They got halfway up the staircase when Ashley suddenly stopped moving.
"What was that?" she said.
The others paused. "What was what?" Jess asked.
"I thought I heard a noise," Ashley said. She thought for a moment. "Everyone take a step up, one person at a time."
Tyler took a moment, not understanding where she was going with this, but he did as she said.
He lifted his foot and stepped up to the next stair. creak...
Jess took a step next. creak...
Then Ashley followed in the back. creak...
creak...
The three of them jumped on the spot and did a one-eighty as Jess wildly whipped the flashlight around the staircase. Their hearts were beating so hard that they all thought they were having heart attacks.
But they couldn't see anyone around them.
"What was that?" Ashley shrieked, scared out of her mind.
"I don't know! I don't know!" Jess said frantically.
Tyler was supposed to be the leader of the pack, but his arms were shaking badly, and the gun rattled and echoed against the bare walls. "Everyone just relax!" he cried. "Keep going! Keep going!" He didn't realize how shaken his voice was, and he forced himself to keep moving.
They moved up the rest of the staircase a little quicker, and suddenly a very cold chill came over them, much worse than before. It was like a cloud of pure ice had fallen over them, and all of their teeth immediately started to chatter.
Jess shivered violently as she walked up the stairs, struggling to hold her phone's flashlight steady. "Ash, don't put your hand on my shoulder. It's scaring me."
"...I'm not touching you." Ashley said.
Jess's eyes widened. She screamed, causing Ashley to scream and Tyler to shout in horror. They ran, nearly trampling over each other, as they bolted for the master bedroom.
They reached the upper floor and quickly rounded the corner, sprinting down the long hallway. Jess pumped her arms and the light went up and down with them, swinging violently from the floor to the ceiling and back again, only giving them momentary flashes of the hallway ahead. Each time the light swung around, dizzying and frightening images were painted of looming shadows and tall doorways and odd shapes that they couldn't put a clear image to. Doors seemed to swing open and shut around them and figures moved through the darkness, but it was impossible to tell what was real and what was not.
Jess kept her eyes on the end of the hall. A dull ringing echoed in her head and she felt like something dreadful was behind her, sailing through the darkness for them. But she dared not look.
They reached the master bedroom and Tyler fumbled with the doorknob. He twisted it and shoved the door open, and the three of them spilled into the dark room.
The door slammed shut behind them.
Tyler and Jess screamed and spun around, and Jess held her phone's flashlight up to illuminate Ashley standing in front of the closed door.
"Sorry! That was me!" Ashley said.
With the three of them in the bedroom and the door closed, the feeling of dread in Jess's chest lessened, but it didn't go away.
"Where's the candles?" she asked quickly.
Tyler's eyes followed the flashlight's sweeping motion. "There!" he said, pointing just past the space heater he'd set up.
Jess ran over to it and knelt down, ripping open the box and taking out the two flashlights that Tyler packed. She handed one to him and the other to Ashley, and when they turned them on, Jess shut off the flashlight on her phone to preserve what little charge she had left.
Ashley pointed her flashlight at the box so Jess could see what she was doing as she pulled out candles of all shapes and sizes and a barbecue lighter. Tyler shone his light all around the edges and corners of the room.
"Hurry up, Jess," Ashley said nervously.
"I'm trying," Jess replied, her hands shaking as she struggled to flick on the barbecue lighter. She finally managed to produce a flame at the end of the long plastic tube, but she was shaking too much to transfer it to the candle's wick.
Tyler came over and grabbed the candle she was holding so she could steady the lighter with both hands. She lit the stout candle and Tyler placed it on an old desk at the edge of the room. Jess kept the next one standing on the floor and lit it before giving it to him to redistribute around the room.
When the whole room was warmly basking in a gently-pulsating orange light, she slowed down, looking over the remaining candles in the box and thinking about how they should distribute them throughout the rest of the house—that is, if they even wanted to leave this room again.
The three of them stood and turned to each other. They glanced into each other's eyes momentarily before looking away, as if locking gazes would be confirmation of what each of them suspected they experienced on the stairs.
"What happened back there?" Ashley asked at last, breaking the silence.
Jess and Tyler looked at each other, but neither one of them offered a response.
"Are we safe?" Ashley asked, staring at a window that overlooked the back of the property. It was covered with thin white curtains, but the darkened square of night could still be seen under them. And it made them nervous, like something would smash through the glass and swoop in to get them.
"I don't know," Jess said.
"Maybe we should go," Tyler said. "I... I don't think we should be here. I think all those people that talked about this house were right." He swallowed a lump down in his throat, reflecting on the sobering thought that he just expressed.
"No," Jess said.
The other two turned to her.
"I'm going to get to the bottom of this," she said.
"What do you mean?" Ashley asked.
Jess looked around the room, her eyes settling on the door they just came through. "There's something going on here. Something happened to my uncle. Something spooked Buddy. Something's happening to us in this house. And I'm going to find out what."
