by Jill Bisker
We filed into the kitchen as Dean told a funny story from when we were in high school. “And that was the last time I put milk in my locker!” he finished as we all laughed. He had a way of bringing the party with him wherever he went.
Connie passed out the beer while I found some disposable plates and paper towels. “Sorry, all we’ve got is paper towels, we didn’t remember napkins,” I told them.
“I’m not sure I can eat here with these low standards,” Dean kidded as the pizza guy knocked on the front door. “It’s a good thing you splurged for the expensive beer,” he said, holding up a bottle of Lift Bridge, a microbrew sold locally. I smacked him on the stomach playfully and noticed Emmett watching us.
Connie left the room to answer the door and returned with several steaming boxes that she set on the table. “We got pepperoni and sausage or supreme with everything. I hope you guys aren’t too picky.”
“If it has meat, it’s good,” Glen replied. We all dug into the pizza. “You bought the good pizza too,” he added. “Not that cheap chain fare. I think I’m in love.”
“Nothing but the best for the professionals,” Connie chimed in.
As I opened a beer and grabbed a slice of pizza, I was starting to relax while we laughed and kidded. I couldn’t remember having this much fun with Simon. It’s not that he was more serious, he just wasn’t fun. I could get used to being on my own, with a new life and new friends. Or old ones, I thought, looking at Dean as he found a spoon to hang off the end of his nose. Was it wrong to fantasize about two separate men when I wasn’t even divorced yet?
“So, Laney,” Emmett began after the feeding frenzy had subsided. “We’ll set up the cameras probably in the upstairs hall, kitchen, living room and master bedroom if that’s all right with you. Then, really, we just wait until after midnight.”
“Can I ask you something? I’ve always wondered this. Why do you wait until dark and then investigate with all the power off? There have been a few things that happened during the day. Not many, but still, can’t you catch something during the day?” I asked.
“We get that question a lot, actually. I can’t speak for the guys you see on TV, but for us it’s a sensory thing. Think about it, at night we turn off the electricity, and then you don’t have all those odd sounds like the air conditioner, furnace and who knows what else running. It makes it easier to hear natural things. You’d be surprised how sound carries and can confuse an investigation. It could be anything, a TV from a neighbor’s house, someone talking in their backyard, a car radio two streets over, you name it. By waiting until after midnight those extraneous distractions are minimized,” Emmett explained seriously, opening another beer.
I thought back to the music I heard the other night and felt foolish. Did I just hear something from outside?
“There is also a theory that ghosts are cautious and shy and come out more in the night when things are quieter and nobody will bother them,” Emmett continued.
“That actually makes sense,” I agreed.
“I was just kidding about the last part.” Emmett laughed.
“Oh, right.” I kind of smiled, feeling foolish for falling for his gag. Then, seeing that he was just trying to keep the coming experience from getting too serious, I laughed and rolled my eyes at him. “Funny.”
I grabbed a plastic bag from the pantry and hung it on a drawer pull. “You can put your recyclables here and the garbage is under the sink.”
“Does that mean you’re not going to clean up after us?” Dean teased, winking at me.
“I think not,” I winked back.
“Tough crowd,” he sighed. “Just when I thought I’d found the girls of my dreams.”
“We should go get the rest of our gear and start setting up,” Emmett said, back to business. I followed him, Dean and Glen outside and saw they had driven up in a big brown van that was at least twenty years old. They brought in the rest of their suitcases, cables, extension cords, tripods, and other unidentifiable equipment into the house. I couldn’t imagine they needed quite that much stuff, but whatever.
“Anything I can help carry?” I asked.
“That’s okay, we got it,” Dean answered as he hefted two heavy-looking cases of mystery paraphernalia. Wanting to help anyway, I took a duffel bag I saw in the back of the van and carried it toward the house. Dean was coming back out as I was walking up the front walk.
“Thanks, Laney, but unless you’re planning to wash my dirty gym clothes, you can leave those in the van.” He smiled as he took the duffel from me and headed back for more equipment.
“Sorry!” I said, feeling foolish. Wanting to avoid any other embarrassment, I went inside to see what Emmett was doing. He had already begun unpacking several suitcases and Glen was running extension cords and cables throughout the first floor rooms. “I can help with setting up some of this,” I said. “I actually do some photography as a hobby.” I picked up a tripod and started opening it.
“Really, Laney, you don’t have to do that. This is our job.”
“What, you don’t think I’m capable? I’m not helpless, you know. And I’m definitely not paying you.”
“That’s not it. We bought a lot of this stuff second-hand and some of it takes a little babying. I’d hate to see you hurt yourself on some old piece of metal that sticks or slips the way it’s not supposed to.”
“You men and your toys,” I started to say then loosened a wing nut on the heavy tripod I was holding which caused one of the leg extensions to fall out and land on my bare foot. “Ouch! “Son of a—”
Emmett looked up quickly and saw me rubbing my foot, my pride hurt, but the rest of me mostly uninjured. “Are you okay? You really need to put some shoes on.”
“I’m fine,” I snapped at him. “Here, I’ll let you do this part. When you’re ready to place the cameras I can tell you exactly where I saw things.”
I went into the kitchen and fiddled around meaninglessly while I recovered my dignity. After a few minutes I had to return to the living room to see what everyone was doing.
“So anything else happen recently that you can tell us?” Emmett asked. “We want to get coverage of any place where something strange happened.”
“Mostly it was upstairs. The footsteps we heard when we were sitting in the living room, and the sound like someone was leaning against the door when I was in the bathroom. When I was upstairs I heard the music coming from downstairs. And while nothing has happened in the basement yet, I do feel super creeped out whenever I’m down there. But I really hate spiders so that may be the reason for that.”
“Hey,” Connie interjected. “Don’t forget the chair in the kitchen.”
Emmett looked at us questioningly.
I was uncomfortable telling him about it, and I didn’t know why, but he had to know. He was, after all, a professional.
“One of the chairs seemed to move by itself in the kitchen, kind of like in that movie, Poltergeist.”
“Hmm, I see. We’ll make sure we get a good camera angle of that area. Anything else?”
I looked at Connie and we both shrugged. “I think that’s it.”
“We’ll check it all out.” Emmett and his team finished placing cameras, microphones and various sensors around the house until the place looked like some kind of movie set. When they were done setting up, everyone sat down in the living room.
“We’ll split up into two teams. Laney and Connie can be with me while Dean and Glen work together. Is everyone okay with that?” Emmett inquired.
“You know,” I said. “They always used to split up on Scooby-Doo, and it was never a good thing.”
Emmett laughed. “Very funny. That’s not the first Scooby-Doo comment we’ve gotten. We’ll come up with a ridiculous plan for catching the ghost later.”
“And why did it usually involve Scooby dressing up like a woman?” Glen asked.
“I don’t want to know,” Connie said, laughing.
“Ok, I’m ready,” I proclaimed,
sitting on the edge of my seat. I suddenly visualized sitting close to Emmett in a darkened room and my pulse went up a notch. “Let’s go,” I said breathlessly.
“Dean and Glen, you start in the basement where you can pull the master switch at the electrical box. We’ll start on the second floor in the master bedroom.” Everyone nodded in agreement. “Let’s roll then,” Emmett said, heading up the steps two at a time.
Chapter Thirteen
Connie followed Emmett up the steps and I hung to the back. I stood in the hall outside the master, suddenly feeling very silly. Maybe this whole thing was a ridiculous idea. How was this really going to help us? Even if we found some kind of evidence that a ghost was here, what would that change? What would we do about it? Try to scare it off?
The entire house was dark and silent as a tomb. So very silent. It made every move we made seem loud and disturbing to the quietness around us. Emmett provided each of us with a small flashlight so we could see our way around in the blackness. They had red lens filters so our eyes would stay adjusted to the dark. I moved just inside the bedroom door and looked up to see the camera above me on a tripod trained at the window where we’d seen the shadow.
“How does the camera pick up anything in the dark?”
