The coffee maker sputtered its glorious nectar and I watched the droplets fill the pot, trying to hypnotize myself away from the anxiety. Patricia walked into the kitchen without a word, the expectation of an explanation clearly drawn on her face. I had wiped the death threats off the mirror, but there was no hiding the damage.
“Whatever was at the chicken farm followed me home,” I said. Might as well tear it off like a Band-Aid.
She sat down at the table, her eyes betraying worry, and folded her hands on the tabletop.
“I got another EVP, here, after you left. Same thing. ‘Trapped.’ ‘Pain.’ It said it was from the chicken farm,” I said.
She nodded slowly, and said, “Alright. The mirror, too?”
“Yes. And the remote flew off the table yesterday. I didn’t want to worry you.”
“That’s a poltergeist. Have you been attacked?”
“Attacked?” I said, trying to maintain composure. “No. What do you mean?”
“Scratched, bitten, burned. Physical harm,” she said, almost clinically.
“No.”
“I’m gonna call Hedy and have her come over here, instead.”
I nodded. The hell with what the neighbors might think. We were in trouble.
The morning sped by surprisingly fast considering we didn’t know what to do with ourselves, and there was a knock at the door. Hedy Nightshade was in her fifties, but she looked much older due to the heavy creases around her eyes and mouth. With the dark eye liner she reminded me of Keith Richards.
“Patricia, so good to see you again,” Hedy said, walking in like a gust of wind.
She and Patricia hugged, and then Hedy turned her dark eyes on me.
“The nonbeliever, I presume,” she said.
I held my hand out and she shook the end of my fingers absent-mindedly while she surveyed our apartment. She may have had a bad back, because her whole body turned to look at things. She leaned back and to the side to look up at the ceiling, almost to the point of falling over. It was comical, the way she breezed through the rooms like a spinning top, and I had to stifle a laugh. Talk about dramatic. Just like the psychics on Patricia’s TV shows.
I put my arm around Patricia while Hedy did her work. I looked at her with a half smile turned down at the side. She jabbed my ribs and raised her eyebrows.
“Don’t even say it,” she whispered.
I held my hands up in surrender and we waited silently. It did seem ridiculous to me, but there was a small part somewhere deep down that had a sliver of hope. I was definitely out of my element with what was happening, and while I didn’t trust this psychic, I trusted Patricia.
Hedy came out of the bathroom and walked right up into our personal space, like a bull charging. “I feel a male presence that is separate,” she said.
“I knew it,” Patricia said. “It’s a poltergeist, isn’t it.”
“Unclear,” Hedy said, holding up a crooked finger. “Physical disturbances, yes, as seen with the bathroom mirror. However, poltergeists are typically tricksters, or playful, sometimes antagonistic. But this doesn’t feel that way. It feels more like…frustration.”
“A frustrated ghost,” I said.
“That’s what it feels like,” Hedy said.
“What does that mean?” Patricia asked.
Hedy opened her black shoulder bag, which had been hidden up to this point between flowing folds of her cloak. She withdrew a water bottle, flipped back the top, and took a long pull. “Perhaps he’s trying to tell you something and you’re not listening,” she said, lips glistening and wet.
“It says–” I started.
“He,” Hedy corrected.
“He says he’s trapped,” I said.
“A common reaction,” Hedy said. “Often when a spirit lingers it’s because they don’t realize they have passed.”
I’ve always been good at hiding my emotions, keeping a neutral demeanor, except from Patricia. She saw the apprehension on my face.
“What is it?” she asked.
Part of me wanted to keep it from her out of a misplaced sense of chivalry, thinking I was protecting her, but she was the strongest woman I knew. Stronger than me. She could handle it.
“The last EVP said, ‘Don’t go. You will die, John.’ It was written on the mirror, too,” I said.
Both Hedy and Patricia flashed alarmed expressions and quickly composed themselves. That gave me a sinking feeling.
“Sometimes when spirits communicate through the veil it’s metaphorical,” Hedy said.
“She’s right,” Patricia said. “Not everything’s literal.”
“How do you know which is which?” I asked.
“The sense of frustration I’m picking up, he could be lashing out. It could be he’s simply trying to get your attention,” Hedy said.
“I’m hearing a lot of ‘coulds’ and ‘maybes.’ Truth is, you don’t know,” I said.
“What can we do?” Patricia asked.
Hedy dug into her shoulder bag and pulled out a bundle of sage wrapped in string. “First things first, the residence needs to be smudged,” she said. “Then I will perform a blessing.”
“That’ll get rid of it? Him?” I asked.
Hedy shrugged and said, “It will cleanse your home. If he has a particularly strong attachment, it may not. In that case, other measures will have to be considered, but I wouldn’t worry. This usually works.”
She lit the sage and started walking the perimeter of the rooms, along each wall, swishing the smoking bundle up and down as she went. The smell reminded me of my college dorm. Then she started speaking a blessing, some words in English and some in Latin, which reminded me of church, back when my parents forced me to go. The whole process took about fifteen minutes.
When Hedy had finished, she hugged Patricia, waved me off, and said to let her know if any further poltergeist activity or EVPs materialized. Then she breezed out of the apartment.
Seemed like a waste of three hundred bucks to me.
I ended up having to eat my words, though, since we encountered no more activity of any kind that night or the next week. We even tried a few EVP sessions for confirmation and got nothing but dead air. The knot of anxiety I’d been carrying since the abandoned chicken farm finally unravelled. I felt relaxed and could enjoy the evenings together with Patricia now that her thrift store inventory was over.
