Medium Rare (Haunted Hearts)

1. Cade

1

CADE

I hate my job.

There. I said it. I’d been thinking it for weeks.

If anyone found out it would ruin me.

I sat in the beater of a car I owned, which barely ran without a good kick to the side, a hope and prayer as the key turned in the ignition, and several choice words yelled into the dash. It was late March, and we still had several feet of snow on the ground. Today was freezing. Bone chillingly cold.

Blowing hot air into my frigid dry hands, I rubbed them together in a desperate attempt to get feeling into them. Canadian prairie winters are deadly, and my poor dilapidated car just didn’t have the stones left in it to grant me any warmth through the vents.

As I glanced out the frosty passenger window at the house I was here to inspect, still trying to thaw my frozen digits, a different kind of chill ran down my spine. I could tell just by looking; this house had history, and none of it good.

I hadn’t done any research on the Colonial Revival style home — yet. That would come at a later date, but right now, I needed to determine the root cause for the owner’s call to me for assistance.

Old Glenora in Edmonton had some of the most haunted houses in all of the prairies. I hadn’t even stepped onto the property, and I already had the heebie-jeebies.

You would think that after a dozen years of being a medium, and cleansing homes of their unwanted visitors, I’d be immune to the supernatural. You’d be wrong. They creep me the fuck out.

“Okay, Cade, gotta make the money.” I closed my eyes and steeled my guts. Every time I entered into one of these houses, I needed to pep talk myself into going through with the job.

I could see the dead. Worse, they would talk to me if they were inclined to do so. My mother had the gift, as did my grandfather. I’m a generationally cursed man, although my mother constantly went on about the Ivanov clan’s “gifts”. I chuckled as I thought about Mom, slinging her wine glass around with flamboyant hand gestures at any holiday family gathering.

She’d passed a few years ago. Cancer. It runs hard in the Ivanov line. Yet another generational “gift”.

If we trace our family’s history, we can only go back a couple hundred years as the Romani people didn’t keep written records. A lot of my family’s tradition and lineage is known through stories passed down from generation to generation. I took everything Mom said with a large grain of salt.

Dad was Swedish. Poor bastard. Never stood a chance against the Ivanovs, which is why he didn’t stick around. Mom raised me by herself with occasional help from my three uncles.

“Let’s do this.” I shook my head. After so many years and so many ghosts, I should have this nailed down to a methodical, step-by-step approach. And I had, sort of. Something had changed within the last year. There were a lot more hauntings, poltergeists, and even a couple possessions. I couldn’t put my finger on what brought about this rampant rise in preternatural occurrences, but my cell phone hadn’t stopped ringing. Every day another frantic individual called, desperate, afraid, and often crying.

There was another thing that had shifted too.

The dead had become aggressive, mean, and often cruel.

And that meant violent.

That old wives’ tale stating a spirit can’t cause you physical harm? Total bunk. They’ll kill you if they have a mind to carry the task out, or so I had come to discover.

I slammed the car door, the only way to ensure it actually closed, and shivered again as icy wind blew down the back of my neck.

It was overcast today. Grey. Winter days were too often coated in the colour of dull led. And to be frank, I preferred the colourless sky. It usually indicated a warmer winter day. And when I say warmer, I mean minus fifteen degrees Celsius. Winter in Alberta was cold, but anything warmer than minus twenty and you could almost say the day was balmy.

My perfect winter day held overcast skies, just like today, and a light dusting of snow. I loved big fat flakes as they gently fell from the sky. The falling crystals blanketing everything, casting a white shroud of death, made the snow-laden landscapes serene and pretty. It also hushed all the ambient noise, except for the crunch of shoes into the snow. Those days were always warm too, like minus five degrees.

But the wind today blew off an iceberg or some mountaintop glacier. The iced air bit at exposed skin, threatening to tear it away.

