by Aaron Polson
The house held its whispers close.
The little-girl fears from her childhood drew life from the quiet house, little-girl fears amplified by the extra hours she spent lost in Wind Cave as a child. How old had she been when she strayed from the tour and turned into a dark shaft? How long did she wait in the pitch black, afraid to move because it—the thing with sharp, tearing teeth waiting for her in under the black curtain—could find her? But no, this was not Wind Cave, this was not a stony maw under the Earth’s skin. The house—while lonely and a little strange—didn’t house any monsters save those which they may have brought with them. Ben perhaps. He had the potential to be a monster. But Kelsey wasn’t a little girl anymore. She’d celebrated her twenty-seventh birthday, and was only a few years shy of completing a doctorate in psychology.
There was nothing to fear. She was a God-damned expert.
But yet, in the house’s quiet slumber, a voice came to Kelsey. This sound crawled through the frame and walls, over the polished hardwood floors, into the sheets and comforter on Kelsey’s bed. It whispered in her ears.
I’m here.
Come play with me.
Chapter 12: In the Morning
Morning broke into the yellow room with sharp razor-points of light. At some moment in the night, well past two, Kelsey had fallen asleep. She rolled over, not ready for the sun, and pulled the comforter over her head. She remained cocooned for a few more minutes until, finally, the futility of resistance forced the blanket from her face.
She blinked at the bright light.
She was alive and unharmed. One night down and six to go.
Her feet slid from the bed’s edge and touched the cold, firm hardwood. Sarah was gone already, perhaps downstairs with the others having breakfast while she, Kelsey, tried to hide from the world and make up for a sizable hunk of her night lost to silly fears and speculation. She grabbed her cell phone for the time.
“Only 6:40?” she muttered aloud.
The door clicked open. It was Sarah with a towel wrapped around her chest and another folded over her damp hair. “Welcome to the world of the living. Don’t worry. You didn’t snore.”
Kelsey rubbed her eyes, wondering how she’d missed Sarah waking and heading for the bathroom. A faint smell of lilacs wafted through the room, perhaps Sarah’s shampoo or lotion. Her nose wrinkled—the odor always reminded Kelsey of her grandmother’s house, a stuffy, cob-web strewn bungalow always smelling of lilacs.
Sarah slipped into a bra and panties and rubbed her hair with a towel. She paused, studied Kelsey for a moment, and said, “Medusa, right?”
“Huh?”
“My hair. Looks like Medusa.” Sarah frowned. “You know that bit Ben said about ‘free reign’ last night?”
Kelsey dragged her toes in small circles on the floor. “Yes. He said we could go anywhere inside the house.”
“Yeah, well except for the bathroom right on this floor.”
“The bathroom?”
“You know the one, Kels. We all remember that night.” Sarah tossed the wet towel aside. “Well never fear. It’s locked solid. I had to go downstairs to use the shower.”
Kelsey stood and straightened her back, stretching. “That’s right… It’s locked.”
“You can’t tell me you wanted to go in there, right?”
Kelsey shook her head. No, she hadn’t wanted to go into the second floor bathroom. She’d made a point of brushing her teeth downstairs before bed. She hadn’t even thought to check the door. Once Ben said it was off limits, she’d forced it from her mind.
“Well it’s locked. Part of Ben’s game, I suppose. I thought maybe he was joking when he mentioned it last night. Guess not.” Sarah slipped a blouse over her pale, lithe torso. Her ribs made small peaks and valleys under her bra. “Looks like we’ll have to migrate for showers and midnight toilet runs. Don’t worry about the cameras, though. The bathrooms are evidently off limits. Don’t forget your microphone. We wouldn’t want to disappoint the boss.”
“Right,” Kelsey said, rubbing her eyes. “We wouldn’t want to disappoint the boss.”
~
Breakfast, like dinner the night before, was served on the sideboard in the dining room. Kelsey picked over the selection, choosing a small helping of what looked like scrambled eggs and dry toast. She slid into a chair on the side of the table, trying to be as small as possible. Erin and Sarah were sparring at the other end—
“No, I didn’t hear anything last night. Out cold.” Sarah closed her eyes and mimicked a sleeping person with hands folded at the side of her face. “Maybe it was a ghost.”
