Sinister Entity

by Hunter Shea

  Jessica pulled him by the arm so he could keep up as they moved back into the house. The upstairs hallway smelled like potpourri and Eddie thought he’d be hard pressed to find a speck of dust in any of the rooms. They went into Rita and Greg’s room, where her mother had heard Selena’s voice, then the bathroom and her little brother’s room.

  Eddie saw the blow up bed and his heart broke for Selena. She was at the age where you were supposed to think you were invincible. The universe only existed to serve you and nothing could bring you down. Sixteen was a crappy age to realize the world was a frightening place.

  “It’s not fun sharing my little brother’s room, but I just can’t sleep in my own room alone right now,” Selena said. The walls were covered with Red Sox posters. Ricky’s dresser was littered with handheld game systems, loose change, a smattering of polished stones and five trophies, four for baseball and one for soccer.

  “Good thinking,” Eddie said. He realized it was the first thing he’d said to Selena since they had entered the house. He looked over at Jessica to see if she disapproved. She didn’t.

  Selena hesitated when they got to the entrance to her room.

  “I haven’t been in there since that night. I even made my parents get my clothes and makeup and stuff out for me. Sounds kinda crazy, right?”

  Jessica gave her a warm smile. “If I was in your shoes, I would have done the same thing, and I do this for a living.”

  Eddie gave her a mental gold star for lying to comfort the girl.

  She continued, “If you’re not cool with it, we can go in ourselves, check out the closet and be right back out.”

  Selena crossed her arms and hugged herself, nervous. “How about you go first and I’ll follow you?”

  Her room was like any other teenage girl’s room in America. Posters of hunks in cowboy gear and R&B bands lined the walls. A hint of floral perfume permeated the walls and fabrics. Most of the normal trappings had been removed, but there was enough left behind to let even the dullest observer know who lived in it. A collection of red and gold pom-poms sat in a pile by the bed.

  Selena stayed close to Eddie’s back. When Jessica opened the closet door, he heard her gasp.

  The closet was empty, not particularly deep or wide, and had a heavy scent of pine.

  “There’s nothing there,” he reassured Selena. He meant it in more ways than one. When he first came into the house, he kept his totemic barn doors closed tight. When he didn’t sense anything poking around the outside walls, he opened them a crack, pushing the heavy doors farther and farther back until they were wide open. Not even a whisper of a psychic breeze wafted inside.

  Odd.

  Other than the closet, bed and computer table, there wasn’t much to see in Selena’s room.

  Selena looked relieved but also very happy to get out of the room. They met her parents downstairs and asked a few more questions.

  Jessica pocketed her notebook and said, “Okay, I think we have what we need right now. We’re going to check into our hotel and be back tonight.”

  “Could you come after nine? Ricky will be asleep by then,” Rita asked.

  “Absolutely. We’ll work around your schedule, not ours. We’ll see you tonight.”

  Greg Leigh showed them to the door, a look of relief to be rid of them for the moment on his face. When they got in the car, Jessica turned to Eddie and asked, “Well, did you sense anything?”

  “Nothing. That place is like a psychic sensory deprivation chamber. I can’t remember ever being somewhere that felt like such an empty void. Weird.”

  “I don’t proclaim to be a psychic, but I have been pretty accurate when it comes to knowing something isn’t right in a house,” Jessica said. “In fact, it’s saved me a couple of times from investing a lot of time in locations that would amount to nothing. Even knowing that there’s evidence of a doppelganger, albeit unproven evidence, my internal EB meter didn’t move squat.”

  As soon as they were out of sight of the Leighs, Jessica stamped on the accelerator.

  “All right, I felt nothing, you felt nothing, but what did you see on the stairs? All I heard was one of the steps creak, but that’s not anything to write home about when you have a humid day like this.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been in the house before, so it just could have been a normal shadow. Maybe one of the curtains in the living room billowed out and created some light play on the wall along the stairs. Again, it was probably nothing.”

