The Supernaturals (62 page)

The main monitor
showed a man standing in front of a brand new Chevrolet Silverado, explaining why all of America should own one. Harris started counting down the seconds to the fifth hour of the Halloween special. He had been informed by the CEO himself that the show was just now climbing back to the ratings values they had anticipated, but the polls were still showing an overwhelming degree of disbelief on the part of the viewing public. They had lost the test family completely—they had given up on the show, and were now watching reruns of
Family Guy
on another network.

Inside Summer Place, Cordero, Lonetree and Gabriel stood in the darkened kitchen. The camera and soundman waited anxiously for their cue as Julie started her brief interviews with the men trying to get power to the house, and the fire chief who couldn’t seem to break a pane of window glass or batter down a door.

Julie Reilly was right outside the double swinging doors of the large kitchen, her remote setup complete. She started off directly with the lead mechanic first. He explained how the power was connected to the house, but that it was being lost somewhere between the breaker boxes and the distribution points. Julie asked the question everyone was thinking: was the power being used by something inside Summer Place? The mechanic laughed. It was an impossibility, to put it mildly.

Julie grimaced at the answer. She had hoped the man would be more of a team player. She then started questioning the fire chief from Bright Waters.

“Chief, what problems are you encountering trying to break into the house?”

The cameras cut to the chief, who was standing outside on the veranda of Summer Place, looking up at the house.

“It seems the storm has built up the barometric pressure to a point that—”

“Chief, we need to stop you right there. We can see the shadows of your men from the inside through the ice that has formed on the glass; they don’t seem to be doing much in the way of breaking in. Is it true you have had orders to stand down?”

The question took the chief by surprise. Even Harris Dalton and his productions team looked at one another. Harris picked up the red phone and was connected directly to the CEO in New York.

“Sir, have any orders come from New York to stop attempting to get inside the house?”

Harris listened, and his knuckles turned white on the phone’s handset.

“Damn it sir, we have an injured man inside that house. We need to get him out.” Dalton listened and closed his eyes. “Yes, sir, right now it’s a possible broken leg and a concussion. Yes, sir, a dramatic break-in in the sixth hour, I understand. Now, I also understand that it’s your orders to not get help inside the house at this time?” Harris listened and made a sour face. When he hung up the phone, he rubbed his eyes. Then he looked up at the greenish image of Julie Reilly as she ended her remote interview with the two men outside.

“I must admit, you’re damn good, Reilly. I never saw that one coming,” Harris said on cue. The preview monitor switched to the live shot of Kennedy, Cordero and Lonetree as they stood at the basement door inside the kitchen; only she could hear him.

“Yeah, well, what about Father Dolan? Are they going to get him help anytime soon?” she asked. She placed her hand on the kitchen door, wanting desperately to get inside before they started down into the basement. She listened to Harris. “The sixth hour? Has everyone here and in New York gone nuts? The fire chief will be crucified if this gets out.”

“Yeah, and in the end you’ll find out our small town chief just earned five times more in retirement benefits than he would have normally received. I don’t think he gives a flying fuck about getting fired, not after what the network must be paying him to stay out of the house.”

“Harris, maybe we should ask Kennedy to get the Father out of here. I think whatever is in this house may have a hard-on for the good Father.”

“Okay, okay, ask Kennedy if we should get him out through one of back windows or doors, so no one can see.”

“You got it. I’m going with Kennedy to the basement now.”

“Okay. Be careful what you say. They’re live in there.”

Julie pushed opened the double swinging doors, leaving her own camera crew behind. Kennedy had opened the basement door and was getting ready to enter the stairwell leading down. Julie nodded her head at the sound and camera men she had just joined. The camera stayed trained on Kennedy, following his green tinted image down into the blackness of the cellar.

Immediately, Julie started hearing the sounds that had so scared the production team in the van. The cries were getting louder and far more insistent. They were indeed women—a lot of them.

From the van, Harris Dalton informed everyone that the noises and voices were coming through loud and clear. The world was hearing what they were.

“George, are you picking up anything?” Kennedy asked. He slowly moved down the stairs in the total darkness.

“Anguish…yes, anguish. Not physical pain. It’s...it’s like a mental torture.”

Gabriel reached the turn in the wooden stairs and stopped. He could now hear spoken words mixed with the crying.

“I don’t know about you fellas, but I’m hearing German, maybe Polish, some Italian…a few other languages.”

Julie was also hearing what Cordero described.

The cameraman and the soundman, with his mic boom hanging out over Julie and Lonetree, were both nervous. The soundman was of Polish decent and knew the language from his grandmother. He leaned toward Julie and muted his microphone.

“One of them is calling out for Leana, no—begging for Leana,” he said nervously.

“And Magda,” Kennedy said. “German, although I haven’t studied it since high school. The accent is right—Magda.”

“Our sound man, David, off the air, says that one of the voices he understood was in Polish. It’s calling the name Leana. And now Professor Kennedy has confirmed a name being spoken in German—Magda,” Julie explained. She started down again, holding tightly to the handrail. Just as her feet touched the small landing where the stairs turned sharply to the right, the kitchen door above them slammed shut. The sound was like a cannon going off and made Julie almost lose her footing on the landing. She bounced off of one rail and nearly went off backwards on the rebound. George Cordero and John Lonetree reached out in the darkness and grabbed her. John switched on his small penlight and made sure Julie got her bearings.

Julie mouthed,
“Thank you.”
 

