Authors: Jacqueline Smith
Kate wasn’t sure what it was, but as they trekked along the graveled pathway that Luke guessed would lead them to the barn, the familiar feeling that they were being watched by some unseen presence returned.
She shone her flashlight into the surrounding woods, expecting to see a flash of eyes, or maybe even a shadowy figure darting through the trees, trying to evade her glance.
“Are you okay?” Michael asked.
“Yeah,” she replied. “It’s just creepy out here.”
“Don’t you love it?” Luke asked.
Kate couldn’t see his face, but she was pretty sure he was grinning. “If I could visit locations like this and get paid for it - oh wait, I do!”
“I would so love to hit you right now,” Michael told him.
“I’ve told you before, Mikey. You want to be on the show, you just say the word.”
“Thanks,” Michael muttered.
“He’s offered you a spot on the show?” Kate asked Michael. That was new information. “Why don’t you take it? You’d have so much fun! You’d get to see a bunch of new places and you’d be on television!”
“See, Mikey?
She
has a brain,” Luke remarked.
“It’s just not
my thing,” Michael told them.
“Whatever you say,” Luke sighed as a broad and very neglected building came into view.
Unlike the chapel, no one had bothered to board up the windows, all of which were cracked, shattered, or non-existent. The brick-colored paint was chipping away to reveal the wooden planks beneath it.
Glancing up to the second story, Kate began to feel the world closing in around her.
Something was watching them from that window. She couldn’t see it, but it was there.
Suddenly, that barn was the last place on Earth Kate wanted to be.
She wanted to run, to climb back into the car, and get as far away from that horrible place as quickly as possible. Luke and Michael took a few steps toward the steps leading up to the porch. Kate remained frozen on the spot.
“You coming?” Luke asked her.
“I don’t know if we should do this,” she told them.
“What?” Luke asked.
“Why not?”
“I just feel like whatever’s in there really doesn’t want us disturbing it.”
“Kate, if you were murdered, wouldn’t you want to be able to tell the world what happened to you?”
“Well yeah, but - ”
“If you‘d stayed dead after your car accident, wouldn’t you have wanted to talk to someone?”
“Hey, knock it off,” Michael snapped.
“If she doesn’t want to go, then she doesn’t have to. You don’t have to bring up stuff like that.”
“What?
She’s not sensitive about it. Are you?” Luke asked Kate.
“No, but - ”
“See? No problems.” Kate was still hesitant. “Kate, I promise. Nothing bad will happen. I do this all the time and under a lot nastier circumstances. Did you see the episode where we investigated the witch’s house where they used to perform Satanic rituals? Or what about the music hall with all those demonic entities?”
As a matter of fact, she had seen those episodes, and if memory served, Luke and his crew had spent the next weeks being haunted and scratched and God knew what else by those spirits that had decided to follow them home.
A more skeptical person may have laughed over the idea of an invisible figure following them home from a haunted location, but she already had a ghost. She didn’t want another one.
Still, they had come all this way.
And she’d been the one who’d said she wanted to make the most of a ghost hunt with Luke Rainer. She couldn’t back out now.
“Okay,” she agreed.
“That a girl,” Luke grinned.
~*~
They followed the porch around the side of the house until they finally found the front door, which had been chained and shackled shut by a large, rusted padlock.
“That looks locked,” Michael remarked.
“Never fear, Mikey.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” Luke assured him, gently setting his camera on the ground. “Kate, may I see the backpack, please?”
She passed it to him.
He rummaged around in it for a few seconds before he pulled out a pen and a large paperclip.
“Are you going to pick it?” Kate asked.
“Yep.”
“Wait, what?” Michael demanded.
“We’re going to break in?”
“How do you think this business works, Mikey?
As a professional, yes, I prefer to call ahead and get permission, but back when I was first starting out and no one wanted me inside their decrepit old buildings, I had to learn to pick a few locks.”
“Are you crazy?
We’ll get caught!”
“By who, a possum?
There’s no one out here.”
Michael exchanged a wary look with Kate before the soft
click
of the lock turned their attention back to Luke.
“We’re in,” he announced, pulling the chains off from around the handles.
“But - ”
“Don’t worry, Mikey.
I’ll put it back just the way we found it,” Luke patronized, pulling the door open with a loud
creak
.
Although the air inside of the barn was much cooler than the humid summer night outside, it was still stuffy and musty from months of being locked up and undisturbed.
While Kate and Luke shone their flashlights around, taking in the dusty decor, the brown leather couches, the old-fashioned fireplace, the western-themed tapestry that hung on the wall, and the narrow, winding staircase, Michael’s eyes drifted up to the second story, where the shadowy figure of a woman in a flowing gown watched them from the railing.
“Kate, turn on the recorder,” Luke whispered.
“Got it,” she replied.
Luke cleared his throat.
“Hello?
Grace? Are you here?”
A swift movement out of the corner of Michael’s eye almost caused him to jump back.
He turned his camera in her general direction and shifted his eyes just above the flip screen, praying silently that she wouldn’t notice him staring. She stood in front of the staircase, her pretty face screwed up in what could only be called contempt for her intruders.
“What do you want?” she hissed.
“Luke,” Kate said, unaware of the girl’s presence.
