by Jason Brant
What was it about the land this church sat on that could so captivate two successful, wealthy people that were separated by a generation?
In his headphones he heard something... slither.
He looked over at his friend, expecting to see him shifting his weight, or shuffling his feet. Kyle wasn’t even awake – he sat with his back straight, and his eyes closed, swaying as he slept sitting up.
The same sound came again, but slightly louder, longer.
Bryan lifted his hands to the headphones, pressing the cups tight to his head, trying to eliminate any background noise. He spotted Travis, Joey and Ben sitting behind the monitors, each with a beer in his hand. Joey’s head had rolled back, his mouth slack as he slept in his chair. His beer had tipped in his lap, spilling its contents down his pant leg.
Glancing back over his shoulder, Bryan looked for Katie, wondering if she had decided to come out of the room for a break. He didn’t see her anywhere.
A small thump, like a light footstep, reported in his ears.
He squinted, trying to see through the dimly lit room for some kind of speaker or contraption used by the Specter Slayers to ensure they picked something up on the EVP recording. Nothing appeared out of place to him, but the poor lighting could easily hide something small.
Slithering again, followed by several thumps this time.
Bryan felt his heart beat faster, his senses becoming heightened. He told himself that it the sounds were simply some trick to make the show more interesting, but he wasn’t sure he believed that.
Many more thumps, perhaps two dozen, followed by the long, sustained sound of something dragging. He’d mistaken it before as slithering, but now he recognized it as something being pulled along the floor.
He nudged Kyle with his elbow.
Kyle jumped, the microphone shifting in his hands and nearly falling to the floor. “Huh? Shit, was I sleeping?”
Bryan held a finger to his lips and looked Kyle in the eyes trying to convey the need for silence. Kyle gave him a confused look, but kept quiet. Bryan pointed to his headphones with both index fingers before cupping them with his hands again.
He didn’t hear anything. Motioning for Kyle to follow him, he slowly stood and moved around the altar, trying to keep his footfalls light. Kyle, still confused, followed him.
There was nothing on the other side of the altar but empty space. They quietly tiptoed away from the center of the church toward Ben’s workstation.
The sounds came again, but softer this time.
Bryan stopped and gestured for Kyle to turn around. He lifted his hands, mimicking holding the boom mic, and tried to demonstrate to Kyle to lift it in front of them. Kyle shrugged his shoulders and shook his head, not understanding Bryan’s pantomime.
Bryan went through the signals again and then pointed at the boom mic when he finished.
“Dude, I have no idea what you want,” Kyle said.
“Hold it out in front of us,” Bryan hissed. “I want to find where the sound is coming from.”
“OK,” Kyle said. He recoiled when Bryan shot him a look. “Sorry,” he said, his voice much lower.
Bryan nodded his head toward the shrine and they began to take slow, measured steps back to the center of the chapel.
The sound came again when they were less than ten feet from the altar. It was louder and squishier than before. It went through two full series of thuds and wet dragging noises before dissipating again.
Bryan reached up and grabbed Kyle’s shoulder, motioning for him to stop. They stood in place, waiting. Bryan tried to slow his breathing; doing everything he could to hear the smallest of sounds. He reached up to his headphones, found the volume knob, and rolled it as high as it would go.
The thuds rapped again, much louder, but this time Bryan could hear subtle differences in the dragging portion. It had taken on a smacking quality, almost like someone chewing with their mouth open.
The ear-piercing sound of clanking metal exploded through his head, almost knocking him over.
“Shit!” He tore the headphones from his ears, and dropped them to the ground. His ears ached as he held them in his hands, his face scrunched in pain. The sounds of the room slowly came back to him as the spikes of pain subsided.
Laughing. The Specter Slayers were laughing. Bryan spun around, confused and angry, searching for the source of the deafening crash. Ben, Travis and Joey stood by the workstation, pointing and snickering at him.
