by Jason Brant
“And cut,” Travis said. He and Joey shared a high five. “Nice! More than one murder on the same altar - great touch.”
Bryan lowered the camera from his shoulder and stood up, shaking his head. “You guys are ridiculous.”
“Yes we are. And it’s made us filthy rich,” Travis said. “What time is it?”
“Eleven,” Bryan said, looking at his watch.
“What do you know, it’s beer thirty,” Travis said. He and Joey pushed past Bryan, hitting both of his shoulders with theirs.
Deep breaths. Bryan kept thinking that over and over, afraid of what he might say to them otherwise. He looked around and saw Kyle standing by Ben’s workstation, glaring at the nerdy production manager.
On the other side of the church, Katie had stopped analyzing the wall, but now inspected the floor directly in front of it. His curiosity couldn’t be contained anymore, so he sat the camera down on the altar and walked over to her.
Bryan stood behind her, watching as she ran her fingers along the stones directly in front of the rear wall. Occasionally, she’d stop and push on the mortar between them, other times tapping them. She moved methodically, checking every inch of floor as she went.
“Are you looking for a secret trapdoor?” Bryan asked.
“Yes,” she said, without turning around. “This is a false wall.”
Bryan’s eyes opened wide and his mouth popped open. He hadn’t expected her to say yes to that. The idea of a crummy, abandoned church having a secret room almost seemed comical to him.
“I was just kidding.”
“I’m not. When we were outside I visually estimated the length of the church, and then I did the same when we entered.” She continued sliding her fingers along the base of the wall as she spoke. “The back of the building appeared to be at least twenty-five feet beyond the last window in the wall while we were outside the building. From the inside, it looks closer to fifteen feet.”
Bryan watched her work, thoroughly impressed that she had noticed so many details about the place. He had been too busy complaining about Travis, Joey, and people’s stupid beliefs in the supernatural. She had been doing her job, and analyzing the church.
“So this wall is either ten feet thick, or there is something behind it,” Bryan said. He looked at the wall to his left, trying to guess the distances between the walls and windows. The windows did seem to be off center.
Katie straightened her legs, but remained bent at the waist, tracing her hands up the surface of the wall. Bryan couldn’t help but check her out as she worked, her backside sticking in the air.
“Don’t stare at my ass,” she said.
“I wasn’t!”
“Of course you were. Now come over here and help me, I think I’ve figured this out.”
Chapter 10
Everyone gathered around Katie, except Ben, who never strayed from his workstation, and listened as she explained what she’d found.
“I knew from the moment we stepped inside that this was a false wall. For the past few hours I’ve been searching for a lever or fulcrum of some sort – anything that would open a hidden door,” she said. Though she spoke to everyone, she maintained eye contact with Bryan through most of her explanation.
“Obviously, I didn’t find anything. There are no evident cracks or gaps in the mortar holding the stones together, and the floor and wall seem to be properly sealed together.”
“Yeah, yeah, get to the goddamn point. We have a lot more crap to film tonight and then I want to get outta here,” Travis said. He popped the tab on another can of beer as he spoke.
Katie ignored him. “When tapping on the stones in the wall, however, they produce a different sound on the back wall, than they do on any of the others. This leads me to believe that the false wall is thinner than the rest.” She stopped and looked at everyone as if waiting for them to finish her thought.
No one said anything.
“That means that whatever is behind here has been sealed in such a way that it would not be readily accessible, or discoverable, but could be reopened if necessary.”
Everyone stood in silence.
“Wow. What I’m saying is that we can knock it down. The false wall is built correctly, but with thinner materials. It should be fairly simple to break apart with a couple of hammers.”
“Let me pull some tools out of my ass and we’ll get started,” Creepy Joey said.
Katie turned her attention on him, and it was immediately evident that he didn’t want it. He averted his eyes like a dominated dog, staring at the floor. “I brought some,” she said. “The next time you feel like speaking to me, don’t.”
Travis smiled broadly at her threat. He seemed to relish the tension between them. Turning around, he looked back at Ben’s workstation.
“How’s the feed from all of the helmet cams?”
“Good to go,” Ben called from across the room.
“All right, let’s get your hammers and see what we can find,” Travis said.
Kyle stood at the wall, tapping on it with his knuckles. “I don’t think we’ll need them. The mortar is pretty thin here.” He took a step back and kicked the wall.
Dust and dirt cascaded down as Kyle kicked at it again and again, a large section of the wall bowing with each impact. His foot punched through on the fourth kick, his leg going knee deep into the wall.
“See? No big deal,” he said, pulling his foot free.
Travis leaned over to Bryan, but kept his eyes on Kyle as he continued to kick stones free. “What the hell do you feed him?”
“Short, arrogant, asshole television hosts,” Bryan said with a straight face.
The sound of more large rocks breaking free and landing on the floor blocked out most of the vulgarities Travis spewed out.
Kyle finally stepped away, waving his hands in the air to clear the cloud of dust. He’d opened a four foot wide hole that started about three feet above the floor. They would have to step over a section of the wall, but it was big enough for all of them to get through.
