Leonard and Jenny stumbled down the dark steps. John started down behind them, knowing full well that if he lost his footing he would break every bone in his body on the concrete floor below. As he forced himself to slow down, he heard the smashing of the door far above him. The entity was on its way down to stop him from doing what had to be done.
John hit the turn on the stairwell just as Jenny and Leonard hit the bottom. Lonetree took a chance and started taking the invisible stairs two at a time, nearly breaking his ankle on the last step before touching firm, flat concrete.
“The trapdoor, we have to open it!”
Jenny was crying but still trying to function. She ran toward where she remembered the door to be. Her foot kicked something on the floor and then suddenly a bright beam of light illuminated the floor as the flashlight spun in a circle. Jennifer picked it up, not knowing it was same flashlight that Kelly had been holding when she was attacked just thirty minutes before. She located the subbasement trapdoor and then sighed.
“The lock’s been removed and then bent back into position. We’ll never get it open!”
As John and Leonard joined Jenny at the trapdoor, it started to rattle in its frame. The concrete cracked around it and the door actually bent outward, rattling violently. Jenny could swear she heard voices of desperation from the other side.
“Jesus, it’s already in there!” Leonard said as he backed away.
“No, but something is that can help us I think,” John said. He ran to the far wall and one of the old wood stoves that lined it. “Help me. Hurry!” He pushed against the quarter ton stove.
Leonard and Jenny immediately saw what he was attempting. They joined him and started pushing the wrought iron stove toward the trapdoor. John tilted the heavy stove on end and flipped it over onto the thin, wide door. The weight disintegrated the trapdoor and the stove hurtled down, smashing and breaking the wooden steps as it fell to the deepest part of the house.
Above them they heard the black entity storming down the stairs, cracking the wooden steps as it came.
Suddenly the basement filled with light. Shades of colors never thought imaginable emanated from the dirt lined subbasement, accompanied by the gentle smell of young girls. Wisps of curling streamers came out of the hole and they all heard the screams of torment. The room filled with the sound of women screaming their horror at what had happened to them.
“Who are they?” Jenny asked. She ducked as several of the tendrils whisked by her head.
“Mothers…they’re mothers,” John said, as if in a daze.
The entity coming down the stairs had stopped and was screaming in outrage as the real secret of Summer Place spilled out of the bowels of the house. The swirling multicolored tendrils of spirits that had been tormented for close to a hundred years hung momentarily in the air around John, Jenny and Leonard. Then, with the roar of outrage from the stairs sounding again and the sound of the beast retreating, the tendrils of rainbow-colored spirits screamed their own indignity and shot forward and up the stairs.
“Get her,” John said as if to himself.
The entity was caught as it reached the doorway to the basement. Lightning flashed throughout the house as tendrils of color struck the beast. It roared with pain. The tendrils curled in and out, around and through the black mass, and every time the beast screamed, it weakened. The ghosts of the women who had met their end at Summer Place vented their revenge. They split apart, scattering throughout the house.
The black mass smashed through the door. It lifted Gabriel high into the air closing around his throat and squeezing the air out of him. He clawed at his throat, fighting to breathe, but broke one hand free and waved the others out of the room.
Damian pushed Julie, George and Peterson out the door. He was about to turn and help Gabriel when a powerful wind slammed into him and knocked him down. Gabriel was thrown hard into the wall. His body slid down and thumped onto the carpet. Jackson went to him and started pulling the professor out by the arm. The multicolored wisps of smoke were all over the black mass, which was screaming out in pain. Parts of it were being torn free to vanish like smoke in the wind. Jackson finally managed to get Gabriel’s still form out of the room, just as the beast roared in newfound pain. Then as suddenly as their rescuers had appeared, they vanished. The black mass had vanished also. The air warmed, until Jackson could no longer see his breath.
Gabriel moaned and tried to sit up.
“Take it easy, Professor. You have two broken legs.”
Gabriel opened his eyes and looked up at Jackson. “Now tell me I don’t know how to throw a Halloween party.”
Jackson smiled for the first time in what seemed like many years. He patted Kennedy on the shoulder and sat down beside him. “I think I’ll skip your next party. I’m way too old for this shit.”
Outside, the night became silent with the exception of the falling rain striking the production trailer’s smashed and battered exterior. Harris Dalton picked himself up off the floor and looked around as the power came back on. The others in the trailer were all right—they slowly raised their heads.
“Is it…is it over?” Nancv asked.
Harris didn’t answer. He stood in stunned silence as the night returned to normal. Lights were flashing on the phone terminal. He took a deep breath and reached for the cracked instrument, then pushed one of the flashing buttons.
“Dalton,” he said as calmly as he could.
“Damn it, man, where have you been? We’ve been showing nothing but dead air for the past twenty minutes!”
Harris pushed the main screen button, bringing online the camera that lay on its side in the rain. The view showed the smashed front doors of Summer Place and to Dalton’s horror, several people lying on the wet ground. To his relief, several of them were moving, starting to pick themselves up.
“What the hell happened out there?” Feuerstein raged.
