The case file, case number 4040, was thick and old, the first reports filed in 1953. The contents of the file were all missing children reports; none of the children had ever been found, or even had a true common tie, save for one thing—a house outside the county seat of Armour, old and abandoned since heaven only knew when. It was the perfect haunted house, an illusion that local rumor and teenage dares to spend the night in the place certainly helped to spread. Mostly it was left alone in the hopes that sooner or later, someone would buy it and it wouldn't be such an eyesore anymore.
And yet…
Of course the house had been investigated in sweeps of the town whenever the children went missing, but nothing ever turned up. It was just an empty house with as many unfortunate implications as it had broken windows—or so people were assured. More than a few people insisted that the place was haunted—or, as a few fraternity members so eloquently put it, "fuckin' evil."
The entrance of the college students into Douglas County Sheriff Alfred Franklin Jones' office, and by extension his investigations, was noteworthy perhaps for one reason only: they appeared one morning a few days after the disappearance of another child with a fascinating claim—they were at the house for one reason or another (the sheriff suspected marijuana was a major factor, given the vague smell of it clinging to their clothes), when they heard Voices. Voices with a capital V that didn't sound friendly or seem to come from a human being.
The sheriff humored them by taking down the details and promising to pass it along to the appropriate people (himself being one of them), and sent them on their way (not to mention added a thinly veiled warning about the pot as a parting gift). He did mention it to the county police chief and the state troopers, mostly as a footnote, but the response was much greater. His superiors were fascinated by the report and asked what he planned to do with the information in it.
"File it," he'd replied with a shrug. "Maybe take another look at the place."
That was when the trooper had suggested, "Hey, think this is something Paranormal Nat might be interested in?"
Alfred Jones took a seat at the diner table and started leafing through a file folder. Several Internet printouts, a resume, some testimonials—and a business card, paper clipped to the whole thing. It looked like it belonged to a real estate agent, which made its words—Natalia I. Arlovskaya, Paranormal Investigations—seem almost comically out of place. The photograph on the card showed a woman in a dark business suit with white blonde hair and an incredibly austere expression. He sipped his coffee as he considered the portrait; she might be attractive if she smiled. But hey, the woman dealt with "ghosts" for a living, which he wouldn't put at the top of his "pleasant jobs" list.
"What am I doing?" he grumbled, replacing the card and closing the folder. Paranormal investigations? Really? That might work for cops in artsy fartsy places where half the population had their head in the clouds—damnit, he thought the troopers had better sense than that—but it was going to take more than the glowing reassurances of the county police chief and the trooper (both of whom loved yanking him around) and a file folder devoted to this woman's work to convince him. It was, in all likelihood, going to take seeing Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd suck a ghost into a vacuum cleaner.
Alfred was looking out the window at the grey sky and tapping out the Ghostbusters theme on the table when the door opened and closed. He shifted his attention to the diner's newest arrival before doing a double take. It was a woman, several inches shorter than himself and about his age, holding a briefcase and clad in a blouse and pencil skirt, as well as a windbreaker to guard against the gathering rain. What caught Alfred' eye was her hair, white blonde, and her stern expression as she spoke to the waitress. He flipped open the file folder and took up the business card once more, eyes flicking from the card to the woman. That had to be her.
The waitress pointed the woman toward Alfred, and he stood to meet her halfway between the door and table. "Miss Arlovskaya?" he said, extending his hand.
"Sheriff Jones," she greeted. Her voice was little deeper than Alfred envisioned a woman of her stature having, and heavily accented—Russian, perhaps? When she shook his hand, it was with a tight grip.
Alfred showed her to his table, telling one of the waitresses that whatever Miss Arlovskaya wanted was on him. The woman's request was simple, ice water with a lemon wedge, and the pair settled into the booth, littered with Alfred's files from the case, empty sugar packets and his coffee mug. "So what makes you call me, Sheriff Jones?" she asked, shrugging out of her windbreaker.
