“Wouldn’t be the first time,” she muttered. She took the paper from Nigel and looked at it closely. She didn’t know what she expected it to do, but nothing happened and no thoughts popped into her mind. “Then again, healthy people drop from heart attacks all the time…right?”
Nigel looked at her skeptically.
Jorden took the folder back and moved to the next page, and then the next, and before she knew it, she was finally starting to relax. Perhaps Nigel was right and it was her lack of information that was making her uneasy. Still, information or not, that didn’t, and couldn’t, explain the nightmares she’d been experiencing and until she was able to do that, she wasn’t sure that she would ever truly rest easy again.
“Hand me that Phillips…will ya?” Matt asked from the top of the top ladder as he held his hand out and waited for the heavy-duty screwdriver to be handed to him. When it never hit his hand, he looked down thinking that Isis had abandoned him, though she hadn’t. In fact, since the moment he climbed the step ladder with the second camera for the living quarters, she hadn’t moved, and he feared that she might have entered one of her psychic trances. He wasn’t sure if he believed in psychic visions, but he’d known Isis for a long time and knew that she wasn’t an attention seeker, in fact she was quite the opposite. She had no interest in broadcasting her talents and outside of the SCP family, very few people were aware of her abilities.
“Hello,” he addressed, “Isis…are you with me?”
Isis seemed to shake herself from her trance and she looked up at him with a slightly foggy gaze. Her short, dark brown hair framed her face almost perfectly and complemented her rich, olive-tanned skin. Her dark eyes, however, remained distant. “Huh?”
“The Phillips,” he repeated and pointed to the toolbox they’d borrowed from the caretaker’s cottage.
She looked down at the box. “Which one is that again?”
Matt’s shoulders were growing tired from holding up the camera and waiting for the screwdriver, and he exhaled a sigh. “The one with the cross-shaped tip,” he quickly explained.
“Sorry,” she sneered then dug for the screwdriver and slapped it into his waiting hand. “You don’t need to get so snippy.”
“Well I’ve only been trying to install this damned thing for the last twenty minutes without really putting my arms down,” he said as he started twisting the screws though the holes in the bracket and into the wall. “And it didn’t help that the electric screwdriver decided to stop working just as we got started. My arms are sore and I have a cramp in my ass from stretching to get this damned thing in place, so forgive me for being a bit brusque, but right now I just want to get this thing up and running.”
“Well that was a little too much information, but I think that I can forgive you,” she said with a crooked grin.
“Thanks,” he grumbled as he turned in the last of the four screws then secured the camera to the wall, eleven or so feet from the floor. He then raised the radio to his mouth. “How’s that Ana?” he asked.
There was a brief pause. “Tilt down a little,” she suggested.
Matt did as she said. “Now?”
“A little more.”
Matt gently tilted it just a bit more until Ana told him to stop. “Thanks Ana,” he said then climbed down the step ladder and took a look at Isis. Now that he got a good look, he could see that her brown eyes remained a bit distant still and her mind seemed to be somewhere else. “So did you pick up on something?” he asked.
There was a slight pause as she looked around. Eventually her gaze fixed on Matt and she shrugged and shook her head. “Distant voices. I can’t really make out what they’re saying…I can’t even tell you if they’re angry, sad, happy or what. They’re garbled.”
After five years of having Isis as his secretary he’d gotten used to her…feelings, though wasn’t sure if he’d ever believe in them himself. Of course he knew that she believed in whatever it was she heard or felt and he didn’t doubt her sincerity, but he was a man of fact; which given his second job was ironic, and he simply couldn’t allow himself to believe…not just yet.
“I know,” she said out of the blue.
“You know what?”
“You doubt my abilities,” she said candidly though she didn’t seem to be offended. “But you won’t forever.”
Matt felt a smile stretch over his mouth. “That sounds like a challenge.”
Her dark eyes focused on him and her gaze remained uneasily steady. “No,” she said simply. “Just fact.”
Matt’s smile faded into a scowl and he folded up the ladder. “We’re done here.”
“For now,” she said with a crooked grin that either meant it was a challenge or that she knew something he didn’t.
“So how did your portion of the investigation go last night?” Isis asked as she gathered up the step ladder and he secured the tool box.
“Fine,” he said shortly.
“Nothing interesting?” she pried further.
Matt wasn’t sure what she was looking for and he looked at her curiously. “Like what? Did you find something?”
“Nothing that wasn’t in my report earlier, and even that wasn’t worth reporting,” she said then moved just a bit closer to him. “I meant how was it investigating with Jorden?”
Matt took in an uneasy breath. “The same as it was last time I investigated with her,” he said then started down the hall, passing the partially open doors on both sides. As he passed and took in his surroundings he began to think that he preferred the decrepit monastery under the cover of darkness; an abandoned building never was his favorite place to be and now was no different.
“Yes, but this time the two of you were very much alone,” Isis pushed. “You can’t tell me that you didn’t-”
“I can tell you that because nothing happened,” he snapped. “For Christ’s sake this is a ghost hunting expedition not a co-ed overnight. All we did was investigate,” he insisted then stopped to glare at her briefly. “And when exactly are you going to stop trying to set Jorden and me up?”
