Chapter 12
CHAPTER
TWELVE
After dousing themselves in bug spray in case of ticks, Oscar and Chris made their way past the asylum, through the long grass and overgrowth, to the cemetery. The ratcheting song of crickets and the peep of spring frogs filled the night, falling quiet in their immediate surroundings, picking back up once they moved on. So far away from a living town, the sky was remarkably free of light pollution, so the stars blazed in their thousands, obscured only by a few threads of wispy cloud.
The cemetery was nothing but a vast open field, slowly being retaken by the forest. A few headstones showed here or there, but for the most part, the dead had no markers to remind the living where they lay. Oscar took a deep breath, centering himself, before trudging through the long grass to the nearest one. He’d hoped to make out a name, but decades of weather had worn away the identity of whoever slept below just as surely as if there had been no stone at all.
“Let’s film the intro here,” he said to Chris.
Chris got into position for the shot they wanted, then signaled Oscar to start.
Oscar laid a hand on the grave marker, his expression somber. “We’re here at the Howlston Lunatic Asylum cemetery,” he told the camera. “According to reputable accounts, some twenty-thousand people died within the asylum walls. The lucky few were claimed by their relatives. But for the majority, their families were too ashamed, too far away, or too poor. Instead, they were laid to rest here. A handful of graves like the one I’m standing beside have markers, paid for by relatives who couldn’t afford to transport a body but still wanted some dignity for their deceased loved ones. Thousands more sleep in the unmarked earth.”
They could intercut this with drone footage shot during the daylight, to give viewers a feel for the scope of the cemetery. Oscar walked a few feet, Chris paralleling him, and looked around. “Many of them don’t sleep alone, however. For the sake of efficiency, deep graves were dug, with bodies stacked on top of one another until the hole was filled. Some of the graves contain four or five bodies, their bones intermingled within the earth.”
Did that sound too grim? Whatever; he’d worry about it in editing. “Cemeteries aren’t generally haunted, as our long-time viewers know,” he went on. “Hauntings tend to occur at the site of the death, or in places the spirit has a strong emotional attachment to. However, the nature of the burials, and the fact that they took place on the asylum grounds where the deceased drew their last breaths, increases the chance we’ll find something here.”
He signaled Chris he was done with the formal intro. “What next?” they asked.
Oscar took out his EMF reader. “Considering how much ground we have to cover, this could be our best bet for finding anything.”
“Can you call out to them?” Chris tapped their head. “You know, with your psychic abilities?”
“Let’s stick with medium—psychic makes me sound like I have an 1-800 number and advertise on late-night television.” The question was a good one, though. Too bad Oscar didn’t have an answer. If he could have just learned more, gotten more experience, before coming here…
Well, he wasn’t going to walk around beaming thoughts into the air and opening himself up to anything that wanted to come in. He’d been possessed once before, and had no desire to do anything that might lead to it happening again. Instead, he held out the EMF reader as he walked and said, “If anyone is here, come closer and touch the device in my hand.”
Nothing happened. They kept going, Oscar calling out invitations every minute or so. The EMF reader remained dark, and after a while, Oscar’s heart began to sink. This had seemed like a good idea, but now that the time had come, it looked like they were wasting time wandering around an empty field.
“Hey,” Chris said suddenly. “What’s that over there?”
The EMF reader blipped.
“Now, for those who don’t remember,” Adrienne said to the static cam, “mirrors can act as portals for ghosts.”
“Yeah, like that time at the Kehoe House in Georgia,” Zeek jumped in. “That was a crazy investigation, so if you haven’t seen the video, be sure to click the link below!”
“Exactly,” Adrienne agreed. “That time, I was using a single mirror with a candle—what’s known as the Richfield Approach. But tonight, we’re stepping up our game.”
“That’s right, Adrienne! We’re using two mirrors facing each other to make a mega portal!”
Adrienne rolled her eyes for the camera. “It’s not called a mega portal, Zeek.”
“Well, it ought to be.”
Nigel was having a hard time not rolling his own eyes. Adrienne and Zeek clearly had their schtick down pat, and he had no doubt it was popular with less…serious minded…viewers. Personally, he preferred Oscar’s more measured approach.
Once they wrapped up their explanation for the camera, Adrienne gestured him over. “Here.” She handed him their shoulder cam. “Just keep an eye out and try to get multiple shots of both of us. We’ll edit and intercut as needed. Oh, and don’t drop the camera—it’s expensive.”
“I won’t drop it,” he said, annoyed.
“I dropped an EMF reader on the floor of this jail we were investigating—smashed everywhere,” Zeek said. “Adrienne wouldn’t talk to me for a week.”
“That’s not true,” she said, settling down in front of one of the mirrors. “It might have been half an hour, tops. Now turn off the lights and get into place.”
They both turned off their head lamps, as did Nigel. Before filming, they’d set up a soft light to one side, to provide enough light for the camera to record their faces. With only the single source of light, the shadows seemed to grow denser.
Was the creeper here somewhere? Watching them? It was a shadow person; they’d never see it in the darkness.
