Chapter Text
DAY 13
A sound, guttural and multipronged, like some heavy chain being wrenched forward over an uneven floor. It has to be tearing his vocal cords apart. John can practically see them, although they could be tendons, straining in his neck like leaded pipes under thin film, sweat glistening on the apple of Gale’s throat as he throws his head back, bitten lips parted in agony. That sound again. That dreadful, desperate, deep howling of a man being torn soul from body. John’s not going to forget it for the rest of his life. He has no idea if that’ll be years, or simply the conclusion of this wretched, profane night.
TWO DAYS BEFORE SHOOT
“Christ, John, keep doing that.”
John looks up at Gale. Mouth hanging open, spit wetting the soft swell of his bottom lip, head back and eyes shut. He rolls his hips again, angling John further up toward his prostate.
“Not doing anything,” John says through gasping breaths.
Gale’s been riding him for nearly half an hour. His thighs must ache like hell, visibly trembling as he grinds down slow and hard onto John’s cock. He’s clenching in his body’s grip with every lowering and raising of his hips, muscle tight and hot around John’s full length. Little breathless moans keep stuttering out of him. John’s closer with each languid grind, but Gale’s keeping him right there, on the edge. It’s making John whine. It’s making him feel a little mean.
He grabs Gale’s narrow hips and thrusts up into him hard. Gale chokes in surprise, balance faltering. John grins, and does it again.
“Fuck, you’re pretty like this.”
Gale looks down at him. He looks mildly irritated. “Told you not to call me that.”
“But you are, doll,” John says, teasing and sickly sweet. He rocks up into the heat of Gale’s body, groaning at the glide. There’s lube smeared in John’s public hair, half-tacky and making lewd sounds as Gale fucks himself down. He’d wanted it like this. Wet and slow; Gale’s own cock leaking pearly and sticky against his stomach. He rolls his eyes. Opens that pretty mouth like he’s going to say some other objection, so John cuts him off with another rough thrust. “Y’know there’s some real filth about you online, doll. You gonna tell all them to stop callin’ you precious, too? Would take all day.”
“I’ll just-” he’s panting now, resolve crumbling as John takes control of their speed. “I’ll steal your laptop. Stop you postin’ it.”
John sits up just to laugh into Gale’s open mouth. Gale’s hole is so tight, the new angle so warm and deep around John he can feel his stomach tensing. He moans as he pulls Gale’s hips forward again.
“Jesus, I’m close, Buck.”
“Yeah,” Gale gasps at John’s teeth. “Yeah, God, yeah- yes- hang on, hang on-”
John’s groaning the moment he hears it. Not good groaning; exasperated groaning, because, “Don’t do it, don’t fuckin’ answer- fuck.”
Gale, sweaty and shuddering still, climbs off John’s lap. The air is suddenly freezing around his aching cock. He watches mournfully as Gale answers his ringing cell phone.
“Yeah? No, I’m not doing anything.”
“Fuck you, Buck,” John says.
Gale pushes his damp hair back from his forehead, giving John the middle finger without a glance back toward him. “Yeah, it’s John.”
“Is that Brady?”
Gale waves a dismissive hand. “Yeah, we can be there in forty-five.”
“No we fuckin’ can’t,” John calls out. He’s stroking himself idly, watching Gale pout from the end of the bed. “Make it ninety. Make it two hours.”
“There’s something up with the edit,” Gale hisses at him. “We can continue this later.”
“Ah, Jesus Christ,” John moans. Then says, louder, “May you never know fuckin’ peace John Brady.”
“Never do with you,” Gale says for him, hanging up and throwing John’s underwear at his chest. “C’mon. Let’s go.”
“Nuh-uh,” John says. “You’re not bein’ serious.”
“Am, Bucky,” Gale’s already looking around for his shirt. John sees it out of the corner of his eye, one sleeve poking out from under the bed. He doesn’t mention it. He sits up, wraps his arms back around Gale’s bare waist and pulls him down. “Bucky. Brady’s waitin’ on us.”
“Tell him we aren’t in a three-way relationship,” John says. Gale rolls his eyes, but John can feel him yield in the way he softens in his hold, allowing himself to hit the sheets again.
