Paranormal Research Club Ch. 01

Erin smiled sadly and answered for the group of us. "It clearly just wasn't meant to be. We're three people short, and that means that we don't have enough people to do a good job investigating my dad's church."

Kim looked at me, then back to Erin. Kim had occasionally tagged along on our ghost-hunting excursions, and she and Erin had developed a pretty close friendship on their own over the last few years. "I was just over there talking to my Mom and cousins about this awesome trip that John was going to get to go on, and that I didn't get to go because you already had everyone you needed! If I can go, count me in! Not to mention, Heather and Sarah thought it sounded awesome. I could totally throw my stuff in a bag and be ready to go in an hour!" Kim glanced at Heather and Sarah. "If you come, we'll have just as many people as they were originally planning to have, and I can explain everything you need to know about what to do on the way there. Come on! You were both just talking about how you didn't have any major plans for Spring Break, and this is going to be awesome!"

Sarah was short and slender, with a cute pixie-cut that was somewhere between blonde and light brown, tanned skin, and adorable little freckles on her nose and cheeks. Upon hearing Kim's offer, she immediately squealed an excited "Hell yeah!" and then looked at her sister, Heather, expectantly.

After the dream last night, I saw Heather differently than I previously had. She really was a very pretty woman, and her pale complexion and light blond hair all made her even more beautiful in my eyes. My eyes traveled down, admiring the swells of her large breasts and her wide, feminine hips. I briefly reminisced about how she had looked and felt in my dream from the previous night as I looked admiringly at her face, remembering how it had felt to kiss her, to touch her, and to make love to her. I looked at her and felt my breathing quicken. I could almost feel myself inside of her again. Suddenly, I realized that I was checking out my cousin, and she was looking at me intently. My eyes met hers, and, for a long moment, Heather met my gaze. Then she blushed a deep crimson then shyly averted the sky-blue eyes that peeked out from behind her thick glasses.

While Heather didn't usually volunteer for this sort of crazy adventure, she was the sort of person that never liked to disappoint anyone. If her sister and cousins needed her for this, then she was going to Vermont. Still, she glanced at my mother before making a decision.

My mother, Alice, smiled sweetly at Heather. "You run on with your sister and cousin. I love you all, but from what John and Kim have been saying this sounds like you're going to have a lot of fun, and, frankly I think it will be nice to have the house to myself for a few days!"

"I love you too, Mom!" Kim said with playfully feigned rejection.

Heather smiled and her sweet round face lit up as she displayed a pretty row of clean, white, evenly spaced teeth. "I'm in." She looked at me, as though looking forward to spending time together, then she looked at my mother, Alice. "Are you sure you won't be lonely until Mom gets back from that business trip to Seattle?"

My mother looked at her with a sweet smile. "I'm sure. It will be nice to get caught up on my writing. As a matter of fact, if you guys come back with some good scary experiences, tell me about them and they might give me some ideas for my next book!" She winked at us, giving the impression that she was joking. But despite being a moderately successful author that would never lack for money due to the success of her first several books, she had been having a hard time producing the same quality of material since my father had died. He had been a healthy 50-year-old man with a body that most men would have envied when they were 20. He had been out running for exercise early in the morning before work when a drunk driver, who had only then been leaving the bar, swerved across the road and struck my father from behind despite the bright yellow reflective vest that Dad always wore when running before it was light. Shortly after the tragedy, we had moved here to be closer to my maternal Aunt Cindy and her daughters. When Aunt Cindy's husband left her, they had moved into our large house with us while the courts got everything settled from the divorce, and then they just stayed on as permanent roommates. I half-jokingly complained that I was surrounded by an unhealthy level of estrogen, but it was still nice to have so much family around.

I briefly considered what it would mean for Kim, Heather, and Sarah to tag along on this investigation. Kim had been on a few of our excursions, but nothing quite like this before. This was definitely not an ideal investigation to take beginners on, both because Erin's family was counting on a professional investigation and because the particulars of what Erin and her family had told us about the site sounded like this was a very active intelligent haunting that might be very frightening even for seasoned investigators, and it might possibly even be dangerous for beginners. Our discussions with Professor Morrison had us very interested in the site, but also a bit frightened of it. We couldn't categorize the haunting except to say that there were most definitely several very active intelligent entities involved, but there were also several very unusual features of this haunting that made it almost impossible to categorize.