“No,” Erin said. “More like someone pacing in the hall.”
“You’re on the second floor, too?” Sarah asked.
“Just down from the two of you. I’m in the blue room. Color by number… Curtains, quilt, wallpaper… It almost looks like a room in my Gran’s place in Santa Monica.” Erin fingered the handle of a coffee cup in front of her. “I swear I heard someone walking last night.”
“Kels?” Sarah turned to Kelsey. “You hear any late night wanderings? Maybe take a little sleep walk yourself?”
Kelsey shook her head and pushed a fork load of eggs into her mouth. She felt the camera’s presence in the corner of the room. The muscular man—Wayne—watched them through the lens. The other camera was missing as was the older man with the microphone.
“Nothing but the wind,” Sarah said.
“The wind blows like footsteps in Kansas? I’ve seen The Wizard of Oz, but really—”
Sarah snorted. “Wizard of Oz. That’s good.” She hooked a finger and spoke with a witch’s snarl, “I’ll get you my pretty. Ha. Footsteps in the hall. This is genuine haunted house, then. Right from the start. Footsteps and locked rooms. Bo-ring.”
“I heard what I heard.” Erin sipped her coffee.
“Heard what?”
Kelsey glanced toward the parlor entryway and found Johnny standing there, rubbing his neck. He looked good, even in the morning with stubble on his chin and short hair matted on one side—no, especially in the morning with his face in disarray. But shadows hung below his eyes, darkened as though he’d been awake all night. If Erin really had heard footsteps, maybe Johnny was the phantom pacer. Johnny’s eyes met hers, and she shifted back to her plate.
“So, what did you hear… Erin, right?”
“Yeah. Erin Connolly. I thought someone was walking the hall last night. Up and down. The floor didn’t creak, not like I’d expect in a house this old. But someone was walking. Thump-thump-thump.”
“I noticed that, too. Not the pacing, but the other thing, how quiet the house is.” Johnny sauntered in the room. He wore a black t-shirt and jeans with nothing on his feet. “This place is quiet.”
Sarah cleared her throat. “It was quiet five years ago, too. That didn’t mean it was safe.”
Kelsey laid down her fork. Sarah smirked at her. Kelsey understood: she’d done it intentionally, opened the door to her memories. Erin sat sipping her coffee but her eyebrows rose. She would ask, now. She would want to know about five years ago and she, Kelsey, was trapped in the room. There was no running, no hiding from the memories. Sarah might explain why the door on the second floor was locked.
Erin set her cup on the table. “Mr. Wormsley sort of implied this last night… You’ve been here before?”
“Four of us have. Johnny, Kelsey, and our fearless leader. Ben—Mr. Wormsley.”
Kelsey glanced at the camera. The black, shiny eye appeared to wink. The muscular man behind the camera didn’t move.
“So what were you doing? Sight-seeing? Seems like a pretty funny place to vacation.” Erin dabbed her lips with a napkin. “Mr. Wormsley didn’t say anything about being here before. I mean he mentioned the second floor last night, but nothing else.”
“It wasn’t vacation,” Sarah said. Her lips drew into a line.
Kelsey shook her head.
Johnny pulled out a chair at the end of the table a
nd sat. “No. We didn’t plan on spending any time in this place. What did he tell you about it?”
“Just he was filming a pilot for a new series, a reality show. They wanted a couple of UCLA students on board. He said we would be spending a week in an old house. It’s a big place, isn’t it? I mean, big for out here in the country.”
“Big. Yeah.” Johnny snorted. “It’s as big as an inn, 19th century style. Nobody builds a three story farm house. Not in Kansas. Not even in the 1800s. I don’t even know where they found all the brick. But I guess it would make a nice spot for a show. Isolated. Spooky.”
Spooky, Kelsey thought. Yes, quite spooky. Not haunted, but spooky. Spooky and strange.
“A reality show?” Sarah asked. “Sounds like the same line of bullshit he fed me. When bullshit comes with a check for twelve grand, I’m listening. But reality programming? I’m not sure I buy it. Wormsley has a trick or two up his sleeve. I know why I came. I imagine Johnny and Kelsey have a similar story. Besides, we all have history with this house. What sold it to you? I mean, why did you agree to come along? Was it just the money?”
