Sinister Entity

by Hunter Shea

  “You look like an undertaker,” she said to him.

  “Better I should look like a refugee from a 1988 Anthrax concert?” he shot back. A look of pained consternation washed over his face. He must have thought he was getting off on the wrong foot. She didn’t bother to bail him out of his concern.

  She had to admit he was a pretty good-looking guy. His thick, wavy hair and strong jawline made him look like a Disney prince or hero. He was tall with just the right amount of lean muscle, as far as she could tell. Living on Long Island, she had grown a strong aversion to muscle-bound juice-heads. No, Eddie Home was a looker.

  Concentrate on the job, she scolded herself.

  “Take this and follow me,” she said, thrusting a black, metallic case into his hands.

  Tim McCammon answered the door. The bags under his eyes were dark and heavy and his posture was one of absolute fatigue. One of his hands gripped the doorframe. It looked like the only thing keeping him upright. His breath smelled like stale beer.

  “Come on in. It’s been a rough night. Kristen took the kids to a hotel around midnight last night. I decided to stay, show it that I’m not afraid. That plan shit the bed in short order.”

  Jessica touched his arm and gave a warm smile. “The fact that you stayed did more than you can imagine. Trust me. Tim, this is my associate, Eddie. He’s going to help me set up equipment, take notes and generally keep things from disturbing me while I work.”

  Eddie did as he was told and nodded in greeting.

  They sat for a moment in the living room. Everything was in disarray. It looked as if Tim McCammon had thrown a party the night before with a hundred college students. Lamps were on the floor, curtains were half-hanging off their rods, every drawer was open and the floor was littered with objects that should have been on shelves.

  Tim leaned forward in his chair, rubbed his hand across his face and stretched his neck until they could hear his bones crack. “Jessica, we appreciate all you’ve been doing for us, but to be honest, things only seem to be getting worse. I’m at a loss here. The truth is, I’m no longer sure we should be doing this. Kristen and I have been talking about selling the house. Since you told us this, whatever it is, isn’t related to us or the children, it’s best we just leave. I know you’ve meant well, but I don’t think this is working.”

  The words came out softly, precisely, as if he had been rehearsing them for days.

  Jessica said, “I know how you feel. I’ve told you before that I’ve had an experience similar to this. It was horrible, worse than you can ever imagine. But once my father found the key, it all ended in an instant. I know I’m close. All I ask for is one more night.”

  She neglected to mention that her father had lost his life finding that key thirteen years ago, but she was confident it wouldn’t come to that in this case, or any other. Her childhood hell was unique and, she often prayed, singular.

  Tim shook his head. “I don’t know. If this house had been a stock, I would have cut and run months ago. I make a living knowing when to sell. I’ve gone past the acceptable holding limit here already.”

  Jessica was about to speak when Eddie interjected. “I promise you everything will be over when you get back in the morning. Besides, it’s a buyer’s market anyway. Better to hold on and wait for the market to swing in your favor.”

  Eddie sat back in the couch and crossed his legs. Jessica noticed how he avoided her gaze. She wanted to kill him. She should have told him rule number three, never promise the client something you’re not one-hundred-percent sure you can deliver.

  Tim McCammon took in a great lungful of air, closed his eyes and thought things over.

  He looked at Jessica and said, “Okay, you have one more night, but that’s all. I’m going to meet my family and collapse. I’ll be back, alone, tomorrow at nine.”

  “Thank you, Tim. You look like you could use the rest. Leave the ugliness to us.”

  Tim nodded and headed upstairs to pack a bag. Eddie started to unlock the latches on the metal case he’d brought in. Jessica motioned for him to stop.

  “Wait until he’s left. I don’t like setting stuff up in front of clients. It has a tendency to freak them out and he’s obviously already at his limit.”

  Eddie stepped back from the case, palms held out. “Sorry. I’ll just kick back until you tell me what you want me to do.”

  She took two quick strides until she was inches from his nose, glaring into his eyes. “What was the deal with your promising him this would be over tonight? Don’t you realize how much of a toll something like this takes on a family? The last thing they need is false promises. No one, and I mean no one, can bend the paranormal to their will just because they want to. Shit, with every passing year, we dig up more questions than answers. That was very uncool.”

  She kept her voice low, but it was impossible to hide her anger.

  Tim came down with an overnight bag.

  “The keys are on the kitchen counter if you need them. I’ll see you tomorrow morning. Call me if anything comes up or if you need me.”

  “Please say hello to Kristen and the kids for me.”

  “I will.”

  The front door closed silently behind him.

  Now Jessica could raise her voice. She turned on Eddie.

  “That’s one strike, which is one more than I usually give anyone at any time for anything. From here on in, everything is done my way, understand?”

  Eddie gave a conciliatory bow of his head. “I’m really sorry. It’s just that I’m getting a serious vibe about this place and I know I can help you…a lot. You seem to forget that I have some substantiated talents on my resume.”

  “And you seem to forget that I don’t necessarily believe in what you’re selling. That’s why I brought you here, to prove it. Now if you’d be so kind, please unload the Trifield meters and put them on that table there while I set up these two cameras.”

