Ordinary Souls

by J. S. Bailey

  I wondered why they’d never picked up their Legos.

  “I’d love to hear this place’s story,” Paige said as she nudged a dog’s rope toy with her shoe. “If only walls could talk.”

  “I’m almost afraid to hear what they’d say,” I murmured. This place was giving me the creeps more than I liked to admit. What could cause a family of four to leave all their things behind like this? Had they all died in an accident? Had they really all been murdered?

  I vowed then that I would research this house and learn its secrets once I was safely nestled in my spider-free apartment.

  In the meantime, I moved on to the spacious kitchen, which presented even more of an enigma than the living room. A table set for four sat in the center of the open space. My flashlight revealed mouse droppings scattered across the tabletop and plates which I’m sure at one point held the remains of this family’s dinner before it was consumed by rodent and insect life.

  Cynthia went to the counter and prodded an uncertain finger at a stack of envelopes, then picked one up and turned it over. “This looks like a medical bill. It’s still sealed.”

  “What’s the name on it?” I asked, craning for a better look.

  “William Arnold. Postmarked October 2, 1986.”

  William Arnold must have been the bug-eyed man in the photograph out in the living room. I shivered. Part of me was tempted to tear open the envelope and see what exactly he’d been billed for. Had he been in poor health? Had he passed away?

  That still wouldn’t explain why the entire family vanished.

  “Come on, let’s keep going,” I said. Standing in one place for too long was making me uncomfortable. I swept the room with the thermal imaging camera, spotting nothing abnormally cold nor warm.

  We proceeded up the stairs and investigated the bathroom and bedrooms, finding exactly what you’d expect in a place like this: dusty toothbrushes sitting in a holder on the sink, limp towels draped over a rod, beds covered in rumpled blankets. A smattering of building blocks spread across the carpet in the girls’ bedroom, and a single pink bunny slipper stared at me with beady plastic eyes.

  The air smelled of mildew and decay, like a tomb.

  Thunder rumbled as we regrouped on the landing.

  “I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen all I need to see,” Darren said.

  “As if you aren’t as intrigued as the rest of us,” Paige said while a second roll of thunder rattled the windows.

  I caught sight of another spindly spider scuttling across the floor and decided it would be in my best interests to vacate the premises as soon as possible. “Darren’s right. We should get going.”

  “Best idea I’ve heard all night,” Darren muttered. Then, “Wait a minute. Look at this.” He held up the K-II meter, which suddenly registered EMFs too high to be normal. “This is crazy.”

  I looked at the camera screen once more and saw a spot so cold it appeared black. “This is picking up something, too. Look.”

  I showed them the screen, and Darren and Paige held their hands out to touch the cold place that hovered midair in front of us. Paige jerked her hand back and flapped it a few times as if shaking off something that had touched her. “Eww, that was weird. Like ice.”

  Cynthia reached out her hand, too, and had a similar reaction. I almost did the same but held back. Putting my hand into a mysterious cold spot emitting waves of electromagnetic energy didn’t seem like something I wanted to do.

  “Okay, let’s scram,” I said and headed down the stairs.

  A brilliant flash of lightning preceded a boom so loud I was rendered deaf for several seconds.

  Rain started falling in torrents. I turned to say something to my friends—I can’t quite remember what—and found myself alone at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Um, guys?” My voice sounded small in my ears.

  No response came.

  I swallowed. “You’re comedians, all of you. Now let’s go before the storm gets worse.”

  Goose bumps crept up my arms as I stood alone in that quiet house. I’d thought so sure they’d all been right behind me, and I couldn’t for the life of me imagine where they might have gone in half a second.

  “Fine, then,” I said, my words coming out in a fearful quiver. “I’ll leave you all here.”

  I hurried through the kitchen and living room and waited out on the porch by the weathered graffiti. Rain hissed through the trees, masking any sounds that might have come from within the house. I expected my friends to burst through the door laughing at any moment, so I braced myself.

  Ten rather damp minutes came and went as wind gusted stray droplets of rain underneath my refuge. My friends’ absence gnawed at my insides like rats. They’d been so ready to leave—especially Darren. So what was taking them so long?

  My heart banging at my ribcage, I clomped back inside. “What are you guys doing?”

  Unfathomable silence met me, which might seem odd considering the storm raging so near, but that’s what it was: a silence so deep it could only be the silence of absence.

  I realized my teeth were chattering. When I tried to still them, my hands began trembling as well. The photographs on the living room wall seemed to monitor my movement as I crossed through to the kitchen and up the stairs, where the smell of Darren’s cologne lingered in the air like a phantom.

  My heart hammering more frantically now than it ever had in my twenty-two years, I pushed open the bathroom door once again and prayed that Paige or someone would jump out with a shout of “Boo!”

  I regarded only the open shower curtain, spotted porcelain, and the toothbrushes that hadn’t seen mouths in thirty years.

  I checked the bedrooms and their respective closets. No one was in them.

  Tears coursed down my cheeks. Something terrible had happened to my friends—something supernatural, I was sure now, though I couldn’t understand why I of all people had been spared.