Harris looked at the men and women looking at him. They were all flushed and most were shaking badly. He shook his head and looked away, placing the phone back to his ear.
“Before I tell you what you can do with your special, Feuerstein, I’ll say this, and I think I speak for the rest of my crew: I quit. Now you have a happy Halloween, you son of a bitch!”
John looked down into the hole that was the subbasement. Jenny knew what he was going to do and reached out with a shaking hand to stop him. He smiled and touched her arm.
“There’s nothing down there that can hurt us. We have to look for Kelly and Sanborn. They could be hurt down there.”
Jenny whimpered but let go of John’s arm. Leonard came over when Lonetree looked his way and placed his arm around Jennifer. He nodded that John should go.
Lonetree shined the light around the darkness below and saw that he could shimmy his way down the broken staircase where the stove hadn’t demolished it.
After three minutes and almost falling to his death five times, Lonetree hit the dirt floor of the subbasement. He shined the small penlight around and saw the stove which he had used to free the trapped entities. Then he froze as he saw some of the barren earth move to his left. A hand pushed its way through the dirt. He grasped it and pulled. Kelly Delaphoy came free of the soil with a gasp, trying desperately to breathe. John left her laying on the hard packed floor as he searched for Jason Sanborn. It didn’t take long—he heard the associate producer moan as he too broke free of the spot where the black mass had buried him alive.
Kelly was spitting dirt out of her mouth and crying. John assisted Sanborn to the wall and helped him to sit.
John looked around as they recovered from their premature burial, and he noticed the designs on the wall. Pentangles and other demonic designs were etched into the hard earth walls beneath Summer Place.
“God almighty.”
Epilogue
“The Doors are now firmly shut, and the floors are no longer clean and free of dust”
Kelly paid for the meeting room at the Waldorf Astori
a with the severance pay she had been issued the week before. At the table were nine people, four of whom were now happily unemployed.
George Cordero, Leonard Sickles, Harris Dalton, Kelly Delaphoy, Jennifer Tilden, Jason Sanborn, Damian Jackson and Julie Reilly spoke in hushed voices, catching up on what they’d each been doing over the two months since Halloween night at Summer Place.
Wallace Lindemann had committed himself to a hospital in Westchester County, New York for treatment of alcoholism and a possible schizophrenic condition brought on by his stay in his only investment left in the world. As for Lionel Peterson, he had moved to become head of Fox News, where, as Julie Reilly put it, absolutely no one would ever take him seriously again. Julie, Kelly and Jason had been released from their contracts by the network—the company was “moving in another direction” with reality television. Julie had not been offered the anchor chair for the nightly news, and that had forced her out along with Hunters of the Paranormal. Damian Jackson had been forced to accept early retirement from the Pennsylvania State Police, on the grounds that he had been overworked to the point that his reports no longer made sense. As for the network, it was being sued by every one of the sponsors that had bought into the primetime Halloween special—a debacle that had forced the aging CEO to step down (with a full golden parachute, of course).
The door opened and everyone turned to see Gabriel Kennedy being wheeled into the meeting room with John Lonetree pushing him along. Gabriel was parked at the head of the table, and then John took a seat next to Jennifer. She leaned over and kissed him. Jenny was resplendent in a bright yellow dress, and her weight had come back strong. Her life had totally turned around. She could even listen to “oldies but goodies” stations again without feeling bad over Bobby Lee McKinnon and his sacrifice for her. She smiled at Lonetree and leaned back in her chair.
Gabriel took in all of the faces around the table. He tossed a large folder onto the table, and once again looked from face to face.
“John, would you like to start? Then I’ll give you the police findings.”
Lonetree squeezed Jenny’s hand and then slowly stood.
“The Dream Walk is where the story starts and ends. When I was under, I was able to see the very beginning—the creation of Elena Lindemann, if you will. In all actuality, Elena Vilnikov was born Vasily Gregory Vilnikov in 1881—the only son of Russian parents who were distant relatives of the Russian royal family, the Romanovs. Vasily had twin sisters, who were four years younger. The father doted on the girls, to Vasily’s severe detriment. The boy was ignored, ridiculed, when all he wanted in life was to be loved. As you may remember from Leonard’s photographs, there were no girls that matched Elena’s age in the family, only the boy and the two younger sisters. Vasily had a warped impression of just what his father hated about him. That was the spark, we think, that ignited Vasily’s plan to become what he knew his father loved: a girl.”
John paused for a drink of water and looked toward Gabriel, who nodded his encouragement.
“During the Dream Walk, I witnessed Vasily’s turning point. He burned his father and his sisters to death in their house. He escaped with his mother, who we may assume covered up for him until the day she died, leaving the boy alone in the world and free to become anyone he wanted. We can only assume he had launched into a homosexual affair with F.E. Lindemann at some point. At what point Frederic was talked into actually marrying and allowing his lover to become a full time woman...that’s only conjecture.”
“We do have proof—the bodysuits in the sewing room, sewn by Vasily’s meticulous hands,” Gabriel reminded everyone.
