Nightmare

by Robin Parrish

  "So what's the story here?"Jordin asked, her eyes peeled and her digital recorder already going.

  "The Myrtles is steeped in Civil War history," I replied. "A Confederate soldier is sometimes seen or heard in this area."

  We circled the gazebo slowly from opposite sides, and then entered to meet in the middle.

  "Snap to, soldier,"Jordin called out. "A Union battalion just arrived! Grab your gun and fall in!"

  I threw her a wicked look.

  "Chill out, Maia," saidjordin. "I'm not teasing it. Just trying to get a real response."

  We didn't stay there long.

  Once we were done at the gazebo, I tried to give Jordin a tour of all the hot spots, and there were many.

  The former slave shack was popular with tourists. Despite its dilapidated exterior, it was used as a private cottage for visitors and was outfitted with modern furnishings inside. We did some recording and moved on to the graveyard. The Myrtles had its own graveyard out on the surrounding land, and most of the headstones were more than a hundred years old. It was a truly creepy location, deathly quiet, but we didn't find anything. We swung through the cobblestone courtyard where Chloe was often seen leaning up against an exterior wall. Again we found nothing and had no other sign of Chloe that evening.

  Long after nightfall, the two of us wandered back through the double front doors, diffused with opaque glass, into the main house, with video cameras, flashlights, and digital audio recorders in hand. We checked out the ladies' parlor and the gentlemen's parlor, expansive and lavish sitting rooms on the first floor. The walls were covered with costly artwork, and each room was filled with antique furniture. The empty space in this bed-and-breakfast was nothing like a traditional hotel. It was more cramped, and though there was room to move around, it seemed that every inch that could be spared was devoted to an endless collection of historic objects and luxurious furnishings. Beautiful multicolored rugs covered the hardwood floors, and elaborate candelabras hung from the ceilings of nearly every room.

  After spending a few minutes in the dining room, we made our way up the old wooden stairs, covered in a long row of red carpet, and slowly went through the empty guest rooms. It didn't escape my notice that aside from a few subdued comments or ghostly provocations, Jordin had not been her usual chatty self all evening. I again wondered if talking about her parents' death that afternoon had dredged up bad memories that wouldn't go away.

  And I couldn't help wondering if her parents' death had something to do with Jordin's obsession with investigating the paranormal.

  Around midnight, we were walking the halls when we thought we heard footsteps in one of the guest rooms ahead. I turned to one door, sure that the sound had originated from there, while Jordin approached the door opposite me.

  Before opening her door, Jordin caught herself. "You're probably right...." she whispered, and spun around to join me.

  Both of us were facing my door when a creaking sound came from behind us.

  I turned quickly but Jordin rotated far more slowly, being the closer one to the source of the sound.

  "Did you ... ?" I whispered.

  She shook her head. "Never touched it."

  The door Jordin had been about to open now stood fully open.

  "Urn," Jordin began, her voice high and jittery, "would you call that an invitation to come in or a warning to go away?"

  I threw her a look to indicate that I didn't know and then plowed straight into the now-open room. I held my video camera high, doing a full 360 of the room. It wasn't until I'd finished that Jordin joined me inside.

  The room was similar in size to the room I was staying in, decorated with quaint historical accoutrements, like a portrait of a stern-looking man hanging on one wall and identical antique flower vases situated on opposite ends of an ancient hardwood bookcase.

  I sat down on the edge of the room's queen-size bed. "Is anybody in here?" I said out loud. "Are you trying to reach out to us?"

  Jordin sat in an antique rocking chair opposite the bed. She held her audio recorder aloft with one hand while pulling out a digital still camera with her other. She began snapping photos of every view of the room she could manage.

  "It's colder in here," she whispered.

  I agreed. "Air's heavy, too. Breathing is a little harder."

  Jordin decided to try her hand at communicating. "Can you do something to let us know you're here? You could move something here in the room, or tap on something, or even touch one of us."

  There was no response.

  "What's your name?" I asked the dark, oppressive room.

  Jordin let out a small gasp.

  "What?" I asked.

  It just-" Jordin's eyes were wide and she was searching the entire room, breathing faster. "It felt like someone touched my hair. Like they wanted to see what it feels like."

  "Maybe they did."

  "Is this level of activity normal?" she asked. "Seems like we've had really good luck on every investigation we've had."

  "No," I said, "this isn't normal. I mean ... we are intentionally visiting places known for their extensive paranormal activity. But we've had exceptional results. If I didn't know better, I might think paranormal activity itself was up-way up-across the board. Either that, or ... well, never mind."

  "What?"

  I squirmed a bit. This wasn't a theory I was eager to put forth. "Sometimes certain people can attract high levels of activity. Like, maybe it's not the place that's haunted-it's the person."

  Jordin looked shocked. "A person can be haunted?"

  I nodded. "But if either of us were, we'd be noticing it all the time. Not just during investigations. Has anything unusual happened to you lately? Like at home?"

  "Not that I've noticed."

  "Me neither. So that leaves us with the raised activity theory-"

  My breath caught in my throat as my eyes fell on the portrait on the wall.

