Hunter's Desire

by Meg Ripley

  "So they're contacting you hoping for a different response?"

  "Evidently. I guess they've been cyber-stalking the house and found out that Grandma died and left it to me so they decided they would swoop in and try again."

  "That seems…tacky. Are you going to do it?"

  Madison sighed. She had clicked through the link at the bottom of the email that connected her to the website of the group and was browsing through some of the images. There seemed to be an abundance of vaguely humanlike shadows and doors standing partially open, but with dramatic captions that told her whoever posted the pictures had apparently read far more into the pictures.

  "I'm not sure. I mean, if Grandma didn't want them doing it, I'm sure she had her reasons."

  "I doubt it. Grandma didn't have to have a reason for anything. She'd refuse a package delivery for something she ordered just for the fun of it."

  "That's true. I guess I'm just torn. You know how I feel about all of this paranormal stuff."

  "That it's bull-honkey?"

  "I don't think that's a phrase I would ever use to describe it, but yes, that's the basic idea."

  "Actually, that's the exact phrase you used. I wrote it down. September 17, Madison talking about paranormal investigations…bull…honkey."

  "That's written on your calendar?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, I'm glad to know you're chronicling my life in such detail."

  "Only the outlying moments. I'm keeping track to screen for early-onset Alzheimer's."

  "Dianna, just because your neighbor said one weird thing, you said she had Alzheimer's, and it turned out that she actually did does not mean that that’s how it always works out. Anyway," Madison lifted her voice a little to try to regain control of the conversation, "The point is that this Noah guy wants to meet with me to discuss filming at the house for his Halloween special, and I think I might be considering it."

  "But I thought it was all bull-honkey?"

  "Bull-honkey aside, they are offering to pay me to rent the place out for three days and to appear with them in their evidence video."

  "Ooo! Hello sexy ghost hunter, goodbye student loan debt."

  "Exactly my thought process."

  They chatted for a few more minutes before Madison hung up the phone and turned her attention fully to the website on her computer screen. The investigator certainly was beautiful, she couldn't deny that. She just wasn't sure all the bad-ass black clothing in the world and even eyes and lips that could probably charm the panties right off the ghosts of the schoolmarms that once taught at her grandmother's mansion could make her get over the ridiculousness of the concept of a paranormal investigation.

  ****

  "I don't think I can do this."

  It was the next day and Dianna was sitting in front of Madison's computer, clicking slowly through the pictures on the paranormal investigation website.

  "Why not?"

  "Have you seen the so-called 'evidence' that they've posted? There are about 30 videos of creaking floorboards, another 30 of windows being pushed open by the wind, and at least two of what I'm fairly certain are reflections of wayward Halloween decorations in vanity mirrors."

  "I will admit those are not the most compelling."

  "But he's freaking out about them like he just watched a ghost walk by in its underwear brushing its teeth."

  "He may be a little excitable, but you're missing the most important element all of these evidence videos have in common."

  "And what's that?"

  Dianna spun the computer around to face Madison and pointed at a still image of Noah, his face turned just enough to the camera so that a strand of his dark hair fell across one shockingly blue eye.

  "He's so damn pretty. Look how pretty he is."

  Dianna stroked her fingers along the screen like she was petting Noah's head and gazed at him like she was about two seconds away from licking him.

  "Ok, that's enough," Madison said, pulling the computer away from her.

  "I don't understand why you are being so difficult about this."

  "I'm not being difficult, I just don't want my grandmother's house turned into some freak show and me edited so that I look like some screaming imbecile because a mouse sneezed and set off the motion activated cameras."

  "So let me go. I'll be you and run around investigating with the boys, and you won't have to worry about it anymore."

  "I don't think that's going to work out."

  "Why not?"

  "What was my grandmother's name?"

  Dianna hesitated.

  "Grandma…?"

  She looked at the picture closer and sighed.

  "He is gorgeous."

  "And?"

  "And it would be nice to be able to pay off my student loans and not have to continue pretending I don't exist between the hours of 9 AM and 6 PM, or 9 PM when they switch it up and have the west coast office call me."

  "And?" Dianna's voice had risen to an almost frightening pitch.

  "And I’m going to let him investigate my freaking house."

  "Yay!"

  "But only, only, if they agree to accept that I am a skeptic and that they will not edit me to look like anything else."

  Madison fired off an email back to Noah, agreeing to meet at the house to discuss the project, and closed her computer, leaning over to rest her head on it. This was going to be a long weekend.

  ****

  Two days later, Madison drove slowly up the winding driveway toward her grandmother's mansion. The crunching of the gravel beneath the tires was familiar and she felt herself smiling as she remembered all the times she had heard that same sound when she arrived for visits with her grandmother when she was a child, and then when she moved in with her when she was a teenager. It was a sound of comfort and of coming home.

