by Rod Redux
“Jim wanted to stop and have a couple beers after we golfed,” he said as he returned to the living room with his dinner. He sat in the lounger at the end of the sectional and poked a piece of steamed broccoli with his fork. “I know I should have called and let you know we’d be late. I hope you didn’t worry.”
Sharon peeked up at him again. She smiled dubiously, as if she thought he was playing some kind of prank on her.
“You always manage to find your way home,” she said.
“Yeah. I guess I do.” He stuck the broccoli in his mouth and chewed. It was rubbery after its spin in the microwave, but he swallowed anyway.
“You shouldn’t drive when you’ve been drinking,” Sharon said mildly, turning another page. “You get a DUI, you know it’ll be all over the news.”
It was the most she’d spoken to him at one time since the show went on hiatus. He felt pathetically grateful, and it made him angry and embarrassed and sad all at once. He put another spear of broccoli in his mouth and stared at her, drinking in her soft femininity with his eyes, her long wavy auburn hair and round Irish cheeks, her full breasts and plump behind. He was still sexually attracted to her. He still loved her, too. Question was, did she still love him?
Ask her, a voice spoke up in his head.
It was Allen’s own voice, but it was also kind of his father’s voice, too. His father Bud was a gruff, no-nonsense guy when he was alive. He wasn’t one of those men who were afraid of their own feelings, either. He had loved as fiercely as he hated.
Why are you sitting there being miserable? Just ask her if she still loves you. Do it fast, like ripping a bandage off. If the answer’s no, then you do what you gotta do. No more whistling past the graveyard.
He wanted to, but he was scared she would answer.
Man up, Mandel, that voice in his head said sternly. Act like you got a pair! Life ain’t worth living if the woman you’re with don’t love you back.
That was his father’s philosophy for everything. Do it quick, like ripping off a Bandaid. That’s how he’d abandoned their family, too, right out of the blue, no warning, no regrets, and that’s how he’d died years later, sticking a gun in his mouth when the pain from the cancer in his bones was more than he could endure.
Heart thudding in his chest, Allen put his fork down and opened his mouth to speak.
In his shirt pocket, his cell phone began to play the Scooby Doo theme song.
Sharon looked up at the music and their eyes locked.
Allen’s mouth worked but no sound came out.
Sharon looked down at his shirt pocket and said, “You going to answer that?”
“Yeah,” he said, face flushed, and he set his plate on the coffee table to grab his phone. He pulled it out of his shirt pocket and flipped it open. “Hello?”
“Allen?”
“Yeah?”
“Allen, I have some awesome news!”
It was Jane. She sounded breathless and excited.
“What is it?” Allen asked.
Sharon closed her paperback and rose from the couch. She walked past him toward the hallway, brushing her fingertips—ever so lightly-- across his shoulder as she left the room.
Allen opened his mouth to call her back. He wanted to talk to her, but Jane was babbling on the phone. She sounded like she was going to hyperventilate. Allen sighed at the missed opportunity, said, “Take a deep breath, Janie. Now… say again?”
“We got it!” Jane cried.
“Got what?”
“The Forester House! In Illinois! Old Lady Forester croaked, and the house’s new owner is going to let us investigate it!”
Billy
1
Billy Kasch woke with a thumping headache, a split lip and sore balls. If those were the only problems he’d had that morning, he would have considered himself lucky, but he realized as soon as he rolled over and looked at his alarm clock that he had overslept, too. He was never going to make it to the staff meeting on time.
He quailed at the thought of inconveniencing the rest of the gang. None of them would razz him too much. They were used to him rolling in late. They even had a word for it: Billytime. Kind of like “bullet-time”, just thirty minutes late. He never did it on purpose, but his friends deserved better.
With a groan, Billy flung his sheets off, then swung his feet to the floor and ran naked from his bedroom. He dashed across the hallway and skidded into the bathroom.
He considered taking a pass on the shower, just splash on some cologne and pray for the best, but he was sticky and probably stank of sex, and he wasn’t subjecting his friends to any other indignities today.
