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dixiehellcatThat Which Lies Hidden, a Ghost Adventures fic, chapter 3
In which Nick and Claire take the memory card they discovered in the ruins of the equipment from the ill-fated Kansas lockdown to Billy for analysis. Brace yourselves, the ride will be intense; keep hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times while the ride is in motion. Rated R for intensity and cussin, this go round.
Much thanks for the love and appreciation from you all! Again I must give all props to xXTailo-Lives-OnXx for writing the wonderful fic in progress, The Other Side, which inspired this one, and for giving me kind permission to post my meandering variation on its theme. This is not in the same verse as TOS, btw. (go to chapter 1 of Hidden to get linked to it)
I'm tickled to get Billy into this section, as he never EVER gets any ficlove, that I've seen anyway. :-) And I love me some Billy.
When the video playback starts, I have italicized the dialogue from it so you can diferentiate it from the conversation going on among those watching it.
A cookie to anybody who gets all the Supernatural refs in here--there's one obvious one, but some others not so much. I just threw them in for fun, mostly, although one will play a role in upcoming chapters.
Again, I do not own the GAC, doggonit. And this fic is not set in the same verse as my and tetiny68's GAC/Supernatural crossover fic, Worlds Collide.
Comments are loved and squeezed and called George. :-)
Onward! If reading it exhausts you as much as writing it did me, then I have achieved my goal...it's pretty darn intense, imho. And long, for which I should maybe apologize, but when you get to the last line you will se why I could NOT STOP till I got there.
3 Billy Tolley turned to be a pleasant-faced guy who rocked horn rims and a Mohawk. His regular gig was as a club dj, and he explained to me as he set up a starship bridge's worth of audio-video equipment at his place that that was how he and Zak had met—Zak had dj'd too, back in the day. I clapped a hand over my mouth to stifle my half-hysterical giggles at the mental image of the Zak I knew presiding over turntables. Not that it was all that funny, just that the deeper I delved into this mirror-world, the crazier and more contradictory it all got.
Billy was sharp as the spikes of his hair though, and he recognized the camera we brought immediately. "After the ambulance took you and Aaron off I got the local guys who helped with setup together and we swept the house. There wasn't much worth saving, but I took photos in every room, and labeled all the pieces with their locations, just in case…"
"In case charges were filed," I finished. To his surprised look I added, "Vegas PD. Granted, I'm just admin support, but I still know how important chain of evidence is. "
"It wasn't gonna happen." Nick's tone was flat. "Besides not being able to find Zak for a damn long time, neither of us wanted to drag things out. Better to cut our losses and move on."
"Anyway," Billy went on, "I remember this little old guy 'cause we found it outside. How the hell it got there, who can say; but it was lying in the front yard. There were bits of another rig, but this one's older and tougher so it took more punishment. The card slot door's broken, though, see? That's how I missed the card being inside. And besides that, if I remember right, it was getting late by then, and nobody wanted to be within fifty miles of the place after dark." He took the card from Nick and inserted it into a slot. "All the other cards were useless; the images were degraded by impact, exposure, and so on, so don't get your hopes—" An image popped up on the screen. "Never mind."
Aaron Goodwin's broad, cheerful face filled the screen in neon green and black. I gathered he was placing the camera in a designated spot. He fiddled with this control and that, and finally patted it like a well-behaved puppy before he stood up. Nick smiled sadly. "So this was one of the static night-vision cameras," Billy said. "How the fuck did it get outside?"
"Dunno." Nick frowned at the room on screen. "I can't place the exact location yet. Let it roll and we'll see if we caught anything…Claire, we're gonna have to run this in real time or risk missing something. It's gonna be pretty long and tedious. Why don't you head on home and get some rest, we'll let you know if—"
My eyes never left the screen. "Shhh," I said softly and settled my bottom more comfortably into the swivel chair. I felt rather than saw Nick shrug before he sat down beside me and returned his attention to the playback.
After a while the tromp of feet over the speakers announced new arrivals. Aaron reentered the frame with a larger camera rig perched on his shoulder; then Nick appeared, and finally Zak strode across the screen to the row of small windows to the camera's left. "I bet we get some great stuff in here," he said.