  Eddie picked up a Trifield meter and made a loud tsk.

  “You have a problem?” Jessica said.

  “These are superfluous. And they’re not proven to be reliable. You might just as well be reacting to a natural flux of electromagnetic energy or even the neighbor’s cell phone than a ghost.”

  “I call them EBs.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t use the word ghost. It conjures up too many hokey images.” Jessica set up the two tripods with practiced ease and unscrewed the lens caps on the video cameras.

  “What does EB stand for?”

  “Energy Being, which is exactly what they are.”

  Eddie thought it over for a moment as he filled half of the table with Trifield meters.

  “I like it. Hmm. EB. Makes sense,” he said.

  “Happy to hear it.”

  Jessica walked around him to get an audio recorder out of the case. She knew he would have questions as well as his own theories. He’d been at the Rhine Research Center for over a year, exposed to the entire history of paranormal research. There was a chance he knew more about the field, at least the scientific-psychological side of things, than she did. So why was she getting so damn irritated? Something about Eddie Home seemed to bring out the bitch in her.

  “Anyway, if you want me to prove myself, let me be your Trifield meter. I guarantee that I have a much better success rate. Took a boatload of tests and passed every one.”

  In a way, he was right. Even though most ghost-hunting groups employed Trifield or EMF meters, there wasn’t enough solid evidence to say they were the ultimate ghost detection tools. For lack of a better option, they were simply the best available. They’d steered her down a wrong path quite a number of times.

  “Okay, you get to be my human EB detector. What kind of information can you tell me when you sense it?”

  Eddie stopped what he was doing to face her. “Most times? Everything.”

  The surety of his answer, the grave look in his eyes, gave her a chill.

  “If you want to know the tru
th,” Jessica said, feeling as if it was time to ease off a bit, “I really only use the Trifield meters and cameras so I have something to show my clients. They see this stuff so much on TV that it gives them a kind of comfort. If I had it my way, I’d just come in here with an audio recorder and maybe a digital camera. I don’t think you need a lot of expensive, fancy-ass equipment to capture proof of the existence of EBs. And above all, I do it to help people.”

  Eddie leaned against the dining room table, silent, taking everything in.

  Finally, he said, “So, the stuff on your website is…”

  Jessica tied her hair up in a ponytail. “It’s a place where people can learn about what I do and contact me when things get bad. That’s it. I try to show the world the real things I’ve seen and experienced, but with editing tools out there today, it’s impossible for people to believe anything they see. For those who already believe, I like to think my website gives them the strength and curiosity to keep looking for themselves.”

  Eddie turned toward the kitchen, but Jessica thought she saw the beginnings of a smile on his face. She wondered if he’d still be smiling when the McCammon EB started flinging its shit against the fan. Well, she did want to put him to the test.

  She locked the camera in place and flicked the power button. She called out to him in the next room. “You ready to experience the night of your life?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “You said it yourself, something weird is going on here.”

  “I don’t know what’s happening. That doesn’t make it total science fiction.”

  “Well, I’m worried about Selena. We have to do something.”

  There was a long, silent pause.

  “I’ll be damned if I know what that something would be.”

  Selena Leigh listened to her parents in the next room. Since the incident with her ghastly twin in her closet, she had been sleeping on a blow up mattress in her brother Ricky’s room. It was late and she couldn’t sleep. She was about to plug in her ear buds when she heard her parents talk about what was referred to as Selena’s Freak Out. It aggravated her that her parents always put a name to everything. Like when her first boyfriend, Max Matthews, broke up with her and she heard them whisper, “Looks like we’re in for more Heartbreak Hotel.” It made her feel as if they were mocking her, that her feelings didn’t matter more than earning a silly nickname.

  This was different. She prayed they were taking it seriously.

  Her mother pressed her father for help.

  “As parents, it’s our job to keep our kids safe. Our daughter no longer feels safe in her own home. I’m not feeling much better.”

  “It’s not like you saw something in your closet.”

  “But I heard her call for me the day you were all out. She was miles from home, Greg.”

  “You must have fallen asleep and not realized.”

  “Trust me, I wasn’t asleep. I had only been awake for a couple of hours at that point anyway, so it wasn’t like I was even remotely tired.”

  Selena pressed her ear closer to the wall. She hadn’t known that her mother had had her own experience. So that made three out of four, even though her dad refused to acknowledge that the mess with the car coming off the ramps was anything but his eyes playing tricks on him.

  She looked over at Ricky, fast asleep under a sheet. He’d passed out wearing his Red Sox cap and reading a comic book. The comic was inches from sliding off the bed. He had his annoying moments, but overall he was a pretty good kid. She hoped whatever it was that had made an unwelcome entrance into their home decided to leave him alone. He was her brother, and only she had the right to scare him.

  Her father said, “So what do you want me to do? Call the cops? Call a priest?” He sounded exasperated.

  “I don’t know.”

  The bedsprings groaned as they shifted. There was a soft click, followed by applause coming from the television.

