((Infrared is a sequel to the story, Desdemona))
"What the hell was that!" Chris whispered fiercely, squinting into a small hand held video monitor. The rainbow of colors was stationary, shapes discernable. His eyes kept flicking back and forth from the monitor to the wanly lit field of headstones in front of them. A surge of adrenaline flushed through his system. He had seen something! Finally!
Seth leaned over Chris' shoulder to peer carefully into the small screen of the thermal scope; everything was still. "I don't see anything."
Their eyes flicked up from the monitor to travel over the weedy cemetery; it was choked with overgrown headstones and brambles, surrounded thickly in dead or dying trees. Their powerful spotlights cast a wane light over the field. Secluded and forgotten, it was prime for urban legends and lore that had ultimately attracted them.
"On the dead-zone, over there…" he pointed again to a patch of dirt. Vegetation refused to grow there, the trees around it dying as well; a regarded hot spot for paranormal activity. They'd gotten some odd readings from it on an earlier visit. "Something flew up from the ground. I got it on the monitor."
They both leaned toward the hand held screen, jumping back as the unknown event spritzed across the panel again.
"You saw that right?" Chris asked, out of breath.
They both stared into the cemetery.
Seth nodded. "Kill the spotlights. Start taking pictures, no flashes, on all cameras," Seth's voice was quieter than usual over his walkie-talkie, controlled and almost nervous. He kept staring intently at the dead zone.
Another team member, Eduardo looked at his friend Regina, and then flipped the switch at their base camp up the hill. As the spotlights faded, their breath calmed to a nervous quiver. The intense black closed in, lingering with a soft glow in the sky from the city lights reflecting off the clouds. The darkness became thick, palpable, and almost alive as their eyes adjusted.
Regina began to take pictures into the darkness on several variations of cameras.
Chris was watching the screen intently.
"What do you have?" Eduardo's voice came over the walkie-talkie.
They could hear the soft clicks of Regina's camera shutter in the distance.
"We don't know, we're twenty feet from the dead zone," Chris whispered back, walking forward. "Something flew up from the ground, super fast, we read it on the scope. We're moving forward to take some better readings."
The trees beyond the dead zone began to move. They both stopped, looking from the monitor into the field ahead of them.
"My EMF is going crazy," Seth continued, his foot bumped a headstone under the brush. His voice was audibly shaken. "Temp's dropped, you can feel it."
"What is that?" Chris looked up again from the monitor into the darkness, his words intensely articulated. Several shadows were moving from the trees at a slow procession toward them. They read on the scope, some definitely human shaped. His breath was coming in fast gulps. Looking over his shoulder, Seth was already running up the hill toward Eduardo and Regina.
Chris panicked, dropping the monitor and delving into total darkness. He backed toward the base camp, turning and running through the darkness. The sound of footsteps and crackling brush behind him sped up his gate, boot smacking the front of a head stone to send him tripping into the air from the force of his speed.
Landing hard on his stomach, he gasped for breath, pain tearing through his back as he saw two humanoid shadows rush past him up the hill.
"Help me!" he screamed to his friends, his shirt in shreds. The pain was unbearable, his skin flaying in strips as he struggled. Warm blood trickled down his sides. Teeth tore into his arm. He fought fiercely with the attacker, jaws releasing as the dark shadow abruptly lunged for his face.
His cries for his friends suddenly became silent, equipment from the base camp also suddenly quiet; the screech of tires breaking the calm momentarily before fading to the distance.
The sound of gurgling blood died off to nothing.
The field of headstones became deathly still.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Grissom's mag-light traveled over the headstones, red and blue lights swirling through the darkness. "Who called it in?"
"Anonymous tip to 911," Brass answered.
"Ghost hunters," Greg said, his light moving across the equipment at the base camp. Tables were organized with notebooks, film, and other equipment. "Man, this is high end stuff. Scopes, night vision, hydrometers, ion counters."
"Ghost hunters?" Brass blinked, looking to Greg. "This equipment looks scientific."
Greg scoffed. "Ghost hunters are scientific." He slid on a pair of gloves, kneeling over a body. "Just because ghosts haven't been proven real doesn't mean they don't exist."
"The great white whale," Grissom commented.
"Chasing something that doesn't exist," Greg smirked. " I know Moby Dick. You thought I didn't? Where would I be if scientists didn't chase something that people thought didn't exist?" He tweezed something off of the body and looked at it closely as an example. "Processing what people suspected was DNA?" he finished, dropping it into a bindle.
Brass pursed his lips and nodded. "Point taken. But it doesn't mean Casper killed these kids."
"Impossible," Grissom started. "Casper was a friendly ghost, it was his three uncles who weren't." Grissom knelt next to the other body, smiling gently, "However, it looks like you didn't read Moby Dick."
Brass blinked at him. "Huh?"
"The whale didn't kill Ahab, the quest is ultimately what did him in," Grissom finished, his flashlight shining on a distinct bullet hole in one boy's temple. "And the whale did exist."
Brass' eyebrows rose over his slightly rolled eyes as he took a drink of his coffee.
Sara was already walking into the thick of the cemetery with her flashlight, shining it across the broken, forgotten, run down and vandalized headstones. Her face was serious, set as her mind rolled over her thoughts; what a waste. Buried in the ground in all your finery, for what? So some high school kids could graffiti your headstone and leave beer bottles instead of flowers?
Her lips pressed together as she stepped over another vandalized stone.
The floodlights suddenly fired, slicing through the rotating red and blue lights to illuminate the entire secluded and forgotten graveyard. Sara flinched slightly at the light, continuing her search for evidence.
The lights washed across the tips of the tall grass, the ground still in shadow. She focused her mag beam toward the ground. She'd walked the entirety of the cemetery, following a trail through the grass from the edge of the trees. Setting a yellow number next to what looked like a broken camera, she took several pictures. A strike point was on the edge of a headstone, glass shards littered around it. She took several more pictures, the steely smell of blood sharp in her nostrils.
Her light continued its sweep through the grass, finally shining on a young man. Yellowed grass around him was soaked in blood; face twisted into a visage of pure horror, fear. Blood was everywhere.
"I got another DB," she yelled up the hill.
Grissom stood, shining his light across the headstones. "Well that's redundant," Grissom said with a glimmer of humor in his voice. "Perfect place for the dead."