Crime Scene
Ashley shifted her weight on the desk she was sitting on in the office, while Tyler leaned back in the dusty old office chair that definitely seemed like it was straight out of the 1930s. They were bathed in orange candlelight, having placed a few candles around the room, and the dim glow carried on outside in the hallway on the first floor. They placed the large number of candles that Jess had brought throughout the areas of the house where they thought they would spend the rest of the night, leaving unimportant areas in darkness. But by even lighting this small portion of the house, the oppressive heaviness and silence that had come over them seemed to lift; they could hear the gentle breeze washing by the house again along with the sound of the swaying trees. Everything was almost peaceful. A light spatter of rain came down on the house's old roof, and they could hear it pattering on distant windows, making Jess worry about Buddy.
Jess stood in front of a bookshelf, pulling out old books, files and business ledgers. Everything she looked at in the room appeared to pertain to Mr. Dover's business dealings. His full name was Vernon Dover, and he seemed to be somewhat of a business tycoon in his day, but there was no indication of what happened to him or his family from what Jess could find. There was also a library in the house that they found on their first tour, and Jess intended to search there next when she was finished looking through the office.
She placed a binder back on the shelf and a little cloud of dust wafted out from it and made her cough. She turned back to her friends and considered them with a defeated look.
"No luck?" Tyler asked.
"Nothing here," she said. She walked over to the desk and Ashley shifted over so she could sit down. It was a monstrous piece of wood and intricately hand-carved just like so many other pieces of furniture in the house, and it seemed like something they'd expect to find in the Oval Office of the White House. Jess flicked a dead bug off the surface with her finger then took a seat. She stared out the doorway that led into one of the first floor hallways stretching from
the kitchen and ballroom to the back of the house. She sighed.
"What is it?" Ashley asked.
"I'm just thinking about Buddy," Jess said. "I think I should go back out there."
Tyler shook his head. "It won't do any good. Buddy has to come back on his own. And he will, don't worry."
"But what if something happened to him?" Jess asked.
"What would've happened?" Tyler asked. "It's just an empty forest."
Jess's eyes sharpened. "Something made him bark. Something was out there that got his attention. And I know you don't want to admit it, but something happened to us in here, too."
Tyler grumbled and looked away. Despite having admitted to the ghostly phenomena happening around them just half an hour before, he seemed to retract his admission after they lit the candles and their soft glows soothed the darkness and his fears.
Jess gazed at her two friends with careful consideration. Then she said, "What do you two remember about this house? Tell me everything you've ever heard about it."
Tyler and Ashley were both a little flabbergasted, not knowing where to start. But Ashley gave it a try.
"Um... I think the first time I ever heard of this place was when that thing with you and your uncle happened," Ashley said. "But I was only a little girl at the time like you."
"And?" Jess pressed.
"And... I remember asking my parents about the house, and I think they told me that this place was supposed to be haunted for a long time before that, but they didn't seem to know much—or they didn't tell me much. After that, we all heard the rumors about this place, but I don't know what's true and what isn't. The only thing I know is that the man who built this place killed his family, and that it was a spur of the moment thing, like he got angry and killed them all for some reason. After that, I heard he was arrested. I think he died in prison."
Tyler shook his head as she talked. "No, I'm telling you... it wasn't a spur of the moment thing; he planned it. He killed his family one by one, then he killed himself. I don't know why. I heard he was just crazy."
"What do you remember about my uncle?" Jess asked.
Ashley shrugged. "Not much, sorry. Just what you've already told me, really."
Jess looked at Tyler.
"Only what I mentioned," he said. "I heard that the police found you in a car, and they found your uncle out in the woods. I know his face was cut up pretty bad. They said the only way they were able to identify him was by his dental records. And even that was lucky, because the teeth in his mouth were all cut up and loose." He looked at Jess sympathetically. "Sorry Jess, I don't mean to be so graphic."
She waved him off. "No, that's okay. I want to know everything you remember."
"That's about it, really," he said. "Just that and that he was holding the knife in his hand that did it. I think they said the marks matched." He considered all of this for a moment. "...It just seems strange that a person could do that to themselves, even if they were drunk or on drugs or something, you know?"
Jess thought about all of this carefully. And she agreed with him. That was the one detail that she could never get over when she thought about her whole ordeal and what had happened to her uncle: she just couldn't believe that her uncle could do that to himself. She remembered him as he leaned against the hood of the car and startled her. She'd seen his wide, bewildered eyes. He looked scared. He looked like someone had attacked him, like he was fleeing from them. None of it made any sense.
"What about you?" Ashley asked. "Do you remember anything else you've never told me?"
Jess shook her head. "Not much. I remember my uncle told me about the family that owned this house, but he didn't say much more than you guys already did. He said that Mr. Dover went crazy and killed his family, but he didn't say why, or why my uncle was so interested in it. He seemed obsessed with the blood moon, too. I think it definitely had something to do with what happened that night."
"What did he say about it?" Ashley asked.
Jess drummed her fingers on the edge of the desk, searching her memory. "I think he said something about the energies getting stronger on a blood moon... something about the other world getting more powerful." She shuddered away an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. It wasn't easy to dredge up these memories, but it was important.
"What other world?" Tyler asked.
