’s point, though? Trying to solve it, to help them, the priest became possessed, jumped through a window, and broke his neck. It’s dangerous for someone with the gift to become involved.”

  “I’m not sure The Exorcist is entirely analogous to what’s happening in my house.”

  “I don’t know. That thing upstairs sure seems like the devil to me.”

  “I don’t intend to involve anyone with a gift, so you don’t need to worry. No broken necks in my house.”

  “I don’t know, man. They really needed that old lady in Insidious to figure shit out, and those people weren’t stupid. Without her, they were fucked.”

  “I’m not going to use Hollywood as a guide, Jake. Just because things happened in a movie doesn’t mean it has anything remotely to do with what’s happening here. That’s fiction.”

  “Huh,” Jake replied, sliding down a little in his seat, and taking another sip of coffee. “I guess.”

  - - -

  The bear of a man dwarfed the counter he stood behind. He had a dark complexion and a series of tattoos that ran down his right forearm. He swung a monitor around so that Ron and Jake could see what he was looking at.

  “Here’s your property lines,” he said, using thick fingers to move a small mouse, highlighting green boundaries that defined Ron’s acreage. “If we go back in history, you can see that nothing changes much as we move back…1950 survey, things are still the same…1946…1939…”

  “I’m impressed that all this is on the computer,” Ron said. “I was expecting big books we’d have to browse through.”

  The man lowered his voice. “We got a grant from the state to digitize three years ago.” The screen stopped on 1934. “Yeah. That’s it. Same plot lines.”

  “Is that as far back as it goes?” Jake asked. “1934?”

  “We’ve got records older than that, but they’ve been scanning in the data starting with more recent years, since that’s most of the demand.”

  “Wouldn’t matter anyhow,” a short, rotund woman said as she walked behind the man, returning to a desk. “The fire.”

  “The fire?” Ron asked.

  “The records prior to 1934 are all hammajang,” the man answered, spinning the monitor back around.

  Ron and Jake looked confused.

  “Sorry, ‘hammajang’ means screwed up.”

  “He’s from Hawaii,” the woman offered. “I’ve learned a few new words since he started working here. There was a fire in the courthouse storage in 1933. What wasn’t destroyed in the fire got ruined by the water they used to put it out. They saved boxes of bits and pieces, but no one’s very anxious to try and stitch it all together, and then figure out how to input it into the doom beast.”

  “Doom beast?” Ron repeated.

  “That’s what she calls the computer system,” the man answered. “Doesn’t like it.”

  “The books worked fine,” the woman piped up. “Worked fine for fifty years. No one complained. But that thing…” she pointed at the monitor. “Bah!”

  “What else do you have on my property?” Ron asked. “Anything other than just the boundaries?”

  “Yeah, there’ll be a file in the system with all the documents. Twenty-five dollars gets you a print up.”

  “Great, I’d like the full set. Can you do that for me now?”

  “No,” the man replied, pulling a sheet of paper from under the counter and placing it in front of Ron. “You fill this out and pay the fee, then we mail it to you. Takes about ten days.”

  “That long?” Ron asked, filling in the form using a pen with a large plastic flower glued to the top. “I thought it was all digitized?”

  “Yes, you’d think it’d be faster,” the woman said, “what with a newfangled system and all. We used to provide it in three days before. Now it takes ten days. Progress.”

  “Might be less than that,” the man offered. “I’ve seen them go out in a week, but we’re supposed to say ten days.”

  “Gotcha,” Ron replied, finishing the form and sliding his credit card to the man.

  “There’s an extra fee for credit cards.”

  “Of course there is. I’ll pay the fee.”

  “Gotta take this in the back to run it,” he replied. “Be right back.”

  “Everything’s digitized, but he has to go somewhere else to process the card?” Jake asked Ron, under his breath.

  “Tell me about it,” the woman piped up, clearly able to hear the whispering. “We have to run back to that machine fifty times a day.” She rose from her desk and approached the counter, where she reached under it and produced a metal and black plastic contraption. She laid it on the counter in front of them and smiled as though she had produced a diamond. “Remember these little beauties?”

  “A credit card slider,” Ron said, smiling back at her. “I do.”

  “So now I know how old you are!” she replied, her demeanor becoming more conversational. “I could process a card right here, have the little form filled out in less than a minute. Now he has to run it into the back. Takes three times as long; longer if it’s down. Which it is, half the time.” She slipped the machine back under the counter.

  “I’m surprised you still have that,” Ron offered. “I haven’t seen one of those in ages. They never went down, though, did they? They always worked.”

  She seemed pleased to have found a sympathetic ear. “They wanted to throw it out, but I insisted it stay as a backup. They wanted to get rid of the typewriter, too!” She pointed to a corner, where a lonely IBM Selectric sat on a small table. “But I put my foot down. You have to be able to do your job, you know.”

  “Absolutely true,” Ron replied.

&n
bsp; “I still have to use that thing sometimes!” she protested. “Not every form has an electronic version yet, you know. There are still some forms that are on paper. How are you going to fill them out without a typewriter? Professionally, I mean.”

  “You couldn’t be more right.”

  His response made her beam; she smiled up at him. “You know, sometimes when we need information about Mount Soltis prior to 1934, I go to Mrs. Hughes. Her family has lived there since the area was settled.”

  “Really?”

  “We have a department policy against operating off hearsay or memory, but her mind is like a steel trap. I hope I’m that sharp when I reach seventy-eight.”

  “She provides you with information? About the mountain?”

  The man returned with papers, and the woman raised her hand to her mouth, twisting her fingers at her lips as through she was turning a lock, her eyes rolling upward and to the side. She stepped away so the man could deal with Ron at the counter, where he placed a credit card receipt and asked him to sign.

  “So, a week or so,” Ron asked, completing the slip.

  “Ten days,” the man corrected, handing him more paper. “Here’s a copy of the form. There’s a number on it if you want to call in and ask about the status. Reference the number in the corner, that’s your request number.”

  “Thank you both,” Ron said, smiling, gathering the papers.

  “Good luck to you!” the woman offered, giving him a wink.

  They left the office, walking back to the central lobby of the county building. Jake looked up at the old, ornate ceiling and the row of second-story offices above them. “Do we have to hit all the departments in here?”

  “Nope,” Ron replied, heading for the doors. “I think I got exactly what I needed. I want to find this Mrs. Hughes.”

  - - -

  “Aw, shit,” Ron said, pulling into the short driveway. Two dogs came bounding out from behind a shed, chains stopping them just feet from the car.