He tried to push his nerves to the side and focus on the ritual. Adrienne and Zeek settled in cross-legged, hands resting on their knees, eyes on the mirrors in front of them.
“Let’s light the candles,” Adrienne said. They did so; the tiny flames barely pushed back against the darkness, and their flickering cast shifting shadows. “Spirits, we want to communicate with you. If you need to, draw on the energy of the candle to show yourself.”
“We just want to learn your story,” Zeek added.
Silence descended, broken only by the scuff of Nigel’s boots as he shifted position to get different camera angles. The darkness seemed to press in, and Adrienne’s candle started to flicker. Then it grew dimmer, the flame shrinking to a pinpoint without quite going out.
Candles went out on their own all the time, of course. There could be too much wax pooling around the wick, or a draft, or a thousand other things.
Or a spirit drawing on its energy.
“Is someone there?” she asked. “Can you show yourself to me in the mirror?”
Fog began to cloud the mirror—but it seemed to be contained within the glass itself, rather than on its surface. As Nigel watched, the fog slowly took on the shape of a face.
A strand of mist floated slowly across the graveyard behind the asylum. Oscar’s heart quickened—what little wind there was blew in a different direction, and there were no other spots of fog or mist anywhere around them.
The EMF beeped, then fell silent as the mist moved away. Oscar followed, closing the distance between himself and the mist, reader extended toward it. As he’d expected, the EMF reacted, blipping almost to yellow, then down again.
All right. Time to do something a little unorthodox. Oscar reached into his pocket and pulled out a D-cell battery.
“We want to talk to you,” he said to the mist. “We’d like to know your name. If you want to talk to us, or show us anything, you can use this to get more energy to do so.”
He carefully put the battery down on a broken headstone, then backed away to give the ghost space. At first, he didn’t think it would respond. He could sense something, or at least he thought he could. Longing, a need for…he wasn’t sure what.
Then the apparition changed direction and drifted back toward them. Chris let out a little gasp, camera trained on the formless mist as it settled around the headstone and the battery.
The cricket and frog songs stopped as though they’d been flipped off with a switch. Deep silence filled in the void, a shroud hanging over the entire graveyard. The sense of longing grew stronger, accompanied now by frustration. The mist seemed to thicken, and a vague outline of features and a body appeared.
“I’m not sure what the camera is picking up,” Oscar said in a low tone, “but the spirit appears to be a woman in what might be a dress or a patient gown, I can’t tell which.”
She turned to look at him, her lips moving soundlessly. Oscar shook his head. “I can’t hear you.” He unclipped the EVP recorder and held it out. “Can you try talking into this device?”
The night grew colder, feeling more like winter than a spring chill. The spirit’s features became more defined: large eyes, long hair. Her lips parted, revealing the suggestion of teeth.
Then the teeth vanished, rendering her mouth a ghastly void, opening only into hungry darkness.
Nigel stood frozen as the face of a man slowly resolved in Adrienne’s mirror. His skin held the pallor of the dead, and his eyes were nothing more than black pits. A grin formed beneath his bushy mustache, and he lifted his finger and pointed.
Adrienne’s eyes were wide, her breath coming in shallow pants. “Wh-what’s he pointing at?”
Nigel panned the camera away from her, following the direction of the ghost’s finger. On the wall, where he was certain there hadn’t been anything before, two words were gouged deep into the plaster.
Look up.
All the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. He leaned back, panning up with both eyes and camera…
A black humanoid shape clung to the ceiling directly above them.
Adrienne screamed. As if at a signal, both candles went out, along with the remaining electrical light, plunging them into pitch darkness.
Nigel stumbled back. His salt was in his right pocket, he’d have to shift the camera to reach it in time?—
Both mirrors shattered, and Zeek let out a shout. The temperature plunged, as if the depths of winter had overpowered spring and held the asylum in its icy grip. The creeper was there, right above them—or coming closer, unseen in the total darkness?—
Zeek’s headlamp cut through the gloom, nearly blinding Nigel. “What—oh fuck!” Zeek yelled.
The light from his headlamp revealed the dark shape of the creeper, scuttling like a spider across the ceiling away from them. It crawled down the wall, then vanished into one of the seclusion cells.
Hands shaking, Nigel snapped on his headlamp as well, and a moment later Adrienne did the same. Broken glass from the mirrors sparkled in the light.
“Is everyone okay?” Zeek asked shakily.
Adrienne’s skin had gone chalk white, but she managed a nod. “Y-Yeah.” She cleared her throat, then looked to Nigel. “Did you get all of that?”
“I think so.”
Zeek stood up, then helped Adrienne to her feet. “Let’s shoot our analysis of what happened somewhere else, okay?” he asked. “Like, as far from here as we can get.”
She wrapped her arms around herself. Though the cold was losing its grip, all three of them were still shivering. “Agreed. Did you see anything? In your mirror.”
He nodded. “Right before the lights went out. I think it was the nurse.”
“I saw a man in mine.” She looked to Nigel, who nodded.
“I got it on camera,” he said. “I want to take another look at the footage, but…I think I know who he was.”