by Aaron Polson
“How so?”
“It reeks of foul play. Ben’s got some kind of plan to amp up the drama and keep us all at each other’s throats.”
“Really?”
“Are you that naïve, Kels?” Sarah blew on Kelsey’s toes. “The guy stinks since coming back. Hollywood has seeped under his skin and done something to him. It’s about as cliché as all this haunted house crap—Kansas boy lured astray by the demons of Hollywood—but in Ben’s case I’d say right about on.”
“But it didn’t stop you from coming.”
“A stack of money had a little something to do with my being here, you know. It’s not like it would be easy to walk away from twelve grand. Only now…” Sarah paused and took a breath.
“Now what?”
“Now… With everything… I’m not sure I should have come. I’m not sure how much I can stay here, Kels.” She dropped on her bed.
The lights flickered again, sputtering like a candle in a light breeze. The room went dark.
“It’s this bullshit, too.” Sarah sat up. “I’m not going to take it, Kels. There wasn’t anything in our contract about being guinea pigs or anything. I’m going to find Wormsley and give his sneaky ass a piece of my mind.”
“Sarah…”
“Are you coming?” Sarah rose and moved toward the door, a solid shape moving in a sea of shadow. “Or you going to take a nap and sleepwalk through the rest of the week?”
Chapter 20: Gone Missing
A light assaulted them as they rounded the stairwell landing.
One television camera was mounted with bright lights for shooting in the dark. Kelsey shielded her eyes and followed Sarah into the room; it was impossible to see who was behind the camera, but there was only one. She imagined it was Wayne, the man who’d so rudely called both of them bitches in the bathroom on the third floor. The others were already sitting or standing—Johnny and Daniel on the couch, Erin in one chair, and Ben on his feet, pacing.
“Oh, Kels. Sarah. I’m glad you’ve joined us.” Ben looked at them, but he didn’t smile. His lips twitched, but remained set. “We… We have a bit of a problem. Other than the lights, I mean.”
Sarah scowled. “What’s going on? If there’s a problem, what’s with the camera? Couldn’t we kill it?”
Ben’s face twisted slightly. He paced across the room, opposite Johnny. “It’s for the light. We’re only shooting for the light.”
“So it’s not recording?” Sarah said as she sat in a chair.
Ben reddened. “We—of course we’re recording.”
Johnny grunted.
“The problem is… Well, a member of my crew has gone missing.” Ben’s arms flopped to his sides as he finished speaking.
The cold crept into Kelsey’s arms again, slithering across her skin like a living thing. It wormed into her shoulders and dribbled down her back like thick drops of frigid water. Missing. A crew member was missing. The word echoed in her memory, bringing back police cars and acres of snow…
“Who is it?” she asked.
“Howard,” Ben said. “Our sound man. Wayne’s outside checking the RV again, but nobody’s seen him since after lunch.”
“He was working on the second floor,” Daniel said. As always, he dropped his head after speaking. “Erin and I were talking, and we saw him. He was doing something in the hallway.”
“That’s right. We were chatting after lunch, and he had his big microphone up there, like was recording the wall. Weird. I went into my room, and Daniel—”
“I went upstairs. I was feeling a little tired, so I thought I should lie down.” Daniel laid a hand on the side of his face.
“I saw him, too,” Kelsey said. She glanced at Sarah. “But on the third floor. That was before lunch.”
Johnny passed the empty chair and moved to a window. The grey clouds sagged as though laden with moisture. Snow blurred the world. Erin’s chair squeaked as she shifted position. The big grandfather clock in the foyer continued to click, click, click. It wasn’t ticking away fast enough for Kelsey. Click, click, click…
“He’s got to be here somewhere,” Ben said. “I mean it’s not like—”
“Don’t say it,” Johnny said as he wheeled around. Malice flashed in his eyes. “Of course he has to be here, somewhere. So let’s look for him. Didn’t you guys have radios or some other way to communicate, two-ways that would work even though cell phones are dead in this fucking black hole?”
Ben looked at his hands. “We… Yes, we had radios. Have radios. Howard left his in the RV this morning. Said it interfered with his work.”
