The Belly of the Beast, page 13
part #3 of The Graveyard Series
Now I’m all alone.
And the energy in here is extremely different than my previous visits.
I may have shut myself inside an abandoned farmhouse with an ancient demon.
Not one of my brightest moments, among the many, but what am I supposed to do? Allow Deanna Hampstead to stay in here and have another repeat of the Chelsea Situation?
If I take her home possessed, soaked to the brim in evil, vomiting demon piss, and spitting pea green soup all over the house, I’m dead in so many different ways. I can’t go through that again. I can’t allow it to happen twice. My guilty conscience would plant me in a mental ward, staring out a closed window and drooling all over my straight jacket.
So, yeah.
Here I am.
Back to the basics; might as well attempt another EVP session.
I sigh. “Here goes nothing.”
I push the red Record button, mark the time and the location, and then gingerly, cautiously, step from room to remaining room, staying out of the master, because I haven’t quite built up the jujus to head in there. I introduce myself, again, ask all the standard questions like ‘Who’s here with me tonight?’ and ‘Papa Joe, if you’re here, will you give me a sign of your presence?’
I do this for ten minutes and then do a live review session before I tackle the last bastion of evil in the Hampstead farmhouse.
Ten minutes of my questions.
Ten minutes of no replies.
Shit.
Downstairs, the front door opens, and Mike calls up, asking if I’m okay, asking if I need him to join me.
“Not a chance,” I bark back. “Stay with her. Please. I’m good here.” Though I’m positive my shaky voice betrays me.
“Okay. Yell if you need me.”
Another deep breath. Here we go. Second verse, same as the first.
Not really, because I can feel this place taking on a life of its own now, as if the house itself is breathing, the walls expanding and contracting each time it inhales and exhales. It’s huge, crouching, and bestial. Throat rumbling, fangs bared, their sharp points glinting with each flash of lightning, while I crawl around inside the belly of the beast.
I shiver thinking about it.
And this is just the beginning.
We’re only here to send a message.
What’s it going to be like when this place is crawling with cameramen and crew, each one of them like a goddamn supercharged battery with energy that can be soaked up to power a raging, angry, revenge-fueled demon?
Okay, Ford, stop freaking yourself out.
One thing at a time. One day at a time.
“You’ve done this more before,” I remind myself, and then I press on.
I would like to say I bravely march toward the master bedroom door. Instead, I kinda run to it like a chickenshit coward.
I grab the doorknob, twist, and for a second, it feels cold on my palm.
Then my brain catches up with my sense of touch.
It’s so hot that it feels cold at first, confusing the synapses sending signals.
I haven’t felt something similar since the Craghorn house.
I scream obscenities, push it open farther, and then jerk my hand away, trying to shake it free of the pain.
Downstairs, Mike must be eavesdropping because he once again yells up and asks if I’m okay, if I need him.
“No,” I shout back. “I got this.”
“What happened?”
“Doorknob is about a million degrees. I’m going in.”
“Be careful, please,” Mike begs, and then I’m through the door.
It’s so hot in this room, I’m surprised Satan isn’t sitting in the shredded easy chair by the window. Up near the headrest, two springs have broken through the thinning purple material, and they remind me of jagged Devil’s horns.
Thanks, Ford. Didn’t need that imagery.
I breathe deeply, calmly—as best as I can—and for ten full minutes, I stand in the bedroom, enduring the heat, trying to use each piece of investigative equipment I have with me and watch as, one by one, the fresh, full batteries die. The entity, or entities, present are soaking up everything I’m throwing at them.
Sweat beads race down my back and sides like wet snakes slithering along my skin.
I search my pockets and find one last set of batteries, choosing the digital voice recorder for my final round in the chamber. I spend another five minutes addressing Papa Joe, explaining what we’re up against, but only revealing part of our plans in case there are prying demonic ears that might run home to Daddy Master and tattle on us.
Then I play back the recording.
The first voice I hear, in between my yammering, is Papa Joe, finally.