"You think the guy might still be in here?" the onscreen Nick queried.
"Wouldn't surprise me a bit," Zak replied.
"There are some other places we want to be sure we hit," Nick continued, "like the root cellar in the basement, where the bodies were found."
"Right, I'm thinking we need to lock Aaron down there." How strange it seemed to me, to hear Zak's usually flat voice so playful and animated.
"In your dreams," Aaron fired back. "Or on second thought, go ahead. Then when a cyclone blows you two jerkoffs to Oz I'll be safe and sound right here in Kansas with Toto."
Beside me, Nick's mouth suddenly fell open. "Fuck me," he breathed. "I remember this conversation…oh God, this camera was in the garret!"
The garret? Shit. The place where everything had gone horribly wrong. If the battered little camera had done its job, we might be about to see what had happened to Zak in that room, beyond that door Nick and Aaron had been too late in opening. Without thinking, I reached over and took Nick's hand.
The three figures onscreen left the room, led by Zak, who seemed excited beyond words at the thought of cornering the ghost of a mass murderer. "After we left that room, Zak seemed fixated on it," Nick said. "He got the idea in his head of his own mini-lockdown, and two or three hours later he insisted we go do it."
Knowing now what we were seeing made all three of us sharpen our focus. Several times I pointed out strange spots of light or shadow, but Billy or Nick always knew the explanation; their skills at distinguishing video artifacts from true anomalies were remarkable.
Finally voices could again be heard on the recording, and Zak stepped into view, talking over his shoulder toward the half-open door. "Yeah, fifteen minutes should be good for starters. If I can't get a rise out of something, we'll try tag teaming it." He laughed and turned, a small video camera in his hand aimed at the door as it closed. The click of the lock sounded as loud as a gunshot in the silent room. I wondered if it had sounded that loud to him. "All right!" he said, then began to pace around the room, narrating for the camera as he went. "So here I am, locked down in the garret apartment of the Gamble house in Stull, Kansas. In 1952 Benjamin Carver boarded in this very room, until one night he killed the entire family, Eric, his wife Sera and their two young sons. He dumped their bodies in the root cellar, dug in the basement. We've already gotten some amazing EVPs in other parts of this house that indicate some of Carver's victims still haunt this place where they died such brutal deaths. Now we want to confront their killer."
Now that he was alone on stage, so to speak, I had leisure to observe him more closely. He wore fatigue pants and a long sleeved shirt—were those thumb holes in the cuffs? That was a fashion statement no one would ever see in the bland wardrobe of the Zak I knew. As he moved, too, I was struck by the odd grace, the economy and compactness and power of his every move; again, nothing at all like the stolid walk I was familiar with. "Benjamin Carver!" he yelled. "Are you here? Come out and face your accusers!"
Billy pulled up a timer in the corner of the screen. "Fourteen minutes and counting."
At nine minutes in, with no response to his repeated demands, Zak fished around in a pants pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. Unfolding it, he held it up to the lens of his camera. "This is a police photo taken of that wall—" he pointed the camera toward the back wall briefly—"after Carver's arrest. No one knows exactly what these bizarre markings signify, and Carver went to his grave without divulging their secret. Let's see if we can get some answers." He tacked the paper to the wall, stood back, and called out again. "Benjamin Carver! What did these symbols mean to you? Come on out and explain them to me. I want to know!"
A faint, scratchy noise whispered through the speakers. "EVP!" Nick exclaimed.
"I got it!" Billy froze the recording and moved it back several seconds. When he restarted it, I closed my eyes to concentrate on the sound.
"—explain them to me. I want to know!" Zak's recorded voice insisted again, and again the whisper came.
"You don't," I said. My eyes popped open to two faces as horrified as mine must have been. "It answered him. He said he wanted to know and it said 'you don't'."
"Fuck," Billy said earnestly. "That'd be some class A evidence, if only…" He shook his head and turned back to the controls.
"Wait a sec," I said. "Billy, can you zoom in on the paper on the wall, and print me a copy?" As he did I asked, "Nick, did you guys find out beforehand what the sigils meant? Did Zak research them?"