  I patted my pockets for my phone and realized I must have left it out in the car.

  Once again I fled the house. As soon as I got in the car, I called the police.

  THEY never found anything. Law enforcement questioned me so many times I began to doubt my own recollection of events. Eventually they slapped me with a minor trespassing charge and let me go, though I think they still had their suspicions about me. I was, after all, the last person to see my friends.

  I hate to think I was the last to see them alive, though I didn’t actually see them die, did I?

  I fell into a black mood I could find no way to lift. I drifted from class to class like an anchorless ship, rarely taking in anything said by my professors or classmates. At times I found myself reaching for my phone to text any one of my friends, and then, shyly, I would slip it away and hope nobody noticed my eyes had gone misty.

  About a week after my visit to the house on Sutter Lane, Dr. Ogude, my literature professor, stopped me on my way out of class.

  “Mr. Colby, can I have a word with you?” he asked as he stuffed his iPad into his bag.

  I braced myself for a lecture. “Sure.”

  He gave a soft laugh. “Don’t worry, you aren’t in trouble. When’s your next class?”

  “Two.” It was eleven in the morning.

  “Excellent. If you’d like, we can talk in my office. It’s more private there.”

  I shrugged. “Okay.”

  Dr. Ogude’s office lay a short distance down the second-floor corridor. He let me in first and then closed the door behind us.

  I planted myself in the chair facing his desk and rested my chin on my hands while he went around and took a seat on the other side. “I guess this is about my grades,” I said.

  Dr. Ogude studied me with dark brown eyes. He was old enough to be my dad, and I had the feeling he was about to give me a rather dad-like talk. “Your grades are fine,” he said evenly.

  “Then why am I here?”

  It took him a few seconds to answer. I imagined he was trying to find
the best words to say. “I’m very sorry about Paige, Darren, and Cynthia,” he said. “I know they meant a lot to you.”

  I just nodded. What could I say about that?

  “You are of course aware that there have been several missing persons cases tied to that piece of property,” Dr. Ogude said.

  “I am now. The police only brought it up about seventy times while they were questioning me.” As if I could have been responsible for the disappearances occurring while I was a child in another state. If only I’d listened to Darren and Cynthia when they said we shouldn’t go to that house.

  If only.

  “Have you thought about why you might have been spared?” Dr. Ogude asked, tilting his head and studying me like some specimen. I admit it was kind of creepy, and I had the feeling this was no innocent conversation.

  “I—I’ve thought about it,” I hedged. “Why?”

  “Oh, I was just thinking. If you could figure out why you didn’t disappear, that knowledge might save others foolish enough to go exploring there.”

  Ah. Of course.

  “I really don’t know, sir. We were standing there all together, and when I went down the stairs, they were gone.”

  “And there was nothing you did any different from them?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  I returned to Sutter Lane on a sunny spring day accompanied by Lori, a woman I’d met at The Union Jack the month before. Like me, she was from out of town, and like me, wanted to solve the disappearances that had plagued the area. According to my research, at least two dozen people had vanished from town during the past three decades. Several had connections to Sutter Lane.

  “Wait until you see this place,” I said as we rode our bikes side by side down the narrow road. “You’ll love it.”

  Lori had a special fondness for old places. When she wasn’t waiting tables, she investigated haunted houses like my friends once did, so her round face was flushed with excitement, and maybe a little bit of sorrow since she knew what had happened to them.

  “The way you describe it gives me the absolute creeps,” she said. “I can’t wait to see it!”

  “Just be careful, though. I don’t want anything to happen to you.” The plan was to just stay outside and look in the windows; maybe explore the property a bit and see if we could find anything unusual. I didn’t think we would disappear that way.

  Some people would have thought me crazy for going back, but I needed closure.

  “Are you going to be all right, seeing it again?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I hope so.”

  As we neared the house, the sound of beeping machinery carried through the trees, followed by a great crunch that sent a flock of birds scattering into the cloudless sky.

  Lori and I exchanged an uneasy glance.

  That couldn’t be good.

  I could see equipment the moment we turned onto the long driveway leading to the house.

  Or what was left of the house. Workers stood around as a backhoe tore down another wall like some great hungry monster.

  I felt a pang in my heart, knowing that those family photographs and the half-built Lego house and the pink bunny slipper upstairs would soon be interred forever, but perhaps it was better that way.

  I approached a woman wearing a hard hat and a reflective vest. “What’s going on?” I asked, though the answer was painfully obvious.

  The woman jumped, then scowled at me. “This place is condemned. Should have been torn down years ago. Last month a kid was snooping around in there and his leg went through a rotted floorboard, so now we get to clean it up before any more knuckleheads come out here and get hurt. Besides, there’s been too many disappearances. You should know. A few years ago, some professor at the university’s kid came out here to snoop, and nobody saw him again. It was all over the news.”

  My insides felt cold. Dr. Ogude?

  “But the people who lived here,” I said. “Do you know what happened to them?” I’d scoured old news articles for months and found no explanation for their disappearance. They had just simply gone away, like the others.

