The Dark Man

by Desmond Doane

  Mike is beat; says he feels like he had a garbage truck run over his chest, then back up and do it again; wants to drive home and go to bed, sleep next to his wife, but I tell him it’s probably too dangerous. If he’s that exhausted, I don’t want him passing out on the way home, crashing, and then dying. I’d be sad, yeah, and clearly I don’t want Mike haunting me because that would be a never-ending barrage of practical jokes, missing keys, and general pestering until I joined him on the other side.

  We made the pact to haunt each other, and to be annoyingly foolish about it back when we first started this journey together, and I’m quite positive that Mike hasn’t forgotten.

  Instead of letting him drive home, I convince him to come zonk out in my hotel room down at the Virginia Beach oceanfront. The couch in my room folds out into one of those grotesquely uncomfortable beds, and I remind him that it’ll be like old times, back when we were on the road and filming. Me sleeping like a pampered princess with my face cream to keep the cameras and lighting friendly during the day, accompanied by a rejuvenating eye mask and earplugs, skin soaking up mist from the portable humidifier, all while Mike lay in the other queen bed, snoring, drooling, and sleeping naked.

  Awkward were the nights when he’d kick the covers off.

  In addition to saving his ass from turning into highway hamburger, I let him know that Detective Thomas will most likely want to speak to him again, adding, “What I do now, it’s not like the old days where we’d pack up and head back to the hotel for an after-party. I usually spend a day or two with the detectives, answering questions, going over details of my investigation, maybe trying to help them piece together clues if I don’t get any direct answers.”

  “Whatever,” Mike says. “Just give me a bed and some coffee in the morning.”

  As we pack up the rest of our gear—my small collection compared to Mike’s ghost-hunting surplus store quantity—I tell Mike what the right-hander said while he was catatonic. I add, “You’re not going to believe this, but I think it’s the one who hurt Chelsea.”

  Mike snorts. “You’re shitting me.”

  “Dead serious, dude. It said, ‘See you again. Hopper house.’ Just like that.”

  “But that doesn’t necessarily mean it was him.”

  “True, and I considered that, but the more I think about it, the more it feels right. Doesn’t it? I mean, didn’t it to you? The same type of energy, the same strength? And you know how we always talked about whether or not demons each have their own signature vibrations?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “It feels right. It feels like it was the same one.”

  Mike works an SB-11 spirit box into its cushioned slot of the storage case. “Feeling is a lot different than proof. You know that.”

  “There was something else, too, and it didn’t click until it mentioned the Hoppers.”

  A fat rechargeable battery, now lifeless, gets shoved into its home. “And?”

  “That laugh. When I told you it was pretending to be a little girl? You didn’t hear it, but I swear on my mother’s grave, it was copying Chelsea.”

  “Funny, I don’t remember her laughing. Just terrified and crying.”

  I slam the lid closed on my case. “Low blow.”

  “Sorry. Old habits.”

  “Anyway. It was the same one. I’m positive.”

  We take one more quick look around the living room to make sure we didn’t leave anything behind, and as we’re doing so, Mike asks, “Does this mean you’ll consider the documentary? Sounds like a challenge to me. Fucker is calling you out. Wants to do battle back at the Hoppers.”

  He’s baiting me, ever so subtly, and it would work if I was ten years younger, but my mind is made up. “I told you already, no way in hell am I exploiting her again.”

  The hotel room is icebox cold since I left the air conditioner dial on the January-in-Minnesota setting, and I’m certain that Mike is asleep before I’m finished brushing my teeth. Thankfully, and possibly because in here it’s as cold as a demon sucking all the energy out of the room, Mike’s conked out in his clothes. The snoring and drooling haven’t changed. I’m positive there’s already a wet spot on the pillow.

  With the temperature outside still sitting at roughly eighty degrees, even at two o’clock in the morning and a hundred yards from the ocean, it seems ridiculous to climb underneath the covers, but man, that air conditioner is top notch. So I pull all eighteen layers of blankets that come with a hotel bed up to my neck and shut my eyes.

