The Supernaturals (53 page)

Everyone, including the nervous soundman laughed aloud.

Lionel Peterson even grinned, to a point. He had to hand it to the queen bitch of the universe; she knew how to handle the production team.

“It makes me want to have the locks changed,” Peterson mumbled.

“What was that?” Wallace Lindemann asked, leaning toward Peterson.

“Nothing.”

An hour later
, Harris Dalton stood on the upper tier of the production van while the three teams were in makeup. Without the roving team cameras and sound, he had to be satisfied with testing the static night vision and infrared cameras on each floor, bedroom and basement. He would have liked to test Leonard Sickles’ lighting system before the start, but he guessed that would have to wait—the ghosts wouldn’t move on cue just because he needed a test.

“Go to One,” he said. The view on static Camera One showed the interior of the ballroom. There were three people inside sitting at the computers that had been installed. One of the state policemen was there as a precaution, as most were still outside the house. As the camera zoomed in, Harris could see the technicians tapping away at their keyboards. Every once in a while they would look up nervously.
Jesus
, he thought,
if they’re going to do that all night long, they’ll never uncover anything.

“Okay One, switch to infrared please.”

On the monitor, the scene switched and it showed three red hot figures, two sitting at the table by their computers and one standing at the open door to the ballroom. Their body heat put out enough energy to turn their images red. The rest of the ballroom, with the exception of the computer monitors and their towers, was a soft blue, yellow or green.

Harris continued the static camera check. Twenty minutes later the still camera and sound backup installed in the stable picked up movement, and just as Kelly Delaphoy walked into the production van Gabriel Kennedy came in view. Harris was annoyed at Kelly for coming into the camera check, since he usually allowed no one in or out during this critical time. He looked at her, annoyed, but went back to Camera Thirteen inside the stables. Kennedy just stood there looking around, then moved over to the first stall and eased down on a bale of hay. He sat silently, rubbing the tiredness from his face.

“Tell makeup they have to hit Professor Kennedy again before airtime. He just rubbed his face off.” Harris shook his head. Amateurs. He would have to watch everything these people did. A shadow fell on Kennedy and then a large man stepped into the view of the night vision camera.

“Bring up the sound on the parabolic microphone on Thirteen please,” Kelly said.

“You don’t give orders in here, Kelly,” Harris stared a hole through the smaller producer. “Harris, turn up the Goddamn mic, will you? Do you see who that is?”

Dalton looked again and saw that the man who had joined Kennedy was none other than Damian Jackson. The state policeman stood over the professor with his hands casually at his sides. Then he moved over to a bale of hay feet away from Gabriel, sat down and tipped his fedora back on his head.

“Do as she says, bring up the volume,” Harris ordered.

At first there was nothing, only the camera picking up two men who seemed to be taking a quiet moment for themselves.

“I don’t like eavesdropping on private conversations.” Dalton leaned on the large console as he watched the scene before him.

“They know the stables are hot. That camera was placed where Kennedy himself wanted it. Leave it. I wouldn’t miss this conversation for the world. In fact...” Kelly placed a set of headphones over her ears. “Record this. It may come in handy.”

Dalton shook his head but nodded to the playback technician anyway.

In the barn, the two men faced each other. Jackson leaned forward and entwined his fingers, resting his elbows on his knees.

“I guess you’ve been waiting for this night for quite some time,” Jackson said.

Gabriel looked at the detective. Then he straightened and looked around the stables for a brief moment, his eyes momentarily settling on the camera and its stand in the far corner. He looked away and finally settled on Jackson.

“Even if I prove nothing, I know what happened that night seven years ago.”

“You know, Doc, I truly believe that you think something supernatural happened at this house, but that doesn’t make it right that you placed kids in your charge in danger.” Damian held up a hand when Gabriel started to say something. “Whether it was you or one of your students responsible for the disappearance of that kid, it doesn’t matter. He’s dead and gone, and I’m going to bring the person responsible to justice. If that makes me the bad guy here in this sickening menagerie, then so be it.”

“You’ll never understand anything about this world, will you? All you see is black and white, and there’s never anything in between. I used to believe that hauntings were simply self-induced illusions brought on by adrenaline and stress. Mass hallucinations by people expecting to see something, and the human mind producing the desired outcome.”

“Now, that is a sound theory, Doc. You should have stuck to it.” The camera couldn’t see Jackson’s expression as long as his back was to the camera, but it could pick up Kennedy’s. His was tolerant, as if he were speaking to a child who didn’t know any better.

“The theory is shit, and any clinical psychologist that subscribes to it is a moron. I was one of those, seven years ago. I assumed I knew the natural world, and this house is a part of that world. I didn’t know a damn thing.” Kennedy leaned forward until he was only a foot away from Jackson’s face. Kelly and Harris did the same thing, unknowingly leaning toward the monitor for Camera Thirteen. “There is something in that house, Detective. As matter of fact, there are several somethings. If they show themselves tonight, you better be prepared to open up that pit you call a mind, or you’ll find yourself in a purgatory, like I did—a place where nothing in the universe makes any damn sense at all. I know what it’s like to have a closed mind forced open, and it hurts.”

“Doc, your rhetoric is the best I ever heard. You talk a game that most can’t follow, and those that can, well...” he gestured toward the stables’ twin doors, “look at the ones who do believe; the people you assembled, they’re all nuts. The true believers will get you every time. That’s who I’m going to be watching tonight, Doc.” Jackson stood and looked down at Kennedy. “And you, of course.” Jackson turned and walked toward the doors but paused before opening them to the gathering darkness outside. “It ends tonight, Kennedy, one way or another; you’re going to come clean.”

