The Dark Man (12 page)

I remind him how much that experience sucked and make him promise to tell me if he feels anything out of the ordinary over the next few hours. I add, “You know the drill, Mike. Depression, murderous ideas.”

He rubs the back of his head where it hit the floor and checks for blood on his fingertips. Hand clean, he says, “You mean murderous ideas directed toward you?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s not out of the ordinary, Ford. That’s a Tuesday.”

I laugh. Mike laughs.

And for a moment, it’s good. That would’ve been a prime capture for the show. A speck of levity to break the ungodly tension right before a commercial break.

Your sheets will be as white as ghosts with new clothesline-scented Sparkle Clean.

While I’m picturing that kid in the red T-shirt and gray jeans as he runs around with the blanket on his head—acting like a ghost, as expected—Mike hums a few bars of the commercial’s theme song.

Yeah. We’re back. I’d like to high-five him, but it’s slightly creepy how connected we are.

Are? Were? I’m not sure where we stand.

He pushes himself to his feet, and I get up with him.

“Should we check?” I ask. He’s already lifting his shirt before I finish the sentence. I wince and hiss. “That’s a good one.”

“Burns like hell.”

“Ha ha.”

“No, man, I’m serious. My skin is on fire. Look at the welts.”

There’s a big splotch on the right side of his rib cage. It’s bright pink and getting redder, along with five raised welts and a mottled mound that looks like a palm. It’s a handprint, for sure, but it’s not human.

“You smell that?” Mike asks sniffing the air.

“Yeah. Your skin smells like brimstone.”

The thing about being a standard, run-of-the-mill private investigator is that they can gather
tangible
evidence, which, mostly, comes in the form of pictures, videos, testimony, and other concrete things wherein a judge will look at it, nod his bald little head, waggle his floppy, loose-skinned jowls and say, “You have proved that Bill is sleeping with Tina, and Jane is entitled to forty bajillion dollars.”

Or, rather, the house in the Hamptons and other valuables.

The point is, they can collect material proof that can be used in a court of law.

Me? What I do as a
paranormal
private investigator? It requires more finesse and deductive reasoning, not to mention the fact that the field of paranormal research remains
persona non grata
in most scientific circles. I don’t care how many full-bodied apparitions I’ve seen, how many voices I’ve heard from beyond the grave, or how many pictures I’ve taken where a translucent man is standing off to the right of somebody’s kitchen table, the general public, minus our legions of believers and fans, will look down their noses at it and say, “Yeah, but you could’ve faked that. See right here? The bottom of the door is off camera. Who’s to say you didn’t tie a piece of fishing line to it and yank it closed from across the room?”

That’s what Mike and I, and the rest of our crew, had to battle every single day while the show was running, and it’s what I deal with now during each investigation, and it’s why my work would hold as much water as a sieve if it were taken to the US legal system.

I often spend days on location, poring over historical records, interviewing potential witnesses and clients, conducting investigations, filming dark bedrooms and hallways, taking pictures, and being sneaky. The difference is, the people I’m trying to talk to are dead.

And the dead don’t always cooperate—at least not fully. It’s rare that I can walk into a home where someone has been murdered, fire up the old cameras and recorder, and hear a spirit on the other end of the line say, “It was Ronald James from accounting; he’s the one who slit my throat.” As a matter of fact, I think that’s only happened once in the two years I’ve been contracting as a paranormal private investigator.

And it wasn’t Ronald James from accounting, actually. It was Ted, down in the mailroom, because we all know the mailroom is where the creepy people work.

Okay, so, the point I’m trying to make is, sometimes during an investigation, I can say, “My name is Ford Atticus Ford, and I’m here to talk to Amanda Wallace. Amanda, if you’re here, can you tell me where your husband hid your body?” and I’ll get a vague response like, “He left me … She told him to.”

Right there is an extra clue that the police can use. After friends and family members have authenticated that it’s Amanda’s voice, then begins the process of tracking down this “she” that Amanda mentioned. The family, the lawyers, the police, none of them had any clue that there was (potentially) a mistress or a girlfriend on the side, and if not that, a puppet master pulling the strings to help collect an insurance settlement, etc.

