The Supernaturals Read online

“You’re bordering on blowing a quarter of a season’s budget on an eight-hour special? The network brass would go ballistic. No way am I approving this.”

  Kelly smiled with as much fabricated embarrassment as she could muster. “I, uh…already broached the subject to Mr. Feuerstein in New York when we attended the Emmys a month ago. He said corporate would be onboard, on one condition.”

  Peterson frowned. Kelly was sure he thought her an arrogant bitch for going over his head and making him look like a moron, or at the very least a dupe. However, she watched as he looked around the table at his very own people. Their enthusiasm for the project was obvious. He forced himself to smile and nod his head. He knew the game she was playing very well; after all, he had almost invented it.

  “Okay, I’m all jittery inside with expectation and anticipation,” he said sourly. “What’s Mr. Feuerstein’s condition?”

  “They want Julie Reilly of the Nightly News to go along, for window dressing and legitimacy.”

  Peterson didn’t say a word at first. He stared at her and then lowered his head with a shake.

  “You want the best investigative reporter at the network to tag along? And what if she sees through your little scam?” He finally looked up. “Some people in that money-losing division are actually good at their jobs.”

  “Lionel, she works for the network. She’ll do as she’s told. Besides, it will never come to that. We can trick the house out days before—and don’t give me that look. It won’t be people dressed in bedsheets being caught on camera, or things moving by a string the audience can see. I think I know a few things, after all these years, about how to scare people. Small stuff, it doesn’t have to be much, just enough to get viewers’ eyebrows to raise and their hearts to race a little. We’ll fine-tune it during the test broadcast two weeks before.”

  She could see the gears turn in his head. If corporate wanted their star reporter in on this, it was so that entertainment could help prop up the sagging ratings of the news division. Ultimately, it would help those people he just mentioned—the ones who were good at their jobs.

  “You’re taking an awful big risk for a house that, at least historically speaking, is not in the least bit haunted, despite the shady testimonials of people not named in your research,” he said. “Correct me if I’m wrong here, but wasn’t it Julie Reilly who made her bones by hanging Professor Kennedy, asserting that he was a publicity-seeking opportunist who wanted nothing more than to sell books. I believe she reported that an unnamed source claimed that the only way he could do that would be to have at least one of his students vanish into thin air. She cost him his career, and now corporate wants her to tag along? Ms. Reilly is another person who climbed to power by not naming her sources. This is quite a cast of characters you’ll be pulling together, Kelly.”

  “Look, there have been other deaths at the estate. And if it was a hoax, why hasn’t this student ever turned up? I’m willing to cut Julie Reilly loose and see her investigate that, regardless of the outcome—it would make just as good a story if we could prove Kennedy is a nutcase and a murderer, or at the very least, the opportunist you claim he is. The angle here is the missing student and the stories about the house’s past.”

  “What other deaths? I thought the only incidents were a disappearance, a horse riding accident and a supposed assault.”

  “Several prominent families have died on their way home from weekend stays at the retreat in the twenties and thirties...maybe not right at Summer Place, but on the roads leading from it. You see, it’s not just the earlier stories that will sell the show, it’s everything rolled into one ball. And one very important bit of information you’re overlooking, Lionel, is the small fact that Kennedy has refused to write or discuss a word of that night, even though one publishing house offered him a flat two million dollars in advance money. And that, Lionel, is documented and quotable.”

  The conference room grew quiet.

  “This house sits on land that has some of the most treacherous roads in Pennsylvania. Let me venture further, most of these accidents occurred long before there were paved roads in the area. Am I correct?”

  “I really haven’t checked the—”

  “In addition, the fact is that the longer Professor Kennedy waits, the more money he will get when he finally does write his book. Am I right?”

  Kelly Delaphoy raised her eyes from the table and looked into Peterson’s. She knew he was attacking her because of her discussion with corporate. She had a good guess he also knew she was after his job, just as he was after the CEO’s.

  “Yes on one, but not on the other two points. Kennedy was frightened by something in that house. In order for him to write about it, he would have to relive it. He doesn’t want to do that.” She looked at the faces around the table that were silent, waiting for her last push. “I believe there is something here that goes far beyond the accidents, the opera star, actress, the columnist, and finally the Kennedy incident. This Halloween special will bring viewership to an all-time high. I’ll see to it that all these puzzle pieces fit into one terrifying eight hour show. And here’s something for you to chew on: the reason Professor Kennedy chose this house above all others when he sought his research grant from USC, was the fact that it supposedly scared the holy shit out of one of America’s literary giants, Shirley Jackson.”

  “The Haunting of Hill House was required reading in English Lit,” Jason Sanborn offered, lowering his water bottle to the table and then looking up in thought. “What was the famous passage from that book of hers?”

  Kelly could have kissed Jason for his quick thinking. She would now let that earlier indiscretion pass. She hurriedly rifled through her notes, letting tension build, and then smiled. She quoted from the page even though she knew the passage by heart: “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

  “You have to admit, Lionel, that coupled with these tales, this whole thing is pretty creepy stuff,” Sanborn said. He pulled his pipe from his pocket and placed it in his mouth.

