The current owner had abandoned the house after only two weeks as its resident. He refused to return - even for one night with a team of ghost hunters to accompany him; and, knowing the harm it was capable of, he refused to sell the house on. For the past forty years, passing through numerous unsatisfied owners, it had been left empty for the most part. But not tonight. Tonight every room was swarming with thrill seekers, and every room was cluttered with cameras and all kinds of equipment to detect and record manifestations of the supernatural.
The house was waiting for them.
"Cass, are you okay?"
Her eyes met his nervously. "There's something here," she said, and started as the incoherent, muffled voices of two men reverberated within the walls around her. They were arguing furiously with each other. "There's definitely something here."
Bill grinned at her. "Excellent."
"No, you don't understand," she said, trying to keep her voice steady. "This doesn't feel right - it's not like all the other times."
"In what way?"
She stared down at the ground. The presence had been there for a split second when she had entered the house; recognising what she was, it had retreated before she could explore it any further. "I'm not sure," she said honestly, pressing the tips of her fingers against the side of her head as her mind searched the house to hunt it down. But there was nothing - just the voices, and they were insistent, eager for her attention. "I can't find it."
"Then there's nothing to be afraid of."
"No," she exhaled, looking up at him. "That's...that's not what I mean -"
"The past can't hurt you," he explained calmly. "And that's all these things are in the end - echoes from the past, supernatural special effects with no substance. That's all."
"It's done," Evan said. "Let's get on with the show."
Bill clasped his hands together. "Cass, it's too late to get anyone else. We need you."
They weren't the first paranormal investigators to spend the night in the house. They had all experienced a few chills and unpleasant sounds - some had managed to capture footage of red orbs in the rooms upstairs. Bill was right. It was like a rollercoaster ride with all the thrills - that was all it could be, because the past wasn't strong enough to assert its presence. It could only reach out to them with tricks that other sceptics might be able to find an explanation for or dismiss. This house wasn't any different than the other houses they had investigated.
Lowering her head, she listened to the incoherent voices as she readied herself. "I'll do it," she said. "I'm ready."
"Fantastic," Bill said, clapping his hands. He turned to the others inside the room and shouted orders. "One minute. Lights off. Come on. Everybody, it's time to shut up!"
Mentally distancing herself from the people around her, allowing the influences she had kept at bay to reach out to her, she released her consciousness and looked openly at her surroundings again, barely aware of the mobile camera as it was trained on her, of the others in the room staring at her expectantly and waiting for her to speak.
"There's..." She faltered. Her eyes widened as the phenomenon took shape. "There's two men," she said.
The voices swelled towards her and exploded inside the room. They were coherent now.
"Yes, two men. They're brothers. They're arguing with each other." Taking them in, she held her breath for a moment, and then exhaled breathlessly as their raw emotions touched her. "There's so much anger."
"You killed them!"
She stood back with shock as the voice resonated jarringly inside her head.
"You killed them! I know you did."
"Two brothers," she said again, sensing their minds now. "Bruce and James. It's Bruce. It's something he did. He murdered -"
Two tremulous, shapeless black pools squirmed agitatedly out of the air in front of her; rapidly extending their forms, they flitted close to each other, against each other. As the past kept reaching out to her, there were intermittent, half-formed glimpses of the two men - contorted, liquid faces, hands that lost their shape as they stretched out.
"James is convinced that Bruce is responsible for a number of murders," she went on waveringly. "He's found some clothes covered with blood, and the description the police have given of the murderer matches his brother."
"You're going to the police!"
She watched curiously as one of the forms swept out of the room. "James wants his brother to go to the police. Bruce isn't listening. He's going upstairs."
"Let's go," she heard Bill say. But she was already making her way out of the room. They all followed her as she climbed the staircase, and instinctively entered the main bedroom.
She could see the two men now, and she could see the room as it had once been - it was being decorated by the two men; they had bought the house with the intention of renovating it and selling it on.
"Is anything happening?" Bill said. He was impatient now.
She had forgotten the crew. "They're fighting now," she answered, watching the men grappling with each other as they rolled across the floor, and Bruce managing to pin his brother down. "Bruce wants to kill his brother. He's got his hands around his throat - the other hand's against his brother's face. He's stronger. James is suffocating -"
Cass caught her breath as James reached out and slashed his brother's face with a stripping knife. With a cry of pain, Bruce fell back. She heard a sickening crack as his head struck the fireplace.
"He's killed him."
"James is dead."
"No," she almost hissed at him. "Bruce is dead. His brother found a weapon. He had no choice but to kill him."
