by Aaron Polson
A camera hummed and shifted focus.
Ben flushed, straightened his back, and regained his composure. His eyes hardened toward Johnny. “Like I said, John, I’m no architect. This is all just speculation. The original house deed had been lost and no records of an owner—”
“But an unidentified suicide with impeccable cleanliness,” Johnny interrupted.
“No records of an original owner could be found. If you ask around Muskotah, nobody remembers who built the place. Nobody knows who used to own it. It’s always just been here, according to anyone who bothered to speak with us.” Ben continued as though Johnny hadn’t interrupted him. “We estimated the age based on the floor plan.”
“Late 19th century.” Johnny leaned close to a wall and ran his forefinger across the surface. “Feels like plaster, but damn it’s in good shape. Funny to find a wall in such good shape after all these years, isn’t it? Especially an old lath and plaster wall?”
Ben’s gaze flicked toward the nearest camera. He forced a smile and replied, “I suppose it is. Now if we can continue? Good. The maid’s quarters will be a sort of base of operations for the crew—when they’re not in the RV, that is. As I said last night, no part of the house is off limits—”
“Except the second floor bathroom,” Erin said.
Ben nodded. “Yes. Except the bathroom on the second floor. No other part is off limits, even the crew’s base here on the first floor.” He waved for the others to follow as he stepped into the hallway. A light switch clicked and the small, darkly painted hall glowed with blue light reflected from the walls. The strange light played with each of their faces, making skin seem pale and cold as though it had been frozen. Ben grinned, and even his too-white teeth took on a blue tint. Kelsey looked over a shoulder, coming face to lens with a camera.
“To the left is the bath. On the right you’ll find the door to the maid’s quarters. It’s shut now, but unlocked. I’m sure the rest of you—especially those on second floor—have found the bathroom useful.”
“Yes of course. But what about the top floor? Are you saying there’s a bathroom on the third floor?” Erin asked.
“Yep. That’s what Mr. Wormsley is saying. I used it myself this morning.” Johnny pantomimed a man in the shower. “Funny having plumbing on the third floor of a Victorian era building, isn’t it? In what looks like a converted attic?”
“You’ve established that already, John.” Ben’s lips pursed into a thin line.
“Maybe they were just ahead for their time,” Sarah said. Her voice dripped with sarcasm.
Kelsey had yet to step fully into the hallway. It looked rather crowded, and the light bothered her. Why was it blue? Why were all their faces covered in a thin sheet of blue? It was strange, like they’d been caught underwater too long or had slipped through a thin veil. The door to the first floor bathroom—the only one she’d used so far—was open, waiting. Her gaze followed the wall to the hallway ceiling. The walls, like the hallway and bedrooms upstairs, were papered. The other bathroom would be overhead, wouldn’t it? The locked bathroom.
“If you’ll follow me, we’re taking a different route to the second floor.” Ben moved through the small throng. His eyes caught Kelsey’s as he passed, and his arm brushed her shoulder. She flinched. “There’s another set of stairs leading to the second floor. We discovered them two nights ago.”
“A hidden staircase?” Erin asked.
“No.” Ben paused, but didn’t turn around. “We hadn’t spent much time digging around, to tell the truth. This one isn’t a secret passage.”
They came to a door at the end of the small, first floor hallway. Kelsey held back and lingered at the rear. She looked over her shoulder. A window marked the hallway’s far end. The blue light hummed. Small, abstract shapes in the wallpaper looked like they moved. The thing which whispered to her last night had been following her. It was there, in the hall. Kelsey stepped closer to the group. Ben’s voice rose and fell—she couldn’t tell what he was saying. The wallpaper things started toward her. Coming closer. She could almost hear the minute skittering of their little insect feet. Patterns shifted and changed. Her head swum, spinning as though passing into a troubled sleep—
A hand caught her arm.
“Kels?”
Johnny rested his hand on her shoulder. He smiled. “You all right?”
“Just spacing out a little.” She shuddered and offered a sheepish look. “I’m not being very brave, am I?”