Katie stepped forward, intent on being the first to explore the new area.
“Whoa there, author lady,” Travis said, putting his hand up in a stop gesture. “This is our show; we have to be the ones that go first.”
“Stick your show up your ass.” Katie stood by the hole, shining her powerful flashlight inside. She blew at the dust swirling in front of her face and squinted into the darkness. “Interesting,” she said and then stepped through the wall.
Kyle looked back at Bryan and shrugged his shoulders. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket, started his flashlight app, and stepped through. Travis and Joey shared a glance before turning to Bryan.
“Grab the camera from the altar and follow us in. We can cut around them already being in there,” Joey said.
Bryan let out a long sigh, but didn’t feel like arguing, so he went back and grabbed the camera. He switched it on and went through the process of turning the light on, adjusting the zoom and focus, and framing his two least favorite people through the viewfinder.
They looked at him impatiently and he gave them a nod when he depressed the record button.
“You just witnessed the Specter Slayers uncovering a hidden room at the legendary Danver Church. Now we ask that you hold onto your loved ones and pray for our safety. We’re about to enter a hidden room with untold possibilities,” Joey said. “Perhaps we’ll find the bodies of those who disappeared so many decades ago.” He turned and looked into the hole with a somber look on his face.
Travis gave Joey a slight nod and stepped through. Creepy Joey followed, his soft stomach scraping along the stones as he squirmed into the hole. Bryan went in last, careful not to bounce the camera off any hard surfaces.
Though the primary area of the church had very low light, the hidden room had none outside of their flashlights. Bryan brought the camera back to his shoulder and used the mounted light to see his surroundings.
The room appeared
to be a simple office or library. Shelves full of old, dusty books covered the walls with a small desk pushed against the far right corner. Several candles lined the edges of the table, most of the wax melted into hardened puddles.
“A goddamn library? We broke down a wall to find some stupid books?” Travis asked.
Katie stood by the desk, gently pulling a thick book from a shelf. Her eyes were wide open and her lips parted as she carefully opened the cover. “I knew it,” she whispered to herself.
“What is this?” Kyle asked. He looked questioningly at the volumes that surrounded them. “Who closed this off?”
“The information in these texts is very dangerous,” Katie said as she placed the book back on its shelf. “At least that’s what Charles Danver thought.”
Bryan moved his face away from the viewfinder and watched Katie’s expression as she moved around the room. She seemed to know significantly more than she let on. At first, he had been deeply impressed at how easily she’d discovered the secret room, but now he wondered if she already knew its location when they arrived.
He decided to wait until they were alone to approach her. The last thing he wanted was another fight between her and Travis.
“What do you mean, dangerous?” Kyle asked. Though he seemed disappointed to find a room full of books, his interest picked up when he heard they weren’t safe.
“This is the most complete set of archaic, occult texts I’ve ever seen. They’re supposed to contain the knowledge of old gods and powers forgotten by history.”
“We’re going back to see Ben. Hopefully we can do some fancy editing and make this room look scarier than a stupid ass library,” Travis said. He gave the room one more disgusted glance and then left through the makeshift door. Joey followed without saying anything.
Bryan dropped the camera from his shoulder, but kept the mounted light turned on. He looked toward the top of the false wall and saw the stained glass window depicting the ocean at night. That’s why the image is so dark in that one, so nobody can see through it or they would be able to tell there is another room here.
“So Charles Danver collected these and stored them here so he could perform rituals from them?” Bryan asked Katie.
“There were accusations that he had stolen several from personal collectors when they refused to sell them to him. This room is clearly the reason they were never recovered.”
Kyle stood by one of the shelves, rubbing his finger along the spine of a book, wiping decades of dust from it. “What languages are these in?”
“Sumerian, Egyptian, Hebrew, Assyrian - who knows what else.” She continued studying the book on the desk. “They’re all worth a fortune, so please don’t touch them.”
“Sorry,” Kyle said, retracting his hand.
The light on the camera Bryan held dimmed significantly, pulsed a few times, and died. “And there goes my only light.” He gave it a few cursory smacks, not because he thought it would help, but just to make himself feel better.
He looked out through the hole in the wall, making sure that the morons were still at Ben’s makeshift desk. Travis and Joey stood behind him, pointing at the monitors. Satisfied, Bryan reached up and felt for the power button on the back of his helmet camera. He switched it off and walked over to Kyle, who stood with his back to him, and turned his off as well.
“Dude, what are you doing?” Kyle asked.
“Leave it off. We need to talk.”
Kyle’s eyes narrowed as he looked over Bryan’s face. “What’s up?”
“Someone isn’t telling us everything,” Bryan said.
Katie stopped turning the pages of the book and slowly straightened her back, standing to her full height. She turned and faced them, exuding her usual confidence.
“What would you like to know?”
“Are you really here to research a book?” Bryan asked.
“Yes.”
“Is that the only reason you’re here?”
“No.”
“Oh come on. This is going to take all night if you keep giving me one word answers.”