Cass took an unconscious step forward and studied James. He was terrified. Shaking his head repeatedly with disbelief, trembling, he looked down at the dead body of his brother.
"Don't," Cass warned him, catching the man's desperate thought.
But it had already happened. She watched as James reached under the body's arms and dragged it through a door into a smaller connecting room; a room which dissolved with the two brothers as they receded back into the past.
There was just a wall there now.
Shuddering as the present returned to her, she shook her hand at the wall. "He's in there. There's another room. He's behind the wall."
Holding herself, she drew back into a corner of the room as Bill reached for his cell phone and the others moved eagerly towards the wall and began to take their readings. Knowing what he planned to do, she found herself growing increasingly uneasy as she listened to Bill's conversation. She couldn't sense anything now - and that was wrong, because, in varying degrees, there was always an awareness of a presence in a house. It was as though, receiving what it wanted, the presence had deliberately withdrawn and concealed itself from their radar; it had led them all to this room, and now it was waiting. But what was it waiting for?
Bill grinned at them as he snapped his cell phone shut; he was pleased with himself. "The owner doesn't care about the house. He's given us the go-ahead to knock down the wall. The tools should be here soon."
She looked at him uneasily. "Are you sure that's wise?"
His brow furrowed with surprise. "We can't just leave it there, can we?" He stepped forward and placed his hand on her shoulder. "You don't look well. Maybe you should take a breather."
"I'm okay," she replied. But she wasn't okay; her stomach was tied up in knots - she couldn't even bring herself to look past him at the wall. If she had just kept quiet. This was her fault. They were making a mistake - whatever was there, it was better to leave it alone.
Why?
Her mind could offer no reason for her fear. Silently, she watched them for a while, but their excitement was too much for her. It wasn't until she left the room and felt an unmistakeable rush of relief, that she realized how much the room had preyed on her mind. She had intended to escape to one of the rooms below, but her curiosity got the better of her when she passed the next room and saw Harry scru
tinising the live feeds - seven monitors had been set up on a table in the middle of the room. He glanced up and smiled as she entered and sat beside him. "It's all happening," he said cheerfully.
"Bill's pleased," she replied, making no effort to hide her disgust.
"Well, it's not every day you get a corpse."
"No," she admitted, and suppressed a shiver as her eyes fell on the feed streaming from the main bedroom and caught one of the team entering the room with a sledge hammer. "This is wrong," she whispered.
"What?" Harry muttered distractedly, studying the feed on another screen.
"This is - "
Cass flinched as the sledge hammer was swung heavily into the wall. It was a hasty, flimsy construction, because some of the bricks separated and gave way immediately - and a part of the door was exposed with the first blow. They didn't stop. More blows followed in quick succession, and the door was soon accessible through the hole. Bill couldn't contain himself. Unable to wait for them to finish, he pushed open the door and proceeded to climb through the hole - and before he was inside, an object, only a few inches in size; a transparent, squirming mass, flew past him and out of the room.
"Did you see that?" she cried.
Puzzled, Harry looked closely at the screen. "What?"
"Something went past him!"
"I didn't see - bloody hell."
They were bringing the corpse out of the room now. They were able to see most of its body through its worn, tattered clothes - rodents had eaten their way through them to reach the flesh - there were holes in these areas; a shrivelled, desiccated body with its limbs twisted protectively into itself, its mouth yawning wide, frozen in a scream, and its lost eyes staring sightlessly ahead. But it was irrelevant. There was something else that concerned her more than the pitiable shell on the screen now; crawling into her consciousness as it asserted its presence and swelled convulsively into a form that was far from human; something driven blindly by a hatred that had been left to fester for years.
There was a scream from below. Bill and all the others in the room next to them ran past the door. They thought it was another manifestation of the supernatural to film on their cameras. They wanted to see what it was.
"Look," Harry yelled at her, pointing to the monitors.
Involuntarily, she obeyed, and witnessed the people below them dying before their eyes, being hunted like animals by something that kept on moving out of the cameras' range. But they caught glimpses of it, of its face, and they could see that whatever it was, it was merciless; ignoring the screams as it trapped and swiftly closed in on its prey, reaching out with hands that choked, and smashed, and mutilated.
And then everything stopped.