Johnny shrugged. “Ben’s really amping up the spook factor. He’s trying to scare us with all the Victorian mysterious second staircase business. I bet this house was slapped together after World War II.”
“Really? Bricks like this?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me. Yeah, it seems a bit out of time, but think about how clean it is, how well built.” He ran a hand over the wall. The little black shapes didn’t move. The wallpaper steadied itself. “I wouldn’t even be surprised if it was newer. Maybe an old frame gutted and rebuilt. It is awfully damn big, though.”
The others began filing into the doorway at the end of the hall. Sarah paused and glared over her shoulder. She was still jealous, still protective of Johnny.
“The others are going,” Kelsey said. “We should—”
“We should what?” Johnny smiled. “We’re never alone with our friend the camera.” He waved.
Kelsey spun, surprised to see the thin, mousy cameraman standing behind her in the hall. The black-eyed lens watched them. “He wasn’t there a minute ago,” Kelsey said.
“You have to be on your toes, I guess. C’mon, Kels. Let’s catch the rest of the tour. See if Wormsley offers any more Looney Tunes descriptions of this place. We don’t need his imagination to think terrible thoughts, do we? At least we aren’t doing it alone.”
The warm press of Johnny’s hand on her shoulder disappeared. Kelsey pulled her attention away from the camera and followed. The back staircase was narrow with each step less than a foot deep. She leaned on the wall and tilted each foot to fit the slender steps. The staircase wound twice at ninety degree angles until opening into a second floor room, bigger than the yellow bedroom by at least half and covered with a sleepy, almost blue-grey wallpaper dotted with tiny flowers. It may have been a bedroom, too, but now they found it empty save for a few trunks pushed to one side. Two doors waited on adjacent walls.
“Does anyone want to guess where we are, relative to the rest of the house, of course.” Ben pushed his smile around the room, pausing for the cameras. “Any takers?”
“Well, duh. The second floor.” Sarah rolled her eyes.
“Obviously,” said Ben. “But where on the second floor?”
“In a room,” Sarah said. “Near our bedroom. The yellow room.”
Ben shook his head. “Afraid not.”
Johnny knocked a fist against one wall with a door. “I’d say the end of the hall to the right of the stairs.”
“You’re right. So this door leads—”
“Okay. I get it now.” Sarah turned the knob and yanked the door open. “To the hall. The yellow bedroom is the first door past the stairs on your left. Kels and I are going to eat Lorna Doones and tell ghost stories after dinner. Everyone’s invited.”
“Right. I know a few good ones, but the all have hooks in them.” Johnny said, holding up his fingers bent in a jagged curl. “How about you Kels?”
“What?” Kelsey had wandered across the room, past the dust-covered trunks. She drifted, without conscious thought, toward the other door in the room.
“So you know where this other door leads, Kelsey?” Ben stepped closer to her. “You know what’s behind this door?”
“The bathroom,” she said.
“The bathroom.” The smile flickered on Ben’s lips—flickered and almost vanished. He didn’t move for a moment. Kelsey imagined his memories brought the same images she’d remembered: the dead man, the spotless, clear water, the cold, blue look in the dead man’s glassy eyes. Th
e bathroom. “It’s locked for now. No reason to dredge up bad memories.” He pulled his attention away from the door and grinned at Kelsey.
She heard the word yet in her head as sure as Ben had said it. No reason to dredge up bad memories, yet.
“Then why this house?” Johnny asked. “Why play your little game for the cameras here if not for the bad memories?”
Ben glanced toward a camera. Wayne’s face was hidden, devoured by the black lens. “I got a good deal on the property. Plenty of space. No one else around to get in the way.”
Erin chewed her lip.
Kelsey watched her. She studied the younger woman’s body language, the way she carried her body, how she shrank a little from the group. Why wasn’t she speaking up? Why didn’t she mention haunted houses? Why didn’t she mention now, in front of Ben, what she’d said earlier that morning? Then she had it. She understood.