“Well it’s not like he’s treading water in a shark-infested sea, is it?” Sarah asked. She leaned forward, hands on her knees. “He’s a big boy.”
“He’s supposed to be working,” Ben said.
“Your problem, not ours,” Sarah replied. “Now the lights, that’s a different—”
The door interrupted Sarah, banging open with a sudden ferocity. Wayne strode from the porch, his nostrils flaring. He glared at Ben, and then, as though suddenly realizing other people were in the room, his shoulders relaxed. “Can I see you for a minute, Mr. Wormsley?”
Ben nodded. He joined Wayne near the stairs. Both spoke in hushed tones. Kelsey, closest to them, only heard snippets of the conversation. She peeked over her shoulder. They’d seemed to be disagreeing, and now Wayne looked mad, ready to level Ben with his big, meaty fists. Her attention flipped to the rest of the room. Sarah leaned on the arm of the chair, Daniel was sitting next to Johnny, still studying his hands. They were like little playthings. Dolls almost, captured in the house by the camera. It’s bright, glowing eye still held them like flies in amber. Her gaze dropped to her feet. She was outside the circle, probably a good place to be. Bad things were going to happen, and Howard was just the start.
“I want to know what we’re going to do about power. Whatever happened to this mystery generator Worm-boy brought?” Sarah twisted in her chair and faced the camera. “Yoo-hoo, camera guy. I’ve got a question for you.”
The light shifted slightly.
“Can you speak, or are you dumb?”
The light dropped toward the floor. “Hell yeah I can speak, but I’m supposed to be like the wallpaper, kid. What do you want?”
“A phone. I figure you guys must have a satellite feed, some way to reach the real world while we’re all cooped up. We need to get some utility work taken care of, and pronto. Lights, camera, all that action.” Sarah waved a hand in the air.
The lights flickered, almost on cue, and sputtered to life.
“What a load of crap. Must be magic,” Sarah said. A wide grin split her face. “I have the touch.”
“You are touched, maybe,” Johnny said.
Sarah opened her mouth to speak, but the words didn’t come. Ben had stepped back into the room, his face ashen and drawn.
“We need to find Howard,” he said.
“Sure, okay. Of course we do,” Johnny replied. “Good thing the lights are back. Maybe he—”
“Damn the lights,” Ben said. “Howard’s missing.”
“Maybe he turned them on,” Johnny finished. He looked at Wayne. “Where did you guys find the breaker box yesterday? We should make sure everything is squared away before running off to play hide and seek.”
Wayne shook his head. “No breakers. We checked yesterday.”
“But the lights…” Ben rocked back on his heels. “How?”
“I don’t understand the big deal about Howard. Maybe he’s taking a union break,” Sarah said.
Wayne stepped closer. “Howard’s got heart problems. I found his meds in the truck. Empty.” He held up a small bottle. “If he’s had an attack and can’t get help… It could be ugly.”
Johnny stood. “Okay. Right. We can split into teams and take a look.” He glanced at Ben. “I suppose our deal—not leaving the house is off, considering?”
Ben stiffened. A touch of color returned to his face as he shook his he
ad. “No—no. Wayne, Nick, and I can search the grounds. You’ve signed a contract. He’s most likely to be in here, anyway.”
~
Kelsey followed Erin into the basement, both of them armed with small portable flash light from the crew’s contingency kit. The stairs, much like those leading to the second and third floors, looked as though they should creak and groan—covered as they were with weathered wood and nails—but didn’t make a sound as the women descended. Once below floor level, the walls became rough wrought limestone held together with thick lines of grey mortar. The temperature dropped, too. While rather comfortable on the first and second floors, it became rather chilly below. Kelsey rubbed her arms, wishing for a sweater or jacket or, better yet, no need to go into the basement at all.
“I didn’t expect it to be so much colder down here,” Erin said.
“Probably no open vents.”
Erin paused a few steps from the bottom and glanced over her shoulder. “Vents?”