“The recorder just died.” Luke’s face lit up.
“She’s here.
I just put fresh batteries in that thing before we got here,” he said. “Did you just drain all the energy from this recorder?” Michael’s eyes shifted back to the girl, who looked confused and irritated. The way she stared at Luke reminded Michael of the way a girl might stare at someone who’d just used a really terrible pick-up line.
“Do you want me to change the batteries?” Kate asked.
“Actually, I was thinking we could try the Spirit Box.”
“I thought you said it was loud and annoying,” Michael said.
“It is, but it will spare us the trouble of having to go back and rewind to hear what she has to say,” Luke explained, setting his night vision camera onto a ledge. It made sense, Michael acknowledged, as Luke pulled a rectangular, black device out of the backpack. It looked a lot like a larger version of the digital recorder.
And Luke was right.
It was loud and annoying. It was more than static, as Kate had described. It was like static slowed down so that you could almost make out certain sounds, and ten times louder.
“How are you supposed to hear her through this?” Michael had to yell to be heard above the racket coming out of the SB7.
“Trust me, you’ll be able to,” Luke replied.
“Grace?” he called out. “Are you here Grace?” Michael glanced back at their spectral visitor. She was a beautiful girl with wavy dark brown hair and big dark eyes, dressed in an elegant yet simple lace wedding gown. She’d clasped her hands over her ears, clearly just as off-put by the device as they were.
“Turn that thing off!” she screamed.
At the same time, her voice broke through the static of the Spirit Box.
“
Off
!” Michael stared at the device.
“It actually works!”
“Told ya,” Luke grinned.
“Do you like this Grace?”
“What is that?” Grace asked.
“
What
?” the Spirit Box relayed. Grace eyed it curiously.
“What is it?
This is a Spirit Box. You can talk through it,” Luke explained.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” she snapped.
“
Don’t want to.
”
“Why does it only pick up fragments of sentences?” Michael asked, still competing with the disruptive volume of the Spirit Box.
Both Luke and Kate looked at him. Michael instantly regretted asking the question. How would he know that a ghost was actually saying more than what the box conveyed? Quickly, he tried to cover for himself. “I mean, no one actually talks like that.”
“Maybe it has to do with energy,” Kate suggested.
“I think it has to do with that and with the device itself,” Luke replied.
“Grace, why don’t you want to talk to us?” Michael glanced back to the spot where Grace had been standing. She wasn’t there. Michael looked around the room, wondering just how he’d missed her. “Grace?” Luke called again.
“Stop,” Kate yelled, grabbing Luke’s shoulder.
“Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
Luke asked. But Michael had heard it too. Above the roar of the Spirit Box it was almost inaudible, but it was there; the screech of a wooden chair being dragged across the floor above them.
“Turn that off,” Kate said, indicating the SB7.
“Listen.”
With the sudden absence of the irritating static, the silence was almost deafening.
It didn’t stay so for long. Footsteps, soft but distinguishable, paced anxiously back and forth across the floor above them.
“Come on, Grace.
We just want to talk to you,” Luke called up to her. Seconds later, a small, hard object bounced off the ground near their feet. Kate shrieked and leapt back. Luke wasn’t as easily shaken. “What the hell was that, Gracie? You throwin‘ rocks at us?”
Grace appeared once again at the foot of the stairs, glowering fiercely at Luke.
“
Don’t
call me Gracie!” But without the Spirit Box, her harsh voice fell on (mostly) deaf ears.
“I’m going to turn the Spirit Box back on, okay, Gracie?”
He pressed a button and again, the irritating static broke the silence of the barn.
“Who are you?” she asked.
This time, the Spirit Box conveyed the entire phrase.
“
Who are you
?”
“‘Who are you!‘
Did you hear that?” Luke asked his companions. “My name is Luke. This is Kate and Michael. Do you have anything you want to tell us?”
“No.
Get out!”
“Get out!”
Kate exchanged an apprehensive glance with Michael, but Luke pressed on. “Why don’t you want to talk to us?”
By now, Grace was seething.
The temperature in the barn dropped even further, and as she growled in frustration, Michael felt the all too familiar rush of dizziness as she drained away his energy. Kate seemed to feel it too. She pressed a hand to her forehead, like she was trying to ward off a headache, and squeezed her eyes shut.
“Kate,” Michael tried calling out to her before another wave of dizziness nearly knocked him off his feet.
He slumped against a wall and took a few deep breaths. Luke remained focused on the investigation.
“Come on, Grace.
You don’t have anything to say?”
As his vertigo subsided, Michael glanced up just in time to see Grace summon every ounce of newly acquired energy and send something, probably a small vase, toppling off of the coffee table next to the couch.
It hit the ground with a loud
crash
, heard even above the Spirit Box.
Kate screamed.
Luke jumped back.
“Woah!” he cried.
“Did you
see
that? Mikey, did you get that on tape?” Luke turned and looked at Michael.
He didn’t respond.
He was frozen, staring into the virulent eyes of Grace Bledsoe.
Turn!
Look away! Blink! Do
something
!
a voice in the back of his mind screamed at him. His body didn’t obey. He’d seen her and she knew it. He could avert his eyes as much as he wanted, but it wouldn’t do him any good.