The Haunting of Isola Forte di Lorenzo

by Sherlyn Colgrove

  The sound was eerie and made Jorden quickly sit up at attention. She immediately highlighted the area where the sounds were coming from and marked the time, then listened to the declaration carefully, writing it down on the sheet of paper beside her laptop. Sono libero.

  From the corner of her eye she saw Matt look over at the paper, which she turned over, and immediately after he tapped her shoulder, prompting her to stop the playback and remove her headphones.

  “Care to share the secret?” he asked.

  “It’s Isis’s recording from the bell tower. It was pretty much a repeat of our recording,” she said then rested back. “I was thinking that it might be a residual haunt, if it’s a haunt at all, but then I heard this,” she said. She handed Matt her headphones and started the playback.

  Immediately it became apparent when the scream occurred because Matt straightened as if someone had dropped an ice cube down his shirt, and he shot a curious glance over at Jorden. “Will you play that back again?” he asked.

  She highlighted the area of the playback and played it another two times for Matt. “Sounds like ‘sono libero’,” he said.

  Jorden nodded and turned the pad over so that he could see her notation. “That’s what I thought, but it’s still a little rough.”

  “Do you know what it means?” he questioned.

  She shrugged and shook her head. “Italian isn’t one of my languages, you know that.”

  “Yeah, I do. I was just hoping that you might have picked something up over the last few days,” he said.

  Jorden looked at him for a moment and tried to figure out if he were being serious or doing his usual ribbing to get a rise out of her. Somehow she knew that it was the former, but her fatigue wanted some kind of tension breaker.

  “I didn’t mean…”

  “I know,” she said calmly though it disturbed her that he could so easily read her mind. “As far as the sono, I think that it’s either I or myself. As far as the libero goes,” she shrugged, “I really don’t know.”

  Matt nodded. “Same here,” he said. “Do you know where Syd is?”

  “The last I heard he was with Tony, Ana and Isis taking down equipment in the dormitories and the refectory,” she guessed. “I can call him on the radio if you’d like.”

  Immediately Matt shook his head. “No, we need the equipment taken down ASAP and get it ready for phase two. We’ll just make a note of the time and have him listen to it later on.”

  “Already marked,” she said then reached for her headphones, however Matt stopped her from putting them on. “What?” she questioned curiously.

  “I think that we should take a break,” he suggested out of the blue.

  She found the suggestion curious. “Huh?” she questioned. “We just started a couple of hours ago.”

  “Not right now, but…” he began but then seemed to hit a wall.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  She was almost amused at his sudden inability to speak and couldn’t hide the smile that she felt stretch clear across her face.

  “We should be finished with the analysis of the first phase by tomorrow afternoon, and before we start with the second phase I was wondering if-”

  He suddenly stopped when the front door swung open, allowing in a cold gust of wind accompanied by driving rain and four drenched team members.

  Without being asked, both Jorden and Matt hurried to the door to help Syd and the others with the cases of equipment, all of which were thankfully waterproof.

  “I’m beginning to wonder if this was the best time of year to come out here for the investigation,” Isis complained as she removed her jacket.

  “The weather has been odd, but not completely out of the ordinary,” Syd said. “Weather fronts move in and out all the time and I’m sure that this will blow over soon enough.”

  “I hope so, otherwise it could make the rest of this investigation a lot less fun,” Saph said as she entered the cottage behind them.

  “Where have the two of you been?” Matt asked as Jesse entered behind her.

  Saph peeled several clumps of long, black, wet hair from her face. “We went back to the church for one last hurrah,” she said, not really hearing what she said, though the statement wasn’t completely lost on the rest of the team.

  Isis was the first to blurt out a giggle followed by Tony, though thankfully Jorden was able to keep her composure and she only stared at the young woman with a raised brow.

  On the other hand, Jesse’s face turned tomato red, and it wasn’t out of anger.

  For months Jesse and Saph had been seeing each other, though it didn’t seem serious yet.

  “What?” Saph asked in a tone so naïve that most people would have thought that it had to be feigned, however anyone who knew Saph, knew that it wasn’t an act.

  No one in the room would, or could, speak up and Matt was forced to play the part of the responsible adult. “Did you find anything?”

  Saph looked back at Jesse, who was still obviously embarrassed and she grew even more confused, but continued with her report. “We weren’t able to pick up anything audible to the human ear, but I’m hoping that we picked something up on the digital recorder.”

  “What makes you think that you may have found something?” Jorden coughed; unable to completely stifle the laugh that wanted desperately to come out.

  Again, Saph looked back at Jesse, who finally stepped forward. “I had a DVR going that was fully charged and it died after fifteen minutes of recording, and with the history of battery draining we’ve experienced there, we’re hoping that we got something.”

  Matt nodded. “All right then, hand over the recorder and we’ll give it a listen. While we’re doing that, you guys need to get the equipment ready for the next phase of the investigation.”

