1998 – A TV crew from the paranormal investigation show Ghost Smashers spent Halloween night in Butler House. Unconfirmed reports indicate a tragedy occurred. No one knows what happened, but the host, Richard Reiser, immediately retired from television without the program ever airing.
Tom clicked on the PHOTOS section of the website. The first picture looked a lot like the White House, but no columns and a darker color. The second was of three people, the Butler brothers and Annabelle.
Jebediah Butler was a bespectacled man with white hair and a Van Dyke beard. He looked a lot like a fatter Col. Sanders, minus the mirth. His wife was also plump, and either there was a spot on the photo or her left eye was severely crossed. Colton was the tallest, and rail thin. He leaned on his cane, hunched over as if his back was hurting him, and had one of those walrus mustaches with the ends curled up and waxed.
The next photo looked like a hole in the dirt filled with rocks, and Tom had to read the inscription to understand what he was seeing.
Over four thousand human bones found buried on the property.
Creeped out, he made the mistake of clicking on the next photo, which was a shirtless African American man who had so many scars on his body he no longer looked human. As Tom hurried to hit the ESC button, something in the image stopped him.
Something hanging on the man’s mangled shoulder.
A third arm.
It was small, withered, hanging over his chest like a wrinkled leather belt. But there were clearly five fingers on the end of it, and they were—
Holy shit. The fingers are holding a tin drinking cup .
Tom zoomed in, trying to spot if the photo had been altered, but it looked real enough.
What the hell was wrong with some people? Assuming even some of the facts on the website were true, what could make someone treat his fellow man like that?
Tom went to the next picture, partly out of morbid curiosity, partly because he wanted to see the Butlers get what was coming to them. He was rewarded by a photo that looked like two bloody, skinned deer carcasses.
Wrong again. The caption read The bodies of Jebediah and Annabelle Butler. They’d had every inch of skin on their body whipped off.
Thankfully, there were no pictures of the tortured Colton. But there was a portrait of Sturgis Butler, and Tom was shocked at how much he looked like Vlad the Impaler. Same dark, bulging eyes. Same pointy black beard. Tom found himself staring into those eyes, revulsion wiggling in his stomach.
Next came a picture of the house after the fire in ‘45. The structure remained intact, but there was telltale soot and fire damage surrounding the windows and front doors. Tom was going to move onto the next page, but something in the photo caught his eye.
He made the jpg the size of his monitor. In one of the blackened windows was a speck of white.
Tom zoomed in further.
The white speck looked like the ghostly face of a man screaming.
There was a sound and movement to Tom’s right, and he immediately glanced over his shoulder, adrenaline kicking in, and watched as his bedroom door—
—closed by itself.
As his fight-or-flight response kicked in, Tom remembered his window was open a crack. The draft sometimes blew the door open and closed; something that happened often enough that Tom actually looked it up and discovered it had to do with air pressure in the room.
Still, it was disconcerting after reading the history of Butler House. Tom’s mouth was dry. His heart was doing a fox trot. And he both felt, and saw, all the tiny hairs on the backs of his hands stick straight up.
He was afraid.
And the Feebies were right. Tom knew, more than most, what it was like to be afraid.
He didn’t like it. Not one bit.
Tom stared at the phone, wanting to call Joan. Hearing her voice would reassure him, calm him down.
Instead he visited YouTube and played an upbeat rock performance by Bob Walkenhorst.
He also turned on the bedroom light.
In the bright room, with the music playing, Tom felt less frightened.
But he couldn’t relax enough to sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw that poor, scarred, three-armed slave. And thought of his partner, Roy.
Mililani, Hawaii
Fran
Fran stood in the safe room with her family, watching the porch monitor. The two men who stood at their front door looked around when Josh hit the intercom button and spoke.
“Who are you and what do you want?”
“Mr. VanCamp?” They still couldn’t find the camera. “We’re from the FBI. We want to talk to you and your wife.”
Josh glanced at her, and Fran gave her head a small shake.
“We’re not interested,” Josh answered. “Go away.”
“It’s an opportunity for you to each earn a million dollars.”
“Two million bucks?” Duncan said. “Mom, that’s a crapload of money.”
“And probably a crapload of trouble,” Josh added. “Hon?”
“No way,” Fran said.
“If you’d let us in,” the man on the porch continued, “we could explain in detail. It will only require a day of your time. It’s a government-sponsored experiment.”
Josh snorted. Fran saw the incredulity in his eyes. She felt exactly the same way. She’d jump off a cliff onto a bed of nails before trusting the government.
“You have ten seconds to get off of our property,” she said into the intercom. “Or we’re going to shoot you.”
One of the men on the monitor reached into his pocket, and produced some folded papers. “We have all the information right here.”
“Five seconds,” Josh said.
“We’ll, um, leave it here for you.”
Fran watched the man stick the papers in the door jamb, and then they left. She followed them, monitor to monitor, until they walked off the grounds.
Duncan stared over at her, his eyes wide. “Would you really have shot them, Mom?”
Fran didn’t answer. But her thoughts went back to Safe Haven. To all the friends she’d lost. To all the horror she and her family had endured.
Would she have shot them? Hell yeah.
No one will ever have a chance to harm her, or her family, again.
Not as long as Fran still had the strength to rack a shotgun and pull a trigger.
Cleveland , Ohio
Mal
“It’s just for twenty-four hours,” said the FBI agent in the doorway. “You’ll arrive, have a meal, get examined by a doctor, then be locked in the Butler House overnight, and closely monitored to study how you react to fear.”
“So they’ll be purposely trying to frighten us?” Deb asked.
Mal had tucked the gun into his bathrobe pocket, and his wife was holding his hand so hard she was cutting off his circulation.
“It’s a fear study,” the agent said. “You both have had unique experiences that make you ideal candidates.”
“And we live with those experiences, every day,” Mal said. His apprehension had been fading since they answered the door, and was slowly being replaced by anger. “You have no right to come here and make this offer.”
After all he and Deb had survived, why would they willingly expose themselves to even more horrors, real or convoluted? To even ask that of his wife made Mal’s blood pressure skyrocket, and there was no way in hell he’d ever allow—
“Can we think it over?” Deb said.
Mal stared at her, unable to hide his surprise.
“Deb?”
“I didn’t say we’ll do it, hon. But I think we should talk about it.”
Mal didn’t understand. Sure, two million dollars was a lot, but they were doing fine financially. Why would Deb even consider this?