“It’s actually a full spectrum camcorder that uses infrared sensors to pick up light not seen by the human eye,” Emmett responded.
“Where do you get something like that?”
“The internet,” Emmett answered, looking slightly alien in the light.
“Of course,” I said. These days you could get just about anything online. I sat in the doorway and leaned against the door jamb while Connie sat on the bed. Emmett walked to the other side of the room and stood next to the bedside table, leaning against the wall.
“You have a few boxes in here. Cozy. I heard you were a talented decorator,” Emmett remarked, getting into the act. Connie giggled, breaking the tension I was feeling as I was nervous about sitting around all night in a dark room waiting for ghosts.
“Maybe you should have made your bed, Laney,” Connie razzed me.
“You know I’ve been a tad busy today,” I whispered.
Emmett took a device out of his pocket, getting back to business. “This is a digital EMF reader. You don’t seem to have high EMF’s here,” he said as he squeezed past the clutter around the bed. He walked up to where I was sitting and leaned over, showing me the display. The numbers meant nothing to me but they were low. He put it in his shirt pocket and took out another electronic device, kneeling close to me. “This is the recorder we use to pick up EVP.”
He smelled delicious.
“I know,” I said in all seriousness.
He looked at me, surprised. Then we both laughed. “Okay, that time you got me,” he said as he stood up. “The stuff we pick up on the recorder that we don’t always hear at the time is interesting. It’s hard to say what it is exactly. Sometimes you wonder if it’s just a defect in the recording, or if we’re just hearing what we want to hear. But there have been times I’ve experienced personally where the voice is crystal clear, and it wasn’t audible in person.”
I shivered a little bit. The ghost thing was getting a little too real for me. But something strange was going on in the house. I did not imagine all these weird incidents. Connie experienced some of them as well. Then we found out earlier today from our mothers that they had grown up with ghostly occurrences. Now that we were here in the dark with everything else shut off, I started hearing the natural creaks and groans of the house.
Connie lay down on my bed. “I could take a nap I’m so tired,” she complained.
“It’s the beer. I’ll bet that’s why Emmett’s standing, he doesn’t want to fall asleep on his watch,” I teased.
I heard Emmett chuckle in the dark.
The darkness surrounded me and I felt my eyes grow heavy. I struggled to keep them open and stay alert.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.
Suddenly wide awake, I spun around and flashed my light down the hall towards the stairway. “Did you hear that?” I whispered, backing up in a crabwalk towards the bed.
Connie sat up and slid off the bed to sit next to me on the floor. “Why are you whispering? If there’s a ghost in the house, it already knows we’re here.” She reached out and took my hand.
“I don’t know,” I replied trying to raise my voice. “It just seemed wrong to talk aloud.”
Emmett moved next to the door, standing stock still with the EVP recorder still in his hand. “Is there something you’d like to tell us?” he asked. “We’re here to help you.”
Quiet. He stepped out into the hall. “Can you tell us your name? We’re not here to hurt you.”
A shiver ran up my spine, I could hear a tiny tinkling. Almost like ... music. It seemed to be coming from everywhere, yet nowhere. Growing louder.
“Do you guys hear that?” I asked, unable to hide the shaking of my voice. The fear was not from the music exactly, more from the feeling of not being alone, of otherworldliness.
“Yes,” they both answered as Connie gripped my hand tighter. Abruptly, it was quiet again. No one moved. I felt like my legs had put roots down deep into the floorboards.
Emmett took a step forward into the hall. Nothing. Another step, still nothing. “How can we help you?” Whatever it was, it was gone.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
Crash!
I nearly jumped out of my skin. Connie screeched then asked, “What was that?”
“I think it came from your bedroom.” I took a deep breath and stood up, pulling Connie with me as we moved down the hall towards Emmett. He looked back at us in askance, and I pointed to the room Connie was using.
Moving forward, Emmett shone his flashlight into Connie’s room, flooding the corners with light. The shadows shifted but nothing moved within. “I don’t see anything that could have fallen. Come and take a look.”
