by Jason Brant
“Listen up, Don Juan, I don’t need you—”
“Yo,” Ben’s voice echoed through the church. “Morons!” He sat at his workstation, about fifteen feet from where Kyle and Bryan stood.
“I hate this asshole,” Kyle said as he turned to face Ben. “When this is over I’m going to wring his neck like a chicken.”
“Just wanted to let you 'tards know that you're microphones are hot. If you recall, you're on a TV show and we're recording everything you're saying.”
Bryan felt like his head was going to explode at the thought of people hearing what they were just arguing over. He should have realized the helmet cameras probably had small microphones built into them.
“While it's funny as hell listening to you two argue over who is the biggest loser, I’d appreciate it if you would finish screwing around with your cameras and walk around and record some stuff. We didn't bring you onboard to try and have sex with Katie. Now do some damn work.”
Kyle's mouth dropped open when he looked around and saw that Travis, Joey, and Katie were all watching and listening. Bryan wondered if he should run outside and jump into the crevice. Assuming he didn’t die of embarrassment first, anyway.
They stood in silence for what felt like a year, the ever present quiet surrounding the church not easing the situation. Bryan couldn’t bring himself to look at Katie, so he studied the floor with an intensity it didn’t warrant.
“OK,” Kyle finally said. “Thanks for putting that out there for everyone.”
“Oh, and if you try and 'wring my neck', I'll stomp a mud hole in your ass,” Ben said.
Travis' voice came from the other side of the church. “Fucking idiots.”
After a few moments, Kyle lifted his hand up in front of his helmet camera and curled all of his fingers down, except the middle one. “You see this Ben? That's just for you.”
Though he was incredibly ashamed of arguing with his friend over a girl they had just met, Bryan couldn't help but feel a little better for it. It had been a long time since he'd thought of someone other than Christine like that. Though he was embarrassed to have it out in the open, it still made him feel somewhat alive for the first time in months. Maybe this experience wouldn't be all bad after all.
“What are you grinning at?” Kyle asked.
“It's nothing,” Bryan said, his smile growing. After a few more minutes of maneuvering, the helmet camera finally felt secure on his head, though the straps dug into his forehead a bit. He glared at Ben, wishing he could bore holes in him with his eyes. “What do you want us to do?”
“Go take a look at the rest of the stained glass windows and try not to do anything stupid while you’re at it.”
Bryan wasn’t much of a fighter, finding it pointless and stupid, but dealing with Ben had him reconsidering that position. If nothing else, he planned on enjoying watching Kyle break him in half.
He turned and looked up at the closest wall with a stained glass window. The room was still too dark to see the details of the place without the aid of a flashlight. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and moved closer to the window.
Being a poor college student, he didn’t have a smartphone, so the tiny screen on his flip phone didn’t provide enough light to record the window. “Kyle, I need the light on your Droid.” The lighting situation grated on him. How could they be expected to film things if the area was too dim for the cameras?
Kyle walked over, still grumbling about Ben, and shined the light from his phone on the window. The stained glass had a lot of dirt covering it, but they could still make out the image contained within.
“Is that a snake? What is that?” Kyle asked.
The glass portrayed a long, thick creature slithering out from some kind of underbrush. Bryan squinted, trying to see what it was. It could have been a snake, but it seemed too thick, and its open mouth portrayed too many teeth.
“If that’s a snake, it’s the freakiest one I’ve ever seen. Maybe it’s some kind of prehistoric ancestor of snakes? I should have paid more attention in biology,” Bryan said.
“Who do you think made this crap? I’m guessing you don’t just look up ‘weird-stained-glass-designer’ in the yellow pages,” Kyle said.
Bryan walked along the wall, mindful of the debris scattered around, and approached the next window. “That’s a good question. There is some weird shit in here. It’s almost worth the trip, just to say we got see this place.”
Kyle grabbed his arm and turned him so they were face to face. “Did I hear that right? Are you actually enjoying yourself?”
“Enjoying myself? No. Those three butt plugs are making that impossible. But I have to admit, the Danver church is definitely interesting.”
“So what you’re saying is that I’m not such an asshole for dragging you out here. It sure beats studying all weekend, right?”
“I should be studying, that’s for damn sure. This isn’t a total waste though. I guess I’m trying to say thanks,” Bryan said, feeling a little awkward about their conversation. “That doesn’t mean you aren’t an asshole though.”
Kyle punched him on the shoulder, sending him back a step. Sometimes he didn’t seem to know his own strength. Bryan figured that it was because he spent most of his days around other athletes, and when he hung out with regular people he had trouble reeling himself in.
“You’re welcome – now let’s go look at some more weird shit.”
“That was real touching guys,” Ben called from across the church. “Pick up the pace.”
Grabbing Bryan by the shoulders, Kyle stepped toward him, and moved Bryan’s helmet camera close to Kyle’s face. “Suck it, pipsqueak.”
They moved down to the next one, and followed the same procedure. This window contained a picture of the Danver church, but there were slight differences. The building portrayed in the glass was shorter, more decayed. No windows were on the front and the door seemed wider and higher.