“Ain’t in any relationship, far as he knows,” Gale reminds him. John smiles at him, pushing his legs further open. Gale goes easy. His breath hitches as John presses two fingers back inside him. “’M serious, Bucky. We’ve talked- ah- about-”
“I know, I know,” John says, a third finger sliding into Gale’s body with almost no resistance. He opens him back up for a moment, until Gale’s writhing beneath him, fucking himself down on John's hand. John pulls out, lowers himself to kiss Gale’s left hip. Repeats from memory; “If we don’t get picked up for a fourth season. Don’t shit where you eat. Although-”
“Jesus, John,” Gale gasps as John dips lower, pushes his tongue into him just briefly. “You’re- Christ- you're incorrigible.”
John laughs as he sits up again, lining his cock up, pressing in just a little. Gale grunts, relents his mask of steel finally, wrapping his legs around John’s back and dragging him forward. John falls down onto his elbows as he bottoms out, watching in awe as Gale arches up, moaning into his mouth.
“Say incorrigible again,” John challenges, pulling out nearly all the way before driving his hips home with force. Gale only whines. “Yeah, you want it, you pretty thing.”
“I swear to God-” Gale starts.
John laughs, kissing him and fucking in deep. Gale stops complaining, after that. John’s head dips between his shoulders as his cock sinks in, sheathed by Gale’s hot clutch, muscle spasming around him. Gale moves to take himself in hand, and John, still feeling a little petty from earlier, pins his wrists to the bed.
“Bucky,” Gale gasps.
“Hold on,” says John. He pulls out halfway, holds himself there, feels the throb of his pulse right where he’s joined with Gale. “Fuck.”
“Bucky, please,” Gale’s sweating, and squirming underneath him.
John fucks him harder. Keeps his hands immobile, keeps himself raised enough over Gale’s body that he’s got nothing to grind his cock against. John watches it twitch and slap full and pretty on his stomach with each thrust, leaving a pearling smear of sticky desperation in that gold trail of hair.
“Hold on,” John says again, half mangled and breathless.
He’s sped up now. Fucking Gale hard enough that each noise beneath John is ragged and keening, John’s own groans and gasps picking up volume until he comes, heat rolling through his gut and crashing wave-like and overwhelming. John shakes. Breathes deep. Grinds himself further in just to feel the wet slide of his own spend inside Gale.
“John.”
John looks down at him. Flushed and panting, sweat gathering in the hollow of his throat where his heartbeat is visibly drumming under his skin. He bites the peach curve of his bottom lip, and John can only be so petty for so long. He lowers himself. Kisses those lips, fucks his tongue deep into Gale’s mouth and hears his muted moan.
“Take what you need,” John breathes.
He doesn’t move his grip from Gale’s wrists. Doesn’t pull out of his body. Watches, delighted, as Gale does exactly what John wanted him to do. He rolls his hips upward, the new angle allowing him to grind against John’s stomach like an animal, and it only takes a few needy, frantic jerks for him to come, cock trapped between their bodies and spilling as he groans.
John grins as he finally pulls out. “See? How long did that take?”
Gale’s grimacing at the mess on his torso. “You’re-”
“Incorrigible?” John suggests, with a wink.
†††
The job was perfect. Perfect in an insensitive, morbid kind of way, but that is the job. A heritage property, creaking hinges and cobwebs included free of charge.
It’s the site of a double-murder-suicide.
Some mother had killed her sweetheart and two kids as they slept. Even after years on the frontline of all this bullshit, the details make John’s skin crawl. It happened long ago- over forty years- the place beginning to crumble and turn in on itself, but the energy remained unsettled, to say the least.
Off camera John would say the vibe was rancid, but that’s not what he gets paid for.
She’d suffocated the kids, but had poisoned the father before shooting herself. Most women poisoned, this shocked John none, but she’d not done it slow, or sneaky. She’d shoved a tube down his throat, and pumped his stomach full of lye. He’d dissolved from the inside out.
Despite the gnarly specifics, it was- morbidly, insensitively- perfect. Cash in hand. Not John’s favourite, like he needed any more reason to feel seedy about the whole thing, but they’d been told that’s just how the estate ran business, and he wasn’t going to look too hard to find cracks in that story when the cash was a good chunk of cash. Talking head interviews, a history segment that’s always, as a rule, eighty-percent or above true. The overnight stay. John still hates overnight stays. If he didn’t have Gale, level-headed and cool, he reckons he’d still have to go heavy on the bottle to get through them. It’s not like either of them believe in any of this. Bucky would just rather his own, spook-free bed.
It was a standard affair. A completely average, uneventful shoot.
Now, in their editing suite, John says, “You found a what?”
“It looks like a ghost,” says Brady.
