The Supernaturals Page 5

  Anyway, just what would a grown man say to explain such a fear as his? A grown man who once thought that the monster under the bed was dispelled by age and the advent of the electric light, only to be proven wrong. Age and light had nothing to do with mentally ousting those demons; Kennedy knew now that the thing under the bed was very much a real threat.

  He had even tried to explain the night in question once. When Harrison Lumley offered him the position at Lamar, Kennedy felt the need to tell his friend what had happened, to explain he wasn’t what the newspapers and television shows said he was. He had failed miserably in his attempt to explain the unexplainable, just as he had failed to explain it properly to the police in Pennsylvania. Just reliving that night with his friend, he nearly had a mental breakdown. Gabriel thanked God everyday that Harrison had known him when he had been considered a brilliant—if a little misguided—clinical psychologist on his way to the top.

  Beaumont, Texas was a good place to hide for the remainder of your life. People did not care about the stuff they talked about in the larger cities. As long as the Lamar Cardinals and the Dallas Cowboys were winning, and the bottom didn’t fall out of the oil market, Lamar University couldn’t give a damn about Kennedy, or his lost student, Warren Miller.

  “So, where do we stand to this point?” Kennedy asked with his back to his large class. “Freud never said that most issues of the human consciousness could be traced to a mean daddy or unloving mama. He didn’t say that it must have been Uncle Bob that molested you when you were seven, that made you climb the bell tower and shoot thirty-five people on the street.” He paused for the laughter from his first year students, as he turned away from the blackboard and faced them. “What he did say was people are built like we build cars: parts are added to the mind as you go through life. Good parts, bad parts, and sometimes the human thought process produces what the auto industry calls a lemon. Everything we read, see and experience is placed into that human mind, but how it is processed, stored, maintained and then acted upon is the real work of clinical psychology.”

  The buzzer sounded and the students started to rise and leave for the weekend. Kennedy felt as if he himself was the student who could not wait to get the hell out of this environment. As Kennedy placed his study guide and papers into his briefcase, he looked up. Since that night at Summer Place, he had been sensitive to the feeling of being watched. Still, he almost didn’t see the woman sitting at the rear of the class, hidden well in the theater-style seating. He reached down to his desktop, picked up his wire-rimmed glasses and put them on and then looked again. The woman was blonde and had her hair cut short. Kennedy didn’t recognize her, so he continued to put his papers away.

  “I’m not doing any outside tutoring this semester, sorry.”

  The woman did not respond. She sat quietly and watched the professor until he looked up once more. He studied her a moment and then frowned.

  “No,” he said as he closed his briefcase and secured its latches. “I don’t speak with newspapers, television people, or ladies’ sewing circles.”

  “Well, I don’t work for a newspaper, and I haven’t sewn anything since summer camp twenty years ago. So I guess that leaves me guilty of television,” the blonde woman said. She stood and slowly made her way down the slight incline of rowed seating.

  Kennedy looked at his watch. “Listen, I don’t even have the time it would take to say no again. I have to—”

  “Go home to your apartment, eat a Swanson’s frozen dinner and stare at the walls?” She placed her case on his desk.

  “Actually, it’s a Marie Callender’s Salisbury Steak frozen dinner. I have distinguishing taste.” He lifted his briefcase and turned away. “And it’s not the walls I stare at, it’s Jeopardy. This week is Tournament of Champions week, so, I gotta go.”

  “You may not remember, but I wrote to you, and called. Boy, did I call.”

  Kennedy took a few steps away and then stopped. His head dipped in exasperation.

  “I just want...” He paused, turning so the woman could see his face, “to be left alone. I have nothing to offer anyone, and I will never allow someone like you to make money from me saying anything about Summer Place. I owe it to my kids—to one of them in particular.”

  “We’re going back into Summer Place, Professor. We’re going on Halloween night for a live broadcast.”