  Sleep has never come as easily to me as it has for Mike, and once again this feels like our glory days. Same old routine. Mike snoring, me struggling to doze off, only now I’m not worried about how my complexion looks on camera, and I didn’t bring earplugs because I hadn’t intended on having him around for a sleepover.

  It’s almost a comforting sound, though, because after what we just went through, it’s nice to have company. I appreciate having another living soul in the room. The sound of Mike sawing logs is like a nightlight when you’re afraid that something might be under the bed.

  I try a variety of meditation techniques to clear my mind—tricks I learned and had to use for a long time after Chelsea’s incident—but they’re useless at the moment. Every time I feel the junk of the previous sixteen hours slipping away and the slow-moving calm of slumber seeping in, my mind spins back around to that thing’s voice and the way it imitated Chelsea’s laugh, mocking me.

  Wherever it may be now, it was here, damn it, and regardless of whether it was a coincidence or not, I’m kept awake by the fact that there seems to be some sort of netherworld connection that shares information—like a ghostly Pony Express.

  Or perhaps information is shared across energy.

  “Energy” in the broadest sense, I guess. I’m not talking about, like, electricity or wind power. I’m no scientist, and, in fact, I could barely tell you the difference between an astrologist and an astrophysicist, but what I believe is this: everything, from a ladybug to a boulder, from Dick Cheney to a candy bar, from a cup of coffee to a ‘69 Chevelle with white racing strips, is made up of atoms and protons and neutrons, the building blocks of the universe, and whether it’s inanimate or a two-year-old jumping on a trampoline, everything is made up of this interconnected web of energy. It’s not necessarily the hum of life, but the hum of existence.

  Your coffee table may not be alive, yet it exists, and there are billions of particles screaming around and around that make that object what it is.

  Thoughts are energy. Emotions are energy. A ham sandwich on rye is energy—bear with me here—and everything is connected.

  I’ve believed this for a long time, and I’ve also believed that spirits can somehow share information like it’s a phone call or an e-mail, but I’ve never really seen concrete evidence of this reality until recently.

  I chose not to tell Mike that I had already been investigating Chelsea’s case again because, for now, I didn’t want him to use it as ammo, or a bargaining chip, in his efforts to get Carla Hancock’s documentary going. But in a way, I suppose he deserves to know what I learned back at the old farmhouse before I left for this case.

  And, amazingly enough, it’s further proof of that interconnected, subatomic layer of … what, invisible universe juice?

  Which apparently exists on both sides of life and death.

  Physically, I don’t have an ounce of get-up-and-go left in me. My mind won’t stop turning, in spite of this, and I’m afraid my thrashing around in the bed will wake up Mike, so I force myself to sit up and tiptoe quietly through the room. The balcony door complains loudly as the seal is broken—plastic peeling away from plastic. I cringe, but Mike only mumbles something in his sleep and rolls over while I’m greeted with the thick humidity outside our room.

  I’m only wearing a pair of basketball shorts, and after the frozen tundra of the room, the warmth feels good on my skin. The concrete balcony is pebbled and prickly under my feet. The white plasti
c chair, still temperate from the day’s heat, bends when I sit and prop my legs up on the glass table. I spot a few lights of trolling fishing vessels, along with a tanker or two heading north toward the Chesapeake Bay, and I try to sit peacefully as the waves crash against the shore.

  I go over the three visits to the Hampstead farmhouse in my mind again, trying to make sense of the connection to Chelsea, the demon that affected her and Craghorn both, and the vicious, malevolent, but not demonic, entity residing there.

  He, the old farmer I spoke with, may not have anything to do with Chelsea or the demon. Maybe he was just sharing information with me.

  The first visit, the two Class-A EVPs: “I know what you want,” and “Chelsea … Hopper.”

  The second visit, nothing. It happens.

  And then, this last visit. Wow.

  How did I end up there to begin with?

  The short version goes like this: I got an e-mail from a young lady named Deanna Hampstead about a month ago. She said that I should call her “Hamster,” because everyone else did, and that she’s our number-one fan. Or, rather, she admitted to being Mike’s number-one fan, but since he wasn’t available on the Internet, she figured I would be just as interested in performing an investigation at her family’s abandoned farmhouse.