  “Hell if I know. This place has been empty since the eighties. Now you two scram before you get in our way.”

  Lori and I took that as our cue to leave. As we walked back to our bikes, I remembered, and drew up short.

  “They touched the cold spot,” I said.

  “The what?”

  I recounted the strange phenomenon that my friends had all put their hands into. “The family who lived there must have found that spot, too, and that’s what took them.”

  “But what was it?”

  I swallowed. “I don’t know. Something bad. Something no one should have ever touched.” My writer’s mind conjured images of portals and black holes, neither of which should have existed in an old house in small-town Pennsylvania.

  Behind us, another wall of the house caved in with a crunch.

  “Do you think that spot will stay there even with the house gone?”

  I continued toward my bike without looking back. “I don’t want to find out.”

  A VIOLENT WIND began to howl across the desert in the early afternoon, sounding very much to Kerry Wellington like a chorus of the damned.

  The sky grew darker as flying sand blotted out the sun. Anxiety began to churn Kerry’s stomach. They shouldn’t have been out in this kind of weather. They shouldn’t have been out here at all.

  “Perhaps we should stop and wait for this to pass!” he shouted to Hugh Treviño, his boss and mentor, as their transport lurched ahead over the uneven ground.

  Hugh didn’t even turn his head. His gaze was fixed on the windshield in front of him, or rather the drab terrain which lay beyond that.

  Kerry spoke again. “Sir, I’ve heard that the storms out here can be extremely dangerous. I really think we should wait here for the winds to let up.”

  “Nonsense!” The old man’s grip tightened on the steering wheel, turning his knuckles white. “The storm will cover up our tracks.”

  Kerry sighed. Though he hated to admit it, the man was right. Neither of them had sought permission to set out on this little jaunt. The paperwork alone would have taken weeks! And all because management back at the base thought that the radiation levels were still too high, even though centuries had passed since the land had been fried in a bomb blast. Furthermore, the former management had permitted them to work out here without radiation-proof suits, so where was the sense in that?

  Kerry had never been overly concerned about the possibility of radiation poisoning. What worried him the most right now, aside from the storm, was the machine sitting in the trailer they were hauling. It had been Hugh’s idea to bring it with them. And sometimes, Hugh had very bad ideas.

  He leaned back in the passenger seat and folded his arms, trying to distract himself by watching the needle on the dashboard compass gradually sway from left to right and back again. Airborne grains of sand ticked against the windows. The outside world had been reduced to a yellow-brown haze.

  “You know; we could drive off a cliff in this mess and not know it until we hit the bottom,” he said, hoping to talk some sense into his mentor.

  Hugh tapped the topographical map displayed on the screen embedded next to the compass in the dashboard. “No cliffs for miles. If we’re to die out here, it won’t be from a fall.”

  “Always so quick to dismiss my fears, aren’t you?” Something white on the ground before them suddenly caught Kerry’s eye, but they passed it before he could get a better look. “Hang on. I just saw something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Stop the car.”

  “You’d better not be bluffing.” Hugh gently applied the brake. “Make it quick.”

  “I’ll try. This wind’s so bad, I just might blow away.”

  Hugh rolled his eyes. “I mean it.”

  “Well, if I’m not back in five minutes, send out a search party.” Kerry undid his seatbelt and slipped o
n a pair of safety goggles; then stepped out into the gale.

  The white object now lay about thirty yards behind the trailer. It must have been heavy to have remained still in the wind. He trudged toward it, shielding the lower half of his face with one hand to prevent his mouth from filling with grit.

  He squatted down beside the object. It looked like a small, white dome protruding from the earth, like a child’s toy ball. There were a few dents in it; and some thin lines traced their way around the dome like threads. No, not lines. Sutures. Kerry had seen his fair share of skeletons in his lifetime. The thing sticking out of the ground was a skull.

  He returned to the transport.

  “Well?” Hugh asked when Kerry opened the door. He was drumming his fingers on the steering wheel with an air of impatience.

  “It’s a skull.”

  Hugh lifted an eyebrow. His fingers grew still. “And?”

  “I’m fairly sure it’s a human skull.”

  “You’re putting me on.”

  “If you don’t believe me, come look for yourself.”

  Hugh muttered some kind of profanity and killed the engine. “Where is it?” he asked when he joined Kerry at the passenger side of the vehicle.

  “This way.” Kerry led him to the place and pointed at the ground. “See?”

  Hugh dropped to one knee and scraped some dirt away from the skull. “Looks like whoever this was took quite a beating. See these marks here? Blunt force trauma. Maybe a club of some kind.” He straightened. “Kerry, you can give yourself a pat on the back. I suppose we’ll stop here after all.”

  HUGH moved the transport into reverse and angled it so the trailer sat ten feet to the windward side of the skull. The goal was to block most of the stinging grains of sand from hitting them once they began to exhume the rest of the skeleton. Kerry thought it was a foolish idea to begin digging before the storm was over, but he kept those thoughts to himself. Nothing short of death could convince Hugh Treviño to change his mind once it was set on something.