But gone is the cranky old bastard that I’ve spoken to before.
It’s the voice of a man cowering in a corner, holding up his hands and shaking his head before he meets his fate.
“They’re here…” Papa Joe whimpers through the speaker. “They can … tell him. No. No, please.”
It’s one of the clearest Class-A EVPs I’ve ever caught. Instead of being on the other side, he sounds as if he’s directly in the room with me.
“His … minions. Can’t you … see …”
My voice, having not heard this in real time, continues to blather, asking if he can send a message to Boogerface for us, it would really help us out, and blah-blah.
“They … know. They’re coming. He’s coming.”
With each passing word, his voice grows more and more frightened on the recording while I fumble with my words. A second or two here, a second or two there, Papa Joe talks over my questions, addressing me directly, telling me that a portal has opened. He can see a wave of lesser demons howling, flying up, up, and up.
And then my voice stops for a moment. I had paused to give him a chance to respond.
“Tell everyone … I’m sorry,” his voice says, then Papa Joe screams in such abject terror, I can feel gooseflesh flood my entire body at once.
My voice again: “If you could send that message, it would help.” Short pause. “Oh, and if there’s any chance you know his name, could you maybe tell me? Please?”
“Mirror, mirror,” is the last clear EVP I hear, and then his horrified voice fades as if something is dragging him away.
Or down.
If it’s possible, the room has grown hotter, and I decide it’s long past time to leave this place for the night.
You’ve heard the expression, ‘Going to hell in a handbasket,’ right?
It takes me a moment to fully comprehend I just listened to a spirit being dragged into a pit of raging fire, and it is certainly possible Mike and I aren’t far behind. When the time comes, I’ll probably have to save Mike a seat in the handbasket.
This is bigger than us.
I know that now. I understand we’re out of our league, completely.
My only consolation is that Father Duke has agreed to join us, along with Carter Kane, who, aside from Mike Long, are two people I inherently trust to handle the demonic. We’ll have some quality backup the next time we’re here.
Until then, maybe I can figure out what Papa Joe meant by ‘mirror, mirror.’
I don’t take my time descending the steps, pausing only at the bottom to look back once, regretting I didn’t ask Papa Joe if he knew what “The blood of the meek shall feed my horror,” referenced.
Aside from what could be construed as a doomsday prophecy.
Chapter Fourteen
One Week Later
Gunnar Creek.
Two words. First name. Last name.
Three syllables that elicit a look of annoyance, disgust, and mild rage in anyone over the age of thirty. Rather than working hard like most overnight successes that took two decades to come to fruition, the dude was nearly handed his fame in a week.
For the first fifteen years of his life, he was a cute kid with bleached blonde hair, bright blue eyes, and real, rare talent with a guitar. He learned to play when he was six. When I was six years old, I was picking my nose and seeing how many Matchbox cars I could fit into my mouth at one time.
Then, YourVideo appeared on Ye Olde Interwebs, Gunnar’s mother uploaded a couple of recordings where he performed excellent cover songs of popular Beatles tunes, and boom, honey, viral ain’t even the word for it.
The short clips shot around the internet, garnered millions of positive votes in a handful of days, and a month later, he performed an original song on Sherilyn, the super popular daytime talk show hosted by the queen of comedy, Sherilyn Jones. In between interviewing the Hollywood elite, Sherilyn likes to play games, give away coffee roasters, and scare the crap out of her celebrity guests around Halloween.
Not long after, Gunnar Creek was on posters in every single teenage girl’s bedroom from Seattle to Mongolia, a worldwide sensation who grew up in a trailer park outside of Mobile, Alabama. He went from eating string cheese for dinner every night to earning north of two hundred million dollars in his first three years of performing to sold out shows across the globe.
You’d think the Beatles landed in the U.S. for the first time again with the way crowds react to Gunnar Creek’s arrival.