A lone hand appeared from the darkness of the doorway, sticking out the middle, reaching for something unknown.
“Ok....” Kyle cocked one of his eyebrows up as he looked at it. “I’m guessing that’s some kind of symbolism?”
“I have no idea. You’re the one who’s into this bizarre crap.” The work seemed surprisingly detailed considering it was stained glass. Most of the pieces Bryan had seen in churches as he grew up were clunky, and usually simple. These had a quality he didn’t expect to see in a church in the middle of nowhere, let alone with such odd depictions.
They moved to the rear of the building, avoiding the jumble of shingles, boards, and branches that had fallen through the hole in the roof above the right corner. A cast iron, wood burning fireplace sat in the left corner of the room, a metal pipe running from the top through the ceiling.
Set in the middle of the rear wall, the window seemed darker than the rest, the majority of it being an inky black. The very bottom was a dark brown, but lighter than the top, with small shards of white appearing between the two. A symbol sat below the image. It appeared to be a cross with an infinity symbol beneath it.
“I’m guessing this one is a lake, or an ocean. See the white? I think those are the caps of waves on the beach,” Bryan said.
Kyle nodded his head in agreement. “I think you’re right. Why portray it at night?”
“Of all the crazy shit in here, that’s probably the only thing that I’m not concerned with. What’s with the infinity sign and the cross?”
“The symbol means ‘Leviathan’.” Katie stood by the wood burner, inspecting the area to its right with an intensity that a stone wall doesn’t usually deserve. She didn’t look around when she answered them.
“Wish me luck, dude,” Kyle said quietly. He ran a hand through his hair, pushing a few stray strands from his forehead. “Pay attention, because class is in session.”
He walked toward her, his normally confident stride faltering a little, his tension obvious to Bryan. As he approached her, he pulled his s
houlders back and stuck his chest out, emphasizing his already large frame.
They stood too far away for Bryan to hear what they were saying, but he assumed it wasn’t going well. Katie never turned and fully acknowledged Kyle during the entire conversation. After a few tense moments, in which he seemed to be largely ignored, Kyle lumbered back to where Bryan stood.
“She’s a lesbian,” he said.
“Really?” Bryan asked. “I didn’t know that—” Bryan stopped himself, taking a second to look at Kyle’s face. “Are you just saying that because she has no interest in you whatsoever?”
“No.” Kyle wouldn’t look at him.
Bryan shook his head, trying not to laugh. “That’s classy, dude.” He glanced over at Katie, watching her continue to study the wall. “Did you find out what she’s doing?”
“She’s standing over there being a lesbo.”
Bryan did laugh at that. So did Ben on the other side of the church. Kyle spun on his heels and looked toward Ben, who sat at his table looking at them over the monitors. When he saw the anger on Kyle’s face he lowered his head down, hiding his face behind the screens. Even the arrogant nerd knew better than to poke at the angry bear.
“I told you, man.” Bryan chuckled again. “She’s way out of our league.”
He looked around at the last stained glass window and saw that it had been broken, a few shards of it scattered on the floor, with the rest presumably outside. “I guess we don’t have to look at the last window. I wonder what weird thing it depicted.”
Chapter 9
Bryan held the camera on his shoulder, struggling to look through the viewfinder and keep from laughing at the absurdity of the image in it. He walked five feet behind Travis and Joey as they approached the altar, creeping forward as if they expected it to spring to life and grab them. Once again, he found himself moderately impressed with their showmanship.
Creepy Joey held a barometer in front of him, waving it around as if it was the PKE meter used by Egon in Ghostbusters. He read aloud any small fluctuations in the pressure of the room, as if they held great significance to the presence of anything paranormal.
Travis snuck along beside him, with an EMF reader in his hand.
“This EMF detector lets us know if there is a disturbance in the electromagnetic field. It’s a known fact that spooks and specters cause significant spikes in E.M. fields, so if this needle starts dancing, we’ll know that we aren’t alone,” Travis said.
The camera vibrated slightly as Bryan struggled to contain his laughter again. The more he dealt with these two, the more outlandish they seemed.
“I’m using a barometer to measure drops in pressure that often occur in the presence of a poltergeist or other malignant entity,” Travis said, his voice barely above a whisper. “If we witness a drastic change in the reading, accompanied with a spike in the E.M. fields, we know that a powerful and angry spirit is among us.”
A crashing sound to their right startled all three of them. Bryan spun the camera around instinctively trying to capture the source.
“Goddamn it!” Kyle sat on the floor, the pieces of a broken bench on both sides of him. “Piece of crap broke as soon as I tried to sit on it.” He had to rock back and then throw his weight forward to get out of the wreckage. “My ass can’t be that fat,” he said under his breath as he got to his feet.
Looking up as he dusted himself off, he noticed that everyone had stopped what they were doing and now stared at him. “Sorry, my bad.”
“I swear to God, your parents must be related,” Travis said. He turned to Bryan, grabbing the camera and pointing it back at himself. “I don’t feel like doing that over, so we’ll just start from here and edit that out in post.”