The courts won’t accept it, but the detectives can choose to believe or ignore what I give them. Occasionally, they dismiss my evidence because even though they called me in to assist them in their investigation, they refuse to believe they could have missed something so simple. And then, when I’m out of sight, they’ll follow it anyway. They’re not stupid, just prideful.

If they do accept the validity of my data, it opens up an entirely new line of questioning and potential leads.

Because, like I’ve always said, dead people see things that others don’t.

Sometimes it’s that easy. Sometimes a spirit will muster enough energy and come through to our side and avenge his own death. Other times, I establish communication, but it’s gibberish. Perhaps a family member can watch a video I’ve captured where a plant moves two inches, and then the sound of footsteps follow. It doesn’t prove that Harold Bigelow choked Mrs. Harold Bigelow to death in a fit of murderous rage. What it proves, according to the family member, is that Mrs. Bigelow has come back from the grave, and she’s still trying to position that plant exactly how she wanted it, against Harold’s demands. It’s proof that she’s around, but it’s not proof of her husband’s guilt nor is it proof of his innocence.

Looking back on my case history, it’s about a forty-sixty split between usable evidence and tangential proof of the afterlife.

I mention this because after we’re finished examining the seared handprint on Mike’s side, he lets me listen to the recording. He’d said, “Whoa, hang on,” about a half second before the demonic linebacker caused a fumble on the one-yard line, and now, as we stand here in the hallway and listen to the rest of the recording, I get chills when the EVP comes through.

“
Ford … death …
”

It’s a growl more than words, and I imagine that the voice is coated in thousands of years of soot and has been charred by the fires of hell.

Dramatic? Maybe. Sometimes I still picture myself talking to our viewership in my mind.

I cringe and lift an eyebrow at Mike. He returns it.

I take it to mean this right-hander is threatening my life, and it’s freaking spooky, yet if I had given up and tucked-tail out the front door every time this happened, I would’ve quit, oh, about a thousand investigations ago.

We listen to it twice more and note that it comes in over top of the soft, female voice we’d heard that drew us to the room in the first place. That tells us a couple of things: one, this demonic entity didn’t lure us into a trap, because sometimes they impersonate things they aren’t, like children or a distressed family member, and two, that being noted, there is definitely more than one spiritual presence in this house.

We had already established this, more or less, but this is legitimate proof for Mike and me. It changes the direction of the impending overnight investigation now that we know for sure what we’re dealing with.

Mike stops the playback and checks his watch. “What’re we thinking? Another hour, hour and a half before total sundown? If that?”

“Probably so. I’d say we run a couple more baseline checks up here on this floor and the attic, just to be safe. Can’t hurt to clear up all the variables.”

“Yeah, and maybe if we find an EMF hotspot, we can target that location a little more than the dead zones. Craghorn told me that he often sees a lot of action in his bedroom and—oh for God’s sake, Ford. Are you thirteen years old?”

“Sorry, it was just the way you phrased it.
Action
in the bedroom? Huh? Huh? C’mon.”

“And Carla would have put that in an episode, and we would have spent the next week under a mountain of dick and fart jokes online.” He scoffs, but he can’t quite hide his grin. “I’m going to do the baseline EMF. Why don’t you do a little recon around here and see if you can find anything he didn’t tell us about?”

“On it.” He doesn’t have to tell me what he’s thinking about, because we’re operating like the machine of old, back in the saddle, and whatever cliché you can come up with. “Be careful,” I add, hesitant to leave him completely alone after such a violent attack. But he’s been working out, so he should be good.

Mike heads west, back in the direction of the spare bedrooms, and I go east to the front of the house. The giant bay window lets in the waning evening light, and the semitranslucent curtains hanging on an ancient iron rod do little to provide cover. They remind me of the ones back at the Hampstead farmhouse, which makes me all the more eager to get home and follow up on the leads I uncovered with Ulie the night before I came here.