  All eyes turned to Peterson, whose jaw muscles were working as he looked at Kelly. She could see the hatred in his eyes at what she had done, but she knew with this latest bit of information out in the open, others would now bring pressure to bear on the entertainment president.

  “I’ll let you know in twenty-four hours,” Peterson said. “I don’t have to be in New York for five more weeks.”

  “But we need to get—”

  “Kelly, I said twenty-four hours, and not one minute before. And leave the Kennedy file here with me. I want to look it over.”

  Kelly slid the thick file down the long table, passing it from one person to another until it reached Peterson’s girlish hands. She then picked up her laptop computer and bag. She started to say something, then thought better of it. A few executives nodded their supposed support as they left the room. Her eyes went to the four inch-thick file on Professor Kennedy sitting under Peterson’s hand. She bit her lower lip, hesitated, and then turned and left.

  Once he was alone in the conference room, Peterson opened the file to the eight by ten color glossy of the house in question. Kelly hadn’t even had the good sense to issue a black and white photo to give the mansion a more sinister look. His lips curled into a sneer. The picture showed a flattering view of the property. The four-story Summer Place had a pool that would make any hotel in Las Vegas envious. It had the kinds of gardens and walkways you would see on European estates.

  Peterson shook his head and wondered what a joint like that would cost to build in today’s dollars. All of this opulence fr
om money provided by the sewing machine—well, that, and ten thousand sweat-factory workers in New York City. He perked up at that thought, and then just as quickly deflated. It had been a well-known fact that the Lindemanns, at least the founding branch, had been the least likely candidates for scandal. They treated their workers like family and were never even remotely scrutinized for any wrongdoing. They had three schools and six parks named after them in Philadelphia and New York. No, no angle there to play. It was Kelly’s slant or nothing. Anyway, since it had already been brought to the attention of the president of the network and the board of directors, he could do little about it.

  As he looked at the picture of Summer Place, his eyes wandered over to the black and white photo of Professor Gabriel Kennedy that was stapled to the opposite side of the folder.

  What happened to you and your supposedly lost student, Professor? Peterson asked himself. Knowing that just may give me a leg up on our little spook girl.

  The picture of Kennedy, of course, did not answer. It only stared back at Peterson with the eyes of a haunted man. He had screamed for three solid months about the house in the Poconos—the house that everyone said could never be haunted. The house that was indeed not just haunted, but a killing place.

  A corner of another picture poked from the folder and he slowly pulled it free. It was an old photograph of the Lindemann family. The patriarch was sitting in a large wicker chair. His wife of royal blood, Elena, stood at his side with her right hand placed securely on his left shoulder. The eight children, ranging from nine to one years of age, were arranged around the parents, with the baby on a small pedestal at Lindemann’s feet. Even though hardly anyone smiled in photographs in those days, this photo was different. He could see that the Lindemanns were happy. Every one of them, with the exception of the baby, wore warm and inviting smiles. Of course, being the fifth richest man in the country probably helped the family bite the bullet, as they say.

  He was about to place the picture back into the pile when the small, beautiful face of Elena Lindemann caught his attention. She was a stunning woman for her time, and Peterson took back what he had thought a moment before. She did have sad eyes. With her hand placed upon her husband’s shoulder, her small fingers splayed out as if she were not caressing, but holding him at bay. Her slim fingers were slightly raised from the surface of his coat. But it was her smile—it never quite reached her eyes.

  Peterson shook his head and slid the photo back inside the file. He knew he was just looking for something bad in the family. All he had to do was open any history book or delve into the historical society pages of any leading newspaper to see that this family was more than just impeccable, they were damn near Christ-like in the way people spoke of their legacy.

  Peterson lay the folder aside and looked at the facsimile of Kennedy’s notebook entry, the one also supposedly found on the wall that the boy had disappeared into. He furrowed his brow as he read the harshly written words once more.

  “They are mine.”

  The entertainment president repeated the three words from the fax aloud repeatedly, expecting them to lose meaning the way repeated words usually do. These did not.

  “They are mine. They are mine.”

  Kelly Delaphoy sat with her show’s two hosts inside her large study in her Studio City home. Greg Larsen and Paul Lowell stared at her, wanting desperately not to believe what she had just told them.

  “You mean we have a chance to finally get into that house, and instead of really investigating it, you want us to fake it if something doesn’t happen?”

  Kelly had known the two men since they were nothing but freelance photojournalists eight years before. They had been her closest friends during good times and bad. She smiled. “Listen, Paul, we’ll have too much invested in the live show. We won’t be able to explain away a flop to the sponsors and our viewers. Sometimes, as you know, ghosts don’t show up on cue.”

  “But Kelly, we’ve always been on the up-and-up. If it isn’t haunted, we say so. That’s why people watch us. The word is integrity—do you want me to spell it for you? In addition, when we do declare a house free of paranormal activity, that doesn’t mean the episode is a failure. There’s still enough spooky stuff to make viewers tense and uneasy. To fake something as large—”

  “We need this,” she said, cutting Paul off mid-sentence. Her eyes could not hold his, so she looked away.