  “Back to the void.”

  Eddie exhaled and tensed as Jess zipped through a yellow light at a four-way intersection. “Yeah, back to the void, and that concerns me.”

  They checked in at a nearby Best Western, separate rooms, of course. Jessica had informed Eddie before the trip that hotel expenses were on her and there was no sense arguing the point.

  “At least let me buy dinner,” he said when they got their room keys. The hotel had put them in adjoining rooms.

  Jessica agreed to it and after dropping her bag off in her room, they headed across the street where there was an Irish-pub-themed restaurant and a gas station with a little grocery. She was relieved when he came back with a menu to the restaurant. She wasn’t a fan of gas station fare and refused to eat beef jerky.

  They had dinner early. The restaurant was huge and empty. It was just them and several waitresses.

  “Busy night,” Eddie joked when he gave his order.

  “It won’t get much more crowded than this on a Monday,” the waitress replied. “You should come back when it’s Monday Night Football. We have awesome wing and drink specials.”

  Eddie thanked her, gave a wink and she winked back.

  “Please don’t tell me you’re planning on making any moves on her. I am in the next room, you know, and I didn’t bring any headphones.”

  Eddie waved her off. “I just spent five years in North Carolina. Down there, they call that southern hospitality.”

  “In New Hampshire, they call that flirting with the waitress.”

  Jessica took a big gulp of her soda. She said, “So, what do you think of the Leighs?”

  “I’m sure the same you do. Rita seems nice enough, and worried. Selena is completely freaked out, which lends credence to her story. And Greg would like to see us head back to New York in short order.”

  “He doesn’t seem to be the warm and fuzzy type.”

  “I can’t say that I blame him. He obviously doesn’t believe what he saw, much less a couple of people from a paranormal website. I’m sure he’s worried that we’re feeding into his wife and daughter’s irrational fears and will only make things worse.”

  Jessica’s cell phone rang and she saw that Eve was calling. She excused herself from the table and took the call outside, letting her know that they made it in one piece and all was well. Eve sounded relieved and made her promise to check in once each morning and once each night.

  “Guess who came into the restaurant for lunch?” Eve said.

  “I don’t know, was it Brad Pitt?” Jessica smiled.

  “I wish. One of the Baldwin brothers came in, had our veal parmigiana and left Cassie an amazing tip.”

  “That’s so cool! Which one was it?”

  “I have no idea. They all look alike to me,” Eve said with a laugh. “Look, be careful up there. If you need me, you just call and I’ll be there before you know it. And email me everything you find out along the way. I may not be physically there, but I’m going to be with you every step of the way.”

  Jessica sighed. “I know, and I love you for it. I gotta go. My dinner should be ready any minute now, and I don’t have any Baldwins to gawk at. Talk to you tomorrow.”

  After the call, she walked into the gas station and bought a pack of cigarettes. She smoked, on average, half a pack a month, and felt the need for a pre-dinner cig.

  By the time she got back to the restaurant, the waitress was putting their plates on the table.

  Eddie crinkled his nose. “I
didn’t know you smoked.”

  “While it’s still not a crime,” she said.

  After a few bites of her fried clam strips, she asked, “I’ve been wondering. What have you heard about my family and Alaska?”

  He took a huge swig from his root beer. “Just bits here and there. You go on enough message boards and you get little snippets. The word is that a man, your father, moved his family into a haunted house in some little town that’s no longer on the map. There were paranormal events off the scale of believability. People were hurt. A lot of people died. It’s hard to tell the fact from fiction. Most people don’t equate others getting killed with hauntings, so they don’t want to believe it happened. Nothing in the story is verified. It’s just word of mouth, like a legend from a long time ago.”

  If Dad only knew he was going to create a legend, she thought.

  “Hm. Just curious,” she said, tucking back into her dinner.