“Fine.”
Bryan let out a heavy sigh and shook his head.
“You love being a pain in the ass, don’t you? Don’t answer that – it was rhetorical. You knew about this room before you even got here, didn’t you?”
“I hoped so, but I didn’t know for certain. I’ve looked for Danver’s private book collection for years. This church was the only place I hadn’t checked.”
Bryan scanned her face, looking for any kind of sign that she might be lying.
“OK, I believe you. What the hell were they doing here? Trying to conjure something?”
She leaned against the desk and took a deep breath. “That’s what I’m trying to find out. I’ve been researching the occult for years now. My new book has to do with demonology, or at least it did, and I’m known for making the fantastical elements of my stories seem plausible by backing them up with as many facts as I can. Once I started digging around, I found that many of the famous texts I sought had been missing for over forty years.”
“Because Danver took them,” Kyle said.
“That’s what I found out later. I went through what information I could get my hands on. I began to notice many similarities throughout them – things that seemed like coincidences at first.”
It hit Bryan like a punch to the stomach. The article he’d read on Katie Upshaw hadn’t been about her signing a new book deal, but about her not fulfilling the deal. She missed multiple deadlines and her publisher had demanded they receive the seven figure advance they’d given her as a part of their contract. Her attorney tried for months, but had been unable to contact her.
Family and friends hadn’t heard from her in weeks. They said she’d so immersed herself in the research of a new book that she had completely segregated herself from everyone. This wasn’t entirely uncommon for her, but they stated that it had never lasted for more than a few days at a time.
Her increasingly bizarre and erratic behavior led to the article that Bryan had seen in Entertainment Weekly. He was far from a Katie Upshaw fan and had only skimmed through the article.
He looked at her anew, wondering if the woman he was stuck in the middle of Appalachia with could be classified as crazy. Who turned their back on a million dollar deal so they could read some old books?
“−but they all seemed to point here,” she said.
Bryan cleared his head. “Sorry, what seemed to point here?”
“If you aren’t going to listen to me, then why are you asking questions?”
“Yeah, Bryan, pay attention,” Kyle said, jabbing him in the ribs.
“I was saying that what information I was able to dig up pointed to this location as a point of interest in occult folklore.”
“This church is mentioned in ancient texts? No way. It can’t be more than one or two hundred years old,” Bryan said.
“Not the building. The land it’s built upon.”
“So what’s so significant about it?”
“I don’t know. The detailed works I looked for were all gone, stolen by the late Charles Danver. I’ve been scrounging around, trying to find any scraps he may have missed that could clue me into the importance of this area.”
“So when the old man killed himself last week, you jumped at the chance to search the church,” Kyle said. The goofy grin on his face told Bryan that he was rather pleased with himself for that piece of deduction.
“Yes.”
“But the Specter Slayers beat you to the punch and had already secured the exclusive rights to the property,” Bryan said. “So you had to pay them a ton of money to let you join them.”
“Yes.”
“Yo! Get out here! We have work to do! And what the hell is wrong with your cameras? We aren’t getting any signal from them,” Travis yelled from the front of the chapel.
Bryan and Kyle ignored him.
“So what do you think they were doing up here? Wh
at happened to everyone that came with Danver, but never left? Why was he missing one of his hands?” Kyle asked.
“That’s what I plan to find out - hopefully tonight, if enough of these books are in English.”
“Is there anything else you aren’t telling us?” Bryan asked.
Katie hesitated for moment as if she were contemplating whether to continue or not. “In the research I was able to accomplish, two things were continually mentioned as significant: this exact location and this exact date. I don’t believe Danver killed himself because of the shame of the anniversary of murdering his friends. I think he took his own life because he feared whatever is supposed to happen on this date.”
Chapter 11
Bryan and Kyle sat on one of the benches by the altar. In silence, they watched the flame of a lit candle dance about to an unheard tune. They’d taken a handful of candles from the hidden room and had placed them on the shrine to supply a little extra light. Kyle didn’t want to continue using his phone as a flashlight because his battery was already half empty.
When they’d left the hidden room, the stench had struck them like a slap to the face. The closer they moved to the center of the church, the stronger it became. It had slipped from Bryan’s mind as they looked over the massive collection of books in the back, but he found himself struggling to breathe through his mouth once again.
Now they sat there, recording EVPs for the Specter Slayers. Bryan had seen this kind of thing performed in movies or TV shows before, and found it patently ridiculous. Why a ghost could only be heard on electronic recording devices never made any sense to him.
This was apparently a function that they included in every episode, so here they sat in silence, staring at the digital recorder that sat on the altar. Kyle held the boom microphone in his lap. Bryan wore the headphones that were connected to the mic, but wasn’t listening for anything in particular.
Instead, he contemplated what Katie had said. Though he didn’t say anything to her face, it occurred to him that her behavior was similar to that of Charles Danver himself. He had learned of some great significance regarding this area, and had abandoned his life in pursuit of that knowledge. Now the famous author Katie Upshaw seemed to be following the same path.