Hobbs Hollow

"Hello?" I called out softly.

"Konichiwa?" She replied slurring the word badly. "Hello Joe." She giggled. "Sucky-sucky fuck five bucky."

"Huh?" I said as I saw the spirit appeared barely of age. She was extremely cute but the pain in her expression was clear. "Can I help?"

"No help." She struggled to get her point across. "He won't let you."

"He won't? Who won't?" I asked as a wind blew through the hallway. It picked up in strength as something else manifested. "What the hell is that?!" I asked as I fought to keep my feet and aim the camera. The distinctive sound of helicopter rotors roared in my ears. I took out one of the glass globes and lobbed it down the hall.

"Grenade!" A man called out. Instead of an explosion everything stopped. I was once more alone, and my surroundings were empty of any spiritual manifestation.

"Damn! That was intense!" Don exclaimed. "Was she a Saigon whore?"

"Subtle and tactful," Tori growled at Don. "But yeah, she was definitely Asian."

"Anything I should know about Cassandra?" I asked but she didn't reply. "Cassandra?"

"She's gone... again." Madison declared. "Give us a sec to check the cameras and sensors."

I waited and kept watch for movement around me. Cassandra didn't suddenly appear, and they couldn't locate her. Maybe that just freaked her out and she retreated to her safe room. I asked to see if they wanted me to continue, they did. I felt that it was a waste of time after that level of manifestation. Was there a Vietnam vet haunting the house? It seemed to feel that way.

"Fuck this, I am going to check out the other hallway!" I snapped as I felt a sudden rush of rage. "Sorry, I don't know what got under my skin. Another poor choice of words."

I turned around and passed the tripod where the two halls met. I looked down and waved at the assembled crew. I couldn't see Cassandra, so she was either hiding or left the mansion altogether. I didn't blame her. The roar from the helicopter blades had almost been too much for me. Was it learning about what bothered me? That was unsettling and I hesitated before entering the left hall.

"Anything?" I asked as I stood next to the mounted camera.

"Nada," Don informed me. "It is all clear for now."

"Take your time Forrester..." A voice said over the earbud.

"Who said that?!" I snapped with an equal mixture of anger and fear.

"Said what?" Madison asked her voice welcome and soothing.

"Never mind. I am walking down the hall now." I stated as I pushed on.

I opened one of the bedroom doors. This side had been cleaned and was dust free. Perhaps we were meant to sleep in here. I walked in as my uneasiness deepened to full on dread. I wasn't alone. I took the scanner and held it up.

"Hello." I called out.

"Forrester." She greeted me from behind. I spun to face the woman in the doorway. This was no spirit, she appeared to be flesh and blood. "I didn't mean to startle you." She giggled. "I apologize for being late. I am Deirdre Crane, Cassandra's cousin."

"She never mentioned you." I stated as she walked towards me. She had the tell-tale Crane characteristics and she drew a close resemblance to her cousin. The chief difference between the two women was the noticeable wave in her hair and a more down to earth personality. Cassandra had a perpetual air of aristocracy while Deirdre was more easy going. "How goes the investigation?"

"The house has been surprisingly lively." I shared as she sat on the bed and reached into her clutch purse and withdrew an antique silver cigarette case, a jeweled cigarette holder circa 1920's, and a matching silver lighter. She opened the case, withdrew a cigarette, attached it to the holder, and lit it. "MMMM I needed that!"

"Something is coming." I warned her as the temperature slowly dropped.

"It is just 'Him'." She replied dismissively.

"Him?" I asked as I faced the open door.

"Elizabeth's father, we don't use his name." Deirdre whispered. "Names have power Forrester."

"Yeah, they do." I agreed feeling at a severe disadvantage.

"Aw, why the long face? I like your new name, Rinaldo Medici. Rinaldo is so flowery, and people aren't likely to shorten it to Rin, now are they? Nah. Now Medici that is pretty dark for someone like you. That name has history doesn't it?" She said removing the cigarette she had finished and loaded a second from her silver case. "I hope the smoke doesn't bother you."

