The troubled homeowner points to an access panel cut into the ceiling farther down the hallway. “It's got a sectional set of stairs that pulls down.”
Ricky then asks when the noises and door rattling display usually begin.
Travis says, “Right after sunset, most evenings.”
Ricky asks if they happen in unison, the noises and the rattling doors.
Some nights the hissing, other nights there's rattling. Sometimes both. Sometimes neither.
Ricky asks if this happens every night.
Two or three times a week. More when there's a full moon coming.
Ms. Josephine looks over at me and shrugs as if she doesn't hear anything otherworldly that would cause her to be concerned.
I cross my arms and shake my head, and then something touches my leg.
16
114 West Briargrove, Flower Mound.
10:58 am . . .
This jet black little creature races by, starling me.
“Oh, don't mind Steele,” Travis says as a smile softens his face, “that's my cat. He's been a bit nutty ever since this all started.”
Steele? I say.
“Yeah,” he replies, as he kneels down to pet the energetic little feline. “I named him after that detective in those novels.”
Todd Steele is like my favorite fictional detective ever, I tell him.
“You read Chemical Sundown , yet?” he asks me.
Just started it.
Travis blows on the cat's ears as he plays with it. “It's a roller-coaster, for sure.”
Ricky nods at me. I'm accidentally establishing rapport. Maybe I was a car salesman in my forgotten past life.
“So,” he says as he continues to pet Steele one too many times, the cat squirming and racing away in a flash, “what happens now?”
“Well,” Ricky said as he put his notepad away, “we need to go and get our equipment and dig in for the night. We'll stay as long as it takes to observe the occurrences , or you tell us enough is enough.”
“How much is this going to cost me?”
Without skipping a beat, Ricky answers, “Twelve-hundred dollars a day.” And he says it so easily you'd think he was selling bubble gum. As if the price was a wooden nickel.
“How long do you believe this will take?” Travis said, adding numbers in his head.
And I'm starting to think the guy's serious because normally the prospect of paying three strangers 1,200 dollars a night to hang out and eat pizza in your house would send the average paranoid consumer running. But not this guy. Whatever is going on in this house, he sure thinks it's the real deal.
“Twelve-hundred bucks a day,” he folds his hands behind his head. “That's expensive.” He even did that whistling through the teeth thing people do when they're at the edge of their price range.
“Travis,” Ricky said matter-of-factly, “we're not talking about spraying for termites here, or getting rid of a mouse problem. You may have a legitimate paranormal event taking place at your residence. It's affecting your sleep, and your feelings of safety and comfort. So, who's house is this? Yours . . . or the unyielding entities from the dark abyss?
“Now, you can either take that twelve-hundred dollars a day and spend it on psychiatrists and family counseling, or you can rid this beautiful house of its evil. Your choice.” And then Ricky glanced at his watch like we have somewhere better to be . . . which we don't.
Travis considers what he's heard. Takes a deep breath and then sighs through his nose, nodding to himself, “Alright, let's do it.”
Ricky narrows his eyes, pondering something, “Travis, you said ' we' hear the noises. Who is we?”
“Oh,” he smiled, “my wife Sophia and our son, Paulino. But don't worry, they'll stay out of your way.”
Ricky took one more look around the hallway and then shook Travis's hand. “We need to gather up our equipment. We'll be back in a couple of hours, and then we'll figure all this out.”
And we're walking, we're walking.
13 minutes later . . .
We're heading up the access road to I-35 South, heading towards Dallas. I have some theories about Travis's house, but I kind of like the idea of doing a real live steakout, so I'll wait until tonight to voice my opinion
I look at Ms. Josephine in the front passenger seat. Somehow she seems to know I'm looking at her and she says, “What's on your mind, Jack?”
Ricky glances at me in the rearview mirror.
I ask, Did that guy, Travis, did he seem spooked to you guys?
“Somethin' scare dat man,” Ms. Josephine said, staring out the window at the traffic that looks like it's parked on the highway. Ricky's not driving his usual hyper-speed, but he's still technically 'hauling ass.'