  She could see that he was waiting for her to fill in the blanks, to tell him if he was right or wrong, to give him the true story. It wasn’t a subject she was about to discuss in detail.

  From then on, they ate mostly in silence, then walked back to the hotel where they changed, took a nap and met by the car. Eddie noticed that she wasn’t carrying one of her black cases.

  “Traveling light tonight?” he asked.

  “I just want to get used to the house, get a feel for the place and the family. I’m hoping you can provide even better insight. Maybe later it won’t register as such a zero with you.”

  “I hope, because everyone and every place has something attached to it. If I’m still coming up with nothing, it can only mean that something is actively blocking me. You didn’t tell Selena in your correspondence about me or what I can do, did you?”

  “Are you crazy? No way.”

  “Well, if she doesn’t know, someone must.”

  Jessica shivered despite the heat, adding, “Or something. We are, after all, dealing with a doppelganger.”

  They climbed into her car and hit the road.

  Jessica said, “That’s the one aspect that concerns me. I mean, what do we really know about doppelgangers? I come to places to help people. I keep thinking, if we come face to face with this, what the hell can I do to help them? There’s no manual on this.”

  He let her concern hang in the air. When she pulled into the driveway, her Jeep’s lights briefly illuminated the top windows. They saw Selena at the window, quickly pulling back the curtains and fading from view.

  Eddie jumped out of the car before it came to a stop.

  “What are you doing?” Jessica called after him.

  He ignored her and rang the bell. She had just caught up to him when Selena answered the door. She saw their faces and looked startled.

  “Selena, where were you just now?” Eddie asked.

  “I was in the kitchen making a cake. Sometimes when I’m nervous, I bake. Why?”

  Now Jessica knew why Eddie had run out of the car.

  It was in the house.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Eddie sprinted up the stairs. Jessica was close behind. Greg Leigh jumped out of his easy chair and shouted at them.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing? My son is asleep!”

  Eddie stopped and turned to talk to Greg. Jessica saw her chance and slipped ahead of him, proceeding up the stairs. She heard Greg Leigh say, “You have no right to come barging in here like a couple of lunatics. You’re scaring the shit out of my daughter.”

  While Eddie tried to talk him down, Jessica slipped into the room where she believed she had seen Selena. It was the master bedroom. A small bedside lamp was on, but the room was empty. She looked behind the curtains, then checked under the bed and the closet. Nothing.

  As she walked over toward Selena’s room, Greg pointed to her from the stairs. “Hey, I’m talking to the both of you.”

  She pretended she didn’t hear him and stepped into Selena’s room. The only illumination came from the half-moon shining through the window.

  Better not scare it if it’s in here, she thought, abstaining from flipping on a light. She walked around the room, careful not to make too much noise.

  The closet door beckoned. Maybe Selena’s closet was where it felt safest. It made sense. When it came to EBs, almost all had a remote corner that was less traveled than others to call home. Just like Edwin Esposito in Bronxville. She’d yet to fully grasp why that was, but had come to expect it.

  She walked softly toward the door. She could hear Greg and Eddie going back and forth in the hallway now, but Eddie knew to keep the rabble from Selena’s room, at least for a few more moments.

  The wind picked up outside and something pinged against the window pane. Jessica gave a slight start, but returned her attention to the closet door. She reached out, grasped the knob. It felt cool against her damp palm. She took a breath, steadied herself and turned.

  The door pulled back to reveal nothing but a few shirts and skirts on hangers and scattered shoeboxes. Jessica put her hand between the clothes, reaching until she could touch the back wall. It was completely empty.

  Then she thought about the inside corners by the doorframe and poked her head inside, expecting to see a pair of glowing eyes greeting her from within the darkness.

  That’s when Eddie and Greg came in. Greg hit the ceiling light, chasing the gloom away.

  “Find anything you like?” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

  “Nothing that I had hoped to find, no,” Jessica replied.

  Eddie said, “I told him what we saw when we pulled up, which is why we felt there was no time to waste.”

