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Gary Brewster pulled the blue cargo van into the driveway and stared at the house for a moment before turning off the ignition. It didn't look like a haunted house, though most really didn't look like the decrepit Victorian houses portrayed in the movies. Even so, this one looked completely innocent of the evil goings-on its owner had described in their telephone conversation. It was a narrow but deep two-story, built-oh, maybe in the fifties, by the look of it, with a detached one-car garage. It was covered in blue, vinyl siding with white shutters on all the windows and had hanging flowerpots along its front porch. Maples ran along one edge of the property line and a row of evergreens along the other. The grass was mowed and the sidewalk edged. It was a delightfully maintained piece of property on the outside, something most owners of haunted houses neglected, considering what was happening within. That struck Gary as odd, but he never questioned a job.
Tal Gordon tapped him on the shoulder from behind, and he finally turned the idling van off.
Gary unbuckled his seatbelt and said as he wiped a line of sweat from his forehead, "Let me go tell the owner we're here before we start unloading."
"Right," Tal replied as he turned to the others sitting with him. "Maury, Walter, check over your equipment one more time. Make sure all batteries are at full charge. If you don't, and the electricity goes out during tonight's session, this job is toast. Got it?"
Maury began doing what was asked of him and turned to some black boxes in the space behind the seats where the equipment was stowed, but Walter sighed loudly. "You'd think we'd never done this before."
"Check twice and cut once," Tal quipped
"Yeah, yeah. Your daddy was full of neat, little catch phrases," Walter replied dryly.
As Gary closed the van door, he looked back up at the house one more time, eyeing the vacant and shadowed windows at the front of the house. Though, admittedly, it was probably the least menacing looking of all the homes they had held sessions in, an unexpected chill coursed down his sweat-soaked back when, inexplicably, he saw the curtains sway slightly against a blackened room on the second floor. He saw no one brush by it. If it were a fan, even an oscillating one, the curtain would be in constant movement. Now, it just hung there as limp as it was before being disturbed. He knew full well that looks could be deceiving. He felt this house's deception clear down to his bones.
Finally, Gary leaned through the open window with a knowing smirk on his face as Tal and Walter continued their bickering and Maury, behind them, shook his head silently as he readied his equipment. "Tal, don't be too hard on these guys," he said. "It's bad enough dealing with all this heat. And I have a feeling this is going to be a long night, so you might just want to save that enthusiasm until two in the morning when you'll be needing it to stay awake."
They agreed but started up again when Gary left the van and headed to the house. As he climbed the porch steps, a humid breezed whistled through the evergreens, and the current sent the hanging flowerpots gently kissing one another with a quiet plink, plink. He raised his hand to knock on the screen door, but the inner door opened before he had the chance.
"Hello, Mr. Keller," Gary began. "We spoke earlier this week. I'm Gary Brewster from the Northern Alliance of Ghost Researchers."
An old man poked his large nose against the screen of the door. He eyed Gary suspiciously then eyed the van in the driveway for a moment. Suddenly, a smile creased his wrinkled face, and he opened the door.
"Hello, hello," he said as he came out onto the porch to greet him, patting a handkerchief on the back of his neck. "Sorry about the scowl, there. I've had so many Kirby vacuum cleaner salesmen stop by the last couple of months, that I'm getting tired of answering the door, so I am."
He was a little troll of a fellow, barely making Gary's chest with the top of his head. And the wrinkles on his weathered face were as numerous as the stars. Nonetheless, there was a twinkle in his eye and a quickness in his step that betrayed his ancient covering.
"I am so glad you came," he said, shaking Gary's hand. "This house has been mine since the day she was built. I've taken about as good a care of her as anyone can. But I'm at my wit's end, so I am. You're my last hope, or else a for sale sign goes up in the yard next week."
Gary smiled consolingly. He was good at that, and many people living under the spell of the supernatural needed it. That was why he was the team leader. "Give us a night or two and once we find the problem, we can focus then on a remedy."
"The house is yours," Mr. Keller said. "I've packed my bags, and I'm going to stay at my sister's house till your done, so I am. Her number's on the fridge door, so you can call me when you're done."
"Okay, then. With your permission, my team and I will unpack our equipment and get set up."
Mr. Keller sat on the porch and watched curiously as the four men brought in briefcases and small trunks full of equipment. As the last piece was lugged up the steps, Mr. Keller fell in behind it and followed its carrier into the kitchen where the rest of the equipment was being unpacked.
