The Supernaturals

by David L. Golemon

  “Sir, have any orders come from New York to stop attempting to get inside the house?”

  Harris listened, and his knuckles turned white on the phone’s handset.

  “Damn it sir, we have an injured man inside that house. We need to get him out.” Dalton listened and closed his eyes. “Yes, sir, right now it’s a possible broken leg and a concussion. Yes, sir, a dramatic break-in in the sixth hour, I understand. Now, I also understand that it’s your orders to not get help inside the house at this time?” Harris listened and made a sour face. When he hung up the phone, he rubbed his eyes. Then he looked up at the greenish image of Julie Reilly as she ended her remote interview with the two men outside.

  “I must admit, you’re damn good, Reilly. I never saw that one coming,” Harris said on cue. The preview monitor switched to the live shot of Kennedy, Cordero and Lonetree as they stood at the basement door inside the kitchen; only she could hear him.

  “Yeah, well, what about Father Dolan? Are they going to get him help anytime soon?” she asked. She placed her hand on the kitchen door, wanting desperately to get inside before they started down into the basement. She listened to Harris. “The sixth hour? Has everyone here and in New York gone nuts? The fire chief will be crucified if this gets out.”

  “Yeah, and in the end you’ll find out our small town chief just earned five times more in retirement benefits than he would have normally received. I don’t think he gives a flying fuck about getting fired, not after what the network must be paying him to stay out of the house.”

  “Harris, maybe we should ask Kennedy to get the Father out of here. I think whatever is in this house may have a hard-on for the good Father.”

  “Okay, okay, ask Kennedy if we should get him out through one of back windows or doors, so no one can see.”

  “You got it. I’m going with Kennedy to the basement now.”

  “Okay. Be careful what you say. They’re live in there.”

  Julie pushed opened the double swinging doors, leaving her own camera crew behind. Kennedy had opened the basement door and was getting ready to enter the stairwell leading down. Julie nodded her head at the sound and camera men she had just joined. The camera stayed trained on Kennedy, following his green tinted image down into the blackness of the cellar.

  Immediately, Julie started hearing the sounds that had so scared the production team in the van. The cries were getting louder and far more insistent. They were indeed women—a lot of them.

  From the van, Harris Dalton informed everyone that the noises and voices were coming through loud and clear. The world was hearing what they were.

  “George, are you picking up anything?” Kennedy asked. He slowly moved down the stairs in the total darkness.

  “Anguish…yes, anguish. Not physical pain. It’s...it’s like a mental torture.”

  Gabriel reached the turn in the wooden stairs and stopped. He could now hear spoken words mixed with the crying.

  “I don’t know about you fellas, but I’m hearing German, maybe Polish, some Italian…a few other languages.”

  Julie was also hearing what Cordero described.

  The cameraman and the soundman, with his mic boom hanging out over Julie and Lonetree, were both nervous. The soundman was of Polish decent and knew the language from his grandmother. He leaned toward Julie and muted his microphone.

  “One of them is calling out for Leana, no—begging for Leana,” he said nervously.

  “And Magda,” Kennedy said. “German, although I haven’t studied it since high school. The accent is right—Magda.”

  “Our sound man, David, off the air, says that one of the voices he understood was in Polish. It’s calling the name Leana. And now Professor Kennedy has confirmed a name being spoken in German—Magda,” Julie explained. She started down again, holding tightly to the handrail. Just as her feet touched the small landing where the stairs turned sharply to the right, the kitchen door above them slammed shut. The sound was like a cannon going off and made Julie almost lose her footing on the landing. She bounced off of one rail and nearly went off backwards on the rebound. George Cordero and John Lonetree reached out in the darkness and grabbed her. John switched on his small penlight and made sure Julie got her bearings.

  Julie mouthed, “Thank you.”

