Pang stopped the recording and hit play again.
“Are there any spirits here?”
He turned up the volume, until the recording became almost a hiss. Then he pressed stop.
“Did you guys hear that?” Pang said, the excitement in his voice apparent.
Sara shook her head.
“At the end. It sounded like whispering.”
Pang played it again, the volume even higher. There was a faint murmuring sound, but Sara wouldn’t have called it a voice.
“Someone said yes on the recording. Did anyone else hear it?”
“Apophenia,” Frank said.
“What’s that, bro?”
“Your mind is seeking a pattern in randomness. Like seeing Jesus’s face in in in burned toast. You want to hear a voice, so you think you hear a voice.”
“You still saying spirits don’t exist? So what broke your arm, bro? Was that your mind seeking a pattern when that bleeding ghost dropped from the ceiling?”
“That,” Frank said, “is harder to dispute. But your EVP recording is nonsense.”
“Whatever, bro.” Pang pressed the record button once more. “Are there any spirits here?”
The silence ticked past.
Pang played it back.
“Are there any spirits here?”
Sara listened hard, to see if the faint murmur returned. Then the recorder let out an ear-splitting screech and wailed:
“I’M COMING DOWN THE STAIRS!”
Everyone turned to look as Jebediah Butler, dripping blood, stepped off the dark staircase and into the dim light.
Fran
Fran set down the magazine in mid-sentence and glanced over at her sleeping men.
Duncan, fifteen years old, but still young enough that there were traces in his face of the little boy he once was. And Josh, caring, strong, as close to a soul mate as could ever exist.
She closed her eyes and thought about Butler House. Having survived Safe Haven, Fran could imagine all too well what was going on right now in South Carolina. There would be blood. And death. And unimaginable horror. They would need help.
Looking at her family, Fran knew there were things worth fighting, and dying, for.
For the hundredth time she questioned whether they were doing the right thing.
And for the hundredth time, she didn’t know the answer.
Tom
Seeing Ol’ Jasper in the hall ahead, Tom did a reversal and ran back the way he came, passing Sturgis as he stuck his head out of the satanic chapel. Without his flashlight, Tom was at the mercy of his glow stick, which didn’t illuminate more than a few steps ahead of him. He bumped into a wall when the hall turned a corner, kept sprinting, and wound up in front of some double doors.
Tom tugged one open and saw he was in a large, open room. Tile floors. Ornate, crystal chandeliers. A row of chairs against one wall. A stage.
It was a ball room.
He drew his gun, keeping his knife in his left hand, and began to make his way across the dance floor. It was dark, quiet, eerie, and Tom was shaking so badly he felt he might fall over. He’d never been so frightened, and his mind kept flitting between the horror of what was happening and the horror of what he’d already gone through. He kept replaying the same terrifying scenes, over and over, and wanted to find someplace safe to hide and never come out again.
But people were counting on him. Good people. And fear be damned, Tom wasn’t in the business of letting people down. Even if he was going to die of fright in the process.
Tom reached a doorway, cleared it, spinning as something lunged at him in the darkness.
He fired, his Sig kicking, and then jumped to the side as a black object hurtled past him. Keeping a bead, he stared as it jerked to a stop and swung from the ceiling.
A body bag.
But he quickly realized something was strange. Bodies had weight as well as mass, but this swung like it couldn’t have weighed more than a few kilograms.
Tom reached for it carefully, and squeezed.
Fake. A prop, like they had in haunted houses around Halloween, where you paid ten bucks to have some teen in a mask jump out and say boo!
What was the point of that?
He followed the track on the ceiling—a metal rail that the body bag had been hanging from—and came to a breakfront.
Tom braced himself for something to pop out, and his expectations were met when a rubber zombie pushed through the cabinet doors, making a pneumatic hissing sound. Another phony prop, probably triggered by a motion sensor, like the body bag had been.
Though in a state of hyper-alertness, some rational thoughts still managed to gain traction in Tom’s fear-addled brain. He felt like he was missing some key element. They’d all been summoned here, offered money to be part of an experiment. Forenzi, though certainly odd, seemed sincere enough. He’d told them the goal was to scare them, and he’d made good on his promise.
But had Forenzi’s promise involved these silly Halloween gags? Was that his plan? And had something gone terribly wrong?
Tom was fighting for his life against an unknown enemy that apparently couldn’t be harmed. He had shot two of his attackers, and also slashed Sturgis across the chest. But that didn’t even slow them down.
Was there something supernatural going on? And if so, how did these dime-store attempts at scares mesh with what was happening elsewhere in Butler House?
Had the fake haunted house somehow become real?
He kept moving, and came upon a large, black crate in the center of the floor.
No, not a crate. A coffin. And not a real one. This was another Halloween prop, made of plywood. Tom approached, knowing exactly what was going to happen. The lid would open, and some fake monster—maybe a vampire or a mummy—was going to pop out.
Tom got within a meter of it, gun pointed forward, anticipating the obvious.
As predicted, the lid opened.
As predicted, a monster sat up in the coffin.
It wasn’t a vampire or mummy. It was some bizarre, bloody mannequin with a gas mask on. There were many gashes on its bare chest, glistening with stage blood.
“Hee hee,” went the prop.
Tom kept his Sig on it, then slowly walked past. It was creepier than the zombie in the breakfront, and the body bag on a conveyor track, but Tom was going to save his adrenaline for real threats, not fake ones.
“Hee hee hee.”
Movement, in front of Tom. He held fire as another body bag swung past on a pulley track. He watched it swing past the empty coffin, and disappear into the darkness.
Tom pressed forward, and then his fear spiked. He spun again, staring at the coffin.
The gas masked prop was gone.
Tom looked side to side, sweeping with his Sig. That prop apparently wasn’t a prop. Tom remembered Forenzi’s dinner speech and realized it was—
“Hee hee hee hee.”
The Giggler.
Now where the hell did it go?
Tom turned in a slow circle, ready to shoot anything that moved. He was so focused on what was around him that he wasn’t paying attention to where he was walking, and suddenly he lost his footing and stepped into a hole, falling onto his ass.
He tried to pull his leg free, and his calf screamed at him. Tom holstered his gun and reached into the hole in the floor.
Spikes. Digging into his skin.
“Hee hee hee hee.”
The Giggler walked out of the dark, into view. He was rubbing a large, bloody meat cleaver against his chest.
Tom drew his Sig and emptied his clip into the demon.