Bryan repositioned the two of them in frame and then noticed the reading on Joey’s barometer. “You said you’re using that to measure pressure right?”
“Yeah,” Joey said, giving Bryan his wide-eyed, creepy stare. “What about it?”
“Well, it’s showing the temperature on the display, not the pressure.”
Joey looked down at the instrument. It read sixty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. “So what?”
“You aren’t worried that someone watching the show will see that, hear you talking about pressure, and realize you’re full of shit?” He admonished himself internally as soon as the words came out of his mouth. The last thing he wanted to do was help these two cover up their fraud.
“Our audience consists of trailer park retards. They don’t even know what a barometer is. Now get us in the frame and shut the hell up.”
“Whatever, let’s get this over with.” Bryan clenched his jaw, determined to keep himself from fighting with them all over again. He zoomed out slightly, and leveled the camera, doing his best to make the shot decent. Though he couldn’t control the garbage content in the show, he was determined to at least make it appear professionally produced. His name would be attached after all.
The Specter Slayers resumed their slow march toward the altar, swinging their misread instruments in front of them as they went. The occasional blip from the E.M.F. reader was the only thing breaking the silence. As they moved closer, the frequency of the beeps increased, the needle on the meter jumping slightly.
“We’re picking up something. The signal is getting stronger as we approach the altar,” Travis said, his voice reverting to a whisper. “It’s important to remember that there is no electricity in this building at all.”
Except for the dozens of electronics we brought into it, and the generator outside, Bryan thought.
They stopped two feet from the edge of the stone top of the altar, with the two men holding their instruments out toward it. The beeping of the E.M.F. meter held a steady pace of once every few seconds.
“The signal is definitely coming from the altar placed in the center of the Danver church,” Joey said. “The pressure surrounding it is significantly lower than the rest of the building.”
Through the viewfinder Bryan noticed that the reading of the barometer no longer showed the temperature. Despite his bravado, Joey didn’t want to appear like an idiot after all, and was at least partially concerned with his audience catching on to their schemes.
Travis gagged, bending at the waist and placing his hand on the stone to steady himself. “Christ, the smell of this place is even worse right here,” he said.
Joey waved his hand in front of his face, trying to move the stench in the air away from his nose. “Wow, that’s awful. Smells like a bag of burning shit.”
Bryan noticed it too. He took his free hand away from the zoom ring by the front of the camera and pinched his nose shut. The frame in the viewfinder swayed as he did so, but he didn’t care enough to let go of his nose for fearing of vomiting. The smell seemed much more pervasive at the center of the church than anywhere else.
The stench reminded him of fishing with his father when he was a child. They had gone to a stream by a fish hatchery. The small body of water had been teaming with fish that his father had told him were put there by the owners of the hatchery to help increase the local population of salmon.
That had been one of the most memorable days of his early childhood. It was one of his first real memories of the two of them spending father and son time together. He also remembered that day because of the horrible smell. The farther upstream they walked, and the closer to the hatchery they went, the more unbearable the air became.
The odor around the altar had a similar quality and intensity. He even thought he could smell salt water, the same way you do when approaching the coast, but shook it off as part of his memory of the hatchery, though that had been fresh water.
The three of them stood by the altar, trying to acclimate to the wretched air. Travis straightened his back, blinking in a slow, hard rhythm. “This is the first time we’ve ever experienced a powerful stench in the presence of a haunting.”
Bryan took slow, shallow breaths as he took his hand from his nose. He didn’t want to s
tand here too long, but figured he could handle it long enough to finish recording. He tried to focus on the technical aspects of getting his shot right, hoping it would take his mind off the gut wrenching emanation.
Joey rubbed his hand along the top of the altar, drawing attention to its smooth surface. Several red blotches were scattered around it with some bleeding down over the side as if a liquid had been spilled on it.
“Knowing the reputation of the Danver church, these are likely blood stains. Whether they’re human, or animal, remains a mystery,” he said. “The altar is roughly four feet by six.” He held his arms out to approximate length. “Making it more than large enough for a body.”
Kneeling down, Travis inspected the large stump the altar sat upon. Bryan also took a knee and aimed the camera at the section of tree. There wasn’t enough light under the stone top for the camera to pick up any details, so he turned on the attached lamp.
Travis held up his hand, blocking the light from his eyes. “Warn me next time, for Christ’s sake.” He scooted to the side several inches, angling his face away from the light, and looked over the stump.
The base of the long dead tree had a diameter of at least three feet. All of its bark had been stripped away, and odd symbols had been carved into the exposed wood. The markings looked similar to the ones on the book that they had found earlier, leaving Bryan to believe they were Latin.
Travis raised his hand, stopping with his splayed fingers just short of touching the wood. “I can feel some kind of energy coming from the base of the altar, almost like electricity.” Gingerly he touched the markings, running his index finger over them.
Joey knelt beside him, his eyes following the stained lines that ran down the length of the stump. They led to large areas where the liquid had pooled, leaving a discoloration on the stones in the floor.
“Whatever was killed here must have been very large to produce this amount of blood.” He looked directly into the camera. “Unless there was more than one person murdered here at the same time.”
