The Dark Man

by Desmond Doane

  Technically, we could classify it as poltergeist activity. However, it’s not like there are a bunch of cabinet doors flying open and dead-battery toys dancing around the room. This demon is strong enough, and focused enough, and intuitive enough, to lift one single object—an object that caught my attention earlier in the day—and sling it over thirty-five feet.

  That’s not just an explosion of paranormal energy.

  That’s intent.

  Mike inhales and exhales; the tempo of his body rocks like a persistent metronome. I want to be hunting for this thing, calling it out, telling it to come fight us, but it’s good to ease into an investigation like this. We have all night, and it feels like we’re getting back into our groove. Mike was always the one who focused more on the technical side of the investigation. Devices, gadgets, cameras, you name it, we tried it.

  Back in the day, and it looks to be shaping up the same way, he was James Bond and I was Oprah.

  You know, gadgets versus emotion. He’s pushing buttons, tweaking dials, and I’m riling up the crowd: You get a demonic possession! You get a demonic possession! You get a demonic possession! Everybody gets a demonic possession!

  “Ford?”

  “What?”

  “Did you hear that?”

  “No? Maybe?”

  Mike hasn’t peeled his eyes away from the thermal imager screen yet, but he’s clearly focused on something as he lifts an arm and points over his back, which is also to my rear. I hate to be sneaked up on. Frazzles me, waiting on something to pounce.

  One thing I never understood was how our cameramen, Don in particular, could stand there with a camera focused on Mike and me while we were freaking out about something happening behind them. They were brave, man. Never flinching, never wavering—it was always about the shot, capturing our reactions. I argued with the producers for over a decade that our fans wanted to see what we were looking at. They didn’t want to see us having an absolute shit-fit when a shadow figure darted across an empty gymnasium. The spirits were the real show, not us, but the producers, Carla in particular, didn’t see it that way.

  I spin around and take a couple of steps to put my back closer to the wall. “What was it?”

  “Sounded like a voice. Couldn’t tell from where. Female, probably, and I’d bet your beach house in the Hamptons that it’s Louisa again.” He finally looks over at me and drops the thermal imaging camera to his side. “I got nothing downstairs. Whatever it was ain’t there anymore. Should we go check out the voice?”

  “Yeah. And the Hamptons house is gone, by the way. Melanie from wardrobe got it in the divorce; turned right around and sold the damn thing for about nine million.”

  Mike puts his hands on his hips, shakes his head like a disappointed father.

  “What?”

  He hooks a thumb down toward the far bedroom and starts walking. “Did you ever think that maybe one of the other reasons she left you, aside from cheating on her six fucking times, was because you couldn’t take the relationship seriously?”

  Defiant, I say, “What’s that supposed to mean? Of course I took it seriously. Kinda.”

  “Dude, you never stopped calling your wife ‘Melanie from wardrobe.’”

  “Not to her face.” But, again, he has a point. “That was habit, nothing more. That’s who she was for six years before we started dating.”

  “And then, things changed. You didn’t respect her.”

  “This is not a discussion I feel like having, okay? We’re here to help Craghorn, not dissect my failed marriage. I’m not on Oprah.”

  “What?”

  “Forget it.”

  As we stand in front of the bedroom door, Mike gives me a sharp look and says, “She’s a good girl, Ford. You ruined it. Just like you managed to ruin everything else.”

  It stings to hear it, out loud, again, but I’m not going to argue with him. One, I don’t feel like it and two, I have no counterpoint. I open my mouth, and I’m about to tell him to leave my personal life out of the hunt when we both hear it.

  A soft moaning comes from the second guest bedroom at our backs. We turn, ready and guarded, cocking our heads, listening intently, glancing at each other sideways. It’s definitely female, and it does indeed have the same tone and pitch as what Mike caught on his digital recorder earlier. He lifts a finger to his lips, gently taps out a shush, hands me the thermal imager, and then reaches into his back pocket to pull out his GS-5000, which is the big brother to the BR-4000 I accidentally left at home. This thing is the Cadillac of digital voice recorders. Real time audio playback so you can ask questions while you record and hear any responses. If you do happen to catch something, you can skip back and listen to it while the secondary mic continues ahead. It’s a brilliant device.