John stares at him. He’s leaning over a screen in front of them, knobbly spine constantly visible at the top of his neck with how frequently he’s stooped over a monitor, a camera, a script, a whisky. In his time producing the show, John has never known him to be anything other than serious. Dry-toned and competent beyond his years.
“Johnny. I know you’re a believer,” John says, crossing his heart with eyes on the ceiling and receiving a stern glare in return, “but c’mon.”
Brady pinches the bridge of his nose. John reckons there’s a permanent indent there by now. “There’s nothing on our cameras. It’s clear as day. But our thermals- there’s a definite shape.”
“Uh-huh,” John says. He peers at the screen from around Brady’s shoulders. “A shape. Are you sure the recordings are lining up?”
“You wanna do my fuckin’ job, Bucky, be my guest.”
“Don’t think your winning charm will take you far in front of the camera,” John says.
“Oh, I’m not swapping,” Brady says. “I’m taking my cut and going to Paris.”
John snorts. “Paris, Texas maybe.”
“John,” Gale says.
Both John and Brady turn to look at him. He’s frowning slightly at their monitors, nodding at the bottom left one: a still thermogram filling the screen. It’s difficult to discern, but far from impossible. There is a figure in the centre. A dark smudge in the middle of the room, two arms, two legs, a head. It’s deep purple, almost black. The figure is freezing.
“This hasn’t been touched?” Gale says. It’s an open secret; everyone does it. Drops ghouls straight into frame with the power of editing software. No one would ever get any evidence otherwise. Because ghosts aren’t real.
“This is raw,” says Brady.
“Right,” Gale says. He scratches his head.
John frowns at the screen. He leans closer, peering at the blurry figure, tapping the monitor. “Where’s the Canon footage?”
“Here.” Brady points.
They all look. John scours the monitor, searching up and down for any signs of tampering or manipulating. Brady would never allow it at this stage, but John tries to find it either way. Their team is good. Curt’s perfected the skill of fast, flitting camerawork; the ideal balance of steadiness that prevents a homemade look, and just enough jerking, imprecise movements that allow for an apparition or odd shadow to be slipped into the blur in post. Kenny’s great at adding them in. It’s almost seamless. They’ve got no big time FX, however. Every part of the show stretches their budget to the absolute limit, including the paycheques of their editing room. So John searches, squinting and uneasy, looking for any signs of fatigue, any imperfection, any digital puppet strings left in.
There’s none. There’s nothing on the screen at all. Just an empty room.
“Time stamps are right,” Gale says.
“Course they’re right,” says Brady. “It’s the same footage. Untouched. There’s nothing fucking there.”
“But there’s something there,” John says quietly, turning back to the thermal monitor. A shudder rolls down his spine. He spares a glance at Gale. He’s looking right back at him, jaw clenching, brows furrowed. “Alright. It’s fuckin’ weird.”
“Even if there was someone in the room,” Gale says, still looking at John as if he’s nervous to turn back to the screens. It flips something in John’s stomach. Gale doesn’t get nervous. “They’d be colder than the lowest human body temperature.”
John looks back at the thermogram. He swallows hard. “They’d be dead.”
ONE DAY BEFORE SHOOT
“It’s going to be boring as hell,” John says. “We’ll run out of footage.”
“So we run out,” Gale says. He’s strolling out from the shower, towel low on his waist, and John stares unabashed at his hips, at the line of hair slipping just out of view. “Awful lot of money.”
“Yup,” John says, thoroughly distracted.
Gale reaches for his pants. John leans over to the other side of the bed, hooking his fingers into the fold of the towel and pulling Gale down. The towel falls. Gale rolls his eyes. Reaches for his pants again, so John gets his hands around his waist and drags him onto the mattress. He runs a gentle touch up from Gale’s hip-bone to his ribs, tan skin still damp from the spray.
“You listenin’ to me?”
John shakes his head. Takes Gale’s wrists, straddles him, licks at one of his nipples until he’s arching beneath him. Gale frees a hand and tugs at John’s hair. John groans softly, biting until he hears Gale gasp, and then Gale is shoving him off with a huff.
“Bucky.”
“What?” John sighs. He allows himself to be pushed back to his own side, and flops down in defeat. “Yes. Yeah. A lot of fuckin’ money. I dunno, Buck, do you not think it’s gonna be a waste of time? The Ram Inn’s opened its filming schedule again, and we got those two museum offers on the table. The fuckin’,” he waves his hand, memory escaping him, Gale’s bare stomach flexing as he sits up to get his phone. “The one with the doll; that one in New York that’s going bust.”
