Chapter Ten
Horeland Estate seemed eerier in the night.
A row of exterior lights illuminated artistically chosen points on the façade, giving the monstrosity a surreal, supernatural glow. The aged shutters made the windows look like eyes, but the creepiest part was knowing that there was someone watching from them. Even from inside the car, I got a sense of his gaze on us — questioning and calculating.
I pulled the Jeep as close to the door as I could to unload our equipment. Past experience had shown us the infrared camera cases were heavy to carry long distances, and when Vespers broke one — the case, thankfully, not the camera — we reevaluated our habits.
“This spirit is unhinged,” I told them as we filed from the Jeep. “I wasn’t here long, but in the short time I was, he went from nice to mean in two seconds. I think you both need to wear your magnets tonight.”
“That’s gonna cause problems with the investigation,” Vespers whined, stomping a Birkenstock on the concrete. She was in an ankle-length, green tie-dyed skirt, even though I’d repeatedly told her it would get her in trouble one day when she had to fight off a spirit. “He’s just a ghost.”
“He could be an Earthbound,” I told her grimly. “Do you want to be pushed down the stairs if he’s feeling frisky?”
After the fresh experience of the Albert Street house, Vespers shuddered. “You’re right.”
“We can’t be flippant with our own safety.”
“Says the star offender.” Trevor chuckled, heading for the trunk.
Madison opened the front door as we were unloading. She was in a pair of plaid pajama pants and an oversized “Tory County Country Club” T-shirt. For a brief moment, she looked like my older sister again: the girl who woke me up on Saturday mornings with pancakes and sausage, and we would get the couch sticky with syrup as we watched cartoons. I felt a pang for those days, when life was simpler and neither of us had other obligations sucking our time dry.
“Is Jacob home?” I asked her, draping a duffel bag over my shoulder.
“No. I sent him to a friend’s house for the night. He wasn’t interested in being around for this.”
I laughed. “And you are?”
Madison wrapped her skinny arms around herself. “I’m not afraid, if that’s what you mean. I know you won’t let anything hurt me.”
From the other side of the Jeep came Vespers’s whispered, “Aww…” followed by a low admonishment, presumably from Trevor.
“You’re right. I won’t let anything hurt you,” I agreed. It was the closest we’d come to a loving family moment in years.
“Where do you want me?” Madison asked as she stepped back to let me in the door. “I don’t want to get in the way.”
“Where do you feel safe in the house?” I asked, crossing the threshold to the living room. “Or ideally, where is the least amount of activity?”
“My bedroom.”
“Then that’s where I want you.”
She nodded once. “Okay. Come get me if you need me.”
Just to seal the loving family moment we’d had, I leaned over and kissed her cheek. It was awkward, and she turned her face too far so I ended up getting a space somewhere near her ear. But we tried.
I listened to her footsteps shuffle away. Through the open front door, I heard the murmur of my friends’ voices. I was alone in the living room.
I slid my case and notebook on the coffee table and sat on the couch. Closing my eyes, I took two deep breaths, reaching for… something. But I couldn’t find him. Not even a whisper of his signature. The strange humming sensation I’d gotten from the fireplace the day before seemed muted tonight.
Where was he?
A moment later, Vespers and Trevor lugged their own equipment into the living room, where I was already unpacking one of the infrareds.
“Where’s the sheet?” Trevor asked, glancing around the room.
Before any job, we gathered info on where the most activity took place inside the home so that we could plan what cameras and recorders would go where. At Starbucks, I’d mapped out a sheet for Horeland while I was listening to audios from the Albert Street investigation. We’d almost finished analyzing the place. Thank goodness for Trevor coming home; we’d overbooked ourselves big time this weekend.
“On the coffee table,” I told him, pointing without looking.
I plugged the cord into one infrared, and then heard, “Boss, it ain’t here.”
“What do you mean? I just put it there!” I sat the camera down and stomped to his side.
The coffee table was empty.
“So it has begun,” Vespers intoned, clicking on an audio recorder and setting it on the coffee table.
I rolled my eyes at her theatrics. I should have known I was in trouble when she decided to go for a degree in theater.
We looked all around the table and the living room, but my notebook was MIA. It wasn’t the end of the investigation; the outline was just that — an outline. I easily recalled my plans, and began to divvy up responsibilities accordingly.
“The fireplace is a source,” I told them, eyeing the decorated marble. “I want an infrared trained on it, and an audio on the mantle.”
“What about an EMF?” Trevor asked, already placing the audio recorder on the mantle. Well-oiled machine, we were.
I shook my head. “No. I know the fireplace is a source, so the EMF would be off the charts, and for no analytical reason at all. Let’s save them for other locations within the house. The office and the main stairwell. I want video recording on all hallways and stairwells, including the basement and attic.”
General consensus among the paranormal community was that activity was often at its best in places like doorways and stairwells. I concurred, and added hallways to that list. Consider it like this — a doorway, stairwell, or hallway was nothing more than a portal in which a living person passed from one room to the next. For ghosts, especially those spirits not Earthbound and free to pass between the two realms, these echoes of the living formed true portals in which they could exit their world and enter ours.
