The Dark Man

by Desmond Doane

  I succumb to the darkness.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I come to, and it takes me a second to realize that a few minutes have passed. I’ve been moved, and instead of lying on the searing sidewalk outside, knocked unconscious, I’m stretched out on Craghorn’s couch. It’s freezing in here.

  I quickly sit up. A spark of fear shoots throughout my body—I’m inside, alone, where the dark man is—and then my eyesight swims just enough to send me back down, hand on my forehead and groaning. The coppery hint of blood remains on my tongue and I feel the dried, caked aftereffects of Mike’s headbutt on my upper lip. My eyelids and nose are slightly puffy, and the bulge hinders my vision. When I drop my left arm, I feel an ice pack resting against my thigh.

  At least they were a little considerate, and I hold the ice up to my face, wincing and hissing with the pain.

  I wonder where Mike and Craghorn are, and it occurs to me that Mike might have been pissed enough to drop me off inside, alone, as a tasty, immobile sacrifice to whatever abomination inhabits this house. If that’s the case, I picture myself tied to a railroad track with a locomotive bearing down on me, horn wailing, but there’s no cowboy in sight coming to my rescue. There’s no flying man in a cape, swooping down to sweep me away. No fireman with a ladder or a helicopter pilot with a dangling harness. You know, standard hero shit.

  My mind does that sometimes, goes places. If you’ve spent enough time in silence, as I have, waiting on a sign from the afterlife or something to manifest, it’s easy for your imagination to run unchecked. I should write books. I bet I could give Carter Kane a run for his money.

  While I’m pondering my demise and picturing the dark man bearing down upon me, I hear voices in the distance, maybe down the hallway and upstairs, and I realize that it’s Mike and Craghorn.

  Thank God they haven’t left me in here entirely alone.

  It sounds like an informative discussion, but mostly it’s Mike asking questions and Craghorn responding. He’s such a hushed and beaten-down man, I can barely hear his replies.

  Mike says, “That happened in here?” And seconds later, he follows up with, “That was only six months ago? When Detective Thomas came back? Interesting.”

  I make a concentrated effort to sit up, but slowly and cautiously, to give my throbbing face and woozy head a chance to catch up. One last groan, and I push myself to my feet.

  You’d think I’d be used to things like this now, but there’s a large mirror above the fireplace, and a peek at my own reflection spooks me. I chuckle at how ridiculous this is—the great and mighty ghost hunter scared of himself—but I wasn’t expecting it to be there. Mike would probably say it’s an improvement, because I really do look like Wile E. Coyote hit me in the face with a fat hammer from Acme. Blood is caked in tendrils around my mouth and crawls down my neck. Luckily I’m wearing a black T-shirt, my trademark, so you can’t tell how thoroughly it’s soaked, which is enough for it to pull against my skin when I turn away from the mirror. It’s the same sensation you get when you pull a scab off too early.

  I find them in the upstairs hallway. Craghorn is in his submissive stance, hands clasped at his belt buckle, hunched over like he’s waiting to be reprimanded, examining his shoelaces.

  At first, I think Mike is simply standing with his arms crossed as he surveys the photographs hanging on the walls, but upon closer inspection, I see that he’s trying to warm himself. If the downstairs was cold, this is igloo territory up here. He sees me coming, drops his hands to his waist, and shakes his head. He tries to say something, but it comes out halting, like trying to start a car on a freezing day.

  “It’s okay,” I tell him. “I probably deserved that.”

  Mike clears his throat. “Right,” he says, then adds, “I’ll buy you a beer later.”

  “Make it a steak and we’re even.”

  He lifts a corner of his mouth in a genuine attempt at a smile. The steak thing, that’s a running joke going back a few years, before the show was a hit, back when we were starving college students who would trade the promise of a high-dollar steak on bets and dares while we stole handfuls of coffee creamer from a convenience store just to have milk for cereal.

  That’s old history between us, and it’s gratifying to see that he can’t headbutt good memories in the face.

