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Bryan held the camera on his shoulder, struggling to look through the viewfinder and keep from laughing at the absurdity of the image in it. He walked five feet behind Travis and Joey as they approached the altar, creeping forward as if they expected it to spring to life and grab them. Once again, he found himself moderately impressed with their showmanship.
Creepy Joey held a barometer in front of him, waving it around as if it was the PKE meter used by Egon in Ghostbusters. He read aloud any small fluctuations in the pressure of the room, as if they held great significance to the presence of anything paranormal.
Travis snuck along beside him, with an EMF reader in his hand.
“This EMF detector lets us know if there is a disturbance in the electromagnetic field. It’s a known fact that spooks and specters cause significant spikes in E.M. fields, so if this needle starts dancing, we’ll know that we aren’t alone,” Travis said.
The camera vibrated slightly as Bryan struggled to contain his laughter again. The more he dealt with these two, the more outlandish they seemed.
“I’m using a barometer to measure drops in pressure that often occur in the presence of a poltergeist or other malignant entity,” Travis said, his voice barely above a whisper. “If we witness a drastic change in the reading, accompanied with a spike in the E.M. fields, we know that a powerful and angry spirit is among us.”
A crashing sound to their right startled all three of them. Bryan spun the camera around instinctively trying to capture the source.
“Goddamn it!” Kyle sat on the floor, the pieces of a broken bench on both sides of him. “Piece of crap broke as soon as I tried to sit on it.” He had to rock back and then throw his weight forward to get out of the wreckage. “My ass can’t be that fat,” he said under his breath as he got to his feet.
Looking up as he dusted himself off, he noticed that everyone had stopped what they were doing and now stared at him. “Sorry, my bad.”
“I swear to God, your parents must be related,” Travis said. He turned to Bryan, grabbing the camera and pointing it back at himself. “I don’t feel like doing that over, so we’ll just start from here and edit that out in post.”
Bryan repositioned the two of them in frame and then noticed the reading on Joey’s barometer. “You said you’re using that to measure pressure right?”
“Yeah,” Joey said, giving Bryan his wide-eyed, creepy stare. “What about it?”
“Well, it’s showing the temperature on the display, not the pressure.”
Joey looked down at the instrument. It read sixty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. “So what?”
“You aren’t worried that someone watching the show will see that, hear you talking about pressure, and realize you’re full of shit?” He admonished himself internally as soon as the words came out of his mouth. The last thing he wanted to do was help these two cover up their fraud.
“Our audience consists of trailer park retards. They don’t even know what a barometer is. Now get us in the frame and shut the hell up.”
“Whatever, let’s get this over with.” Bryan clenched his jaw, determined to keep himself from fighting with them all over again. He zoomed out slightly, and leveled the camera, doing his best to make the shot decent. Though he couldn’t control the garbage content in the show, he was determined to at least make it appear professionally produced. His name would be attached after all.
The Specter Slayers resumed their slow march toward the altar, swinging their misread instruments in front of them as they went. The occasional blip from the E.M.F. reader was the only thing breaking the silence. As they moved closer, the frequency of the beeps increased, the needle on the meter jumping slightly.
“We’re picking up something. The signal is getting stronger as we approach the altar,” Travis said, his voice reverting to a whisper. “It’s important to remember that there is no electricity in this building at all.”
Except for the dozens of electronics we brought into it, and the generator outside, Bryan thought.
They stopped two feet from the edge of the stone top of the altar, with the two men holding their instruments out toward it. The beeping of the E.M.F. meter held a steady pace of once every few seconds.
“The signal is definitely coming from the altar placed in the center of the Danver church,” Joey said. “The pressure surrounding it is significantly lower than the rest of the building.”
Through the viewfinder Bryan noticed that the reading of the barometer no longer showed the temperature. Despite his bravado, Joey didn’t want to appear like an idiot after all, and was at least partially concerned with his audience catching on to their schemes.
Travis gagged, bending at the waist and placing his hand on the stone to steady himself. “Christ, the smell of this place is even worse right here,” he said.
Joey waved his hand in front of his face, trying to move the stench in the air away from his nose. “Wow, that’s awful. Smells like a bag of burning shit.”
Bryan noticed it too. He took his free hand away from the zoom ring by the front of the camera and pinched his nose shut. The frame in the viewfinder swayed as he did so, but he didn’t care enough to let go of his nose for fearing of vomiting. The smell seemed much more pervasive at the center of the church than anywhere else.
The stench reminded him of fishing with his father when he was a child. They had gone to a stream by a fish hatchery. The small body of water had been teaming with fish that his father had told him were put there by the owners of the hatchery to help increase the local population of salmon.