Fame, and all the nasty vagaries that come with it, took its toll on young Gunnar, and he spent two years getting arrested, being photographed with a rolled up dollar bill stuck in his nose as it hovered over a white powdery line, to having a raucous public breakup with another teeny-bopper songstress named Kayla Carmichael after some paparazzi snatched a photograph of Gunnar cozying up to a naked supermodel—also with a line of white powder stretching from nipple to bellybutton below Gunnar’s distorted, stoned grin.
His publicists have been working double-time to repair his image, and so far, I’m not entirely sure it has been doing any good. He’s still an entitled prick who treats waiters poorly and racks up the occasional speeding ticket while berating the beleaguered officer unfortunate enough to pull him over.
If I had my druthers, I’d avoid him like a leper in the buffet line.
What I mean is, the dude’s a humongous asshole, and anyone with a modicum of maturity sees him that way. In the Over Thirty Crowd, he might be the only person in the U.S. who has a poorer public image than I do.
Er, did. I hope.
And yet, he’s going to be in our documentary, because the Under Thirty Crowd absolutely adores him. In their eyes, he can do no wrong.
Asshole? Not a chance, Grandpa. My boy up on that stage has the voice of an angel.
A twelve-step angel, but an angel nonetheless.
As Dakota had said, the Under Thirty Crowd will go watch the documentary multiple times because he’s in it, while the Over Thirty Crowd will go just to see him scared shitless—and cross their fingers really, really hard that he wets his pants.
The numbers sent over by Carla’s data guys have suggested that including Gunnar Creek in the celebrity lineup will raise worldwide profits by an estimated three-hundred million dollars.
We’ll see. That’s all I can say.
For the time being, Mike and I had some serious discussions about his involvement after we exchanged a handful of phone calls with his representatives and Gunnar himself. He was a major fan of Graveyard and sent out those tweet things constantly before the show got pulled…
…are you sensing the but here?
He has never been on a paranormal investigation before, which could pose a problem.
We had uninitiated celebrity guests on Graveyard in the past, but none of them were quite on the same level of popularity as Gunnar Creek. Nobody would care if Dane Kowalski, the standup comic who starred in that movie with the talking cat, ended up possessed after a night spent in a haunted asylum with us. Nor would they mind much if Lucy Lanyard, the host of the ultra-conservative news show, Today Tomorrow, found herself sitting in a corner, sucking her thumb for the rest of her life because she got groped by a dead sex offender.
There is no such thing as a Big Loss when it comes to B- and C-level celebrities.
A Big Loss of Gunnar Creek, on the other hand, would raise the ire of a few billion people on Earth, perhaps even alien planets, if someone committed him to the loony bin, post demonic encounter. We would have nowhere to hide.
So, armed with the fear of reprisal from every teenage girl with working ears, Mike and I decided that Gunnar needed the experience of at least one investigation, and we had an adequate location in mind.
There’s a place in Oregon we always wanted to investigate but never had the chance. It was actually on the docket for our eleventh season—and we all know how that turned out.
Once all the calls were made and details arranged, we caught up with Gunnar Creek and his entourage in Bend, a small city in central Oregon, home to amazing scenery, professional athletes, and a number of celebrities, both retired from the public spotlight and others actively engaging in selling their soul to Hollywood. It’s a fantastic area if you love the outdoors, being active, consuming mass quantities of microbrews, and enjoying three-hundred days of sunshine each year.
The snot-nosed brat insisted we stay the night and dragged us from local brewhouse to local brewhouse until we finally threw in the white towel around three a.m. Evidently Oregon’s serving laws don’t apply to Gunnar Creek.
I’ll have to admit, the conversations were somewhat entertaining in the fact that while almost every person on the planet knows who this young guy is, he gushed over us like he had met a couple of superheroes. We spent the night drinking gloriously excellent IPAs, pale ales, and wheat beers, all while recanting stories about our past investigations and trying to curb Gunnar’s expectations. “It’s not going to be Ghostbusters,” we told him time and again, “because this is some serious shit. We’re taking on a demon—an actual, real, live—well, dead—demon.”
