by JL Bryan
I walked to the door, feeling my heartbeat kick up a little. Intellectually, I knew there could be nothing behind the door—there wasn’t room for anything behind it—but at that moment, in that dark and silent haunted house, I could believe that it would open onto something else entirely, some scene of horror and death...but I opened it anyway.
And found myself staring at a blank wall.
I let out slow sigh, feeling a mixture of relief and disappointment. It’s my job to find, observe, and remove the ghosts, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy encountering them face to face, not at all. It’s just a necessary part of the work.
Something had passed through here, either Gerard or the boogeyman, but it was gone now.
I walked up and down the hall, listening and watching. I would usually make rounds of the house, checking in person for any activity, but I didn’t want to stray too far from the kids tonight. Protecting them was my main concern.
Time passed. Slowly. I mostly checked the basement cameras to watch the activity there. Stacey mentioned over my headset that Jacob had gone home for the night, to catch some sleep before he woke up to count other people’s money at the firm where he worked.
By about three in the morning, I was feeling drowsy, and fairly certain that nothing would happen that night. It happens a lot. Ghosts don’t always follow a set schedule, unless they’re obsessed with a certain time—the time of their death, usually. I once dealt with a ghost who appeared like clockwork at 1:11 each morning, the exact moment she’d been murdered by a jealous lover. That one was easy to find. Unfortunately, this fearfeeder was not so predictable.
Just as I was ready to give up for the night, Stacey whispered urgently through my headset.
“Ellie, I’ve lost both cameras in Mia’s room,” she said. “They blacked out.”
“I’ll take a look.” I drew my flashlight without clicking it on, then took Mia’s doorknob in my hand. It was like grabbing a ball of ice. “Stacey, I might need back-up. Get ready.”
I turned the handle, which wasn’t easy—the tumbler and latch assembly inside the doorknob let out cracking sounds as though they had been frozen into place.
Pushing the door open, I stepped into Mia’s room with my flashlight out in front of me like a firearm.
The room was cold, as I’d expected from the doorknob, so cold my breath turned solid white in the air. Something growled soft and low in the darkness.
Mia lay in her bed, rigid as a corpse with her eyes wide open. She was staring at her closet, but I had to step deeper into the room before I could see it.
The two cameras remained in place on their tripods, undisturbed, pointing at the closet door. The door itself was open a few inches.
Something dark stood in her closet. The low growling sound rumbled from there, too soft to be heard by anyone outside the room.
“Stacey, hit the floodlight,” I whispered, looking at the remote-controlled light she’d installed. Nothing happened. “Stacey!”
“I’m trying!”
I ran to Mia’s bedside table and pressed the floodlight button Stacey had installed there, but the light still wouldn’t come on. I tried the lamp—dead. The wall switch for the overhead light—no response.
Mia looked at me, too terrified to speak, then looked back at the closet.
I clicked on my flashlight, narrowing and concentrating the beam with the little iris, and jabbed it at the closet. The dark figure slipped out of sight, but the room remained painfully cold, and I could still hear the growling. It was a mechanical sound, I realized, more like an engine than an animal.
“Stacey, get in here now,” I whispered, approaching the closet door.
“I’m already on my way.”
“Mia, run.” I looked at the girl in the bed, but she shook her head very slightly, too scared to budge from under her covers.
The mechanical roaring grew louder as I reached for the cold closet handle and slid the door aside.
It sprang out at me, ignoring the high-powered tactical light in my hand. Behind me, Mia screamed.
Fleshface, the supernatural stalker-killer who’d risen from the grave in sequel after cheesy, low-budget sequel, swung his chainsaw at my head as he leaped up from the sunken closet.
My only defense was to dodge back, leaning back as far as I could while the chainsaw sliced through the space where my head had been. I’m not Matrix Girl, so this was not done elegantly, and led to me crashing backwards and sprawling on the carpet, in a fashion that might have been horribly embarrassing if I hadn’t been preoccupied with feeling terror for my life.
