Chapter Text
“Who the fuck is Neil?”
Andrew had asked that question two days ago and still hadn’t figured it out. He’d wandered around the village, pulled aside various employees and volunteers. They all knew who he was, and seemed to think they knew where he was, but Neil remained elusive.
Leaning against the stone wall, Andrew snapped another picture of the rolling hills bathed in the orange glow of sunset. Photography was only a side hustle, an unexpected perk that boosted his instagram numbers and brought in decent income. Plus, it was always nice to be able to use his own photos for his books. But so far, he hadn’t been able to capture anything supernatural on his current trip. The graveyard had been a bust the night before and the building he was staying in himself seemed relatively quiet. Which was why the girl at the front desk had given him the tip to track down Neil – the villages groundskeeper and handyman who had keys to all the buildings. So far, that too had been a bust. Neil was nowhere in sight and Andrew hadn’t felt so much as a hint of paranormal activity since he arrived at Shaker Village – one of the more haunted places in Kentucky.
The early 19th century village sprawled over 3000 acres of green rolling hills, bright and fragrant with spring. There were thirty-four buildings and Andrew hoped to visit all of them, but some weren’t open to the public, especially at night when he was more likely to come across anything supernatural. The most ‘haunted’ of them was a three-story house with mustard colored siding next to a parking lot, surrounded by nothing but green. Apparently, it used to be a part of the inn, as most of the houses were converted into hotels rooms, but they stopped renting it out after too many people checked out in the middle of night citing ghostly encounters.
Checking his phone, Andrew shouldered his camera and headed back to his room. He would get into the houses one way or another. Sometimes his profession required him to bend the rules a little and he’d gotten pretty efficient at breaking and entering. In the decade since he’d turned what he used to consider a curse as a child into his profession, he’d somehow only been arrested for trespassing once. On the other few occasions, he’d been caught they let him off with a warning so it was usually worth the risk.
At six he called for room service, ordering something from the on-site restaurant. The village was remote and it would take more than an hour to pick something up elsewhere.
While he waited, Andrew opened his laptop and sat at the antique desk, watching the last dregs of April fade from the sky out of the window in front of him. Ignoring the multiple emails from his brother and cousin (it had been a full eight months since he’d visited either of them and they probably thought he was dead with how little he bothered to keep in touch when he was on the road), Andrew opened up his notes. They were mostly blank, other than some research he’d done about the various buildings. He thought for a moment when he was checking in that he felt a presence near him, but it turned out just to be a weirdly placed air vent on the wall.
If it turned out there was nothing here, he could make it up. He did that sometimes. He didn’t give a fuck what people believed or didn’t believe. He’d lived the last 28 years of his life with people not believing him about the truth, so if he fabricated stuff to sell a book or five it didn’t matter to him one way or the other. But the truth was – Andrew Minyard could sense departed souls. He never knew what to really call them. In his books he used terms like ghosts, spirits, apparitions. Things people were familiar with. But to him it was just a feeling. When he was in close proximity to ‘spirits’ he could feel them – like a fading memory. The feelings tended to be neutral, neither good nor bad. Though occasionally he would come across something that felt more agitated. He never spent long in places where the memories felt like that – typically prisons or sanitoriums, and once an abandoned Bennigans in the middle of Ohio for some unknown reason. But typically, they were just...there. Existing but not, on the edge of reality. Forgotten and mostly alone, clinging to something they once knew. Andrew felt the same sometimes, which was maybe why he’d stopped ignoring his connection to them and decided to turn it into something useful. At the very least, it provided him with enough money to support his travel and help his brother through med school. Since Aaron had graduated and Nicky had moved to Germany, they encouraged him to settle down as well. But nowhere ever felt like home to Andrew. So, he retained his transient lifestyle, flitting all over the country (and sometimes overseas), cataloguing and documenting, and sometimes bullshitting, his experiences, good or bad.
By the time his dinner arrived it was dark outside. He ate in silence, piling the dishes back on the try outside his room once he was finished. After that he dicked around online for a while, waiting for his alarm to go off. At nine o’clock it finally beeped.
👻
The village was quiet as Andrew strolled down the gravel road towards his destination. It was Wednesday night so he suspected most people were already tucked away in their rooms for the night. Even the animals were out of sight as he walked past their enclosures, encased by stone or white fencing that spanned most of the property. Rounding one of the larger houses, he caught sight of his target. The mustard house, or the Wash House, as was its official name on the map they’d given him upon his arrival, stood quiet. It was dimly lit by a single lamp perched along the cracked stone walkway. He circled the building once before, crouching down by the front door and only entrance, picking the lock with ease.
The iron latch on the door clattered louder than he would have liked as he shut the door behind him, but after a moment it was quiet again. Andrew didn’t bother with the lights, walking slowly and spinning in place in the middle of what looked like a meeting room. He was careful to be light-footed, the wood underneath him barely making a sound. Sometimes when he investigated, he used an EMF meter and other equipment to capture sounds or images. But tonight, the little electromagnetic device was tucked away uselessly in his pocket. It was never better than his own senses and he still needed proof of something before he bothered to further his scrutiny of the building.
Andrew ran careful fingers along the backs of wooden chairs, along the moldings on the walls and the podium at the head of the room. Moving carefully, and quietly, he made his way up to the second floor. There was a room that looked like a living room with aging furniture and old rugs, a bathroom, and two smaller bedrooms filled with old equipment. Nothing out of the ordinary – nothing supernatural.
Finally, he climbed the narrow staircase to the third floor. The staircase ended at a locked door and Andrew could see light underneath the crack. He first wondered if maybe a lamp from outside was shining in, but then something moved. A shadow flitted across the floor, silent but obvious.
Putting a hand to the smooth, aged wood, Andrew closed his eyes. There was no sound, but he could feel something on the other side the door. It was a faint pulse, steady and warm. Whatever was on the other side of the door wasn’t menacing or a threat. With a faint clinking of his lock picks, Andrew twisted the metal tools in the old iron latch until it clicked open. And then everything went black.