My family sounded excited about coming, and I hated to disappoint them. I told myself that everything would probably be fine if we put each less experienced person with a more experienced person, and it sounded like my family had already made the decision to come with us anyway. To forbid them from coming would probably disappoint everyone here, and hauntings that are physically dangerous to people are rare enough that I could probably get away with taking a chance on a site just this once. After all, Erin and her family were all just fine and they lived there, right?

Sarah got up from the table and walked towards the restroom, still smiling. "Be right back. I'm so excited that we're going to get to go!" She giggled excitedly and did a little dance as she walked to the door into the ladies' room.

"So the three of you can come? Great!" Diana beamed towards Kim. "After we eat, why don't you three go home, pack your bags, and then meet us at Steve and Frank's house as soon as you can get ready! Kim, you know how to get there, right? Good! Be sure to pack sleeping bags, since we'll be camping tonight on the way there. Also, pack warmer clothes than you usually would for this time of year, and a small flashlight or two if you've got one. Preferably something that runs off of double or triple A batteries, and if not then bring lots of extra batteries to make sure you don't run out. If you need sleeping bags, flashlights, or anything else, tell us and we'll bring extras."

The directions we had printed off from the internet said that the trip to the parsonage where Erin's parents' lived, and the haunted church directly beside it, would be about thirteen and a half hours away from our hometown. That said, the internet doesn't have to stop to eat, use the restroom, or refill the constantly draining gas tank. The big van was as comfortable as a large boat on the ocean, gently creaking and rocking as it sped down the interstate. We were getting a late start, so Diana had wisely decided to make the trip over the course of the next two days and get into Erin's parents' place at a reasonable hour tomorrow. That way there would be plenty of time for Erin and her family to give us a tour of the place, point out areas where things frequently happened and tell us what to expect, and we would have time to set up our equipment before it got dark. Erin's father had amused us all with his insistence upon being present for the walk-through. As we headed down the road, Diana at the wheel and Erin in the front passenger seat, Erin explained to Kim, Heather, and Sarah what the rest of us already knew about the old church where her father preached.

"The original structure that stood where my father's church now sits was a Roman Catholic church that was built by the French some time about 1743. Like a lot of churches in the area at that time, it was also one of the sturdier log buildings in town, and it doubled as something like a little fort when the community was threatened. During the French and Indian War, a company of British Rangers attacked the settlement while on their way to raid a larger French trading post to the north. When the French settlers barricaded themselves in the church, the British left a squad of their best riflemen behind to watch the church and ensure that nobody escaped alive to warn the trading post that British troops were coming. For the next two days the British riflemen watched the place like hawks, and their snipers picked off anyone that dared to show themselves. A total of five men and two women are said to have been killed in or near the church by the British. The French couldn't leave the church, so they chose to bury their dead beneath its earthen floor. On the third day, the main body of the British returned through the town laden with scalps and trade goods they had recovered from the trading post. The riflemen rejoined the main body, and they disappeared into the forest as a unit."

"At the end of the French and Indian War, the land was ceded to Great Britain. The small church became Anglican, and it's still Episcopalian to this day. In 1782, the original structure was badly damaged during a skirmish between American patriots and British loyalists. Remembering the fate of the Frenchmen that had died defending the church, the Americans buried the dead Tories beneath what had been the earthen floor of the humble old church, disturbing the bones of several long-dead French settlers in the process. And so the church lay desecrated and in disrepair for over thirty years. In 1813, immediately following the War of 1812, the church was rebuilt out of locally made bricks by a wealthy local gentleman. I suppose, more realistically, it was rebuilt by his slaves. When constructing what is currently the basement of the church, the bones of the Frenchmen and British loyalists were, of necessity, disinterred. Disdain for the British was running high at that time, and the locals refused to have the bones buried in the same churchyard where their friends and family lay. The first pastor of the rebuilt church was afraid that burying the bones outside of the graveyard would result in the graves being desecrated by angry locals, so remembering the charnel houses of old Europe, he consolidated the bones into neat piles in a small room in the back of the basement. He was an elderly veteran of the French and Indian War and the Revolution, and while he apparently approved of his old enemies' bones being artfully arranged behind closed doors as a sufficiently respectful alternative to traditional burial, he adamantly refused to ever go into the basement himself, and he would not even go near the church at night. The pages of his diary that have survived are the first written documents that imply that the church might have been haunted."