Good timing, too, because my next commercial property inspection was for a national bank with an ag client looking to expand their operations into our area. It was a huge contract with a lot of dollar signs attached, my biggest yet. This was one I needed to be a hundred percent for.
They were looking at a local wheat farm for sale that had some storage and equipment buildings, and a large grain elevator that serviced the railroad that had an easement through the property. This meant they could more easily distribute nationally, and the ag company particularly wanted to know the shape of the grain elevator.
I dropped Patricia off at her thrift store, and started the drive out of town to the wheat farm. It was about twenty miles on a two-lane highway. I had the radio and my insulated travel mug full of coffee to keep me company.
The town I live in is near the mountains, but as soon as you head east the geography turns flat and desolate. When you pass by the large fields that were recently plowed and only show gray dirt, it’s like you’re on the moon. Not much traffic, and when you do pass someone they’re usually in some kind of farming vehicle that looks like a giant beetle on raised legs.
Journey came on the radio and I cranked it. Sipping artisan coffee with classic rock blasting on a beautiful, sunny day with the windows down and my hair blowing, on my way to a big payday. Life was good.
I could see the tall grain elevator in the distance, stretching toward the sky from out of the golden swaying fields of wheat. It was still a ways away, but distance was deceiving when the land is so flat and sparse. I finished my coffee and stepped on the gas.
The radio cut out into static for a moment, and then came back loudly playing Cheap Trick. I looked out the open driver’s window and felt the warm air rush by my face, the smell of dirt and water and hay filling my nose.
Loud static burst out of the speakers again, and the deep voice bellowed, “DON’T GO!”
It jolted me like I’d touched an electric fence and I jerked the wheel to the right, careening into the borrow pit on the side of the road. I overcorrected and shot across both lanes to the oncoming side of the asphalt, and then eased the car back to my lane. Luckily the road was deserted.
The voice again shouted, “DON’T GO, JOHN! YOU WILL DIE! YOU WILL DIE! YOU WILL–”
I punched the power button on the radio and shut it off, killing the voice and hearing only blowing wind. My entire body was numb and I had to grip the steering wheel tightly to keep my hands from shaking. My elbows still did.
When I pulled into the parking lot in front of the grain elevator, I shut the car off and sat for a few minutes, staring at the dashboard. Anger replaced fear and I told myself I had a job to do and I was going to do it, no matter what. Finally, I stopped shaking and could feel the blood return to my limbs.
I got out and looked up at the imposing structure. This was as close to high-rises that we had out in farm country, and I had a wave of dizziness staring up at the sharp roof. The wind was gusting like it always did out here, and the metal siding, similar to the chicken farm’s, was rattling and screeching. Some squares were loose and flapping.
My toolkit was on the back seat, and when I opened the rear door it slammed shut as if a heavy gust of wind had hit it. Except the wind was blowing toward the open door. I tried opening it again and felt a forceful resistance push it closed again, almost catching my finger.
“What the hell?” I yelled, and took a step back from the car.
Screw it. I’d do an initial survey without my tools, then. I started for the front door and heard a crash in the bowels of the building. The wind was really taking a toll. I unlocked the door with the key I’d picked up at the bank yesterday and stepped inside. It was dark and dusty, and I coughed and cleared my throat. I should’ve brought water.
The wind whipped the front door open and then closed, open closed, schizophrenically, and a moment later the hinges screamed and the door tore off and flew out into the parking lot, cartwheeling across the highway. I pulled the digital recorder out of my front shirt pocket and noted the door and flappy external panels. Structural instability. Yeah.
The entryway was a bare room with walls and an open ceiling looking up at the massive interior expanse. A cage elevator with chainlink fence enclosing it was over in the corner. The elevator rose to a gantry, which led to the conveyor belt and silo bins. I looked up toward the high ceiling and could see dust particles floating in the shards of sunlight coming through broken-out windows and gaps in the walls. The building looked like it was breathing, walls expanding and contracting with the wind.
I walked toward the elevator and caught my sleeve on something, yanking me off balance. I turned to unhook it, pissed because this was a new jacket, and stopped. My left arm was held out at the elbow, the sleeve pulled outward into thin air. Panic hit at once and I jerked my arm, but it remained, crooked and frozen. I flailed spasmodically and managed to pull myself out of the jacket. It hung motionless in the air for a moment, and then dropped into a heap on the concrete floor.
Without thought, driven purely by adrenaline and instinct, I fled toward the elevator. Something tripped me, sending me sprawling on the floor. The wind was knocked out of me and I choked and coughed, gasping, rolling until I was on my back. I lay there, breathing in spurts until my lungs expanded and I caught my breath.
I sat up. Nothing was on or near the floor where I tripped. I looked down at my hand. I was still holding the recorder.
“Who are you and what do you want?” I shouted into the glowing red light.
I kept recording for a moment and then clicked it off, tapped the rewind button, and played.
There was so much static that I was about to try again, when the deep voice echoed through the ether:
I’M YOU, JOHN! GET OUT OR WE DIE!
A cacophony of sheetmetal and steel girders and wind erupted from above and the building shook all around me. I jumped to my feet and ran toward the front door opening, a tunnel of light getting smaller and smaller, choked by dust and debris, amidst a roar of collapse.
| Part 1 | Part 2 |