Glancing at the house in front of me, the thought of getting inside seemed almost like a reprieve from this bitter winter wind, except I wasn’t expecting anything good on the other side of that door.

But five hundred bucks is five hundred bucks, and I had rent to pay.

I walked up to the front door and used the door knocker. The brass head of a lion with a ring through its mouth stared at me: common on the old houses in this neighbourhood. After three raps, I stood back and waited, pulling my collar up to protect my neck. The front porch on the house would have been shrouded in shade from the old lilac bushes planted around it, but in the dead of winter, with no leaf coverage it was as cold as a witch’s?—

The door opened.

A bedraggled woman with dark circles under her eyes, puffy and red, peered out and looked expectantly at me.

“Hi, Mrs. Orson? I’m Cade Ivanov. You called me to come inspect your house?”

She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. Her head lowered slightly as she expelled her breath, as if in relief that I had shown up.

“Thank you for coming.” She bit her bottom lip as it began to quiver. “Please come in, and you can call me Julie.”

She opened the door wider and stepped back to grant me access.

The foyer wasn’t huge, but enough to hold the two of us. I slipped my shoes off and slid them over to the side.

“You might want to keep your coat on. Despite the heat set to twenty-two, the house is always cold.” She swallowed hard as she tried not to cry, but her eyes were glassy, and I knew the tears weren’t far behind.

She gestured for me to come in and escorted me into the living room.

As we sat on opposite sides of the room, she perched precariously on a well-used sectional, the family dog, a mutt that obviously had some poodle in its background, had curled up on a cushion, hiding its head. It was odd that the creature hadn’t even lifted a nose to see the stranger who had entered her home.

Julie offered me a drink, “Can I get you something? Coffee? Something stronger?”

“I’ll have a coffee if you have some made, but don’t go out of your way.”

“There’s still some in the pot from this morning. I’ll just heat it up for you.”

She disappeared around the corner, and I heard cabinet doors opening and glasses tinkling. Then a microwave running. I wasn’t expecting good coffee, but the promise of something hot to swallow already had me warming up.

She returned a few minutes later, handing me a mug. She had a tumbler with ice and obviously a drink stronger than caffeine.

She sat down and took a long sip.

“Can you tell me what’s been going on?”

“Stuff moves. Doors slam. The house is perpetually cold, and…” She glanced away. Her chest heaved, and then she wiped a tear away with the sleeve of her sweater. “It comes into my bedroom at night. I can hear it breathing.”

“Do you live alone?”

“No, my husband is at work, and our daughter is at school. I wouldn’t be here alone, but I knew you were coming. And my husband thinks this is stupid,” She started, and then her cheeks went pink. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to imply you’re stupid, or a scam artist. I don’t know what to do anymore.” She sobbed this time, a full-on cry.

“It’s okay, Mrs. Orson. I will do what I can. It hasn’t hurt you, or anyone else yet?”

She nodded.

“It has?”

She nodded again.

“What has happened?”

Her face contorted into a grimace. She swallowed hard, again, placing her drink down on the coffee table, then lifted up her sweater and shirt to show me her ribs.

There was a handprint—a purplish bruise in the shape of a handprint.

“Oh.” This wasn’t good. At that very moment I had doubts about being here by myself. I should have brought Uncle Gallius with me. He occasionally acted as muscle in my weird occupation. Not that a hulking brute of a man would do any good against the spirit world, but sometimes the deceased were a little less pushy when there were more people around.

Safety in numbers and all.

“So, your bedroom is one spot I’d like to see, but are there other places in the house?”

She nodded. “The kitchen. The dog won’t even go into that room, and that’s where we placed her food when we first moved in. She stays here in the living room, and rarely gets off the couch. We have to almost force her to eat.”

“Okay. Well, let’s have a look, shall we?” I took a sip of the coffee she had brought. It was lukewarm and burnt, having sat on the coffee machine’s warmer too long. I forced the liquid down and then placed the cup on the side table. I stood up and walked around the corner into the kitchen.