  Her private musings were cut short as her car crested the final swell of the hill and found the small patch of grass at the back of the house already crowded with people. Several people were milling around looking out over the view of the city beneath, and one man was teetering precariously on a cinderblock trying to peek into one of the windows positioned high off of the ground.

  She climbed out of her car and shut the door hard enough that the sound brought the attention of everyone in the yard. A few looked uncomfortable and Madison wondered just how angry her expression was as she stood there watching them make themselves at home. Out of the corner of her eye she saw someone approach and turned to face him. Stunning blue eyes stared back at her and she felt her breath catch in her throat.

  "Hi, I'm Noah."

  His voice was a dark and smooth as she would have expected, it to be, and held the slightest whisper of an accent that she couldn't quite place. She hadn't noticed it in any of the videos, and she thought she may have made her decision to go through with the video a bit quicker if she had. He didn’t smile at her and she sensed a bit of tension in his presence.

  "Madison," she said, taking the hand he offered and shaking it, "I see you all got here promptly at twenty minutes earlier than the time we agreed to meet."

  Now that she had gotten over the initial shock of being face to face with the beautiful man, the frustration at being denied a few minutes of time to herself to assimilate to the strange feeling of being back at the house after so long and to come to terms with the situation was bubbling out of her.

  "We like to get started on time."

  "I can see that." She glanced over at the house, "Who's that?"

  "That's Jesse, the other investigator on the team."

  The man standing on the cinderblock had gone completely still as if trying to blend in with the house. When he heard his name, he waved over his shoulder in her direction, and then turned slowly to face her.

  "Hi. I'm sorry. It's a really great house."

  He smiled at her, puppy-dog eyes staring hopefully from under shaggy brown hair. The effect was a softer, more innocent attractiveness than Noah that immediately disarmed her. Sh
e felt the anger slide out of her when she saw the excitement in his eyes and realized that it was time to let go of her defensiveness and anger, and allow the team to enjoy the space that obviously meant something to them.

  She offered Jesse a smile.

  "Yeah, it is."

  He grinned and turned back to the window, cupping his hands around his eyes to try to see into the house.

  "Jesse is very into all of this."

  Madison felt Noah step up behind her so close that the warmth of his breath rippled down her neck. She shivered slightly and looked back at him.

  "I thought you were the lead investigator."

  Noah shook his head slightly.

  "I'm the look."

  "So you don't really think there are ghosts in there?"

  He shrugged and Madison thought she saw a shimmer of a smile in his eyes.

  "We'll see."

  ****

  "What do you know about the history of the house?"

  Madison had just stepped through the back door and was standing in the middle of the kitchen. The emotions running through her made it so she barely heard Jesse's question. Everything around her was so still, as if suspended in the moment right before her grandmother died. It had been a week, but everything looked as if any moment she would come walking down the stairs.

  A single glass sat in the dish drainer, the kitchen curtains were open, and there was a sponge tucked behind the sink where the care provider left it on her last day of service. The house didn't feel empty even though it had been days since the cleaning crew she had hired came in and cleaned out her grandmother's bedroom and no one else had stepped foot inside since.

  She sighed. There still wasn't sadness, only a strange sense of calm and finality. Jesse repeated his question and Madison jumped slightly, brought out of her thoughts and back into the moment.

  "Oh. Um, not much actually. I know it's been here for a long time."

  "Just a couple hundred years," Noah said from the living room where he had wandered.

  "My grandmother inherited this house from her mother, but that's as far as I know. She never really talked about it much."

  "Is there any electricity?"

  "Yes. In most places."

  She was walking out of the room and could hear Jesse questioning her response from behind her.

  "Most places?"

  "I was never allowed in the basement when I was younger and my grandmother told me that there wasn't any power down there. There's also a room in the back of the house that hasn't had power as long as I can remember."

  "Why?"

  "I don't know."

  "Can you show me?"

  Noah asked the question from behind her and she turned to nod him.

  "Sure."

  Madison led him toward the back of the house to the small room beside the library where she had spent much of her childhood curled onto the green leather chairs reading through the old books lining the shelves. Many had been there since long before she was born; some since even before her great-grandmother was born.

  The small room was as dark and close as she remembered from when she was young. Noah stepped up beside her and turned on his flashlight. There were no windows in the room, so the narrow beam was the only illumination to cut through the darkness. The light danced across the desk set on one wall and the fireplace on the other. They were the only two things in the room and Madison was starting to turn to leave when she saw Noah step forward toward the fireplace.

  "Did you know that this house was allegedly designed and built by a serial killer?" Noah asked, his voice low, calm, and without even a hint of trying to shock her.

  She shivered slightly.

  "Really?"

  "Mmmmhmmm. Years before it was a school, it was his private residence. He supposedly wanted it to look completely normal to anyone who visited, but he added features that would let him conceal and do away with his victims whenever he pleased."