"Just Alfred," he replied. She didn't respond to the correction, leaving him to clear his throat slightly and begin. "What I have here—" He laid his hand on the thicker file—"is about sixty years of missing children's reports—"
"You understand my line of work is not with missing children?" she cut off.
"See, here's the thing," Alfred went on, swallowing his annoyance at being cut off. "None of the missing kids have ever been found—" He lowered the voice as the waitress stopped at their table to deliver the ice water and a refill of his coffee—"and they're all tied back to this house." He removed a photo of the abandoned house and slid it across the table for Natalia to inspect.
She picked it up and examined it. "No one lives there," Alfred continued, picking up a sugar packet and tearing it open. "Investigations into the disappearances keep bringing us back there—"
"But you find nothing," Natalia finished, looking up from the photo.
"Exactly," the sheriff confirmed. "The place has been, pardon the expression, graveyard dead for years—nothing in it."
"But now you suspect otherwise," she supplied.
Alfred nodded, recounting the story the teens had told him, about hearing ominous, disembodied voices. This piqued Natalia's interest, and she pulled a notepad and pen from her briefcase and started writing, occasionally asking a question to clarify but not speaking until Alfred finished. "So you think the home is haunted?"
"I don't," he replied honestly.
Natalia looked up from her notepad with an arched eyebrow, something that may have been a small smile touching her face. "You don't believe in the paranormal?" she guessed.
"I personally don't believe or even care for it—nothing personal, Miss Arlovskaya—" Alfred held his hands up in an honest, open gesture—"but the troopers thought it was worth calling you in."
"I take neither disbelief nor dislike personal," Natalia replied, looking back to her notepad. "I'm used to them." She stopped and considered her notes before putting the notepad back in her briefcase, finishing the rest of her water and standing. "Where is the house?"
Alfred shuffled a few papers before he found the address. "640 280th Street—it's about a half mile out of town."
Natalia nodded resolutely. "I will meet you at the house at midnight," she announced.
"Why so late?" Alfred asked, standing and watching her shrug into her jacket.
She paused and looked at him levelly. "Midnight to four in the morning are the peak hours," she explained, very matter-of-fact. "If you suspect hauntings and want to find anything, that is the time to look."
A quarter to midnight found Alfred sitting in his cruiser outside the house and sucking down a Diet Coke in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to stop his mouth from being so dry. It was pitch dark and windy, and frankly, Alfred could think of about fifty other places he'd rather be than at this creepy place in the middle of the night. He forced those sorts of thoughts from his head. If you want to be a sheriff, he reminded himself, you had to do the unpleasant stuff like this.
Headlights in his rearview mirror caught his attention, and within moments Natalia was knocking at his cruiser window. Trying to downplay the skittish jump the action provoked, he rolled down the window and poked his head out. "Ready to rock and roll?" he asked.
Natalia nodded. "Are you?" She looked like a different person from the professional woman in the diner. In fact it was a complete one-eighty—a plain pullover, jeans and sensible boots. Her long hair had been swept back into a tight braid.
"As ready as I'll ever be," Alfred replied, rolling up the window and getting out of the cruiser. He gestured to the bags in her hands. "I see you brought your sleepover gear."
Natalia fixed him with a cool, level gaze. "Laptop," she said, indicating the messenger bag hanging from one shoulder. "Equipment." She lifted the black duffle bag she held in her free hand and shouldered past Alfred to start through the uncared for lawn to the porch. Swallowing his nerves, Alfred was quick to follow.
As the sheriff had imagined, the interior of the house, specifically what he assumed was at one point a living room, was dusty and littered with garbage and empty booze bottles. He kicked a Rich and Rare bottle out of the way before turning to watch Natalia work. "So what part of the world are you from?" he asked, if only to fill the place with some kind of sound.
"Belarus," she replied simply.
"Oh, that's cool." So assuming Russia wasn't entirely accurate, Alfred thought, but he'd been in the ballpark.
