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When Gary emerged at the top of the stairway, everyone was huddled around Maury's EVP unit. There was a look of both fear and astonishment on all the faces. Maury had quickly rewound the tape and was now fumbling with a myriad of buttons as he motioned for Gary to join them.
He was still not quite able to shake off the horrific image that had stared back at him through the mirror downstairs. It had features he'd never seen on a specter before. Most images were of people as they were in life, not how they looked in or after death. This face was a face that was meant to scare, and it worked. He sighed, flexed his hands as he stared down into that dank, tomb-like basement then quickly closed the door and joined the others; he would tell them what he'd seen after he heard the EVP.
"Tell him what you told us, Maury," Tal prodded.
"Give the poor bastard a chance to speak," Walter shot, "and maybe he will."
"See, I was getting nothing at the 300 range, which is where the typical spectral voice can be heard. But they've been heard as low as 100, so I kept reducing in increments but always had to stop at 100. The makers of the software knew ghosts weren't heard below 100 so their software could only take me down that far."
"That's why he thought something was wrong with the EVP," Tal noted.
"Especially since the meter registered so high in the dining room. I really thought I'd get something at 300. Then, I decided to get brave and it took a little jimmy-rigging, but I got the computer to go lower." He smiled triumphantly. "We got it at 88. Listen."
Gary listened intently as Maury turned the machine on. At first, only static buzzed through the air. After about 15 seconds he heard it:
A woman's voice: "You are in danger."
Static.
Something unintelligible then: "They know who you are and what you do."
More static then: "They will never leave here and are bound and determined to never let you leave either, Mr. Brewster."
Static-
"Beware . . ."
Static-
". . . the. . ."
Static-
". . . light."
Suddenly, there were screeches and howls like a pack of rabid dogs descending on their victim. The female voice screamed and fell silent. A wet phlemy growl came over the speaker. It was a sinister snarl that shook everyone when they heard it.
Gary looked back at the closed door to the basement and wondered if the face he saw belonged to the thing he now heard. A sudden anxiety could be wrung from him like a saturated sponge.
It spoke. "We've been waiting . . waiting for you. Now, you will never leave!"
All went silent.
An alarm suddenly sounded on one of Tal's video screens. Everyone turned to monitor number 3, which was the bedroom where Gary had seen the presence in the window earlier in the day. Tiny glowing lights called orbs were shooting haphazardly across the room.
Walter said, "I don't think I've ever seen so many orbs at once in my whole life."
"So, are you still only getting gas from this place?" Tal asked.
Walter ignored him and went to his own equipment and checked his trifield meter. The needle was shaking in an epileptic fit as it climbed higher and higher up the scale. He checked it against his baseline for the room.
"Gary, the trifield has gone over double the baseline for this room. I can only imagine what it is beyond the kitchen. Should I go check?"
Gary, now dividing his time up between the monitors and the trifield meter with quick jerks of his head, said, "I don't think we need to have the meter telling us what I think we already know what's happening here. Let's just stay put for now and watch."
They all clustered around the equipment, taking notes and adjusting knobs, but mostly they watched Tal's video monitors.
"So, what do you make of what Maury's EVP recorded?" Walter finally asked.
"Well, what we do for a living must make it's way around the haunting circles," Gary replied with forced levity.
Maury asked, "The fact that the female ghost called you by name-doesn't that bother you?"
"Scares the hell out of me."
"Why do you think she warned us?"
"It's obvious that something bad is going on here. She was a good entity that wanted to warn us, keep us from harm."
Tal said, "So, we've moved beyond a classic haunting, here. I'm not so sure I'd even classify this as a poltergeist or apparition. What exactly are we dealing with?"
"Possession," Gary stated emphatically.
They all stared silently at each other for a moment. Each look, one to the other, conveyed the same lost look; they had never encountered a possessed house before.
Lightning ripped open a momentary hole in the heavens and the sound of its mending pealed shortly afterward. The rain outside now came down in sheets.
Maury asked, "So, what, exactly, has possession of the house? Who was that woman on the EVP warning us about?"
Gary shot a glance to the basement door. "I met him-or it-in the basement. I saw it in the mirror as I was washing my hands."
"What was it?" Walter asked as he glanced up from his negative ion detector and wrote some numbers on a clipboard. He was trying to keep busy, but his voice betrayed an anxiety that everyone now felt.
