11 – A Brief Moment of Abnormalcy

“Hello!” Erika called out. “Anyone home?”

The aged wooden door creaked, long and squeaky, as Erika pushed it open. A darkened foyer greeted her. One musty rug sat on the floor while massive webs clung to the corners. A grandfather’s clock, frozen in time, stood just in front of a set of stairs. A heavy scent of mold hung in the air, thankfully swept away by a sharp draft that blew in from behind Erika.

She stepped inside, taking in the environment. It certainly gave off a perfect spooky atmosphere. She didn’t see any sign of ghosts, but the pub had been fairly unassuming at the start as well.

“I don’t know about this,” he said, head darting this way and that, snapping to the direction of odd creaks in the old wood.

Erika looked back at Daniel, raising an eyebrow. “This was your idea.”

“First of all, it was Beth’s idea. Second, that was before I actually saw this place? It’s creepy.”

Planting a hand on her hip, Erika grinned. “Did you expect a haunted house to not be creepy? Thought we’d find a nice little quaint adobe?” She shook her head. “Besides, you keep saying you don’t believe in ghosts.”

“Not ghosts I’m worried about,” he said, shuddering as a heavy breeze of cool November air followed him inside. “I don’t want to wind up in tomorrow’s news. Two idiot teenagers shot while trespassing.”

Erika turned back to the utterly empty home, taking an extra good look at the floor with her flashlight. A thin layer of dust covered everything, disturbed only where she and Daniel now stood. If there was anyone around, they would have to be ghosts just to avoid touching the dust.

Still, she cupped a hand to her mouth and called out, “Sorry, I don’t mean to disturb the household, but our car broke down out here and I was wondering if I could use your phone?”

Only silence returned her call.

Well, silence and Daniel sucking in a sharp, hissing gasp of air before holding his breath. He froze, his wide eyes were the only things moving as he stared around the foyer.

“What are you doing?” he hissed, letting out his breath.

Erika shrugged. “Seems pretty abandoned to me.” She continued further into the house, pulling out the EMF reader and the spirit box. The former had served her well at the pub and then made some noise during the seance, so she figured it would be her best bet again. An old home like this, out in the middle of nowhere, probably wouldn’t have much in the way of normal electromagnetic fields hanging about.

The spirit box was another tool entirely. It was some kind of radio device that continuously scanned various frequencies, drifting up and down the range. Normally, it just emitted a dulcet static sound. Allegedly, ghosts could actually talk over it with real words.

The path split from the foyer. Besides the stairs leading upward, there was a small office-type room just to the side, while a larger dining room occupied the rear of the house. An old-fashioned kitchen sprawled across one wall. There was a cast iron stove that probably ran on wood or coal, counter space covered with breadboxes and spice racks, and even an upright cupboard that wasn’t attached to the house like the pantry and actual cupboards. It had wood paneling and heavy metal latches.

“Did people have refrigerators a hundred years ago?”

Daniel, moving away from the dining table still set with plates, utensils, and glasses, paused at Erika’s side. “Iceboxes, right? They’ve been around since at least the mid-eighteen-hundreds.”

Erika pried open the rusted latch, pulling open the largest of the three doors. A stench hit her nose before she even got it fully open, making her gag and retch. It was like an overfilled outdoor concert porta-potty had been dunked in a vat of raw sewage. She slammed the door shut again, deciding she didn’t want to know what had been rotting inside for the last century.

It was a surprise that it still stank. She would have thought there wouldn’t have been much left to decompose. The seal on the ice box must have been just good enough.

The smell hit Daniel a moment after Erika, leaving him backing away with a gasping cough. He moved over to the dining table, leaning on it while catching his breath.

“Got to be careful,” he said between wheezes. “I’ve heard about places like this getting pockets of toxic gas building up. Especially in basements. If they had potatoes down there, they could have rotted into a bunch of carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. I heard about a family that died one by one as they went into their cellar because of rotten potatoes.”

“Aww, but what if the ghost is in the cellar?”

“Better to not find it than to join it.”

That was fair enough. “Right. So, no entering rooms that look like they don’t have good airflow. Got it. Maybe we should open some windows.”

Erika left the fridge behind, giving it a quick wave with her EMF reader for good measure—it didn’t even budge from the first light being lit—and headed back toward Daniel. “Find anything?”

He was still hunched over the table, staring down at a plate at the head of the table. Since he wasn’t obviously gasping for breath anymore, she figured something interesting was going on.

Instead of answering, Daniel pointed a finger at the plate.

