Matt looked at the others then back to the screen. “Tony,” he addressed after a couple of long moments, “I want you to make a copy of this footage. Enhance it and dissect it frame by frame if you have to. I want to know what happened. There has to be an answer here somewhere.”
Tony nodded.
“What about putting another camera in there?” Nigel asked.
Matt shook his head. “No,” he said emphatically, “We don’t have enough equipment to risk or enough money to replace it right now. We’ll have to make do with the IR at the other end of the hall and handhelds.”
“I think that this is evidence enough to reinforce the rule that no one go anywhere alone,” Jorden spoke up. “It doesn’t really matter who or what did this to the camera the fact of the matter is that it happened, and whatever the case we don’t need anything like this happening to any one of us. From here on out, no one goes anywhere on this island alone.”
A fire crackled in the fireplace of Seth’s lavish drawing room and the dim lighting gave the room a warm glow, though the atmosphere was cold. Jonas stood to the side of the leather chair where Seth sat and waited for the old man to start his inquisition. It wasn’t that Jonas didn’t expect that he’d have to keep Seth and Stanley updated, but he had been standing at Seth’s side for the last thirty minutes or so, and there was no sign that the old man would begin anytime soon.
Still, Jonas remained still and at attention, though he could not keep himself from questioning why he had accepted the invitation to partner up with them in the first place. He was never the type to be a joiner, not even when his father insisted. Then he remembered how important getting some answers was and how he’d exhausted every other option before approaching the two men.
“So, Jonas,” Seth said finally, “how is the investigation going?”
Finally, he thought. “They’ve only been there for a day sir and I haven’t been in contact with them yet.”
“I don’t care if they’ve only been there for an hour, I want to know how the investigation is going,” Seth said, his voice remaining eerily calm.
“Of course. I’ll give them a call as soon as I-”
“No,” Seth said, remaining calm.
“Excuse me Mister Crandall?”
A smile creased the old man’s lips. “I thought that I told you to call me Seth,” he said in an almost fatherly voice.
Jonas smiled, though his nerves wouldn’t allow it to last.
“I want you to head out there and oversee the investigation personally,” Seth said out of the blue.
Jonas was stunned and found it difficult to find any words; something that rarely happened. “I’m not sure that’s a wise idea,” he said finally.
Seth’s smile had faded and he looked up at Jonas with a questionable glower. Clearly the old man was not accustomed to being second guessed. “And why’s that?” he questioned flatly.
“That could undermine the investigation. We need a completely unprejudiced outcome, and if I was to go out there, any conclusions, no matter how straightforward, will remain suspect,” Jonas explained.
When Jonas could see that the wheels in Seth’s mind were turning he had hopes that he’d gotten through to the old man, but there was a stark coldness in his determined stare that told Jonas otherwise.
Not even two hours after standing at the arm of Seth’s chair, Jonas was on a private jet headed for Rome. He didn’t know how he was going to break it to Matt and his team that he had to join the investigation but even with the most charming or even logical delivery he could manage, he knew that it would not go over well. Worse yet, Isola Forte di Lorenzo was not a place that Jonas wanted to be, in spite of his obsession with it, and he hoped that the stories were not true…stories that the tortured dead were still there wandering the island. He had lost enough to that godforsaken place already.
CHAPTER SIX
Courtyard – 11:35pm…
Around the cloister and throughout the courtyard overgrown jasmine vines reached up long forgotten trellises and filled the air with a fresh sweet scent. A cool breeze whipped around and through the vines, carrying with it the scent of the jasmine as far as the cottage and almost directed Nigel and Isis to the courtyard. Had they not been hunting for ghosts and had he the courage to ask Isis out on a date, this would have been Nigel’s idea of the perfect night.
But they were hunting ghosts and they had a job to do.
For a half hour Nigel and Isis walked along the stone path that had long been overgrown by crabgrass, nettles and other weeds along with a healthy dose of lavender while taking video with their camcorder and trying to conjure up some kind of EVP, but if the spirits were talking, their voices weren’t being heard by the naked ear.
“So what got you into ghost hunting in the first place?” Isis questioned out of the blue.
Though he should have been used to Isis’s instincts and shouldn’t have been surprised, he was, and for a moment he couldn’t say anything.
Isis looked back and he could see her curious gaze in the soft light of the three-quarter moon. “Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yeah, fine,” he said; still feeling a bit off center. “It’s just that I was thinking about that a minute ago and the question startled me.”
She didn’t say anything but only continued to stare.
Being the gallant gentleman that he was, Nigel cleared the dust off a nearby marble bench and pulled away the weeds that obscured much of the seat. Once Isis took her seat, he sat down beside her. “I’m not sure that I can explain it.”
“Why?” she questioned.
“I don’t like to think about it,” he admitted, then bowed his head as painful memories resurfaced. “I’m not like you and the others, who have had their own experiences with the dead.”
“Then what interested you?”