“As for the children of Elena and F.E. Lindemann,” John continued. “Now, Vasily obviously couldn’t have children. So they created changelings. Children were stolen from their mothers at birth—or were cut directly from their mothers’ wombs. There were no end of immigrant mothers, pregnant and seeking help. The Lindemanns were handily positioned, taking in those pregnant immigrants. Alone in a new world, they would never be missed. To outward appearances, it looked generous, assisting those lonely women by providing them work and lodging.”
“You mean to say that none of the Lindemanns’ eight children were their own?” Damian interjected. “That they were—?”
“Changelings,” John said.
“The sons of bitches.”
“Yes,” John agreed. “One of those young women was the sister of the German opera star, Gwyneth Gerhardt. Gwyneth came looking for the girl after she got pregnant and ran off to America. She tracked her to Summer Place and suspected something wasn’t right. I witnessed her death when she got too close to the truth.”
“The trapped spirits in the subbasement?” Julie Reilly asked.
“Yes. They were the mothers of the changelings. They were brought to Summer Place and buried in the subbasement, along with twenty-two other women whose births weren’t successful.”
“My God,” Jennifer breathed.
“But the hauntings supposedly started long before the death of Vasily—er, uh, Elena,” Kelly countered.
“That is more speculation,” Gabriel said as John took his seat. “I finally had a talk with the silent movie star’s companion, a lesbian who had a long-standing affair with her. She finally admitted that Vidora Samuels told her she had been raped by a man. Now, we can speculate that it may have been F.E. Lindemann who had committed that crime, or it could have been Vasily. The actress never could identify her attacker, so she just said there was no one there—that was how the haunted house stories began. We can presume the same story goes for the gossip columnist. But since her assault was attempted in broad daylight, she may have seen her attacker.”
“So why not tell the police?” Julie asked.
“Because, we have since learned, the newspapers she wrote for were mostly owned in silent partnership by F.E. Lindemann.”
“Shit. They skipped through life without a care in the world. But their own children, they seemed to have been cursed, themselves,” Jennifer said.
“You bet they were,” Gabriel said. “Not one of them died of the causes listed on their gravestones. As a matter of fact, there isn’t one body in any of those graves.”
That sent everyone to asking questions all at once, but Gabriel was patient and let the voices around the table calm before he continued.
“The children were each lured home one at a time and killed by their parents.”
“What…what for?” Jason Sanborn asked, feeling sicker the more he heard.
“Who knows? Maybe because they were indeed changelings, maybe because Elena couldn’t call them her own, or maybe just because they weren’t babies any longer. The one thing we do know for sure is that all eight of the bodies were buried right alongside their birth mothers in the subbasement. That has been confirmed through DNA testing. Altogether, we are looking at one of the first substantiated cases of a brutal serial killer who was into devil worship on a major scale. With the eight changelings, there were thirty-one bodies unearthed under Summer Place.”
“I think,” John said as he stared at the table, “that Elena, or Vasily, was so evil that his power kept growing even after his death. Hell, maybe we’ll never know how the entity was really created. But everyone here must understand: where there is one, there is another, and another.”
Everyone talked for another half an hour and then Gabriel cleared his throat. He picked up the folder he had placed on the table when he entered the room.
“This is from Lord Henry Wilcox in the House of Commons in Great Britain. He has requested our services, naming each and every one of us specifically. It seems he has some trouble on his estate in Scotland. Several people have disappeared, and he wants us to investigate. The police and Scotland Yard have come up with no viable answers. Although I initially turned him down, he has become quite the persistent gentleman. He has placed an offer of one million dollars compensation for each member of…well, each of us, to find out what is stalking his estate.”
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br /> The room was quiet, and Gabriel waited for the refusals to spill forth with vehemence that would be well deserved. Instead, each person looked to the next.
“I’m out of work, so a million dollars looks pretty damn good to me right about now,” Julie said.
“I hear that,” Kelly Delaphoy agreed.
“Are you people nuts? Wasn’t Summer Place whacked enough for you?” Leonard asked, rising to his feet.
George Cordero placed his hand on Leonard’s and pulled him back into his chair.
“That translates into: when do we go?” George smiled at Leonard, who only grimaced.
“Detective Jackson, what do you say?” Gabriel asked the large man to his right.
“That’s former detective Jackson. And just to let you know, I didn’t save as much money as I should have. So, I agree. When do we go?”
It was agreed. They would do just one more investigation to get everyone back on their feet again.
As men and women started gathering their things, it was John Lonetree, with Jenny on his arm, who asked the question.
“By the way, Gabe, what did Lord Wilcox say? You stopped at ‘each member of’.”
Gabriel hesitated, then smiled. “Why, it was that stupid name that Julie called us during that damned Halloween special.”
“I don’t remember,” John said. “I was a little preoccupied at the time.”
Most in the room rolled their eyes, but it was Gabriel who reminded John what they had been nicknamed during that long, dark, and very stormy night in Pennsylvania.
“Each member of the team known as...the Supernaturals.”
About The Author
David was born and raised in Chino, California. He has raised three great children, Shaune, Brandon and Katie Anne, and has welcomed a new daughter-in-law to the family, Tram, and last year a brand new baby granddaughter named Kiera.
The Supernaturals Page 53