There were bones on it. Nothing else. The plate itself was blackened in parts and covered in dust. The marks probably came from rotting meat. Either scavengers had picked it clean a hundred years ago, or the meat had simply evaporated through time and exposure. Either way, whatever meal had once been plated was gone now.

“Ribs,” she said with a small shrug, not sure what Daniel was staring at. She didn’t see anything special about it, and her EMF reader remained stubbornly inactive. “There was probably something else there, too, maybe vegetables. I don’t know.”

“They left the food out on the table? Just sitting here?”

“Sloppiness isn’t a recent invention. I leave plates sitting out all the time.”

Daniel shot her a look of unfathomable disappointment.

“I mean, I clean them up eventually, but like sometimes I’m in a rush, you know?”

“Uh-huh,” he said, turning away. “I just thought it was interesting that the rumor says they vanished one night, and here we find plates out like they were in the middle of a meal.”

Erika looked over the table again. It was hard to say if it was in the middle of a meal or not. There wasn’t anything left. Perhaps if they went and found records of whoever found this place saying that a full meal had been left out, it would change things. As it was, she couldn’t tell one way or another.

Beyond the kitchen, Erika found a little workshop with some old-fashioned tools set out and a small closet with a nice old coat that she was tempted to take with her simply for its age. It didn’t look like it was in the best shape, unfortunately. If there had ever been mothballs protecting the clothes, they had long since gone away.

“No toilet,” Erika said, finally realizing the source of an oddity that had been nagging at her. “They had toilets a hundred years ago, right?”

“Yeah. Water closets. They’ve been around since the eighteenth century, usually with an overhead cistern and pull chain. I think outhouses were more common in places like this, though.”

Erika silently regarded Daniel for a moment, nodding along with his explanation. “You planning on a history degree or something?”

“No? I just like looking this up.”

“And you look up toilets and refrigerators…”

Daniel shrugged and averted his gaze. It was hard to tell in the flashlight’s light, but his ears looked like they were changing color again. “I mean, you’re sitting on a toilet, phone in hand, what’s the first thing you search for?”

“Music videos.”

“Okay, well… I tend to—”

A booming thud overhead made both Erika and Daniel jump back. A light fall of dust wafted through the air, coming down from the rafters above the workshop. For a long moment, neither of them said a word. Erika tossed her EMF reader back into her pack, slowly and carefully drawing her bat in its place.

“P… Probably just a wild animal got in,” Daniel said. “We shouldn’t go up there. It might be rabid.”

Erika just gave him a flat look.

“When I drag you to the hospital and you have to get thirty-two shots from needles as big around as your pinky, I’m going to be there, telling you I told you so with every injection.”

“Yeah, yeah. Keep your imagination on a leash. It’s probably just a ghost.”

As expected, Daniel gave her a look for that quip. At least he wasn’t giving nervous looks at the ceiling anymore.

“Come on,” she said, already walking back toward the foyer. “I’ve got a good feeling about this.”

“You mean bad feeling,” Daniel muttered. He still followed despite his continued grumblings. “We’re in a horror movie. You’re not supposed to get good feelings.”

Erika, bat in one hand and flashlight in the other, let him talk to himself without comment. She paused at the stairs, frowning. While the vast majority of the house seemed in remarkably good condition for being well over a hundred years old—abandoned for a hundred years, no less—the stairs didn’t look quite so stable. The steps all had their nails poking up above the wood, and the fifth step in particular looked broken clean through.

Erika wasn’t afraid of no ghost, but falling through a step and impaling herself on some jagged piece of wood didn’t sound like a fun way to end the night.

“Careful,” she said as she started climbing, making sure to put her weight on the sides of the step closer to the support. She held her flashlight over the broken step, making sure Daniel saw it.

“Rabies and tetanus,” he grumbled, staring at the nails. Nevertheless, he made it up alongside Erika.

The second floor was in significantly worse condition. A bedroom door across from the stairs was hanging off its hinges. Shattered glass covered the floor next to what might have been an oil lamp at one point in time. A photograph no larger than Erika’s handspan, black and white, hung crooked from a nail with its frame pulling apart at the corners. The air smelled much stronger of mildew, and yet, Erika felt a breeze coming from somewhere up ahead. There was a faint whistle as the wind blew through some crack up here.

“The thump came from down that way,” Erika said, pointing further down the hall. They had been in the workshop downstairs, which basically meant whatever room was furthest from the stairs up here.