  He was running his hand along the front of the mantelpiece, and when he stopped talking, he pressed on the center of a carving. A section of the wall beside the fireplace shifted and slid out of the way. Madison gasped. She couldn't believe that it had been there here entire life and she had no idea. Noah ducked into the space revealed by the false wall, and then stuck his head back out.

  "Are you coming?" he asked.

  Madison hesitated for a moment, thinking about what he said about the serial killer. She could almost hear Dianna taunting her if she admitted she was nervous about going into the hidden passage because of a story a ghost hunter told her while creeping around in the dark.

  "Absolutely," she said, hoping she sounded confident.

  The passage was small and tight, forcing her to nearly stand up against Noah as they inched their way along the space. He stopped short and she ran into his back. She caught herself by grabbing his muscular hips and hesitated just a second before letting him go.

  "Where does this door lead?" Noah asked, flattening his hand on a thick wooden door at the end of the hallway.

  She gave an exasperated sigh.

  "I have no idea. I didn't even know this passage was here until about three minutes ago."

  "Well, we're about to find out. Step back."

  Madison did as he asked and he handed her his flashlight. Noah stepped back close to her and then lunged forward, bashing his massive shoulder into the door. She let out a startled scream and he repeated the move, hitting the door in the same place over and over until it crashed open.

  "It would have been nice for you to let me know that you were going to bash down my door."

  "You didn’t even know that door was there."

  "It still would have been a nice courtesy."

  They climbed through the broken door and Noah took the flashlight from her so he could sweep the beam around the room. There was a damp chill in the air and as soon as she started looking around Madison realized they were in the basement. She hadn't even noticed that the floor in the passageway had been tilting down, gradually bringing them beneath the house into the massive room.

  "Legend has it that the killer kept some of his victims down here for weeks on end. He was only caught because one of them lost so much weight that he was able to slip out of his chains and escape."

  "Chains?"

  Noah stepped further into the room, following the walls with his flashlight until the light fell onto a set of shackles hanging from the stone. Her breath caught in her throat.

  "Of course, that's just the story. There could be any number of explanations for that."

  There was a hint of teasing in his voice and Madison felt the eerie chill down her back as he led her out of the expansive basement, up the stairs, and through the door that she knew would let them out into the kitchen again. The door had always been locked throughout her childhood, but they found a key protruding from the lock on the inside of the door. Something about that made her even more nervous.

  Jesse and the other crewmembers were wandering somewhere elsewhere in the house. She could hear their voices and followed them until she got to the second floor where the bedrooms were, including one with a door she insisted remain shut.

  "Why?" Noah asked when she placed her hand on the doorknob and told him that that room was off-limits for their investigation.

  "I just don't want anyone going in there. My house, my rules."

  He scoffed at her and walked into the room beside it. She followed and saw piles of bags and strange equipment stacked across the floor and along the white-and-yellow bedspread that had always adorned this guest room.

  "Do you want to see some of the equipment we'll use for our investigation?" Noah asked.

  "Sure."

  He picked up a few items, describing the purpose of the EVP recorders, the spirit box, and the EMF detector. As he showed her each one, she couldn't get the "Ghostbusters" theme song out of her head, but fought to keep it inside.

  "What's that?" she asked, pointing to what looked like a compli
cated black army jacket draped across the bed.

  "This is my favorite piece of equipment," Noah said, putting down a recorder to pick up the jacket, "It detects changes in the environment as well as your vital signs to show possible spirit interference with the atmosphere."

  "What does that mean?" she asked.

  Noah stepped toward her and guided her into the jacket. He stepped back and Madison held her arms slightly to her sides, somewhat worried the jacket would short circuit at any second.

  "The diodes on the sleeves change colors and light up in different areas depending on the temperature to show sudden changes. There is an EMF detector embedded in the side that will alert the person wearing it if there are any changes in the electromagnetic field."

  "And my vital signs?" she asked.

  Noah's lips curved slightly in a mischievous smile.

  "There are strips in the lining that monitor respiration and heart rate." He stepped closer, "Let me show you."

  Madison watched as his face drew closer and his lips touched hers. The kiss was soft at first, and then his hands slipped beneath the jacket to smooth along the curve of her waist and clutch her hips before his lips parted over hers and she felt his tongue flick prodding, encouraging her to open her mouth. When she did, the kiss deepened. Their tongues tangled and she felt herself whimper into his mouth. She was so lost in the sensation of him that she almost didn't hear the alarm emanating from inside the jacket, indicating her heart rate had suddenly spiked.

  "See?" he said slightly breathlessly, smiling down at her, then walking out of the room.

  ****

  Madison's belly was trembling before she even climbed out of her car the next day. She sat in the driveway for what to her seemed like an eternity, staring up at the house and the single light she saw glowing in the window of the dining room. The crew was in there setting up sound equipment and linking cameras to their computers, and also in the house, somewhere in those secret-keeping walls as Noah. She could still taste his hot mouth against hers and feel his strong hands grazing her body. Getting through the night filming with him was going to be a challenge.