  Kennedy closed his eyes and turned away, walking toward the door at the side of his teaching podium. His knuckles were white from his tight grasp on the briefcase handle.

  “Halloween...That’s a selling point for sponsors,” he said, not even affording her a look. “I wish you luck, Miss. Now, as I particularly like Salisbury steak, I’ll be saying goodbye.”

  “This is your chance, Professor. A chance to let the world know what happened.”

  Kennedy continued walking without looking back. The door opened and then closed.

  “Damn it!” she said, and slapped her hand on her case.

  Kennedy watched the microwave dinner rotate through the double-paned glass, his eyes fixed but not at all focused. Kelly Delaphoy had guessed correctly—a Swanson frozen chicken fried steak twirled in front of him. He couldn’t afford the luxury of Marie Callender’s. Though he stared at the spinning dinner, his eyes were seeing the bright yellow house with the white trim and manicured grass, the ornate and meticulously carved wood of the interior. The white walls of the billiard room and the gleaming water of the pool.

  He was so intent on his memories that he jumped when the bell went off. He shook his head and popped the small door open, but when the smell of the meal hit his nostrils, he frowned and slammed the door again without removing the dinner. He rummaged in the cabinet above the sink until he found the small bottle of Tennessee whiskey. He spun the cap and let it fall to the floor, and then poured a small shot into a milk-stained glass that his hand found in the sink. He lifted it to his mouth and then hesitated. The sharp smell of the alcohol hit him directly in the face and he let the small glass crash back into the sink. He leaned over and threw up his lunch, on top of the broken glass and dirty dishes.

  He didn’t know how long he leaned over the sink, but it was long enough for him to develop a kink in his back when he finally straightened. After running cold water from the tap and splashing his face, he turned and took two quick steps to the small kitchen table and its one orphaned chair. He sat and pressed his palms to his eyes as hard as he could.

  It was only then he realized that he had not thought of Summer Place in over two months. He had mentally blocked it from seeking its strong handhold on his mind, and he had done so without any psychology tricks learned in practice or school. He had just been working and, finally after years, sleeping.

  But there would always be someone in the world willing to throw his life for a loop because of what happened to him. He chuckled to himself—not a good sign if he was on the other side of the couch, but he laughed nonetheless. What happened to him? He laughed again. He looked around the dreary kitchen. What happened to him? At least he had a dump of a kitchen to go to. His former student would have been happy to have just that. Instead, he had been eaten alive. Kennedy froze in mid-laugh, and then thought for a brief moment. The laughing slowly gave way to sobbing, as these outbursts usually did. He knew himself as a once-strong man, a former football star. Now he was reduced to crying in his kitchen over the thought of a house that just wouldn’t die.

  Kennedy fell into a deep sleep at the table. Unlike most nights, tonight he had cried himself to sleep without the need for alcohol.

  At three in the morning, he came awake just long enough to stumble to his foldout couch—it had not been made up from the day before, or even the day before that—and collapse. Gabriel was well on his way to reliving that night long ago when he tried desperately to save his lost boy and the sanity of his remaining students from an entity, an enemy, that could not be defended against.

  As he drifted back to sleep with that night surrounding him o
nce more, he knew that Summer Place was a live thing, a hungry thing, and somehow he also knew that dinner service was once more being offered at the Pennsylvania retreat.

  The house was once again awake, and very hungry.

  October 13

  Bright River, Pennsylvania

  Greg drove the van over the uneven blacktop that wound around the furthest reaches of the estate. He had turned off the state maintained highway and onto the private road that led to Summer Place.

  Kelly sat in the front seat with a road map and her cell phone—and the phone’s GPS, which was telling her that the road map was mostly wrong. Paul Lowell sat in the backseat with Jason Sanborn, who had his ever-present water bottle in his right hand and his pipe clenched in his teeth. Every once in a while he would give his goatee a fatherly swipe of his hand.

  “With all the money this damn family has, they could fix these roads!” Greg said angrily as he swerved to miss a large pothole in the macadam.