  Selena lay back, staring at the ceiling. Ricky and her mother had spent an entire afternoon sticking glow-in-the-dark stars up there last summer when he had decided he wanted to be an astronomer. It had been a short-lived dream once he realized how much math you had to know to be an astronomer. He hated math. A quarter of the stars had fallen off over time, and many of the rest had lost their luminescence.

  She tried not to think about that night in her room, but it seeped into her consciousness like a slow-moving wave of sewage, spoiling any good feelings she had accumulated during the daylight hours and infecting the night with its foul stench of terror. Her heart raced when she recalled looking into her own face, staring back at her with sightless eyes. She shivered, wondering what would have happened if she had accidentally touched her phantom twin. She had looked real, just very, very pale with deep, dark, inhuman eyes. Was there substance to her, or would Selena’s hand have passed right through her, stopping only when her fingers touched the closet’s back wall? She had to clamp her jaws tight to keep her teeth from chattering.

  After that night, she’d asked her parents to remove all of her belongings from the closet and she transferred them to a few storage containers. It didn’t take any effort to get her mother to agree to buy the blow up mattress, though Ricky did need some convincing to share his room.

  Selena knew it was putting a strain on all of them, but guilt couldn’t come close to overriding her fear.

  She heard muffled voices and lifted herself up to move closer to the adjoining wall.

  Her father said, “Even if we found someone that may be able to help, what do we tell them?”

  “We tell them exactly what’s been happening.”

  “And what is that?”

  Her mother began to sob softly, as if she had pulled a pillow close to her face.

  After a while, she settled down and said, “I guess we would tell them the truth. That we’re being haunted by…”

  Her breath hitched and she sniffed back her tears.

  “We’re being haunted by our own daughter.”

  Selena’s head jerked away from the wall as if she had been struck. She felt dizzy, as if everything in the room had just become unimaginably large and she were a mere speck, crushed by the weight of existence in a world a million times her size.

  Like her mother, she started to cry. With fumbling hands, she reached for her laptop. Her fingers were cold and numb and typing was a chore. She was going to find help the best way she knew how.

  So she searched, well into the night and past the dawn, until her eyes were dry and it hurt to blink, her tears long dried but for the first time in days, her spirit stronger.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Eddie paced around the living room in an attempt to burn off some of his nervous energy.

  Jesus, he could feel it. The hairs on the back of his hands stood at attention and his scalp tingled. Something was here, all right. It was too far removed at the moment for him to draw a bead, but he knew that would change.

  Jessica had placed audio recorders, ten in all, around the entire downstairs. It was hot in the house and beads of sweat dotted her hairline and the little he could see of her chest. His own shirt felt as if it had been plastered to his skin. Ducking into the foyer, he took a quick sniff of his underarms and was thankful to the scientists who invented deodorant.

  He looked out the front window. The sun was still thirty minutes from setting in the western sky. Two boys zipped along the sidewalk on mountain bikes that looked to be two sizes too big for their struggling riders. It never ceased to amaze him how the regular flow of life mingled with the shadows of the unknown, most people none the wiser. There were times he wished he were part of that majority.

  “So, do you want to go out and grab a bite to eat?” he said.

  Jessica shook her head. “Why would we do that?”

  “Well, I just assumed you would prefer to do your work in the dark. Might as well carb up before the sun goes down.”

  “That’s ridiculous. There’s no set time for EBs to show
up. The only reason people do it at night is because A, things are creepier at night and they get their thrills from it and B, since cameras are often used, spirit activity just shows up better in low light. The truth is, just as much happens during the day, except we’re so surrounded by activity, noise and the simple act of going through our day-to-day lives that it’s almost impossible to notice any signs.”

  Eddie smiled. She was pretty damn perceptive.

  “What are you thinking?” she said, suspicion heavy in her tone.

  He recovered by throwing out a question. “But you have cameras set up, too. Don’t you think you’d get better evidence if you waited until later, like say after a nice Mexican meal?”

  It may have been a trick of the light, but he could have sworn she almost smiled.

  “Look, at this point, I only want to help Tim and Kristen. I’m not that concerned about evidence. They already have more of that than they can handle, and it’s not like I’m about to show this to anyone else. These are just here in case something odd comes up that, if it’s positive, I can show them. After all, you did promise Tim that it would all be over after tonight. It might be nice to show them just how that happened.”

  Her sarcasm was not lost on him.

  Walking over to one of the cameras, he peered into the lens and said, “So you have no intention of posting this on your website?”

  “Come on, I know you’ve looked at everything I have up there. I post things other people send me, and only if I think it has merit. What I do is between me and my clients, unless they specifically ask me to post it in hopes of letting others know they’re not alone with their own troubles. Their anonymity is the most important thing to me, just like our family’s was after…well, everything. It’s also why you’ll never see me roll up in a car or van with some gimmicky ghost-hunting logo wearing my custom-made shirt and hat, broadcasting to every neighbor what I’m there for. People who come to me are at the end of their rope. They don’t need me bumbling through their lives like a thousand-pound bear.”

  Score another one. Eddie had to admit, she was good. Just what he’d hoped. It made his insane gamble coming to New York worth it. And underneath it all was this reckless current that even she wasn’t aware of. He hoped he was up to the task of helping her navigate through the forces surrounding her.