  The camera had been jostled as it tried to focus on Julie’s face. She grimaced and nodded toward Kennedy as he was nearing the bottom steps. She felt embarrassed at her near misstep and feared she would now be perceived as a klutz by the viewing audience. She would have to redeem herself below.

  Kennedy paused at the bottom of the stairs, allowing his eyes to adjust to the pitch black basement. He heard the door open at the top of the stairs, and suspected that Damian Jackson was joining them. He ignored the heavy footsteps that descended the steps slowly and carefully.

  Gabriel turned toward the root cellar door, moving forward so that Lonetree, George, and the camera crew could step onto the concrete flooring.

  “The voices and the weeping have started to fade down to almost nothing,” Kennedy said as he listened.

  Damian Jackson joined them on the floor and looked around. He was only able to make out the camera crew in front of him. He pressed his earpiece into his right ear and listened to what the professor was saying to the live audience. He shook his head. Kennedy was having a field day with this fiasco.

  Gabriel finally switched on his small light and shined it toward the far side of the basement, illuminating the trapdoor. He started forward.

  “Gabe, I’m registering a massive temperature fall-off on the digital thermometer,” Lonetree said. He moved the small device around, taking readings. “It’s colder around the center of the room.” John stepped toward Kennedy. “Okay, it just dropped another ten degrees.”

  George joined them with the thermal imager. The camera zoomed in on the screen of the handheld box-like device. The blue wave it caught seemed to be flowing freely from the cracks around the edges of the sub-basement door. George held the imager out for Kennedy to see.

  “Professor, could this image be caused by much colder air rising from below, as would be natural for a deep root cellar?” Julie asked in a whisper.

  “A normal drop-off would be a three to five degree difference. But as you can see on the thermal imager, we have a massive drop of over thirty degrees. Unless the root cellar is refrigerated, no, this is not normal.”

  Julie heard a small snicker of laughter from behind her. When she turned, Damian Jackson held up his hand in apology.

  Julie knew that Kennedy was scoring points off her. She was starting to understand that he was out to get her now.

  Gabriel squatted and examined the old lock.

  “The owner of the property gave the professor the key to the lock earlier, with the dire warning that no one has been down in the root cellar since the Lindemanns last stayed at Summer Place back in 1940. Whatever we see down there hasn’t been seen in over seventy years,” Julie informed the viewing world.

  From somewhere up above them a loud bang sounded. Then another, and then another.

  The ballroom doors had been standing wide open, and then they both slammed shut. They opened and then slammed again, then yet again. Leonard Sickles looked up as everyone in the room fell silent. Even the injured Father Dolan came up on one elbow and looked toward the doors. Jennifer Tilden took Leonard’s arm and nodded in the light of the computer monitors. Leonard nodded in return. The camera team joined them just as Leonard pushed the mic button on his belt.

  “Professor Gabe?”

  As Kennedy answered from below, the camera zoomed in on Leonard’s face. Then it caught Jenny as she leaned in with a small device, the same one that was being used down in the basement. She held it so Leonard could see.

  “We have a temperature drop of nearly twenty-five degrees up here. The ballroom doors just slammed closed three times on their own. We also—”

  The computers shut down without warning and they lost the light
from their monitors. The camera man immediately switched to his ambient light camera.

  “Stay with the ballroom,” Harris Dalton said from the production van.

  “Okay, we lost power in here,” Leonard said as he started checking the connections.

  As they waited for Gabriel to comment, a pounding started from upstairs somewhere. Everyone in the ballroom turned their heads to look at the ceiling above.

  “It sounds like its coming from the third floor,” Jenny whispered. The camera had her framed, and all the world could see that Jennifer was frightened as the pounding started to take on the sound of footsteps.

  At that moment in the production van, Harris Dalton looked over at preview monitor five and his blood froze. Everyone around him stared at the ambient light picture coming from the third floor hallway.

  “Okay people, we have activity up on the third floor. Both the sewing room and the master suite doors are standing wide open. I suspect that’s where the pounding originated.”