The camera had been jostled as it tried to focus on Julie’s face. She grimaced and nodded toward Kennedy as he was nearing the bottom steps. She felt embarrassed at her near misstep and feared she would now be perceived as a klutz by the viewing audience. She would have to redeem herself below.

Kennedy paused at the bottom of the stairs, allowing his eyes to adjust to the pitch black basement. He heard the door open at the top of the stairs, and suspected that Damian Jackson was joining them. He ignored the heavy footsteps that descended the steps slowly and carefully.

Gabriel turned toward the root cellar door, moving forward so that Lonetree, George, and the camera crew could step onto the concrete flooring.

“The voices and the weeping have started to fade down to almost nothing,” Kennedy said as he listened.

Damian Jackson joined them on the floor and looked around. He was only able to make out the camera crew in front of him. He pressed his earpiece into his right ear and listened to what the professor was saying to the live audience. He shook his head. Kennedy was having a field day with this fiasco.

Gabriel finally switched on his small light and shined it toward the far side of the basement, illuminating the trapdoor. He started forward.

“Gabe, I’m registering a massive temperature fall-off on the digital thermometer,” Lonetree said. He moved the small device around, taking readings. “It’s colder around the center of the room.” John stepped toward Kennedy. “Okay, it just dropped another ten degrees.”

George joined them with the thermal imager. The camera zoomed in on the screen of the handheld box-like device. The blue wave it caught seemed to be flowing freely from the cracks around the edges of the sub-basement door. George held the imager out for Kennedy to see.

“Professor, could this image be caused by much colder air rising from below, as would be natural for a deep root cellar?” Julie asked in a whisper.

“A normal drop-off would be a three to five degree difference. But as you can see on the thermal imager, we have a massive drop of over thirty degrees. Unless the root cellar is refrigerated, no, this is not normal.”

Julie heard a small snicker of laughter from behind her. When she turned, Damian Jackson held up his hand in apology.

Julie knew that Kennedy was scoring points off her. She was starting to understand that he was out to get her now.

Gabriel squatted and examined the old lock.

“The owner of the property gave the professor the key to the lock earlier, with the dire warning that no one has been down in the root cellar since the Lindemanns last stayed at Summer Place back in 1940. Whatever we see down there hasn’t been seen in over seventy years,” Julie informed the viewing world.

From somewhere up above them a loud bang sounded. Then another, and then another.

The ballroom doors
had been standing wide open, and then they both slammed shut. They opened and then slammed again, then yet again. Leonard Sickles looked up as everyone in the room fell silent. Even the injured Father Dolan came up on one elbow and looked toward the doors. Jennifer Tilden took Leonard’s arm and nodded in the light of the computer monitors. Leonard nodded in return. The camera team joined them just as Leonard pushed the mic button on his belt.

“Professor Gabe?”

As Kennedy answered from below, the camera zoomed in on Leonard’s face. Then it caught Jenny as she leaned in with a small device, the same one that was being used down in the basement. She held it so Leonard could see.

“We have a temperature drop of nearly twenty-five degrees up here. The ballroom doors just slammed closed three times on their own. We also—”

The computers shut down without warning and they lost the light from their monitors. The camera man immediately switched to his ambient light camera.

“Stay with the ballroom,” Harris Dalton said from the production van.

“Okay, we lost power in here,” Leonard said as he started checking the connections.

As they waited for Gabriel to comment, a pounding started from upstairs somewhere. Everyone in the ballroom turned their heads to look at the ceiling above.

“It sounds like its coming from the third floor,” Jenny whispered. The camera had her framed, and all the world could see that Jennifer was frightened as the pounding started to take on the sound of footsteps.

At that moment in the production van, Harris Dalton looked over at preview monitor five and his blood froze. Everyone around him stared at the ambient light picture coming from the third floor hallway.

“Okay people, we have activity up on the third floor. Both the sewing room and the master suite doors are standing wide open. I suspect that’s where the pounding originated.”

Indeed the heavy pounding sounded as if it were moving from the far end of the third floor toward the center of the hall—toward the landing.

In the cellar, the temperature was rising and the voices and crying had disappeared completely. Kennedy pressed his earpiece in tighter just as Jackson had done just a moment before. He shook his head and straightened and then started moving for the stairs.

“Something is happening upstairs and team one is now moving to investigate,” Julie said. She scrambled to keep up with Kennedy, who was taking the dangerous steps two at a time. Jackson, who had stepped out of the way to allow everyone to pass by him, shook his head at the dramatics.

“This is getting good,” he said as he turned to follow.

“Go to Two
,” Harris said as he watched the monitor that showed
Preview
, and then he switched to the live shot of Kennedy running up the darkened stairs. “Okay, back to One.” The shot moved from Kennedy’s camera team to the ballroom just as the camera moved from face to face. The soundman was picking up the heavy pounding heading toward the third floor landing. Harris thanked God they had left a team inside the ballroom.

“Camera One, great job. Now turn eighty degrees to your left and get that little shit Lindemann in the shot.”

The cameraman zoomed in on the owner of Summer Place, who had stood from his seat at the bar and was watching the doors, the drink in his hand forgotten. He didn’t know he was on the air live, but the man next to him did. Lionel Peterson shook his head and tried to move away from the live shot.

“Don’t let Peterson slip away. Get him!” Harris said excitedly into his microphone.

The camera caught Peterson and he froze. He tried his best to look as if he was the man in charge, placing his hands on his hips. He stood stock still, watching the ballroom doors. Even in the blackness around him, he could see the camera frozen on him.