Why were they laughing? What had he missed? Bryan turned his head and looked at Kyle, hoping for answers. Kyle’s eyes were slits and his ears seemed to be plastered to his head.
“Who threw it?” he asked the cackling fools.
Bryan scanned the area around him still confused, and then he noticed an empty beer can behind Kyle. They had thrown it on the ground by the end of microphone, intentionally scaring the shit out of him.
“You almost popped my ear drums,” he yelled, turning on them. “What the hell is wrong with you? We’re actually over here doing your bullshit investigation and you pull something like that?”
“Look at the baby cry,” Joey said between fits of laughter. “You should have seen the way you jumped!”
Bryan felt like walking out of there right then. At this point, he wasn’t certain that an associate producer credit could possibly be worth this. The show runners were mostly inebriated and the night was only half over. If they were pulling these kinds of stunts now, he didn’t want to guess what could be coming.
He massaged his ears while taking several deep breaths, the terrible smell making it difficult. His hearing seemed to have returned to normal, and he wanted to make sure that any decision he made wouldn’t be detrimental to his career.
“What the hell were you morons doing anyway?” Ben asked.
Kyle didn’t seem interested in talking anymore. He stepped forward, balling his hands into fists. Bryan put a hand against his chest, stopping him in midstride.
“You didn’t hear that?” Bryan asked. Even though he had turned the volume on his headphones to their maximum, he had a hard time believing that they couldn’t hear the sound. It had been very distinct.
“The boom mic doesn’t have wireless. You looked like two assholes wandering around in the dark,” Ben said.
“You didn’t hear it either?” Bryan said to Kyle.
Kyle finally pulled his eyes from the Specter Slayers and held Bryan’s gaze. “I didn’t hear anything.”
“No thuds? No dragging, chewing sounds?”
“Nothing, but what you’re describing sounds pretty cool.”
Before they even began filming, Joey and Travis had said they faked their EVPs. If Kyle couldn’t hear it, even as he stood beside Bryan, that must mean that they had somehow tampered with his equipment. When he thought it was recording, it must have been playing something they’d already created.
“How did you do it?” he asked.
Travis and Joey shared a confused look. “How did we do what?” Joey asked. The ends of his words slurred slightly as he spoke.
“Did you switch the buttons on this recorder?” Bryan unclipped it from his belt and held in front of his face, inspecting the plastic for signs of tampering. “Does the record button play instead of actually recording?”
“Look Brad—”
“Bryan.”
“Whatever. If you think you can trick us into thinking you were actually listening to an EVP, then guess again. We’re the masters of the hoax,” Travis said. His head cocked to the side, his eyes narrowing as if he heard something in the distance. “Do you guys hear that?”
“I didn’t hear anything,” Bryan said.
“And that’s how it’s done,” Travis said, smiling. “I appreciate you trying though.”
Bryan walked across the stone floor and dropped the sound recorder on the table, shaking his head as he went. “If this thing really isn’t tampered with, then play it and hear for yourselves.”
Ben stared at the
recorder, obviously not believing any of it. “He just said that you can’t fool—”
“Play the tape, or get ready to start eating that empty beer can,” Kyle said as he stepped forward, cracking his knuckles.
Ben’s tough guy façade fell for a second as he looked up at Kyle with genuine unease in his eyes. He seemed to shrink into his chair, his upper back hunching and his arms sliding from the table. Bryan felt a hint of a smirk touch his lips before he wiped it from his face.
“It’s not a tape recorder – it’s digital,” Ben said, his voice soft, its usual arrogance gone. “We don’t use any tape based formats anymore.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake, Ben, just play the damn thing so we can get back to drinking,” Travis said.
Ben huffed, rolled his eyes, and lolled his head as if the task was so absurd that he shouldn’t even bother. He grabbed the recorder and plugged a USB cable into the back of it. Looking at one of the monitors, he clicked away at a mouse for several seconds, huffing in annoyance as he did.
