by Eve Evans
“Max,” Sam warned. “Maybe not the time.”
“No, it’s okay,” I said quickly. “I’m here to find out the truth, after all. What do you mean by unnatural?”
“Well…” Max hesitated, seeming to regret bringing it up, but I gestured for him to continue. “I’m not sure how familiar you are with the house’s history.”
“I know what I read in the article,” I said.
“Ah, well, that was more of a brief summary. The house’s violence goes much deeper. The first owner of the house, Thomas Hartley, was murdered here by a jealous cousin. The family history is a sordid one, although most of it takes place outside of the house itself. Trish can tell you more about that. But since Hartley’s gruesome death, many of the homeowners have succumbed to a similarly violent end. There are always exceptions, of course, but it’s a generally perceived as fact that anyone who lives here dies at the hands of suicide or murder by a family member.”
I swallowed thickly and found myself wondering, not for the first time, if that night, had I been home with my parents and not sleeping over at my friend’s house, would I be dead too?
“Trish has details on most of the homeowners, but the house’s history points quite clearly to being inhabited by some sort of paranormal entity. A violent one, too.”
I kept quiet, struggling to take in everything he was telling me.
Eventually, I said: “Is it dangerous? This… this ‘entity’. Will it try to hurt us?”
Max flicked a glance over my shoulder, presumably at Sam, before returning his gaze to my face. He looked solemn. “I can’t say for sure,” he said honestly. “We still don’t understand a lot about entities and spirits. Motivations, curses, energies. They’re different for each one. We might be dealing with a vengeful spirit, or a completely malevolent one, like a poltergeist. But if there’s any chance of danger, we’ll cleanse the house as soon as we can and get out of here. So, don’t worry,” he added with a forced chuckle. “We’ve been doing this long enough to recognize the risks.”
“Like Max said, we’ve all had experience dealing with dark energies,” Sam concurred from behind me. “We can handle ourselves.”
“Alright,” I said evenly. There was a lot about the paranormal that I had no clue about. I’d spent the last few years of my life writing about murder cases and crimes, but nothing supernatural. All flesh and blood killers.
“How about you go and get some air?” Max suggested kindly. “I’m sure it’s a lot to take in.”
“Yeah, I think I will,” I said, shoving my hands in my pockets as I made my way back outside. The atmosphere was getting heavy in there, and even now I could feel each breath straining to pass through my lungs.
Calm down, I told myself. You don’t have to stay here. If it gets too much, don’t be afraid to admit defeat.
My mom had always told me that. There was nothing weak about admitting defeat, nothing weak about asking for help. But this was something I didn’t want to run away from, not if I could help it.
“Hey, you alright?”
I glanced sidelong at Amie as she stepped out onto the porch, rubbing her hands together. The morning had grown chilly, and a mist was beginning to roll in from the valleys, eddying against the horizon.
“Yeah, just getting some air,” I said nonchalantly. “The house can get pretty stuffy.”
Amie hummed thoughtfully, training her eye on the distance. “You said on the phone that you want to publish your experience here,” she began, keeping her voice low and obliging, unintrusive. “You’re a writer, aren’t you? I recognize your name from somewhere other than our research.”
“I write crime novels,” I said with a shake of my head. “I feel like there’s some irony in there, somewhere.”
“Maybe,” she agreed. “But if that’s what you feel the need to do, then why does it matter. Sometimes the best way of dealing with emotions is confronting them head-on, whether that be in a novel or something else.”
I listened to her with piqued interest. She seemed to speak from her own experience, but I was reluctant to invade her privacy. Instead, I asked: “What made you turn to the paranormal?”
Amie chuckled. “Oh, you know, the usual. I had an encounter when I was younger that changed my life in many ways. It made me realize that we know very little of the human condition, especially after death. I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to find answers to questions that nobody quite knows how to ask.”
“Is there something waiting for us after death?”
Amie nodded. “Not only if, but why and how? There’s still so much we don’t understand.”
“And you think there’s something to discover?”
“Yes. That’s why I’m here. Well, our primary objectives involve cleansing places of bad energy, to stop others from getting hurt. But if, in the meantime, we can record evidence and experiences, maybe we’ll be one step closer to finding out that why and how.”
I frowned down at my feet, tapping my fingers thoughtfully against my arms. “I’m glad I came,” I said eventually. “I think I’d like to help you. Not only for my sake, but for yours too.”
Amie grinned at me, her cheeks flushing slightly. “Thank you, Nadia. I’m glad you’re here too. I hope, somehow, you’ll be able to find some peace after what happened here.”
I turned around to glance up at the house, with its dark, grim façade and shadowed windows and the ivy clinging to the crumbling bricks. “So do I.”
“Any energy readings?” Amie asked as Max scanned the sitting room with a small beeping device.
“Nothing yet,” he mumbled.
“Nothing at all?”
Max shook his head distractedly. “All clear so far.”
“Hm, it could be periodic,” Amie suggested. “It’s likely there’s peak times for activity.”
It was already mid-afternoon, and the sky outside had turned various shades of grey under a burgeoning rain shower. The wind was starting to pick up too, rustling the brown grass outside and making the gutters tremble.
