by Isaac Thorne
“What do you think about the remake?”
Jeremy rolled his eyes. “Never saw it. Heard it was awful, though. I don’t think the fans appreciated it much. I would know. I’m in a cosplay group that does the Ghostbusters at conventions all over the state and it’s pretty much still a sausagefest.” He beamed. “I’m kind of the Ray Stantz of the group, I guess. I keep the ECTO-1 running.”
“What’s the ECTO-1?”
That provoked another eyeroll from Jeremy. “The Ghostbusters car,” he replied. “I’m one of two of us who keep the car running. I drove it over here, as a matter of fact. After I’m done here I have to get it over to my friend John’s place so we can take it to the comic shop in Uptown. They’re doing an event today.”
Staff smiled at him. “You’re a budding historian and an auto-mechanic? That’s quite a double-major you’re headed for there.”
The young man shrugged. “Yeah. I guess.”
This exhausted Staff’s supply of relatability to Jeremy. He muttered a “Yeah” in response and went about setting up the outdated Channel 6 camera and lighting equipment. After some discussion, Afia and Patsy eventually settled on the set of modern chairs in front of the fireplace for the interview, which would create a nice visual reference when they later interviewed Patsy herself in the same spot. Staff made a mental note to close in tight on his subjects so as to crop out the art deco piece hanging above them. Afia looked perfectly natural on camera as she seated herself on the edge of her chair, leaning in so that viewers could see how interested she was in Jeremy’s story. Jeremy himself looked swallowed by his surroundings, like a toddler sitting in grandpa’s recliner. Even so, his face came to life when Staff switched on the lights and indicated that they were rolling. He was eager to share what he knew.
Afia smiled at him. “So, Ms. Blankenship says you were hanging around in the Gordon house on Hollow Creek Road and that you heard something strange. Tell me about it.”
“Jesus! We’re just going to jump right in? I thought you’d ask for my vitals first, like Lois Lane did in Superman.”
“We’ll make sure we have your name right and everything afterward,” Afia assured him. “Don’t swear on camera, please. We can bleep you or cut it out when we edit everything together, but it creates more work for us.”
The young man blushed a little. “Sorry.”
“Now tell me about your experience in the Gordon house. Why did you go in there? Didn’t you know you were trespassing on private property?”
Jeremy glanced at his hands. “Well, I guess I knew it was trespassing. We—I mean my buddies and I—weren’t thinking about all that. We’d just heard the rumors and wanted to check them out for ourselves.”
“What rumors?”
“About the screaming. There were some other kids at school who told us they were going to go in there to explore the place. One of them, Brandi Wakefield, is big into haunting shows. She was thinking she might try to start a new ghost investigation series, sell it to Travel Channel. Like Ghost Adventures, you know? Except with some girl power instead of somebody like Zak Bagans running around and shouting at dust. I asked her why she wouldn’t do something new and original instead of gender-swapping a B.S. show like that. She called me a misogynist incel and said it was her business.”
Afia chuckled. “Ok. What did they tell you about the screaming?”
“Only that they heard it.” He shifted in his seat. “And that they didn’t go in the place after that. Brandi said that they had parked her car on the street at the end of the driveway and were starting to unload when they heard this godawful screaming coming from somewhere inside the house. She said it was this horribly shrill and long shriek, some real ear-drum piercing kind of shi—uh, stuff. At first it startled them. Then they figured they must have been busted, so they hauled ass back to the car and drove off.”
“Busted?”
“Yeah. They thought someone had told on them, alerted the owner or something. If I owned an abandoned house that’s exactly the kind of thing I’d do to keep people away from it. Hide a set of high-power speakers where no one would think to look and setup a motion sensor trigger and bam! You got yourself a haunted house, talk of the town.”
“Uh-huh. What was it about their story that made you want to check it out for yourself, then? I mean, your friends assumed they had been had. Weren’t you afraid you’d get caught?”
