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We made our way to the parlor where all the equipment was still set up. The team looked up from whatever they had been doing and gestured and said hellos. After we stowed our gear, we made our way over to the monitors where Turner sat with Dev.
“Hey, you two,” Dev said. “We were just getting the reels queued.”
Turner fast-forwarded through a bunch of footage from the attic, periodically looking down at a notebook that he had next to him. Suddenly, he glanced back up and stopped the forward motion, pausing the video on an empty shot of the attic room and just the very top of the stairs.
“Okay, this is it, I think,” he said and turned to Dev.
“You stopped it right at when we marked the time from the Handycam and the EVP recordings?”
“Actually, it’s several minutes earlier. Thought it might be good to see if anything happenedbeforeSky got tugged up there. Especially since the monitor went black the night of the investigation and we didn’t see anything,” Turner said and then stood. “Someone else can have my chair. I’m gonna go and grab some water. I’ll be back in to take a peek, but you should be fine without me to do whatever you need to do next.” He walked out of the room.
I turned to Sky. “Do you want to sit? There might not be too much opportunity for that tonight, and this might be hard to see.”
“Yeah, okay,” she said and took the chair that Turner had vacated.
Hanlen, Dakota, Aaron, and James all gathered around, and I scanned the space. “Where’s Birdie?” I asked.
Dev looked up and out the archway. “I’m not sure. She must be taking care of something. I can fill her in later if needed. Van and Lennie are looking at some of the equipment in the back of the house and I don’t want to bother them right now. It’s not super important for them to see anyway. They already reviewed all the data from the JumpBox, the Geoport, and the Wonder Box to make sure that everything was working well electronically when we received what we did.” He turned to us. “You guys ready? We have it set up in slow motion so we can catch things better, so this may look a little weird—and probably even scarier. But I want to be able to mark things to enhance after the investigation, and we can always watch again in normal speed later.”
He clicked the mouse, and we saw and heard nothing for a minute, just some dust motes floating across the field of the night-vision camera. Suddenly, however, I caught movement in the corner and looked over to see . . .
“Holy shit,” Sky gasped, and those behind us exclaimed, as well.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. There, in the corner of the attic, was a figure. A full apparition, nearly asrealas we were in the moment. It was a female, dressed in a black cloak with the hood down. Given the way things appeared in night vision, her hair and eyes were probably dark. She had a petite build and looked . . . anxious.
Dev quickly paused the video and looked at all of us, turning to take in those behind him, too. “You guys see that?”
“Holy fuck,” Aaron said.
“I’ll take that as a yes.” Dev chuckled. “I guess our hypnosis and spell worked,” Dev said and then turned back to the monitors, pressing play once again.
The figure remained, wringing her hands and looking around frantically. Suddenly, another apparition popped into existence next to her. A tall, slender male wearing the same kind of cloak as the first figure. He seemed to have light hair and eyes. He turned to the first form and said something, his features pinched in anger and frustration. While we couldn’t hear what was said, we could intuit the gist. He was very unhappy with the female.
He gestured wildly around the space, pointing his finger at the woman and then at the stairs. When the female moved towards the stairwell, he grabbed her by the arms in what looked to be a bruising, crushing grip and shook her, his eyes narrowed in rage.
We all gasped, and Dev paused the video again. “If I had to venture a guess,” he said, “I’d say that’s Seiko and Lance.” He turned so he could see Dakota. “Have you gotten any psychic insight?”
“Nothing specific. More just . . . feelings. And I have to agree with you.”
“So, those are my biological parents,” Sky breathed, and I reached out and squeezed her shoulder. She let me; even raised her hand across her chest to place it over mine, but she never took her eyes off the frozen image on the monitor. “Either that, or I have a brain tumor. Might be more plausible.”
Dev looked over at her. “It’s not a tumor.” Aaron and James laughed, and it took me a second to realize that it was a movie line. Dev just shook his head and then asked Sky, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said.
“But you know what happens next,” he said. “This isn’t going to get any easier. And now that you know that you can see the spirits, I don’t know what that will mean for what we might witness next.”
She turned to him. “I’m fine,” she snapped, and I squeezed her shoulder a bit. “Let’s see what we might have to deal with tonight.”
“Okay.” Dev pushed play again, and the figure we believed was Lance pulled the woman we thought might be Seiko into a chokehold, holding her against his body so she couldn’t get away, but making her face the stairs. Just as he did and whispered something in her ear, we saw phantom footsteps appear in the dirt and dust of the floor, leading to the stairs. We couldn’t see a body attached, but there were definitely footprints there—long, huge feet with claw marks. It reminded me of the water we’d found in the hall, and I tried to remember what the shape of those looked like.
Then, we heard the screams on camera.
I tensed, and most everybody said something. The shrieks sounded even more blood-curdling in the slower speed, and I felt my stomach bottom out a bit. We watched, in slow motion on screen, as Sky’s hair appeared first at the top of the stairs and then the rest of her body, bit by bit. She thrashed and fought, screamed and swore, before sliding across the floor and slamming headfirst into the wall with force and speed—even in slow-mo.
Sweet Jesus, that could have broken her neck.
“Merde,” Dev said and paused the video again to a chorus of:
