by Carey Lewis
Contents
Copyright
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Carey Lewis
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher.
CHAPTER ONE
“HOW MUCH LONGER IT GOT?”
“According to the blue bar?”
“If that’s how you want to time it.”
“According to the blue bar, it’s got half more to go.”
“How long you been waiting on the blue bar?”
Rodney held up his finger and his thumb, the gap between them showing roughly an inch. “About that long,” he said.
“Suppose I ask how long it took the bar to get that far, you’d tell me since there was no blue bar,” Deacon said.
Rodney nodded, said, “That’d be accurate. You want to put a different frame of time on what we’re doing?”
“How about rotation of the sun?”
“Since there was no blue bar to where it is now?”
“That’d be accurate.”
“I’d say it’s been a half hour.”
Deacon bent over and looked at the laptop screen to see the little blue bar twirling with white streaks. It was in the little window on top of the open editing program. ‘Rendering’ with three dots was in text above it.
“So it took a half hour for it to get half way?” Deacon asked.
“If we’re going by rotation of the sun, yeah,” Rodney said, leaning back in his chair, his arms crossed on his pudgy chest. “Want to ask how much longer the blue bar’s going to be?”
“You said this computer could handle the program.”
“You asked me and I said it could.”
“But I never asked you how well it would do, that what you’re going to tell me?”
“Remember when I said ‘but’ and you walked out?”
Deacon stood up straight and looked over his shoulder to the front of the house to see members of his crew staring back at him. Brooke was seated in a chair, the lights set up on tripods giving her a halo effect. Maggie had her hip cocked to the side, the boom mike resting against her body. All waiting on him.
He turned back to Rodney and said they didn’t have another half hour. Told him everyone was waiting on them.
“Waiting on the computer actually,” Rodney said. “The one I was about to tell you could run the program but would move like molasses through a strainer before you walked out.”
“You move like molasses,” Deacon said.
“That a black joke?”
“It’s a fat joke. Which one you offended by more?” Deacon looked back through the house to see Brooke stand from her chair, fake smile on her lips as she left the room. It was immediately dropped as she crossed the house to the back, into the kitchen.
“What’s the problem?”
“It’s still rendering,” Deacon said.
“Why?”
“Because that’s how we get the effect to look real,” Rodney said. “I’ve told you how these programs work since the beginning.”
“When’s the beginning of you not trying to sound like the smartest asshole in the room?” Brooke asked.
“Who said I was trying?”
“How’s the sheet gag look?” Brooke bent over to look at the laptop.
“Can’t see it while it’s rendering.”
“Rodney, stop the goddamn render and show me the sheet gag.”
Deacon took a step behind Brooke to look at the laptop as Rodney hit the cancel button and scrubbed the footage forward. The image on the screen was two people sleeping in a bed, tossing and turning in fast-forward, a pale green glow to them from the night-vision mode of the camera.
“Here it is,” Rodney said and the footage slowed down to normal speed, the two figures in the bed sleeping at a normal pace. Then the sheet was violently yanked from them and the man and woman sat up quickly, startled awake.
“It looks good,” Deacon said. “Let’s see how far the render got.”
Rodney looked over his shoulder at him, then back to the screen. The image went quickly in reverse, the sheet moving back onto the bed and the couple repeated their quick movements but backwards. Rodney hit a few buttons and the image played forward at normal speed.
In the lime green haze of the footage, a gas formed beside the bed, slowly turning into what could be a figure, floating in the air. Though not defined, you could see a woman with stringy hair running down the side of her head, but it was also enough of nothing that the image could be argued to be anything - like looking at a cloud and imagining it to be whatever you wanted it to be.
The gas figure floated for a little before forming what could be a tormented face. It turned to look at the camera then seemed to float toward it. Then the image got pixelated and cartoonish.
“That’s where the render left off,” Rodney said.
Brooke stood up and crossed her arms on her chest. Deacon looked over at her, knowing that look. Familiar with the crease on her brow when she was thinking on her feet, running a thousand scenarios in her head. Even Rodney knew enough to shut up when he saw that look.
“You still got that scream you made?” she asked.
“The tiger and the pig?”
“That one yeah.”
“It’s on another drive.”
“Is it here Rodney?”
Deacon saw another look he recognized from her now. One that he hated. Her no bullshit, I-don’t-have-time-for-how-stupid-you-are look.