If Natalia heard this statement, she made no indication of it, nor any effort to respond; instead, she ran her finger along the fireplace mantle. "Dust—bad for photographs." She brushed the dust onto the leg of her jeans. "Do not move unless it is absolutely necessary."
She went through her bag again, her every action deliberate, including shoving a camcorder into Alfred's hands with the instructions to put the case file down and film her making her rounds with it. The first several minutes of the tape recorded her following that up with clipping a small Walkman to her belt loop and connecting it to a pair of earbuds, tucked into her ears, and a microphone, led out in front of her like a dowsing rod. In her other hand she held something that looked remarkably like a stud finder, but when Alfred asked about it, she called an EMF meter, tri-field model.
The passes she made on the room were agonizingly slow, and the silence (or was it his nerves?) made Alfred want to throw the camcorder across the room. Rather than break (and likely have to pay out the nose to replace) her equipment, he opted for another question. "What made you get into… this line of work?"
"I like it," Natalia answered, passing the EMF meter over one side of the fireplace.
"I bet you loved scary stories at summer camp, huh?" he asked, a thin smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.
This made Natalia look up. In the poor light, she looked more than a little spectral herself. "Sheriff Jones, shut up and let me work." Silence fell on the house for several minutes before—"When was this house built?"
"Oh, so you can talk but I can't?" Alfred asked, more than a little offended, lowering the camera a few inches.
"When was this house built?" she demanded.
Alfred's free hand scrubbed through his hair, disturbing his cowlick. "This is one of the oldest buildings in town, so I wanna say… I dunno, 1890s?"
"Has anything unusual ever happened here?" she asked, starting on her second pass of the room.
"Apart from kids disappearing and this being the only common factor?" Alfred deadpanned.
Natalia stopped and positively glared at him. "Sheriff Jones—"
"Uhh…" Alfred leaned down to open the case file, sitting on a moth-eaten armchair; when he straightened up, he held a yellow Post-It in his hand, his brow furrowed. "There was a—"
"Shut up," she snapped. Alfred bit back his irritation as Natalia tilted her gaze slightly upward, as if she were processing something, before hastily gathering up her equipment and all but throwing it back into her bag. "We need to get out."
Alfred lowered the camera, eyes wide behind his glasses. "What?"
"We need to leave," she repeated, thrusting the EMF meter into the bag. "Zaraz."
"Why?" the sheriff asked.
Natalia seized her bags and all but rushed Alfred. "Listen—" She pulled out the earbuds of the recorder and shoved one into his ear.
Alfred's eyebrows knit together as he concentrated on the sounds coming through the bud, a lot of static and their heavy breathing—there it was. A voice, rasping and impossibly old sounding, but painfully clear. Get out... GET OUT.
Uttering a curse that would have scandalized his grandmother, Alfred jerked the earbud from his ear, seized the case file and tucked it under his arm, and grabbed Natalia by the upper arm, practically dragging her from the house. For all the power in his run, Natalia had no trouble keeping up with him as they bolted to the cruiser. "Passenger seat, now," Alfred commanded, all but sliding across the hood and throwing himself into the driver's seat.
Natalia had barely closed the passenger door, her bags piled awkwardly on her lap, when Alfred turned the key in the ignition and tore off down the country road, kicking up an incredible cloud of dust in their wake. "Y'wanna know the reason I don't believe in the paranormal?" Alfred thumbed over his shoulder, toward the house, once before gripping the steering wheel with increasingly pale fingers. "Makes it easier to not be scared of shit like that."
Under more normal circumstances, Alfred might have taken pride in the fact that the cruiser's top speed between the house and the sheriff's office touched eighty miles per hour; as it was, he didn't think much of it, apart from the fact that he'd successfully put a good deal of distance between himself and Natalia and whatever the fuck was talking through that tape recorder. The pair had locked themselves inside his innermost office, Natalia's laptop open on a mostly clean corner of the messy desk and the recording being transferred from the Walkman to the computer.