“I think it's his wife and kid that are scared,” Ricky said, “not so much him. That's why he hesitated on the money at first. He's obviously loaded, so a couple thousand dollars shouldn't make the guy bat an eye. I think it's his wife and kid who can't sleep at night.”
I'm so hungry right now that I could chew off my own fingers. I could eat my own long pork, raw, I'm so starved.
Ricky pulls out his cell phone and dials, sliding it to his ear. Moments later he's saying, “Billtruck, it's Ricky. We've got ourselves a client . . . yeah. And it looks like it might be a Class-one disturbance . . . ”
Ms. Josephine and I glance at each other. We're both wondering if either of us knows what he's talking about. She just smiles. I didn't even know we had a rating system for the paranormal. I'm going to have to learn a whole new vocabulary.
“ . . . we're going to need all the gear, and see if you can get some information on the house, it's one-fourteen, West Briargrove, in Flower Mound.”
Ricky is really getting into all of this.
“ . . . and we're going to roll by McDonald's on the way to the office, so do you just want the usual?”
About twenty minutes later I find out that 'the usual' is eight Double-Quarter-Pounders with cheese.
I ordered three Quarter-Pounders just so I wouldn't look like a wimp. Plus, Ricky says I need to start massing-up if I want to go to war with the forces of evil. Apparently, a good bench-press should turn the tides in our favor.
When we drive past the multi-colored, plastic playground, I see a few spooks making their way towards a table where this woman was laughing with her kids.
By tomorrow, those innocent little kids, they'll be motherless.
Ms. Josephine, sifting through her brown paper bag, the smell of Chicken Caesar Salad permeating the SUV, she turns her head halfway towards me, “Dyin' is much worse when you see it comin'.”
“I wonder if we can use that as our slogan?” Ricky said, but instantly saw our reactions and realized it would be in poor taste. “Right,” he apologized, “ . . . maybe that's a hair too morose.”
The gift I have, it's like watching other people drowning. They're dead way before they actually die. And when I see the spooks hobbling around, now, I look past them to the people that are knocking on the door to the Land of Sorrows.
For whatever reason, neither God nor Lucifer can find any use for that woman's soul. So she will go to the dark place that I half-dwell in, and she will wait in the cold darkness for her judgement.
I can't see anything about her that looks unsalvageable. But then, who the hell am I to judge? I'm just as lost as her. I'm dead way before I'm actually going to die.
These shadowy creatures are forecasters of death. Much more accurate than the weatherman. My stumpy, scary little allies are one of the few things I can actually count on.
As we drive off I notice a few of the spooks looking in my direction. I turn back around and shove fries into my mouth, realizing that I have more friends that are dead than alive.
17
ALG office, Dallas.
1:16 pm . . .
When we arrived at the office, Billtruck already had our gear and equipment packed into three large black duffel bags. He handed Ricky a manila fo
lder and said, “Everything I could get on the house is in there. Construction, Zoning, the home builders that developed that street, tax rolls, everything.”
In trade we handed him bags full of hamburgers.
“Anything weird?” Ricky asked as he struggled to get the biggest duffel bag strung across his shoulder.
Shaking his head, Billtruck said, “Nothing came up. Street wasn't built on any religious or ceremonial land. Nobody died tragically that lives within three blocks of the place. It's a fairly new housing development. Quiet area. You know, Nouveau riche. ”
Then he pulled a small grey plastic box out of his pocket. It wasn't much bigger than a cigarette lighter. He handed it to Ricky, “Hide this somewhere in your Porsche . Somewhere obscure.”
What is it? I ask, the other two bags tugging at both my shoulders like heavy boat anchors. This can't be good for my new tattoos.
“Tracking device I'm messing with,” Billtruck said as he leaned over one of the workstations and typed something impossibly rapid on one of the keyboards, “did my own little surgery last night.”
“What's the range?” Ricky asked as he headed towards the door.