We caught a lot of cool stuff in portals.
Even though there were only three of us, we worked well together. Within twenty minutes, we had the hotspots hooked up to the grid and were ready to start.
“Same deal as usual,” I said as we pow-wowed at the base of the stairs. “We’ll do our initial walk through together, then split up. Vespers, got your audio?”
She waggled the recorder.
“Trevor, full spectrum camera?”
“Can you miss it?” he quipped. It wasn’t a small contraption dangling around his neck.
“Yeah, yeah. I just like to cover my bases. Let’s get a move on.”
Our system had always worked for us. Our initial walk-through was done together — clockwise from the left of the front door, and then any subsequent floors the same way. As we walked, we’d discuss anything that might need further investigation in each room, and I’d make notes for us to refer to once we went our separate ways. As we moved, we also killed all the lights.
In the dark, Horeland Estate was creepy. Not that it wasn’t creepy in the daylight, of course, what with the ghost pretending to have a sun allergy. In my experience, it wasn’t necessarily the lack of light that caused or magnified ghostly activity. If something was going to happen, it’d likely happen whether the lights were on or not. But as human beings, we were hardwired to fear the dark. Millions of years ago, things in the dark had claws and fangs and preyed upon us. Today, criminals hid in the dark places of the world, raping, robbing, and murdering.
In a house like Horeland Estate, an Earthbound could harm us in the dark.
“Do you feel him yet?” Vespers asked me as we passed into the kitchen.
I shook my head. “No. This dude is one of the hardest spirits I’ve ever tried to pinpoint. One minute, he’s there, he feels alright like he’s not bothered by death or by us, and then bam, there’s nothing but hate, anger, and a
seething desire to make someone pay.”
“So what you’re saying is we have a bipolar spirit on our hands?” Trevor piped in.
I rolled my eyes. “Leave it to you to psycho-analyze a dead guy.”
By the time we finished our tour, I had nothing more than I’d had before. The house was suspiciously quiet and empty.
“Keep your radios on and keep in touch,” I reminded Vespers and Trevor as we prepared to split up. Both had their magnet necklaces on. “Safety first, kids. I’m not sure about this silence.”
Vespers was heading for the first floor, I would do the second, and Trevor the third. We’d reconvene in a couple hours and do the basement and attic together.
I mounted the stairs feeling kinda dejected. I usually felt more than this. In most investigations, I knew intimate details about the ghosts involved just by being in the same house with them. I didn’t know why I had “psychic ghost powers” as Vespers called them, but they’d never let me down like this before.
Of course, there was always the possibility he didn’t want to be seen. A spirit needed serious manpower to manifest. If he didn’t want to be seen, he wouldn’t bother trying.
I turned on my camera in the hallway. I wasn’t a fan of the nightvision or the infrared, so Vespers and Trevor usually used those. I liked a normal recorder with a tiny green guide light.
I moved into the first room — a spare bedroom. One of a dozen in this house. I wasn’t much of a talker when I investigated, not like my partners who asked inane questions in the hope someone would answer. I understood the sentiment behind it, of course, and when we walked together, I took part; it just wasn’t my thing.
I skirted furniture, my recorder held in front of my body like a weapon or a guide. There was nothing to indicate a presence; with the source oddly silent, it seemed as if the spirit wasn’t even in the house.
That would suggest a simple Shade and not an Earthbound.
I circled the hallway, checking each bedroom to no avail. I felt nothing and saw nothing. Trevor and Vespers checked in fifteen minutes later, and their conclusions were the same.
I stuck my head into Madison’s bedroom, squinting in the light coming from her bedstand.
She jumped, a manicured hand fluttering to her chest. “Jesus, Boston. You scared me.”
“Just checking in.”
Madison waved the book she held in one hand. “Reading. I’m fine. Have you found anything yet?”
I shook my head. “Not yet. The house is quiet tonight.”
Madison laid the book on her lap. She looked mussed but pretty sitting up in bed with glasses on and blankets covering her legs. “It’s always quiet when we have a large group of people over. Dinner parties go off without a hitch.”
I bit my lip, considering this new piece of info. “The ghost is comfortable with dinner parties.”
“It would make sense if he was a Horeland,” Madison offered. “The Horelands have always been social.”
“Doesn’t help our investigation, damn it.”
Madison smiled. “Sorry.”
I left her to her book, heading next door to her office.
I had high hopes for the office, remembering the signature around her laptop the day before, but I wasn’t going to hold my breath, either. Tonight was turning out to be a big bust. Not every investigation yielded results. If the Horeland ghost really was a previous socialite, he was likely riding a high from the dinner party and wanted nothing to do with us.
The office was cooler than the hallway. I closed the door behind me and stood still for a moment, pushing my senses away from my body, searching for him.
Still nothing.
I walked over the plush carpet to Madison’s laptop, panning the camera over it as I slid my other hand across the smooth surface. Nope, nothing.
The curtain was still open from my visit the day before. I looked out over the grounds, lit by a pale half moon. The yard looked like a moonscape, everything glowing until I couldn’t separate objects from one another. Even my Jeep looked like the Mars rover.
