As the saying goes, you stare into the abyss long enough, and the abyss will stare into you. In Haskell’s case, it swallowed him alive.
“Let me get this straight,” Winters said. “Despite Haskell’s skeptical nature, he felt Krippner’s spirit was talking to him?”
“Krippner or some other force inside the house. I know how it sounds — coming from anyone else I wouldn’t have paid any attention to it. I’ll be honest. When Haskell first started going on about the place, I thought he was trying to spice up a dull episode. He’d done it before. But this time was different. He wasn’t fucking around. When I realized he was serious, I didn’t know what to think. I’d never seen Haskell like that.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Obsessed,” Fisher admitted.
“And what about you?” I asked. “You were at the house too, weren’t you? Did the house similarly affect you?”
“I didn’t like it,” Fisher said slowly. “I mean, who would? After all, Krippner murdered nine women in the damn house. ”
“But you didn’t start hearing voices. No ghosts whispering in your ears.”
Fisher shook his head. I silently handed him my unopened can of Coke, and he cracked it open.
“What about Sara Maitland? How did the house impact her?”
Fisher held my gaze for a beat, the soda poised at his lips.
“She was okay at first. I think she’d been having nightmares, though, about another place in town.”
This new piece of information made me perk up better than caffeine. “Go on.”
“One of our segments focused on the Craftmore Theater.”
“The theater is a popular stop on the North Bay Harbor Ghost Tour. Local legends say the ghost of an actor who performed at the theater in the 1930s still haunts the place,” Winters chimed in. She gave Fisher a skeptical look. “And now you’re saying that Miss Maitland was disturbed by a presence there?”
He bristled at her tone, his defenses going up. “I know how it must sound, but you asked for my opinion. I’ve visited hundreds of supposedly haunted locations over eight seasons of doing this show. Some are creepy as all hell--some even give us nightmares—but only a handful of places have ever gotten under my skin.”
“The Krippner house and the Craftmore Theater,” I said .
Fisher nodded. “I have no idea what’s in that house. Maybe it’s Krippner’s damn ghost or the spirits of the runaways he murdered. Whatever it is, it’s something that refuses to move on. And I can prove it to you.”
The ghost hunter waved me toward his MacBook. “I'll show you some footage we recorded at the Krippner house. The place freaked out the crew, which isn’t surprising given its dark history.”
Fisher clicked on a video file, and spectral green night-vision footage filled the monitor. The effect definitely upped the creep factor. There were shots of the various rooms of Krippner’s house--a bedroom, a kitchen, a dank basement. The basement felt especially eerie, with a large walk-in freezer dominating the space like a doorway to Hell. This had to be the same freezer where Krippner had stored his grisly souvenirs.
Even without music, sound effects, or any commentary, the footage made my pulse quicken. There was an air of menace to the place, a power that cast a dark spell over the viewer’s imagination.
The flashlights of the Haunt Chasers crew lanced the encroaching darkness but failed to erase the nagging feeling that something was hiding in the shadows, something man wasn’t meant to disturb.
And then a guttural voice cut through the cloying darkness.
Detective Winters flinched and let out an audible gasp. A chill raced up my spine even though I couldn’t make out what the disembodied voice was saying.
Doesn’t matter how many supernatural entities I face—each one fills my heart with its own special brand of terror. The fear never goes away. It’s hard-wired into our species.
The living fear the dead.
“No one heard the voice while we were filming in the house. I only noticed it once I played back the footage,” Fisher explained.
On-screen, the ghost hunters, didn’t react at all to the sound, confirming Fisher’s story.
He played the audio again, the voice sharp and jolting, like nails raking across a blackboard.
The camera zoomed in on the Haskell and Maitland, and then started to focus in on the mirror behind them where an eerie handprint had materialized.
I glanced over to see the blood drain from Winters’ features. It looked just like the two handprints burned into Haskell’s corpse.
“Could you please play the segment again for me?” I asked.
Fisher hesitated for a moment and nodded. “Sure. You don’t want to know how often I’ve watched this damn thing since they found John’s body.”
“Can you make out what the voice is saying?” Winters asked, having regained her composure somewhat after the initial shock. “It just sounds like spooky gibberish. ”
“The gibberish makes sense when you play the track back at five times the speed.”
Fisher pressed play and a chilling, inhuman voice invaded the bright farmhouse. It was a man’s voice. Deep and menacing. And this time I understood the message of his staccato utterances. He was asking the same question repeatedly.
“Where are my children, where are my children?”
I swapped a glance with Detective Winters. Her haunted expression told me everything I needed to know.
The ghost of the dead serial killer was searching for the runaways he’d murdered.
Chapter Eight
Mike’s Crab House was one of North Bay Harbor’s most popular dining options. In fact, Sara Maitland thought ruefully, it was one of the only dining options in town.
The seafood restaurant overlooking North Bay Harbor’s main pier was the type of place that seemed to be a staple of coastal towns. Wooden floors, giant stuffed fish on the walls, and plaid checkered tablecloths—the kind of joint where they handed you a lobster bib when you stepped through the doors.
