7. LO
LO
E ven though the website of the people who owned the home before me is undeniably fascinating, my gaze is pulled over toward Stevie. She’s doing a good job of keeping her voice low enough that I can’t really hear what’s going on. But she looks stressed.
“Everything okay, Stevie?” I ask, mostly because the people who called her are presently at my house, and I want to make sure no one actually did burn it down.
About one percent of me did it because I feel a schoolgirl crush setting in, even though Stevie is a strong personality and seems to have a compulsive need to do things like play devil's advocate.
Stevie gives me a nod of acknowledgement, telling me she’ll give me an answer in a second. “We’ll get back to you as soon as we can. Okay. Alright. Can you just hold on—alright. Alright . Jeez. We’re coming.”
She gets off the phone and looks at us. “They’re saying something weird is going on at the house. I think we need to go.”
“Did they say anything beyond that?” I think over the thousand possible things that the ghost—or whatever—living in my house could be doing to terrorize them. There’s not one part of me that doesn’t believe them.
“They didn’t give any specifics. They actually sounded kind of shaken up.” Stevie looks surprised by this, as if she wasn’t there for what most people would consider a paranormal encounter just earlier today.
“We should get back. We can’t afford to have them quit on us,” Stevie says.
“Go back? Can’t they Uber to the hotel from there?” Andrew asks.
“On whose dime?” Stevie asks. “We’re going back.”
I can see the hesitation written all over Andrew’s face. He doesn’t want to go back to the house.
“Isn’t this supposed to be, like, your bread and butter?” I ask. “Going into an actively haunted house? Aren’t you supposed to be jumping into action right now?”
“Not necessarily.” Andrew takes on a somewhat defensive tone. “I’m just…not prepared for it right now. A ghost is still a ghost, even if you’re an investigator.”
Stevie shoots a glare in Andrew’s direction that’s so quick that it would’ve been easy to miss, and even easier to write off. But they’ve been having little moments like this all day to the point that I feel like I’m missing something rather than just making an assumption.
I look between them. “Personally, I would like to get back to the house just in case something bad is happening. It was not a cheap purchase.”
Andrew nods. “For sure. Yeah,” he says. He gathers the limited film equipment he brought with him. Locard, who’d been sleeping peacefully on the couch the entire time, jumped up from the sudden noise.
“Thank you for your help, Valerie,” Stevie says, clapping a hand to her back. “This was really helpful.”
“Good luck with your cult,” she responds as Stevie, Andrew, and I head for the door.
“Not a cult,” Stevie counters just before stepping back outside. When I shut the door behind us, Stevie sighs. “Alright, let’s go retrieve the idiots.”
My stomach is in knots just like it always is when I drive home.
It’s like getting the Sunday scaries over and over again, but it’s every day and hits me every single time I try to go home.
It’s been months, and I still haven’t gotten used to it.
I’m surprised my hair hasn’t started to fall out in clumps from the stress.
I park at the curb and wait for Stevie and Andrew before I head up to my front door. When I stare at my unassuming home through my window, everything seems normal enough—except for the two freshly-adult boys sitting on the front stoop.
I sigh a little bit and get out of the car. There’s still no sign of Stevie and Andrew, but I also know the most efficient ways to get home. I wouldn’t be surprised if they got caught up somewhere.
After shutting my driver’s side door behind me, I approach Andrew and Stevie’s interns.
One of them is Sean and the other is Tanner, but they’re identical so other than their shirt colors, it’s impossible to tell which one is which.
It doesn’t help but Andrew and Stevie refer to them almost exclusively as the idiots or some variation of that.
“You guys okay?” I ask, feeling more like an older sister than someone who’s supposed to be on-set with them.
“We’re not going back in there,” one of them says. He rubs his hands together, probably from the cold. It says a lot that they’d rather sit out in the chilly air—at least, as chilly as it gets in October in Los Angeles—than stay inside.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Dude—sorry,” he says, stopping immediately, and I quickly realize that they view me more as their mom than even an older sister.
“It’s fine,” I say, refusing to let my ego be bruised. I’m used to people being assholes about my age in my industry, anyway, even though I’m not even thirty yet.
“I don’t know what happened—”
“It’s like we upset it or something,” the other one cuts in.
“Yeah!” the first one says enthusiastically. “That’s exactly it. It’s like we upset it.”
“It?”