“Furnace vents. I’ve heard the fan kick on, that whispering sound you can hear upstairs. There are big, cast iron wall registers in most rooms. I noticed several yesterday when we took the tour. Our bedroom has one; I’m sure yours does, too. The registers date back a lot further than the furnace.”
“How do you know?” Erin asked.
“My father. Dad was an HVAC guy for years. The sound—the whispering from the vents—that’s a forced air unit. If this house is as old as Ben says, the furnace wasn’t original equipment.”
Erin continued to the final step. Her yellow beam swung around in an arc. “This house is strange.”
“How so?” Kelsey asked as she joined Erin on the hard floor.
“Just off somehow. I keep expecting creaking wood and old doors to blow shut with a bang. Standard haunted house fair. But nothing. This basement even looks a little like my Uncle Joe’s, and that place isn’t haunted at all. You were here before. You explored the place, didn’t you?” Erin asked.
Kelsey shook her head. “No. Once we found the body… There wasn’t much we wanted to explore. The police did the work. They did the searching.”
“How’d you get out? Wasn’t it a big snowstorm?”
“Yeah. The biggest problem was our car in the ditch. We trekked back out to the main highway and flagged a truck. The snow had slowed down… I wasn’t going to spend another minute in this place.”
“And now—it’s strange. It should be haunted, but it’s just here.”
Kelsey held her light high and made a sweep of the basement. It didn’t run under the entire house, but one side, the portion under the kitchen and parlor. To her left several unfinished walls—simple 2 x 4 stud construction—showed where someone had once held plans for the space. The wood was brown and somewhat dark, showing at least twenty or thirty years of age. Even so, the boards were clean—no signs of water damage or dry rot common to a basement. To the right, she found the furnace, a tan unit which had been installed within the last dozen years. “Who said the house was haunted?”
“Nobody. I put two and two together. Mr. Wormsley mentioned this place was a little spooky, so I figured that was his angle. His pitching point.”
“I wish you’d stop calling him Mr. Wormsley. Ben Wormsley isn’t much of a Mister anything.” Kelsey approached the furnace. Shadows receded as she moved, pulling further into the corners of the grey space. “It’s gas powered. Lined in natural gas.”
“Does that mean something?”
Kelsey shook her head. “Not really… Sometimes rural houses rely on propane or wood. We must be close to a line, that’s all. I didn’t pass any towns on the way except for Muskotah, and that’s a bit far. I’m not sure where it would get the service.”
Erin frowned. Her flashlight swept around the basement. A block of dark space held in the far corner, but when she shifted position, the flashlight beam revealed the same rough limestone as the other walls. “I hope you don’t think I’m a bitch or anything, but this isn’t what I expected Kansas to be like.”
Kelsey, feeling emboldened by the lack of basement secrets, approached the furnace. “What did you expect? Dorothy? Toto? I’ve grown up with those jokes my whole life.”
“No.” Erin slumped on the first step. “I thought it would be more rustic I guess. Wood burning stoves. Stuff like that. Not a nice furnace and backup generators and everything.”
“Sorry to disappoint. We are in a cell phone black hole, and the generator pooped out, if that means anything to you.”
Erin grinned. “That is pretty rustic, I guess.” Her smile slid from her lips. “What scares you the most, Kelsey?”
Kelsey rapped her knuckles against the furnace’s side. The metallic skin sounded a dull thunk, thunk, thunk. She tilted her flashlight toward Erin again. “What scares me?”
“Yeah. You were talking about your research, what you’re doing with the rats. You seem to be interested in fear.” Erin waved her flashlight in an arc. “I suspect that’s what this is all about. Kind of a Fear Factor, Ghost Hunters, Survivor highbred.”
“Survivor… Right. If it works—if people tune in to watch this mess, Ben will owe us a lot more than the twelve grand he promised.” Kelsey circled around the furnace, allowing her flashlight beam to pass over the shiny metal ductwork leading from the unit.
“So really, Kelsey, what scares you the most?”