Daniel took a deep breath when he got to the top, wrinkling his nose lightly at the smell. “Okay. Just a quick peek, wave around some tools, find out it was a wombat or something—”

“A wombat? Really? Aren’t they native to South America or something?”

“Australia. But one escaped a zoo earlier this year, and I don’t think it has been found yet.”

“Uh huh…” Erika shook her head and started walking. The floor wasn’t as bad as the stairs, at least. One fairly large section, right in front of another bedroom door, looked heavily water-damaged. Stains on the ceiling and walls meant the roof was leaking.

She peeked inside nonetheless, checking each room as she moved on. There were two bedrooms, a nursery-kinda room with lots of old wooden kid toys sitting about, and a large storage room. With Daniel waving around both the EMF reader and the spirit box, Erika expected something, but they didn’t get the slightest beep until they walked near the final door on the second floor.

Outside the door, the EMF reader jumped up to a two, letting out a faint tone. It only lasted a moment before flicking back down to a one.

On the other hand, the spirit box crackled. Daniel just about jumped out of his pants when the calm static turned harsh and spiky. No voice yet, but they weren’t even inside the room.

Erika waggled her eyebrows at him. “Getting closer,” she said.

“Maybe.”

“Unless you think a wombat is making noise on our devices.”

“Could just be that one of our phones tried to get an update from cell towers or something. Dad has an ancient phone that makes the computer speakers crackle when he gets a call.”

“You’ve got some major denial problems, huh? Fifty bucks, we find a ghost on the other side of this door.”

“What? I’m not going—”

“And,” Erika said with a grin, “I’ll put ten thousand down that it isn’t a wombat.”

“The wombat thing was a joke,” Daniel muttered as Erika pushed open the door.

The door swung open with a low groan, revealing a dimly lit room. Motes of dust, shaken from the movement, wafted through the air in a dazzling dance in the beam of Erika’s flashlight. The room was sparsely furnished with a single bed pushed against one wall and a small dresser opposite it. The window pane was cracked, explaining the draft they had felt earlier.

Erika stepped inside cautiously, her eyes scanning the room for any signs of movement. The EMF reader in Daniel’s hand flickered again, this time holding steady at a two, while the spirit box resumed its erratic crackling. Still, no discernible words emerged.

“Step two was to identify the ghost, right?” Erika asked, nodding to the equipment. “That tell you anything?”

“Not really. Just that this spot is more prone to some kind of electrical interference. Maybe the magnetic field of some radio tower crosses right through this space.”

“Is that likely?”

“I mean… no…”

Erika hummed, looking around the room again. She pulled open a drawer of the old dresser, finding clothing that might have fit a person around Carter’s height. Maybe a girl based on the one dress, but it was a bit hard to tell without fully rummaging. “I’ll admit, kind of expected some creepy ritual or maybe evidence of a suicide or something,” she said, a little disappointed with how normal the room looked. “Hello! Ghost? Anyone here?”

“Do you have to shout out all the time?” Daniel hissed, tense again.

Erika shrugged. “There’s clearly nobody here. Not sure why you’re worr—”

“Who are you?”

Erika and Daniel both jolted at the noise from the spirit box. He held it out as far as he could reach as if it had turned into a snake that was trying to bite him. The EMF reader remained at a neutral two, but the erratic noise from the spirit box intensified tenfold.

“Are you here to play?”

It didn’t sound like someone talking. Instead, it was more like someone managed to tune a radio to a different station just long enough to pick up one word. Each word came from a different station, a different person, but they still formed a proper sentence.

Daniel’s eyebrows climbed so high that they had merged with his hairline.

“Can’t you hear me?”

He clearly wasn’t going to say anything, so Erika cleared her throat. “Hello there. I can hear you. Who am I talking to?”

The spirit box crackled a little louder for a moment before dropping back down to what it had been at since entering the room. “Em e lee.”

“Emily?” Erika asked. That one sounded like multiple words chopped up to fit the name. “Hello, Emily. I’m… Flora,” she said, not sure if giving her real name to a ghost was a good idea.

Everyone she had met on the other side of the coin used those silly titles. Presumably for a reason.

Daniel blinked twice, finally coming back to his senses. He shoved the spirit box into Erika’s hands before rushing over to the desk. It was covered in dust, far more than the rest of the house—presumably blown in through the cracked window—but he ignored it all as he pulled out his little black book. He started flipping back and forth through it, ignoring Erika entirely.

“Flo rah. Are you here to play?”

Daniel looked up from his notebook. Turning to Erika, he shook his head back and forth vehemently.

