The Supernaturals (6 page)

As he looked at the picture of Summer Place, his eyes wandered over to the black and white photo of Professor Gabriel Kennedy that was stapled to the opposite side of the folder.

What happened to you and your supposedly lost student, Professor?
Peterson asked himself.
Knowing that just may give me a leg up on our little spook girl.

The picture of Kennedy, of course, did not answer. It only stared back at Peterson with the eyes of a haunted man. He had screamed for three solid months about the house in the Poconos—the house that everyone said could never be haunted. The house that was indeed not just haunted, but a killing place.

A corner of another picture poked from the folder and he slowly pulled it free. It was an old photograph of the Lindemann family. The patriarch was sitting in a large wicker chair. His wife of royal blood, Elena, stood at his side with her right hand placed securely on his left shoulder. The eight children, ranging from nine to one years of age, were arranged around the parents, with the baby on a small pedestal at Lindemann’s feet. Even though hardly anyone smiled in photographs in those days, this photo was different. He could see that the Lindemanns were happy. Every one of them, with the exception of the baby, wore warm and inviting smiles. Of course, being the fifth richest man in the country probably helped the family bite the bullet, as they say.

He was about to place the picture back into the pile when the small, beautiful face of Elena Lindemann caught his attention. She was a stunning woman for her time, and Peterson took back what he had thought a moment before. She did have sad eyes. With her hand placed upon her husband’s shoulder, her small fingers splayed out as if she were not caressing, but holding him at bay. Her slim fingers were slightly raised from the surface of his coat. But it was her smile—it never quite reached her eyes.

 
Peterson shook his head and slid the photo back inside the file. He knew he was just looking for something bad in the family. All he had to do was open any history book or delve into the historical society pages of any leading newspaper to see that this family was more than just impeccable, they were damn near Christ-like in the way people spoke of their legacy.

Peterson lay the folder aside and looked at the facsimile of Kennedy’s notebook entry, the one also supposedly found on the wall that the boy had disappeared into. He furrowed his brow as he read the harshly written words once more.

“They are mine.”

The entertainment president repeated the three words from the fax aloud repeatedly, expecting them to lose meaning the way repeated words usually do. These did not.

“They are mine.
They are mine
.”

Kelly Delaphoy sat
with her show’s two hosts inside her large study in her Studio City home. Greg Larsen and Paul Lowell stared at her, wanting desperately not to believe what she had just told them.

“You mean we have a chance to finally get into that house, and instead of really investigating it, you want us to fake it if something doesn’t happen?”

Kelly had known the two men since they were nothing but freelance photojournalists eight years before. They had been her closest friends during good times and bad. She smiled. “Listen, Paul, we’ll have too much invested in the live show. We won’t be able to explain away a flop to the sponsors and our viewers. Sometimes, as you know, ghosts don’t show up on cue.”

“But Kelly, we’ve always been on the up-and-up. If it isn’t haunted, we say so. That’s why people watch us. The word is integrity—do you want me to spell it for you? In addition, when we do declare a house free of paranormal activity, that doesn’t mean the episode is a failure. There’s still enough spooky stuff to make viewers tense and uneasy. To fake something as large—”

“We need this,” she said, cutting Paul off mid-sentence. Her eyes could not hold his, so she looked away.

“You mean
you
need this. You’re not fooling us, Kelly, we’ve known for a while what you have your sights on, and it sure as hell isn’t the integrity of our show. It’s the entertainment division of the network that you’re after.”

Kelly looked at the bearded Greg Larsen and forced a tear to her eye. She swiped at it as if she were embarrassed at the weakness.

“Do you really think that?”

Paul looked at Greg, and then back at Kelly. “Yes, we do. For quite a while now, actually—ever since the network picked us up. You’ve changed, Kelly.”

“That’s unfair. Where would you be if I hadn’t sold this show to UBC? We’d still be stuck in Cincinnati, going nowhere! I have never asked for anything. I do the work and you two get the glamour. I want this—
we
need
this
!” She alternated her eyes from Greg to Paul. “Soon our ratings will start to slide, you know it and I know it. This one special will guarantee us at least two more solid seasons, probably three with total sponsorship. Then we get out while we’re hot. We’ll move onto another show, different format. All of us.”

“Kelly, we’ve never faked anything that—” Greg started but was once again cut short.

“Camera angles, tripping by clumsy soundmen, house settling noises? Come on, we’ve faked a lot. Okay, so omitting is not the same as faking, but don’t sit there and tell me you’re so clean and I’m so dirty.
It’s all in the editing
. Remember that statement, Greg?”

Greg Larsen shook his head. He had said that to Kelly years before—that scaring people on film or videotape was just a case of creative editing—and now it had come back to haunt him.

“Come on, at the very least we have an opportunity to go to a place we’ve always wanted to investigate. In addition, we can put on a very convincing show just explaining the history of Summer Place and the Kennedy thing. That’s enough to creep people out right there. I promise we won’t go overboard on tricks. Jason Sanborn and we three will be the only ones in the know. We will storyboard the entire eight hours. No camera operators, investigative assistants, or soundmen will be in on it. We won’t even bring the director in. We will feed off all their reactions to the prearranged gags, okay?”

The two hosts sat for a moment. Paul was absent-mindedly scratching his temple and Greg just held Kelly’s eyes as he thought. Then with one look at Paul, he cleared his throat.

“Don’t you mean, if the place really isn’t haunted?”