  “Which I find hard to believe,” Greg shot back. “I mean, no one has seen anything for weeks and suddenly you’re here and you see something right away? Please don’t yank our chains. Go find another place to sensationalize for your little website.”

  Jessica held up her hands. “Mr. Leigh, I apologize for the way we burst in here just now, but believe me, we only did that because we thought we could get to the bottom of this right here, right now. This isn’t the way I usually work. I promise we will both be discreet. No more running around.”

  Greg scowled. “Save it. I want you both out of here, now.”

  Eddie stepped between them. “Greg, please, just give us another chance. I take full responsibility. If anything, I’ll go and Jessica will stay.”

  Greg seemed to think about it for a brief moment, but his face clouded over and he said, “Both of you, out, before I lose my temper.”

  Jessica knew they weren’t going to get anywhere by begging or apologizing. She pulled Eddie by the arm and left the room without another word. She was mad at herself, angrier than Greg was with her. She prided herself on always conducting herself in a professional manner. When they reached the living room, she could see the fear on Selena’s and Rita’s faces and realized she had done the exact opposite of what she had set out to do. In just a few minutes, she had managed to create a complete clusterfuck.

  Greg was hot on their heels, his rage a physical force compelling them toward the front door.

  Jessica looked at Selena and said, “I’m so sorry.”

  Rita turned to Greg, said, “Honey, what happened? Why are they leaving?” She looked on the verge of tears.

  He didn’t offer her an explanation. He opened the door for them, and closed it with a soft click the moment they stepped outside. Jessica thought she heard muffled crying behind the door.

  It was the first time she’d ever been thrown out of a house.

  Eddie avoided her gaze, walking like a dog with its tail between its legs and into the passenger seat.

  Jessica cranked the ignition, punched the roof of the car as hard as she could and sped off.

  Eddie knew enough to not say anything during the tense ride back to the hotel. When they pulled into the lot, he expected Jessica to tell him to grab his things from his room because they were heading home.

&nb
sp; She surprised him by saying, “We might as well get some sleep, head out in the morning.”

  “Jessica, I’m sorry about the way things went down.”

  She stopped him with a look. “We both screwed up. I don’t want to talk about it right now, okay? I’ll see you at breakfast.”

  Jessica didn’t look back at him as she walked to her room and locked the door. He leaned back against the Jeep, taking in the night air, amazed by the number of stars in the sky. This was what he called a country sky. The air had cooled and smelled faintly of salt from the nearby Atlantic.

  Well, this is the last time she has you along for the ride, he thought. And he couldn’t blame her. When he thought about how scared Selena looked when they left, he wanted to kick himself, hard. Talk about amateur hour.

  But then again, he was an amateur, at least as far as field investigating went. His expertise was being a lab rat.

  Why the hell couldn’t he detect anything? Even tonight, the house and everyone in it came up as a complete blank. For once, he saw something with his own eyes before sensing it within his mind, and to wonderful results. Had the altercation with Edwin Esposito’s spirit taken so much out of him that his extra senses were dulled to the point of being nearly nonexistent? Meditation was in order tonight, if anything to help restore some balance.

  Before that, though, he wanted to get a better view of the stars. He walked behind the hotel to the closed pool area, and farther back into the tree line where the hotel lights couldn’t reach. It was breathtaking. He couldn’t remember ever seeing so many stars. They were so numerous and bright and clustered together, it seemed as if the sky were on fire. Crickets chirped around him, their harmony just short of hypnotizing.

  At least there was one perk to their short-lived disaster in New Hampshire.

  As tempting as it was to stay out all night, he willed himself to go back and meditate. He walked across the street and bought a bottle of water and a pack of cocktail peanuts from the twenty-four-hour market at the gas station. At the counter, he saw a souvenir magnet in the shape of New Hampshire and added it to his bill. Might as well commemorate the night you fucked it all up with something you can stick on your fridge.