Jeremy grinned. It was the sheepiest of sheepish grins Staff had ever seen. “I guess. But I think what I really wanted to do was debunk the screaming itself. Brandi thought it was probably the owner. I wanted to prove it. I mean, everyone knows that Constable Gordon owns the place. Before that he worked at the Media Place Smarty Bar. I mean, come on! If you’re a guy with some power and access to the right equipment, why wouldn’t you mess with people?”
Afia grimaced comically. “It would certainly keep me away. So you went to the constable’s house to see for yourself. You knew it was the constable’s house and you weren’t afraid you’d get in trouble?”
“From him?” The grin on the kid’s face would have betrayed his lack of fear and respect for Lost Hollow’s law enforcement if the tone of his question had not. To her credit, Staff thought, Afia chose to ignore that path.
“Tell me what happened then.”
Jeremy leaned back in his chair. His right ankle was propped on his left knee. He knitted his fingers together in his lap, steepling the index fingers so that they pointed at Afia.
“This is where things get weird.”
***
There were no signs of another living human being at the Gordon place when Jeremy arrived. Naturally, that didn’t mean anything if the constable, or even Jeremy’s former high school buddies, were hiding out somewhere on the site, maybe preparing to leap out at him at the scariest possible moment. He pushed the front door inward, allowing his iPhone’s flashlight feature to cast its white light on the interior before he stepped over the threshold. The moon was full and bright. Not a supermoon this time, but it cast enough light through the windows of the old place to help illuminate the corners his iPhone did not. Within, there was dust and footprints in dust.
So far, he didn’t see a damned thing to be afraid of. Yes, it was an abandoned house of sorts. No one lived in it, even if Constable Gordon now owned the place. There were still signs of life. Whole and broken beer bottles lay scattered about the floor. The footprints were another dead giveaway. People had been here recently. That made Jeremy feel less like he was exploring a creepy haunted relic from the past and more like he was breaking and entering. Still, if the good constable didn’t want anyone trespassing in this old house, why hadn’t he bothered to put a lock on the place?
The old hardwood floor groaned when he stepped inside, but it wasn’t menacing. Just a nail that had pried loose from a floor joist over time. It happened in every house. That’s what his dad always said when Jeremy was little, anyway. Those strange squeaks and groans you hear in a house in the middle of the night—those footsteps of monsters, intruders, or ghosts in the imagination of childhood—were almost never anything more than the strained sounds of nails against bending wood, the sounds of a house settling. He glanced around the room with the ray of light from his iPhone and, satisfied that no one was going to jump out at him from behind the door, walked several paces through the interior.
To the left of him was a large room, something that looked like it might have once been a living area or family room. In front of him stretched a wallpapered hallway that ended with a window that probably looked out on the backyard. There also stood the mouth of a staircase that led to the second floor. In a wall beneath the back of that staircase, and closer to Jeremy’s spot near the front of the place, was a small door with a hook-and-eye latch on it. It looked like it might close off a storage area or access to a basement. As the beam from his iPhone passed over the latch, he thought he heard something skitter behind that door. Rats? Maybe. Then again, a door like that might be a perf
ect place to bide your time if you had a friend who was exploring a supposedly haunted house and you wanted to scare the shit out of that friend when he did.
Jeremy grinned. “Ok, guys.I know you’re here. Come on out.” His words bounced off the walls and floors of the empty rooms and echoed back to him. There was no more response than that.
“Guys? I know you’re in here.”
Nothing. He was annoyed now. Pranks are funny, but they’re best when you can share the laugh at yourself. There comes a point in a prank when it’s more important that the joker knows it’s time to stop or risk getting punched in the dick. Most of the time, that point is when the butt of the joke figures out he’s the butt of the joke.
“I’m not playing around here. I’m giving you to the count of three to come out or I’m coming in after you. And you don’t want me to have to come in after you. One.”
Jeremy thought he saw the loose hook latch on the door jiggle a little in his light, as if the door to which it was attached had moved a hair’s breadth and then become still.
“Two.”
Nothing.
“Three!”
Silence.
