Will had heard her come into the barn but didn’t want to reveal that he was here – or have her discover his gear – until the smell of blood floated up from below and smoke filled the air. He didn’t know what was happening, but his equipment was beeping and Jena was making some ungodly sound, like a cat being blended alive.
He was frozen for a moment, torn. He wanted to help her, but he also wanted to know what was going on, and if he pulled her out, would that do her more harm?
He finally had proof. Proof that there was more to this than just a tragic accident, but that vindication was tainted by the knowledge that some weird shit was going down right now, and he was here in the middle of it.
And that he had no idea what to do.
He pulled himself out of his shock and stood, deciding that Jena being okay was more important than his quest for answers, running for the stairs and taking them two at a time to get to the ground floor. He ran towards her, gripping her arms and shaking her. Her eyes had rolled back in her head, revealing their whites, and she was still making strange sounds; now it was a low groan that sounded like it was coming from her very core.
‘Jena, Jena, come on, snap out of it. You’re freaking me out. I don’t know what’s happening but it’s time to come back now. Come on.’ He shook her again but she didn’t respond.
There was a thud on the roof, and the dim light in the barn grew even dimmer. Will glanced up, seeing dark shadows landing on the clear-lite. The thuds came harder and faster as birds flung themselves against the plastic until it shattered into tiny pieces, raining down on them. Will pulled Jena down, covering their heads with his arms as best he could.
Feathers fell with the plastic and the smell of blood was stronger now. Birds streamed into the space around them, pushing him back from Jena as they surrounded her. Will wanted to do something, but there was such a barrier of birds – their small, feathered, black-and-white bodies swarming Jena – that there was nothing he could do but watch in horror.
And then they were gone. Back up through the hole in the roof. He watched till the last one flew away, so surprised by their behaviour that he couldn’t move. And then he remembered.
Jena.
He crawled across the floor to where she lay silently on the ground, her body prone, her eyes closed and her breathing even. Whatever had been happening before was over now, and he thought … he thought maybe the birds had been trying to help her, because whatever they had done snapped her out of it and brought her back to the here and now.
He leaned over her, relieved to find her breathing was strong. He pushed the hair back from her face, dislodging a feather from the corner of her mouth.
‘Hey, Jena. Wake up,’ he said gently. ‘Come on, wake up. I don’t know what’s going on but you need to get up.’
She groaned, bringing her hands to her head as she sat. She spat out a mouthful of feathers, her eyes going wide as she caught them in her hands, black and wet. She opened her mouth as if to scream but then she noticed him, her eyes locking on his.
‘What happened?’
‘I don’t … I don’t quite know. But the birds – they brought you back.’
She tucked her chin into her chest, bringing her knees up and wrapping her arms around them. She stayed like that, rocking ever so slightly – back and forward, back and forward – before she finally let go.
‘Nothing happened here,’ she said, her voice firm and steady. She looked at him pointedly. ‘Nothing. Do you understand? I don’t know what you think you saw, but it was nothing.’
Will looked around them at the clear-lite on the floor, at the bodies of the magpies who had killed themselves getting in here. Finally, he looked at Jena, who looked so much like that little girl on the news report after the fire that it took his breath away.
‘Do you want me to help you back to the house?’ he asked, choosing his words carefully.
‘No. No, I’m okay.’ She got up and brushed herself off, though there was nothing she could do about the rips in her clothing, the scrapes on her face. ‘I’m cooking dinner tonight, right?’
Her question was so normal that it took him a moment to grasp it.
‘Huh? Oh, yeah,’ he said. ‘But I can do it.’
‘No, no, it’s fine. I’ll catch you later.’ And with that she was gone, out the door, leaving him alone in the barn wondering what the fuck had just happened.
Will looked around. The floor was littered with a mess from … from that. He had no way of knowing what had been happening to Jena, because she didn’t seem ready to talk about it, but he’d bet money on the fact that his gear had picked something up. Once he was sure she wasn’t coming back, he scrambled up the stairs to check.
They all had levels of activity on them – the magnetic readings were way higher than any other time since his arrival, and there was definitely a recording on the EVP – but the one he was most interested in was his camera. It was set to start recording when there was any activity in the barn. He pulled it off its stand and took it to the table, hitting the button to skip back through the video.
And there it was. Evidence.
Jena was standing in the middle of the barn. Her eyes were open, the pupils rolled back to show the whites as she fell to her knees. Thick black smoke seemed to fill the room – the fact that it was on the recording stunned him. He’d thought it was only in his head. Mere seconds passed before he showed up on the screen, shaking Jena. Birds streaming down from the room above them. And then the camera shut off.
Will let out the breath he was holding, carefully placing the video camera on the table, his hand shaking. He leaned back in his chair, unsure of what to do. His first thought was to tell Rose, or Jena, but then he’d have to come clean about the real reason he was here. He could tell his friend Josh, from the hospital, or even Rebecca. Would she take him back if she saw that it was real? That he wasn’t just ghost obsessed?
But he wasn’t ready to share it with anyone. Jena had looked so vulnerable, and all it would do was make others ask more questions.
He didn’t know her very well, but he didn’t want to expose her like that, not to someone who might not be sensitive. Now that he was here and had talked to her a little, seen some of what she was dealing with, he realised that his hunger for information about what happened was a little insensitive. He’d never meant to hurt anyone with his querying; it was really only a means to make sense of what
had happened to him – to his mother. To try and prove that she hadn’t really killed herself and that there were things at work in the world that couldn’t be explained by science.
He just wanted to know more.
And he realised now that maybe he was hoping he’d never really know. He’d been keeping alive the hope that his mother’s death wasn’t suicide, that it somehow wasn’t his fault for being an awful son. Convincing himself that it was something else, something darker and scarier, was the far easier option.
The fact that it all might be real – that his mother had been taken over by something evil, something that wanted to cause him pain; that Jena had suffered from some otherworldly event as well – was almost too much to get his head around.
The idea of it being true was more exciting – no, more palatable – than the reality.
He pulled his computer out of the desk drawer and booted it up, manually transferring the video file from the camera and storing it in the cloud in a secure location under multiple decoy folders, alongside a bunch of videos of proven fake paranormal activities that he’d saved. That way, if anyone did find it, they would assume this one was a fake too.
Will put his computer away and held the camera in his hands for another moment, trying to decide what to do with it. He had the evidence that he’d craved; did he need to see more?
Did he want to run the risk that Jena might find his equipment on another day?
He pulled the drawer back open and shoved the camera in alongside the computer, and then set to work packing up the rest of the stuff into cases and stashing it all under the desk. He’d figure out what to do with it later – what to do with this revelation later – but right now there was a huge mess on the floor and he felt like he owed it to Jena to clean it up before anyone else found it.