That had been one of the most memorable days of his early childhood. It was one of his first real memories of the two of them spending father and son time together. He also remembered that day because of the horrible smell. The farther upstream they walked, and the closer to the hatchery they went, the more unbearable the air became.
The odor around the altar had a similar quality and intensity. He even thought he could smell salt water, the same way you do when approaching the coast, but shook it off as part of his memory of the hatchery, though that had been fresh water.
The three of them stood by the altar, trying to acclimate to the wretched air. Travis straightened his back, blinking in a slow, hard rhythm. “This is the first time we’ve ever experienced a powerful stench in the presence of a haunting.”
Bryan took slow, shallow breaths as he took his hand from his nose. He didn’t want to stand here too long, but figured he could handle it long enough to finish recording. He tried to focus on the technical aspects of getting his shot right, hoping it would take his mind off the gut wrenching emanation.
Joey rubbed his hand along the top of the altar, drawing attention to its smooth surface. Several red blotches were scattered around it with some bleeding down over the side as if a liquid had been spilled on it.
“Knowing the reputation of the Danver church, these are likely blood stains. Whether they’re human, or animal, remains a mystery,” he said. “The altar is roughly four feet by six.” He held his arms out to approximate length. “Making it more than large enough for a body.”
Kneeling down, Travis inspected the large stump the altar sat upon. Bryan also took a knee and aimed the camera at the section of tree. There wasn’t enough light under the stone top for the camera to pick up any details, so he turned on the attached lamp.
Travis held up his hand, blocking the light from his eyes. “Warn me next time, for Christ’s sake.” He scooted to the side several inches, angling his face away from the light, and looked over the stump.
The base of the long dead tree had a diameter of at least three feet. All of its bark had been stripped away, and odd symbols had been carved into the exposed wood. The markings looked similar to the ones on the book that they had found earlier, leaving Bryan to believe they were Latin.
Travis raised his hand, stopping with his splayed fingers just short of touching the wood. “I can feel some kind of energy coming from the base of the altar, almost like electricity.” Gingerly he touched the markings, running his index finger over them.
Joey knelt beside him, his eyes following the stained lines that ran down the length of the stump. They led to large areas where the liquid had pooled, leaving a discoloration on the stones in the floor.
“Whatever was killed here must have been very large to produce this amount of blood.” He looked directly into the camera. “Unless there was more than one person murdered here at the same time.”
“And cut,” Travis said. He and Joey shared a high five. “Nice! More than one murder on the same altar - great touch.”
Bryan lowered the camera from his shoulder and stood up, shaking his head. “You guys are ridiculous.”
“Yes we are. And it’s made us filthy rich,” Travis said. “What time is it?”
“Eleven,” Bryan said, looking at his watch.
“What do you know, it’s beer thirty,” Travis said. He and Joey pushed past Bryan, hitting both of his shoulders with theirs.
Deep breaths. Bryan kept thinking that over and over, afraid of what he might say to them otherwise. He looked around and saw Kyle standing by Ben’s workstation, glaring at the nerdy production manager.
On the other side of the church, Katie had stopped analyzing the wall, but now inspected the floor directly in front of it. His curiosity couldn’t be contained anymore, so he sat the camera down on the altar and walked over to her.
Bryan stood behind her, watching as she ran her fingers along the stones directly in front of the rear wall. Occasionally, she’d stop and push on the mortar between them, other times tapping them. She moved methodically, checking every inch of floor as she went.
“Are you looking for a secret trapdoor?” Bryan asked.
“Yes,” she said, without turning around. “This is a false wall.”
Bryan’s eyes opened wide and his mouth popped open. He hadn’t expected her to say yes to that. The idea of a crummy, abandoned church having a secret room almost seemed comical to him.
“I was just kidding.”
“I’m not. When we were outside I visually estimated the length of the church, and then I did the same when we entered.” She continued sliding her fingers along the base of the wall as she spoke. “The back of the building appeared to be at least twenty-five feet beyond the last window in the wall while we were outside the building. From the inside, it looks closer to fifteen feet.”
Bryan watched her work, thoroughly impressed that she had noticed so many details about the place. He had been too busy complaining about Travis, Joey, and people’s stupid beliefs in the supernatural. She had been doing her job, and analyzing the church.
“So this wall is either ten feet thick, or there is something behind it,” Bryan said. He looked at the wall to his left, trying to guess the distances between the walls and windows. The windows did seem to be off center.
Katie straightened her legs, but remained bent at the waist, tracing her hands up the surface of the wall. Bryan couldn’t help but check her out as she worked, her backside sticking in the air.
“Don’t stare at my ass,” she said.
“I wasn’t!”
“Of course you were. Now come over here and help me, I think I’ve figured this out.”