by Tim McGregor
“Do you see her?”
“Just flashes, nothing definite. There were other deaths too. A lot of blood has been spilt down here.” She straightened up and brushed the dust from her hands. “What happened to the owners?”
“Things went downhill after that. The stock market crash wiped them out and the two of them became recluses in the house. Then she killed her husband. He was found down here with his throat cut.”
Billie covered her ears with her hands. “Ooh. She doesn’t like that.”
“Who doesn’t like it?”
“Her, Evelyn. She doesn’t like us talking about killing her husband. She started shrieking at me.”
“She’s back?”
“She never left,” Billie said. Her face winced, as if in pain. “She’s screaming at me that it’s all lies and slander.”
Mockler looked over the room. He didn’t necessarily want to see anything but he couldn’t stop himself from looking. “Where is she?”
“Right beside you. Screaming into your ear.”
Mockler flinched and backed away, the way one does when a wasp flies too close. There was nothing there. “Can you tell her to get lost?”
“She won’t listen to me.” Billie looked at the photograph again. “What happened to her?”
Mockler shook off the clammy sensation crawling up his spine and went on. “She was locked up in Hamilton Asylum. Killed by another inmate in nineteen thirty-seven.”
“That did it. She’s gone.” Billie tracked something across the room. “What happened to the house after that?”
“It sat empty for a while before being purchased by this man.” He held out another photograph. “Howard Gunther Albee. A writer during the pulp era. He wrote spooky books and stuff. Like the owners, a devotee of the occult.”
Billie studied the man in the photograph. A broad face with small eyes hidden behind wire-rimmed spectacles. “Was he famous?”
“Not that I know of,” Mockler replied. “Have you seen him in the house?”
The man in the photo was a stranger to her. “No. What happened to him?”
“He disappeared. After a prolonged absence, a colleague came to check on him but he had vanished. All of his stuff was still here, the suitcases and whatnot. There was even a half-written page in the typewriter but Albee himself was gone.”
“He was never found?”
“Nope. Gone without a trace. But the police found blood down here in the basement.” Mockler nodded at the broken cavity in the floor. “Right in that spot, actually.”
Billie’s eyes widened at that. “So was that him, Albee? The body in the pit?”
“That’s what I thought too but it’s not him. The coroner said the body you found was a couple decades old. Albee disappeared in forty-three.” Mockler shuffled through the photographs in his hand. “Here’s where it gets weirder.”
“Like it’s not weird enough?” Billie joked.
“When Bourdain, the original owner, was found dead in this space, the walls and floors were painted with weirdo symbols. Pentagrams and witchcraft stuff. Evelyn had apparently been the artist who had done it. Now, all of that had been scrubbed off and painted over when the house was put up for sale again in nineteen thirty. When the police came back in forty-three looking for the missing writer, Albee, the symbols were back. Take a look.”
Billie took the photo he held out. An overhead angle of the basement floor, painted with an elaborate pentagram with candles set into the five points. In the centre of the star was a large puddle of dark blood. Billie scanned the floor before her with the crude symbol painted there and compared it to the one in the photograph. “It’s the same one.”
“Yup,” he said. He pointed at the floor. “What you’re looking at here is actually the fourth occurrence of this symbol.”
“Fourth?”
“That we know of,” he explained. “Now, there are no photos of the original pentagram that Evelyn painted but I imagine it looked like this. After it was scrubbed off, it shows up again with Albee’s disappearance. Again, it’s scrubbed off at the time. It shows up a third time a few decades later with the death of this man.”
He handed over two more photographs. Billie gazed down at a picture of another pentagram on the floor. It was identical to the other photograph, the only difference being the police office in the picture revealed a more recent era. The second photograph was a mug shot of a young man with long hair and a scraggly beard. Billie felt her throat catch at the familiarity of the face. “This is the man I saw. The hippie.”
“Stanley Whistler,” Mockler reported. “Draft dodger from Ohio, relocated here. Found dead in October of seventy-two. Guess where he was found?”
Her eyes dropped automatically to the caved-in pit in the floor. “Here too.”
“Yup. Right in the same spot. Another pentagram on the floor, which you can see in the photo there.”
“He was cut open,” she said. “Like an animal.”
“That’s right. His throat was slashed then his belly was cut open. According to the notes, his insides were spread across the room.”
She tried to block the image from her mind but once Mockler had said it, she could see it as plain as day. The body on the floor, mangled and brutalized. His intestines unspooled like cords of rope across the cement floor. “Was anyone arrested for the murder?”
“No. The detectives at the time had little to go on. Whistler was a drifter with no ties here, no real friends. The only leads they had was this group of hippie people that Whistler had been seen with. Apparently this group were modern-day witches or something but the police couldn’t find any of them. They must have fled town after the murder.”
“Witches?”
“The reports were contradictory. They were described as hippies, flower children, witches and-or Satanists.”
“And they re-painted the same pentagram and stuff on the walls?”
“Yup.” Mockler took the photos back. “Do you see anything about this Stanley kid? Or what happened to him?”
“A tiny bit. But it’s foggy. Residual energy.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Residual?”