Connie dropped my hand and tentatively stepped into the room. She looked behind the beds to see if anything could have slipped off, while Emmett and I lingered at the doorway. “Okay, Velma, see anything?”
“Hey, if I’m anyone, it’s Daphne. I don’t see anything obvious.” Connie turned, sweeping underneath the beds next with her flashlight. “You know I opened that little door to the closet under the eaves when we were first in here and it was packed full of stuff. Maybe it came from there.” We turned to look at the far end of Connie’s room. Both this room and the bathroom had storage areas under the eaves that I hadn’t had the nerve to tackle yet. The spider population would be out of control there.
Emmett walked over and pulled on the door. It was stuck.
“I just opened that yesterday, right after we moved all the boxes out of the way,” Connie said going to the door also. “Let me try.” The door wouldn’t budge for her either. “Maybe something jammed in the opening or something,” she said, as she slid her hands around the edges of the door.
“Okay, my turn,” I challenged. Connie and Emmett moved over and I grasped the handle and pulled. Holding tight, I pulled with all my weight. The door gave way immediately, sending me flying backwards. Emmett jumped forward to catch me and we both crashed to the floor, our flashlights scattering. We lay in a crumpled heap, too dazed to move.
“Are you guys okay?” Connie’s forehead creased in concern as she leaned over us.
Slowly, I started to laugh. “I’m fine, except for my dignity and a few scrapes. Good thing I landed on Emmett.”
“I’m all right,” Emmett groaned from beneath me. “Got the wind knocked out of me but it was worth it.” I looked down at Emmett who was grinning at me from the floor. I blushed as I realized what he was saying. I hoped he couldn’t tell in the dark.
It was a new experience being around other men after so many years with just Simon. I hadn’t felt like this since I was in high school. Emmett’s breath was warm on my face and I felt an irresistible urge to kiss him. Connie cleared her
throat behind me, breaking the spell. I rolled off Emmett and jumped to my feet. He climbed to his feet slowly, a hand to his back. Connie was looking at me with a smug smile on her face. I tapped her in the shoulder with the back of my fist. “Don’t start with me,” I said, looking down for my flashlight, looking everywhere but at Emmett.
He picked his light up off the floor and moved back towards the closet, examining the door. “There was no reason for this door to be stuck like that and then just let go. That was kind of strange, huh? Well, we’ll never be able to tell what that noise was, unless we shift everything and look for something that appears to have fallen or is out of place. Even then, with all this dust it looks like this stuff has been here for such a long time, why would it fall now?” He proceeded to close and reopen the door again. “It doesn’t stick at all. I just can’t figure out why it wouldn’t open.”
We moved back into the hallway and paused, hesitant about what to do next. “I wonder if the guys had any luck in the basement,” Connie said. “Probably I should have gone with them.” She gave me a sly look. I thought about kicking her but decided Emmett was too close.
“We should go down and regroup. Then we can move to another area.” Emmett walked to the stairs and warned, “Everyone be careful walking in the dark.” I wondered if Connie’s comments were being missed or ignored by Emmett.
I grabbed Connie’s arm and we paused at the top of the steps. “Seriously, Connie, stop with the comments already. You’re embarrassing me.”
“What? Oh come on, it’s just a joke. We joke all the time. It never bothered you before.”
“Well, it bothers me now. I’m not even legally divorced yet. You might give him the wrong idea.”
“I don’t think I have to give him any ideas.” Smirking, she started down the stairs.
I tried to see down the hallway one more time. I was glad Emmett wouldn’t think I was nuts, at least not about the paranormal things. I was sure he thought I was a flake otherwise. What was wrong with me? Suddenly feeling very alone in the dark, I noticed a chill in the air. I started down the stairs, shining faint light on the steps as I went. The darkness pressed on me from behind, and I resisted the urge to run. Watching my feet, I took a few quick steps then felt a shove between my shoulder blades. I found myself tumbling forward, smashing into Connie and inadvertently pulling her down the stairs the rest of the way, landing at Emmett’s feet.