"I know I didn't, and I don't think Zak did. They were just a trigger, something to get the spirit's attention."
"Idjit," I growled, and was only a little appalled to hear my uncle come out of my mouth in the form of his favorite epithet. All those summer days spent in his big old library of a house rubbed off more than I thought, sometimes. I looked at the print Billy handed me. "I can't ID them, but I know somebody who can."
Billy hit play. On screen, Zak stood still for a moment more, then began to sweep the room with his camera again. "Whoa, go back," Nick said after another minute or two. "Is that a shadow form, back along the wall?"
"Could be," Billy agreed after rewinding and rewatching. "Right around the edges of the paper there, it's pretty clear there's something moving."
With a sinking feeling, I continued to watch. Several more unexceptional minutes passed before Aaron's voice sounded again. "Yo, bro, you okay in there?"
"Yeah, I'm good," Zak called back. "No luck yet, though." He hadn't heard the threatening voice, or seen the dark mist. "I put the target up. Let me out and we'll leave it here for a while before we come back and hit it again."
"Um, can't do that, dude. The door's stuck." The knob gave a pro forma jiggle.
"Bullshit!" Zak retorted and went to the door. "Open the fuckin' door, Aaron."
"What if I don't?"
"I'll kick it open! And then I'll kick your ass!" But Zak was laughing as he said it, and despite the sickness in my gut, I had to smile at the affection and camaraderie of the partnership.
There were whispers and snickers behind the door, and more backtalk, but I missed it, my attention abruptly pulled to the wall where the mysterious symbols were posted. "Shit, guys, look!"
The shadowy mist we'd seen earlier had returned in force, circling in a counter-clockwise spiral around the paper. As we watched transfixed, it darkened and expanded. Like a speeded-up film of a tumor I'd seen once in school, it spread, along the wall, and across the room—
Toward the door, and toward Zak, whose attention was all on the locked door, and who was still laughing and bantering with Nick as he began to open it. "No, no, no," The words spilled from my lips, useless as they were. "Turn around, Zak. Turn around. God, baby, please, please turn around!" I already knew the ending of this movie, and it didn't end well.
The dark fingers brushed past Zak and engulfed the door. "Oh, shit," Nick gasped beside me, even as his onscreen self was saying "It won't open, Zak, for real!"
Simultaneously, Zak shuddered and jumped, then spun to scan the room with his camera; unbelievably, he was still investigating, still filming. "Guys, hurry up, I'm getting a bad feeling," he said and added in a lower voice meant for his camera, "I just felt an incredible temperature drop. Something's in here." He glanced wildly around the room, his face a mask of fear. "C'mon guys, get me out of here, please…"
The picture blurred. I nearly yelled at Billy—we needed to see now, we needed to know, why was it fucking up now?—before I realized it wasn't the screen, but the tears filling my eyes.
Onscreen, the door was ratling violently as Nick struggled to reach his friend; but the dark force was easily holding him at bay. Zak raised his camera again, lifting his other hand beside it to steady it, and with the suddenness of a snake's strike the darkness lunged for him. I let out a faint cry, and Nick's hand tightened on mine, but I could not look away. Zak froze; his body jerked several times, then was still for a long awful moment. The mist vanished.
He lowered the camera again, and the fear was gone from his face, replaced by a strange look of satisfaction. Calmly, he walked over to the windows, opened one, and tossed his camera out. He turned to sweep the room with a glance, then approached the static night-vision gear. I flinched away, out of pure reflex, as the figure approached. The face filled the screen as he picked the camera up, as Aaron's had when he placed it. The features were grotesque this close, bathed in green, though the eyes were flat and white. "Bye bye," he said, then was gone. The last sound recorded was the thump of the camera hitting something, then a grinding noise and another thump.
We sat and stared at the blank screen in stunned silence. "Well, that explains how the rig got outside," Billy said finally. "The house had a tin roof over the front porch. Zak's camera was lighter so it flew out farther and then down three stories to the ground. But this old boy fell straight down and hit that roof, then slid down it and just fell a few more feet, slower."
Nick roused from his near-trance. "Thanks, Mr. Science. So whatever that dark force was, where did it go after it—attacked Zak? And what did it have to do with what he did?"