  Indeed the heavy pounding sounded as if it were moving from the far end of the third floor toward the center of the hall—toward the landing.

  In the cellar, the temperature was rising and the voices and crying had disappeared completely. Kennedy pressed his earpiece in tighter just as Jackson had done just a moment before. He shook his head and straightened and then started moving for the stairs.

  “Something is happening upstairs and team one is now moving to investigate,” Julie said. She scrambled to keep up with Kennedy, who was taking the dangerous steps two at a time. Jackson, who had stepped out of the way to allow everyone to pass by him, shook his head at the dramatics.

  “This is getting good,” he said as he turned to follow.

  “Go to Two,” Harris said as he watched the monitor that showed Preview, and then he switched to the live shot of Kennedy running up the darkened stairs. “Okay, back to One.” The shot moved from Kennedy’s camera team to the ballroom just as the camera moved from face to face. The soundman was picking up the heavy pounding heading toward the third floor landing. Harris thanked God they had left a team inside the ballroom.

  “Camera One, great job. Now turn eighty degrees to your left and get that little shit Lindemann in the shot.”

  The cameraman zoomed in on the owner of Summer Place, who had stood from his seat at the bar and was watching the doors, the drink in his hand forgotten. He didn’t know he was on the air live, but the man next to him did. Lionel Peterson shook his head and tried to move away from the live shot.

  “Don’t let Peterson slip away. Get him!” Harris said excitedly into his microphone.

  The camera caught Peterson and he froze. He tried his best to look as if he was the man in charge, placing his hands on his hips. He stood stock still, watching the ballroom doors. Even in the blackness around him, he could see the camera frozen on him.

  “Okay, get a shot of the ballroom doors. Audio, you’re doing real good, but move over into the shot and get your mic boom close to the door. Camera one, make sure you get him doing it.”

  In New York, most everyone was impressed with the way Harris Dalton moved from shot to shot with the same kind of quick thinking that had won him all of his Emmy awards. Abe Feuerstein smiled and took a deep swallow of his whiskey. On the large screen, the greenish image of the soundman placed the sound boom as close to the door as possible.

  The footsteps moved to the third floor landing and then they stopped. The silence was even more frightening than the noise had been. The cameraman caught the Father crossing himself.

  “Great job, One, that was a once in a lifetime shot there.” Harris said.

  Kelly Delaphoy moved over toward Lionel Peterson. Although it was dark, she could feel the anger radiating off of him in waves.

  “Convinced yet?” she whispered.

  “Fuck off,” he hissed, not really caring if the sound equipment heard him or not.

  “Go to Camera Two. Kennedy is at the top of the stairs,” Harris said quickly.

  The camera view switched with a fluidity that made Harris proud.

  Gabriel slammed into the door that lead back into the kitchen. The camera lost him for a moment as the technician pushed past George and Lonetree, but finally focused on him just as he turned the cut glass doorknob. Nothing happened. Kennedy tried it again.

  “It’s locked from the other side.” He pressed his shoulder against the door and pushed. This time the door opened a few inches and then was suddenly thrust back, shoving Gabriel away from the door.

  Lonetree stepped past the camera and sound men and placed his large bulk against the door. Then, as one, they pushed. This time the door opened about a foot, and the camera caught both men struggling to maintain the opening. They could see the resistance on the other side of the door. Then they all heard the sound at the same time, right along with the live television audience. The growl was deep, as if it had come from a tunnel, and it made Kennedy and Lonetree lose their battle with the door. The force on the far side pushed it closed once more.

  “What the hell was that?” Harris said into his microphone.

  “Jesus!” the experienced cameraman said. His lens focused on the door in front of Gabriel and John.

  “Goddamn it Camera Two, we can hear you!” Harris hissed into his mic.

  His assistant patted his arm. “Take it easy. That was intense, and I doubt TV-land minded at all.”