I did escape the chainsaw, though. It passed over me and lodged into the door frame around the closet.
The apparition seemed dangerously solid. I could feel the displaced air when it leaped at me, smell the motor oil and exhaust from the chainsaw. It looked just like the movie monster, its head wrapped like a mummy’s but with strips of human skin (or the Hollywood effect-shop equivalent) instead of ancient cotton. His enormous, heavily patched overcoat rustled as he pulled the chainsaw free.
“Mia, run!” I shouted again as I scrambled to my feet, backing away from Fleshface. It’s not a good idea to fight chainsaw-wielding ghosts in the same room as a small child, if you can avoid it. Not that I’ve ever seen a ghost wield a chainsaw before.
Mia pulled her thick quilt over her head, hiding in her bed. It was frustrating, but I understood where she was coming from. Only the bed was safe. Leaving the bed, even reaching a finger or toe over the edge, or leaving any part of yourself exposed from beneath the covers, meant opening yourself to attack. Every kid who’s ever seen a monster in the closet knows that.
Fleshface regarded me for a moment, his dark eyes glittering in their sunken sockets as I shined my flashlight at his head. I suddenly wished I’d seen at least one of his movies.
“Mia,” I said. “How did they kill Fleshface at the end?”
“With his chainsaw,” she whispered. I could barely hear her, but I was pretty sure that was what she’d said.
“Of course.”
“He’s powerful but slow,” Stacey said over my headset. “The girl who kills him in the second movie is a gymnast.”
“Sounds like a job for you,” I replied.
Fleshface came at me again, the chainsaw raised above his head in a way that, I’m pretty sure, violates the standard chainsaw safety manuals. He looked ready to bring it down and split me in half. The smart, self-preservation thing would have been to run, but no matter how scared I was, I couldn’t leave Mia alone with this monster.
I dodged to one side and let him charge past me. As Stacey had promised, he lumbered onward, not nimble at all. His chainsaw swung toward the floor, and he started to twist around, belatedly trying to follow me.
The only option I really had was to swing my tactical flashlight, its anodized shell of aircraft-grade aluminum designed to double as a blunt weapon when cops needed one in a pinch.
I swung it with both hands like a baseball bat, right at the fleshy strips on the back of his cranium.
This was a big risk. Most of these entities aren’t very solid when you try to fight back—you find yourself wrestling with a cloud of energy that lashes at you with psychokinetic energy but has no real mass itself, no stomach or groin where you can plant your boot. There was a good chance I’d stumble right through the movie monster only to get hacked apart by its chainsaw. The chainsaw, of course, wasn’t actually real, either, but represented a dense, sharp, rapidly moving center of the ghost’s psychokinetic power.
The flashlight whipped toward his head...and slammed into the back of it with a satisfying crack.
Fleshface let out an awful moan, like a high wind through a graveyard just before a storm. He staggered forward, the tip of his chainsaw dragging through the carpet and shredding it into a cloud of lint.
I drew my flashlight back for another strike, but he was already turning toward me, his chainsaw swinging in an upward arc toward my ribcage.
<
br /> I changed the trajectory of my flashlight in time to bring it clanging down on the chainsaw before it reached me, as if we were suddenly in a medieval sword fight.
A storm of electrical sparks erupted, briefly lighting up the room before he sliced my flashlight in half. I stumbled backward as he raised the spinning blade yet again, the tip pointed at my heart.
I was moving in the only direction open to me...right into the closet, a dead end where he’d have me cornered in one of his favorite spots in the house.
Another light flooded the room. Stacey stood in the doorway, her tactical flashlight in one hand.
“Buddy slaughter!” she shouted.
I couldn’t make any sense of those words, but Fleshface stopped and turned toward her.
“Guess what I’m about to do,” Stacey said. “I’m on my way to a party, where I’ll drink beer and maybe sneak off with a guy. And if I hear any strange, creepy noises while I’m there, I’ll be sure to go and investigate them all by myself, without telling anyone where I’m going.”