Billy shrugged, then set about pointing and clicking. "Let me run it back to that point and go frame by frame. It moved so damn fast, but if we run it at max slow, could be we'll see more."
He slowed it till it was practically a slide show, a succession of still photos taken fractions of a second apart. Horrified, hypnotized, we watched again as the dark tentacles crept across the space and captured the door. Then, click by click, we saw what the blurry split-second motion had done. One tentacle whipped around Zak's legs just below his knees, and another around his wrists. His mouth began to open, but darkness poured into it, silencing any attempt to call out, and yet another tendril wound around his throat and tightened.
But then, as quickly as in the regular speed run, it was gone again. Nick swore. Billy let the controls go back to normal. The final seconds played out as before while they debated something; I didn't catch what exactly; my focus was still on the screen, and Zak's face with that awful little smirk as he carried the camera to the window to dump it. "Hey Billy, can you change the night vision image to something more normal? Or at least to black and white? Something's off here, but I can't tell what."
"Sure." He ran the footage back a few seconds, and with several clicks and taps of keyboard and mouse the screen looked a bit closer to real life. It restarted as Zak walked away from the window toward the camera placement, and I narrowed my eyes to watch, looking for some tiny niggling detail.
It wasn't a tiny niggling detail. In fact, it was plain as the nose of your face; or rather, the eyes on Zak's face…the eyes that, when he crouched to pick up the static cam, were solid pools of inky black.
I cried out and recoiled. Nick caught my shoulder before I fell out of my chair. "Claire? What's—what the fuck is that??"
"That," I said, suddenly very calm, "is what I needed to see. I know what we're dealing with now, and I know where it is. It's a demon. Not sure what kind, but the sigils probably say, and I know someone who can read them. That man Carver summoned it, accidentally or on purpose, in '52 when he drew them on the wall." I held up the page with a hand gone numb. "And when Zak posted them again, and called it out, it answered."
"But where is it?" Billy asked. "Where'd it go?"
It was Nick who answered him, Nick who made that terrible leap with me. "It didn't go anywhere," he said. "It's still in Zak."
In which Nick and Claire take the memory card they discovered in the ruins of the equipment from the ill-fated Kansas lockdown to Billy for analysis. Brace yourselves, the ride will be intense; keep hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times while the ride is in motion. Rated R for intensity and cussin, this go round.
Much thanks for the love and appreciation from you all! Again I must give all props to xXTailo-Lives-OnXx for writing the wonderful fic in progress, The Other Side, which inspired this one, and for giving me kind permission to post my meandering variation on its theme. This is not in the same verse as TOS, btw. (go to chapter 1 of Hidden to get linked to it)
I'm tickled to get Billy into this section, as he never EVER gets any ficlove, that I've seen anyway. :-) And I love me some Billy.
When the video playback starts, I have italicized the dialogue from it so you can diferentiate it from the conversation going on among those watching it.
A cookie to anybody who gets all the Supernatural refs in here--there's one obvious one, but some others not so much. I just threw them in for fun, mostly, although one will play a role in upcoming chapters.
Again, I do not own the GAC, doggonit. And this fic is not set in the same verse as my and tetiny68's GAC/Supernatural crossover fic, Worlds Collide.
Comments are loved and squeezed and called George. :-)
Onward! If reading it exhausts you as much as writing it did me, then I have achieved my goal...it's pretty darn intense, imho. And long, for which I should maybe apologize, but when you get to the last line you will se why I could NOT STOP till I got there.
3 Billy Tolley turned to be a pleasant-faced guy who rocked horn rims and a Mohawk. His regular gig was as a club dj, and he explained to me as he set up a starship bridge's worth of audio-video equipment at his place that that was how he and Zak had met—Zak had dj'd too, back in the day. I clapped a hand over my mouth to stifle my half-hysterical giggles at the mental image of the Zak I knew presiding over turntables. Not that it was all that funny, just that the deeper I delved into this mirror-world, the crazier and more contradictory it all got.