Outside, a storm was brewing. Fat raindrops pearled down the large windows, while fishing boats bobbed in the choppy water beyond.
As she stared out of the window, Sara Maitland fought back the tears. John Haskell had loved this place, with its kitschy New England charm and generous portions. They’d eaten here almost every night during the shoot .
Sara watched the gloomy weather in numb silence. Her shrimp dinner sat in front of her untouched. The glass of white wine, her third for that evening, was fulfilling all her nutritional needs at the moment.
She still couldn’t believe it.
John was dead.
The man had been a huge part of her life for eight years, and now he was gone for good. She felt lost and adrift, like a part of her had died too. Haskell was the brain, the heart, and soul of Haunt Chasers. Without him, there was no show, no point in going forward.
Sara took another sip of wine and let the alcohol dull the sharp edges of her grief. For as far back as she could remember, the paranormal had captivated her imagination. When she had first signed on to Haunt Chasers , she’d been an eager young woman ready to probe the mysteries of the universe. Eight seasons of ghost hunting later, that starry-eyed enthusiasm had given way to disillusionment. She felt like a charlatan selling lies to a gullible audience. Sara had long since concluded that ghosts were about as real as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.
People had a tendency to let their imagination run wild. Ghost stories were just that—stories. All part of humanity’s voracious appetite for meaning.
As of late, the only upside of doing the show was her relationship with John. They’d started as friends but became lovers when both their marriages failed. They’d kept their romance a secret, both of them worried that it might reflect badly on the show.
As Sara finished her glass of Sauvignon Blanc, she sank deeper into misery. The grim details surrounding John’s death weighed heavily on her mind. The authorities hadn’t ruled out
suicide, but she knew better. John loved life, and he’d loved her. He would’ve never left her.
Somebody had murdered him.
That somebody was still out there.
Suddenly she felt like the walls of the restaurant were closing in on her, and she needed to get out.
She ordered a black coffee, drained it, and paid her check. Ten minutes later, she sat in her rental car and gave up fighting the hot tears streaming down her cheeks.
God, how she missed the man.
She tried not to think of John’s pale, naked corpse covered in weird occult tattoos. The police had asked her to identify him, and the nightmarish memory of seeing the warm body she’d embraced so many times laid out like a piece of cold meat on a stainless steel autopsy table would haunt her for the rest of her days.
The cops had kept asking questions for which she had no answers. Did the strange symbols suggest some crazed fan of the show might’ve murdered Haskell? Could the tattoos be self-inflicted, some final statement before checking out?
Or perhaps it was the house that killed him , a voice deep inside of her suggested, a voice that was growing louder the more she thought about what had happened to John.
The place had gotten under his skin. He’d talked about almost nothing else since they’d visited it. It had literally haunted him. She recalled him waking up soaked in sweat on the nights following the shoot of the Krippner segment. Terrible nightmares of the cursed house plagued him, and Sara had held him each time until the shaking stopped.
No, there was no doubt in her mind. He would have never voluntarily returned to that awful place.
The house had affected her too, but not quite to the same degree as it did John. Making matters worse was the voice in the footage they recorded. None of them had been able to explain it, but they all felt it.
Something lurked within the cottage on the hill.
Something evil and not of this world.
Suddenly, Sara wasn’t so sure that she didn’t believe in ghosts.
Eight years earlier, proof of the supernatural would have quickened her pulse. Today, the possibility of such a thing filled her with a gnawing sense of dread.
She wiped the tears away and started her car, feeling sober enough to drive. Not that there were any taxis in this backwater even if she had wanted a lift home. There was no need to turn on Google Maps, either. After more than a week in this godforsaken village, she knew the way back to the farmhouse by heart. She drove in silence through the dark seaside town, too distraught to even listen to music. Fifteen minutes later, she turned onto the dirt road that ran through the forest toward the farmhouse.
She tried not to dwell too much on the dark trees that grew along the side of the narrow road or the mist that wound its way between the gnarled trunks. A milky fog veiled the surroundings, the condensation erasing reality and making her feel like she was the last person on Earth, hurtling through a gray void.
Her hands clutched the wheel tighter, and her breathing became irregular.
Relax, focus on the road, don’t let your imagination get the better of you.
Unfortunately, all she could think of was John’s dead body on the autopsy table, his neck twisted at an impossible angle. Sara shuddered, lost in the vision.
And as John’s head turned toward her, and those dead eyes stared daggers into her soul, she heard that terrible, guttural voice emanating from his lifeless, blue lips.
“Where are my children?”
Sara wasn’t paying attention to the road. That’s probably why she only noticed the green Ford when it was right upon her.
The car completely blocked the two-lane road, and she was forced to slam the brakes to avoid a crash. Her vehicle ground to a violent stop a few feet in front of the Ford. Her safety belt cut painfully into her chest, and she let out a loud gasp. Her eyes wide, she took in the flashing hazard lights that painted the forest in a stroboscopic light show.
There was no sign of the driver. Had he taken off on foot hoping to find help?
She shook her head at the idea. Good luck with that at this hour! Surely a local would know better than to run off into the woods. She scanned the trees anyway, searching for any sign of movement.