  The thing is, I get about, oh, 437 of these e-mails each week, and it’s often a huge burden on my time to sift through every single one of them myself. So I’ve hired a personal assistant, a young man named Jesse who lives in Albuquerque, to read through them all and pick out the ones that appear to come from actual detectives in need of assistance. He then follows up with a reply e-mail to assess the validity, and if it’s a real case, he passes it along to me for review.

  I was up late one night after having watched this bogus “Where Are They Now?” piece on some trashy TV show where they once again compared my good name to a certain German dictator from the past—I laughed, but it didn’t mean it wasn’t hurtful—and insomnia was inevitable. I decided to give Jesse a break and sort through a few hundred e-mails myself, and fifteen minutes in, I ran across a subject line that read: DON’T U KNOW SOME1 NAMED CHELSEA?

  That sweet child’s name might as well be tattooed on my forehead, and I hadn’t had a thorough reaming in a good while, so of course I clicked. This is what it said (spelling mistakes hers):

  Dear Mr. Ford A. Ford,

  I am Deanna Hampstead but u can call me Hamster since all my friends do. I’m 13yrs old. My fam owns an old farmhouse close to where u live. I think. Ur in Oregon now? N E way, that’s what your site says. Biggest fan here of GC and was always in luv w/ Mike Long. #1 fan on earth. I couldn’t find him on the web, so I wrote 2 u. N E way, u are an inspiration and made me want to hunt ghosts. I went with my cousin Em and we hunted 1 nite. U would not believe what we caught! EVP of a man and my mom sez it’s her Papa Joe, her granpa.

  Truthfully, it hurt my eyes, and my head, trying to decipher what young Hamster was trying to say. Kids these days. But I’ve always had a soft spot for the younger fans since their minds are such clean slates, unburdened by maturity and skepticism, so I continued reading.

  I nvr would have believed it if I hadn’t heard it with my own 2 ears. (Y do ppl say it that way? Course u heard it w/ your own 2 ears. How else would u hear it?) N E way, it was SO cool. We listened and he said, “Ford … ghostman” and we were like WHAT SHUT UP. And Y is that cray cray? Papa Joe died in 1983. Mom says he was a mean ol cuss.

  Now she had my attention, obviously. I’ve had plenty of spirits and demons call me out by name, but rarely, if any, who just happened to pass over to the other side twenty-plus years before the show first aired.

  Me an Em—me is Em backward—funny! N E way, we asked him more ?s and all he would say was, “Ford … ghostman.” He musta said it 8 more times b4 we left. We said, “Ford and Mike from that show, right?” And then he said, “Yes. Chelsea. Danger.”

  After reading that, I said, out loud, as a fully grown, adult male human being: “What?! Shut up. That’s cray cray.”

  N E way, I have it all on tape. I dunno if u would want to but my mama says u should come talk to Papa Joe because it could be important! I think so 2 b/c Chelsea was like the gurl from that live show u did, right? Here is our phone and email but prob don’t call after 9 since Dad gets up early for work. Pls tell Mike he’s the best ever! And u 2 obv.

  I remember checking the clock, seeing that it was half past 1:00 a.m. and contemplating calling regardless. I was so amped that I had my cell in my hand, finger hovering over the call button, before better judgment prevailed.

  I waited until the next morning. I called. I spoke to Carol Hampstead, Hamster’s mother, and after a few rounds of, “Holy crap, you’re a celebrity! Hon, get in here! We got that Ford guy from that ghost show on the phone,” it was fairly easy to get permission for an investigation. Multiple investigations. As many as I wanted, as long as I promised to give them credit or mention the family if I ever got back on television again.

  Funny, isn’t it? They didn’t want their fifteen minutes of fame. All they wanted was to serve me a nice dinner, ask a few behind-the-scenes questions about Graveyard: Classified, and to hear their names on television if the opportunity ever came up.

  They live less than thirty miles from my home, just outside of Portland. The primordial family farmhouse is another six miles beyond that, nestled in a field and backed up against a small, rolling hill.