I knew just what Stacey was doing, describing behaviors that would mark a character for certain death in any teen horror movie. Only the virtuous virgins survive.
Fleshface let out a roar and charged at her.
I went after him, raising a leg and landing my boot in the center of his back. My foot sank in a little—his body felt spongy, as if I’d just stomped on a Jell-O mold covered in a dirty napkin.
He went down, and I fell after him, since I’d put all the power I could summon into that kick. Three years of kickboxing class finally paid off.
The monster crashed on top of his chainsaw, and the blade ruptured out the back of his overcoat, directly in the path of my fall.
I managed to fling out my arms and catch myself, landing on my hands and knees, the buzzing chainsaw blade only an inch from my chest.
He squirmed under me, and I pushed back into a squatting position.
Though the chainsaw jutted out through his midsection, there was no blood or gore. His limbs twitched and flopped, as boneless as a scarecrow’s.
Something poured out of his flailing form. At first I took it for some strange black liquid, thick and viscous, flowing from his crumpling overcoat and deflating mask.
Then they crawled up my leg, and I realized I was looking at a flood of spiders. Black widows, thousands of them, pouring out while the coat and mask shriveled to the carpet like empty rags.
I stood and staggered back, screaming as I pulled my sleeve over my hand and swept at the spiders crawling up both legs of my jeans. People rarely die from a single black widow bite, but just one can make you extremely ill. I didn’t want to find out what a hundred of them might do.
Mia screamed along with me.
“Calm down, Ellie,” Stacey said, looking at me like I was crazy while she turned on the room lights. “It’s over.”
“Do you not see—” I began to shout at her, but then I looked down. I was smacking at my legs for no apparent reason. All the spiders were gone. So were all traces of Fleshface.
“Did we kill him?” Stacey asked.
“I wouldn’t bet on it.” I drew my thermal goggles down over my eyes to check the room. “Probably just chased him away. Mia, are you okay?”
“Yeah,” the girl breathed. “Is he gone?”
“Gone for now,” I said. “Stacey, what did you yell at him when you ran into the room? Buddy something?”
“Buddy Slaughter.”
“That’s Fleshface’s real name,” Mia said. “In the movie.”
“Gotcha.”
Alicia arrived in a panic, wearing frayed blue satin pajamas, clearly drawn by her daughter’s scream. While she sat on the bed to embrace and soothe Mia, the three of us told her what had happened. The room rapidly grew warmer, shifting from a bitter winter feeling into humid, warm summer air. Kalil appeared in the doorway as we spoke, watching and listening but saying nothing.
“Did you see anything, Kalil?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. He was trying to sound nonchalant, but his voice trembled, hinting at fear underneath the surface. “I just heard screams. Is it gone?”
“We think so,” I said.
“Can I stay in your room, Mommy?” Mia asked.
“Of course you can, baby. You too, Kalil.”
“I’m okay,” he said. “I’m not scared.”
“I don’t think I’ll sleep again tonight,” Alicia said. “It’s almost four, anyway. I’ll just go clean the kitchen.”
“I’ll help you, Mommy,” Mia said.
“Kalil? Cleaning or sleeping?” she asked.
“Cleaning,” he said with a sigh, but he looked relieved at having a third way out, not having to sleep alone or with his mom.
Alicia and the kids left, off to clean and organize an apartment that was already pretty neat and spotless as far as I could see. It was a relatively healthy reaction under the circumstances, I guess, getting busy with something that would both distract them from their thoughts and help them reclaim some feeling of control over their home.
Stacey and I remained in Mia’s room. While Stacey took snapshots of the scene, I studied the gash in the closet door frame.
“Look at this,” I said, and Stacey came over. I ran my finger across the shallow, diagonal cut. “This seemed much deeper to me at first. There’s no chips, no splinters...like he cut it with a scalpel instead of a chainsaw.”
“Maybe we should really insist on the family leaving the house for a few days,” Stacey said.