“It’s going bust, Bucky,” says Gale, scrolling through his phone.
“Yeah, but it’s got attractions. You’ve seen that doll. It’s creepy as fuck, everyone on the circuit wants a piece. We’ve done this one, Buck, we got good footage. We got great footage, we got a fuckin’ ghost.”
“We got a technical anomaly that we can sell,” Gale says. He looks at John, face softening a little. “You don’t think it’s worth something? Us goin’ back? Says something. It don’t gotta be the whole fortnight, but we need something explosive, John. Everyone’s got the dolls.”
“God, you’re chatty on this,” John says.
“We ain’t getting renewed ’less we got something nobody else has got,” Gale ignores him. “Y’wanna go back to YouTube? ’Cos those Buzzfeed guys got us beat on that.”
John groans, running his hands over his face. Gale’s right, he’s always right, but John has a bad feeling about it. In no cosmic, otherworldly way. He just gets the creeps from the place, from its owner- a weird, insular type on the phone, yet miles away in Campania or somewhere, sunning it up whilst John and the crew do his personal real estate advertising. It makes his skin crawl. The whole job has, as of late, been making his skin crawl with wasted fucking ambition. The ratings haven’t been helping.
“What if I wanna do serious docs again?” he says.
Gale frowns at him. “Thought you said there wasn’t anythin’ in baseball exposés.”
“You don’t have to say it like that,” John says, pressing the words into a pulp against his teeth to stop the bitterness coming through.
“Bucky. Hey,” Gale grabs his chin. “Meant nothin’ by it. C’mon, what is this?”
John breathes through his nose. Bites the inside of his cheek, reaching out to the still-bare planes of Gale’s body. John’s chest feels all knotted up and heavy with something like yearning. He says slowly, “Maybe it wouldn’t be the end of the world if we got axed.”
Gale looks pained. “John.”
“Or don’t you think that would sell,” John presses on; an old, boring debate that he can’t leave well enough alone. “You know people online already think we’re fucking. They got a name for us, y’know, like Brangelina.”
“I don’t go online,” Gale says.
“You’re on your goddamn emails right now.”
“John,” Gale says. He sighs, faced pinched, and John feels a pang of guilt settle cold and heavy in his stomach.
“You’re right,” he sighs.
It hurts, like always, but he’s not trying to be an asshole. Everyone knows John’s business, and people only know because of some other asshole whose business it wasn’t to tell. It took him weeks of misery, hiding in his apartment and re-reading all the shitty forums; pictures of him coked up and kissing anyone, girl or guy, who made him feel a little better about himself, one rotten night in some grimy club. He’s got no idea who took them. He’s got no idea who any of the people he’d necked onto were, either. The coke had gone, replaced by mood stabilisers and Marlboros, but the pictures, and John’s business, are out there forever. He’s owned it. It helped, in some ways. Bagans plays the bad boy of paranormal tv, but when John was outed as a real human- when John was outed- viewings for 100 Haunts shot sky-high for a while. It doesn’t change that it all happened without his consent, and he isn’t doing that to Gale any time soon. No matter how much he wants to hold his fucking hand.
“Bucky,” Gale says. John blinks at him, shaking off the memory. Gale kisses him, speaks gently as he says, “It ain’t about that. ’M not tryin’ to hide us. But we can’t be distracting the crew right now, risking the network dropping us. We’re on the rocks. Just gotta get out of this rut with the ratings before we complicate things.”
“Think they’ll improve if I start makin’ a public fool outta myself again?” John says, aiming for levity, landing somewhere between desperation and sourness.
Gale’s mouth flattens into a firm line. “John.”
“I’m kidding, I’m kidding.”
“I’m serious,” Gale says. His fingers are still ghosting over John’s jaw, playing with the curls at the nape of his neck. “Just ’til this season airs. Then you can tell anyone you like,” he kisses the shell of John’s ear, making him shudder. “Can take me on dates.”
“Sure thing,” John deadpans. Gale’s particular about publicity; fiercely private, almost comes off shy if you don’t know him any better. “What next, huh, Buck? Gonna let me fuck you on the writer’s room table?”
“If you want,” Gale says. Hardly a whisper, lips wet at John’s pulse. “Just do one thing for me?”
John swallows, tongue heavy. “What’s that?”
“Can you sign off on this email?”