“Maybe later,” Erika said, not wanting to piss the ghost off. “I actually had a few questions first, if that’s alright?”

The spirit box crackled again, elapsing into a long pause before words came once more. “Oh kay…” Despite still sounding like the word had been taken from two separate radio stations, Erika could almost feel the disappointment.

Still, she had the okay to ask a few questions. Daniel wasn’t objecting either, having gone back to his notebook.

But what to ask?

Last time, she had gone in with a clear and concise goal: Ask about Leah. Now, however, she was here on a complete whim. Judging by the room, the clothes, and the repeated request to play, Erika guessed this was some little girl who had died long ago. She wouldn’t know anything that Erika wanted to know, not unless all ghosts were granted some mystical knowledge post-mortem.

Which, for all she knew, they might. That ghost during the seance seemed to know an awful lot for a random ghost.

“Can you tell me what happened here? What happened to all the people who lived here?”

“What do you mean? What happened?”

Erika grimaced. Did the little girl not know she was dead?

“Can you tell me where you are right now?” Erika tried, hoping for a more obvious answer that might get her some clues without outright telling a kid that she was dead.

“In my house. You don’t know that?”

“Your first instinct to people wandering into your house is to ask them to play?”

“Daddy has friends over all the time. We always play.”

Daniel sucked in a clipped breath at that. He flipped a few pages in the notebook before holding it up for Erika to read. He tapped his finger on one line. Abused child ghost – High Danger.

Erika closed her eyes, letting out a soft breath. She had been about to ask what kind of games. Now, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. As Daniel went back to flipping through pages, Erika instead asked, “Have you seen your daddy recently?”

“No. He went away with mommy. They never came back.”

“Where to?”

“Away.” The single word came slow and somber despite still sounding like it came from the middle of a sentence.

Erika let out a small sigh, wondering what had happened here. “Do you miss them?”

“Yes. I wish they were here. I wished them away and they went away, but I wish and wish and they never come back.”

That didn’t sound like an abused child to her. Erika glanced at Daniel. He looked up at that, but gave her a shrug and went back to his notes.

Then again, she wasn’t a pediatric psychologist. It could be Stockholm syndrome, some kind of double-think, or just a long absence making the worst days less prominent and the best days feeling all the more missing from her current… life? Undeath? Or, they could have the situation all wrong.

“You wished them away?”

“The shadow man said they would go away if I wished. Mommy sent me to bed without sweets, so I wished. I… I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“Alright. Alright,” Erika said, not wanting to upset a potentially dangerous ghost. “We can talk about other things like—”

“Is it time to play?”

“Not quite,” Erika said as Daniel gave her a quick shake of his head. He moved behind Erika and unzipped her backpack, rummaging through it while she still had it on. He emerged a moment later with a large box of salt that Erika had bought along with a quintet of candles. “Are you in this room with us?”

“Yes.”

“Really? Huh. We can’t see you. Can you see us?”

“I can. I’m right in front of you.”

“Are you standing right here?” Erika asked, pointing a bit in front of her.

“Yes.”

Daniel moved forward, pulling the spout of the salt box open. He started pouring it out in a fairly sloppy circle around where Erika was pointing.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s a little surprise,” Erika said. She wasn’t sure what happened to an exorcised ghost. Hopefully nothing bad. The situation already had her feeling morose. Regardless of whether the girl’s parents abused her or not, something tragic had happened here. She wished she could ask more, but she didn’t want to upset the girl further. “It might help you find your parents again, if you wish hard enough to see them again.”

“Really?”

“Of course,” Erika said as Daniel finished with the circle of salt. A lot of it fell through some cracks in the wooden floor, but since he wasn’t trying to fix it, Erika figured it was fine enough. He started moving around again, setting up the little tealight candles in a rough pentagram. “Just try to stay in the middle for now. We’ll tell you when to start wishing, okay?”

“Okay.”

With the candles set up, Daniel went back to Erika’s pack, still on her back. He rummaged a bit more, growing a bit more aggressive to the point where he almost knocked Erika off her balance. “No lighter?” he whispered.

She wasn’t sure why he wasn’t talking louder or why he hadn’t addressed the ghost. Maybe he was too spooked.

Erika closed her eyes and reached into her pocket, searching her memories. There had been a lighter with her collection before. It must still be in the truck. All the equipment had been scattered around on the floor in the back, so it wasn’t a surprise when she recalled seeing the corner of a little BIC lighter poking out from underneath the passenger seat. A quick grasp in that strange way that brought it to her pocket, and she handed it over to Daniel.