“There is something in that house, damn it. I know it. But you know and I know how many houses and abandoned sanitariums we’ve been in that were haunted, where nothing happened on cue.”

The two hosts sat quiet for a moment. It was Greg, just who she thought it would be, that spoke first.

“We only use outside people, a technician whom Paul and I trust to trick out the house, and only sound gags. No material props that can be caught by the investigative team. That’s the only way we’ll do it.”

“Deal! We’ll test sound gags during the test broadcast. That’s a full two weeks before Halloween, and I’ll have so much information for you two guys to explain on the air that you’ll scare the hell out of everyone just from the script. I’m going to make another attempt at seeing Professor Kennedy. I know I can make this work—for
all
of us.”

“It had better, Kelly.” The two co-hosts of
Hunters of the Paranormal
stood. Greg stared down at Kelly. “And when you become president of the entertainment division, if you ever do become president, you better remember your old friends, or they could come back to
haunt
you,” Greg said as he held her gaze, the threat very clear in his words and the pun just as clearly intended.

two

Lamar University

Beaumont, Texas

Professor Gabriel Kennedy’s fall from grace almost broke him, spiritually as well as monetarily. It seemed as though he had hit every sharp rock and academic outcropping on his way down the professional mountain. He just hadn’t fallen in the way the news reporters had hoped. Money had never been the driving force behind Kennedy, as many of them had said. The acquisition of money was only a means to an end. Gabriel Kennedy had invested everything he had ever earned on his chance to get inside Summer Place. His books, though selling well enough before that night, only helped him in that quest.

The Summer Place incident had never been planned as a ploy to gain monetary stability, nor self-serving notoriety. It had been a chance to prove to the world that parapsychology was a science and not just a topic for ridicule at university social functions.

The long, difficult fall had taken Kennedy from the well-funded psychology department of USC to a moderate Behavioral Psych position at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. He was there only because he had gone to school with Lamar’s Science Chair, Harrison Lumley, a million years before. An old dorm room pal, Lumley used to sell methamphetamine for spending money and take speed to assist with his finals. Harrison Lumley was everyone’s pal at one time or another.

Now he was here at Lamar, relegated with a broken heart and shattered spirit to quoting Freud instead of voicing his own research on the science of the mind and paranormal.

Kennedy stood at six foot three and had a narrative voice that commanded attention from a generation of kids that cared for nothing other than their iPods and cell phones. He had long before moved the classroom’s clock to the wall behind him, so that he would not notice the minute and hour hands that never seemed to move.

Kennedy was hiding from the world; hiding from the questions that he couldn’t answer without going back in his mind to that night at Summer Place. Most would have thought he would be eager to clear his name and prove his science, but he was not. He had come to this place to hide and have his nightmares about a house that transcended the realities of the physical world. A world he had once thought he knew well enough to teach to young minds.

Anyway, just what would a grown man say to explain such a fear as his? A grown man who once thought that the monster under the bed was dispelled by age and the advent of the electric light, only to be proven wrong. Age and light had nothing to do with mentally ousting those demons; Kennedy knew now that the thing under the bed was very much a real threat.

He had even tried to explain the night in question once. When Harrison Lumley offered him the position at Lamar, Kennedy felt the need to tell his friend what had happened, to explain he wasn’t what the newspapers and television shows said he was. He had failed miserably in his attempt to explain the unexplainable, just as he had failed to explain it properly to the police in Pennsylvania. Just reliving that night with his friend, he nearly had a mental breakdown. Gabriel thanked God everyday that Harrison had known him when he had been considered a brilliant—if a little misguided—clinical psychologist on his way to the top.

Beaumont, Texas was a good place to hide for the remainder of your life. People did not care about the stuff they talked about in the larger cities. As long as the Lamar Cardinals and the Dallas Cowboys were winning, and the bottom didn’t fall out of the oil market, Lamar University couldn’t give a damn about Kennedy,
or
his lost student, Warren Miller.

“So, where do we stand to this point?” Kennedy asked with his back to his large class. “Freud never said that most issues of the human consciousness could be traced to a mean daddy or unloving mama. He didn’t say that it must have been Uncle Bob that molested you when you were seven, that made you climb the bell tower and shoot thirty-five people on the street.” He paused for the laughter from his first year students, as he turned away from the blackboard and faced them. “What he did say was people are built like we build cars: parts are added to the mind as you go through life. Good parts, bad parts, and sometimes the human thought process produces what the auto industry calls a lemon. Everything we read, see and experience is placed into that human mind, but how it is processed, stored, maintained and then acted upon is the real work of clinical psychology.”

The buzzer sounded and the students started to rise and leave for the weekend. Kennedy felt as if he himself was the student who could not wait to get the hell out of this environment. As Kennedy placed his study guide and papers into his briefcase, he looked up. Since that night at Summer Place, he had been sensitive to the feeling of being watched. Still, he almost didn’t see the woman sitting at the rear of the class, hidden well in the theater-style seating. He reached down to his desktop, picked up his wire-rimmed glasses and put them on and then looked again. The woman was blonde and had her hair cut short. Kennedy didn’t recognize her, so he continued to put his papers away.

“I’m not doing any outside tutoring this semester, sorry.”

The woman did not respond. She sat quietly and watched the professor until he looked up once more. He studied her a moment and then frowned.

“No,” he said as he closed his briefcase and secured its latches. “I don’t speak with newspapers, television people, or ladies’ sewing circles.”