“It isn’t interest as much as it is looking for answers,” he said then looked up into the shadow of her face. “When I was twelve I was swimming in a pond not far from my house. We, some friends and I that is, were horsing around, jumping off the dock, splashing…doing things that kids do,” he said with a nostalgic laugh, but the light and slight jubilance quickly died when he remembered what happened next. “I remember diving off of the end of the dock and feeling a sharp pain in my head.” He paused for a moment; he knew that it would be difficult, but didn’t truly realize just how hard it would be to talk about his experience. “I don’t remember much after that until I woke up in the hospital, just fragments really, but I know that something happened. When I was on the shore of the pond, I could see myself lying on the ground, surrounded by all of my friends. They were blowing into my mouth, trying to resuscitate me. It seemed to take forever before the paramedics arrived and they worked hard.” He hesitated again. “That’s the last thing I remember before waking up in the hospital a couple of days later with a hell of a headache.”
When he finished he had to look over at Isis to make sure that she was still there; her silence was unusual.
“Don’t you see love, I died and had an out of body experience,” he said simply.
She shook her head. “Are you sure that you were dead?” she asked almost so simply that he wanted to laugh.
“Of course I was dead, even one of the medics said that I was gone. If it hadn’t been for the other medic, who insisted they keep trying, I probably would have been buried a long time ago.”
“And that’s why you’re here?” she asked. “Because you think you died and now you have some kind of obsession with death?”
Nigel grabbed her hand and squeezed it tightly. “Of course not love,” he assured then paused as he looked for the right words – it was difficult. “When I died, I didn’t experience any light at the end of the tunnel, or any pain of fire nipping at my heels, and for the longest time I didn’t think much of it. But a couple of years ago, after writing an article about an elderly woman who had died, it got me wondering if there really was an afterlife.”
; “What exactly was it about this woman that sparked your curiosity?”
“The article focused on the woman’s granddaughter and her claim that the woman’s spirit had come to her after she died to say goodbye. The article was about ghostly encounters and if they were real,” he explained then shifted to face her. “I didn’t experience any kind of life after death and I have to know if it’s real or figments of our over-active imaginations drawn on by too much television, fanciful movies or simply wishful thinking.”
“Perhaps you weren’t dead long enough,” Isis attempted to reassure, “or it just wasn’t your time. Maybe that’s why you hung around long enough to see what was happening…because you weren’t truly dead yet.”
Nigel took a deep breath and bowed his head slightly. “Of course I’ve thought about that, but it doesn’t change my need to know. I need a push in one direction or the other.” He took another deep breath. “I just need to know.”
A thick blanket of silence fell over them that neither one of them seemed willing to shed. “Why?” she finally asked.
Nigel was once again caught off guard and couldn’t really answer.
“The point is that you didn’t die, and let’s face it, once you’re gone…are you really going to care?” she questioned.
He couldn’t help but give a small laugh. She was right.
“Let me ask you this,” she said as she wrapped her fingers around his hand, “once you get your answer, what then?”
Again he didn’t have an answer at the ready. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I guess that when and if that day comes, I’ll figure it out then.”
Worry took seed in her deep, brown eyes and he wanted to assure her but didn’t know how.
At that moment, the breeze picked up and both of them wrapped their jackets around themselves. “Come on love, we should get back to work,” he said. “After this, we need to head over to the dormitories and see if anything is going on there.”
He could see when he helped her to her feet that she was still uneasy, and he knew that there was nothing he could say to assure her, simply because he didn’t have any answers himself.
Monastery Cemetery – 1:15am…
The light of the moon above illuminated the cemetery in such a way that each headstone was clear. As Ana carefully stepped around them, she noticed that the headstones didn’t hold names, only that they were almost a thousand years old and quite weathered. Even if names had been placed on them it wasn’t likely that she would see them now. There were, however, several headstones with numbers on them, though they didn’t look much like dates. Exactly what they meant was a mystery and she took several pictures in hopes of getting feedback from Matt, Jorden or even Nigel later.
“Have you seen anything yet?” Jesse asked as he approached.
“If you’re asking if I’ve seen any restless apparitions then the answer is no, but I did find something a bit interesting on the headstones,” she said then went on to tell him about the numbers on several of the stones throughout the cemetery.
“Well I didn’t find anything with the thermal either. I did see an animal of some kind that gave me a bit of a shock, but it ran off so fast that I can’t even tell you what kind of animal it was without rewinding the footage. Other than that, I haven’t seen much more than headstones and a lot of overgrown flora.”
“Well we need to keep going. With all the reports of activity here I refuse to believe that we’re going to continue to come up with nothing,” Ana complained.
“We can spend another ten minutes or so here, but we do need to move on to the rice fields,” Syd lectured slightly from Ana’s side.
“Fine then,” Ana sighed. “Let’s do a final sweep of the cemetery from the east entrance to the west entrance with the thermal and the digital recorder,” she said then slowly panned the thermal camera from side to side as they started to walk forward.