“This is fucking weird,” I told the window.
My first ghost hunt had been when I was sixteen. Some friends caught wind of my supposed powers, and a guy named Victor Petty offered his house as an experiment.
He lived in a split-level in a fairly new part of Tory. He and his parents were experiencing some poltergeist-type activities: doors slamming, objects flying.
The minute I stepped into the house, I froze. There was blood on the foyer floor, just beneath the stairs. “What’s that?” I asked, horrified.
Victor had followed my gaze, then glanced back at me, confused. “What’s what?”
He didn’t see it.
He also didn’t see his grandmother when I found her sitting in the living room, a ghostly pair of knitting needles in hand. Grandma was a very chatty Shade with blue hair and kind brown eyes. Her welcoming energy infused the house like an oil burner.
“Well, I sure don’t mean to scare them when I move things!” Grandma Petty had squeaked. “I just want them to pay attention to me.”
Once word got out that I’d spoken to Victor’s dead grandma — and seen the bloodstain from where she’d fallen down the steps, cracked her head, and died — I was notorious. Neighbors came out of the woodwork for me to visit their houses. Unfortunately, a great lot of them were hoping I could connect them with people they’d lost.
Not everyone who dies sticks around.
But my investigations were always like that first trip to Victor’s house. I saw things and sensed things no one else could.
So why was I having so much trouble with Horeland Estate?
I sighed. “Where are you?”
I laid my head against the window, staring at the moon. It had no answers for me.
The temperature dropped so fast it was like I’d been dunked in a frozen river. I straightened, sensing his presence behind me.
I turned around, my heart pounding.
He was there.
Chapter Eleven
I gaped. Literally, mouth open quite unattractively.
He was gorgeous. Medium-length ash blonde hair smoothed back from his face; fair-complexion right down to ethereal eyebrows; and rosy red lips that made an almost perfect bow. I wasn’t great with period attire, but he definitely wasn’t from the twentieth century in his knee boots, cotton pants, and vest.
And he looked very, very real.
Earthbound.
The spirit smirked. “You look as if you have seen a ghost.”
My surprise disappeared with his bad joke. I grimaced. “Oh, come on. Really?”
Chuckling, he shrugged. “Apologies. I have little else to amuse me. You are the first in a very long time to see me.”
“You’re an Earthbound.” I shook my head. “Anybody you want could see you.”
He clasped his hands behind his back. “I do not want just anybody to see me. What is this ‘Earthbound’ of which you speak?”
Great. Nobody told me I’d be educating ghosts on their own kind. “An Earthbound is a spirit who cohabits with the living. You can move things and interact with the living in ways regular spirits usually can’t.”
“I was unaware there were varying degrees of being deceased.” He said it with a smile to show it was lighthearted.
“But if you’re Earthbound, I should have felt you immediately,” I went on, less talking to him and more to myself. “I never miss Earthbounds. I’m cursed to be bothered with them. Your signature is all over the place, like an unattached spirit trying to cling to this world and the next.”
“Signature? And how do you mean you should have felt me?”
“You ask a lot of questions for a dead guy.”
“You pose a lot of confusing notions for a living girl,” he retorted.
Man, this guy gave as good as he got.
“Pray tell, what are you and your companions doing in my home with those… contraptions?” He waved at the video camera in my h
and.
I’d forgotten I still held it. I lifted it to catch him on video, but found the screen black. “You son of a bitch! You fried my camera!”
He lifted an eyebrow. “I would ask that you not belittle my mother, God rest her soul.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s an expression. I mean your mother no disrespect. But jeez, back up or something. Your field is outrageous.”
“Again with ‘field’? Would you care to elaborate what it is you’re blathering on about?”
For someone who talked funny, he sure could make a girl feel like a jerk.
“Your energy field. The essence that makes you.” I stared at him in a little bit of awe. “You look like a person.”
“I am a person, thank you very much,” he snapped, drawing himself higher. “The simple fact I am deceased does not make you better than me, though I might argue my state of being is infinitely greater than yours.”
I didn’t miss the way his gaze caught on my nose stud, then my bare belly, and finally landed on my knee-high combat boots — my shoes of choice for investigating.
“Hey. I’m not criticizing your choice of clothes,” I said, crossing my arms. “You look like a walk-on in a Jane Austen movie. Could they make those pants any tighter?”
Not that I was genuinely complaining. For a dead guy, he had some serious heat packing in those cotton pantaloons.
“I beg your pardon, but this is the latest in fashion…” he trailed off. Inclining his head in defeat, he murmured, “Well, it was the latest in fashion the year I was murdered.”
“Murdered?” I latched on to the word immediately. “You remember your death?”
“Of course I remember the moment of my death, woman. I’m deceased, not an amnesiac.”
“I liked you better when I couldn’t see you,” I told him wryly.
He inclined his head as if in agreement. Jerk.
“I’ve never met an Earthbound who remembered dying,” I told him. “I haven’t had the chance to talk to many, but I live with one, and she doesn’t remember it. I actually told her how she died.”
“You continue using this word ‘Earthbound,’ when I do wish you would simply refer to me as a person.”
His Haunting Kiss Page 6