“Nadia?”
“Hm?” I turned quickly, not realizing the others were speaking to me.
“We’re going to go upstairs to do some readings. You can join us or stay down here with Trish and Joe. They’re in the kitchen, sorting out a timeline of the house.”
“A timeline?”
“Of the house’s previous owners, and what happened to them,” Amie explained, tucking a stray piece of hair under her beanie. “They might appreciate your help.”
“Okay,” I agreed, watching them disappear through the door. I waited behind a moment, casting a lingering glance over the room. It was still strange being back here again, but I’d started to feel a detachment to the place. It was no longer the house of my childhood, but a drab, shadowy reflection. There wasn’t anything left of my childhood here.
I turned my back to the room and went through to the kitchen. Joe and Trish glanced up as I walked in, their faces glowing in the glare of the monitor screens they had set up on the table. This was to be our base of operations, so to speak, where all of the equipment was set up in a surveillance display. They had eyes on every room in the house but the bathroom.
“Hey,” Trish said when she saw me.
“Hey. Amie said you might need some help.”
Joe pulled out a chair for me to sit on, and I took it with a small smile.
“Only if you’re comfortable talking about, you know,” she said quickly.
I said nothing for a moment. I couldn’t be sure whether I would be comfortable or not talking about what had happened, given this was the first time. All of those therapists I’d had as a kid could never get a word out of me. At the time, I never knew what they wanted me to say.
“It’s okay,” I said.
Trish tilted her head, appraising me, then nodded. “Okay, so we’re trying to map out the history of the house’s residents. It’s a lot harder than you might think, given the lack of official records. There is
n’t much of a paper trail for the original owners, other than a couple of documents we found in the national archives. But so far, we’ve been able to get a pretty decent picture of most of the house’s owners. It all starts with Thomas Hartley,” she continued, pulling up a landowner agreement onto her screen. “He was a wealthy businessman back in the early 1800s. We don’t know too much about his life, other than the fact that it came to an end only ten months after the house was built. Although its mostly speculation, people believe one of his cousins had an intense dislike of him, and murdered him in his own home, before killing himself out of regret. The local historian corroborated their deaths as happening at the same time, so it’s the most likely scenario. The house doesn’t make much of an appearance in official records for the next decade or so, until it resurfaces in 1832, when it was bought by a wealthy farm owner, Jacob Peterson. He moved in with his wife and two farmhands. But only a year later, he went on a killing spree, murdering his entire family before killing himself.”
A sudden sickness turned my stomach, and I tilted back in my chair, feeling woozy.
“You alright?” Joe asked, noticing the sudden change in my pallor.
“Y-yeah, sorry,” I said, swallowing thickly. “It’s just… quite a gruesome history.”
“It’s okay,” Trish said. “It’s a lot to take in.”
I nodded mutely. My mouth felt dry, and I got up to fill a glass with water from the tap. Resting against the counter, I turned back to the others. “So, the rest of the owners follow the same pattern? Murdering their family, and then killing themselves?” I remembered what Max had said, that they had all succumbed to an unusual death. The consistency of the pattern was unusual, and deeply disturbing, to say the least.
“Yes. We believe the deaths have been influenced by the dark energy that resides here. A bad spirit.”
I clenched my fingers tighter around the glass. “I can’t believe we lived here for years, and we never knew any of this,” I said. It was troubling to think I’d spent my childhood in a house tainted by murder and suicide, a fate carved into the very foundations of the house. “That night, if I had been here,” I started, speaking aloud my thoughts, “when my father killed my mother… I think I would be dead too.”
Trish and Joe exchanged an uneasy glance, their eyes shadowed.
“He would have killed me.” Saying the truth out loud hurt more than keeping it to myself, and I fought back the blur of tears stinging my eyes.
“How about we have a break,” Trish said faintly, standing up from her chair. She came over and touched my arm lightly with her fingers. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
I looked up at her, the tears already drying as I blinked them away. I cleared my throat, straightening my back. “Yes,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “I’m sure.”
Trish nodded, letting go. “How about you watch the surveillance for a bit? We’ve almost finished with the research anyway.”
I nodded, seating myself in front of the monitors. Each screen was divided into four, showing different angles of each room. Amie and Max were in my old bedroom, checking for energy readings, and Sam was setting up motion sensors in my parents’ old room. Without any of the furniture, the rooms looked sad and empty. Unlived in. Dust flitted around in front of the camera, and the walls were distorted with damp. From the inside, it wasn’t the house I remembered anymore.
The rest of the afternoon passed quickly, until the last vestiges of drizzling sunlight sunk out of sight, and the evening turned dark. Trish went around the rooms, turning on all of the solar lights they brought with them; they weren’t too bright, but emitted enough of a glow to see by. They interfered less with their equipment than regular electric lights, she explained at my curious look.
“We have torches too,” Sam said, coming into the room with a stretch. Amie and Max were still upstairs, finishing up their preliminary sweep of the house. “Are you staying the night here with us?” She asked, directing the question to me.
“Yeah.”