Gary wrinkled his brow in a nervous contemplation. "It-it was a man, yet not a man. Something-something different. Something that chilled me more than anything we've dealt with up to now. And I dare say it was something entirely foreign to our field of study. It had qualities that seemed both spectral and physical at the same time."
Walter said, "But you can't have both. Only one or the other."
"Or so we thought up to present. I have a feeling that tonight will forever change the way people study the paranormal."
"Uh oh," Tal blurted. "Gary, come here and look at this."
Gary was by his side at the monitors before he finished his sentence.
There was something in one of the rooms. A figure was beginning to take shape in the corner of the room. Colors seemed to warp around an invisible sphere, and the air seemed to undulate like ranks of heat radiating from a desert road.
"Which room is that?" Gary asked.
Tal looked over Gary's shoulder to the door directly behind him. "Whatever that thing is, it's just beyond the dining room door."
Without warning, the lights in the kitchen went out.
"I guess it's good that we went to auxiliary power," said Walter.
No sooner had those words issued from his mouth, all the equipment went dead.
"How can that be?" Walt trembled. "How could they have access to our battery backups?"
"Maybe more powerful entities can manipulate electrical currents," Gary wondered out loud.
"What else might they be able to control?" Tal added.
Suddenly, a great light shined through the keyhole and out from around the edge of the door. Everyone gasped and took a step back from the doorway but only for a moment. There was something about the light. Something oddly reassuring, something-benevolent. It seemed too bright to be anything sinister, for surely nothing dark and malign could hide where its rays reached.
"Maybe the good entity, that lady that warned us, came back with others to fight off whatever it is that doesn't want us to leave," Maury guessed.
Gary swallowed hard. "I don't think so. Remember what she said about the light. Beware the light."
Tal shook his head no. "That's all we could make out. There were other things in that statement that we couldn't decipher. Maybe she was saying 'Beware of all you see until you see the light', or something along those lines."
"For once I agree with Tal," Walter said. "I think we need to see what's beyond that door. It's our duty as ghost hunters."
Gary raised his voice and became more insistent. "You didn't see what I saw in the basement." He sighed and brushed his hair back in frustration. "We just discussed this; if it can manipulate electricity, what else can it do?"
Tal reiterated, "We still aren't certain that the female entity was warning us about the light. I say, let's open the door and find out what it is."
"Though I agree with Gar," Maury said with only a slight reluctance in his voice, "I think we need to see what's behind that door, get pictures of it. We need proof of some sort before we leave here or else everyone both inside and outside our circle will think we made this up for the publicity."
Everyone but Gary agreed and Tal grabbed his camera out of a briefcase that was sitting on the floor under the table.
"I can't be held responsible for what happens when that door opens," Gary pleaded.
"Damned it, Gary!" Walter shot. "Aren't you the least bit interested in what's making that light shine behind that door?"
"And aren't you the least bit afraid? I know we've been doing this for a long time without incident, but this kind of work isn't without its hazards. Maybe one of those hazards is going to hit us out of the blue, if we don't proceed carefully."
"You've always approached ghost hunting with a scientific eye. Now, you're acting like a superstitious child."
"Look, of course I'm curious. This stuff runs through my blood, always had. But maybe I'm coming to realize that there are some things that we just don't need to know the answer to. Ask any astronomer if they'd want to take a rocket into the center of a black hole to see what happens to them, and I bet they'd say no. I'm just saying that sometimes it's better-and safer-to speculate."
Tal stepped over to the dining room door. "Sorry boss. We disagree, and if you're not going in then I'm taking charge."
Gary looked at Maury for support, but Maury shrugged his shoulders and said, "I just want proof, Gar. I'm tired of being laughed at when I tell people what I do. This is a golden opportunity to show the world that we aren't kooks, that this stuff is real." He pointed to the door with determination. "That is the proof we've been looking for."
Tal said, "Are you two ready?"
Walter and Maury shook their heads yes.
Gary pleaded one more time for everyone to stay in the kitchen, but his petitions fell on deaf ears.
Tal opened the door, and all three went into the dining room.
Gary went to the door and listened for a moment. "Wow," he heard Walter say.
"Get the picture," Maury said.
Gary heard two snaps from Tal's camera.
For a moment, he thought that maybe he had overreacted to seeing the face in the mirror. Everything from the moving curtain, to the icy chill on his neck in the dining room, to the face in the mirror, to the pleas from a long-dead woman had culminated in an apprehension he'd never felt before in any session. Maybe the newness of the feeling bothered him more than the events that precipitated them.