John hums, angling his neck so that Gale has better access, hands trailing down his slim side until it reaches the apex of his hip. He blinks.
“What?”
“It’s high priority,” Gale is saying. He’s sitting, picking his phone back up, scrolling through his lengthy response to the house’s owner. John feels like he’s been stung.
“Aw, for fuck’s sake, Buck.”
“John, it’s the last correspondence we’ll have with him unless there’s a major issue, then it’s just the groundskeepers. We start shooting tomorrow.”
John falls back against the pillow and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. “You’re killin’ me.”
“I’ll send it, just remind me what he said on the phone again.”
“You know what he said,” John laments, voice muffled by the sheets he’s begun trying to suffocate himself with. He lifts his head like it weighs a thousand pounds, rests it on Gale’s hip and relays from memory: “Mutually beneficial arrangement. Payin’ us double for a revisit, ’cos he needs some televised limelight to convince the housing boards of its historical relevance. Because it’s fallin’ down.”
“Ain’t gonna fall on our heads, Bucky, he assured us of that.”
“Buck, this guy thinks his house is haunted. He's a nutjob. He's got all the money in the world to bulldoze the whole thing and rebuild some swish new mansion on the site, and he's tryin’ to save its crumbling fate with a ghost hunting show.”
“He don’t wanna bulldoze it because it’s his home, John. It's been in the same family for decades.”
“What he said on the phone, actually, was that he didn’t want to upset whatever’s inhabiting it that isn’t him. He moved in, voluntarily, after all the shit that happened there. I don't give a shit if it's his family's house. That's insane.”
“Bucky,” Gale says. John looks up at him. He’s got that end-of-conversation face that only shuts John up half the time, but John sighs, slumps back into the mattress and grinds his jaw. “We got nothin’ to lose.”
“Home comforts,” John mutters. The sheets are scratchy beneath his bare back. John hates the overnight stays.
Gale smiles. “Don’t gotta stay there the whole time. Can slum it in motels every other night, if you want.”
“’S’in the contract,” John groans. “The whole damn two weeks.”
“Anyone there now?” Gale says. “He gonna know if we sneak out for a double bed and a tub a couple evenings?”
“Buck Cleven,” John says, slow and grinning. He sidles up Gale’s body, leans over him with hands caging his shoulders. “Thought you loved a contract.”
Gale makes an amused kind of sound, pulling John down with cool fingers at his hips.
DAY 1
There’s little sense of opportunity or excitement in John as he stares at the gigantic house. Mostly trepidation; uncharacteristic and uncomfortable, and completely undeniable. The place is truly spooky. The red brick centre of the face of the house boasts a large, ornate door, intricate patterns and carved designs rotting and crumbling from decades of weather and neglect. Each side of the brick is framed by a narrower section; one wrapped in wooden slats on the upper floor, the other hollowed and held up precariously by pillars, giving way to some kind of large balcony or second floor patio, filled with leaves and one lone, rusted bench. The owner had assured them that it was safe to stay in. That for a crew of five, with lighter and more mobile equipment than a bigger budget show, the place was not going to collapse on their heads. Only to be wary of the staircases inside. The basement door that won’t reopen if it falls fully shut. The master bedroom; untouched for decades and preserved as a once-sterilised crime scene, is not to be slept in. Like they fucking would, John thinks.
The yard out front is depressing enough alone. It’s rained recently, ochre and orange leaves turning into brown sludge, melding with the gravelly pathway and covering the whole exterior in an iron-hued mulch. There’s a swing set that won’t stop squeaking in the breeze. Even the steps up to the porch are in utter disrepair, white paint clinging for dear life at the edges, the rest of them having turned the colour of necrosis long ago. A shiver creeps down John’s spine. As far as countryside getaways go, this one is a fucking doozy.
“We go in through there again?” Curt’s saying, slogging his cameras out of the van and gesturing vaguely toward the elaborate door.
A small man, hunched and wrinkled, in khaki green rain boots and a matching mac that dwarfs him, is waving toward the side of the house. The groundskeeper, John hazards a guess.
“By no means,” he says. Lilting, accented with some touch of Europe that John can’t place. “By no means. Soldered shut. This way.”
John looks sidelong at Curt and raises an eyebrow. They went through the front last time. John remembers the way the huge doors yawned and groaned. They’d got good footage; a dramatic, fitting entrance.
“Uh,” he calls out to the man. “Soldered shut?”