Gabriel and those watching in the production van saw Jackson exit the stables, whistling a tune none of them knew.

“I’m using this. We’ll find a place to plug it in later in the show,” Kelly said. Kennedy turned his head and momentarily looked at the camera. She saw the small shake of his head before he stood and left the range of the camera and microphone.

“You really are a little cutthroat, aren’t you?” Dalton asked, loud enough for everyone in the trailer to hear.

Kelly gathered her things and made her way to the plastic curtain that covered the door. Then she stopped and looked back at Harris Dalton.

“You better get this through your head, Harris: if this show fails, we’ll both be wishing we had used everything we could get on the air. I, for one, am leaving nothing under, or on top of, the table. Cutthroat? Yes, I am. And you better be also, at least for tonight.”

Harris watched her leave and then lowered his head. He heard one of his technicians punch a button.

“We have the opening angle, and it looks great.”

Dalton looked up into the number one out–on-the-air monitor. Summer Place was glowing bright yellow and white in the setting sun. The house looked magnificent, but he knew it was a beast waiting for its prey to come into range. He had not seen a thing that night of the broadcast test, but he knew something was waiting for all of those who would enter.

Harris also knew that he wasn’t going to be one of those people.

Summer Place wasn’t going to eat him.

After Jackson departed
, Gabriel sat and listened to the sounds around him. The stable, although empty of people, was alive with activity. He could hear birds in the upper rafters and wondered why they hadn’t headed out of Pennsylvania with the turning of the weather. He could hear mice scurrying in the hay. He even thought he could hear the ghosts of summers past and the stable workers employed by the Lindemann family many years ago. The sound of horses anticipating a summer ride by privileged houseguests filled his ears, along with the laughter of men and women long dead.

Gabriel walked over to the old tack room and looked inside as the sun drained from the sky outside. He turned the ancient light switch and saw the gleaming, oiled tack kept in immaculate condition by the Johansson family. The reins, saddles and fancy horse blankets emblazoned with the Lindemann family crest—a shield, two horse heads facing each other with crossed swords. Gabriel knew that F.E. Lindemann had originally come from a family that would have had no crest. His ancestors were hard-working folk from the Alpine region of Germany, farmers for the most part, so he knew that the family crest had either been borrowed or outright manufactured for the benefit of Lindemann’s American friends. Impressions were everything back then.

Gabriel reached out and shut off the light. He stood motionless, thinking. No, Lindemann and his ancestors were not people of historical significance, but Elena Lindemann was. With a last name like Romanov, it wasn’t hard to figure who carried the real family jewels. Gabriel turned away from the tack room. Elena, the matriarch of the Lindemann clan, had met F.E. in 1879 at a function regaling the Romanovs in New York. Old F.E. had already made his fortune by then and was continually adding to it. By all accounts, the romance was burning as soon as Elena found out about that fortune. Gabriel guessed it was enough to keep her good name in even better standing in New York circles. Gabriel had always thought he had a trail to follow with Elena’s ambitions and the effect she had on the family and on Summer Place, but by every account, Elena had been nothing short of an angel on earth. Not only did she feed the hard working women of Frederic’s garment industry, she fed the homeless of New York and Philadelphia. She actually recruited women from Europe, personally financing down-trodden women from all over the continent to come to America and get a fresh start.

Gabriel shook his head. Nothing in Elena’s past could be a key to the haunting of Summer Place.

Kennedy stood and looked into the darkness, toward the expansive wooden beams overhead. His historical research before that night seven years ago was a
cause célèbre
for his classes at USC. He had over a hundred students volunteering for library research on the Lindemanns, their family legacies and their philanthropic endeavors. They came up with nothing more than a five hundred page report on just how great an American family they truly were. Oh, Lindemann himself had his troubles, as every business man in the nation did in those harsh times of early manufacturing. Fires were a big issue in the garment industry in those days. A hundred men and women lost their lives in one such incident in 1889. Even then, long before he met Elena Romanov, Lindemann had paid out to each family a thousand dollars for the loss of their mother, wife or daughter. The payout was unheard of at the time, and he did all of this without admitting to having a sweatshop. He always came out smelling like a rose. Even more, his students’ research report showed that his goodness was never a publicity ploy; newspapers only found out through back channels that Lindemann had made the contributions at all. There was no history of trouble at their New York, Philadelphia or German estates. They were as clean as his students found them to be.

He believed all of it, and that had been the basis for his beliefs seven years ago. The history of the disappearances, the assaults and the strange happenings had to be brought on by hysteria, mass hallucination or a group mentality that forced people into believing there could be such a thing as an actual haunting. The property that Summer Place was built upon also stood up to scrutiny. No Indian massacres, no settler disappearances, nothing. Only F. E.’s old hunting camp; the house was built over the small gorge once used as a hunting blind to catch deer and other animals off guard. No, the property was as clean as the family history. Since there was nothing in the past, there could be nothing haunting Summer Place. Easy: two plus two made four.

Kennedy smiled as he slowly made his way around the darkened stable.
Two plus two makes four,
he thought. That night with his students, he had found out the hard way that Summer Place wasn’t good at math. Two plus two equaled whatever the house wanted it to equal. All through the night he debunked his students’ feelings, or sightings, or misadventures, one after the other. He was proving that he was in control, to not only them, but to himself. He was proving beyond any reasonable doubt that his theory on haunted houses was the correct one. About the time that he was patting himself on the back for his brilliance, was when Summer Place came alive and started showing its true power. The doors slamming, the power surges and outages, the screams, the cries, and finally the apparition that every student on staff claimed to have seen up on the third floor.