  “You should call that detective,” Mike says. He lifts a digital voice recorder and waggles it. “We need to do a full investigation. Not just an afternoon asking questions. There’s no way we can properly comb this place and then meet him back at the office this evening with some answers.”

  I nod toward the recorder. “You catch something?”

  “Class A. It’s a strong one.” Mike stares down at the display, breathing heavily through his nose, as he rewinds the recording to the proper timestamp.

  “You think it’s …” My words trail off.

  Mike doesn’t need me to finish my sentence. He knows. “Do I think it’s the right-hander from the Hopper place?” He pinches his lips together, tilts his head from side to side, lifting his shoulders. “What’re the odds, you know? I don’t think it is. Tone is off, but then again, I was just explaining to Mr. Craghorn about how demonic entities can mimic other spirits, other animals. You know the drill. Anyway … honestly, I think the fact that he called it ‘the dark man’ was a one-in-a-million coincidence. Bad timing, whatever, and, unluckily for you, it was just the right set of words to light a fuse that I wanted lit for two years.”

  I chuckle. “If that’s a disguised apology, I accept. What’d you catch?”

  “Two voices, actually, and Mr. Craghorn, if you don’t want to hear this again, it’s fine if you step away.”

  Craghorn slowly lifts his head. “I’ll be downstairs.”

  Mike waits until Craghorn is gone, head disappearing below the landing, footsteps whispering through the hallway, before he holds the digital voice recorder up and plays the audio file.

  There’s silence, followed by Mike’s flip-flops slapping against his heels, and then comes the sound of a doorknob. The creaking hinges groan like they’re right off a Hollywood movie. Mike’s voice says lightly, “Mark time at 5:38, that was Mr. Craghorn opening his bedroom door.”

  Paranormal investigators tag our own noises and manmade sounds, marking the location on our recordings, so when we go back to review our tapes for evidence we don’t get our hopes up if we’re the cause of something going bump in the night.

  Mike’s voice again, saying, “The energy in here is overwhelming. It’s dark … a dark energy. Jesus, I could cry right now.”

  Which is followed by Craghorn mumbling, “Welcome to my life.”

  I hear the floorboards screech with the weight of a step, and Mike marks the time on that one as well. Now that I conduct investigations on my own, I’ll typically let some standard sounds go, rather than tagging a sniffle or something like that every few minutes. I’ve done this enough to recognize that my own footsteps on a creaky floor don’t need to be marked. It’s second nature at this point, but I get the feeling that Mike is being overly cautious, or perhaps he’s skittish about hopping back on the bicycle again after a long absence.

  Mike, the actual one in the hallway with me, says, “Listen. The first EVP is right here.” There’s more silence, with a hint of moving air in the background, and I recognize that it’s Mike’s anxious breathing. Something has spooked him. “Did you see that?” his voice asks. “That ball of light in the corner?”

  Mike points at the recorder. “Right here.”

  I lean down, turn my ear closer, and hear, “I’m sorry, love.”

  “Wow,” I whisper.

  “Keep listening.”

  The same voice, a female’s, says, “Make it go.”

  “Make it go?” I repeat.

  “Yeah. That’s it for those. Let me fast forward. This one comes through five minutes later.”

  It sounds like they’re still in the bedroom. Mike again mentions the dark, suffocating energ
y. He feels dizzy, as if there’s a buzzing between his ears. Craghorn coughs. “You good?” Mike’s voice asks.

  “It feels like …” Craghorn answers. “Feels like something is squeezing my throat. I have to get …”

  And then the rest of his words are mumbled, because a deep, guttural voice barrels in over top of Craghorn and says, “Guilty … bitch … is mine.”

  It’s so harsh, so evil, that the words feel like rusted razor blades carving my skin, and I recoil. I feel a wetness on my upper lip and realize that my nose has resumed its bloody waterfall. Part of me thinks that’s natural.

  Part of me thinks it isn’t.