“Try it, if you like,” says the groundskeeper, voice growing smaller as he shuffles further around the derelict porch. “Storm last week damaged the hinges. They will rip and it will crush you dead.”
“Jesus,” mutters Curt.
“S’pose we know what to do if we can’t take it anymore,” John says under his breath.
The groundskeeper turns, papery forehead creasing so low above his glasses that the hairs of his brows seem to swallow the tops of the rims. “Say something?”
“No, no,” John waves a hand. Flashes his best tv smile. “Got it. By absolutely no means.”
The groundskeeper turns again, leads them around the back of the house, and stops in front of a rusted basement bulkhead. He fiddles with the equally weathered padlock. The chain closing the doors slithers loudly to the ground.
“Right,” John says.
“What’s wrong with the front doors?” Brady says, rounding the corner with Gale and Benny, all three of them making little effort to mask their unease.
“Soldered shut,” John repeats, still staring at the curled chain amongst the leaves.
“Soldered-” Brady starts, but Gale clears his throat. Steps in front, standing straight and assuming his ever-professional poise.
“Need a hand, sir?” he gestures toward the large, hooked handles on each door.
The groundskeeper smiles. John can’t quite tell if it’s insincere in its inability to meet his eyes, or simply the result of being thin-lipped and old.
“Gustav, please. Yes, if you will.”
Gale nods, and John shakes himself out of his head enough to join him at the doors. The groundskeeper- Gustav- looks old enough to dislocate something if he tries. Sure enough, the things are fucking heavy. It takes a hell of a lot of effort to wrench his side open, and even more effort to conceal his panting after the fact. Twenty a day will do that, John surmises, even if he shook the worst of that habit three years ago.
When the doors are flung wide, John peers down into the cellar. Dust has settled on the steps so thick that he thinks they’re painted grey for a moment. He reaches just inside for a thin cord switch, tugs it, and watches with a knot in his gut as the place is illuminated by three swinging, bare bulbs. It’s full of boxes. Full of crap with dirty sheets flung over it; the vague shape of chairs and various furnishings turned into ghostly, eerie, anonymous lumps. The steps themselves look like a death trap.
“You get your shit down there alright?” he asks, turning to Benny and Curt, filming equipment piling up behind them.
Benny looks around John’s shoulders. Down at the narrow staircase; the sheet-covered obstacles. “Guess we ain’t got a choice.”
“You have the keys, yes?” Gustav says. John feels them out on his belt loop. The whole antique ring of them. He nods. “You remember the layout, yes? Then I will leave you to it. I won’t interrupt your schedule, but I am only twenty minutes down the drive if you need anything.”
“Thank you very much, sir,” Gale says.
“Twenty minutes down one drive?” Brady hisses. John shushes him.
He thanks Gustav with promises of a shared bottle of whisky once the shoot is done. Watches him turn to the front of the house once more, and disappear. Turns back to his crew, holding a disbelieving laugh behind his teeth and shrugging.
“Alright, boys. Let’s get stuck in.”
†††
Brady, Benny, and Curt set up their shit in each room. John helps best he can, before being told not to fuck with the monitors, and then he just watches, taking in the layout of the place, refreshing his brain since the last time they shot here.
“Let’s go exploring,” he whispers to Gale, pulling him to one side and setting his lips to his neck, pressing him into a peeling wall.
“Bucky,” Gale warns.
The others are chatting in another room, their voices carrying and undulating in volume. John kisses Gale open-mouthed in the exposed hallway. Grinds his hips against him once, twice, three times to get him sighing at John’s teeth. He ducks out from under him. Elbows him gently in the ribs and goes on ahead. John whistles low as he walks away.
It’s an attractive house on the inside, really. Underused, dirty, but clearly loved. Through one door to the side of the hallway is a large, old fashioned kitchen. Big square porcelain sink and all. John’s thrilled to see a note on the counter, Beer In Fridge scrawled in splattered fountain ink.
Further up the hall, there’s the living room; the most impressive room in the house. It’s enormous. Cluttered as hell, books and newspapers piled against the yellowing walls, shelves and shelves of more leather-bound volumes stretching up to the high ceiling on one side. On every other wall there are portraits. Gold-framed, varying shapes and sizes, with a mixture of paintings and black and white photographs inside. John guesses they’re all of the family. The murders happened in the seventies, they’d been told. The killer had been some estranged aunt of the current owner, who's kept it largely untouched since inheriting it. John doesn’t think it’s been touched for even longer than that. The whole place is a bizarre and confused time capsule, like something out of Dracula; if Dracula had a bright orange Anglepoise, a CRT tv, WiFi, and a fridge with an ice-maker.