Billy was sharp as the spikes of his hair though, and he recognized the camera we brought immediately. "After the ambulance took you and Aaron off I got the local guys who helped with setup together and we swept the house. There wasn't much worth saving, but I took photos in every room, and labeled all the pieces with their locations, just in case…"
"In case charges were filed," I finished. To his surprised look I added, "Vegas PD. Granted, I'm just admin support, but I still know how important chain of evidence is. "
"It wasn't gonna happen." Nick's tone was flat. "Besides not being able to find Zak for a damn long time, neither of us wanted to drag things out. Better to cut our losses and move on."
"Anyway," Billy went on, "I remember this little old guy 'cause we found it outside. How the hell it got there, who can say; but it was lying in the front yard. There were bits of another rig, but this one's older and tougher so it took more punishment. The card slot door's broken, though, see? That's how I missed the card being inside. And besides that, if I remember right, it was getting late by then, and nobody wanted to be within fifty miles of the place after dark." He took the card from Nick and inserted it into a slot. "All the other cards were useless; the images were degraded by impact, exposure, and so on, so don't get your hopes—" An image popped up on the screen. "Never mind."
Aaron Goodwin's broad, cheerful face filled the screen in neon green and black. I gathered he was placing the camera in a designated spot. He fiddled with this control and that, and finally patted it like a well-behaved puppy before he stood up. Nick smiled sadly. "So this was one of the static night-vision cameras," Billy said. "How the fuck did it get outside?"
"Dunno." Nick frowned at the room on screen. "I can't place the exact location yet. Let it roll and we'll see if we caught anything…Claire, we're gonna have to run this in real time or risk missing something. It's gonna be pretty long and tedious. Why don't you head on home and get some rest, we'll let you know if—"
My eyes never left the screen. "Shhh," I said softly and settled my bottom more comfortably into the swivel chair. I felt rather than saw Nick shrug before he sat down beside me and returned his attention to the playback.
After a while the tromp of feet over the speakers announced new arrivals. Aaron reentered the frame with a larger camera rig perched on his shoulder; then Nick appeared, and finally Zak strode across the screen to the row of small windows to the camera's left. "I bet we get some great stuff in here," he said.
"You think the guy might still be in here?" the onscreen Nick queried.
"Wouldn't surprise me a bit," Zak replied.
"There are some other places we want to be sure we hit," Nick continued, "like the root cellar in the basement, where the bodies were found."
"Right, I'm thinking we need to lock Aaron down there." How strange it seemed to me, to hear Zak's usually flat voice so playful and animated.
"In your dreams," Aaron fired back. "Or on second thought, go ahead. Then when a cyclone blows you two jerkoffs to Oz I'll be safe and sound right here in Kansas with Toto."
Beside me, Nick's mouth suddenly fell open. "Fuck me," he breathed. "I remember this conversation…oh God, this camera was in the garret!"
The garret? Shit. The place where everything had gone horribly wrong. If the battered little camera had done its job, we might be about to see what had happened to Zak in that room, beyond that door Nick and Aaron had been too late in opening. Without thinking, I reached over and took Nick's hand.
The three figures onscreen left the room, led by Zak, who seemed excited beyond words at the thought of cornering the ghost of a mass murderer. "After we left that room, Zak seemed fixated on it," Nick said. "He got the idea in his head of his own mini-lockdown, and two or three hours later he insisted we go do it."
Knowing now what we were seeing made all three of us sharpen our focus. Several times I pointed out strange spots of light or shadow, but Billy or Nick always knew the explanation; their skills at distinguishing video artifacts from true anomalies were remarkable.
Finally voices could again be heard on the recording, and Zak stepped into view, talking over his shoulder toward the half-open door. "Yeah, fifteen minutes should be good for starters. If I can't get a rise out of something, we'll try tag teaming it." He laughed and turned, a small video camera in his hand aimed at the door as it closed. The click of the lock sounded as loud as a gunshot in the silent room. I wondered if it had sounded that loud to him. "All right!" he said, then began to pace around the room, narrating for the camera as he went. "So here I am, locked down in the garret apartment of the Gamble house in Stull, Kansas. In 1952 Benjamin Carver boarded in this very room, until one night he killed the entire family, Eric, his wife Sera and their two young sons. He dumped their bodies in the root cellar, dug in the basement. We've already gotten some amazing EVPs in other parts of this house that indicate some of Carver's victims still haunt this place where they died such brutal deaths. Now we want to confront their killer."