  He lifts it, presses the button with the red circle on it, and pantomimes instructions. He’s going to push open the door while I use the thermal imager to immediately capture what’s in the room. I feel a bit like we’re a couple of real badge-carrying detectives ourselves, and we’re about to bust in on a most-wanted criminal snorting coke out of a hooker’s butt crack.

  I spend a lot of time in hotels. Maybe I watch too much television.

  Mike lifts his hand, reaches for the door, and pauses. Frozen in place, he says, “Whoa, hang on,” and then—“Hungh!”

  He flies into me, sideways, and we both stumble to our left and land hard. My back crashes into a weakly constructed, triple-drawer console table, and the thing explodes under my weight, sending two picture frames and a decorative jewelry box onto my head and chest.

  Mike lands off-kilter, holding his GS-5000 up high to keep from smashing it, and cracks his head against the hardwood floor.

  I fling bits of splintered table and an empty drawer off me and climb to my knees, clambering over to Mike. “Holy shit. What happened? You okay?” I’m whipping my head around, trying, and failing, to see if another ambush is coming.

  Instead of answering, Mike pushes himself up and crab walks back to the wall. We both know who did it—the question is where did it go? Are we still in danger?

  I ask him again if he’s okay, if he’s hurt, either from falling or from the attack, and once he’s satisfied that he’s not going to get another beating, he tells me everything’s fine, to back off a second.

  “Okay, but just—”

  “I’m good, Ford,” he insists. “God, that was intense. I just need a minute. Please.”

  I sit on my haunches and watch him, checking for anything out of the ordinary. Unusual anger, confusion, a feeling of immediate dread. You know, head-spinning, pea-soup-spitting type stuff. With a blitzkrieg that powerful, I’m worried that the right-hander attacked, invaded, and then put up a set of nice linen curtains in its new home, 123 Mike Long Street.

  He understands what I’m doing, too, because he holds a palm up to me and says, “Just chill, man. I don’t feel anything.”

  “Promise?”

  “Yeah. It’s not like that time in Miami.”

  Some people might go to Miami and come home with a sunburn or an STD. Mike went down for a solo investigation while I was on my honeymoon with Melanie from wardrobe—sorry, Melanie—and came home with a stowaway. He got careless, didn’t protect himself going in or coming out, warning the entities that he was not a vessel, and it took days of prayer with one of the big guns from the Vatican and three Native American shamans to get his body, mind, and home clear again. Toni wasn’t too happy about that, and, somehow, per standard operating procedure, she managed to find a way to blame me. Melanie and I were on a rinky-dink motorbike in the jungles of Vietnam when it happened, but, yeah, it was my fault. Thanks, Toni.

  I remind him how much that experience sucked and make him promise to tell me if he feels anything out of the ordinary over the next few hours. I add, “You know the drill, Mike. Depression, murderous ideas.”

  He rubs the back of his head where it hit the floor and checks for blood on his fingertips. Hand clean, he says, “Y
ou mean murderous ideas directed toward you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s not out of the ordinary, Ford. That’s a Tuesday.”

  I laugh. Mike laughs.

  And for a moment, it’s good. That would’ve been a prime capture for the show. A speck of levity to break the ungodly tension right before a commercial break.

  Your sheets will be as white as ghosts with new clothesline-scented Sparkle Clean.

  While I’m picturing that kid in the red T-shirt and gray jeans as he runs around with the blanket on his head—acting like a ghost, as expected—Mike hums a few bars of the commercial’s theme song.

  Yeah. We’re back. I’d like to high-five him, but it’s slightly creepy how connected we are.

  Are? Were? I’m not sure where we stand.

  He pushes himself to his feet, and I get up with him.