  And here I am. Sitting on a balcony in Virginia Beach, Virginia, roughly three thousand miles away from that farmhouse, roughly fifteen hundred miles away from Chelsea Hopper’s former home, having battled the same demon, thinking about the incredible EVP that I caught on my third visit, and how it’s all connected over so many miles and planes of existence:

  “It’s coming … Chelsea … Key … Save … the people.”

  What’s coming? The demon? And was he saying that Chelsea is the key to something? To what?

  And what am I saving the people from? And who are these people?

  As the orange glow of the sun warms the eastern horizon, I’m left with more questions than answers. At the moment, the biggest one of them all is, should I tell Mike about this?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Mike and I each grab a handful of blueberry mini-muffins, an apple apiece, and two cups of coffee from the continental breakfast table before we dart out the door. Well, I dart, and Mike drags along behind me, grumbling about how he’s not beholden to Detective Thomas, and he doesn’t see why he should have to be in a hurry to get to the station.

  By the time the buzzing vibration of my phone woke me up on the balcony at a quarter after nine, the detective had already left seven messages asking what had happened, and did we have any information for him. In addition to that, he had some bad news about Dave Craghorn and wanted to discuss things in person. I was to bring Mike, too, since he had become peripherally involved in the investigation.

  Before I dozed off, just as the sun was peeking over the horizon, I had made up my mind to tell Mike about Hamster, the Hampstead farmhouse, and Papa Joe, yet as we whip around curves and weave through the nigh-impenetrable Virginia Beach work-commute traffic, it’s clear that now is not the right time. There’s too much to explain, too many implications to discuss, and I’d have to parry too many of his queries about my stance on the documentary.

  Meanwhile, we inhale our muffins and apples while I curse at the other drivers, and I manage to slog through half a cup of the worst coffee I’ve ever tasted. Frankly, it tastes like demon piss, which I would expect to be a mixture of sulfur, charcoal, coffee beans that have been scrubbed across the anus of a dead horse, and hazelnut.

  Mike’s grimace when he sips at his cup is the only confirmation I need that he feels the same.

  The station is pulsating with activity, more than I expect at nine thirty in the morning on a random Thursday, with hookers and the homeless, old ladies and tattooed bikers stationed throughout, and it takes a good fi
ve minutes before the desk sergeant comes back around to his post. I explain who we are and who we’re there to see. He’s unimpressed. I can tell by the way his lip goes up into a slight Elvis sneer along with the restrained eye-roll that he thinks I can’t see.

  Sergeant Hobbart—and I so desperately want to make a hobbit joke—points to a row of lime-green plastic chairs along the wall, the kind that are attached by a length of metal on the bottom, and tells us to have a seat, that someone will be with us shortly.

  Before we can move to the horrid chairs that look less comfortable than a bed made of cinderblocks, Detective Thomas pokes his head through a doorway to our right. “You two, follow me.” There’s no welcoming smile, only the hard posturing of a serious man, and it’s then that I wonder if we’re in trouble for something.

  He holds the door open farther, and Mike gives the space in front of us a wide-armed sweep. “After you.”

  We don’t go to Detective Thomas’s desk, where I expected we would be led, and instead, he points into a bare room, with a bare table, three chairs, and the sanitized glow of two fluorescent bulbs overhead. Along one wall is a giant mirror.

  I haven’t been in one of these since the wee hours of the morning after Chelsea’s attack. “Uh-oh, what’s going on?”

  Mike groans and says, “Fuck me, Ford. If you dragged me into—”

  “Relax,” Detective Thomas interrupts. “You’re not under arrest. It’s just standard procedure since you two were the last to see Dave Craghorn alive.”

  Mike says, “Excuse me?”

  And I add, “Wait. Alive? Like past tense? Was he mur … mur …” I can’t seem to get the word out of my mouth. I cough and pretend like I have something in my throat so that the detective will finish my sentence for me.

  “Murdered? No. Sit. Sit.” He points to the two chairs on the left side of the table, the ones facing the mirror and the camera mounted in the upper corner, and refuses to sit himself until we finally relent.