“No.” Erin fingered the edge of her cup as she spoke. She was nervous, Kelsey thought. More nervous than she had been so far. Did she know about the house? Did she suspect anything? “No, he said the house was supposed to be haunted—rumored to be haunted. When he called to offer me the slot, well, he explained the rest. He explained they were trying to put together a program which had appeal for the Most Haunted and Ghost Hunters crowd, but something with a mixed, reality-show feel. Nothing else.”
“So he’d already mentioned it was haunted, even before you were selected?” Johnny asked.
Erin nodded. “Yes. That’s about right. I signed up for the screening because Ben pitched the haunted house angle. I thought it sounded interesting.”
“Great, a junior ghost buster.” Sarah sighed. “I hate to burst your bubble, but I don’t think this place is haunted.”
Erin’s face dropped slightly.
“Disappointed?” Johnny asked.
“I don’t… I don’t know.” Erin pushed her coffee mug to the table’s center. “I guess I expected something interesting. Something out of the ordinary.”
Kelsey ran her finger across the handle of her fork. The mound of yellow-white scrambled eggs on her plate looked cold and rubbery. She pushed the plate aside.
“Anything wrong, Kels?” Sarah asked.
“Not haunted?” Heat rose across Kelsey’s back. “Not haunted, you said. I’m not sure what you mean by haunting, but this place is loaded with bad mojo. Why don’t you tell Erin the truth? Why don’t you tell Erin why Ben wanted us here… Why he went out of his way to make sure the three of us joined his little club?”
“I don’t understand.” Sarah smiled a dirty little grin. She was baiting Kelsey, picking at her until she broke. It was like a game to her, cat and mouse.
Kelsey bristled. “Don’t you, Sarah?”
Johnny tilted his head toward Sarah and then set his eyes on Kelsey. They were cool and dark like two black marbles lost in the near snowfield of his pale face. “Yes you do, Sarah. Don’t be a bitch. Kelsey’s talking about Jared. Jared and the John Doe we found upstairs.”
Kelsey squirmed.
Johnny turned back to Erin. “Look, Erin, I can’t say this place is haunted. I’m not sure I believe in anything like a haunting, anyway.” He stiffened in his chair at the word haunting. “But I do know this: five years ago, the four of us—Kelsey, Sarah, Ben, Jared, and I—were on the way home from Colorado, a ski trip. I was driving and, well, lost control. Snow and ice everywhere. We landed in a ditch about a quarter of a mile up the county road. Just before you get to U.S. 36. This house was the only place for miles, and being as big as it is, it stuck out pretty well.”
“So you came to the house for shelter?” Erin asked.
“Yes, shelter. Or a phone. You’ve noticed, surely, no signal out here in the boonies? None of our cell phones would work then, just like they don’t work now. We needed a phone, at the least. The door was open—unlocked. We were freezing.”
“I’ve never been colder,” Sarah said, crossing her arms. Her grin had vanished.
“We were all pretty cold. We found a phone, but it was dead. No sign of anyone in the house until we realized our friend, Jared, was gone.”
“Gone?” Erin’s eyebrows knit together. “Where was he going to go in the middle of a snowstorm?”
“Shit. I don’t know. He’s been gone since. The cops decided he went for help.” Johnny rubbed his neck again. “Sounds like a damn foolish thing to do in a place like this…”
Erin’s gaze fell on each of them in turn. When she got to Kelsey, she paused. “Was he a good friend?”
Kelsey nodded. “Sort of. We’d hung out quite a bit.” She looked at Sarah.
Sarah’s eyes narrowed. “We weren’t very close.”
Johnny stood and found a coffee mug on the sideboard. “But Jared wasn’t the only mystery.” He began pouring coffee from a black carafe. “There was someone here, only—”
“He was dead,” Sarah said. “Suicide. Slit both wrists in the second floor bathroom.” She mimicked the sound of a razorblade cutting skin while dragging a finger across her forearm. “Just like that. We found him upstairs—”
“In the locked bathroom,” Erin said. Her tan face had gone slightly pale. “God there must have been blood everywhere.”