  “You’re bleeding again,” Mike says, with more concern in his voice than I would expect from someone who recently smashed my nose with his forehead.

  I wipe my upper lip and study my slick fingertips.

  This is a warning.

  The three of us retreat to the front stoop. It’s like climbing out of a freezer and stepping on the surface of the sun. The smell out here has changed. It’s no longer that ever-present hint of coastal air. I think it’s sulfur, or maybe it’s my imagination. I could be projecting, feeling like it’s trapped in my clothes. I’m trying awfully hard to convince myself that it’s not, but the fact that Mike sniffs his T-shirt and grimaces is proof enough.

  Craghorn again confirms that the female voice belonged to his wife, Louisa.

  He hasn’t fully emerged from the black, impenetrable fog that seems to be hanging around him. However, he seems slightly more willing to converse now that he’s heard her voice.

  Mike gently peppers Craghorn with questions, trying to coax more information out of him, while I excuse myself to call Detective Thomas. Mike is a skilled interviewer when it comes to pruning information from a flustered client, while I work best with the dead.

  I move down the sidewalk until I find an acceptable level of shade, out of the direct heat, and it occurs to me that we’re in a situation where “hot as hell” and “cold as hell” are both true and relevant. It’s hotter than hell out here, and Dave Craghorn has been living inside the cold hell of his house for months.

  Detective Thomas answers on the third ring. “Yeah?” He sounds agitated, but then again, that appears to be his normal state of existence. “You find anything?”

  I explain what Mike caught on the audio recorder—the female voice and the demonic one—repeating it word for word. Then I add, “It’s bigger than what we thought. We’d like to do a full night investigation, and as a matter of fact, I recommend it.”

  “What? Why? You caught Craghorn’s wife apologizing, and this thing saying she was guilty. That tells me that the infidelity, the thing with the diary, it’s spot on, so I should definitely be focusing on that as a motive.”

  “Yeah, but motive for who?”

  “Craghorn, the mayor, some hired hitman.”

  “I don’t get the sense that Craghorn is your guy.”

  “All due respect, Mr. Ford, but you can leave the detective work to me.”

  I tell him I understand, though I hold my tongue, choking down what I want to say. I get this more often than I’d like. These police departments call me in to aid in an investigation because they’re stumped, I’ll tell them what I learned, and sometimes they get attitude if they feel like I’m upstaging their authority and skill sets.

  Sometimes it’s merely pride that gets in the way, and I get that, I really do. I wouldn’t want anyone making a guest appearance on Graveyard: Classified and telling me all about how I was screwing up a paranormal investigation as much as a detective wouldn’t want anyone telling him he’d been chasing the wrong tail on a murder case.

  However, there are times when I have to push back. I live with enough darkness on my conscience. It needs a little light now and then.

  “Give us one night,” I say. “There’s more here than that.”

  “Look, Ford, that little hint is enough. I got what I needed.”

  “One night. Sundown to sunup. That’s all I’m asking. Give us twelve, eighteen hours, max. Noon tomorrow.”

  I listen to him grunt in resignation. “It won’t be on my dime. I’m sitting here getting my ass chewed for bringing you on in the first place.”

  I check my watch. It’s three minutes to five. “Pro bono from now on. We can get you more. I know we can.”

  “Fine,” he says. “I doubt any of this will be admissible in court, but if you come away with something solid, it’ll help.”

  “You won’t regret it.”

  We hang up, and I stand there feeling good about this. It’s cliché, I know, but I feel like the band is back together. Well, minus all the lights, cameras, crew, and a catered service cart with a giant bowl of M&Ms and finger sandwiches. Just Mike and me, back into the breach. Old days come ‘round again. History repeats itself.

  A jogger trudges past me, her ponytail limp in the heat and humidity, much like the rest of her. She’s cute and trim, and like a gawking fool, I’m standing there admiring her physique when I manage to tear my eyes away from her fantastic calves long enough to notice she’s wearing one of the original Graveyard: Classified T-shirts, back from the first season when we had that cheesy font that looked like the letters were made out of tombstones.