They had brought this on themselves. They had come to this house looking for the irrefutable proof of the existence of the supernatural, ready to be surprised, intrigued, and more than ready to be disturbed – it was entertainment, after all; there had to be moments of apprehension to entertain their viewers – it was expected. As always, they had been secure in the knowledge that nothing they saw had the capacity to hurt them, that in the morning it would all be over, and they would just pack up their things as usual and move onto the next house on the list. They had expected everything, and expected nothing. It wasn’t supposed to be real – not this real. These things weren’t supposed to happen. For God’s sake, these things weren’t supposed to -
Without warning, her own sight was smothered and she found herself looking down at the dead bodies in the living-room. A stifled moan of revulsion broke from her lips as a distinct consciousness slipped effortlessly into her mind and began to feed her its thoughts. The entity was inside her; she could see through its eyes.
It wasn’t over yet.
Searching, listening, watching for the slightest movement, the thing moved systematically from room to room, and as it did so, it bent down to scrutinise the dead bodies in its sight, and it checked to make sure they were dead.
“Dead...” she choked out involuntarily, echoing the thought in its mind. “This one’s dead…dead...dead...“
“Stop it,” Harry hissed urgently into her ear, his hand shaking as he clutched her shoulder.
Her head convulsed backwards as the appalling vision of her dead colleagues was abruptly severed. Her thoughts were her own again, but there was a moment of frantic confusion as her eyes roved over the monitors in front of her. The live feeds were still coming through from every room in the house. The first sight that drew her attention was the desiccated corpse in the bedroom next to them – hidden, forgotten, bricked up for years in a small room behind one of the walls until they had pulled it out into the open. And then she saw the dead bodies in all of the rooms below them.
“All of them,” she whispered with disbelief, shaking her head. “It’s killed all of them.”
Harry shook his head. “It’s not happening...how can this be happening?”
“It’s our fault,” she said hoarsely. “We should have left it alone. It’s our - “
“It’s there...it’s in the living-room!”
As she followed his gaze, the half-formed, grinning face of the entity was already in her mind; she realized she was afraid to look at it again – it had no right to exist.
The camera inside the living-room looked down on it – it was standing only a few feet away, looking straight ahead. With a glistening, ashen skin that was bruised and almost fragmented in parts – it had a misshapen face that looked as though it were melting, struggling to hold its pieces together, and black, sunken, shrivelled eyes that squirmed as they looked outwards.
It wasn’t just standing there. The realization came to her just as it calmly lifted its head and looked up at the camera.
“It knows we’re up here.”
Harry’s chair fell back as he leapt to his feet. “We’ve got to make a run for it...while we’ve got the chance,” he breathed out tremulously. He was visibly shaking as he stared down at the thing’s face. “While it’s in the living-room – we’ve got to get out!”
She shook her head. “It’ll be waiting for us,” she insisted. We have to stay here!”
“I’m not waiting for it to come to us,” he shouted desperately at her, and began to run towards the door. Following, she stretched out her hand and seized hold of his arm just as he came to the staircase. But he was panic-stricken now; he could hardly see her. As she struggled to pull him away from the landing, his arms thrashed against her, and he struck her across the face. The shock made her lose her hold – he was half-way down the staircase before she could do anything more to stop him, and in the passage, he reached out towards the front door.
Waiting.
She had known it would be ready for him, but she still recoiled from the sight of it. There wasn’t even the opportunity to warn him as the thing slipped swiftly and soundlessly out of the living-room towards him; with melting hands that almost lost their shape, clutched hold of his head and dragged him down to the ground.
And stole the air.
Smiling, it watched him choking for air as it held steadfastly onto his frantically writhing body, bent its head sideways with an unmistakeable curiosity as the body went limp and slumped forwards. She knew what was coming, and felt its eyes turning on her, heard the body being thrown aside, as she staggered backwards and reached out to the bedrooms for a place to hide.
She found herself stumbling into the bedroom where they had discovered the corpse, driven by one thought, a persistent, desperate thought; that it wouldn’t want to return to the room they had found it in, and it wouldn’t want to be confronted with its death.
Her body shook uncontrollably as she reached under the corpse’s arms and carried it back with her through the hole in the wall into the small room; and pulled the cold, shrivelled body against her as the entity appeared in the doorway and entered the room.
And stopped.
Dropping onto its knees, the smile died on its face as it stared
steadily at her. But it wouldn’t look at its physical body. It was reluctant to go any further. It was waiting for her.
But it couldn’t wait indefinitely. In the morning it would disappear, and would return again with the night. This was the ancient law of hauntings and manifestations, she had been told so many times - the dead crawled out of hiding at night, in the dangerous hours, and in the morning, in the cold light of day, everything was alright again. Yes, they had given flesh to its vague, rumoured presence when they had discovered its body, but it couldn’t sustain its form permanently. The morning, she would be safe in the morning. She just had to wait.
Her arms tightened around the body as the smile returned to its face.
All she had to do was wait.
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