“It’s like an echo of a traumatic event. I had a glimpse of him being held down. There was someone wearing a robe but their face is hidden.”
“A robe?”
“Like a costume cape or something. There was some kind of ritual going on.”
Mockler scratched his stubble, mulling it over. “Just like Evelyn Bourdain, crazy spells and stuff?”
“I guess so.” Billie paced forward until the toes of her shoes touched the outer edge of the painted circle. “So this pentagram is the fourth occurrence?”
“That we know of. The place has been empty for so long, there may have been other incidents that we just don’t know about.”
Billie toed the paint on the floor, scuffing it with her shoe. It flaked away like dry sand.
“I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “It’s dried blood.”
She jerked backward. “Eeew. Are you serious?”
“Pig’s blood. According to the lab.”
Billie retraced her steps. It was silly but she felt safer being within arm’s reach of him. “Can I ask you something?”
“Anything.”
“What do you think is going on here?”
He scratched his chin for a long time before answering. “I think it’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy. The house is rumoured to be haunted, all kinds of stories and folk tales floating around about what happened here. That attracts its own bad business. People looking to do something bad come here because of its reputation. It’s like a loop. The myth attracts bad things, the bad things propel the myth. And on and on.”
It was a cop’s take. A method of breaking down all the rampant, contradictory details to get at the problem itself. She chewed on it, seeing the logic of it. “Makes sense,” she concluded.
“There’s been an uptick in this stuff,” he said, nodding to the glyphs on t
he walls. “Crimes with some kind of devil-worship connection. At first I thought it had something to do with your friend Gantry but I’m not sure. I think something else is going on.”
Billie clammed up at the mention of that name. Gantry was just trouble.
“Have you heard from him?” Mockler asked.
“No. Last I heard he was back in England.” John Gantry was a bit of a sore point between them. The slippery Englishman seemed to be a sore between everyone who knew him. Gantry was the one who had helped Billie understand her abilities. Detective Mockler, on the other hand, was after the man for suspicion of murder.
“I heard that too. I also heard he was incinerated in a factory explosion in Oslo.” Mockler shrugged. “I got my fingers crossed that rumour is true.”
“I heard it was a church fire.”
The sound of water dripping echoed from a dark corner.
Mockler looked up at her. “Your turn.” He smiled as he said this. “I want to know what you think is going on here. Why is this place home to so much misery?”
“You’re not gonna like my answer.” It was as honest as she could be.
“Try me. I’m open to anything at this point.”
She took a moment, trying to find a way to phrase her answer so it didn’t sound so crazy to him. There wasn’t one. “This Evelyn woman? She was playing around with something she shouldn’t have. And she summoned something bad into this place and it’s been here ever since. It draws people to it, like a magnet. And bad things happen.”
Silence crept across the room, leaving her response to simply hang there in the air as the detective pondered it. Unlike herself, Billie noted his poker face. It was stone.
Finally, he looked at her. “What is it? Like a ghost?”
“I don’t know what to call it.” She folded her arms over her stomach as if she’d eaten something bad. “It’s not a ghost. It was never alive to begin with. It’s old and it’s evil to the core. And all it wants to do is hurt people. Or make people hurt others.”
“Hey,” he said, taking a step closer. “You okay? You look a little green.”
“It doesn’t like me talking about it.” Billie swiped her forearm across her brow to dry the cold sweat blooming quickly. “And it’s getting close.”
Mockler didn’t believe in any of this stuff but that did nothing to settle the prickle of gooseflesh on the back of his neck. “It’s in the room?”
“I have to leave,” she said. Then, like a puppet with its strings cut, Billie collapsed in a heap and threw up all over the floor.
12
“JUST COME OVER,” Tammy said into the phone. “It’s been ages. We’ll just hang out.”
She listened to the man on the other end blather on. Jay was a friend. A hook-up initially but later a friend. He was a film editor and they often moved in the same circles. More than a few times, they had been each other’s last minute dates for functions that required a partner. At the moment, he was being a pain.
“No, Jay.” Tammy rolled her eyes as she corrected his assumption. “It’s not a booty call. I just don’t want to be alone right now.”
Another spew of blather down the line. Tammy waited for a break in the chatter. “I’m just working and it’s tedious and, I don’t know… Do you have something better to do?”
Blather, blather, excuse, excuse.
“Fine,” she finally said. “Be that way.” She hung up and tossed her phone down.
Hunkered down at her desk, Tammy had set aside the evening to tweak a set of photographs she had taken for Jen’s shop. Jen had an article coming out in a magazine and had asked Tammy to do the pics. The shoot had gone well and a good batch of the photos had turned out but she wanted to tweak them further. All the ladies were there but some weirdo tension was brewing between Billie and Jen. The two of them had known each other since high school and there was plenty of history there to dig at them both. Tammy stayed out of it, leaving them to sort it out on their own.
Sitting down to work, Tammy found her motivation dwindled quickly as the exhaustion set in. She had barely slept the last two nights because of the nightmares and the fiasco at the abandoned house. The other stuff she had initially dismissed as exhaustion but the weirdo factor kept edging up and she was having difficulty dispelling it all. The sound of footsteps in the other room, the sense of dread that had settled over her apartment, the startling voice in her ear that had made her jump out of her skin.