Now that he was alone on stage, so to speak, I had leisure to observe him more closely. He wore fatigue pants and a long sleeved shirt—were those thumb holes in the cuffs? That was a fashion statement no one would ever see in the bland wardrobe of the Zak I knew. As he moved, too, I was struck by the odd grace, the economy and compactness and power of his every move; again, nothing at all like the stolid walk I was familiar with. "Benjamin Carver!" he yelled. "Are you here? Come out and face your accusers!"
Billy pulled up a timer in the corner of the screen. "Fourteen minutes and counting."
At nine minutes in, with no response to his repeated demands, Zak fished around in a pants pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. Unfolding it, he held it up to the lens of his camera. "This is a police photo taken of that wall—" he pointed the camera toward the back wall briefly—"after Carver's arrest. No one knows exactly what these bizarre markings signify, and Carver went to his grave without divulging their secret. Let's see if we can get some answers." He tacked the paper to the wall, stood back, and called out again. "Benjamin Carver! What did these symbols mean to you? Come on out and explain them to me. I want to know!"
A faint, scratchy noise whispered through the speakers. "EVP!" Nick exclaimed.
"I got it!" Billy froze the recording and moved it back several seconds. When he restarted it, I closed my eyes to concentrate on the sound.
"—explain them to me. I want to know!" Zak's recorded voice insisted again, and again the whisper came.
"You don't," I said. My eyes popped open to two faces as horrified as mine must have been. "It answered him. He said he wanted to know and it said 'you don't'."
"Fuck," Billy said earnestly. "That'd be some class A evidence, if only…" He shook his head and turned back to the controls.
"Wait a sec," I said. "Billy, can you zoom in on the paper on the wall, and print me a copy?" As he did I asked, "Nick, did you guys find out beforehand what the sigils meant? Did Zak research them?"
"I know I didn't, and I don't think Zak did. They were just a trigger, something to get the spirit's attention."
"Idjit," I growled, and was only a little appalled to hear my uncle come out of my mouth in the form of his favorite epithet. All those summer days spent in his big old library of a house rubbed off more than I thought, sometimes. I looked at the print Billy handed me. "I can't ID them, but I know somebody who can."
Billy hit play. On screen, Zak stood still for a moment more, then began to sweep the room with his camera again. "Whoa, go back," Nick said after another minute or two. "Is that a shadow form, back along the wall?"
"Could be," Billy agreed after rewinding and rewatching. "Right around the edges of the paper there, it's pretty clear there's something moving."
With a sinking feeling, I continued to watch. Several more unexceptional minutes passed before Aaron's voice sounded again. "Yo, bro, you okay in there?"
"Yeah, I'm good," Zak called back. "No luck yet, though." He hadn't heard the threatening voice, or seen the dark mist. "I put the target up. Let me out and we'll leave it here for a while before we come back and hit it again."
"Um, can't do that, dude. The door's stuck." The knob gave a pro forma jiggle.
"Bullshit!" Zak retorted and went to the door. "Open the fuckin' door, Aaron."
"What if I don't?"
"I'll kick it open! And then I'll kick your ass!" But Zak was laughing as he said it, and despite the sickness in my gut, I had to smile at the affection and camaraderie of the partnership.
There were whispers and snickers behind the door, and more backtalk, but I missed it, my attention abruptly pulled to the wall where the mysterious symbols were posted. "Shit, guys, look!"
The shadowy mist we'd seen earlier had returned in force, circling in a counter-clockwise spiral around the paper. As we watched transfixed, it darkened and expanded. Like a speeded-up film of a tumor I'd seen once in school, it spread, along the wall, and across the room—
Toward the door, and toward Zak, whose attention was all on the locked door, and who was still laughing and bantering with Nick as he began to open it. "No, no, no," The words spilled from my lips, useless as they were. "Turn around, Zak. Turn around. God, baby, please, please turn around!" I already knew the ending of this movie, and it didn't end well.