“Great. We normally take it in turns keeping watch of the equipment, after we’ve done our investigation. It’ll probably be a late night,” she added with an apologetic smile.
“I doubt I’ll get much sleep anyway,” I pointed out.
“True,” Sam agreed solemnly.
The door to the sitting room opened, and Amie and Max came through. Amie had her lips pursed, deep in thought.
“Anything?” Joe asked.
Max cocked his head. “Nothing too intense, but we picked up a few readings in the master bedroom.”
“Hm, might be worth doing an EVP in there,” Sam suggested.
“Yeah, I definitely got a weird feeling in there,” Amie added.
“Okay, let’s take a break, and then get started.”
It was nearing eleven o’clock when the wind picked up, becoming a restless howl through the chimney, and scratching at the bricks outside.
I was in the kitchen with Amie and Trish, watching the monitors for any signs of ‘unusual activity’. Amie had done her best to explain to me what to look out for – anything that shouldn’t be there, to put it simply, even unnaturally-moving dust or shadows – but my eyes were picking up nothing on the screen. I reached up and rubbed them with my fingers. I was starting to feel tired, but I didn’t want to go to sleep. It was more of a mental fatigue, I thought, more than physical. Being back in this house was taking its toll.
“You can go and rest,” Amie suggested, her voice soft. “We’ll let you know if anything happens.”
I shook my head adamantly. “It’s fine. I want to stay awake.”
God knows what dreams I would have, being back here. I’d rather face waking reality.
“If you’re sure.”
I returned my glance back to the monitor, scanning over each square. Joe and Sam were currently investigating the master bedroom upstairs, while Max was in the room next to ours, conducting an EVP session. I thought he’d ask me to join, but he didn’t. I was starting to wonder if they were holding back for fear of upsetting me. But that’s what I was here for. I wanted to find out what – or who – lingered here, just as much as they did. Especially if there was any clue what might have happened to my parents.
“Do you think Max is alright?” Trish asked, looking at the screen. I followed her gaze. He was sitting in view of the camera, his shoulders hunched slightly as he listened. There was a shadow across his face, cast by his furrowed brow. He looked uncertain about something.
“I’ll go and check on him,” Amie said. I reflexively reached out and caught hold of her wrist as she tried to get to her feet.
“I’ll go,” I said, pushing back my chair.
Her eyes widened in surprise, but she nodded.
I knocked gently on the door to the next room before gently pushing it open,
“Max? It’s Nadia. Can I come in?”
He grunted an affirmative, and I slipped inside.
A small chill crept over me from the draught in the room. It was a lot colder in here than the rest of the house.
Max was sitting on the edge of a table, his long legs almost touching the floor. The solar light was on behind him, creating a wan glow that didn’t stretch very far.
“This is Nadia,” he said as I shuffled towards him, speaking out to the room. “She used to live here.”
I stayed quiet, not wanting to intrude.
Max raised his eyebrows at me. “Do you want to ask any questions?”
I nodded hesitantly. What should I ask? I’d never done anything like this before, never tried to make contact with the dead. All of a sudden, I felt foolish and overwhelmed, but Max’s encouraging look steeled my resolve.
I cleared my throat, speaking low: “Uhm, like Max said, I used to live here, eleven years ago. Were you around then too?” I waited a beat, clearing my throat again, then continued. “My… my parents died here. Their names were John and Grace. Do you… do you know them? Do you know what happened to the
m?” My voice broke slightly. “Are they… are you still here?”
A hush fell over the room as the two of us waited for anything to happen, but the stillness was unbroken. I absently crossed my arms over my chest. The cold was starting to seep beneath my clothes now, making me shiver.
“Earlier,” I said suddenly, turning to Max, “you seemed concerned about something.”
The frown returned, darkening his features. “Yeah, I thought I heard something.”
“What was it?”
“It… sort of sounded like someone humming. But deeper, maybe a man’s voice.”
“Anything else?”
He shook his head.
We stayed in silence for some time, listening patiently. Every now and then, Max would ask a question, and I would join in with one of my own. I wondered if we would get any responses when we listened back, or if the night would be as silent as eleven years ago.
I shuffled my feet, blowing out a soft sigh, and then started.
Max looked at me sharply. “Is something wrong?”
I froze, twisting my head slightly to look at my shoulder.
“I… I thought something touched me,” I said, slightly breathless. There was a lingering trace of pressure on my clothes. “Maybe I imagined it,” I added quickly, but my heart was still thudding from the sudden feeling of a hand touching me.
Max stood from the table, his tall frame casting a shadow over me. “There’s nothing around you. Nothing could have touched you.”
I reached up and massaged my shoulder. It had been faint and sudden, but unmistakable.
“Let me know if that happens again,” he said, and I nodded. Maybe I was just being jumpy.
Something thudded upstairs, the echo resounding through the rafters, and a soft mutter of surprise left my lips.
“Was that the others?”
He listened a moment longer before nodding. “Probably. Want to wrap up this EVP session?”
“Okay.”
He turned off the device and stretched out his arms, already heading for the door.
“W-wait,” I started. “Can I… Can I stay in here? On my own.”