Chapter 1
All Ben could see after the leap was a bright light shining directly into his eyes, with only darkness in every other direction.
Okay, he thought as he squinted and blinked, trying to get his bearings, if someone tells me to ‘walk into the light,’ I swear to god I’m gonna lose it. He held a hand up to his eyes to try and get a glimpse of anything else, but it was just too dark.
“So?” a faceless, masculine voice came from the blackness, and Ben found he could just barely make out the silhouette of someone behind the light. “Do you see anything?”
Ben frowned. “Uh, nothing but a bright light in my face,” he complained. “Would you mind…?”
“See, Joey?” came another deep voice from Ben’s right. “I told you we need to use the infra-red. He can’t see a damn thing.”
“He won’t see a damn thing with the infra-red either!” the first voice argued. “Only the camera sees it. We’ll be in pitch darkness.”
“That’s what the flashlights are for! Switch it already.”
The light flipped off, and it did indeed leave the three apparent people present in a black void, except for a slightly illuminated face looking down at what appeared to be the flip-out screen of a video camera, which faded into view once the spots cleared from Ben’s eyes. Well, that gave him a hint as to what may have been happening. Some kind of student film, maybe?
“Okay, I see you just fine, G-man,” the camera operator—Joey?—said. “Lead the way.”
Ben bit his lip. He was supposed to lead them somewhere in the dark? “You got a light for me?”
Joey looked up at him from the screen, eyebrow raised, before reaching a hand to Ben’s forehead, where he flicked on a light attached to his head. Instantly, the immediate area in front of Ben was illuminated, and he saw that Joey, a man in his twenties with a goatee and beanie, was carrying a TV camera on his shoulder. So, potentially a documentary, then?
But where were they, and what were they actually doing here?
He turned, and the head lamp caught the other man in the room—a tall, slim man with an impish grin on his face. He switched on his own head lamp, and Ben turned away from it, and scanned around the room, taking in where he was. This was a somewhat unremarkable living room. Why they were here in darkness was a mystery to Ben.
“Let’s go,” Joey insisted.
“Uh, you know… maybe you should take the lead,” he said to the tall man.
“Me?” the man looked surprised, then amused. “What, are you too scared already?”
“Scared? Why would I be…?” and then it dawned on him, as his hands closed around an EMF meter tucked into his belt. “We’re ghost hunters…” he observed. Then he realised he’d said that out loud, and added, “So of course I’m not scared! I just thought you might like to take point. That’s all.”
“Greg, if the fearless one goes in first, it’s not as entertaining. The people want to see the scaredy-cat absolutely pissing themselves. So go. It’s only down the stairs.”
Okay, that was a valuable piece of information. Downstairs. So they were, he supposed, going down to the basement. Wherever that was.
“Alright, fine, I’ll go first,” he said, and peered around the room, picking an exit at random and heading for it.
Ben, of course, was pretty fearless himself these days, demon hallucinations notwithstanding. What was some old basement in a completely normal-looking house to him, anyway? He supposed he could feign fear, if that’s what the others expected, but it wasn’t like he was being poisoned this time. He could keep a clear head.
As he crossed into the entry hall, he found a door under the stairs—that had to be the basement, surely.
He opened it up, mugging to the camera a little. “Well, here goes!” he said, and stepped onto the staircase, resisting the urge to flip the light switch.
He crept down the creaking wooden steps carefully, hanging onto the banister.
“So far so good,” he announced to the camera, which was following him closely.
He peered down at the EMF meter, and was interested to note that the needle was moving. Well, that could have been any kind of electrical disturbance. No cause for alarm there.
As he reached the bottom of the stairs, he peered around the room. It was full of junk: old boxes, furniture, dusty old clutter.
“Okay, now what?” he asked the others, turning to face them on the staircase.
As he did, a loud hollow ‘thump‘ behind him made him spin back around.
“Did that chair just fall over…?” he asked, catching sight of the chair that had definitely been upright the last time he’d looked at it.
“It sure did. Pretty freaky!” said the tall man, for whom he still didn’t have a name.