“We know this entity can leave the house, though,” I said. “If it follows them somewhere else while we’re here, we won’t be with them to protect them. When Calvin and I investigated the Wilson house, we urged the family to leave, and they did. But I’m trying not to repeat our choices from that investigation.”
“Because it turned out badly.”
“The entity disappeared after that. I couldn’t find it on my own. It needed the family there to draw it out.”
“So we’re kind of using our clients as bait.” Stacey frowned.
“We’re keeping the entity predictable,” I said. “If we change their routine, we change what it does.”
“However you want to say it.” Stacey took pictures of the distinctly non-chainsaw-like cut.
“It’s shocking how precisely it wields its PK energy.” I picked up the sliced halves of my flashlight. “It’s usually blunt force, like knocking on a wall or slamming a door. Or it’s up close and personal, biting and scratching. What this thing just did is off the charts.”
“Great,” Stacey said softly, in a tone that made it clear she wasn’t feeling that great about it at all. She checked the night vision and thermal cameras. “The batteries are drained dry, but these aren’t damaged otherwise. I’ll go get replacements.”
Stacey left, and I stood alone in the room. The interior of the closet was shadowy and still gave me a sinister feeling, like something was there, watching me. My thermal goggles revealed nothing, but the EMF meter registered the same high readings we’d found on our first walk-through. The closet was itself a doorway, somehow leading down into the soulless depths where the monstrous shapeshifting entity dwelled, hungry to terrorize the living.
Chapter Fifteen
Stacey and I left at sunrise, after breaking down our gear from the laundry room and stashing it in Alicia’s apartment. The moment we stepped out of the house into the pale morning light, it was like a heavy, oppressive weight lifting from our shoulders.
“You know what I wish?” Stacey said, while I pulled the van out onto the street. “I wish, just once, that we’d run into a nice haunting, you know, a nice ghost who just plays the piano or tidies up the house at night. One who kind of says, hey, being dead isn’t so bad.”
“A lot of ghosts have some kind of psychological disorder, or else they wouldn’t be here,” I said. “A ghost who understands his situation feels compelled to move on. Like Gerard. He’s got one foot in the next wo
rld already, so I guess he’s not so powerful here.”
“What do you think that next world is like?” Stacey asked. “Is there a heaven and hell? Or is it like the near-death experiences people have?”
“I don’t know. Maybe there’s nothing.”
“How could there be nothing? You talk all the time about ghosts moving on to the ‘other side.’”
“Maybe that’s just a term we have, and not a real place,” I said. “Maybe a ghost is just a tangle of unresolved emotion and longing. Untangle the knot, and there’s nothing left but emptiness.” I thought of my parents, gone forever, my whole life defined and shaped by their absence.
“That sounds bleak,” Stacey said. “What does Calvin say about it?”
“Calvin says we must embrace uncertainty or we aren’t being honest with ourselves.”
“Sounds like something he read in a fortune cookie.”
“Probably,” I said. I didn’t feel like having this conversation with Stacey at the moment, or thinking about whether there was more to life after death than restless ghosts making life miserable for the living.
After dropping her off, I went home for a bit of sleep. I had nightmares about a dark masked figure hunting me with a chainsaw. I was glad to wake up surrounded by daylight, rather than awake from those nightmares in the deepest hours of the night. I’m sure I would have seen monsters in my closet, too. In this line of work, you never run out of fresh nightmare material.
I saw I’d missed a call from Calvin, so I called him back while I brewed coffee. My cat Bandit meowed at my feet, clearly remembering the day I’d accidentally spilled cream on the floor.
“Bad news on the Carson kid,” he said.
“Which one was that?”
“Twelve years old, disappeared in ‘85,” Calvin said. “Turns out when they found him, he was catatonic, wandering down River Street. Dirty from head to toe, wearing shredded pajamas. He didn’t say a word. Kid lived to be twenty-three years old, but he never spoke again. Went persistent vegetative, then died. Shut down. Like something sucked the soul out of him.”