Kim smiled. "So, tell me if I've got this right: we've got lots of people dying suddenly and violently in the prime of their lives, the French wanted to warn their countrymen about the British attack so you have people that died with unfinished business, you've got desecrated graves... wow! Any one of these things can make a place haunted, right? Hey, when John was telling me about this place, he was saying that there was some priest who killed himself in the church protecting buried treasure?"

Erin smiled back at her, but the smile seemed forced, as though it were more of a mask to hide something else than a reflection of real happiness. "There are a lot of stories about that old place, and I've seldom researched any of them that didn't turn out to be based on truth. You see, during the mid 1700s, an Anglican bishop brought a large chest full of valuables from St. Bride's and other churches in London over to decorate the fledgeling churches here in the colonies. His writings seem to indicate that he thought that somehow prettier churches would have a civilizing effect on the unruly, rough-and-ready colonists. Most of what he brought ended up at King's Chapel in Boston, which had been founded during the 1600's. That church is still standing, by the way, but it's Unitarian now. Anyway, when the Revolution began, all property of the crown was considered fair game for confiscation by the United States in order to support their own underfunded war effort, and property of the Anglican church was sometimes regarded as something of a gray area depending on how underfunded the local Patriots were at the moment. But some members of the Anglican clergy viewed the Revolution as treason and refused to support it. The valuables were discreetly smuggled out of Boston shortly after the Boston Massacre, when it became apparent that there would be trouble. Thinking that an inconspicuous hiding place in a more remote location would make the treasure as difficult to find as possible, as well as easier for a small force of British troops to recover without running into massed resistance, the treasure was smuggled into Vermont and is reputed to be hidden somewhere near my father's church. When an American colonel showed up at the church demanding to know the location of the treasure in order to pay his bedraggled, half-starved battalion of American infantrymen, the crazed local priest told him that he would rather go to the Devil than see His Majesty's gold fall into the hands of the Patriots. Then, right in the middle of the church in front of the horrified soldiers, he pulled a horse pistol from beneath his robes and shot himself through the head. The church wasn't used as a religious structure again until after it was rebuilt in 1813. By the end of the war, everyone that had known where the treasure was hidden was dead, and to this day the treasure hasn't been found. There are plenty of written records that my Daddy has photocopied and collected over the years to support everything I've just said."

Heather looked at Sarah and raised an eyebrow as though silently asking what she had gotten herself into. Sarah ignored her sister and smiled excitedly at Erin. "Wow, this place must be crawling with ghosts!"

Erin looked at her with a sad smile touched with an almost invisible hint of brooding terror. "Oh, it is crawling with ghosts. Take my word for it. If more people knew what goes on around there, the congregation would be afraid to show up on Sunday and my poor parents would be besieged by every ghost-hunter wannabe within a thousand miles. You can't do anything to get my father to go into that place after dark, and he's not afraid of anything. Daddy was a Navy Corpsman that got a whole pile of medals for valor while serving with the Marines in Vietnam. That's why a discreet group from out-of-state is perfect for handling this. My father just wants to have someone outside of his own family tell him he's not crazy and give him proof in writing."

Diana drove most of the way to Cleveland, then I took over just before the Interstate began paralleling the southern shore of Lake Erie. I handed the keys to Kim near Buffalo in New York, and then I fell asleep as she drove in the dark.

I slept fitfully, often awakening as the van moved down the long road. These dreams lacked the vivid, lifelike quality of the dream the night before, and were more in keeping with what one would normally expect from a dream in every way aside from their content and memorability.