  “Should we check?” I ask. He’s already lifting his shirt before I finish the sentence. I wince and hiss. “That’s a good one.”

  “Burns like hell.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “No, man, I’m serious. My skin is on fire. Look at the welts.”

  There’s a big splotch on the right side of his rib cage. It’s bright pink and getting redder, along with five raised welts and a mottled mound that looks like a palm. It’s a handprint, for sure, but it’s not human.

  “You smell that?” Mike asks sniffing the air.

  “Yeah. Your skin smells like brimstone.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The thing about being a standard, run-of-the-mill private investigator is that they can gather tangible evidence, which, mostly, comes in the form of pictures, videos, testimony, and other concrete things wherein a judge will look at it, nod his bald little head, waggle his floppy, loose-skinned jowls and say, “You have proved that Bill is sleeping with Tina, and Jane is entitled to forty bajillion dollars.”

  Or, rather, the house in the Hamptons and other valuables.

  The point is, they can collect material proof that can be used in a court of law.

  Me? What I do as a paranormal private investigator? It requires more finesse and deductive reasoning, not to mention the fact that the field of paranormal research remains persona non grata in most scientific circles. I don’t care how many full-bodied apparitions I’ve seen, how many voices I’ve heard from beyond the grave, or how many pictures I’ve taken where a translucent man is standing off to the right of somebody’s kitchen table, the general public, minus our legions of believers and fans, will look down their noses at it and say, “Yeah, but you could’ve faked that. See right here? The bottom of the door is off camera. Who’s to say you didn’t tie a piece of fishing line to it and yank it closed from across the room?”

  That’s what Mike and I, and the rest of our crew, had to battle every single day while the show was running, and it’s what I deal with now during each investigation, and it’s why my work would hold as much water as a sieve if it were taken to the US legal system.

  I often spend days on location, poring over historical records, interviewing potential witnesses and clients, conducting investigations, filming dark bedrooms and hallways, taking pictures, and being sneaky. The difference is, the people I’m trying to talk to are dead.

  And the dead don’t always cooperate—at least not fully. It’s rare that I can walk into a home where someone has been murdered, fire up the old cameras and recorder, and hear a spirit on the other end of the line say, “It was Ronald James from accounting; he’s the one who slit my throat.” As a matter of fact, I think that’s only happened once in the two years I’ve been contracting as a paranormal private investigator.

  And it wasn’t Ronald James from accounting, actually. It was Ted, down in the mailroom, because we all know the mailroom is where the creepy people work.

  Okay, so, the point I’m trying to make is, sometimes during an investigation, I can say, “My name is Ford Atticus Ford, and I’m here to talk to Amanda Wallace. Amanda, if you’re here, can you tell me where your husband hid your body?” and I’ll get a vague response like, “He left me … She told him to.”

  Right there is an extra clue that the police can use. After friends and family members have authenticated that it’s Amanda’s voice, then begins the process of tracking down this “she” that Amanda mentioned. The family, the lawyers, the police, none of them had any clue that there was (potentially) a mistress or a girlfriend on the side, and if not that, a puppet master pulling the strings to help collect an insurance settlement, etc.

  The courts won’t accept it, but the detectives can choose to believe or ignore what I give them. Occasionally, they dismiss my evidence because even though they called me in to assist them in their investigation, they refuse to believe they could have missed something so simple. And then, when I’m out of sight, they’ll follow it anyway. They’re not stupid, just prideful.

  If they do accept the validity of my data, it opens up an entirely new line of questioning and potential leads.

  Because, like I’ve always said, dead people see things that others don’t.

  Sometimes it’s that easy. Sometimes a spirit will muster enough energy and come through to our side and avenge his own death. Other times, I establish communication, but it’s gibberish. Perhaps a family member can watch a video I’ve captured where a plant moves two inches, and then the sound of footsteps follow. It doesn’t prove that Harold Bigelow choked Mrs. Harold Bigelow to death in a fit of murderous rage. What it proves, according to the family member, is that Mrs. Bigelow has come back from the grave, and she’s still trying to position that plant exactly how she wanted it, against Harold’s demands. It’s proof that she’s around, but it’s not proof of her husband’s guilt nor is it proof of his innocence.