  The others nodded in accord and headed into the dining room with the five equipment cases while Jorden and Matt returned to the laptops in the den.

  “I’ll take that,” Jorden offered and held her hand out to take the recorder from Matt.

  Matt hesitated for a moment before he handed the recorder over. “Fine,” he finally allowed. “But I want you to finish with the recordings from the bell tower and mausoleum first.”

  Jorden wasn’t sure if she should be insulted or not; she couldn’t remember the last time she needed to be told what to do and how to do it, and she didn’t appreciate it now. “Of course,” she snapped.

  “Hey,” he said quickly and defensively, “I didn’t mean to tell you how to do your job, it’s just habit.”

  “No kidding…” she said then quickly muttered, though without being able to completely hide her grin, “…damned control freak.”

  “Excuse me?” he defensively questioned.

  “You heard me,” she said then looked up at him, nearly biting her lip. “You’re a damned control freak.”

  For a moment he looked at her with an irritated glare, until he noticed the quiver of her lip as her control started to fade.

  “You’re a pain in the ass, you know that,” he said after a moment.

  “Damned straight I am.”

  He smiled and shook his head as he turned to face his laptop screen.

  Jorden started to pull the headphones over her ears again, though hesitated when she realized that the conversation they were having just prior to the arrival of the others was unfinished. “What were you going to ask me?” she questioned out of the blue.

  Matt was caught completely off guard and coughed out of surprise before he turned and looked over at her. “What?”

  “Before Syd and the others came in, you were in the middle of asking me something. What was it?” she questioned again.

  For a moment, Matt seemed almost as embarrassed as Jesse before he shook his head. “I don’t remember,” he said quickly.

  Her eyes narrowed and she knew immediately that he was lying, but unlike her light jostling before, she chose not to pursue it. She wasn’t sure why; whether she
feared he might ask something she didn’t want to hear, or moreover, he might ask something that she did want to hear and was afraid to answer.

  Instead of pressing him to speak up and spit it out, she simply shrugged and placed her headphones over her ears for another round of terrifying voices and noises.

  Caretaker’s Cottage – 1:30am…

  For twelve hours Matt sat next to Jorden listening to the EVPs, not really hearing anything much outside of the occasional, ambiguous sigh or a possible voice saying something indiscernible. He had to admit to himself that it was time to quit when he started thinking more about what Jorden was writing on her pad of paper as opposed to what he was doing himself.

  Thankfully he was on his last recording – one taken from the dormitories on the first day of the investigation. He remembered that day all too well; it was the day before they lost one of their few cameras in a mysterious crash that completely crushed the valuable piece of equipment. He listened to the questions that Jorden was asking and there was no audible response to any one of them, which he had to admit surprised him. With the destruction of the camera, he would have thought for certain they would have captured something, but instead there was nothing.

  Since there was nothing on the EVPs, Matt thought that before he shut things down he’d review the footage from the camera again, only this time he meant to review only the audio. His team had played the video to death, but never reviewed the audio track.

  After pulling up the file, Matt rested back and made sure that he closed his eyes to avoid watching the video. He didn’t want to see anything coming; he didn’t want to expect any conversation…besides the video and actual events were already committed to memory and he wasn’t about to forget them anytime soon.

  Once again, he heard nothing. Of course he heard the conversation between him and Isis and heard them walk away. Then, the sudden crash of the camera made him jump up, though not so much that he alerted Jorden. Remarkably, while the video feed was shot, the audio kept rolling and Matt continued to listen. He could hear his and Isis’s footfalls as they charged up the stairs and down the hall, however before they reached the camera a loud and emphatic “NO” rang through the headphones.

  Matt wasn’t sure that he had heard it correctly, thinking maybe that he was more tired than he thought or that in his need to hear something, he manufactured one of their voices or some other ambiguous sound into a single word. To check himself he did what all of them did whenever they heard an unusual sound on an EVP, and that was to play it back.

  For a moment, Matt thought that he’d written the time down incorrectly and he rewound the playback to the point of the camera’s destruction, though no matter what he did, nothing happened. The voice was no longer there and worse yet, there was nothing there that would have even come close to sounding like a “no” or anything else for that matter.

  The thought worried him more than anything, but instead of bothering Jorden, he simply made a note of where he thought that the sound should be and he would listen to it again after he got a good night’s rest. In the meantime, he knew that he should be getting to bed, as should Jorden.

  Matt slipped his headphones off his head, rested back and rubbed his face. He could feel the stubble that had grown over the last couple of days and with no investigating tomorrow, he made a vow to shave. Just because they were pretty much in the middle of nowhere and apart from civilization, didn’t mean that he had to look like Grizzly Adams.

  After giving himself a moment Matt finally stood. When he looked down at Jorden, she was still writing, and doing so at a furious pace. It was almost as though she was typing and not writing by hand, and what she was writing looked more like squiggly lines rather than letters or words.

  “Jorden,” he said and lightly tapped her shoulder.