  “You mean you need this. You’re not fooling us, Kelly, we’ve known for a while what you have your sights on, and it sure as hell isn’t the integrity of our show. It’s the entertainment division of the network that you’re after.”

  Kelly looked at the bearded Greg Larsen and forced a tear to her eye. She swiped at it as if she were embarrassed at the weakness.

  “Do you really think that?”

  Paul looked at Greg, and then back at Kelly. “Yes, we do. For quite a while now, actually—ever since the network picked us up. You’ve changed, Kelly.”

  “That’s unfair. Where would you be if I hadn’t sold this show to UBC? We’d still be stuck in Cincinnati, going nowhere! I have never asked for anything. I do the work and you two get the glamour. I want this—we need this!” She alternated her eyes from Greg to Paul. “Soon our ratings will start to slide, you know it and I know it. This one special will guarantee us at least two more solid seasons, probably three with total sponsorship. Then we get out while we’re hot. We’ll move onto another show, different format. All of us.”

  “Kelly, we’ve never faked anything that—” Greg started but was once again cut short.

  “Camera angles, tripping by clumsy soundmen, house settling noises? Come on, we’ve faked a lot. Okay, so omitting is not the same as faking, but don’t sit there and tell me you’re so clean and I’m so dirty. It’s all in the editing. Remember that statement, Greg?”

  Greg Larsen shook his head. He had said that to Kelly years before—that scaring people on film or videotape was just a case of creative editing—and now it had come back to haunt him.

  “Come on, at the very least we have an opportunity to go to a place we’ve always wanted to investigate. In addition, we can put on a very convincing show just explaining the history of Summer Place and the Kennedy thing. That’s enough to creep people out right there. I promise we won’t go overboard on tricks. Jason Sanborn and we three will be the only ones in the know. We will storyboard the entire eight hours. No camera operators, investigative assistants, or soundmen will be in on it. We won’t even bring the director in. We will feed off all their reactions to the prearranged gags, okay?”

  The two hosts sat for a moment. Paul was absent-mindedly scratching his temple and Greg just held Kelly’s eyes as he thought. Then with one look at Paul, he cleared his throat.

  “Don’t you mean, if the place really isn’t haunted?”

  “There is something in that house, damn it. I know it. But you know and I know how many houses and abandoned sanitariums we’ve been in that were haunted, where nothing happened on cue.”

  The two hosts sat quiet for a moment. It was Greg, just who she thought it would be, that spoke first.

  “We only use outside people, a technician whom Paul and I trust to trick out the house, and only sound gags. No material props that can be caught by the investigative team. That’s the only way we’ll do it.”

  “Deal! We’ll test sound gags during the test broadcast. That’s a full two weeks before Halloween, and I’ll have so much information for you two guys to explain on the air that you’ll scare the hell out of everyone just from the script. I’m going to make another attempt at seeing Professor Kennedy. I know I can make this work—for all of us.”

  “It had better, Kelly.” The two co-hosts of Hunters of the Paranormal stood. Greg stared down at Kelly. “And when you become president of the entertainment division, if you ever do become president, you better remember your old friends, or they could come back to haunt you,” Greg said as he held her gaze, the threat very clear in h
is words and the pun just as clearly intended.

  two

  Lamar University

  Beaumont, Texas

  Professor Gabriel Kennedy’s fall from grace almost broke him, spiritually as well as monetarily. It seemed as though he had hit every sharp rock and academic outcropping on his way down the professional mountain. He just hadn’t fallen in the way the news reporters had hoped. Money had never been the driving force behind Kennedy, as many of them had said. The acquisition of money was only a means to an end. Gabriel Kennedy had invested everything he had ever earned on his chance to get inside Summer Place. His books, though selling well enough before that night, only helped him in that quest.

  The Summer Place incident had never been planned as a ploy to gain monetary stability, nor self-serving notoriety. It had been a chance to prove to the world that parapsychology was a science and not just a topic for ridicule at university social functions.

  The long, difficult fall had taken Kennedy from the well-funded psychology department of USC to a moderate Behavioral Psych position at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. He was there only because he had gone to school with Lamar’s Science Chair, Harrison Lumley, a million years before. An old dorm room pal, Lumley used to sell methamphetamine for spending money and take speed to assist with his finals. Harrison Lumley was everyone’s pal at one time or another.

  Now he was here at Lamar, relegated with a broken heart and shattered spirit to quoting Freud instead of voicing his own research on the science of the mind and paranormal.

  Kennedy stood at six foot three and had a narrative voice that commanded attention from a generation of kids that cared for nothing other than their iPods and cell phones. He had long before moved the classroom’s clock to the wall behind him, so that he would not notice the minute and hour hands that never seemed to move.

  Kennedy was hiding from the world; hiding from the questions that he couldn’t answer without going back in his mind to that night at Summer Place. Most would have thought he would be eager to clear his name and prove his science, but he was not. He had come to this place to hide and have his nightmares about a house that transcended the realities of the physical world. A world he had once thought he knew well enough to teach to young minds.