He began to creep toward the door, trying to not cause the old floors beneath him to squeak and give away his position. “Ok,” he called. “I guess there really is no one there. I suppose that means no one will mind if I just grab this little hook on the front of the door here and LATCH YOU IN!”
Jeremy threw open the plank door and held it against the wall with his right hand. In his left, the iPhone shone its beam into the blackness of the void he had just revealed. He had expected an old buddy or two, maybe even would-be Ghost Adventurer Brandi Wakefield, to fall out from behind the door when he yanked on it. Instead, all he saw was a flight of plank stairs leading down into...something. A faint odor followed the breeze the swinging door had created. It smelled musty and damp, like mildew or maybe a mouse that had been dead for a while but not yet decomposed enough to stop stinking.
“Hello?” he shouted down the stairs, although he couldn’t imagine anyone would be stupid enough to try to navigate them in darkness like this and with a damp smell like that wafting over them. The decrepit old things would probably collapse under the weight of human feet. “If anyone’s down there, say something.”
From somewhere outside the void of the cellar there came a shriek so piercing that a startled Jeremy leapt backward from the darkness he had been peering into, dropping his iPhone to the hardwood floor in the process. The plank door, free of its restraint, swung closed on its spring hinge with a slam. He plugged his fingers in his ears and clenched his teeth against the sound. Goosebumps rose on his flesh and the prickles from them felt like they zig-zagged from the crack of his ass all the way up his spine and into his hair, forcing it to stand on end. The godawful sound was really some kind of combination of shriek and scream, as if a giant hawk had suddenly descended on an unsuspecting woman jogging at night and begun disemboweling her with its talons. It was a long shriek, without an overture, and ended as suddenly as it had begun. Whatever it was, there was no mistaking that it had come from somewhere outside the house, not within.
Jeremy’s heart pounded inside his chest. His breaths came in short, shallow bursts. He hadn’t been scared when he walked into the old house that evening. Now, though, he was beginning to fear walking out of it. He retrieved his iPhone. It was miraculously unbroken thanks to the Otterbox his mistrustful parents had insisted on when they bought the thing for him. He backed away from the plank door, pivoted toward the wide open front of the house, and shined the iPhone’s flashlight into the darkness of the yard beyond. He could see only the shadows of the branches of trees cast by the backlight of the full moon. They stretched long across the dead grass, the shadowy fingers of Death clawing at the few fragile remnants of green summer grass. There were no signs of anything else: no animals, no pranksters, no ghosts. He launched the video app on his iPhone and tapped the large red Record button. It was probably too dark to see much of anything on camera, but when another shriek pierced the darkness, Jeremy would be ready for it.
He didn’t wait long.
The second shriek was exactly like the first, except farther away. The first one was definitely outside. This one was both outside and somewhere behind him, as if whatever was making the sound was somewhere in the backyard. Jeremy plugged his ears and dashed to the window he’d noticed by the second-floor stairs at the back of the hall. There he plucked his left finger from his ear canal and shined the beam of his iPhone he held in that hand through the glass. He scanned the night for the source of the sound. It died away again as soon as his eyes adjusted to the lens of the window and some details began to emerge from the shadows. The backyard was small and edged by a long stretch of tall trees barren of leaves, and woods beyond that edge.
Jeremy crouched in front of the window and waited. He became aware that his back was to an open front door, that he was a sitting duck if someone or something from outside these walls wanted to come get him now that his attention was turned elsewhere. Even so, he felt safer inside the house than out just now, almost as if this place had once been his own. It felt familiar to him somehow, although he could not remember ever having set foot inside it before.
He’s hiding in the cellar again, he thought randomly. He’s not supposed to be down there.
Jeremy didn’t know who “he” was and why “he” was not supposed to be in the cellar. The thought had simply formed in his mind. It surfaced there and popped open like a bubble from the bottom of a pot of water just beginning to boil. It was an apt simile, really, because Jeremy suddenly realized that he was angry. He wasn’t sure about what. His left hand gripped the iPhone hard enough to turn his knuckles white. He only realized it when he heard the plastic beneath the rubber covering of the Otterbox case give and crack from the pressure. He made a conscious effort to relax his grip, tried to refocus his attention on his scan of the yard beyond the window. It was not easy. Anger, rage, and snippets of memories or old conversations that somehow seemed both familiar and entirely foreign to him raced through his mind.