Johnny and Kelsey exchanged a glance. Keep it quiet, she thought. No need to tell this poor girl anything else. No need to drag anymore demons from the past. No need to rehash old monsters, to paint memories in broad, blood-red strokes. Her eyes flicked to Sarah’s. A hint of malice danced in Sarah’s gaze, but her lips remained still.
“You see what I mean about haunted.” Johnny sipped his coffee.
The silence grew in the room, almost as it had the night before. It was a full, pregnant silence in which Kelsey supposed each of the four toyed with their own thoughts of death and haunting and what it meant for a physical place to experience dark things. Kelsey closed her eyes and imagined her rats, the poor little white-coated critters scurrying through a maze, anxious to avoid whatever misstep brought the electric shock she’d administered but unaware the shocks were random, caused my no rodent action. Her stomach turned over, cold and thick and uncomfortable. She glanced at the eggs again and wished she hadn’t tried to eat a thing.
Steps pounded on the stairs, and Ben appeared in the foyer with Daniel at his side.
“I can see you’ve all found breakfast,” he said. “Good. We’re going to take a tour of the building today and see what mysteries we can uncover.”
Chapter 13: Round and Round
“The first thing you’ll notice,” Ben said after Johnny put on a pair of shoes and all six gathered in the foyer, “is that the house feels a bit smaller on the inside than it looked from the outside. We won’t be taking any exterior tours, of course, as it would negate your contracts. Just trust me on this one.”
Both cameras were with them, recording everything. Watching everything. Kelsey tucked her dark curls behind her ears and glanced at both as she did. They stared at her—two big, black eyes, never blinking. Could the cameras cut through her skin and find the fear underneath? Did they know how much she missed her father? How much she still loathed the dark? Did they show how scared she was, how frightened? She swallowed hard.
Ben continued. “This place has a pretty open layout for a house of its age. Each of the main rooms on the first floor is joined together by an open doorway, sort of. I’m no architect, but I think it’s a post and lintel type design, somewhat Victorian.”
“The house is that old?” Erin asked.
“Most likely,” Ben said. “I’m not sure it was a house, per se. Probably a hotel. I remember one like it in Dodge City when I was a kid. Of course in Dodge—”
Johnny coughed.
“As I was saying,” Ben continued, “in Dodge there was a thriving cat
tle trade. But here we’re about two hundred miles too far north and sixty from the nearest city with an active railroad hub.”
“Obviously,” Johnny said.
“It’s in great shape.” Erin glanced at the ceiling. “Not even a minor groan from the floorboards.” She bent her knees and sprung up and down to prove a point. Her hair bounced with her.
Ben nodded as he walked toward the parlor. “It’s in excellent shape. Opposite the entrance, you’ll find a similar room to the one in which we find ourselves. Not an exact mirror image, but close enough. Both rooms have the same dark woodwork and original crown molding. I believe it’s plaster, like the walls. It should be plaster. Anyway, the other room leads, through a post and lintel opening, to the kitchen. On—”
“What?” Johnny asked, interrupting. “A door on this side?”
Ben nodded. “Yes. There are two interior entrances to the kitchen.”
Johnny looked at Kelsey. She shook her head slightly. There’d been one doorway five years ago, hadn’t there? She was almost positive—and Johnny thought so, too.
“As I was saying,” Ben continued, “on this side, you’ll find the dining room and back hallway. The dining room leads to the kitchen on the other side, and the back hallway opens to a bathroom. I know several of you showered down here this morning.”
“Funny to have a full bath on the first floor of a Victorian house, isn’t it?” Johnny asked. “You know, funny for a place which might not have had running water when it was built.”
Ben looked to the hallway and back. “Yes, yes I suppose it is. And you’re right—there wouldn’t have been any indoor plumbing when the house was built. But it’s there, John. You are free to utilize its services any time you need. Anyway, there’s a small room adjacent to the bathroom, maybe a linen room or maid’s quarters or—”
“Maid’s quarters on the first floor?” Johnny asked, interrupting again, this time with a sideways grin. “Sounds a little fishy, too. Are you sure you know what the hell you’re talking about?”