CHAPTER ONE
The parched air swarmed furiously with sky-seeking embers that spanned the spectrum of orange and yellow. They emerged from flames of the fire with the vibrating sound of cracking bones and formed abstract waves in the space above my head before drifting off into the darkness.
The campfire was mesmerizing. It swallowed up all of my concentration. I needed to think, to draw in some underlying message that was hidden in the dark corners of my surroundings.
I closed my eyes and shut out the dancing light. With the cessation of my sight, the crackles grew louder and the hollow sound of drumming began in the distance. I felt the air reverberate with each solid blow and let the noises flow throughout my body until they nestled somewhere at the base of my skull.
I needed information. I searched internally for something, anything. I noticed myself taking a deep breath through no conscious effort of my own and felt the threads of my mind reaching out blindly. I didn’t know what I was looking for exactly but I would know when I found it.
An uneasy, nauseous feeling came over my senses like a heavy cloak. My eyes flew open. The silhouette of a small woman stood before me. She had bright yellow eyes that peered at me malevolently, increasing my urge to vomit.
“Something has been unearthed here,” I said in an uneasy voice that wasn’t my own. Like shots from a seizure-inducing video game, images of destroyed tombstones, shovels and dirt, bones lying scattered across a desert land, high-soaring birds against an endless blue sky, four-legged beasts dancing to the tune of a drum, all flowed in rapid succession across my mind’s eye.
The woman smiled at me with canine fangs.
“That’s all you’ll be finding,” she said. “There is no death here.”
“Not yet,” I found myself saying. I slowly turned to the sound of the drumming. A black figure with no face was banging away on a native drum. The edges of the fire were suddenly alive with the slinking figures of wolves. They advanced towards me, each step timed with the pound of the drum until I was completely surrounded.
The wolves leaned back in unison and straightened up until they all stood on their hind legs. They walked awkwardly, unpredictably, like some sort of disturbing canine zombie and within seconds they were within striking distance.
The last thing I remember was looking into their eyes and seeing the eyes of my sister, my mother, even Dex, these horribly human eyes, before they started to tear me apart, limb from bloody limb.
“Are you nervous, Perry?”
I barely heard my own name. My mind still tried to process the remaining fragments from the dream I had the previous night. It took me a few seconds to realize that my sister, Ada, was speaking to me.
“What? Yes, of course I’m nervous,” I told her.
“Well, you look a little green,” she said.
I felt a little green. Not only did I have this overall icky feeling from the dream, I had my internet debut to worry about.
It was a Sunday night and Ada and I were sitting anxiously on my bed, the wide screen of my computer facing us with an impersonal glow. In a few moments my parents would join us, hopefully with a bag of popcorn and lowered expectations, and we would watch a webisode that would make or break my life.
Four weeks ago my life was a lot different. I was just a lowly receptionist at an advertising agency, living at home with my parents and floundering in an uneventful existence. Then one night, while visiting my Uncle Al’s estate on the Oregon coast, I became involved in something that can only be described as “supernatural.” I still don’t have an explanation, but I knew it was worth telling everyone about. I recounted the incident on my sister’s blog, posted a few videos I’d shot on YouTube, and suddenly everyone wanted to know what happened to Perry Palomino that night (which, in hindsight, was really nothing, but with my shaky camera work, it looked like something).
One thing did happen though, while I explored my Uncle Al’s haunted lighthouse; I stumbled across someone else who shouldn’t have been there. His name was Dex Foray, a Seattle-based filmmaker who was scouting locations for a potential ghost hunting show on the website he worked for, Shownet. OK, maybe the term filmmaker is a bit grandiose. Shownet specializes in low-budget, mildly entertaining shows broadcasted primarily on the web. Their current repertoire included Wine Babes, a show that was apparently more popular than I had thought, at least among the men. It consisted of Dex’s girlfriend, the uber-hot and annoyingly exotic Jennifer Rodriguez, who hosted the show that taught hapless men how to pair cheap wines with cheap meals. And when I say cheap, I mean Burger King. Anyway, adding to the highbrow mix was our show (of which, at this point, I didn’t even know the name of).
See, after our run-in, and after I got quasi-famous on YouTube, Dex contacted me in hopes of producing the ghost hunter/ghost whisperer/ghost seeker show with me as the host. I said yes, because, well, what else did I have to do. Before I knew it, we returned to Uncle Al’s estate, investigated the abandoned lighthouse where everything originally went down and attempted to get it all on film.
I’m still not sure what we ended up capturing. Over the last three weeks, I’d only been in sporadic contact with Dex and the most I’d seen of the final footage took place on his laptop during the drive to Shownet’s office in downtown Seattle. The only thing that I really had any control over was writing the blog piece that would accompany the webisode. We hoped that if tonight’s episode did well (it was just a demo, after all), we could branch the show into its own website and have my blog piece run alongside the footage; this way people would get a greater sense of what actually happened versus what we managed to catch on film. In the future we could also have little bios, maybe a Twitter feed about what we were investigating and other interactive components. Of course, if tonight flopped, we would have nothing.
Part of me believed things would work out and that Dex was gifted enough to make something compelling out of nothing, but the other part was certain we were doomed. I mean, for one, neither of us had any idea what we were doing. Although strange things have happened to me in my lifetime (things I was becoming more and more aware of), I didn’t consider myself a ghost whisperer. I didn’t know jack shit about the supernatural, how to communicate with them, how to conjure them, or anything like that. There are tons of people out there who deal with the paranormal (did you know you can get a degree in Demonology? I mean how f**ked up of a major is that?), tons of TV shows and blogs that involve psychics and ESP and EPGs and infrared cameras and whatnot. But me? I knew nothing. I was pretty sure Dex didn’t have the slightest clue when it came to the supernatural, either. Other than the fact that he’s quite supernatural himself. In other words, the dude’s crazy.