Jess glanced at the doorway. "That's what I want to find out." She slipped off the edge of the desk and walked back into the hallway.
"Where are you going?" Tyler called after her. He looked at Ashley, then the two of them got up and followed her.
Jess walked to the end of the hallway and cut through the kitchen. They hadn't set up any candles in the ballroom, and she didn't want to trip over all the junk strewn around the floor in its darkness. She tried not to look up at the bloody mural painted high on the kitchen wall that was faintly illuminated in the flickering orange light as she marched on through the dining room and into the foyer.
They still had most of the boxes they'd brought into the house shoved into the corner. There weren't many (most of them filled with snacks and drinks that Tyler had already unpacked into the dining room or kitchen), but Jess searched through them, looking for a particular one. She found it at last and dragged it across the floor from the rest of the pile and opened it.
"I brought this from my house when we were packing things," she told her friends as they gathered behind her and eagerly stared down into the open box. "These are some of the things my parents took from my uncle's house after he died. Most of it is junk, but there were a couple of things of interest in here."
"Like what?" Ashley asked.
Jess rooted around all the papers inside the box and found the nondescript black notebook that she had discovered just the other night. She held it up for the others to see. "My uncle was big into the occult. Ghosts and stuff like that. My parents mentioned it to me way back when, but they didn't really like to talk about him anymore after what happened."
Ashley looked shocked. "Jess, you never told me about that."
"I didn't know how much he was into it," Jess said. "I always thought he had a drunk and passing interest with the house that night, like something he'd always wondered about. But I was looking through this box last night and I found this old notebook of his. There's things about this house in it."
Tyler suddenly became extremely interested. "Let me see," he said, kneeling down next to Jess and staring at it as she flipped the pages.
"There's not much to see," she said, "but there's one page that talked about communicating or something." She furrowed her brow as she tried to find the right one. "I didn't realize it at the time, but now I think there's a lot more to it."
Ashley stood in front of Jess as she looked through the notebook. She was becoming more uncomfortable by the minute. She'd already had a good fright in this house, and she wasn't sure she wanted to delve any deeper into this.
"Here it is," Jess said, pressing her finger to the page. Tyler's eyes pored over the entry as Jess summarized it out loud. "There's a date and time on here for the blood moon. That was the night it happened. And the rest of it is gibberish, but he mentions communicating and summoning..."
"Summoning?" Ashley gasped.
Jess looked toward the upper floor at the top of the foyer. "I think it has something to do with that room we found with the chalk and candles." She rose to her feet and snapped the book shut.
Ashley looked at the stairs and gulped. "Oh, I don't think I'm up for this."
Jess glanced at them too and felt that same dreadful apprehension come over her. "We're just going to go to that room and then come back," she said, not sure if she was trying to talk Ashley into it or herself.
Tyler walked in front of the two girls and sized up the staircase. He raised the gun a little in his arms in a show of strength and safety to the girls. "I'll lead the way," he said, trying to sound brave.
"You don't have to do that," Jess said.
He
turned around and looked at her like he didn't understand.
"I don't know that there's anything in this house that you can protect us from," she said. He was always quick to act brave and be the protector of the group, and Jess knew that it stemmed from what he went through with his father's abandonment of him and his mom, like he was trying to be the man that his father never was. But she didn't think a gun would do them many good if she was right about what was going on around here.
He grudgingly acquiesced and the three of them went up the stairs in a less formal manner than before, but still staying close together. Jess and Tyler walked up the stairs side-by-side with Ashley close behind. They took the stairs quicker this time, not wanting a repeat of what happened before.
They'd set up some candles along the stairs and around certain spots in the hallway. They didn't have enough candles to light all of it, so there were patches of darkness between them, but there was certainly enough light to find their way around.
The three of them slowly crept along the hallway. Tyler couldn't help but clutch his gun in a death grip. Jess understood the feeling and she unconsciously balled her hands into fists, digging her fingernails into the palms of her hands.
"Oh why did you say we should spend the night here, Tyler," Ashley moaned. "It's so dirty and cold and haunted!"
"It's not haunted," Tyler remarked bitterly.
"And now we're traipsing around the house in the dark, looking for clues..." Ashley cried, unintended drama saturating her voice.
Jess glanced back at her. "It's okay, Ash," she said, squeezing her hand. "I don't like the dark anymore than you do." She stared back ahead at the long stretch of hallway still between them and the bizarre room at the end of it. Sparse candles threw thin sheets of orange on the decrepit and grimy walls, but patches of darkness lay between, invariably spiking their heart rates as they passed through them. The room at the end of the fearsome gauntlet stood in darkness, with no candles lighting it, and the black rectangle beyond the doorway beckoned them to come in and stay; to never leave. Jess shivered. The few candles they passed on the floor didn't do much to banish the coldness hanging in the house like a low-forming cloud, and her discomfort was compounded by the looming darkness that loitered in the open doorways of the rooms they passed. Every once in a while, she thought she could hear something like a whisper, but she couldn't tell if it was happening around her or if it was inside her own head and she was psyching herself out.
The Haunting of Bloodmoon House Page 13