The room was much cooler, but in a house this old, that could have been poor or missing insulation in the outside walls.

Glancing around, taking in the layout and the thirty-year-old cabinets and fixtures, a tickling at the back of my head told me something’s here .

Over the years I’ve learned how to flip the sense on and turn it off. Walking around with the ghost radar running nonstop had landed me in a few situations I would have rather not gone through. You learn when it’s safe to flip the switch and open yourself to whatever is in the vicinity. Trust me, being able to see spirits and entities that most people cannot is no joy.

A glass on the counter wobbled and slid toward the sink.

Oh yes, definitely something here. Cold, dead fingers ran across my shoulders, a graze, a slight touch just to say I’m here which made the hair on my arms and the nape of my neck stand straight up.

It wasn’t a welcoming touch. It was a taunt.

My eyes were drawn to a door that I would have assumed led to the basement and backyard.

“Can we go through here?”

Julie paled but nodded.

“Am I to take it you don’t go downstairs?”

“The laundry is there, but I’ve been taking our clothes to a laundromat. I-I can’t go down there.”

“It’s okay. You don’t have to come with me.” I said, reaching out to her and patting her shoulder.

The gesture was empty. I knew already that something in this house wasn’t happy, and unless I could convince what was here to leave, the current tenants would be stuck having to live with whatever it was that had taken up residence.

I nodded to Julie, then opened the door to the basement, only to be greeted by a gust of ice-cold air.

That taunt pulled me down the steps, as if the ghost that lived here wanted me in the basement. I would have to be cautious. This phantom meant harm. The air, cold and heavy, sustained a taint, an evilness, and it knew it had the upper hand.

I reached into my pocket for a little charm I kept on hand, just in case. It was a silver cross. Not that I’m religious, but the supernatural tend to respect the symbol, along with the charm I wore around my neck. An evil eye. My grandmother had given to me when I first started seeing things.

The basement light was an old incandescent bulb with a string that when yanked illuminated the space. Thankfully, that was located at the bottom of the stairwell. After pulling the light on, I surveyed the room. It had the same smell as a crypt.

More shivers cascaded over my flesh, lining my skin with goose pimples.

Cautiously, I moved toward the far end of the basement where the tug was strongest.

As I got closer, I realized there was an extra room down here. Not surprising in older homes. Many often held cold storage areas with dirt floors and walls, the exposure to outside making the temperatures considerably lower and enabling the house owners to store root vegetables and other food without it spoiling.

But as I got closer, I saw the room had a door with a little window cut into it. Bars ran across the window. Odd.

Then I looked down at the door handle. An old knob style, but what caught my attention was the padlock left hanging from the U-hook and the busted flap that would have been used to secure the door to prevent whatever was in the room from coming out.

I needed to get into the room. The energy pulsing out from behind the door begged me.

Turning the knob and pushing the door open, I found an old rusted out cot. No mattress existed, and the springs on the makeshift bed were worn and stuck out at various angles. The floor was dirt, as were the outside walls.

But the creepiest indication that someone had been held here were the scratch marks on the inside of the door.

I reached out to touch them, and as my fingertip grazed the marks, an image of a sick man flashed into my head.

“Hmmm.” Something wasn’t adding up. The image I saw didn’t belong to the energy I felt in the house. This was different. The claw marks left me sad and lonely. As if someone had been locked down here and forgotten. Abandoned. This wasn’t the hostile energy I sensed. This energy signature was from a different ghost.

I left the room, exited the basement, sure to turn the light off, then followed my extra sense to hunt down the source of the negative vibes. Julie stood at the top of the stairs, clutching her tumbler, which was now empty.

“Anything?” she asked.

I put my finger to my lips, indicating she should be quiet, as I followed a snaky trail of bad vibes.

I pursued it upstairs, down the hall, and into the primary bedroom. This was where Julie had been accosted.