The sound came through the small speakers sitting on the desk moments later. As the seconds rolled past, the thumps became clearer, the dragging noises more apparent. Kyle stared at the speaker in complete rapture, absorbed by the bizarreness of the recording.
The Specter Slayers seemed bored. They both had their arms crossed in front of them as they listened, obviously unimpressed.
“So you tapped your feet a couple of times and then dragged one across the floor,” Joey said.
The moist nature of the dragging came through the speakers as he finished talking. The thuds rapped faster and grew more abundant. Bryan noticed a faint clacking sound mixed with the others that he hadn’t heard before.
Ben stopped the playback at the sound of the beer can hitting the floor. No one spoke for several seconds, but stood there staring at the speakers.
“Still think that was me?” Bryan asked.
“OK, I believe you. But what the hell was that – an animal under the church?” Travis asked.
“You got me. I was just sitting there thinking about how bad this place smelled when I heard it.”
“Why couldn’t we hear anything? We were only fifteen feet away, and the church was completely silent,” Ben said. Though his arrogance hadn’t returned, he sat up in his chair as he thought about the sounds he’d just heard.
“Because that was a true EVP,” Kyle said. “We just recorded something that the human ear can’t pick up!” He clapped his hands together, sending echoes around the hard surfaces of the church.
“Easy there, Lurch,” Joey said. “Travis is right. You picked up a nest of animals under the floor or something.”
Ben shook his head. “That boom mic is a real piece of shit. If Lurch,” he looked up at Kyle, his mouth popping open as he realized how close he was to death. “Kyle, I mean. If he couldn’t hear it, then the microphone wouldn’t pick it up either.”
Bryan still didn’t believe that he’d picked up some kind of paranormal sound through the headphones. He assumed that Ben, Travis, or Joey had something rigged inside the altar, or under the floor of the church, and that they were just really good at lying about it. They had already admitted to similar frauds, and this seemed to be the kind of prank they were capable of.
Kyle bought it hook, line, and sinker. He rubbed his hands together as he went back and forth with The Specter Slayers, trying to convince them of the EVP’s authenticity.
“Hey guys,” Katie said, her head poking through the hole in the wall on the other side of the church. “I think you need to see something back here.”
Chapter 12
“Is it just me, or does it smell a lot better back here?” Kyle asked. “It still reeks of shit, but I can actually breathe now.”
“It’s definitely worse around the altar,” Bryan said. “They must have put a couple of dead animals under the church when they rigged whatever it was that made the sounds.”
Travis and Joey had stayed at Ben’s workstation, replaying the recording and arguing over its origin. Bryan became annoyed at their insistence that they weren’t involved. He understood that they pulled stunts like this to garner higher ratings, but he didn’t appreciate having someone lie right to his face.
“What sounds?” Katie asked. She had moved back to the desk and carefully turned the pages of a book.
“Bryan recorded some EVP’s!”
Katie stopped, her hand still holding a page in midair. “Where? What did you hear?” She released the page and stood from the old stool she sat upon, facing Bryan.
“It was nothing. They’re just planting some fake evidence like they always do,” Bryan said.
“Where did this happen? What part of the church?” she asked Kyle, ignoring what Bryan had just told her.
“We were sitting by the altar when he first picked it up. He couldn’t hear it anymore when we walked away, but the sounds came back when we turned around.”
“Only by the altar...” She spoke to herself as she ran her hands through her hair. “Perhaps the altar is where it will begin? Or is that the only place where a crossover is possible?” She paced back and forth in front of the desk, ignoring the confused men standing by her.
“What are you talking about?” Bryan asked. “You need to stop with the short, cryptic messages. ‘This place and time are significant. Is that where a crossover is possible?’ What the hell does that even mean?”
Katie turned back to the book on the desk and turned a few more pages before reading in silence for several seconds. “Perhaps they built the altar at the epicenter of the area.”