The dark poured into the periphery of Kelsey’s vision, pooling just beyond the reach of her flashlight. Erin had aimed her light toward the hard concrete floor where it spread like a glowing pool of water. She knew the basement was empty; she’d just proven as much with Erin, but the suggestion of fear, the reminder of fear, worked against her. Inside, she was a girl again, ten and separated from her family and the rest of the tour group. The cave dropped into complete darkness. Sounds played beyond her reach, not voices, but sounds, scrapes and knocking. The whispered voice of Wind Cave as the miles upon miles of caverns fought in vain to balance the barometric pressure between the surface and the cave. Kelsey stood tall, straightening her back.
No.
She was not in the cave.
She was twenty-seven, a graduate student, and brave.
“The dark, I suppose,” she told Erin.
Erin nodded.
“It dates back to my childhood. I was ten I think,” Kelsey added quickly. “I got lost once. We were on a tour of Wind Cave, up in South Dakota.”
“Wind Cave?”
“It’s a national park. Huge caverns underground, but no stalactites or mites because it was mostly dry. Anyway, we went on a cave tour. I was almost last in line, just in front of my mom and dad. Somehow, I got separated from the others. It was all so beautiful, and then black.”
“Didn’t you have any lights?”
“No. Not on me. And the lights go out for the tours once they clear through an area”
“Shit.”
“It was dark, blacker than anything you could imagine. There’s nighttime dark and no light at all dark.” Kelsey shivered at the memory. “I never got over it. They found me in like five, ten minutes, but when you’re a kid in the dark—the real, impenetrable dark—it could have been days. I say they found me, but Dad found me. Dad always had a way of knowing when I needed him.” A sob worked in her throat, but Kelsey forced it down.
Erin’s face tilted toward her flashlight. “So I guess you’d like to keep one of these things handy, just in case we have another outage, huh?”
Kelsey took a breath, swallowed the sob, and clicked off her light. “Doesn’t matter. Nothing is as black as the cave. Once you’ve gone all the way with a fear, it’s hard to worry about lesser incarnations. That’s what I’m trying to prove with my research.”
“The rats?”
“Once they’re terrified, they just sort of switch off. There’s only so much a living organism can take before it shuts down.” Kelsey pressed her lips together, wondering if she believed her own words. How much had she taken, along with the others, from th
e house?
Erin pointed her beam up the stairs. “Ready to get out of here? Howard’s not lost in this place.”
“Sounds good.” Kelsey glanced at her dead flashlight, and an infusion of courage pumped through her veins. She could do this, stay in the house for the remainder of the week. She’d been taken to the very edge and the house had nothing else to offer, no more threats. Following Erin up the stairs, she paused to ask, “So what are you afraid of, Erin?”
“Oh, me? The only thing which scares me is knowing too much.” The beautiful blonde let out a tiny laugh and pushed open the door to the kitchen.
Chapter 21: Opening Doors
A small group had gathered in the parlor by the time Erin and Kelsey decided to leave the basement. Daniel stood against one wall, his arms crossed in a silent self-hug. Sarah glanced at the other two women, her eyes wide and blank as she pulled on her lower lip. Kelsey slid in behind Johnny’s bent back, straining for a look at whatever was laid on the table before him.
“What’s the story? Where’s Mr. Wormsley and the others?” Erin asked.
Johnny peeked at her over his shoulder. “Outside, probably. I’m sure they’re still looking for their guy. I doubt they find him outside. We found this upstairs.” He stepped aside. A black hip pack and attached belt sat on the low coffee table in front of the couch.
Kelsey pulled back. “That’s Howard’s.”
“We figured the same. Wasn’t he wearing it earlier today?” Johnny dropped onto the couch. “Anyway, I opened it and poked around. Found a pair of wire crimpers and some other electrical tools. Nothing definitive, but…”
“But what?” Kelsey asked.
“Why would he take it off and just leave it?” Sarah asked. “I mean, it’s kind of a screwy thing to do, right?”
Erin circled the couch and sat. She leaned forward, elbows on knees, and rested her chin in her hands. “So where did you find it?”
Johnny turned to Erin and flashed a quick glance at Kelsey. He told her too much in that glance, a look dripping with something dark. Even Johnny felt fear. Kelsey looked away, aiming her attention at the big window across the room. Snow continued to fall.