  “I’m not really convinced that Lindemann has that much money.”

  Greg looked over at Kelly and then quickly back to the road.

  “You mean he went through the family fortune in less than twenty years? That had to be something in the range of a billion dollars.”

  “Bad investments, four wives, and the collapse of the base company back in the seventies helped drain most of it away. At one point, right around the time of the Kennedy fiasco, Wallace was flat broke. Only the death of the original Lindemann’s brother’s granddaughter bailed him out of his financial straits. She left him her small fortune of twenty million. He’s been scraping by ever since,” Kelly said facetiously. “The real fortune was left to the Lindemann philanthropic foundations in New York and Philadelphia—more than a billion dollars, untouchable to Wallace. That must kill him, to have that much money being doled out to the poor, museums, and art galleries.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Sanborn said, almost to himself.

  Greg looked in the mirror and Kelly glanced at Jason in the backseat.

  “Did you see that?” Jason asked, pointing up ahead, “Through the trees?”

  All of them strained to see what Jason was pointing at. As the van slowly came around a bend in the road, they saw it. There, through the thick pine trees, was Summer Place.

  “My lord, it’s gorgeous!” Kelly said.

  Greg slowed the van to a stop. The house sat in a large cleared valley below them like some turn-of-the-century countryside painting. The yellow painted wood slats of the main structure were trimmed in white, making it gleam in the sun. The large pool sparkled and the yellow and green striped awnings and deck chairs around the brilliant blue stood out starkly against the marble white concrete.

  “I have never seen a private residence this large look this gorgeous and homey,” Jason mumbled. He glanced worriedly at the back of Kelly’s head.

  Behind the pool, the giant barn and stables were impeccable in their red and white paint. But it wasn’t the beauty of the grounds that gave them pause; it was the four-story structure of Summer Place itself that held their fascination. It dominated the small valley. The wraparound porch was spectacular and the high-pitched gables bordered on gothic. The grounds were trimmed and clean and they could even see one of the caretakers off in the distance making the last run of the season on the grass with a large tractor-mower.

  “This looks like a resort, not someplace where people have come to die,” Paul said, leaning over Kelly’s seat.

  Greg placed both arms on the steering wheel and looked at the house sitting two miles distant. “It looks like something from a Walt Disney movie.”

  “Yeah, just as scary, too,” Jason said.

  Kelly didn’t answer them. She was looking at the numerous windows that lined the second and third floors of the house. The house had twenty-five bedrooms, but at this moment with their high vantage point above the property, it seemed so small. Her eyes roamed to the windowless fourth floor and the upper reaches of the gabled roof. The many angles caught the sun and she crooked her head and smiled.

  “You’re not getting the same vibes I am, boys,” she rolled her head and then closed her eyes. “This is the place where dreams come true.”

  Greg looked over at the blonde woman who had carried them from Cincinnati to LA—a woman who had never missed a beat as far as the show’s creativity went. Now he looked at the creator of Hunters of the Paranormal as if she had gone off the deep end.

  “We don’t need dreams here, Kelly, we need nightmares.”

  She opened her eyes and looked over at him with her perfect left eyebrow raised. “The sweetest of dreams can turn into nightmares, Greg, far more often than you realize.”

  Thirty minutes later, the van sat idling at the fifteen-foot-high wooden front gate. The crisscrossed beams of hewn wood were thick and looked as effective as steel. A small guard shack sat empty on their right, its glass still sporting the streaks of someone’s cleaning rag.

  Greg honked the van’s horn several times and succeeded only in startling birds from the green hedges and trees that had yet to taste the first real frost of fall. The hedges lined the front gates and the long, high fence that encompassed the main drive. Fancily trimmed, they were sculpted to look like the parapets of a castle. Behind them, the never-ending tree lines fronting the Pocono Mountains enclosed the house like tall guardsmen, and were just as unflinching.