“The planet earth.”
“Accuracy?”
Billtruck tilted his head back, a sinister grin forming at just the sides of his mouth, “Five feet, maybe less. I'm borrowing some space on an old Cold War spy satellite. A Keyhole.”
Ricky nodded and headed out the door saying, “You should have worked for the CIA.”
Billtruck snorted, “Who says I'm not?”
I followed Ricky, waddling behind, and as I passed Billtruck he gave me a good slap on the shoulder with his bowling ball sized hand, saying, “Go find us some ghosts to bust, Jack.”
Oh, if he only knew.
1:38 pm . . .
We met Ms. Josephine at the Cayenne and she greeted our bags of paranormal sensing equipment with roughly the same amount of skepticism that most of us attribute to psychics and tarot card readers. I find it humorous how the scientists scoff at the psychics, and the psychics laugh at the crudity of modern science.
We're all going to the same place, just from different directions. Nobody is completely right, nor completely wrong.
“ Dat's goin' 'elp us find da spirits?” she asked, clearly unconvinced.
Ricky shrugged as he got in behind the wheel. “It's all the state of the art equipment that you can buy for tracking extra-sensory and supernatural occurrences. Top of the line, really.”
But, I remind him, nobody has ever filmed a real ghost . . . ever. Not one single accurate entity captured on tape or film that any reasonable panel of experts would agree on.
“Just cause you can't see it, doesn't mean it isn't there,” Ricky returned as he hammered the small grey tracking device deep into the guts of the SUV, somewhere near the threshold between the console and the interior carpet. Satisfied, he sat up and started the engine. “Let's go hunt invisible evil.”
We headed back up the Dallas Norty Tollway, going north towards the George Bush Tollway. And we're all kind of quiet, lost in our own thoughts. My theory, which I haven't discussed with them yet was sufficient to explain both uber-normal events that Travis seems to be experiencing.
Event one : The rattling of doors on the second floor, despite expert craftsmanship.
My theory : A draft created by air pressure changes on the first floor, creating the seemingly scary, but quite innocuous, rattling and shaking of the upstairs doors.
I watch Myth-Busters all the time, and I'm getting pretty good at figuring things out like this.
Event two : Hissing and grunting from above, in the empty attic.
My theory : That energetic little cat—Steele—he's probably got a girlfriend in the neighborhood. Cats like to have a lot of sex. I saw it on Animal Planet . They make all sorts of terrifying noises when they make sweet love.
Bad plumbing and swamp gas.
And now that I consider it more, if the cat has a cat door, that would cause the draft. The cat door would have probably been a later addition to the house, so any time pre-kitty would be without haunting. Geez, I'm glad they didn't blame Steele, and send him to the big litter box in the sky.
And right about the time I decide to enlighten my business partners I feel myself suddenly pinned to the back seat. It's Einstein's Equivalence Principle, again.
Ricky is accelerating.
I look up and Ricky's eyes are glancing at mirrors as he weaves in and out of traffic. He doesn't need to tell me . . . we're being followed.
“They may be less experienced than the last batch,” he says as he tries to squeeze in ahead of an old Suburban, “ . . . but they seem much more ambitious. They're really trying this time.” Lots of tire squealing and breath holding ensues.
And then he warns us, “Hold on, Team!”
The way he's driving now, none of that is in my DMV book. He's in full-on Formula-one mode . I've got my feet firmly pressed against the carpeted floor for support, not that it would make any difference at these near-light speeds.
“Who do you tink dat is, followin' us?” Ms. Josephine asks, oddly calm for the predicament we find ourselves in.
Rare book collectors, or pure evil, I answer. Take your pick.
Ricky lowered his head, really getting into the zone, “This is my playground.” And then he performed some feats of driving that I'm having real trouble working out in my mind. Tricks that could have only been learned on the X-Box and Playstation .
We're on the road, on the shoulder, slowing down, speeding up, taking an exit ramp, back on the entrance ramp, turning away at the last second to race off across the grass after jumping two different sets of curbs. Ricky is the kind of driver that Insurance companies cringe to imagine.