The dark fingers brushed past Zak and engulfed the door. "Oh, shit," Nick gasped beside me, even as his onscreen self was saying "It won't open, Zak, for real!"
Simultaneously, Zak shuddered and jumped, then spun to scan the room with his camera; unbelievably, he was still investigating, still filming. "Guys, hurry up, I'm getting a bad feeling," he said and added in a lower voice meant for his camera, "I just felt an incredible temperature drop. Something's in here." He glanced wildly around the room, his face a mask of fear. "C'mon guys, get me out of here, please…"
The picture blurred. I nearly yelled at Billy—we needed to see now, we needed to know, why was it fucking up now?—before I realized it wasn't the screen, but the tears filling my eyes.
Onscreen, the door was ratling violently as Nick struggled to reach his friend; but the dark force was easily holding him at bay. Zak raised his camera again, lifting his other hand beside it to steady it, and with the suddenness of a snake's strike the darkness lunged for him. I let out a faint cry, and Nick's hand tightened on mine, but I could not look away. Zak froze; his body jerked several times, then was still for a long awful moment. The mist vanished.
He lowered the camera again, and the fear was gone from his face, replaced by a strange look of satisfaction. Calmly, he walked over to the windows, opened one, and tossed his camera out. He turned to sweep the room with a glance, then approached the static night-vision gear. I flinched away, out of pure reflex, as the figure approached. The face filled the screen as he picked the camera up, as Aaron's had when he placed it. The features were grotesque this close, bathed in green, though the eyes were flat and white. "Bye bye," he said, then was gone. The last sound recorded was the thump of the camera hitting something, then a grinding noise and another thump.
We sat and stared at the blank screen in stunned silence. "Well, that explains how the rig got outside," Billy said finally. "The house had a tin roof over the front porch. Zak's camera was lighter so it flew out farther and then down three stories to the ground. But this old boy fell straight down and hit that roof, then slid down it and just fell a few more feet, slower."
Nick roused from his near-trance. "Thanks, Mr. Science. So whatever that dark force was, where did it go after it—attacked Zak? And what did it have to do with what he did?"
Billy shrugged, then set about pointing and clicking. "Let me run it back to that point and go frame by frame. It moved so damn fast, but if we run it at max slow, could be we'll see more."
He slowed it till it was practically a slide show, a succession of still photos taken fractions of a second apart. Horrified, hypnotized, we watched again as the dark tentacles crept across the space and captured the door. Then, click by click, we saw what the blurry split-second motion had done. One tentacle whipped around Zak's legs just below his knees, and another around his wrists. His mouth began to open, but darkness poured into it, silencing any attempt to call out, and yet another tendril wound around his throat and tightened.
But then, as quickly as in the regular speed run, it was gone again. Nick swore. Billy let the controls go back to normal. The final seconds played out as before while they debated something; I didn't catch what exactly; my focus was still on the screen, and Zak's face with that awful little smirk as he carried the camera to the window to dump it. "Hey Billy, can you change the night vision image to something more normal? Or at least to black and white? Something's off here, but I can't tell what."
"Sure." He ran the footage back a few seconds, and with several clicks and taps of keyboard and mouse the screen looked a bit closer to real life. It restarted as Zak walked away from the window toward the camera placement, and I narrowed my eyes to watch, looking for some tiny niggling detail.
It wasn't a tiny niggling detail. In fact, it was plain as the nose of your face; or rather, the eyes on Zak's face…the eyes that, when he crouched to pick up the static cam, were solid pools of inky black.
I cried out and recoiled. Nick caught my shoulder before I fell out of my chair. "Claire? What's—what the fuck is that??"
"That," I said, suddenly very calm, "is what I needed to see. I know what we're dealing with now, and I know where it is. It's a demon. Not sure what kind, but the sigils probably say, and I know someone who can read them. That man Carver summoned it, accidentally or on purpose, in '52 when he drew them on the wall." I held up the page with a hand gone numb. "And when Zak posted them again, and called it out, it answered."
"But where is it?" Billy asked. "Where'd it go?"
It was Nick who answered him, Nick who made that terrible leap with me. "It didn't go anywhere," he said. "It's still in Zak."