“You didn’t tell us everything before did you?” Kyle asked. He didn’t seem as perturbed as Bryan, but more excited about the possibilities of what she seemed to hint at. “What do you think this place is?”
“I didn’t want to tell you before, for fear of you questioning my sanity,” she said without looking up from the book. “I wanted to try and verify my theory before presenting it to anyone.”
Bryan stood by the hole in the wall and waited. Between Joey and Travis trying to trick him, and Katie sharing incomplete thoughts, he felt like the butt of a never-ending joke. He already visualized how he would most likely appear on the episode of The Specter Slayers – the skeptic that was slowly changed into a believer by all of the weird occurrences that happened around him.
In reality, the more they tried to spook him, the more he wanted to walk away. It particularly bothered him that an intelligent person such as Katie Upshaw seemed to buy wholeheartedly into the idea that the Danver church could actually be haunted.
“What I was able to deduce, prior to finding these texts, was that the land this church is built upon is special. On a particular date every couple of decades, there is a very specific celestial alignment that allows something incredible to happen here.”
Bryan sighed and covered his face with his hands. “Are you listening to yourself? You sound like a character in one of your books.”
“What happens?” Kyle asked, ignoring Bryan’s skepticism.
“I believe this area becomes thin, for lack of a better word,” Katie said.
“Thin?” Kyle watched her intently, completely enthralled by the story she weaved.
“Yes. The fabric of space and time, or at least our understanding of such things, becomes thin, like a cloth stretched too far. This allows things, to pass between worlds.”
“Things? As in ghosts? That’s why you think this area is haunted? Because a few balls of gas floating around in space are lined up, we’re able to see spirits? You actually believe this shit?” Bryan rubbed at his temples, trying to understand how someone could accept something so stupid.
Katie looked up from her book, her eyes narrowed to slits as she glared at Bryan. “I don’t appreciate your tone. I’ve spent years of my life researching many fields related to the paranormal. You, on the other hand, have watched horrible programs such as the one we’re affiliated with now. Don’t question my understanding
of this situation, unless you have something to offer that can refute what I’m saying.”
“I would think that common sense refutes all of this bullsh—”
Kyle pushed past him, nearly knocking him over. “You said things could pass between worlds. What worlds? The spirit world?”
Bryan threw his hands in the air, giving up.
“I’m not sure,” Katie said. “These texts seem to point to different explanations. Some state the spirit realm, while others speak of something else entirely. Their interpretations of these events can probably be traced back to the time in which they were written.”
“You think what Bryan heard was a ghost? Could it have been something trying to come into our world? What about the awful smell – is that a part of this?”
“Most likely.” Katie put her finger on a line of text in the book and ran her finger under it as she interpreted what it said. “This passage basically says that the barrier between realms will grow thinner as the night progresses and the stars fully align. Or something very similar – I’m stuck on a few of the words.”
“And now you’re telling me that the ‘spirit world’ smells like shit. Guys, seriously, if this was somehow true, why couldn’t Kyle hear what I heard? How could that crappy microphone pick up something inaudible to the human ear?” Bryan asked.
“That’s a good question,” Katie said. She moved away from the desk and began looking at other books sitting on the shelves. “I don’t have an answer for you. The situation we’re dealing with here is something that has not been observed through history, outside of the volumes contained here. Basically, I’m learning as we go, same as you.”
“And you think we’ll hear, and hopefully even see, more as the night goes on? That would be sweet,” Kyle said.
“Maybe. What I’ve gone through so far only mentions that the area grows thinner throughout the night, but doesn’t have an actual timeline we could follow. I still have a lot more to try to read, but that episode you just experienced could have been the peak; or it might just be starting. Bryan thought he could see where this was heading. Earlier Katie had alluded to Charles Danver being innocent of the disappearance of his colleagues three decades ago. Now on the forty year anniversary of that event, she sat in the same church, reading books about thin places in time or whatever. That couldn’t be a coincidence.