  The sound of an approaching tractor stopped Greg from honking a third time. As they watched, it slowly wound its way around the large barn and onto the main paved drive. Kelly’s eyes went from the young man sitting atop the tractor to the main doors of the house that sat underneath the largest portico she had ever seen outside of a grand hotel. The long row of stone steps that led to the large double doors was clean, straight, and recently washed down.

  The tractor pulled up and the driver shut the loud diesel engine off then blithely hopped from the large machine while wiping his hands on an old red rag.

  “Property’s shut down for the season,” the young man said as he stepped up to the thick wooden gate. “Hell, we’re shut down every season.” The boy brushed a lock of long, oily blond hair from his face.

  Kelly rolled her window down and stuck her head out through the opening. “Are you one of the Johansson boys?” she asked.

  The teenager stopped wiping his hands on the filthy rag. He appraised Kelly as if she had been a delivery and it was up to him to inspect the shipment. Greg got out and walked around the front of the van to get between Kelly and the kid who acted as though he was lord of the estate.

  “Yeah, Jim Johansson. Now, who are you?” He seemed to take offense at Greg’s attempt to block his view.

  “We’re supposed to meet the owner here at noon,” Greg answered before Kelly could.

  The boy tilted his head to the side and smiled at Kelly from around her guardian. Facing Greg, still smiling, he spat on the ground.

  “Mom and Dad never said nothin’ to me, and they would have, seeing our family’s been caretakin’ here for the past sixty-two years.”

  “Well, regardless of that fact, we—”

  “Jimmy, what in the Sam Hell you doin’?”

  The voice that cut Greg off came from the shed on the other side of the guard shack. As they watched, the boy looked down at his shoes and then tossed the rag from hand to hand.

  “Don’t you have to finish mowing? I have to winterize that damn tractor early tomorrow morning, now get to it.”

  The voice belonged to an older man who stepped onto the drive from behind one of the hedges. She had the strangest feeling he had been watching them from his hidden shed the whole time they had been sitting there.

  The man stood about six feet, five inches and was heavy around the middle. His denim work shirt was clean but wrinkled and his green John Deere hat was crooked at a jaunty angle on his head. A toothpick was stuck in his mouth.

  “Sorry, we didn’t tell the boy that there would be comp’ny today,” the man said. The tra
ctor engine fired up and his son drove off with one last look back at Kelly. “Wife’s up to the house with your lunch on the table. Mr. Lindemann hasn’t shown yet.” He looked around Greg toward the van. “I thought there were supposed to be more of you.”

  “Yes, we have a large broadcast van and tech-crew truck coming in about an hour; could you let them in when they arrive?”

  “Well, Miss, I guess I will, since that’s the job they pay me to do.”

  As Greg climbed back into the van, Kelly watched as the middle aged man unlocked the thick chain holding the two halves of the wooden gate securely. His eyes never traveled over to the strangers as he pulled the chain through. It was as if he had no interest in them whatsoever. As he pulled open the left side of the double gate, which was plenty wide enough for them to get the van through, he tipped his hat as Greg pulled in.

  “Thank you,” Kelly said as they passed, but the large man said nothing.

  “Friendly folk out here in the wilds of Pennsylvania, I must say,” Sanborn quipped. Turning, he watched the man through the rear glass as he closed the gate behind them. Johansson looked their way, and a smile—or maybe more of a smirk—crossed the caretaker’s face as he shook his head. “Yeah…friendly folk…” Jason mumbled again, his words trailing off to nothing.

  “You said the original Mr. Lindemann hunted this valley before he built Summer Place?”

  “Yes, this used to be a hunting camp in the early 1880s.”

  “I can just imagine this place back then. The deer had to be everywhere,” Paul ventured from the back.

  Kelly, in the front seat, took the opportunity to examine Summer Place as they approached on the circular drive. As she took it all in, she felt in turn as if it were examining her. She jotted the thought down in her notebook for use in the script.