There was a flash of a boy huddled over the body of a dead dog somewhere. Then it was gone. There was a woman. Several of them, actually. All of them hurt, screaming at him. Then they were gone, too. There was a brief memory of a man: a black man in blue work clothes with fire in his eyes. The man was angry, coming for him. Then there was a flash of the same man, either dead or sleeping, crimson liquid flowing down the front of his shirt.
Jeremy suddenly felt sick. His head swam with memories he did not recognize. They swirled in his head like water circling a drain. He lowered the iPhone from the window and bowed his head over his knees, duck and cover-style on the hardwood floor of the old Gordon place. He gagged and retched, but nothing came up. His left hand ached from where he had been gripping the iPhone. He also noticed for the first time a pins-and-needles feeling crawling throughout his right leg, all the way up to his testicles. The leg had gone to sleep on him at some point as he crouched by the window. He hadn’t realized it until he’d changed position.
A third shriek cut through the silence of the backyard of the Gordon place, and it shocked him back to reality. The anger. The false memories. The sickness. All gone as suddenly as they had converged on him. Jeremy rose on his knees and peered out the window again, into the backyard. There, along the edge of the woods, he saw something. It looked like it might be a dog of some kind, but he couldn’t tell for sure. He raised the iPhone to the glass, trying to get it on video, and it turned to look at him then. At least, he thought it did. As bright as the moon was that night, it was difficult to see the thing’s head, even with the iPhone’s flashlight beam pointed directly at it. It shrieked again and, as he plugged his ears for the third time that night like a toddler trying to avoid a scolding, he was sure that—whatever it was—it could not be canine. There wasn’t a dog on Earth that could make that sound.
Then it was gone along with it
s shriek. He didn’t know how. First it was there, then it was not. Silence engulfed the old Gordon house, and Jeremy’s eyes suddenly felt like they were full of sand. He was exhausted. He wanted only to go home.
***
Patsy’s gasp from somewhere to his left startled Staff. He whipped around to look at her, jiggling the news camera on its tripod when he did. She had padded her way to the interview area silently enough. Her iPhone, which she had been using all morning in her attempts to contact Constable Gordon, was still clutched in her right hand. Fortunately, Jeremy Beard had already presented Afia with the meat of his ghost story. The reporter was in the process of closing out the interview when Patsy exclaimed.
“Jeremy Beard! You never told me you saw the black bitch!”
Afia shot her a look, at which point the older woman appeared to realize she’d just interjected that thought aloud into the audio part of the interview. She grinned sheepishly, partially covering her lips with the fingers of the hand that was not holding the iPhone. “Oh my. Oh dear. I hope you can cut that out.”
“We can,” Staff said, “but you should go sit down while we wrap this up.” He glanced at Afia, who provided him with the slightest of nods. “It won’t be much longer.”
Afia faced her interview subject but spoke to Staff. “Still rolling?”
“Rolling.”
The scowl that had overcome her face following the interruption was immediately replaced with a warm and pleasant smile. “So, Mr. Beard, are you a believer in the paranormal after your experiences in the old Gordon place?”
The young man, who still seemed a bit distracted by Patsy Blankenship’s outburst, shrugged. “I won’t rule it out. I don’t know anything about a, uh, black bitch, but I know I heard shrieks and saw something out in the backyard of that old place that night. Even more than that I felt something. I’ve never been in a fight in my life but that night, with all of those weird flashes of people in my head, I felt out of control of my own body. I wanted to punch someone. Or something. I’d swear there was a part of me that wanted to jump out that window and just start whaling on that animal, whatever it was. I think I blamed it for all those weird things in my head, maybe. I don’t know. It’s almost like someone else was in control of me just then, like I was being possessed.”