Having him fawning over us didn’t totally change our opinions of him, by the way. He’ll always be a dipshit with an entitled attitude problem, but we were able to see how he’d been molded into such a jerkhole by his parents and his handlers.
Anyway, Gunnar’s life story aside, we’re now riding in the lead SUV of a celebrity motorcade that could seriously rival the President’s, while traveling northeast through the beautiful, rolling hills of the Ochoco Mountains. The mounds remind me of piles of brown sugar, dotted with pine trees and weathered rock outcroppings. We roll through farmland in the valleys, which often feels as if we’re running a livestock gauntlet what with the number of cattle on either side of the road.
Mike and I are somewhat alert, being old and wise enough to know when to quit drinking to avoid a massive hangover, while Gunnar dozes in the far back seat of the SUV, trying to sleep it off. You would think his tolerance level would be higher than the cruising altitude of a 747, and yet, when he walked out of the hotel this morning, he looked like he’d fallen out of a tree and hit every limb on the way down.
I can’t remember the driver’s real name; he goes by Bomber, and he’s the monstrous head bodyguard who spent time in the Marines, then the Middle East working as a private security contractor before he moved stateside to kick ass and take names for the upper echelon of celebrities in southern California.
We don’t speak much because Bomber quietly hinted that if the “mental toddler”—his words, not mine—in the back didn’t get his beauty rest, he’d be impossible to handle for the next thirty-six hours.
Point taken and duly noted, Mike and I spend the four and a half hours from Bend to Sumpter, Oregon communicating with each other and our respective partners via text, chuckling at goofy pictures of Ulie that Melanie and Dakota keep sending along, and reading up on the history of Sumpter and the haunted hotel where we’re staying.
Ghost Bros and Terrible Tales have both been there before and captured some terrific evidence, but, the hauntings have seemed like they’re tame for lack of a better word, and, to us, that sounded like the perfect place to indoctrinate Gunnar Creek into the world of the paranormal.
The trip seems to get longer and longer as each passing mile reminds me that even in a heavily occupied state, unsettled areas remain, holding onto the feel of a settler making his way west to seek fortune and a place to call home. If I look out to my right, down a steep embankment, down to where a river carves its way through multiple layers of soil, I can imagine a pioneer with his wagon parked off to the side while he pans for gold in them thar hills. Then, looking up and up the other bank, I imagine a line of Native Americans cresting the ridge while they glare down at the interloper below. Cue the music of doom inside my mind movie, and there’s one dead settler with a spear sticking out of his chest.
Fun. My brain is imagining death before we get to our destination.
Finally, we arrive at the middle-of-nowhere town of Sumpter, Oregon, population three hundred and four if you count the pets, too. It’s a borderline ghost town, but back in the day, according to historians, this place was a hopping gold mining metropolis of close to four thousand people. The easily accessible gold dried up, an enormous fire destroyed over ninety percent of the buildings, and the citizenry moved on to seek the yellow, malleable metal elsewhere.
From what I read online, nowadays the townspeople spend their time cruising around on ATVs and entertaining tourists who come to take in the history, ride a fully functioning steam train, and try their luck at digging up some gold wherever they can find a bit of land to do it legally.
Bomber strictly obeys the speed limit of fifteen miles per hour as we drive along Sumpter’s main street, giving me time to take in the scenery. The town seems like it has two more saloons than necessary, in addition to antique stores, restaurants, and a different hotel with a wooden fence built around it and made to look like an Old West fort.
Mike leans up from the middle row and taps on my shoulder, whispering, “Dude, look over there. Not all of the streets are paved. What year is it again?”
How’s that for a step away from civilization, huh? Gravel roads right in the middle of town.
The GPS on Bomber’s phone barks an order, and we turn right up a slight incline, gravel scrabbling under the tires and bouncing of the SUV’s underbelly. The noise is enough to wake Gunnar, and he grumbles his displeasure from the far back as the Sumpter Hotel & Spa looms above us. Two stories tall, painted forest green on the sides and celebrity-teeth white on the front, it looks ominous already, and we haven’t stepped inside yet.