He grabbed his toothbrush and slathered some toothpaste on it, his penis bobbing around in front of him like a jousting lance, then stuck the toothbrush in his mouth and headed for the tub.
He stumbled over the shower curtain and almost fell into the fixture, but he managed to catch himself on the hand bar before he took a header and broke an arm... or his penis.
“Shit!” he cursed. He jerked the shower curtain closed and turned on the water. “SHIT!” he cried again, louder, as the showerhead needled him with icy water. He must have left the diverter pulled last time he took a shower.
He adjusted the temperature, dancing around until the water had warmed, then simultaneously brushed his teeth, lathered his body with Ivory soap and took his morning piss.
His cellphone was ringing when he jumped out of the shower. He scooped it off his desk, glanced at the screen as he ran to his dresser, but didn’t answer it.
It was Allen.
Of course.
“I know! I know!” he said, throwing the phone on the bed. He grabbed socks and underwear and began to dress as quickly as he could.
Riding the elevator down to the lobby, he tugged at the collar of his tee shirt, annoyed, then pulled it out in front of him. Oh, smooth, he thought. The tag was in the front. He had put his shirt on backwards. He pulled the shirt off over his head as the elevator stopped on the third floor. The door slid open. Bonnie Milhouse from 3-C hesitated, then smiled and stepped inside, eyeing his bare midriff.
“I put my shirt on backwards this morning,” Billy explained with a blush.
His downstairs neighbor nodded. “So I see.”
“Sorry about that,” he said, turning the shirt around in his hands.
“No need to apologize,” Bonnie replied, enjoying the rippling pectorals and washboard stomach on display.
Billy Kasch was an extremely fit man, with thick shoulder length black hair and baby blue eyes, and Bonnie, who was recently divorced, couldn’t help but imagine, as she surreptitiously checked out the bulge in the front of his very tight Levis blue jeans, what the rest of him might look like without clothes.
Unfortunately for Bonnie, and all the rest of the divorced cougars in town, Billy Kasch was gayer than a Fire Island vacation. He just hadn’t come out of the closet… and didn’t plan on doing it anytime soon.
2
Billy ran across the street to the parking garage. He lived in a nice, if small, apartment in downtown Dunsany, right in the middle of the art district, which locals had called Bohemian Boulevard since the late 1920’s. He’d chosen the apartment for its location, being an amateur painter, despite the fact that the ever-present crowds and congested traffic sometimes wore on his nerves.
The parking garage attendant, a friendly old fellow with curly white hair named Morrisey, waved to Billy as he jogged through the gate.
Billy nodded back.
He rode the elevator to Level 3, tapping his toe impatiently, then made his way to his space, digging the keys to his Scion tC from his front pocket.
It took fifteen minutes to wind his way through the congested downtown traffic, leaning on his horn and waving out the window, and then he was on the express, the needle of the speedometer gliding smoothly up to 75, the city revolving around him like a carousel as he made his way to the studio.
His cell phone rang again and
he answered it.
“Bill?”
“I’m on my way, Al. I got caught in traffic.”
“I tried calling you earlier.”
“No signal.”
“Oh. Well… we’re all here waiting.”
“I know. I’m sorry. There must have been an accident or something. I’ll be there in just a minute. I’m passing the Lexington Avenue exit as we speak.”
“All right. Be careful. See you in a bit.”
“Bye.”
Billy snapped his cellphone closed and slid it back into the pocket of his tee shirt. He hated lying to his friend. Billy had been pals with Allen since high school, the two of them drawn together by a mutual interest in the occult. They were the founding members of the Ghost Scouts, only back in high school they had called themselves the Ghoul Gang. That was after Jane joined up, making their duo a trio, and their mutual interest more like a club.
Billy smiled at the memories: the three of them wandering through Dunsany’s cemeteries and abandoned buildings, trying to cajole the spirits into speaking or otherwise making themselves known, armed with flashlights and a Polaroid and his mom’s tape deck. There had been something primeval and sexual about those nights, the three of them alone together in the dark, excited and scared, Billy and Jane both secretly lusting after their unofficial leader, and Allen oblivious to it all.
Sex and death was a heady combination.