Sara tried to steady her breathing. By now the tranquilizing effect of three glasses of wine had worn off, and she felt tired, sad, and angry all at once. All she wanted was to be back at the farmhouse, where she could crawl under the covers of her king-sized bed—a bed she’d shared with John only a few days earlier—and shut out everything. Instead, she was stuck on this sad excuse of a road late at night in the middle of a creepy-as-fuck forest. Shit!
Get ahold of yourself, woman, she thought.
Sara contemplated her next move. For a second, she considered pulling off the road and going around the vehicle. She dismissed the idea almost immediately. Her rental would get stuck in the thick shrubbery growing on both sides of the road. So what other options did she have? If this were some lame-ass horror movie, she would have gotten out and tried to push the other car off the road. But she was a host of a paranormal reality show, and she had visited countless homes with a bloody criminal past. She knew the sort of evil people were capable of. And she vividly remembered how they had found John’s Jeep abandoned on a forest road very much like this one .
Fear swept over her. She bit her lip and checked the car door to make sure it was locked.
She should call for help. That was the smart thing to do. Call someone, then sit in her nice, safe, locked car until the cavalry arrived. To her dismay, her phone wasn’t picking up a signal out here in the woods.
“Shit,” she whispered. So much for that plan.
Taking a deep breath, she decided to head back to the village. Perhaps she could find someone to help her, despite the late hour, or at least contact a towing service at the next gas station. She would figure out something. Right now, she didn’t want to spend a moment longer on this deserted forest road. She had to get out of there.
Sara put the car in reverse and started turning the wheel, her eyes trained on her rear-view mirror.
As her gaze shifted back to the windshield, her blood turned to ice. A figure wearing a red ram-horned mask had materialized, seemingly out of nowhere. The black-robed spook in the crimson demon mask felt surreal in the dark landscape—a nightmare come alive. The monk-like robe fluttered in the wind.
Before Sara could let out a scream, the stranger drove a large ax into her windshield. Then her world exploded in a shower of raining glass.
Chapter Nine
Shadows lengthened around the Krippner house as thick tendrils of fog enveloped the structure.
Detective Winters and I sat in her cruiser, parked about forty feet away from the building. Without even consciously being aware of it, she was trying to maintain a safer distance between herself and the house.
Hearing Krippner’s voice had rattled her to the core. Her jaw clenched tight, face drawn and strained—aged in some undefinable way—as she wrestled with the idea that the spirit of her father’s murderer might still linger in the house.
I’d seen that look before on cops who encountered the paranormal. Damn, I hoped to spare the detective, but it was too late now.
“I’m sorry, but I’m not going inside that place,” Winters said at last, her eyes blazing with a haunted resolve. “If some part of that sadistic bastard remains, then I don’t want to go near him.”
“I understand,” I said.
“What the hell is going on, Kane? Do you really think Krippner’s ghost is trapped in that place?”
“I don’t know.” But I hope to find out.”
Winters’ voice held an edge of anger that almost, but not quite, masked her fear. “I thought you were the expert when it comes to this crazy stuff.”
“My expertise only goes so far, Detective. I’m not a psychic, despite the label the press likes to slap on me. I bet you’re a great cop, but that doesn’t mean you can solve a case without looking at the crim
e scene first. Occult crimes are no different in that respect.”
Winters though about my words for a moment. And then another thought occurred to her. “You lied earlier, didn’t you? You do believe in the supernatural.”
I held her intense gaze and said, “Sometimes.”
Winters’ shoulders slumped, and her grip tightened around the steering wheel.
“You know, I wasn’t completely honest either, Kane. I told you I don’t believe in ghosts, but that’s not true.”
I leaned closer. “What happened?”
“I visited the Krippner house when I was a still a teenager, a few years after my father’s death. I guess a part of me needed to see where it happened, you know? I couldn’t sleep because of the nightmares. Krippner had become larger than life in my mind. A demon I had to face. I don’t know why, but I thought going to the house might help.”
I’d gone through a similar experience a few years back. When I was nineteen, I returned to Los Angeles and went back to the mansion where I’d grown up. The nightmares of that place had followed me to the East Coast. It was almost like the place was calling me. The things I would discover upon my return would change my life and set me on my current path. In a weird way, I had to face my past in order to find my future.
But this wasn’t the time for my story. Winters clearly needed to get this off her chest.
“What happened in there?” I asked.
Winters shook her head. “I feel crazy talking about this. I never told anyone about it, not even my mother. As soon as I set foot in that house, I felt the heaviness of the place. The weight of the blood that had been spilled. Even though I was the only one in the house, I sensed I wasn’t alone. I could feel somebody watching me with deep hatred.”
She paused for a beat, her gaze distant, reliving that fateful visit.
“Go on,” I said.
“After two minutes of being in there, I couldn’t take it anymore and I took off. I got about ten feet before I threw up. And when I looked back at the house, I saw him. I saw Krippner standing in the window. And the bastard was smiling at me.”
The Paranormalist- Servants of the Endless Night Page 6