The smoke should have but it didn't. In fact, when I sniffed the air, I didn't smell the smoke or anything else. It was only then that I realized her true nature. She winked at me once she knew that I had discovered her secret. The sudden temperature drop and roar of rage sent her into motion. She stood, kissed me on the cheek, and whispered in my ear before she vanished. Deirdre Crane was a spirit and hulking just outside the door was the Nameless Father. He looked like a deranged specter. Tall and menacing in his tattered frock coat, long ragged hair, and shimmering icy blue eyes.

"You must be...?" I asked trying to get him to name himself. I wasn't so lucky.

"Leave or Die!" He bellowed. "The hour approaches and mortals are not welcome in this place."

A single blast of arctic air nearly knocked me off my feet. It was cold enough to frost over the camera's lens but not before I had captured the likeness of the old man. He was gone as quickly as Deirdre had vanished from sight. I was done both emotionally and physically. I needed alcohol. I went down to face the stunned crew below.

"That was amazing!" Ted exclaimed. "This is going to be epic!"

"He spoke directly to you." Don was equally excited.

"I just glad you are okay." Madison said embracing me once I reached the bottom step.

"That was unexpected." Olivia purred a sparkle in her eye. "Don't say anything, let me get you a drink."

"Where is Cassandra?" I asked and everyone shrugged. "Beer now, search later."

They hadn't seen or heard Deirdre. How the hell did that happen? Olivia was the only one even hinting that she had picked up on anything. I did as she suggested and sipped my beer and told them all about the old man. We had three hours until midnight. I was half tempted to cut and run. We could do a quick run through of the basement, pack up our shit, and be out of here before the stroke of twelve. Speaking of the stroke.

"A ghost gave you head." Olivia giggled picking up on my thoughts. "How do we classify that one?"

"Did it really happen? Was it just a mental projection or a physical manifestation?" I rambled still a bit put off by the event. "Speaking of projection."

"I wondered when you would get to that." Olivia purred. "That might be just the thing to get Elizabeth to manifest."

"Whatever happened to her son? Cassandra never did share that little bit of information." I stated as we opened the double doors to the private home theater. "Nice."

There were thirty-six comfy looking high back leather chairs for the audience to use. A twenty foot pull down screen was anchored on one end and an 8MM projector at the other. On the far end of the room were three closets that I suspected held the collection of Elizabeth's porn career. I shivered and one of the devices in my pack went off signaling not just a drop in temperature but a spike in electromagnetic field. Was it Elizabeth, her father, or perhaps someone else? Olivia took out a full spectrum video camera and panned the room. She gestured to a chair in the middle of the third row.

"Mind if I join you?" I asked as the screen descended on its own, the lights dimmed, and the projector started up. "Thanks." I said as Olivia moved to record the event. The scene unfolded as I sat in the third row. Elizabeth Crane known as Keisha back in the day took the stage. It was a shower scene. She started the water and the music began as she let her robe tumble to the floor. She was wearing black lingerie underneath. She made a show of undressing for the audience.

"Nice ass." I commented aloud for the sake of the ghostly spectator.

Elizabeth entered the shower and began by wetting her long dark hair. She turned away from the camera so that we could watch the water cascade over her shoulder, down her back, and finally trickle off those amazing ass cheeks of hers. She lathered up a sponge and faced us again and began washing that amazing body of hers. For an actress of the time she was trimmer and more physically fit that some I'd seen. There was no surprise when a well-hung actor appeared and watched her rinse off and begin masturbating for him.

"...my little girl!" A faint voice moaned with a heavy possessive emphasis on the word my.

Holy shit! The spirit is Elizabeth's father and he still watches her movies. I looked at Olivia and she had the camera on me and the ghost. What was the nature of the relationship between Elizabeth and the old man? Time to find out.

"She's got a great rack." I stated and a deep rumbling laughter filled the room.

"Damn straight she does!" The voice boomed. It was loud enough to get the attention of the others. "She looks just like her mother."

"Lucky man." I replied and the temperature suddenly plummeted.

"She belongs to me!" He roared just before I was hurled towards the open doorway. I did my best to curl into a ball to reduce the hurt I was about to experience. "Go!" He roared before spending the last of his energy and vanished, for now.

"You just had to go there." Olivia said as she checked for broken bones.

"Ow! What did I do wrong?" I whimpered as I was helped to my feet.

"Dad is still very possessive of his women." Olivia offered. "Great footage though."