He slumps down onto a deep red chaise lounge, and is half surprised it doesn’t immediately snap beneath his weight. Dust kicks up around him in a fine mist.
“Jesus, Bucky, be careful,” Benny says as he twiddles with his mics, looping the wires around a ladder propped against the book-laden wall.
“I’m gettin’ comfortable,” John says.
“You’re gettin’ fleas,” Gale says back. John smiles at him, and woofs.
They were right to be warned about the stairs. As they make their way up, each one creaks with a reverberating death rattle that seems to last far longer than their shoes’ contact with them. The staircase winds to the left, opening up to a wrapping internal balcony that looks down upon the hall. Down upon the soldered-shut front doors.
The second floor is comprised of three bedrooms, and two bathrooms. It’s a strange layout; clearly half modernised in the removal of each four poster bed, the addition of extension cords. Benny and Brady take one, Curt another, and John and Gale in the final suite. John notes the two single beds, thinks about how he’ll push them together later. Curt and Benny set up their equipment in the two double rooms, just in case. John feels slightly weird about staying in a bugged bedroom for two whole weeks.
He’ll just have to remember to turn it all off, when it comes to pushing those beds together.
In Curt’s room, having the luxury of all that space to himself, they create a makeshift editing suite. Brady sets up all his monitors. Fewer and smaller than the ones in their actual studio; travel-sized and portable. Investigation specific. Curt only grumbles briefly about sharing a bed with a bunch of wires.
“Ready for the top?” says Gale as they come out, tilting his head upwards.
John follows the long line of his throat to the direction of his jaw. The second set of stairs. Up to the top floor. He swallows, rolls his head on his shoulders, then smiles.
“You’re not?”
Gale smiles back. Shrugs a little. “You first.”
John cocks his head. “Nah, you.”
“Jesus, stop flirting,” Curt groans, barrelling past them. Gale flushes deep pink, and John smirks.
The top floor is fucking awful. John doesn’t believe in spirits, he doesn’t put any stock in the existence of the supernatural, but he’s not about to say there’s nothing weird up here. That there isn’t a dreadful, sick feeling that curls up in his stomach as they ascend those final few stairs. At least they’re not sleeping here. Although, he thinks, being forbidden from sleeping up here is almost no better- almost as though there’s some real danger, beyond the fact that the attic roof is caving in.
“’S just ’cos of the roof, Bucky,” Gale says. Like he’s read John’s mind.
John grinds his teeth. Pushing a smile out from around them. “Yeah.”
The top floor is a ruin. Unlike the rest of the house- lovingly, if not messily maintained- it’s clear that few have ventured up here in years. The wallpaper peels back from the walls, as if even the fading flowers on it want to stretch and grow away from the foundations. It curls and crumbles into dust on the carpet. Cobwebs are nestled into every corner of the ceiling. The doors of the only two rooms on the floor are open, leaning off their hinges. Benny makes a hissing noise beside him, and heads on into the smallest of the two.
It’s the kids’ bedroom. They’ve been here before, they’ve filmed here before, but it doesn’t detract from the horrendous feeling John gets stepping inside. The ceilings are sloped, the whole room claustrophobic and dark. The pink wallpaper is coming off in curling strips. Two little beds for two little girls are pressed up against opposite walls, hardly a metre between them. There’s still stuffed animals sleeping on the pillows, embalmed in dust.
“Alright,” Brady says, clipped and tense. “Get this one done fast.”
“Fuckin’ roger that,” Curt says, wiring up the cameras and sensors with a hurried, taut edge to his movements.
Benny does the same with his mics, grimacing as he brushes cobwebs out of his way, tucking a cable behind an old framed photograph of a horse. John winces at it, and rubs his left temple. This is the part of the job that feels profoundly scummy. Wrapping their fake tv bullshit around the remnants of two children’s short lives. He glances at Gale. He’s gone incredibly stiff. Fixated, unblinking, at a crucifix in the centre of the wall. It’s hanging just above the beds. Jesus’ mournful plastic face staring down at them, Gale gone equally mournful staring back.
“Hey,” John says. “Buck. You good?”
Gale blinks slowly, tearing his eyes away from the cross and looking at John with a wavering smile. “’M good.”
John looks at Benny and Curt, engrossed in their set-up. At Brady, who’s left the room, only his back visible beyond the door. He lowers his voice, chewing on his next words with measured concern.