“Put the scream in twice,” she said. “Slow it down and lower the tone, fade it up when the cloud forms. The last part where she turns to the camera, speed the footage up so it looks like she’s rushing to the camer
a then cut it like the feed dropped before the render drops out.”
“Speed up the footage?”
“They won’t notice everything else moving fast around them, they’ll be looking at her. Bring the sound up on the slow scream before the feed cuts. Bring it back in before the sheet gag, like the feed came back and put in the real scream and then lose the feed again when they wake up. How long will that take?”
“Five minutes.”
“It’s just for them, we’ll fix it up before it goes to air,” Brooke said and left the room.
DEACON FOLLOWED BROOKE INTO THE living room. It was one of those Victorian houses with three floors that looked big from the outside but was much smaller inside. It had a hallway that ran from the front door to the back door, a staircase that greeted you as soon as you stepped inside. To the side of the hallway were the rooms to the house, a living room in the front with a doorway that led to the kitchen in the back. Through its one hundred plus years of existence, much of the original designs were still intact.
“We’ve never actually had this happen before,” Brooke said as she sat back on her chair in the middle of the lights and cameras. Deacon followed across the original hardwood floors to the chair beside her. “We’re still having a hard time getting the footage together to show you.”
“Is it that bad?” Mrs. Campbell asked, leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. She was nearing fifty, her blond hair coming from a bottle for a number of years. She wore a red sweater. Her large thighs were ready to burst through the seams of her jeans, the ones Deacon overheard her saying were her ‘show’ jeans while she yelled at her husband to change his clothes because they were going to be on television.
“We’d rather just show you when we can, get your real reaction to it on camera,” Deacon said.
Mrs. Campbell gasped as she reached for her pack of Kool menthol cigarettes. She told them she only smoked when stressed as she lit one, expecting everyone to believe her lie. Everything in the house had a tan coat of nicotine, including the floral print couch that sagged where she sat beside her husband. Deacon had no doubt the two of them sat there every night, staring away at the television across the room, chain smoking while drinking malt liquor.
“You think we can cut these lights then ‘til you’re ready?” Mr. Campbell asked. He was a skinny man, much too thin for the wrinkled black suit he was wearing that had a layer of dust on it. He was bald, so chose to wear the hair on the sides and back of his head extra long, maybe to go along with his handlebar mustache.
Deacon looked beside Mr. Campbell to Dominic who was behind the camera filming him and Brooke. Dominic stood up and flicked a couple switches on the floor. The giant tent-like lights faded off, somehow making the room look grimier.
“You’re going to tell us it’s the ghost interfering with your taping?” Mr. Campbell asked.
“We’ll just show you what we have then see what you think,” Brooke said with a smile.
“Yeah sure,” he said.
His wife slapped his skinny thigh, telling him to behave. It wasn’t the husband they’d have to convince, Deacon and Brooke both knew that when they met the couple on the first day. He didn’t seem to complain much when the production company put them up at the Howard Johnson’s Hotel for a couple of days. He even went and asked why they weren’t being put up in the Marriott.
“So it was your parents had the house before you?” Deacon asked.
“It was,” Mr. Campbell said. “You know this already. Know it was my family built the thing before the Jews come and steal it from them.”
Deacon did know that. Knew the Campbell family built the house in the late 1800’s, around 1875 give or take a year. Knew the Campbell’s back then used to lynch and set fire to blacks on the property during the race riots near the turn of the century. Knew the house got handed down to another generation of Campbells until World War Two when Joe Campbell’s grandfather ran to Canada when he was drafted for the war. That’s when the bank tried to take the house because there was no one to pay the taxes on it, who Joe was now calling ‘The Jews.’ During that time when the bank had the house, it was given to a Japanese family who were hiding from the internment camps and angry Americans.
When the war was over, Joe’s granddaddy wasn’t happy at all to find a family of ‘zipper-heads’ living in his house. Unfortunately for the Japanese family and the bank, Joe’s granddaddy wasn’t the type to be reasoned with. After some fighting, Joe’s grandfather and his racist friends ran off the family, killing the wife and one of their children. Joe’s granddaddy went to jail for it, but the friends made sure no one bought the house so then the Campbell’s were able to buy it back at a discount. Not only because the friends wouldn’t allow it, but not many people were keen on moving into a house that had at least two murders occur inside.
Deacon found all that out while researching the property after the Campbells called the production company and said their house was haunted. Deacon knew a lot about the house and its history. He also knew a lot about Joe and his racist family that went back over a hundred years. Deacon and Brooke decided it was the Japanese girl haunting the house.