That had been the prompt to call Jay. The creepiness was edging up her nerves and she simply didn’t want to be alone. Jay had nixed that idea, moaning about how bored he would be watching her work. Douche.
Tammy lingered at her laptop, forcing herself to concentrate on the fine-tuning she needed to apply to the photos. Unable to shake the creeping sensation that she was being watched, she sat with her back to the wall. She had read once that gunfighters in the Old West sat this way, to avoid being shot in the back by some brazen coward.
She wished she had a gun. Or a gunfighter, to sit and keep watch. She couldn’t stop thinking about what Billie had said earlier.
Tammy learnt of her friend’s talents the night that she and Jen and Kaitlin had confronted Billie about her withdrawal from the world. It had been a half-assed intervention which Billie shut down by informing the trio that she could talk to ghosts. The ladies’ reaction had been mixed. Kaitlin believed without question. Jen refused to hear another word. Tammy was in the middle somewhere but leaning more toward Jen than Kaitlin. It seemed crazy but in the two months since that time, she had seen things that had eaten away at her resistance to the idea. Any vestige of doubt had crumbled after the visit to the murder house. Kaitlin’s odd behaviour and sudden disappearance had only underscored it all. And something Billie had said earlier kept nagging at her; the idea that something from that creepy house had followed Kaitlin home.
Could it have followed her home too? Was that the reason behind the strange sounds and unearthly whisper in her ear? Or was it all in her head? Was it too much to ask of Jay to get off his butt and come keep her company when she needed it?
“You’re overtired,” she said aloud. “Go to bed.”
Ignoring her own advice, she scrolled through photograph after photograph from Jen’s shoot, liking some and dismissing others. Something seemed off. She scrolled back and popped one picture into a new window.
A nice shot of Jen, Billie and Kaitlin smiling for the camera. Their signature mugs all around. Jen’s smile was full and bright where Billie’s came off as lopsided, as if smiling came unnaturally to her. Kaitlin normally had a huge smile, all teeth and eyes curled into crescents but not in this photo. Kaitlin’s whole face was foggy and pixelated, as if someone had used the smudge tool in the photo editor to blur her face.
Tammy winced, thinking she had messed up the shot in-camera. She flicked the image away and brought up the next one in the file. A duplicate of the first, snapped a second or two later. Same smiles, same blurry vision of Kaitlin’s face.
Something cold fluttered down in Tammy’s belly.
She pored through the rest of the photographs. Every photo of Kaitlin’s face was pixelated into obscurity. It was as if someone had gone through Tammy’s photo set with a vengeance, eager to mar every snap of the young woman’s face.
It wasn’t a glitch in the camera and it wasn’t a problem with the lighting. Everyone else in the photographs looked fine. Only Kaitlin had been singled out and defaced.
Tammy killed the program and closed the laptop. This was no mistake. It was deliberate. Something bad had targeted her friend and now Kaitlin had disappeared. Snatching up the phone, Tammy crossed into the living room and dialled another number. She prayed that Billie would pick up.
13
THE TIRES SPIT gravel across the steps as Mockler stomped the gas pedal to get away from the Murder House. Billie lay flat across the backseat where he had all but thrown her in his haste to get out of there. The police tape stretched across the driveway flashed
up in the headlights and snapped as he gunned through it.
“Billie!” He twisted around to look at her but all he could see were her legs. “You okay back there?”
No response. The car fishtailed across the gravel as it swung onto the main road, almost swerving into the ditch on the far side. The road was dark and, luckily, devoid of traffic.
He was still numb from what he had witnessed, even with all of the spooky business he had heard so far. After Billie had collapsed and vomited all over the floor, he ran to help her but she had slipped out of his fingers at the last second. She had been pulled away, sliding across the cement floor at a brisk pace as if dragged by some unseen force. The look of absolute terror in her eyes had frozen his blood as she slid clear across the floor and straight toward the open pit in the centre of the pentagram. Whatever force had taken ahold of her meant to throw her down into the crater.
Billie’s fingernails had clawed across the concrete as she tried to latch onto something and the awful sound of it had snapped him out of his paralysis. He bolted and tackled Billie before she was flung into the pit. Worst of all was the reality-splitting tug-of-war that ensued with whatever unseen thing that gripped the young woman’s leg. Billie became a wishbone, close to splitting down the middle and pulled apart. His grip on her wrist was slipping but in the end, Billie had saved herself, shrieking at the invisible thing to go away and kicking at it in a frenzy.
The tension slacked and she tumbled onto him. Yanking Billie to her feet, he rushed the woman out of that awful place.
Murder House. More like hell house, he thought.
“Ray?” Her voice drifted up from the backseat.
Mockler hit the brakes and skidded the vehicle onto the shoulder. “Billie? Are you okay?”
Throwing the car into park, he launched out of the driver’s seat and as rushed into the back. Billie propped herself onto her elbows. Her hair draped down over her face, hiding her features. He slid in next to her, leaving the door open to keep the dome light on.
“Easy,” he said.