  Jordin followed my gaze. "What?"

  I stared long and hard at the portrait before answering. I had to swallow before I could get any words out. "The man in that photo," I whispered.

  "What about him?" Jordin whispered back.

  "He's ... kind of... smiling," I said, unable to believe my eyes. In all my experiences and travels, this was something I'd never seen before. The edges of the man's lips were curled up just slightly.

  "So?"

  "He was frowning when we first came in."

  Jordin did a double take and rose off of her seat to examine the portrait up close. She took several photos before responding. "Are you sure?"

  I nodded. I was as sure as I was sitting on that bed. But she didn't have to take my word for it. I turned off my video camera and rewound the footage to my circle in place of the room when I entered.

  "Look," I said, pointing at the camera's LCD viewer. The camera never stopped moving, but the image of the portrait was perfectly clear. The man was definitely scowling.

  Jordin let out a shuddering breath and rubbed her arms. "Look at that!" she whispered. "That's crazy!"

  Much as I hated to adopt her terminology, there wasn't another word that did it justice.

  Crazy, indeed.

  The next morning around eleven, I was woken up by Jordin knocking on my door. The knocks became louder, and it wasn't until I feared she might break the door down that I finally roused from the comfortable bed.

  "You have to hear this!" she said, and billowed past me to sit on the edge of my bed.

  "Sure, come on in," I yawned, apparently to myself.

  I sat next to her on the bed and only then realized thatJordin was holding her digital voice recorder in her hand. Her eyes were huge and her complexion pale.

  I was a little nonplussed that she'd already begun reviewing the evidence we gathered last night, having hoped that she would wait until we were back in New York to analyze the data after gaining a little distance from the experience.

  The minute I was seated, she hit the Play button, having alre
ady cued it up to what she wanted me to hear. She had the device turned up so loud that our ears were hit by an unpleasant level of static. But behind the white noise, a deep, throaty voice could be heard.

  "I like the blonde," it growled.

  Now my eyes went wide as I glanced up at Jordin. I was startled for two reasons.

  One, managing to record a disembodied voice that was so clear and easy to understand was all but unheard of. Most recorded voices were garbled at best, and took the trained ears of numerous investigators to come to a consensus on what they might be saying.

  And two, I was a brunette. So the voice could only be describ- ingJordin. Possibly even threatening her.

  "That's one of the best EVPs I've ever heard," I said, suspicious that the recording had been tampered with or our surroundings had been compromised when it was recorded. "Where was it taken?"

  I was pretty sure I knew the answer to that question before she said it.

  "The room with the portrait," she replied.

  It was an amazing piece of evidence if it was legitimate, but Jordin appeared unhinged.

  "Does this freak you out?" I asked.

  She looked at me like I was crazy. "It doesn't freak you out?"

  I'd heard tons of EVPs but I'd never had one that spoke of me personally.

  "I don't feel safe here," she admitted.

  I nodded, understanding. "No problem. It's about time we headed for our next destination anyway. You still want to keep going?"

  "Absolutely," Jordin replied, though she tried unsuccessfully to suppress a shudder as she said it.

  Jordin checked us out while I loaded the rental car. We split the duties to expedite our departure. The longer we were there, the more Jordin looked like she might throw up.

  When she came out to the car, I made up an excuse to duck back inside, claiming to have forgotten something.

  Jordin remained in the car as I approached the front desk and asked about the conditions of our investigation last night.

  The kind woman at the counter-the Myrtles's caretaker and historian, whom we'd arranged our stay with-smiled and assured me that Jordin and I were left completely alone on the premises overnight, just as requested. She winked as she noted that she wouldn't have made such a concession for anybody else, but that my reputation-and that of my parents-made it possible.

  I was sure she would ask about the kind of night we had, to make me ask such a question of her. But she merely smiled and told me I had an open invitation to return anytime.

  I had a feeling that if I ever took her up on the offer, Jordin would sit that trip out.

  "I don't understand why you're not writing this down," said Derek, his voice growing louder with every word.

  He and I sat across the desk from police sergeant Bill Rutherford, an abnormally large, muscular man whose dour, blank expression never wavered as Derek related his story to him. It felt like trying to talk to a pit bull.

  "Her name is Carrie," said Derek, nodding at a blank pad that sat on Sergeant Rutherford's desk. "Carrie. Morris. And she's missing. Just like my fiancee. Jordin. Cole."

  Rutherford had listened carefully to our tale: that less than twelve hours ago, Carrie Morris had gone missing the night after she found a strange symbol on her neck-Rutherford had mumbled something that sounded like "gang-related" when I showed him the picture on my phone-just like Jordin Cole before her.

  Derek had insisted on reporting Carrie's disappearance to the police, but I believed this exercise to be a waste of time. For one thing, we'd already been blown off by a wire-thin elderly woman at the university registrar's office, who had politely recited "dropouts are very common, particularly at the beginning of the school year" as if she were reading it out of a textbook. Apparently it wasn't university policy to consider every person who dropped out without telling their roommate or went off on a drunken road trip to be a missing persons case.

