The lost girl felt stirrings within the Dream. They were coming now. The Three.
Malcolm Gerstein turned the ghostmobile into the driveway of the abandoned cider mill, stealing one last glimpse of Persephone's ample cleavage in the rearview mirror, before setting the parking breaks on the van.
For her part, Persephone Orisha continued to stare at the blond curls cascading down the nape of Dante Hades' neck, if that even was his real name. She was beginning to doubt it. He was so neat though. She would never regret taking an internship with the Exploration Channel's
Demon Hunters
show as part of her senior independent study at Vassar. If she hadn't, she would never have met Dante. The show wasn't even carried on basic cable - it was on like channel 413 or something like that, but that didn't matter. She was in love with Dante, even if she was too shy to make a move on him. She knew he at least noticed her (and what heterosexual man didn't?). She saw it in his stolen glances, his subtle return of her smiles.
Dante opened the passenger door of the van and stepped out onto the moss-devoured tarmac. He beheld the ancient vine-covered stone building before him. So this was the fabled Innsbruck Cider Mill, opened in 1873, abandoned forever in 1917. The edifice that probably caused the suicide of one prominent early psychical researcher (Edmund Gurney) in 1888, and drove another mad for a period of several months (that being one James Hyslop, the founder of the American Society for Psychical Research). Well, ghosts weren't so tough anymore. In fact, they never seemed to show up at all these days, something that wasn't helping the ratings of
Demon Hunters
or Dante's prospects for ever finding a real job.
He walked around to the back of the van to help Malcolm unload the equipment. He handed Malcolm the digital camera. He prayed that Malcolm would put his thumb over the lens again, the way he had back in Amityville. They needed a couple of unexplained luminous orbs on this shoot, needed them badly after the most recent fiasco in Alabama.
"What's this?" he asked Malcolm, after picking up an unfamiliar piece of equipment.
"You like that/" Malcolm replied. "That's an old E-Meter. I ordered it from the Scientology website because it has all these cool knobs and dials. It's supposed to tell you if you are an operating thetan, which is like a perfect spiritual being or something like that. Look, it comes with this totally rad three-pen chart recorder, which makes a lot of scratchy noises and beeps and stuff. I figure we can easily shoot ten minutes of this thing beeping and scratching. The fans are gonna love it."
"And its scientific validity?"
"Dude, you have to be kidding me!"
Dante rolled his eyes and asked, "OK, what else do we have."
"The usual, infrared goggles, spot cameras, recording equipment, one outmoded magnetometer, two thermistors, and one standard-issue Schmidt random event generator," said Malcolm, pushing his nerd glasses back up his nose. "Oh, and I brought this, in case the action gets slow." He showed Dante an unopened Hasbro glow-in-the-dark Ouija board, fresh from amazon.com.
"I sure as hell hope it doesn't get that slow," Dante muttered as he watched Malcolm attempt to haul the TV camera out of the bed of the van, his beer gut bouncing with each strain of his "muscles."
"Here, forget that – just set up the tripod," Dante said, as he took the camera from Malcolm's sweaty paws.
The dark spirit floating in the Dream-ether of the mill would also have rolled her eyes, if she had any. These guys were even bigger imbeciles than that crew back in 1976. Oh well, flesh was flesh, and she hadn't worn a human body in quite some time. She could almost taste the delights that were in store for her.
Dante gave Persephone a wink and signaled to Malcolm to begin rolling the camera. He raised his hand mike and began the introductory spiel.
"This is your intrepid ghostbuster Dante Hades. Welcome to
Demon Hunters
. I am standing before the infamous old Innsbruck Cider Mill in Avon, Connecticut. The windows you see before you have been boarded up and shuttered since 1917, when the mill was abruptly shut down and abandoned forever, allegedly due to paranormal activity."
Malcolm panned the camera across the stone edifice, zooming on rotting boards, then following the creek that ran behind mill, which was barely visible because it was overgrown with swamp grass and cattails. Then he slowly panned back to Dante, carefully framing the picture to ensure that his pecs and biceps, so prominent beneath his black
Demon Hunters
tee shirt, would be clearly visible to the female audience (and possibly the gay male audience as well, although the consultants they had hired on the cheap did not provide much in the way of a demographic breakdown when it came to sexual orientation). Just to make sure his bases were covered, he zoomed out a little bit to show the bulge of Dante's package and his large quadriceps muscles. To boost their ratings up above zero and avoid cancellation, they might have to resort to shooting a sweat lodge ceremony with both Dante's and Persephone's buck-naked moist bodies fully exposed, Malcolm thought. He would have to raise that idea at the next production meeting. Of course to avoid a ratings killer, Malcolm's body would remain where it belonged, behind the camera.
Malcolm suddenly become aware that in his digression, he had subconsciously swept the camera to focus on Persephone's humongous breasts, which were even at that very moment valiantly struggling to set themselves free from her halter top. To appear purposeful, he lingered there for only a second, then panned up to focus on her deep dark eyes, her dimples and her lustrous long black hair. This intern thing was definitely working out he thought, licking his lips. The ratings would definitely turn northward if he kept taking shots like this. Reluctantly, he turned the camera once again in Dante's direction.
"As already mentioned, this old mill is famous in the annals of psychical research for causing the suicide of one prominent early investigator into the paranormal and causing another to lapse into madness for months after he spent just one night here," Dante continued. "In the 1930s, a group of college kids camping out in the mill mysteriously disappeared, never to be seen again, and three decades later a man and a woman seemingly engaged in a romantic tryst were found floating in the creek in back of me. Many others have died here.
"Many of the visitors to the mill report catching a brief glimpse of a young woman in nineteenth century garb, who disappears when you look directly at her. Often these visitors report that they were in the process of falling asleep just prior to the vision.
"Legend has it that the ghost is the spirit of Mary Thompson, a young mill worker who one night 1876 offered her favors to the entire mill crew, taunting each man as he finished. Mary Thompson was beaten to death for her troubles, and her body was never found. As a result, her spirit lives on in this place, a hungry ghost seeking justice, or more likely vengeance."
Demon-Mary rose from the Dream, called forth by the sound of her name. She would extract her vengeance again tonight. She felt the darkness within her rising, her will gathering its strength for the coming ordeal.
After several hours of playing with the ouija board while wearing infrared goggles and using the E-meter to test each other's spiritual achievements, our scantily clad intrepid investigators turned in early, early being around 2 AM for them. To Malcolm and Persephone's consternation, each slept alone, in order to cover the entire building in case anything began to happen.
They all dreamed. This was moment the demon had been waiting for. Now she could wear their flesh, defile it and drive them mad. Not to mention eating the rest of Persephone's Big Mac. It had been fourteen years since she had last known the ecstasies of fast food.