I dreamed that I saw a robed king sipping wine from a heavy silver flagon, and he was surrounded by dancing satyrs that played shrill pan-pipes and beat wildly on drums around him. Wildly gyrating to the music, I saw legions of women dancing nude in the torchlight. Driven by a strange, ecstatic, trance-like madness, they gyrated with a manic enthusiasm that had a vaguely disturbing quality to it which I would be hard pressed to quantify or put to words. The wild drumbeats and the frantic piping were all identical to the music from my dream the night before. This was the tune to which I had mated with my own flesh and blood. Had the dream continued, without a doubt other women would have followed suit. I scanned the female faces before me, each one wild with animal passion.

The king looked at me and smiled pleasantly. He looked sincerely happy, but something about his gaze sent a chill down my spine. Among the dancers, I recognized my dear friend Diana, her body looking like a tattooed angel, and I took a moment to admire her nude body. Yes, she certainly did have some very nice tattoos in some very interesting places. I was shocked to see Erin's saintly, virginal body exposed to the world as she gyrated merrily among the other women. To my left, I saw my mother, my sister, my cousins, and my aunt dancing, swaying nude in the firelight.

The king, a well-muscled, bearded man with long white hair and flowing reddish-purple robes of shimmering, iridescent silk, approached me. "Forgive me for not introducing myself to you in your dream last night. You seemed... shall I say, occupied? I am Acratophorus, the giver of unmixed wine. Please forgive me for skipping the usual pleasantries and getting right to the point. In just a few minutes, the van you're in is going to hit a pothole in the road and you'll wake up, so we don't have much time." He spoke English with an accent that almost would have passed for a well-educated 21st century American, but layered beneath that accent I thought I detected almost imperceptible hints of British pronunciations and some strange vestiges of another accent that I could not place. He had used the word "van" with the same sort of emphasis that the elderly sometimes use when showcasing their knowledge of contemporary slang terms to younger people. It was as though he felt more pride in his ability to correctly identify the type of modern vehicle I was riding in than he did in his casual prediction that I would soon awaken because it would hit a pothole.

"I need some minor assistance with a small problem that I have, and in return I promise that I will bless you as I have not blessed anyone in centuries. You see, a few years ago, as a very good friend of mine, John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester lay on his deathbed, a priest named Gilbert Burnet took something from him that belonged to me. When Bishop Burnet realized that he lacked the means to physically destroy it, he had it hidden in hopes that it would never be found again. Later, when I was hopeful that another worthy heir would find it, the priests moved the hiding place to yet another remote location. For four hundred years my hopes have been frustrated. And what have I ever wished for anyone other than happiness and freedom?" He gestured expansively and smiled at me. "You have one more test before I give my treasure to you along with all the honor and responsibilities that come with being my high priest. I'm an excellent judge of people, and I dare say that I know more about you than you know about yourself. After last night, I have no doubt that you'll enjoy the nature of this test and you'll meet my expectations with no difficulty at all, but you can't blame me for being too careful. I've been betrayed before, and I want to see how you will act when we raise the stakes a bit. Oh, yes, last night was only a very special and very realistic dream. Your little adventures last night didn't actually make anyone pregnant, although your sister found the experience realistic enough that she checked her hymen to make certain that it was still intact this morning, and she still felt a few aches as she went through today, although that was entirely in her own mind. And if you want to start a family with your cousin Heather, then you will have to take care of that later. I just let you and a few other people share a very special dream in a separate reality that I personally created just for the occasion. For now, I will need you to recover what was stolen from me. Oh, you'll know it when you see it, don't worry about that. I would describe it, but I am very certain that I would hate to ruin the surprise. I have great need for someone that I can trust to have this and put it to its proper use, and after last night I feel confident that you will serve my needs perfectly. I'm certain that this is an arrangement that will benefit us both." He winked at me with conspiratorial mirth, then glanced up at the sky with the air of a man checking his watch. "It was a pleasure speaking to you, but I must let you go. Your vehicle is moving with frightful rapidity, and you are only a few stadia away from the pothole that will awaken you. I shall see you again very soon. I promise." He smiled at me with the kindly pride of an elderly man regarding a grandchild's modest accomplishments in school. "For now, brace yourself. The moment I leave, these ladies will be upon you like the wild Maenads that you have read about in your books on Greek mythology. If you've forgotten what you read there, then please consider this a brief refresher course, minus some of the less pleasant details that I hope you will never need to worry about."