As I entered the room I noticed there was another door, with a window, leading out to a small balcony. It was wide open. In the middle of winter, the door was wide open.

Standing on the balcony was a man in a uniform—old, like World War I old, with light khaki-green patches that indicated rank and battalion. I didn’t have enough knowledge to know what the symbols meant.

The soldier turned around, glaring at me.

The main door to the hallway slammed shut behind me, blocking my exit.

The ghost rushed me, stopping inches away as his face contorted in rage. His mouth became too wide, too open as he screamed.

“Get out!”

A wave of ice air ploughed through me. Every hair on my body stood straight up. The door to the balcony slammed shut. Drawers from the bedroom dresser flew open, and the knick-knacks that decorated the surfaces in the room were simultaneously all swept off.

I was thrust backward until I slammed against the far wall. Pinned and immobile, blood trickled out from the corner of my eyes as I felt them roll back into my head. This entity was attempting possession. My jaw slackened as blood dripped out of my mouth. The soldier’s see-through ghostly arm plunged into my chest. His hand inside me, gripping my heart, squeezing it.

You cannot have me!

I envisioned myself bathed in white light. Bright, painful white light.

The soldier disappeared.

The temperature in the room returned to its normal state.

But the destruction of the room remained evident as souvenirs from various trips littered the floor. The place looked ransacked and the sheets on the bed had been ripped.

I doubled over, sucking in air.

My chest hurt.

I ripped up my shirt and looked in the mirror.

A circular bruise was forming where the ghost hand had been.

The bedroom door creaked open.

“Yup, not today. I’m fucking done.” I mumbled as I hurriedly tucked my shirt in and exited, stomping my way down the staircase.

Julie waited for me in the living room.

“I heard noises?” she asked.

“Julie, do you own, or rent?”

“We rent. We signed a two-year lease.”

“Move out.”

I bundled up my coat and left her standing helpless in her living room.

Once in my car, I blasted the hot air, hoping for something, anything, to try and warm me up.

“I can’t do this anymore. I can’t.” I glanced at the house, that niggling pull still yanking at my spine.

There on the porch was the soldier. He pointed at me, his face still ragingly mad, and then he shook his head.

I slammed the car into drive and took off.

After a fifteen-minute journey, I pulled into the nearest coffee shop. I needed something to warm me up. I ordered a large drip coffee, took my mug, fixed it up the way I liked it, then sat down in the corner of the shop.

That niggling returned. I had forgotten to shut it off.

Glancing up, an old woman stood in front of the table, studying me.

In a quiet whisper so I wouldn’t attract attention, I said, ‘Fuck off, lady. Not today.”

She evaporated.

I closed my eyes and held the warm mug. My guts were knotted. I would have nightmares for weeks after this.

I needed a break. I couldn’t do this anymore.

I had to get out of the city. It was too crowded with too much history, and far too many fucking ghosts.

Opening up my phone, I searched out the real estate agent ad I had seen on Facebook countless times, one inviting people to come check out the variety of listings in a small town south of Edmonton.

Small town, less people, less dead.

It sounded perfect.

I found the ad, clicked on it, and navigated toward a phone number, then tapped it, initializing a phone call.

The phone rang several times until a voice answered.

“Good afternoon, Prairie Rose Real Estate. This is Jay McClaren speaking. How can I help you?”

“Yes, Jay, my name is Cade Ivanov. I saw your ad online. I’m looking to relocate. I need a break from the city. I understand you have some properties for sale?”

“I do, Cade. Would you like to come down and see them?”

“Very much. Can you do tomorrow morning?”

“Absolutely. Give me your email address, and I’ll send you some of my listings. Have a look at them, and message me back tonight as to which ones intrigue you, and then I’ll set up some show times. Does that work?”

“Yes, thank you.” I told him my email address, agreeing to meet the next day around eleven in the morning.

With my escape from the city in the works, I slugged back the last of my coffee and made my way home.