“Memories…” Kelsey said. “Four of us—including you, Ben—have memories of this place. Awful memories.” She shuddered. The room had grown cold, frigid as the house had been five years ago. They’d stumbled across it in a time of need, lost in the snow. The cold burrowed into her bones and touched her marrow, and now, now they were back. She looked up, finding all eyes in the room pointed toward her.
“I don’t have any memories here. But what they told me, Mr. Wormsley… God,” Erin said. “I can’t imagine wanting to come back.”
Ben’s dark eyes flicked toward Kelsey. “I’m sure they all had their reasons—”
“Look,” Sarah interrupted. “I’m not sure I wanted to come back, okay, but I couldn’t say no to the money. Johnny?”
He shrugged. “Agreed. I didn’t want anything to do with this damn place, but things have been rough since I got back. A medical discharge can hang over you like a cloud, a thick black smudge everyone can see. It’s not like jobs are just landing in my lap. All that stuff about veteran’s benefits? Bullshit. My savings are drying up.”
“See, Erin? I thought I could help my friends. Once I had funding for the show, I sought them out. I thought I could share a little good fortune.” Ben stepped into the hallway. “And here we are, sharing our good fortune. Let’s take a peek down the hall at the ladies’ bedrooms and then on to the third floor.”
The others followed, one after the other. Johnny paused at the door and glanced back at Kelsey. Let him go, she thought. Let them all go and wander through this horrid, horrid house. Let them play little games in the belly of this great brick and stone monster. Kelsey watched them trail down the hallway before taking a deep breath and stepping after them. She would put up her walls. She would build a safe shell and hide inside. Six more days and she could forget the house forever.
Chapter 14: Lights Out
Kelsey hated the smell of nail polish, but didn’t want to be anywhere else. The yellow room was the happiest in the drab old place, better than Erin’s blue or the uninhabited purple bedroom, and even cheerier than the parlor and kitchen. The third floor, the faux attic with its sloping ceilings and dusty wood paneling, was out of the question. Clouds moved back into the area after noon, and the windows hung with the same, dull grey sky outside. She lay on her bed, propped on an elbow with a copy of Murdie’s Principles of Learned Behavior open to an article discussing the effects of intermittent punishment. She wasn’t reading but flipping the pages back and forth, killing time, and waiting for the days to tick from the calendar until she was free.
Sarah looked up from her toenails, a small brush in one hand. “I think you scared valley girl shitless this morning. I don’t think she was prepared for the whole dead body thing.”
Kelsey murmured.
“You know, Kels, I miss you. We used to hang out in school—what happened?”
Kelsey glanced at the window. Still grey. “What do you mean?”
“What happened to us? We hit the bars at least once a week back in college. Then…” Sarah waved her hands like an explosion. “Poof.”
Kelsey knew what had happened. The house happened. Jared happened. A dead man, a John Doe suicide in a bathtub happened. She snapped her book shut and sat up. Her feet came together as she crossed her legs. “We all grew up, I guess. Johnny opted for the Army. I graduated, moved on to grad school.”
“I didn’t.” Sarah frowned. “I regret it, now. I’ve thought about going back, maybe even trying to finish my degree online—I’m only twenty hours away from a B.S.”
“Why don’t you?”
Sarah put the cap on the nail polish bottle, but did not screw it on tightly. “Dunno. I guess I felt like it was a closed door. Like I wasn’t wanted in school anymore. Now I’m five years older—an old woman compared to the twenty-year-olds running around the place.”
Kelsey nodded. “Sometimes I feel that way.”
“But you’re a doctoral student. You’re supposed to be older, right? Older and so much brainier.” Sarah flopped back onto her bed, holding her fingers and toes in the air, allowing them to dry. “I’d be a freak in undergrad classes.”
“Don’t say that. There are plenty of—”
The lights blinked.
“Did you see that?”
“The lights?” Kelsey stood and moved toward the wall switch. “They flickered didn’t they?”
“Yes,” Sarah said. “Quick. On, off. It seems a touch darker now, too. Like they aren’t getting as much juice. Maybe this old joint can’t keep up with the demand. You know, the cameras and everything.”