  It’s a blatant reminder of the days when things were going well.

  A good omen.

  Right?

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHELSEA HOPPER

  TWO YEARS AGO

  A Very Special Live Halloween Episode

  “Enjoy Tiger Puffs, the cereal with bite!”

  The commercial ended with the large, orange cat giving a wink and a thumbs up. Off camera, Ambrosia the intern said, “You’re on, Mr. Ford. Go live in four, three—”

  In my head, I counted out “Two, one,” and then:

  “Welcome back to those of you at home here in the US and the millions watching around the world. That’s our one and only commercial break because we’ve just gotten word from our producers that we’re absolutely shattering all sorts of viewership records tonight. The final numbers for our live television broadcast won’t be in until later this week, but I can officially say that as of right now, we have over six point three million viewers tuned into our live-stream Internet broadcast on TheParanormalChannel.com. We can’t thank our fans enough, and we certainly would not be where we are today without the Gravediggers. You’re the best.”

  I walked down the hall of the Hopper house, my thick-soled boots clunking on the hardwood floors. The cameraman followed me, inching slowly forward.

  “If you’re just tuning in, we’ve been investigating the Hopper home, which you guys voted the Most Haunted House in America. So far, it’s been wild. You heard those footsteps, you heard that faucet turn on by itself in the bathroom, and if you were paying attention, you probably noticed Mike’s shirt being tugged when he was walking through the kitchen. Have another look.”

  A quick fifteen-second recap played on repeat three times, shown in the black-and-green light of our night-vision cameras. In the video, Mike walked across the linoleum floor, holding a digital voice recorder. He asked if the entity who made the footsteps, or turned on the faucet, would give him any further sign of his presence. Clear as could be, there was a visible tug on his collar, and it was strong enough to make Mike jump and accuse me of screwing with him, asking me why I did that, even though you could easily see that my hands were down at my sides.

  It was such a great capture and we were positive that, indubitably, the doubters would be all over the Internet the next day proclaiming our heresy, trying to show how we could’ve pulled it off using filament line in an elaborate hoax. Whatever. It happened, sans shenanigans.

  When the replay stopped and the cameras were on me once again, I’d taken a right turn into another hallway, where I now stood outside of little Chelsea Hopper’s former bedroom. Directly above was a trap door that led to the attic, and Mike was stationed beside me with his hand on the dangling pull s
tring. I could feel him seething, eyes boring into the side of my head. I wanted to tell him that it was too late, that he should just go with it and curse me afterward, and that I definitely regretted what we were about to do, but he should know better because we had a goddamn show to run with millions and millions of people watching.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, lowering my voice and pausing for dramatic effect, tenting my fingertips and holding them up to my lips, “what you’re about to witness may not be suitable for young viewers.”

  It was tough. It really was.

  Carla normally ran things from the production truck, but she was inside with us now, perhaps like a Roman emperor wanting to witness the gladiator carnage. She had this slightly psychotic, leering grin on her face, and for the briefest of moments, I thought about calling it off just to spite her.

  But I didn’t, because, holy shit, this was amazing television.

  And I really, really did want to give Chelsea Hopper some tranquility in her life.

  It was wrong, and I knew it, but both of those statements were true.

  Ratings. Peace.

  If Chelsea could beat that thing, if she could climb into the attic and face down her own personal demon and tell it to go to hell, she would come out a stronger person on the other side. That’s what I was counting on.

  Risky—so risky.

  I paused too long, apparently, because over the cameraman’s shoulder, Carla made a circular motion with her index finger, telling me to speed things up.

  “Okay, here we go. You all know the story. Before our commercial break, we told you more about the Hoppers and the terror that reigned here during their time in this home. All the unimaginable horror, the torture they faced together while they tried to live their lives, but this entity in the attic,” I said, angrily raising my voice, “what they called ‘the dark man,’ this bastard refused to let them live normally. We’re here tonight to send this monster back to where it came from.”