A floorboard screeches under my feet, the wail of a dying animal, and I step away from it. In case Mike is running the recorder, I verbally mark the location and that it originated from me.

The odor up here is different than downstairs. Nothing bad, really, but nothing good either, like Craghorn hasn’t aired it out in a couple of years. It’s stale, musty, and I’m tempted to open the tall, double rectangular windows beside the big bay window, the kind that open with an L-shaped crank, and then I spot the taillights of traffic outside.

Nah, better not. The street noise could easily contaminate our investigation, so I suffer with the smell of dust and air with an expiration date from the Nixon administration.

I’m taking my time here, soaking it all up, trying to get inside Craghorn’s head, hoping to give some substance to his reasons for staying here ten years after his wife was possibly murdered, and then six long months after a goddamn powerful right-hander moved in like that houseguest who never gets the hint that he needs to leave.

For as long as I have been doing this, I’ll never understand why people allow themselves to be tortured. Sure, there are extenuating circumstances, like money issues, no family around, no place to go, along with a million other possibilities, but for the love of God, there
has
to be something you can do. If it were me, I would do whatever it took to get my wife, my husband, the kids, and the cat as far away from pure evil as I possibly could.

It took the Hoppers longer than it should have, but they were smart.

Eventually.

They left. They got Chelsea out.

And then this son of a bitch right here came along and brought her back.

Argh, Ford, stop it. There’s nothing you can do about it this very second. You’re working on fixing things. It’s a process.

I have to mentally acknowledge this on a daily basis, roughly 2.3 million times. My therapist tells me it’s a good thing to remind myself that we all make mistakes.

A
mistake
is putting pepper in the saltshaker.

What I allowed to happen was
unforgiveable
.

The upstairs hall seems fairly normal on this end. No new revelations into the mind of Craghorn. I hear Mike fumbling around in the office and listen for a moment. He sounds like he’s fine, but damn, I’m worried. You take a hit like that from an upper level right-hander, it’ll shake you for a while, especially if you’ve been off the bicycle for a spell like Mike has. If I send him home with a demon in his backpack, Toni might track me down and murder me.

If that happened, I’d come back and haunt her personally, because how perfect would that be?

Satisfied that my former partner, best friend, and brother-from-another-mother is okay back there by himself, I reach for the door handle closest to me. It’s warm, like ten or twenty degrees warmer than the rest of this freezing house. The temperature isn’t hot enough to burn me, however, but that doesn’t stop me from jerking my hand away like I’m grabbing a rattlesnake by the tail. The foreign sensation—heat, I mean—is a surprise.

Normally, I’d check it out with the thermal imaging camera, but the damn thing is all the way over there on the banister, and besides, I already know it’s a different temperature. I’m a bit concerned that something might be on fire in there, so rather than opening the door and fueling it with a fat, fresh supply of oxygen, I drop down to all fours and try to peek underneath the crack. I haven’t done this since seventh grade when Teddy Martin’s sister was changing out of her bikini.

I didn’t see anything then, of course, unlike now, when a set of shadowy legs scamper across the room.

I recoil and jump back to my feet, unsure of what I saw. My hands go numb with excitement. This is it. This is the kind of stuff I live for, regardless of the investigations I’m on or what I’m trying to accomplish for some police department detective that I’ll never see again. There’s something in there, something otherworldly, and I can barely contain myself as I call out to Mike and tell him to hurry.

Mike touches the doorknob and feels the difference in temperature. Like me, he yanks his arm back. “Yowsa.” He checks the palm of his hand, perhaps instinctively, and asks me what room it is.

“Is this the one where Craghorn said his wife painted? Maybe? And I didn’t even get a chance to check out the library and the sitting room over there on the right.” I look past Mike at the two rooms, whose doors are open, and don’t see anything scuttling around in there. “Should we check them out before we go in here for battle?”

“Are you nuts? Why’re you not in there already? The old Ford would’ve run in there with a Ouija board and a handful of batteries like he was handing out Halloween candy.”