The kind of driver that screws up the actuarial tables.
“Number-one rule in racing,” he says between clenched teeth, his knuckles as white as bleached ice, “ . . . keep the rubber side down!”
And then he gets us into a full-on, pissing in your pants, 4-wheel slide at over 60 miles per hour. And I guess I'm the only one scared here because Ms. Josephine seems as relaxed and quiet as a church mouse.
She could be a mental patient on ten bottles of valium.
I'm just a crazed mental patient.
She's like a statue.
I'm a crumbling mess.
Five minutes, four back roads, three hot-laps, two burnt stop lights, and one almost burped-up Double-Quarter-Pounder with cheese later, we're back on I-35 going north toward Flower Mound.
“They're gone, for now,” he said, catching his breath. “But this could be a problem. We can't keep having high-speed chases.”
My heart is beating about a hundred miles an hour.
“Never a dull moment wit you two,” Ms. Josephine said as if we'd just left the museum.
And then I felt my stomach kind of turn upside down, like when you're on a swing set and you're just at the very top before you come back down to earth. And it was just the tiniest little flash in my left eye. Maybe it only lasted about half a second, but it was enough to send a shiver down my spine.
And for that brief moment, I felt the cold, again.
I might be losing me.
18
114 West Briargrove, Flower Mound.
2:40 pm . . .
As we begin to unload our fancy equipment into Travis's beautiful living room, I unzip one of the three large duffel bags to find smaller yellow nylon bags with black stenciled words on each side. This is like those Russian dolls that you pull the head off and there's another, smaller doll. Then another, and another, until you're pulling hydrogen apart at the atomic level.
I don't know what any of this stuff is, nor how to use it, but I feel like a professional. I feel like we might accidentally find something spooky here with all of this high-tech equipment. Although, my money is still on the kitty.
To play the part, with Travis in the living room watching the three of us unpack, I say,
“Hey, Rick, where do you want me to set up the Thermal Imaging Camera?”
“Let's set her to face the upstairs, looking perpendicular to the hallway,” Ricky answers as he seems to be measuring the living room with a light meter. Each time he takes a reading he notes it in his Palm Pilot.
What about the Standard IR Camera and strobe?
“Downstairs, looking upward at the banister and staircase.”
The EVP hub and portable work station?
“We'll base and monitor from down here in the back corner of the living room.”
Travis is seeing all of this equipment and, ghost or not, he's getting his money's worth. He'll have stories to tell at every party for the next 10 years. His eyes are wide and animated like a small child at a carnival.
What about the Full Spectrum Camera? I ask, pointing to another yellow bag. These are the kinds of bags they probably use to transport nuclear devices, or crashed alien remains.
Ricky makes a little inward suckling sound as he considers, “And . . . go downstairs with that too, covering the same area as the Standard Camera. That way we'll have visible, Ultra-violet, and Infra-Red. Triple redundancy.”
“What does that do?” Travis asked, pointing towards the bag with the EVP and laptop.
Ricky saves my ass, “Oh, that's EVP. What's going to happen is, we're going to set-up a series of wireless audio microphones in different locations throughout the house. We'll record everything you can hear, and all the things we humans aren't sensitive enough to pick up. If there are voices beyond our ability to perceive them, the EVP will hear them.”
He pulled out the laptop and opened it up. “ . . . using a series of Digital Audio and Video Filters we will put it all together here, looking and listening for sounds and sights far beyond our own.” Ricky then turns to Travis, nodding, “And trust me, all sorts of interesting things happen beyond our sight and hearing.”
“Cool,” Travis says, all gloss-eyed.
“Let's set the cameras and get the wireless mics in place,” Ricky instructs, looking around for something.
What is it?
“Where's Ms. Josephine?”
Oh, I say, she's outside giving the premises a thorough inspection.
See Jack Hunt (See Jack Die) Page 8