They would have to leave quickly after this. Probably not that quickly though. It was a full hour away from Chicago. Any of The Mummy’s agents who might be tracking her still wouldn’t be able to get here in a hurry. Besides that, she didn’t think they were tracking anything but her breaking things; putting Daniel in danger by trusting that wasn’t a good idea.

Were they still tracking her?

If the ‘gas leaks’ really did stop, could she try to attract attention by going around breaking things?

Something to think about.

But not now.

Daniel lit the candles and stepped back. He stared a moment before hurrying over to his notebook. He flipped back and forth between two pages a few times, looked over the little circle he had drawn on the floor, then finally nodded to himself. His eyes met with Erika’s.

“Alright,” Erika said. “Start wishing.”

Daniel took a breath. “Exorc… Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus,” Daniel started.

At the same time, the spirit box crackled to life again. “I wish I could see mommy and daddy again.”

“Regna terrae, cantate Deo, psallite Domino,” Daniel continued.

“I wish I could see them again…”

“Qui fertis ascendit super caelum caeli ad Orientem.”

“I wish I could—”

Without a single gust of wind, not even a slight breeze like the earlier draft, all five candles blew out at once. The white of the salt turned a crusty, gross-looking black.

Silence fell in the room.

“Emily?” Erika said. She waited a moment, but the spirit box returned to a neutral static noise. “Emily, are you there?” she tried again.

Nothing but static answered her.

“Goodbye, Emily,” she said with a small sigh.

Daniel let out a much heftier breath, doubling over like he just ran three blocks.

“You alright there?” Erika asked, lightly patting him on the back. “Didn’t get possessed on me, did you? I hope not because I don’t know Latin.”

“Neither do I,” he said, groaning as he righted himself.

“Then why speak it?”

“Tradition?” he said as he took a long, slow look around the room. “I was just following the book.” Slowly, he stepped forward, lightly nudging the circle of black salt with his shoe. It crumbled apart, picked up by yet another unfelt breeze as it scattered to nothingness. “What in the hell was that?”

“A ghost,” Erika said with a small grin that she didn’t quite feel anymore. “What we came here to find, remember?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t think… Probably someone with a radio transceiver playing a prank.”

“Uh-huh,” Erika said. “And the black salt?” she asked, pointing at the floor.

He stared a moment, frowning a little, before looking back to Erika. “Heat?”

He didn’t sound convinced, and he sure wasn’t convincing her. “You keep coming up with those excuses,” Erika said. “Occam’s razor. Simple reason is the right reason. And the simplest I see is that we just had a spooky ghost encounter.”

“I…” He trailed off before he could begin his thought, staring down at the notebook in his hand.

Erika walked around the room once. She wasn’t really sure why. It certainly felt empty now, and there hadn’t been any more words on the spirit box. It was just… the experience left her feeling far more morose than her previous two ghost encounters. Something about it felt more real. Perhaps because this was some kind of natural ghost while those had been deliberately summoned, the situation felt more tragic.

The night certainly gave her a fair amount to think about.

“You did good with the exorcism,” she said, giving Daniel a pat on the shoulder as she walked back toward the door. “We should probably head out.”

“Yeah… I guess so.”

Erika paused at the room’s door, giving the sparsely decorated bedroom one quick look over. “Hope she found her parents,” Erika said. “Or something good, anyway.”

“Sounded like she killed her parents.”

“Sounded like she was tricked into it,” Erika countered. She hefted her bag on one shoulder, only to realize it was still open. She hurriedly zipped it up to keep anything from falling out. “Question, though, what would have happened if we played?”

“According to the book? Probably would have died in some twisted version of a child’s game, unless we somehow won the game despite the deck being stacked against us.”

“Ah. Figures.” That sounded stereotypical enough for a bunch of amateur ghost hunters to write down. “Hey, think there was a curse on this land with all the failed development projects?” she asked as they headed down the stairs.

“Maybe. Why do you ask?”

“Bet whoever owns it now would sell it really cheap. And if we just broke that curse by exorcising the girl, it might let us do some development…”

“Dad says that kind of stuff is immoral.”

“Oh no,” Erika said, mockingly. “Not the poor real estate development companies… Wouldn’t want to scam them.”

She laughed at the flat look he gave her.

With one last look at the old farmhouse, they headed back out to the truck. The night had given her a few things to ponder over indeed, not just matters relating to getting a plot of land for a steal or how she might attract the attention of The Mummy, but other, more personal matters.

She should have a chat with her parents when she got home.