  After hearing that, we hadn't bothered with school security, assuming we'd hear the same line.

  So we ventured out to the local police department, at Derek's insistence and over my protests. I knew in my heart that there would not be a natural explanation forJordin's and Carrie's vanishing. After a strange symbol appeared on their necks. After they'd had a week's worth of vivid nightmares. Something else was at work here.

  But Derek wouldn't hear it.

  "We'd like to file a missing persons report over this," said Derek when Rutherford remained silent, looking bored.

  Rutherford let out a long, worn-out breath and began rummaging through a file drawer in his desk. "Fill out one of these for every person you want to report, then take 'em to the officer at the front desk," he said in a lifeless monotone. "Just be sure to notify us when your friends show up again."

  Derek blinked. "Uh, no. No, no. She's not going to `show up,' because she's mis-sing. As in, abducted. Taken by someone who's still out there and who needs to be stopped!"

  I got up out of my chair. "Come on, Derek." I put a hand on his arm and dragged him out the door while he continued to glare at the police sergeant behind us.

  When we were out in the front lobby, Derek located a seat in the waiting area where he could properly fill out the forms. He flopped down into it angrily.

  "I know you think all of this is pointless," he complained, "but it wouldn't have killed you to give me a little support in there."

  I sat across the aisle from him. I know I could have apologized, but I said nothing, letting him get it out of his system.

  Like campus security, the police department apparently dealt with a lot of so-called "missing college students" who had a tendency to turn up drunk or high after attending some party that got out of control.

  Derek was still steaming as my thoughts went elsewhere. He glanced up from his papers. "So why didn't you?"

  "Hm?"

  "Why didn't you say anything to help me out?"

  I sighed. "Because one day I hope to work with these people, or people like them, and I'd rather not do anything to annoy them before that day comes."

  Derek's shoulders slumped, understanding entering his eyes. "Oh, right. The cop thing, I forgot. Okay. I guess that's fair. I wouldn't want to take you to a job interview at a church. No offense."

  I almost laughed. Almost. "The symbol is the key," I said. "That symbol on the back of the neck. There's got to be more to it."

  "I've never seen anything like it," Derek said.

  "Yeah ... But somebody has. I think that should be our next step. But I have one more thing I want to do first."

  "What?"

  I barely heard him, thinking again of what the woman at the registrar's office had told us. "Come on, let's go."

  It was late that afternoon by the time my first task was complete, but it was well worth the effort spent.

  First we returned to the registrar's office and asked if they could give us an estimate of how many students had withdrawn so far in the first week of school. When the registrar lady tried to give us the runaround, Derek did something wholly unexpected. He seemed to sense what I was up to and abruptly turned on the charm. And for a moment, I could see what Jordin saw in him. I saw what others saw in him when it was whispered around school that he was on the fast track to become one of the most influential ministers in the nation.

  He was capable of incredible magnetism and charisma, a form of which he used to charm the registrar woman into giving us the information we were after. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't been there when it happened. He had her hanging on his every word with a smile by the time we left.

  As we were leaving the office, I couldn't help asking, "You learn that from your dad?"

  It was his turn to chuckle now. "All the men in my family have what we call the `Hobbes Family Charm-you can turn it down, but you can't turn it off' "

  I rolled my eyes at his little family motto. Charming and cocky. Yep, I could see that being Jordin's type.

  Derek's father was the pastor of some megachurch out in T
exas. I didn't know which one, but he was extraordinarily popular, and quite influential, appearing often in the media as a guest panelist or advisor on a wide range of moral issues. He had a huge following, which made me suspicious of him, but from the handful of times I'd seen him on the news, he didn't strike me as a phony. He actually seemed like a pretty down-to-earth guy. Someone you'd enjoy watching the big game with, or debating some hot topic with over a nice dinner. Derek had a lot of the same qualities.

  "The registrar said that about ten students gave written notice oftheir withdrawal or transfer, but none have dropped out. It's just too early," he said, back to business. "But, I took the initiative to ask about last spring and this summer semester, and she said twelve students dropped out or simply stopped coming to class. You thinking that these dropouts may not actually be dropouts?"

  I shrugged. "It's just a theory. Needs confirming."

  "Library?" he asked.

  He caught on quick.

  "Library," I said.

  Three hours later, we'd found evidence in police reports, college surveys, and one noteworthy newspaper article from a reporter in Boston that provided all the confirmation I needed. Whatever had happened to Jordin and Carrie, it was happening at major metro colleges all over the mid-Atlantic seaboard. Over three hundred in the past six months.

  I clicked back a page on the computer screen to look again at the Boston Herald article. Written by one Pierre Ravenwood. Seemed to be an editorial more than an actual report, and it was buried on the back page of the Local section. But this reporter seemed to have pieced together the strands of the same strange happenings that Derek and I had stumbled onto. The article mentioned the rash of dropouts at major universities across the East Coast, and suggested that the dropout rate was significantly higher there than at other colleges throughout the country. Ravenwood's article stopped just shy of suggesting that these "dropouts" weren't dropouts at all, and slyly joked that it was "almost as if some complex conspiracy were at play."