"Yeah me." I groaned as I was helped back to the center of operations. "Add sensors and whatnot..."

"We got it boss." Someone eagerly complied. "Did you see how far he flew?"

"I know." A second investigator chuckled.

My pride was as broken as my tail bone. Between Olivia and Zane, a registered nurse, I was declared fit to stay as I had neither a concussion nor any broken bones. I did have a few nasty bruises and chalked it up to great interaction. I called everyone together and asked them for their help tracking down Cassandra and any of the help she had hired. I suggested they break up into two person teams and search the first floor and then as a collective the second. I was going to go down alone at ten o'clock to finish off the basement and then we were going to get the hell out of Dodge. I was surprised when they agreed to leave before midnight.

"Let me see it." I asked Olivia for the footage of being vaulted into the air like a sack of potatoes. "He's getting stronger."

"We can pass on the basement." Olivia suggested.

"Yeah, we have plenty of instrument readings, camera footage, and atmospheric data. Even Don is okay with passing up the basement. Right Don?" Madison asked.

"Well um... sure! No need to push your luck." He said clearly disappointed.

"I promised everyone we'd finish this up right." I stated. "Once they get back and the aspirin kicks in, I am good to go."

Only Don was okay with me going down to the basement. Sis and Olivia were concerned. I was too but my gut told me that whatever strength the old man was drawing upon was down there in the basement. Everyone returned from the second floor with no sign of Cassandra or the work crew. They must have left the house. Good. Once a fresh battery was slapped into the full spectrum camera, I put on my backpack that held everything from the radio frequency scanner, to a motion detector, and lastly the holy water ampules. It had a few surprises in case shit went sideways as well.

"Camera is on." I called out and Don nodded that he was getting a live feed. "Okay, here I go."

"Good luck." Olivia and others offered.

I made my way to the basement steps. I could see that the basement door was wide open. That caused a buzz of excitement since the last crew down was sure they had closed it. That first sense of unease took hold. I walked down and caught a faint hint of perfume still clinging to the air. It was Cassandra's expensive imported variety of course. Why the hell was she down here? I continued and moved straight through the first few rooms that had already been covered. I began my narration in a room once used for squeezing locally grown grapes and collecting their juices. The scent of her perfume was getting stronger and impossible to ignore.

"I think Cassandra is down here. I can smell her perfume." I announced as I filmed the room spied the two hallways running further beneath the house. One was straight ahead and where her perfume seemed to hint at. The other was off the right-hand wall and appeared to end in another chamber. Let's knock that one out and then return to the other. "I am going to take a quick look at another room and then follow the other hallway."

The corridor was clean, in good repair, and opened to a bottling room. Satisfied that nothing was lurking in here I returned to the other room and followed the other hallway. For some reason this passage gave off a lot more age to me. The masonry was the same and yet it felt ancient. I took out the scanner and activated it.

"Are you getting the scanner's signal Don?"

"Yeah, we are in the green for everything." He replied eager to see what would happen.

"...getting warmer... warmer..." the scanner displayed.

"Cassandra!" I called out when I caught sight of her ahead of me. She reached an open doorway and seemed to lose her balance and used her left hand to catch herself on that wall. "Hold up! Wait! Well shit!" I cursed as I raced ahead to keep up with her.

I lost sight of her as I entered the next chamber. My right foot shifted, and two hidden doors slammed shut behind me cutting me off from the others.

"Well fuck!" I cursed. "Don, can you hear me Don?!" I hollered over the radio with no response. "You bitch!"

Click!

Two panels beneath me unlocked, dropped open, and sent me falling into darkness. I guessed I fell only twenty feet or so. I landed on a mound of old mattresses designed to ease the fall. I rolled off as another mechanism pulled the two panels above me closed again with a metallic sound.

Clang!

It was pitch black. It was so dark I saw spots before my eyes as my optic nerve and brain tried to compensate for the utter lack of light. It gave up after a minute or so. In the meantime, I felt around for the camera I had dropped. Luckily, it had landed on the mattresses and appeared undamaged. I fumbled around until I was able to switch on its external light so I could see where the hell I was. The room was a twenty-foot square, the stonework looked like it had been through a fire, and spray painted in bright red letters were the words, 'Welcome to Hell'.