  Dalton knew she was right. Like it or not, the camera and sound men were now a part of the show, no longer just technicians in the background, they were now living this right along with the team down there.

  In the green darkness on the screen, they could see Kennedy place his hand on the door about midway up, and then quickly withdraw it.

  “Freezing,” he said, moving back to allow Lonetree to feel it for himself. “George, what are you feeling?” Gabriel asked Cordero.

  “Scared, damn it.”

  “Nothing else?” Kennedy asked.

  Breathing heavily, Cordero stepped up to the door and held his hand out without touching the wood. His fingers closed into a fist as he gathered himself, and then they spread again as his hand moved closer. He came within an inch of the wood, then suddenly withdrew his hand and stepped back, making Gabriel and John do the same. The night vision camera zoomed in on Cordero’s features. The man looked around like a trapped animal.

  “What?” This time it was the soundman who said the word. The technicians were scared and the whole world now knew professionalism was being overridden by that most basic, overwhelming sense.

  “That’s not a ghost out there. Whatever it was, it was never human.” George took a step back off the landing and onto the first stair, nudging Julie Reilly out of the way.

  The cut-glass knob turned and the door slowly opened a foot. Everyone stepped back, their eyes turned toward the darkness beyond.

  New York

  Every person in the screening room stood as the basement door creaked open. Abe Feuerstein lowered his crystal glass. His assistant knelt by the CEO’s large chair and shoved a printout in front of him.

  “Ratings have shot through the roof. Word is spreading fast. The general consensus is still that this is all a put-on, but they don’t seem to care.”

  “Of course they don’t. This is goddamned good television!”

  They watched the door open. Gabriel felt it first, but it was John who voiced it.

  “The cold is gone.”

  “It’s not there anymore,” George agreed.

  “Our team leader has indicated that the presence beyond the door has left us,” Julie said as the camera turned in her direction.

  Kennedy reached out and gently pushed the door open. He suddenly flinched when the loud boom sounded. They could all tell it came from the direction of the ballroom.

  “Go to Camera One, now!” Harris said.

  Inside the ballroom all eyes were on the giant, thick ballroom doors. The pounding on the wood started almost at the moment the baseme
nt door opened and the cold vanished.

  “Professor Gabe?” Leonard said into his battery-powered mic, “Temperature fall-off of,” his eyes widened. The pounding was growing louder, more insistent, “Jesus, forty degrees.”

  Then the pounding stopped. The doorknobs on both ballroom doors rattled and turned.

  “Camera One, tighten up on that shot!” Harris said.

  The cameraman zoomed in on the ornate door handles as they both turned, slowly at first, then with more persistence.

  Sudden motion blurred past the camera. Jennifer shot forward and reached the doors before anyone knew what was happening. She turned the old skeleton-style key in the lock and then backed away. The pounding started again. Whatever was out there, it was angry that she had locked the doors. Jennifer and the others threw their hands up and covered their ears. Leonard was flinching every time the doors were struck. The pounding was so hard that plaster from the ceiling started to cascade down. The boom mic picked up Father Dolan’s prayers.

  The pounding stopped and the doors started bending inward with a loud crack that froze everyone in place.

  “Holy fuck,” Lionel Peterson said. His words went out live over the air, making legal execs flinch in New York.

  Part of the oaken left door cracked and splintered with a loud pop. It was bent inward so far that the wood could endure no more.

  Wallace Lindemann’s drink slipped through his fingers and hit the carpeted floor. No one, not even Lindeman himself, noticed.

  The right-side door cracked as it bowed inward. They could all hear heavy grunting and breathing above the din of cracking wood. Jennifer was pulled back suddenly by Leonard, who was staring at the double doors. They were being pushed beyond what they could take. The grunting became louder still.

  Suddenly the doors relaxed and sprang back to their original shape and position.

  “Feel it?” Leonard asked.

  Everyone did. It was over and they all knew it, even as Wallace Lindemann fainted dead away.