Two Hours 'til Sunrise

Ivy joined the Nitefield Paranormal Society last month in honor of the Halloween spirit — despite not being a particularly strong believer in the paranormal herself.  Hey, there has always been an explanation for the stuff she's experienced, and surely all those ghost stories she'd heard were from really suggestible people or outright liars... right?  Well, believer-or-not, she figured going on a few ghost hunts would at least be entertaining.  And maybe her more rational mind would help her debunk any weak evidence before the NPS (semi-affectionately referred to as the "Nips" :) ) embarrassed themselves publicly!  Orbs... I mean, come-on!  Dust, bugs, and a refusal to acknowledge depth always explained those away!

"Come on, dudes.  It's just an attic!  The scariest thing up there is that hideous armoire!" Ivy said from the back seat of the SUV the team had laid-out as a base-of-operations.  "And that isn't a face.  It's pareidolia — like when you see a face on the side of a mountain or something."

"Well then, Ms. Science.  You get the attic when we do isolated sessions," Troy responded with an awkwardly twisted spine as he tried to orient himself toward the conversation.

"Look, Ivy, I know you want to prove how fearless you are, and whatnot," Petra chipped in from the driver's seat, "but this one is different.  We've been around the block a few times, you know?  And I'm telling you, this could be dangerous.  You heard the family, right?"  She didn't mimic Troy, instead keeping her focus on the silhouetted house outside her window.

"You don't seriously believe that, right?  I mean, if all of what they said was true, why is the best evidence they could come up with a smudge or something...  I don't even really see a face in this."  Ivy squinted closely at the picture as she tried to push the admittedly goofy face she thought she saw within the circled blob.

"I'm in support of giving Ivy the attic, if she wants to be a badass so badly," Drew said from the other seat.

"She's been investigating for a month — there's no way she's ready for what could be in that attic!" Petra snapped.  This time she was turned around to face the rest of them.  Based on the jiggling of her black-glass earrings alone, everyone in the truck understood that this was serious to her.

"I think you guys are just trying to creep me out before we go in there to set up. We're just burning precious sunset-prep-time, and it isn't working on me."  Truth be told, Ivy would normally have been a bit more mellow with her skepticism.  But right now, she needed to pee and wasn't entirely on-board with wasting any more time outside.

The other three seemed to be about as fed-up with the whole discussion as Ivy was, though none of them noticed her wiggling knees and put two-and-two together.  (Maybe if they could, they wouldn't fall for some of their false-positives?)

"Fine."  Petra un-clicked her seatbelt and opened the driver-side door.  “Let’s go.  Ivy gets the attic, but she’s taking the salt.”

Ivy followed her around to the trunk to fetch some of their gear. “As if a fucking condiment is going to stop the etherial forces of evil!”  Admittedly, she was proud of that one.

Petra was not so amused, as she stared at the green-haired girl and shoved a little bottle into her arms.  “Take. The. Fucking. Salt.”

~~

Ivy had been right to get the group moving at least — setting up all the static cameras and bringing the monitors online swallowed what little remaining sunlight they had left.  And Ivy took no time “proving” her point by carrying one of them all the way up into the attic before anyone else even managed to enter the house.

Though, setting up the camera was only half of her mission.  Once the camera was in place and on (she forgot to check that on an earlier investigation), she descended the creaky attic stairs and started poking open every door she came across in the hope of finding a bathroom.  The house was pretty damn creepy.  Not abandoned-creepy, though it had been ditched, apparently.  The family had left too recently for there to be much of the decay characteristic of a “typical” haunted house.  Rather, it was just a mess of random items and furniture — oddly not taken with the family when they moved.  And a duvet haphazardly draped over a few stacked boxes had a way of looking like a hunched figure in the darkness.

Finally, a bathroom.  Ivy entered, clicked the lock on the door, side-eyed the mirror as she passed toward the niche where the toilet was.  “FUCK!”

“Whoa, whoa!  Ivy?!”  Troy’s heavy footsteps clomped up the stairs outside the bathroom, before he was frantically rattling the locked doorknob.  “Are you alright— did you see something?!”

The lock popped and Ivy opened the door only for Troy to muscle his way past her with his camcorder at the ready… Perhaps ill-advisedly, given the setting.

