“Could you keep up? It is going to start raining on us if we don’t get a move on,” Drew complained. Since Madeline was about two feet behind him, his whining tone and stupid words were even more grating than normal.
“You don’t even know if this place has a roof, or if whatever roof it has is even waterproof. Rushing in isn’t a guarantee we’ll stay dry. Not to mention, aren’t we supposed to take in the ambiance around the building as well as within?” she asked.
“Whatever,” he said, shaking his head. His flashlight beam shifted swiftly, blinding her as he shined it right in her eyes.
Dick. Bag of dicks. Limp bag of dicks, Madeline thought spitefully.
“We do need to hurry,” Cammie agreed. “Even if the ceiling isn’t great, it still will provide some protection for the equipment.”
Madeline snorted. If the haunting was real, we shouldn’t need equipment. That was her big beef with their group and other paranormal research teams she’d seen on television. If the ghosts were real, and they were interacting with their plane, why would they need temperature gauges and other stuff to recognize they were here? A good ghost should be like the old horror movies—in your face, pea-spitting, and obviously nasty.
But then again, they did say she was a perverse little beastie.
Even with them rushing her, though, she paused at the grand staircase leading up to the doors to enter the mansion. She couldn’t help it, something drove her to look up at the windows. Well, what was left of the windows. It looked like someone had busted out most of them and some were replaced with bits of plywood, but on the upper floors…some glass remained, reflecting the latest flash of lightning.
A second after the flash, for a brief second, she saw red eyes. Glowing red orbs, set in what looked like the oval of a face, looking right back at her.
Madeline blinked fast as rain began to pelt her. The face was gone, so it could’ve been her imagination. It could’ve been just the lightning messing with her eyes, like the after effect of a camera flash or something entirely natural. But her excitement ramped. Maybe tonight they really would find proof of something Other.
Is it ridiculous to say that the possibility turns me on?
Because it did.
*
Tamerlane
The four humans—kids, really—stumbling in the dark toward the mansion weren’t particularly interesting. Less common, in recent memory, but not novel in any way.
Back when The Big Bad invented this in-between place, a few had tried to make it a home. Fools. Humans tended to have that in common, though, in his experience. If you put enough windows on a place and threw in a few grand staircases, people thought it was must have property. But the ones who would buy and move into the mansion to try to revitalize it had long since gone, leaving it to the young and the adventure seekers.
They came in droves for a while. They’d bust the windows, blast their music, and otherwise come for a good time. Armed with spray cans for their graffiti, enough drugs to kill an elephant and the beer to wash them down—no condoms…because apparently pregnancy and STDs were less scary than unprotected sex in a supposedly haunted house.
Humans bored him.
Everything bored him.
But that was the idea of the punishment, wasn’t it? Not that it was a particularly fair punishment, not in Tamerlane’s eyes. His brother had tweaked the Big Bad—trolling, that’s what the kids called it in this age. The Big Bad had been out for blood. To protect his sibling, Tamerlane took the heat for the actions.
That’s what brothers did, even demonic ones. He’d make the little bastard pay in his own way when his punishment was over.
The punishment was particularly cruel, at least in his opinion. Banished to the human dimension, stuck with their smelly and brief lives. At least the house afforded him some distance from the bulk of humanity. Isolated as the formerly palatial estate was, not too many came to invade his silent hell.
But when they did… well, that was what it was all about, wasn’t it?
Some souls were particularly evil and had a taste—nay, a penchant—for violence. Both in their behavior since their inevitable demise and in their time on earth, which afforded them certain perks from the Big Bad. One of those dubious perks? The ability to cross the veil at some points and toy with the humans. Basically, it was the equivalent of a resort experience for the baddest of the bad spirits. They got to mess with humans, the humans got a little peek at what hell was like, and everyone went home happy.
Except for Tamerlane, trapped as the babysitter to evil souls and their human victims.
Fun, fun.
The latest band of humans didn’t look like partiers, which was a bummer. He did like the partiers because their glassy eyed shock at seeing a ‘ghost’ cracked him up. But these humans had heavy packs and a determined step which meant one thing and one thing only.
They were ghost hunters.
Tamerlane snorted. If only they knew the reality of the afterlife, maybe they’d spend their short lives enjoying being alive rather than toying with the dead. But it wasn’t for him to judge. Nothing was.