The Unhaunted

4. A Warning From the Dead

The emptiness inside the house hit me hard, ramming into my senses like a freight train. There was a wrongness about it that was suffocating.

After we’d stepped over the threshold, I had no more use for Brian. I pushed past him and made my way down a narrow hallway. The tile floor was beige with a fleur-de-lis pattern that was obscured by dust and cracked in many places. Once upon a time it was probably gorgeous.

“Hey wait up!” Brian called out as I entered a tiny kitchen which lead to an enclosed porch. I glanced over my shoulder and stifled a laugh when I saw him waving the spirit box around. He’d also brought an EMF meter, the tool of choice for ghost hunters. It was used to measure electromagnetic waves and supposedly detected fluctuations which helped ferret out spirits. EMF meters were notoriously unreliable since just about every modern appliance and gadget emitted an electromagnetic field of some type—including cell phones and human bodies.

“Yeah sure,” I said, and continued forward into the small porch. There were no signs of any spirits. The house was empty and cold—a dead house, as Donny liked to call them.

“Well?” Donny asked.

“Nothing,” I said, “But I don’t know. The air around me feels odd. I don’t see any spirits, but something’s not right about this house.

“Yeah,” Donny agreed. “I feel it too.’

That was a surprise. Donny could only detect spirits that existed on his own plane and he was completely disconnected from the living world. A shiver would never again run down Donny’s spine. His only true connection to the world around him was me.

“Hey!” Brian had finally caught up with us. “I said wait!” He looked annoyed. He towered over me and waved the EMF meter around while holding up the spirit box. It hissed and buzzed, cluttering my mind with white noise and making it difficult to think.

“Turn that thing off,” I said, “It’s useless. There aren’t any spirits in here.”

Donny took a step forward and spoke into the spirit box.

“Leave,” he whispered.

His voice came through as a garbled hiss. Brian turned white and nearly dropped the box. “Ohmigod, Ohmigod! Did you hear that! Damn! I wish I’d been recording it.”

“Yes, I heard it.” I said. “It was Donny.”

I pushed past him again and headed back the way I’d come.

“What? Who’s Donny?” Brian called after me. “Are you picking someone up?”

“Yeah, do you want to pick me up?” Donny said in a sultry voice. I ignored him.

I turned right when I left the kitchen and made my way down another, shorter hallway which lead me to two bedrooms. A small bathroom was sandwiched between them. I poked my  head in both of them, but saw nothing. The bathroom was covered in dust like everything else, and completely empty. In fact, the entire house was empty of everything—there weren’t even shades on the windows.

“Where are you hiding?” I whispered.

The house was small. It didn’t take me long to look in all the rooms including the two dormered rooms at the top of a flight of stairs that were located right next to the front door. I even poked my  head in all the closets since sometimes spirits were shy, although based on the history of this house I doubted that was the case with this one.

Brian followed me around and complained loudly, but thankfully didn’t try to stop me.

“I’m just trying to get a good read on the house,” I said. This was true enough, at least. Finally I found myself back where we’d started, standing right outside the kitchen.