Isis stared at him with either irritation or amusement, Matt wasn’t sure, but when a wide smile filled her tanned face and her dark eyes lit up, he figured it was the latter. “I’m not trying to set you up,” she insisted, though a hint of a laugh touched her words. “I was asking if the two of you had a chance to talk things out. You have to admit that things between the two of you over the last month or so have been a bit tense.”
Heat rushed into Matt’s cheeks and if his knee didn’t ache so much at the moment he could have kicked himself in the ass.
“Don’t apologize,” she said, again out of the blue, “I just want to know if the two of you managed to work things out.”
“You tell me. You seem to know everything else,” he sniped then suddenly wished that he hadn’t. “Sorry,” he said almost immediately. “I guess I’m just a bit tired.”
Isis didn’t say anything but rather continued to look at him with her endless, dark eyes.
“Yes, I think we did,” he said finally.
Isis gave him a nod. “Good. Now maybe the two of you can get on with your courtship,” she sneered then stuck her tongue out at him as she passed by and headed down the stairs before he had a chance to respond.
He knew it. She couldn’t resist putting in her two cents about him and Jorden; that’s one thing that hadn’t changed in the last five years.
By the time Matt reached the foyer at the base of the wide staircase he was red, but this time with frustration. It angered him in many ways that Isis continued to play matchmaker where he and Jorden were concerned. It was true that he liked Jorden far more than most…all…other women in his life, including his ex, even when they were still together, but at the same time it was none of her business. Jorden was probably the best friend he had…
A sudden crash upstairs pulled him from his thoughts and caused him to jump. Instinctively he dropped the toolbox and ran back up the stairs he’d
just descended as fast as his stiff knee would allow, and stopped when he reached the top.
A moment later he heard someone running up the stairs behind him. “What in the hell was that?” Isis questioned as she skidded to a stop beside him.
Matt shook his head. “I don’t know. Sounded like something fell.”
“Fell my ass. Outside it sounded like something went through a wall,” she said curiously as she looked down both directions of the hall.
Matt looked as well and when he looked to the right, he found something lying on the ground near the end of the hall. “There,” he said and headed in the direction of the rubble on the floor.
It didn’t take too long to see what was lying on the floor and Matt’s pace increased to a jog. “What in the hell?” he questioned as he picked up the camera that he’d just installed.
“How’d that get there?” Isis questioned as she walked up next to him. “I mean the wall is a good twenty feet away from here if not more. It couldn’t have just fallen, and certainly not with that much noise.”
Matt shook his head as he looked over the camera that appeared to have been swatted with a baseball bat. “We’ll have to look at the footage to find out what happened. Before we head out though, I want to look in these rooms and make sure that there isn’t someone up here trying to pull one over on us.”
Isis gave him a nod. “You check out the rooms, I’ll stay in the hall and make sure that no one tries to slip out behind us,” she said then quickly added, “that’s assuming that there is someone else here.”
Matt agreed and started out by checking the rooms that were closest to where the camera had been attached to the wall, and as he searched the rooms, he had to wonder what brought the camera down. There had to be a logical explanation, though he was at a loss for one at the moment. If someone had been hiding up in the upper cells, there would have, or should have, been some sign of him or her. He and Isis had been on the upper floor for a while and they should have heard something. With all the debris on the floor there’s no way even the smallest child could have walked over it without making a noise, no matter how careful, and Matt hadn’t heard a thing.
Regardless of the evidence, or rather the lack thereof, Matt wasn’t going to allow himself to jump to any conclusions. He was going to do this one by the book.
Jorden sat at the table, still going through the same folder she’d started with an hour ago. Aside from the top page that had no apparent author, the information was all relatively generic and was starting to put her back to sleep. With such an explosive start to her reading she was hoping that more fireworks would follow, but so far, she’d only been able to ascertain that the monastery was almost a thousand years old. Little information was kept about it until about five hundred years later, which was where she was now…dozing off.
“What?” she heard Jesse yell, followed by the slam of the front door. “You can’t possibly have just said that I was incompetent!”
“The recorder you said was fully charged wasn’t! You gave me a damned dead recorder! If that isn’t incompetent, I don’t know what is!” Tony roared so loud that not only did Jorden jump up from her chair, but Nigel jumped off the sofa from the deep, sound sleep he’d been in for the last half hour or so. Ana and Syd ran in from the den and everyone stood in the dining room as Jesse stormed in followed by Tony, who towered over all of them like an angry Kodiak.
“What in the hell is going on?” Jorden blasted as the two of them entered, appearing as though they were about to come to blows.
“This genius here decided to give me a damned dead recorder to place in the church last night, so any chance we may have had at capturing the murmurs Saph and I heard last night is gone!” Tony blasted through clenched teeth.
“And I told you, the battery indicator read that it was fully charged when I handed it to you!” Jesse blasted back. “I wouldn’t have given it to you otherwise!”