"Lovely." I whispered. I continued to narrate if softly as the unease became the first true inklings of fear. "I appear to be a room below the basement. As you can see the walls have the lovely message 'welcome to hell' on them. Somebody else has been down here and not long ago by the condition of the spray paint. Only one door out so here I go."

The door was new. It looked like any plain wooden door you'd buy at Home Depot or whatnot. I opened it and examine the bright shiny screws that attached it to its frame. Yep, it was bought and recently. It even had the bar code sticker still attached on the interior edge that faced the hinges. Maybe the fire had been isolated to this subbasement? The hallway beyond ran left and right from this doorway. I sniffed the air but no hint of Cassandra or her perfume. I panned the light from the camera in either direction there were several new doors just like this one on either side.

"Right it is." I muttered knowing I'd have to go the other direction eventually.

I went to the first door and opened it. The room beyond was the same size as the one I had landed in and equally barren of furniture or anything really. The next room was a whole different story. This one was dotted with dozens of melted candles along the floor as well as air mattresses, sleeping bags, and camping supplies. Whoever had been down here had been somewhat prepared. I searched the sleeping bags and deflated mattresses and found only smashed electronics. One of the devices looked like a digital voice recorder. I took out my multitool and disassembled the recorder to get at its memory card. I did the same with my own recorder and hoped they were compatible. After a bit I had mine reassembled and powered it up. There were ten files saved. I played them in chronological order.

"Testing... testing..." A young man with a distinctive London accent spoke. "My name is Benjamin Quatermass, but everyone just calls me Ben. We are nearly to what's left of the Crane House."

"That's not how you do it," A girl cut in with a heavy Scottish accent. "You do it like this." She stated her breath hitting the microphone. "It is the first of October in the year of our lord two thousand and... see what I mean. The audience has to know when we are doing this."

"She's right Ben." A second girl chimed in with her own London accent. "Now do it right." She laughed. "Oh wait. There's the church. Isn't that just queer that there is only one church for a town this size?"

"Too right you are Stacy!" The Scottish girl agreed. "Right queer and odd it is. And it is nondenominational at that. Let's grab the holy water and bugger off."

Long Silent Pause.

"We are successful in our mission." Ben declared. "We have taken enough to fill all three of the water guns we brought in case the rumors are true." He continued and one of the girls cleared her throat. "Right! The rumor I speak of is that there is a strong demonic presence inside the House of Chaythe. I know I am getting to that. Why is it called that... it goes back to when the house was first built? The miners in the region, silver miners to be precise, it comes from the red clay that stained the hands of the miners. Ooh, we are here folks. Damn it looks spooky! More later..."

That was it. Silver mine, blood red clay, and a possible demonic force. Where the hell did, they get their information from? None of that came up when Madison did her background on this place. There was a mention of a mine but nothing specific. I like Ben's style though two girls and him. I selected the next file.

"Sorry for the long delay. This place is a mess. We've been working our way through the debris left over from the fire. We've made the most amazing discovery! There is a subbasement. Amazing I know! We gathered up a bunch of old mattresses and dropped them down one atop the other to form a cushion of sorts. I dropped down first and then stacked them proper like for the girls to... sorry the ladies to use. Someone beat us to the punch though. They spray painted the walls with the message 'Liberate tu ta me ex inferis'. My Latin is a little rusty, but I think it says, save yourself from Hell." He pauses and then continues. "We've set up camp in one of the cleaner rooms. The others are stockpiled with debris and appeared to never have been touched since the fire. Even the poor spray painter abandoned going any deeper. The ladies and I are recording this as we look up at the star filled sky... more tomorrow."

What the hell. There is no way he could be looking up at a night sky. The mansion was only mildly damaged by the fire. I stood and returned the room with the mattresses. I turned the camera to where the message 'Welcome to Hell' should have been but instead the Latin words were there plain as day. I stopped the camera and rewound the footage to when I first reached the room. I watched as it swung around and there plain as day the Latin phrase 'Liberate tu ta me ex inferis'. My first instinct was to raise the camera over my head and smash it to bits. My heart was pounding in my chest.

"I had seen it!" I demanded as I returned to the room with the camping gear and sat down. "I am going to continue and listen to the next file." I said aloud as I continued recording my experiences.