Gary, who had been holding a large briefcase, set it on the kitchen table and motioned for Mr. Keller over to where he was standing. "Let me introduce everyone to you and what their respective field of expertise is," he said.
"First, he pointed to Walter. "That's Walter Lemming. He's an electromagnetic expert. He keeps track of the static electricity and electromagnetic fluxes of each room. Once he comes up with a baseline, any variant could denote possible infestation."
"Infestation?" Mr. Keller wondered. "We ain't after termites, so we ain't."
Gary laughed. "We've adopted some loose terminology to try and put what we do into an explanation that makes sense to the general public."
"Well, when you start talking about breaking out the Raid to get rid of my ghost infestation, I'm calling someone else." He pointed to Maury, who was blowing and talking into some small microphones and watching the feedback across a computer screen. "What's he doing there? Looks like you'll be doing some
karaoke later on. I'm not paying out good money for you guys to set around and belt out crappy renditions of 'Feelings', so I'm not."
That produced a chuckle from all four men, and the smile on the old man's face betrayed the stern look given when he made the comment.
"That's Maury Eichman," Gary continued with a grin. "He's our EVP specialist. That stands for Electronic Voice Phenomenon. He'll take recordings of all the hot spots in the house and play them back at a wavelength much lower than humans. If there are any ghosts who are trying to speak to us, it'll be picked up by Maury."
Gary pointed to Tal. "That's Tal Gordon. He's our video man. He's the eyes of our whole operation."
"I'm also second in command, should anything, God forbid, happen to Gary during a session," Tal let Mr. Keller know.
Walter moaned. "I'm still puzzled by what you think just might happen to him, exactly-besides going in sane from your insatiable banter about being second in command. Sometimes I think you hope something happens to Gary."
"Absolutely not!" Tal exclaimed. "Everyone knows you should have a contingency plan in case the number one guy goes down. That's where I come in."
Walter turned to Mr. Keller. "Please excuse him. He just got done watching twenty-four hours of Viet Nam movies on the Superstation, so he thinks we're after Gooks instead of ghosts."
Gary coughed scoldingly at the two. "When the work starts, these two are pure professionals, I assure you, Mr. Keller."
"Considering what it is you do for a living, I really wasn't expecting bankers in shirts and ties, so I didn't. Squabble all you want as long as you can help me."
Gary hadn't noticed that Maury had gotten up and was already recording the dining room. "Hey Gar," he said. "You got a second."
Gary turned to Mr. Keller and whispered with a smile, "Truth be known, Maury is probably the only professional. He takes his job very seriously." With that, he went into the dining room.
Standing next to a small, round dining table in the middle of the room, Maury was looking down at an instrument that was strapped around his shoulder while holding up a microphone. "Look at this," he said.
Gary joined him and looked down at the instrument. The needle on the meter jumped wildly as Maury moved the microphone around the room.
"I don't hear any extraneous noises," he said. "So why is the meter jumping like that?"
Maury shrugged his shoulders and looked perplexed. "I don't know. It's supposed to only jump like that when it picks up our voices. I base lined it before starting, so providing everything's working correctly, it means--." He stopped short of saying what he was thinking.
The thought was finished for him, though. "It means there's a lot of something being said in this room right now that we can't hear."
A worried look washed over Maury's face. "But Gar, even in our best sessions-remember Euclid, Maine and Waterford, Pennsylvania-those barely got a register on the meter, and they've been praised as some of the best EVP ever recorded."
At the utterance of that statement, Gary suddenly felt a numbing coldness on his neck, starting at the back and quickly moving its way forward, like frozen hands readying themselves to choke off his jugular vein. In the unbearable heat of mid-afternoon anything cool would have been a welcome relief, but this was a burning cold, a cauterizing chill. He gasped and flailed himself around to find nothing behind him. Luckily, no one but Maury had heard him. Everyone was still in the kitchen unpacking and chatting with Mr. Keller about their equipment.
Rubbing his neck, he quickly turned back around to Maury, who was eyeing him with concern. He said nothing at first. They had been to enough sessions together for Maury to know what had just transpired. The look on Maury's face said as much.
Gary remembered the feeling that enveloped him as he looked upon the innocent, almost virgin-looking abode. He suddenly felt as though the swaying curtain in that window upstairs was a sign-a warning sign.
He said with as much authority as he could summon, "I think it's time to ask Mr. Keller to leave and get this thing started."
Maury nodded resolutely, and they returned to the kitchen.
©2002 StoriesByEmail.com
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