  He figured that she was in a kind of zone when she didn’t respond, though when she didn’t acknowledge him the second time he grew curious and tapped her shoulder.

  Without warning, he slipped the headphones off her head, though surprising to him, she didn’t stop writing.

  Curious still was when he slipped the headphones over his own ears he heard nothing but white noise, and when he looked at her computer screen he could see that the actual playback had ended a while ago.

  Matt took the headphones off and placed them on the coffee table next to the laptop. “Jorden,” he addressed with a bit more urgency and instead of tapping on her shoulder, he lightly grabbed her arm with just enough force to let her know that he was there, but still, there was no reaction from her whatsoever.

  Frustrated with her lack of attention, Matt quickly grabbed the pen from her hand. “Jorden!”

  Jorden looked up at him with hollow, black eyes and a face that wasn’t her own. “NOOOOOO-”

  …Matt jumped off the sofa and vaulted himself over the arm as he jolted to a violent awakening.

  Jorden let out a yelp of surprise and jumped herself, pulling her headphones off and throwing them on the table. “What the hell-”

  Matt looked at her for a moment, her green eyes normal and her face twisted only with concern and confusion. “Oh shit,” he muttered as he rubbed his stubbly face.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked – still concerned and obviously upset.

  He was embarrassed by the episode, and even more embarrassed to admit that he’d fallen asleep while working, but that’s exactly what had happened and that’s what he told her.

  “Well you scared the hell out of me,” she cursed then rubbed her own eyes. “But I understand.”

  “I think that we should call it a night,” he said then held out his hand to her.

  “I think that you’re right,” she said then graciously took his hand after she saved her work and shut off her computer.

  She allowed him to lead her out of the den and up the stairs to the room she shared with Isis. “What were you dreaming of anyway?” she asked before opening the door.

  Matt stood ahead of her and looked down into her peaceful face. The face he now saw was nothing like the nightmare that threw him from the sofa and he wasn’t sure if he could tell her, in fact, he was certain that he couldn’t. “I don’t remember,” he lied.

  Unlike Jorden and most of the others, he was very good at telling a lie, it came with the job of being a cop and then a private investigator, and when she smiled sympathetically and nodded, he knew that he’d managed to tell another one, but this time he felt like shit doing it. Lying to Jorden wasn’t something he liked doing and it certainly wasn’t a habit of his. Hopefully in the morning he would have the courage to tell her that it was her face, or lack thereof that scared the living hell out of him and would likely do so again if the feeling in his gut was any indication.

  “Well I hope that you have more pleasant dreams tonight,” she said with a tired smile. “It’ll probably help that you’re not falling asleep while listening to ghostly EVPs in bed.”

  “No,” he said then shrugged. “Just Tony’s snoring,” he added with a laugh. “I might as well be listening to the EVPs…they’re not much different.”

  Jorden allowed a small laugh of her own before she quieted and looked at him with the same tired smile she had a moment ago. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she said softly though paused slightly before finally opening the door.

  The short pause was just long enough for him to finish asking her out to the mainland for a nice, quiet day of rest before getting back to what was quickly becoming a stressful investigation, but just as he had done in the den earlier, he chickened out. “Good night Jorden,” was all he could manage.

  He couldn’t tell if she was disappointed or not, but he knew that he certainly was. It was a fleeting sensation when, as he continued down the hall to his own room, he again heard the “no” that was present in his dream and he knew that for at least that one night it would be all that he heard whether he was asleep or not…and it worried him. It wasn’t the sound itself that bothered him as much as what it might have
meant, and what bothered him more than that was how it manifested itself in Jorden’s face. It was an image that would haunt him for the rest of this trip…if not longer.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Rome – 9:45am…

  After clashing with authorities in Rome, who would rather leave history in the past to be forgotten, both Nigel and Jonas felt that their only hope to find anything was to sift through a multitude of back issues of the local papers at the Public Library. While most of the papers were from small publications established in the latter years of the twentieth century, they were able to find a couple that dated back to the last years of the colony on Lorenzo Island. Unfortunately, the colony on the island was cloistered and little was known about them. They had some luck when they discovered several articles mentioning the small village on the mainland that Jonas had discovered. Turned out that it wasn’t too far from the dock where their boat was parked. There wasn’t a lot of information, but it was a start.

  The drive to the village was relatively short, but not at all easy. Much of the lonely road that led down to the village was overgrown and appeared not to have been traveled in years, maybe in a century or more. It was a good thing that they had the four-wheel drive SUV, otherwise the trip to the village would have been a short one; they would not have likely even gotten a mile down the road. On more than one occasion they had to veer off road to drive around neglected or forgotten landslides.

  When they reached the village they weren’t in complete shock to find that it had long been abandoned, though in spite of the obvious signs no one had traveled that path in a long time they had hoped otherwise. Still, they weren’t to be daunted and with determination to get answers of some kind, they set out to find a police station or some kind of local government building that might yield some information.