“Why do you want it to be the Japanese family?” Brooke had asked him yesterday.
“He’s not going to run because of a black family. He thinks they’re beneath him, he won’t run.”
“I’ll give you that.”
“Besides when’s the last time you heard a black family haunting someone? You know this.”
“The wife, what’s her name, Helen?”
“Helen or Ellen, I couldn’t tell. You know her front teeth are fake?” Deacon lit a cigarette.
“She’s whiter than fresh snow,” Brooke said. “Probably scared to death of those Asian movies. Get her to run, she’ll drag him along.”
“That’s the stretch isn’t it. Get racist Joe to leave the family home.”
“He’ll follow her she wants it bad enough.”
“Not like he’d have to run fast to keep up.”
“Let’s talk to Rodney, see what we can conjure up.”
“So you’re saying I’m right?”
“Don’t make a habit of it.” Brooke went in the Victorian house to see what they could come up with.
And now Rodney was making his way into the living room, the floorboards creaking under his weight, to hand the laptop to Deacon so they could convince the Campbells their house was haunted.
THE LIGHTS CAME BACK ON, the cameras started rolling, and Deacon and Brooke took turns showing footage from the laptop while talking about the history of the house. Deacon kept a close eye on Joe as they relayed the history of events in his racist family tree. Joe looked uncomfortable, but not in the shameful way you’d expect. He wanted to lash out, tell them that’s how things should be in his America when Deacon told him about the lynchings, the burnings, his granddaddy murdering Japanese folk that were merely hiding. He was restraining himself for the camera.
This happened for the next twenty minutes. Ellen Campbell bent forward, trying to get a good view of the laptop showing the footage of Deacon and his team going through the house for the past couple nights. Dominic had to keep motioning to Deacon that she was getting in his shot, not able to get the laptop on camera with her moving her head in front of it. They would stop filming, remind her not to move too close, then start filming again.
The images on the laptop were in night-vision. The team, led by Deacon, walked through the dark house, acting scared. Things moved off camera the team reacted to. They asked each other if they heard the strange noises, then the noise was heard on the laptop. They spoke of getting heat signatures and odd cool spots. They showed the images of the infrared, some wavelengths they were trying to decipher sound from. Things fell over, picture frames moved, people felt things move around their legs - Terry even got grabbed from behind and yanked back.
Ellen reacted exactly how they wanted her to react. She covered her mouth, gasping at all the right places, even shrieke
d in some. She kept muttering to herself ‘Oh dear.’
Deacon stopped the image on the laptop as Brooke said, “Now we’re coming to the part we were having problems. It took us awhile to salvage the footage and we wanted to verify it. This won’t be easy to watch.”
Ellen was wide-eyed looking at her, all the breath gone from her body, tiny tears forming in her eyes. Deacon looked to Joe, saw he wasn’t impressed - like it was a waste of time, or he didn’t believe any of it.
“Deacon?” Brooke said and Deacon hit the space-bar on the computer in his lap.
“As you know, we asked you to stay in the house last night. We wanted to see how the spirits reacted to you,” Brooke told them as they watched themselves sleeping on screen. “This is the part we needed to verify. What looks like a figure forms at the side of your bed.”
Ellen leaned forward. Deacon gestured with his free hand for her to move back.
“It looks like a girl. We’re not sure what she’s about to do as she starts moving over top of you.” Brooke went quiet, letting them watch.
The ‘girl’ hovered above the couple, then turned to look at the camera. Deacon looked to Rodney leaned up against the door frame. They nodded briefly to each other. The sound of the slowed down tiger/ pig scream was perfect - it had an effect but wasn’t immediately noticeable.
The floating girl looked at the camera. Ellen moved back in her seat. For a split second, the ghost rushed to the camera before the image cut to a blue screen.
“That’s what we were able to salvage but it seems the feed cut out at that point,” Brooke said.
“She was right over top of us,” Ellen said to Joe. Then to Brooke, “What was she going to do?”
Deacon stepped in. “From what we gather from the history of the house, we don’t think it was anything good.”
“It would seem the camera,” Brooke said, “stopped her from doing whatever it was she was going to do.”
Ellen leaned back on the sofa, her hands covering her mouth, tears running down her cheeks. Deacon wondered if they were real or if she liked the attention. Whatever it was, it made for some good TV.
“You don’t think… possession?” she asked.