Ben approached the chair cautiously, and then from another part of the room, another eerie sound came. A baseball rolled into the centre of the room, and stopped at Ben’s feet.
Okay, what the hell?
Ben backed away from the ball. That had got him a little spooked, he had to admit. But there must have been a rational—
Without warning, a dark figure jumped out of the shadows. Ben fell back in a moment of abject terror.
“Oh, sh—!” he yelped as his butt hit the bottom step.
Then, laughter.
The black figure pulled off their ski mask, revealing long blonde locks, and the woman’s green eyes sparkled in the lamplight as she giggled.
Ben’s elevated heart rate began to drop, as he took in what had just occurred.
“Oh my god, Greg, you were meant to run back upstairs, not fall on your ass!”
Ben frowned, rubbing his now-pained tail-bone. So this whole thing was for show?
“I guess you were too good,” he said to the woman, his face contorting as he pulled himself back to his feet.
“Not that I’m not entertained,” the tall man said, “but we’re gonna need to do another take.”
Ben rubbed his butt once more, watching Joey and the tall guy head back up the stairs.
“You good?” the woman asked, grinning. “You didn’t break your butt, did you?”
“I mean, that is a possibility,” Ben said with a laugh. “My tail-bone is killing me.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Wouldn’t want your next spanking to hurt too bad,” she said in a distinctly flirtatious tone.
Ben chuckled nervously. “Uh, yeah. We’ll see how fast that recovers, shall we?” He began ascending the stairs.
“Break a leg!” the woman called up to him.
“Oh gee, thanks,” Ben deadpanned. “Why don’t I just break each of my bones one by one? By the end of this… production… I’ll be in a full body cast. All the ghosts can sign it.”
The woman giggled as she put her mask back over her face. “Well you’d better get this take right so that doesn’t happen. Remember, you panic and run upstairs, ushering everyone out. Make sure you knock the camera around good so it doesn’t get me in frame too long.”
“You got it!” Ben said, reaching the top of the stairs. As he closed the door behind him, he turned and nearly had yet another fall in surprise as he walked right into Addison’s flickering hologram.
“Oh my god, don’t do that!” he hissed.
“Sorry,” she replied, a grin plastered on her face. “Why are you walking around in the dark anyway?”
“For the atmosphere,” Ben whispered, peeking towards the living room to see if the others could see or hear him. He wasn’t able to see them, but he turned off his headlamp just in case. “I’m a ghost hunter. Or rather, a charlatan. This is totally staged.”
Addison was busily fiddling with her handlink. “Oh, I see.” She prepared her information dump with an authoritative pose. “Okay, it’s October second, 2010, and you are Greg Nguyen, co-host of a ghost hunting TV show called ‘Haunter Hunter’—you’re currently filming a pilot, but the show never made it to air. Ooh, looks like the camera man got injured pretty bad during this production.”
“That guy, Joey?” Ben asked, pointing to the other room.
“Joseph Harding.”
“What happened to him?”
“Well, they were filming in an abandoned asylum, and it looks like the stairs collapsed when he was on them. He broke his spine and lost the use of his legs, which put a halt to his career and left him in chronic pain. In 2018, he OD’d on opiates.”
“My god…” Ben shook his head. “Well that should be easy to fix though, right? Just keep him off the stairs.”
“Let’s hope that’s all.”
“Greg, are you coming?” called the voice of the tall man.
“You’d better go. I’ll try not to spook you.” Addison moved to press a button on the handlink.
“Wait, before you go—what are the names of the other two crew members?”
“Oh, uh…” Addison swiped a hand on the rounded device. “Tall guy is Alex McKenzie, and the lady is—oh, Greg’s wife, Iris Hart-Nguyen.”
“Wife…?” Ben swallowed.
“Earth to Greg!” shouted Joey. “If we could do this take before we die of old age, that’d be great!”
Ben and Addison shared a final awkward look with one another.
“Well, just remember your fiancée is around to see what you get up to,” she said with a grin and a wink, before a light swept her figure out of existence, leaving Ben to continue this charade with his new buddies.
“Okay, let’s go find us a ghost,” he called back to the living room.