“The cameras?” Kelsey frowned. “I thought they were battery operated.” She flicked the switch on and off. The light responded, and for a brief moment, while the light was off, the grey rectangle of sky framed by the window glowed. Shadows moved in shadow, and then light banished the monsters. “The switch seems fine.”
“Just old wiring, I suppose.” Sarah blew on her fingers. After a moment, her eyes flipped up and fixed on Kelsey. A hint of cold malice clung in her gaze. “What do you think of that valley girl? Erin?”
“She seems okay.”
“Okay?” Sarah’s nose crinkled. “I think she’s a brat.” Sarah held out her fingers and took a long look at the nails. “And I think Ben put her up to something. Either that or…”
“What do you mean?”
“Hearing footsteps at night. The oldest damn trick in the book. If she heard footsteps, we would have too, right? I mean she’s got a room right across the hall. We would have heard footsteps, too.”
Kelsey nodded. “I suppose.”
“Did you?” Sarah asked.
“No.” Kelsey shook her head. “I didn’t hear any… Footsteps.”
Sarah’s lips curled. “What was that?”
“What was what?”
“You paused just then. You said you didn’t hear any, pause, footsteps. Did you hear anything else? Are you receiving phantom signals from beyond the grave?”
Kelsey squirmed inside but held her back rigid. She hadn’t heard a voice. That had been her imagination. “No. Nothing. And it wouldn’t make sense for Ben’s show, anyway.”
“How do you mean?”
Kelsey tried to smile. “The cameras shut off after midnight, right?”
“Oh yeah. Good point. You do have some serious brains in that skull of yours. So… Speaking of cameras, where do you think they are, anyway? I haven’t seen Wayne and Larry—”
“Wayne and Nick. The sound guy’s name is Howard, I think.”
Sarah’s face screwed up. “Whatever. I haven’t seen the camera guys since the tour, since we poked our heads in the third floor bedrooms. I’ll admit I was a little freaked to come here, but now—now that all seems foolish. This is just an old house. A silly old house. Nothing more. A silly old house with a head full of bad memories.”
Foolish. Kelsey had been foolish to worry, to whine to Brit about the trip and worry about anything. The house was just a house. Sarah was right. Any voice she heard in the night had to be her imagination—her overactive imagination fueled with a million years of e
volutionary fear of the dark and bad memories. “I was freaked, too. Worried, I mean.”
“At week’s end, you and I are going to be twelve grand less worried. Easiest money I’ve ever made. Things have been kind of tight lately. After they cut my hours at the store—”
This time, the lights did not flicker. They went dark without a sound, not even a tiny pop. On, then off. Darkness fell on the room. Sarah let out a slight squeal. “Well shit—I didn’t expect that,” she said. “Damn. I’ve knocked my polish over.”
Kelsey slipped off the bed and moved toward the window, like an insect drawn by kinesis, she moved to the light. She was wrong: the house wasn’t just a house. It had been listening to them, and when Sarah insulted it—called it silly—it shut off the power. Kelsey closed her eyes. Those thoughts were childish and illogical, but she couldn’t put them out of her mind.
“Do you smell that?” Sarah asked. There was a sound of bedclothes rustling.
“Smell?”
“Like cold… It’s a cold smell, like when it’s snowing.”
“Cold doesn’t smell,” Kelsey said.
“Like hell. It smells like a snowy day.”
Kelsey’s left hand slipped behind her and bumped the window pane. The smooth, cold glass sent a quick shock through her wrist like a piece of ice. She gasped.
“Are you all right?”
“Sure. I just bumped the window, that’s all. It’s cold. Really cold like I put my hand against a hunk of frozen metal.”
“Funny.”
“What’s funny?” Kelsey drew her frigid fingers away from the window and rubbed them against her jeans. Her eyes had begun to adjust to the room’s dim light. The beds took shape as two masses of black. Sarah’s shape shifted and turned. Grey window light lit her face, framing it in a tiny, glowing patch.
“I found my polish bottle and the cap, but not a drop spilled on the floor.”
“Maybe it was almost empty,” Kelsey said. She knew—somehow she knew it wasn’t true, but she offered it anyway.