Al still didn’t know that Jane had had a crush on him for years, or that Billy was gay. He was too obsessed with finding the Proof, that one piece of incontrovertible evidence that would prove to the world—and to Allen himself—that there was life after death.
Billy took the next exit, braked at the stoplight at the end of the off ramp and made a left. The sun glared in his eyes and he grabbed his sunglasses from the visor and threw them on. It was a beautiful, bright summer morning, bumper-to-bumper traffic, the sidewalks full of pedestrians in shorts and bright floral shirts, the parks swarming with children, dogs leaping for Frisbees, the whole cliché.
He saw the upper floors of WDBS, rising above the park in the distance. Ghost Scouts Productions leased a studio and several offices from the local television station. They maintained a storefront in town as a fictional “headquarters” but the Ghost Scout HQ was really just a souvenir shop, where fans of the show could buy GS related memorabilia and have their pictures taken next to life-size standups of their favorite cast members. Billy had only visited their fictitious headquarters a few times since the network purchased and remodeled the building for the program. Before that, it was a day-old bakery. His Gramma used to buy pastries there. Scenes depicting them in their headquarters, like the one they were filming today, were actually shot in a conference room inside the WDBS building.
Billy passed a billboard promoting Ghost Scouts and WDBS’s Channel 7 Action News Team. He barely registered the twenty foot high photo of him and Allen and Jane, shining their flashlights around some dark haunted house, their expressions ranging from nervous (Jane) to stoic (Allen). NEW SEASON STARTS AUGUST 29th AT 9:00 PM ON DISCOVERY! The billboard proclaimed. On the right side of the billboard was a photo of the Channel 7 news team and a reminder that Action News was on every night at 5:00 and 10:00 PM.
Billy flew by the billboard. On the opposite side was an advertisement for a national chain of jewelry stores: RENDER HER SPEECHLESS!
He stopped at the broadcast station’s security gate, waited for the guard to let him through, and then he was sliding into his reserved parking space next to Allen’s smoky gray Jag.
He killed the engine, ran across the tarmac and into the foyer of the WDBS building. Down the hall. Up the elevator. Down another hall. Room 217.
Tish peeked out the door and saw him coming, ducked back into the conference room to let everyone know the caboose had finally caught up with the rest of the train. He pushed inside right behind her, grinning apologetically.
“Sorry, guys,” he said, as the gang booed and hissed, and Little Dan shot a paper football at him.
The paper football hit him in the forehead and went spinning away, and Little Dan jumped from his seat, holding his arms up in a “score!” gesture.
Tish laughed shrilly, returning to her place at the mahogany conference table. She was the newest addition to the team, and smoking hot, but T&A wasn’t really his bag, baby.
Allen was sitting at the head of the table with his arms crossed. Jane, to his right, was flipping through a stack of papers in a manila folder. Feeling like a total jerk, Billy circled around past Big Dan and Little Dan and Tish and Jane and Allen, and took his customary seat to Allen’s left. He saw that the cameras were already recording.
Allen frowned at him, touched his lower lip as if to ask: How’d you get the fat lip?
Billy smiled and shrugged: Long story.
He’d already decided he was going to say he’d gotten into a bar fight. That would satisfy the guys. Jane would know better, but she had never been one to blab. She hadn’t since he’d told her his secret, and that was when they were still in high school.
“Now that we’re finally all present and accounted for, shall we begin?” Raj said in his deep-pitched and butterscotch smooth voice.
3
Raj was looking cool and collected today, dressed in white cotton pants and a blousy light blue shirt with a cloud and seashells print. His full name was Rajanikanta Chandramouleeswaran, but in the interest of sparing his companions some very twisted tongues, he just had everyone call him Raj. He was a tall, slender Indian with skin as dark as the mahogany table everyone was sitting at and an unruly shock of black curly hair.
Raj was considered one of the Ghost Scout’s founding four, though he had joined the gang a year after Jane, and despite the fact that he had nearly always acted as more of a coordinator rather than an active investigator. In the early days, when they were fresh out of high school, he’d been in charge of equipment. Later, he took the role of web designer and had programmed and maintained their website and forums. Now he was technically their director-producer, as well as acting as a liaison with the head honchos at the Discovery Network, managing the team’s location shoots and improvising the docu-drama aspects of the show.