“Shut up!” Jorden roared herself. “None of us are deaf, but we will be if you keep this crap up!” The room went immediately quiet for a moment and everyone was forced to take a deep breath. “Now,” she said in a much calmer voice, “I want the two of you to sit down and get a grip on your emotions!”
Jesse looked up at her with his dark, almond-shaped eyes. “But he-”
“Do I have to put you in time out?” she questioned out of the blue then, in spite of the frustration of the situation, she laughed at herself for both her tone and her choice of words; she hadn’t used either since she worked as an instructional aide for a kindergarten teacher more than ten years ago.
“What’s so damned funny?” Tony questioned.
“The two of you,” she said with a light giggle. “Until just now I hadn’t threatened anyone with a time out since I worked with five year olds.”
Neither Tony nor Jesse knew what to say, though Nigel didn’t mind laughing, however a quick glance from Jorden, who had stopped giggling, silenced him.
“Now, both of you know that these things happen. We do hold to the theory that spirits attempting to manifest themselves use whatever energy that is available around them, and there is a simple resolution to this problem.”
“What’s that?” Jesse asked, his tone quieted by embarrassment.
“Place a fully charged recorder in the church again tonight and see what happens,” she suggested then donned an even sterner gaze. “And find a way to work out your differences. I’d hate to lose one or both of you from this team because you have no clue as to how to get along.”
A heavy silence filled the room and every face was grim with tension, but that was something that Jorden couldn’t help. For a couple of years she and the others on the team had had to deal with the irrational bickering between Tony and Jesse. Strangely enough, Jorden thought that the two of them might actually get along and even like each other if they simply stopped and took the time to get to know one another and stopped trying to one-up each other at every turn.
Still, that was an argument for another time. At this moment, if they weren’t getting rest, they had jobs to do and that did not include standing around staring at each other waiting for another screaming match to break out.
“Hey,” Saph said from the top of the stairs as she cinched her thick, lavender bathrobe around her waist, “what’s going on?”
As simple a question as it was, it immediately relieved the majority of the stress in the room. “Nothing,” Jorden said with a sigh. “We’ve all got work to do, so I suggest that we get to it.”
Slowly the team began to disperse and head back to the rooms they started in when the front door swung open and Matt and Isis entered.
When they reached the dining room they stopped and looked at the rest of the group. “Did we miss a meeting?” Matt asked.
“Just a bout of jetlag, but we’re over it now,” Jorden said calmly. “What’s up?”
Matt held up the camera. “This, though it isn’t necessarily up…at least not now.”
“What in the hell did you do to my camera?” Tony asked as he took the nearly indistinguishable piece of equipment from Matt.
“I don’t understand,” Jorden said curiously.
“I’d just placed this in the hall of the living quarters where we heard the sound of shuffling feet last night. Not two minutes after heading down the stairs after the instillation, I…we…” he corrected as he glanced in Isis’s direction, “…heard a crash. When we went back upstairs, we found this on the floor, just as you see it now.”
“Are you sure that you were alone up there?” Syd questioned as he took the camera from Tony for a closer look.
“As sure as we could be,” Isis said. “Matt swept the entire floor while I stayed out in the hall to make sure that no one tried to get out if someone was up there, and we found nothing.”
“I was hoping that we could look at the brief amount of footage we got before the camera went down,” Matt calmly suggested.
“Sure,” Ana said. “We can also see if
the other camera picked something up.”
“No we can’t,” Tony said as he took his camera back and looked at it the way a child would look at his favorite toy that was in ruins, “it’s an IR. This is the only one that will have anything on it…that’s assuming it has anything at all.”
Ana shook her head with disappointment then led the cavalcade of investigators into the den where they all crowded around the desk, which was filled with a couple of computer monitors and keyboards. She used only the monitor on the left and isolated the recording from the moment it was switched on.
In silence, the entire team stood and watched the monitor and all were left with disappointment.
“That can’t be. Something should have shown up on the video,” Nigel said with confusion, “I mean we should have at least seen a shadow of movement on the ground or a jarring of the camera before it went down.”
“I agree,” Isis said. “That camera was angled down pretty sharply in order to capture the rooms you pointed out,” she said looking from Matt to Jorden then back to the monitor. “Not to mention that the sunlight was beaming in through the open door on the left. If anyone was in there we would have seen the shadow.”
“Is there any way someone could have gotten to it from the room across the hall?” Saph questioned as she rejoined the team fully clothed, then pulled her damp hair back in a ponytail.
Matt shook his head. “No,” he confirmed, “the door is warped and difficult to open; I barely got it open myself last night when we were investigating and again this morning when I was sweeping the second floor.”
“The camera was also placed high enough that whoever did it would have had to have used an instrument of some kind or used a ladder to reach it,” Isis said. “The ladder is out of the question because we were up there too quickly for anyone to have escaped with one, not to mention we had the only step ladder, or ladder in general, with us when we headed downstairs.”
“And there was no blur of an instrument being swung anywhere in the picture,” Nigel pointed out.
The Haunting of Isola Forte di Lorenzo Page 7