For the next several minutes they slowly and carefully stepped around marked graves while panning each piece of equipment from side to side. They were nearly all the way through when without warning Jesse stopped.
“What is it?” Syd asked in a whisper that was more out of habit than anything else.
“I thought that I saw something over by the mausoleum,” Jesse said in a hushed voice of his own.
The small team changed their direction and headed towards the small mausoleum that, according to the caretaker, held the remains of only one person, the monk who was rumored to have founded the sect on the small island, Father Lorenzo Santorini, though there was no confirmation of that yet.
When they reached the mausoleum, Ana reached for the door and to the surprise of them all, the door opened with ease.
“I thought that you said that no one ever came in here,” Jesse said.
Syd was at a loss himself. “During the tour, the caretaker had said that the door was locked and had been so since the day he and his family arrived on the island. I don’t understand.”
The three of them entered the small building, which seemed much larger on the inside than it appeared. It consisted of only a single room and though it was dark, they could see that aside from nearly a millennium of dust and cobwebs, the mausoleum was in excellent condition.
As they entered the building completely, they found a single tomb in the center of the room. The etchings on the tomb itself weren’t completely discernible and they would have to go back during the light of day to see more.
“Is there someone in here with us?” Ana asked and held the recorder out in the hopes of catching an EVP. “Are you the monk that is resting in this tomb? Are you Father Lorenzo Santorini?”
All that answered her lightly echoed questions was silence, though outside the wind started to pick up again and the door began to close. And while all three of them knew that it was the wind that nearly closed the door, the feeling inside had grown heavy and tense.
“Did it just get colder in here?” Ana asked.
“There’s a draft-”
“That’s not what I mean,” she interrupted Jesse. “I mean it feels like it’s getting really cold in here.”
“I’m sure that it’s just the cool wind from outside finding its way in here,” Syd assured.
“Maybe,” Ana allowed, though couldn’t sound less convinced if she’d practiced. “Are you here with us now? Are you the one who’s making it cold in here?” she questioned to the air around her.
There were still no discernible voices; just the light howl of the increasing wind outside.
“I think that it’s time we got out of here,” Jesse said as he headed to the door.
Syd followed Jesse out of the mausoleum, however Ana was slow to get moving. She held the recorder out as she backed towards the door. “We’re leaving now. This is your last chance to say something,” she urged, yet all that she was greeted with was silence. Disappointed, she turned and headed out of the mausoleum.
Bell Tower – 2:10am…
Jorden and Matt already explored the refectory with very few, immediate, results – about all they heard was a slight thump that could have been anything from the wind slamming an oak or beech branch into the walls outside to a rodent scavenging around. Of course they would listen to the footage from their recorder, but neither of them held out any hope that they would hear anything other than dead air.
Of course there were a few incidents; however they had yet to find anything substantial or real, though Jorden hoped that that would change tomorrow when she and Nigel started going over the footage they’d logged in up to now. So far, however, Jorden felt like a fool for worrying about the trip to the island. All the energy she’d spent worrying about something that might happen because of a few nightmares, which had lessened in the last couple of days, could have been better spent doing something else far more productive.
As they entered the bell tower, Jorden and Matt stepped into complete darkness. Even the light from the moon didn’t reach down to the ground level and once the doors were
closed they were blind. Only their flashlights could keep them from tripping over the stairs or their own feet now. The darkness started to give way as they ascended the stairs in the form of a growing blue light from the moon above, which gradually pierced the open arches above.
Matt led the way up the winding staircase that spiraled upwards towards the bell. The stairs were old, made of wood, and both Matt and Jorden worried that they might give way as they climbed higher. When they reached the landing where the bell itself used to hang they were equally careful.
“You have to admit that in spite of its age and apparent weathering, this tower is in remarkable condition,” Jorden said as she took a seat on the ledge of the arch that pointed towards the ocean to the south. Though all she could see beyond the blue-lit canopy that covered much of the monastery compound was darkness, she still knew that the ocean was all around them. The smell of the salt air was thick and she could hear just the slightest sounds of lightly breaking waters.
“If you say so,” Matt said as he took a seat across from her on the same arch. “I’ll just be happy when we’re out of here. I’m not sure that I want to send any other teams up here after we’re done. I don’t trust the condition of the stairs or this landing.”
“Then why are we up here?” Jorden questioned, almost offended.
“Because we need to be. With the winds that blow through the arches we couldn’t secure a camera and with the reported activity we needed to do some kind of investigation up here. If we’re going to have only one shot at this tower, then I want to be the one that investigates it. That way, if there’s a screw up, I’ll have no one to blame but you,” he said, though from his tone Jorden knew that he was joking. Of course it didn’t stop her from flipping him off just out of the moon’s glow.
“I saw that.”
His camera wasn’t aimed at her and she knew that he couldn’t see her and she laughed. He did know her well.
The Haunting of Isola Forte di Lorenzo Page 8