He smiled serenely as Billy took his seat, then said, “First of all, I’d like to thank you all for coming in on such short notice, even Billy, who is late as usual. I know we’re supposed to be on summer hiatus, but we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to investigate one of the most infamous haunted houses in the world. Unfortunately, the owner of the property has given us a very narrow window during which the location will be available to us.”
Raj continued: “The network is very keen to have us investigate this property. The new owner has assured the producers that this will be a one-time exclusive. No other paranormal investigation show will have access to the Forester House, and after we finish filming, the property will undergo extensive remodeling. In essence, we will be documenting this house-- with all its fearsome history—for posterity. For that reason, we will be staying for at least a day-and-a-half. The network boys want us to get enough footage for a two hour special. If we catch anything interesting, they plan to promote this episode heavily. Maybe even hold it back for the season eight finale. The Forester House, as you all know, is right up there with the Winchester House, the Borden House, Lalaurie Mansion…”
To Billy’s left, Allen uncrossed his arms and asked, “Why now, and why the hurry?”
Raj nodded toward Allen. “The Forester House has recently changed ownership. The former owner, Mrs. Delilah Forester, recently passed away, and her grandnephew Robert has been deeded the estate. Despite its reputation, he has decided to occupy the property. He plans to remodel it from the ground up while in residence. Why he’s in a hurry to do it is anyone’s guess. Perhaps he needs the money. He asked the network for a rather large sum for the privilege of investigating the home. Apparently, the house is all he inherited. The family fortune has long since dried up.�
��
“Maybe he has a death wish,” Tish spoke up from the other side of the table. Everyone glanced at her and she shrugged. “Everyone knows about this house’s reputation,” she went on, looking directly toward one of the cameras. “The new owner has to know about all the stuff that’s gone on there in the past.”
“He may not,” Jane said, pushing her hornrim glasses up her nose. “And if he does, he may not believe there’s a supernatural explanation for it. We shouldn’t assume that any phenomena we encounter in the house is supernatural in nature.”
Big Dan, who was their lead cameraman, interjected, “Well I don’t know nothing about this place. Why don’t you guys fill me in before you give me the heebie jeebies?” The stocky strawberry blond settled back in his chair as if bracing for a blow.
Raj looked toward Jane. “Jane?”
Jane Rivers nodded absently as she rose from her seat, still shuffling through the stack of papers in front of her. She pushed her long brown hair back behind an ear and started around the conference table, passing a thin stapled handout to everyone present.
Billy took his. At the top, in a large black font, was the title THE FORESTER HOUSE. Below that was a grainy photo of the structure. It was a tall, gothic structure, angular and forbidding, sitting upon a rugged hilltop surrounded by dark woodland. It definitely looked haunted!
“I’ve only had time to do some cursory research on the house,” Jane explained as she finished passing out the documents. She returned to her seat and smiled at everyone distractedly. “However, I can tell you this. It would be a huge understatement to say that this house has a history.”
Raj took a seat at the conference table and looked to Jane expectantly.
Jane lifted a printout in front of her and began to read. “The Forester House was built in 1883 by a Scottish immigrant named John Forester. I haven’t been able to find much information on Mr. Forester before his arrival in the States, but there are some rumors that he fled from Argyleshire, Scotland to escape the law. I don’t know if it’s true, or what crime he supposedly committed, but he had enough money when he arrived to purchase a huge tract of land in Southern Illinois from the United States government during some kind of federal land sale. Let’s see… he arrived in the States sometime around 1875, got married to a woman named Clara Trigg in 1880, and it says here that he designed and built the house himself, using timber cut from the forest surrounding the construction area. Sometime around 1890, one of his children vanished into the wilderness and was never found, though the people in the neighboring town searched for the boy for several days. Shortly after that, and for reasons unknown, John Forester murdered his wife with an axe, then hung himself from the rafters in the attic of his home. He was survived by two children, a boy and a girl.”