“The ghost, but Sean is theorizing now it might be a demon.”
I nearly let out a sigh of relief—finally, at least one of their names has a face. Not that it helps much since they’re nearly identical; I’ll have it straight until tomorrow, when I can no longer use Sean is the one in the red shirt as my visual cue.
But the relief is quickly replaced with a sinking feeling of dread. It had to have been bad if they’re jumping to the word demon. “What exactly happened?”
As they’re about to answer, the van pulls up to the curb. Stevie barely has it parked before she’s hopping out of the car and rushing up the sidewalk toward us. “Yo, what are you two going on about?”
“She was asking us what happened,” the one who isn’t Sean—in the white shirt—says somewhat defensively.
“Sorry,” Stevie says to me and then turns back to the boys. “You don’t need to bother Lo about this stuff. Save it for me and Andrew—we’ll get it sorted out.”
“No, I want to hear about this,” I say. The twins look at each other, fighting off obviously amused grins. I’m slowly piecing together that people on the Paranormal America crew don’t talk back much to Stevie.
“She insists,” Sean says, gesturing to me.
Stevie throws her hands up, quiet for a moment. “Alright. Go on.”
Andrew lumbers down the path toward us. “Dude, you barely even parked that thing. Let me drive next time.”
“Not a chance,” Stevie says.
“What’s going on?” Andrew asks as he tosses the van keys back to Stevie, who catches them easily with one hand.
Sean lets out a sigh of exasperation, telling me this happens often. “Jesus. Okay. We were inside. We’d packed everything up already—”
“Did you find the missing equipment?” Andrew asks.
“No, we couldn’t find it anywhere,” the twin in the white shirt says.
“Great,” Stevie mutters.
I bit my tongue on making a comment about how their stuff was never coming back. I’m still yearning for the jacket that had gone mysteriously MIA from my dining room chair literally overnight a few weeks ago.
“ Anyway ,” Sean continues. “We were inside just, like, on our phones or whatever when we heard someone opening the front door. We thought it was you guys at first, so we got up to go look but there was no one there, and the door was shut.”
Stevie scowls at them. “That’s what scared the shit out of you guys so bad we had to hurry home?”
“Well, wait. We were like, okay, that was weird, so we moved on. It was probably just a sound from inside the house. But then we started hearing what sounded like footsteps down the hall.”
“Yeah, that happens,” I say.
Sean gestures to me as if to say See? and then keeps talking.
The fact that that isn’t the end of his story makes me nervous.
“That really started to put us on edge. But we were like, it’s cool.
We know it’s a haunted house. We hung out for a little bit, and then a frame fell off the wall in the entryway.
And then things that we’d packed up started falling off the table. ”
My heart thuds as I picture it. I haven’t had anything to that level happen to me yet. I’ve had things go missing and heard weird sounds, but I haven’t had anything happen that’s so… obvious . Something so straight out of a horror movie.
“Things were falling? In front of you?”
“Yeah. Like, we saw them fall while we were sitting in the living room. And it was all for no reason. They were on the table one second and then not on the table another.”
Unlike me, Stevie—of course—doesn’t look moved. “You’re absolutely sure?”
“I mean, you can go see for yourselves if you want. I’m sure it’ll put on a show for you, too, if you’re in the house long enough,” the twin who isn’t Sean says.
“I’ll pass,” Stevie says. “Maybe we can get some footage of the things that fell.”
“I’m not going back in there,” Sean says, shaking his head. He glances over at me like he’s hoping I’ll vouch for him.
“I don’t want to go in either,” Andrew says.
I glance between all of them. Maybe I would’ve been better off filming this place myself—for ghost hunters, they all seem a little too eager to get away from a haunted house. Other than Stevie, who keeps insisting there isn’t a ghost at all.
Stevie stands there for a beat, thinking it over. “Alright. Let’s just clear out for the night. We’re doing one last investigative trip tomorrow, and then we’ll shoot back here and wrap. Is everything packed up?”
“It was packed up, but now it’s all over the floor,” Sean says, giving her a well-practiced I already said that, you fucking moron eye roll. It’d never been so obvious how close in age he was to still being a teenager. It was admirable, but mostly because it was directed at Stevie.
“You guys are killing me.” Stevie runs her hands through her hair. “Let’s just get this stuff packed up. I’m starving and tired of thinking about whatever paranormal entity is terrorizing this house.”