Page 34 of Into the Dark

“I dropped an EMF reader on the floor of this jail we were investigating—smashed everywhere,” Zeek said. “Adrienne wouldn’t talk to me for a week.”

“That’s not true,” she said, settling down in front of one of the mirrors. “It might have been half an hour, tops. Now turn off the lights and get into place.”

They both turned off their head lamps, as did Nigel. Before filming, they’d set up a soft light to one side, to provide enough light for the camera to record their faces. With only the single source of light, the shadows seemed to grow denser.

Was the creeper here somewhere? Watching them? It was a shadow person; they’d never see it in the darkness.

He tried to push his nerves to the side and focus on the ritual. Adrienne and Zeek settled in cross-legged, hands resting on their knees, eyes on the mirrors in front of them.

“Let’s light the candles,” Adrienne said. They did so; the tiny flames barely pushed back against the darkness, and their flickering cast shifting shadows. “Spirits, we want to communicate with you. If you need to, draw on the energy of the candle to show yourself.”

“We just want to learn your story,” Zeek added.

Silence descended, broken only by the scuff of Nigel’s boots as he shifted position to get different camera angles. Thedarkness seemed to press in, and Adrienne’s candle started to flicker. Then it grew dimmer, the flame shrinking to a pinpoint without quite going out.

Candles went out on their own all the time, of course. There could be too much wax pooling around the wick, or a draft, or a thousand other things.

Or a spirit drawing on its energy.

“Is someone there?” she asked. “Can you show yourself to me in the mirror?”

Fog began to cloud the mirror—but it seemed to be contained within the glass itself, rather than on its surface. As Nigel watched, the fog slowly took on the shape of a face.

A strand of mist floated slowly across the graveyard behind the asylum. Oscar’s heart quickened—what little wind there was blew in a different direction, and there were no other spots of fog or mist anywhere around them.

The EMF beeped, then fell silent as the mist moved away. Oscar followed, closing the distance between himself and the mist, reader extended toward it. As he’d expected, the EMF reacted, blipping almost to yellow, then down again.

All right. Time to do something a little unorthodox. Oscar reached into his pocket and pulled out a D-cell battery.

“We want to talk to you,” he said to the mist. “We’d like to know your name. If you want to talk to us, or show us anything, you can use this to get more energy to do so.”

He carefully put the battery down on a broken headstone, then backed away to give the ghost space. At first, he didn’t think it would respond. He could sense something, or at least he thought he could. Longing, a need for…he wasn’t sure what.

Then the apparition changed direction and drifted back toward them. Chris let out a little gasp, camera trained on the formless mist as it settled around the headstone and the battery.

The cricket and frog songs stopped as though they’d been flipped off with a switch. Deep silence filled in the void, a shroud hanging over the entire graveyard. The sense of longing grew stronger, accompanied now by frustration. The mist seemed to thicken, and a vague outline of features and a body appeared.

“I’m not sure what the camera is picking up,” Oscar said in a low tone, “but the spirit appears to be a woman in what might be a dress or a patient gown, I can’t tell which.”

She turned to look at him, her lips moving soundlessly. Oscar shook his head. “I can’t hear you.” He unclipped the EVP recorder and held it out. “Can you try talking into this device?”

The night grew colder, feeling more like winter than a spring chill. The spirit’s features became more defined: large eyes, long hair. Her lips parted, revealing the suggestion of teeth.

Then the teeth vanished, rendering her mouth a ghastly void, opening only into hungry darkness.

Nigel stood frozen as the face of a man slowly resolved in Adrienne’s mirror. His skin held the pallor of the dead, and his eyes were nothing more than black pits. A grin formed beneath his bushy mustache, and he lifted his finger and pointed.

Adrienne’s eyes were wide, her breath coming in shallow pants. “Wh-what’s he pointing at?”

Nigel panned the camera away from her, following the direction of the ghost’s finger. On the wall, where he was certain there hadn’t been anything before, two words were gouged deep into the plaster.

Look up.

All the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. He leaned back, panning up with both eyes and camera…

A black humanoid shape clung to the ceiling directly above them.

Adrienne screamed. As if at a signal, both candles went out, along with the remaining electrical light, plunging them into pitch darkness.

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