Alfred's elbows rested on the desk, his head cradled in his hands, when Natalia cleared her throat and nudged his shoulder slightly. He lifted his head; she offered a thin smile (he was right about her being attractive when she did that) and held out a mug of coffee from the Mr. Coffee he had on top of a filing cabinet in the corner of the room. In her other hand was a Styrofoam cup of the same. He accepted the drink with mumbled thanks, wrapped his hands around the mug and took a sip. It was bitter and scalded his tongue, but he didn't mind so much right now.
Natalia offered a cool nod in reply as she sat down in front of her laptop and tucked one of her earbuds, the other hanging loose in front of her belly as she sipped her own drink. After a moment, she broke the silence. "What did your note say?"
"My what?" Alfred asked.
"The Post-It note you started to read," she clarified. "What did it say?"
Alfred shuffled the papers on the desk before locating the case file once more and opening it up. His eyes quickly scanned the note before he relayed its contents to Natalia: "It's from the county historian—apparently, back in the 1910s there was a double murder at that house."
Natalia made a small note of this information on her notepad; unlike in the diner that afternoon, now that Alfred could see the page, he could see that it was half-full of angular Cyrillic characters. "What do you know of that case?" she asked, looking up from the paper.
"Just a few details," he replied with a shrug. "I read that file once but it's more an urban legend kind of thing than anything else."
Natalia's pen scratched across the paper. "Were the murders investigated?"
"Of course."
Now she looked up, her expression serious. "Who was the murderer, and were they convicted?"
The sheriff shook his head. "No one ever found enough evidence one way or the other to catch anyone, let alone convict."
The investigator nodded. "I might have suspected," she replied knowingly.
"Excuse me?" Alfred asked.
"Your abandoned house has ghosts," she stated pragmatically. "Based on studying the audio—" Here, Alfred shuddered—"there are two that I can tell—likely the double murder victims."
"Are you sure they might not be… pets?" Alfred asked, sounding as if he knew it was a stretch. "Or deer? People hunt out here, y'know."
"I am certain," Natalia answered. "Ghosts of animals are rare—they wander. Sherlock Holmes' Hound of the Baskerville was probably a ghost."
"So what do ghosts have to do with this?" Alfred laid his hand on the case file.
"Children are sensitive to spirit and ghosts," she explained. "They may have gone to the house to play or explore, or they may have been lured there."
Alfred supposed it was sound logic—maybe it was, to a paranormal investigator or a ghost hunter or anyone like Natalia Arlovskaya in general—but it left as many questions unanswered as it answered them. "But why are there ghosts or spirits or whatever in that house in the first place?"
"A haunting—you mentioned it yourself." Natalia leaned a little closer to the laptop, tapping a button on the keyboard a few times.
"So why do they want children?" he questioned.
"Perhaps the ghosts themselves are like children," she replied, not taking her eyes from the screen. "They want the attention—attention that missing children bring—only it took sixty years to get it."
Another apparent hole in her logic. "So why didn't they give up and move on after the first few kids went missing?"
"Remember how I said that the ghosts of animals wander?" Natalia began, looking away from the screen and writing a few notes on her pad, underlining a phrase several times. When she looked up in time to see Alfred's nod, she continued: "The ghosts of people are like ships. They can be anchored to an object, or in this case, to a place."
"In English, Mrs. Edgar Allen Poe," Alfred replied, his exhaustion and frustration and fear—yes, he would own up to it being fear—coloring his tone.
Natalia barely noticed the tone, or chose to not acknowledge it. "The spirits here cannot leave, and they're angry about it."
Alfred was silent for a moment; when he next spoke, the words were a soft, almost fearful whisper. "Why can't they leave?"
"According to all of this?" Natalia turned her laptop so that Alfred could see the screen—multiple windows, devoted to sound analysis, notes, video feed, a digital Geiger counter and heaven only knew what else. "If these ghosts are the murder victims from the nineteen-teens, they are still here because they have unfinished business."