  Looking back on my case history, it’s about a forty-sixty split between usable evidence and tangential proof of the afterlife.

  I mention this because after we’re finished examining the seared handprint on Mike’s side, he lets me listen to the recording. He’d said, “Whoa, hang on,” about a half second before the demonic linebacker caused a fumble on the one-yard line, and now, as we stand here in the hallway and listen to the rest of the recording, I get chills when the EVP comes through.

  “Ford … death …”

  It’s a growl more than words, and I imagine that the voice is coated in thousands of years of soot and has been charred by the fires of hell.

  Dramatic? Maybe. Sometimes I still picture myself talking to our viewership in my mind.

  I cringe and lift an eyebrow at Mike. He returns it.

  I take it to mean this right-hander is threatening my life, and it’s freaking spooky, yet if I had given up and tucked-tail out the front door every time this happened, I would’ve quit, oh, about a thousand investigations ago.

  We listen to it twice more and note that it comes in over top of the soft, female voice we’d heard that drew us to the room in the first place. That tells us a couple of things: one, this demonic entity didn’t lure us into a trap, because sometimes they impersonate things they aren’t, like children or a distressed family member, and two, that being noted, there is definitely more than one spiritual presence in this house.

  We had already established this, more or less, but this is legitimate proof for Mike and me. It changes the direction of the impending overnight investigation now that we know for sure what we’re dealing with.

  Mike stops the playback and checks his watch. “What’re we thinking? Another hour, hour and a half before total sundown? If that?”

  “Probably so. I’d say we run a couple more baseline checks up here on this floor and the attic, just to be safe. Can’t hurt to clear up all the variables.”

  “Yeah, and maybe if we find an EMF hotspot, we can target that location a little more than the dead zones. Craghorn told me that he often sees a lot of action in his bedroom and—oh for God’s sake, Ford. Are you thirteen years old?”

  “Sorry, it was just the way you phrased i
t. Action in the bedroom? Huh? Huh? C’mon.”

  “And Carla would have put that in an episode, and we would have spent the next week under a mountain of dick and fart jokes online.” He scoffs, but he can’t quite hide his grin. “I’m going to do the baseline EMF. Why don’t you do a little recon around here and see if you can find anything he didn’t tell us about?”

  “On it.” He doesn’t have to tell me what he’s thinking about, because we’re operating like the machine of old, back in the saddle, and whatever cliché you can come up with. “Be careful,” I add, hesitant to leave him completely alone after such a violent attack. But he’s been working out, so he should be good.

  Mike heads west, back in the direction of the spare bedrooms, and I go east to the front of the house. The giant bay window lets in the waning evening light, and the semitranslucent curtains hanging on an ancient iron rod do little to provide cover. They remind me of the ones back at the Hampstead farmhouse, which makes me all the more eager to get home and follow up on the leads I uncovered with Ulie the night before I came here.

  A floorboard screeches under my feet, the wail of a dying animal, and I step away from it. In case Mike is running the recorder, I verbally mark the location and that it originated from me.

  The odor up here is different than downstairs. Nothing bad, really, but nothing good either, like Craghorn hasn’t aired it out in a couple of years. It’s stale, musty, and I’m tempted to open the tall, double rectangular windows beside the big bay window, the kind that open with an L-shaped crank, and then I spot the taillights of traffic outside.

  Nah, better not. The street noise could easily contaminate our investigation, so I suffer with the smell of dust and air with an expiration date from the Nixon administration.

  I’m taking my time here, soaking it all up, trying to get inside Craghorn’s head, hoping to give some substance to his reasons for staying here ten years after his wife was possibly murdered, and then six long months after a goddamn powerful right-hander moved in like that houseguest who never gets the hint that he needs to leave.