Everyone beyond the door was taken up with an awe of which he was now beginning to be jealous. Their voices held a note of wonder and excitement. Whatever they were seeing had not given any of them the slightest uneasiness.
Yes, Gary decided that he had overreacted and now wanted to join his team.
He was about to push open the door when he felt a coldness upon his shoulder. It was an icy grip that he couldn't break; it prevented him from entering.
Something whispered in his ear. "Don't duplicate the others' folly. I warned you, but they did not listen. Go now, for their demise in that room will follow you in here, if you stay any longer."
Gary shuddered in disbelief; it was the voice of the woman on the EVP recorder. He could hear her as though she were flesh and blood right behind him.
"Wh-who are you?" he asked.
"You were right to call me good. I am a-friend, who believes in the work you do. Unlike those who loathe the living. Those who your friends are about to meet."
Suddenly, Gary heard Tal say, "What the hell is that?"
"Go now, before it's too late."
The icy embrace left him as quickly as it came.
"My god! My god! What is that thing?" Maury exclaimed.
Faint growls, grumblings in the distance, began to swell, growing louder and louder. In an instant they were just beyond the door, chittering and screeching with baleful voices. The noises were from what sounded like hungry growls and laments from what could have been a legion of damned souls. There was no mistaking their nefarious intent; it was the sound of bloodlust.
Gary could hear cries from the three men trapped inside, but he couldn't make out their pleas through the pandemonium. Part of him wanted to rip the door open and help his friends. But they were warned. He warned them. He knew that if he opened the door he would share in their fate.
The door rattled on its hinges. Something on the other side was pounding on it. Was it a demon trying to make its way to Gary or was it one of the three trapped inside desperately trying to escape.
The noises. So ear-splitting, so eerie, so laced with evil that they shook him to his marrow.
He grabbed the doorknob, let go, then grabbed it again. Maybe he could open it just enough to let one of his friends out. He turned the knob slowly.
The door shuddered violently in his grasp, and he quickly let the knob go.
Suddenly, the door flung open and the sight in front of him welded his lungs closed so he couldn't breathe. In the brief moment he was able to stand there, he saw the darkened images of grotesquely shaped beings hovered over a shadow-hidden mass on the floor. There was a light behind them, like a stadium light, making it so nothing in the room was discernable. One of the figures reached down into the pile on the floor and pulled up what looked like the outline of a torn limb.
The shadow-hidden face of the entity holding the hewn limb turned to Gary. "Won't you join us, Mr. Brewster? We were just about to have a late dinner."
The beings turned to Gary and began closing in.
The voice in his ear again: "Your only safety is outside. Get outside, and they won't be able to follow.
Gary ran as fast as he could, almost taking the door to the front foyer off as he went through it.
The malignant laughs grew louder as the specters chased him down the hallway to the front door.
He reached it.
--Closer.
Tried to unlock the door, but the knob turned in his sweaty grip.
--Closer, faster.
He could almost feel them at the back of his neck.
The door wouldn't open
--Closer, faster, hungrier.
He knew they were almost there.
To his immediate right was the living room with a large picture window along the front wall. Without any hesitation, he turned and ran into the living room.
The beings were now upon him.
As one reached out a shadow-cloaked claw to snare him, he leaped headlong through the window and landed in a pool of glass on the front porch. Not satisfied that the porch was still far enough away, in one smooth motion, he kept his momentum going and jumped over the porch railing, narrowly missing a hanging flowerpot, and landed in the rain-soaked yard. He got up and ran to the van.
When he got in and started the ignition, he looked up at the house. There was no more bright light, but he thought he could see the outline of someone at the broken window. Was it one of the ghosts? Was it the woman who had saved him? Was it one of the others he'd left in the room? The last thought he doubted.
Gary put the van in reverse and left as quickly as he could.
A week later, Gary Brewster sat in his van a half a block away and watched Mr. Keller put a For Sale sign on his front lawn. The picture window had since been replaced, and no doubt all the equipment left behind had been thrown out or hocked to pay for the window, since none of the calls from Mr. Keller were returned.
As he watched, he thought about Maury and Tal and Walter. He thought about the mysterious woman who had warned them. He thought about the beings that had torn them to pieces. He shivered.
As He pulled out of that parking space and headed back the way he had come, Gary knew he'd never ghost hunt again. What was the purpose? He knew that they were there, but outside of their existence, he knew nothing about them. He'd decided that that was okay; some things we just weren't meant to know.
©2002 StoriesByEmail.com
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