“You know it’s nothin’ like that,” he says gently. “I mean, it’s evil shit, but it’s not like-”
“It’s good,” Gale says. He squeezes John’s hand quickly, subtly, running his other hand through his hair and shaking his head. “’S’all good.”
John studies him. Holds onto the tips of his fingers as long as he can. Thinks of the scar nestled into the divots of Gale’s spine; old and faded, the apostolic shape of it just as jarring to see now as it was the very first time. John opens his mouth to say something more when Benny turns around, says they’re done, and Gale breaks contact fast as anything to get out of that room.
It’s not like the next one is any better.
The main change John notes from last time is that a quarter of the roof is missing. Already crumbling, presumably ripped off by last week’s storm, the gap is filled by several layers of thick tarp stapled to the rafters. It sags somewhat beneath the gathered rain, but the inside remains impressively dry. It’s a barren room. Far emptier and more impersonal than the kids’, in a way that makes it feel almost like a pre-made set. John knows nobody’s messed with it since the murders. It was scrubbed raw once, a long time ago, but thick filth has since settled over every surface, preserving it as a dreadful husk. The walls are grey, stripped wood stained with damp. The bed is grey with dust, its heavy frame the only thing inside the room that looks solid anymore. There’s still a bloodstain on the floor. At least, it looks like a bloodstain. Perhaps only the memory of one; the darkened, circular splotch on the floorboards merely a lack of varnish and pale paint, from where the blood had been originally lifted. John eyes it warily. It still looks kind of copper, if anyone were to ask him.
This is where they found their ghost.
Somewhere in the vast emptiness of this master bedroom, near the foot of the bed, is where their thermogram had picked up something human-shaped, and so cold it couldn’t sustain life. There is a chill. It’s coming from the rip in the roof, a gentle breeze rustling the tarp and raising goosebumps on John’s neck. Only, the roof had been whole when they were last here.
“Christ,” he says.
“C’mon,” Curt says, moving past him. “Last room.”
John watches as he sets up the final cameras, and keeps close to the bedroom door. He notices Gale hasn’t come in. John turns, searching for him in the dark of the hallway, and spots him back outside the kids’ bedroom.
“Buck?”
Gale clears his throat, clicks his neck. Digs his fingers into his spine, just under his collar. “Think they were big believers?”
John tracks his gaze. That little crucifix, strung up between the beds. It looks so small from all the way back here. Something quotidian, completely unremarkable; a piece of wood and a piece of plastic stuck together with factory glue. He bites the inside of his cheek. Feels his chest tighten, twinging with the urge to pull Gale close. He wants to rip the cross down off the wall.
“Nah,” he says, nudging Gale’s shoulder with what he hopes is an easy grin. “Nothin’ but a bit of tat, Buck.”
Gale smiles faintly. He doesn’t look at John.
†††
John hunts down the beers in the fridge as soon as they’re done. It’s late in the day, and they’ve posted up in a circle on the huge square balcony. The evening is balmy for October, the sun setting early, but in a sky cloudless enough that the orange glow of it lingers as they stoke a little campfire. Brady’s packed his pipe, the oldest twenty-five year old John’s ever met, and John breathes in the thick second hand smoke like chasing a honeyed memory.
“Ah shit, sorry, Bucky,” Brady waves his hand in front of his face.
John waves his own hand, the one not holding his beer, wafting the smoke back towards him. “Don’t you dare. Gimme.”
“Bucky,” Gale says. He’s leaning back in his rickety chair, legs splayed, lips wet with the sparkling traces of home-made ginger beer they’d found next to the crates of Bud. The longer John drinks from his own bottle, the more he sort of wants to climb into Gale’s lap.
“How many times you quit now, huh?” Curt says.
John shoots him a glare. “I’ve cut down. Which means I’m allowed one drunk smoke every now and again. And I’m definitely allowed to stick my nose in Little John’s direction, right? Hey?”
“Alright, alright,” Brady says, moving backwards to avoid John’s still-wafting hands. John laughs.
“Gonna need it stuck here for two fuckin’ weeks with you lot.” He throws Gale a wink, ill-advised and tipsy, and relishes in the way his cheeks pinken, looking away with an aborted smile.
“It’ll fly by,” says Benny, and Curt raises his beer in response.
“To the two longest weeks of our lives,” he says.
“Cheers to that,” John says. “Cheers to fuckin’ that.”