“No.  It’s just—”

“Oh wow, that toilet is fucked.  I bet you think that’s why they up-and-left, right?” Troy interrupted, kneeling down to gather unnecessary footage of the broken commode.  He wasn’t wrong.  The bowl was cracked in half, and the floor around it was mostly missing and the hole revealed the floor joists.  “Twenty bucks says one of their kids broke it, didn’t tell the parents, since they didn’t want to get in trouble, and then the leak caused all this damage.”

“Yeah, I don’t really care about that, Troy.”  Ivy sighed and her face flushed.  “I, just, kinda need to pee.  I’m going to check for another bathroom downstairs.”

“Want me to come with?” Troy said before he held his finger to his mouth.  A loud creak rolled across the ceiling, as if something was walking around up in the attic.

“NO!” Ivy hissed.

“Shhh!”  Troy again muscled past her, exited out into the hallway and began a sweep with his camera.

~~

The group gathered at the back of the SUV once the cameras were up to discuss their “plan of attack.”  Ivy was the last to join them as she stiffly shuffled to the back of the huddle.

“Better?” Troy whispered while Petra suggested an initial EVP sweep of the downstairs.

Ivy’s frustrated expression coupled with the way her thighs were squeezed together answered his question.

“Here,” Petra shoved a digital recorder into Ivy’s hands.  “It’s already recording, so you don’t need to do anything.”  She then handed Drew an EMF detector and pulled on the single head-mounted IR camera for herself.  The group leader always got dibs on the cool stuff.  “Does that sound good?  Any questions?”

“Uh, yeah — what if we need to pee, ‘cuz the toilet upstairs is broken, and there isn’t one downstairs?”  Ivy smiled in an attempt to assuage the humiliation she was feeling, but she was getting pretty antsy.

“Well, what do dogs do?” Drew asked with a chuckle as he clicked on the EMF-reader.

“Fuck you, Drew!  C-can we just, like, drive to a convenience store right quick—”

“You can’t be serious, Ivy!” Petra groaned.  “We just got everything set up!”

“I know, b-but…”

“Just hold it, for fuck’s sake!” Petra snapped.

“And if you can’t, there’s plenty of backyard to pee on.”  Drew shrugged.  “I mean, it’s not ideal, but you gotta do what you gotta do.”

“Look at where we are!  How am I supposed to pee in the backyard — we’re in the middle of a subdivision, and this house doesn’t even have a fence!”

“I mean, Drew’s got a point.  If it’s that bad, you could just pop a squat against the side of the house… I doubt anyone will see you,” Troy added, this time filming a wiggling and increasingly angry Ivy from above.

“I’m a girl.  The ‘process’ is a little less discreet for me!”

“Everyone, just shut up!”  Petra shouted.  “I’m not wasting another second out here when we’re supposed to be in there gathering evidence for a family so they don’t look insane anymore!”

“I know, I’m sorry, but could we please go to a store or something?” Ivy pleaded.  “It will be so quick, I promise!”

“Grow up, Ivy.”  Petra then stormed off toward the house.

~~

Things rapidly accelerated once the investigation started.  It started with footsteps from the second floor ceiling, which eventually evolved into the sounds of a full scramble down the stairs.  That one chilled Ivy.  Sure, it could be the structure, but to the point of her team, they really did sound unnatural.

Debunking the cold-spots also became increasingly more difficult as they seemed to move around.  One of them “stood” waist-high near a bedroom window — a draft, surely.  Until it migrated out into the hallway.  And the entire kitchen seemed to drop ten degrees within a couple minutes of them asking questions.

Then, there was the door slamming — the one to the bathroom at the top of the stairs.  Ivy didn’t have an explanation for that one… The other three were all in the living room with her.  Petra’s face flashed from a momentary horror to a wild grin as she realized that this house was wearing down Ivy’s skepticism.

Ivy was happy to leave the building for a regroup before their respective “solitary” sessions.  Ok, ok, so these things were definitely weird, but that didn’t mean ghosts existed…  The possibility excited her, though, as she realized she might be accomplishing what she set out to do in the first place — albeit, in the opposite way she expected.  But even being on the precipice of getting a life-altering piece of confirmation that these people around her weren’t just suggestible fools, excited her less than something else: the solitary investigation phase meant they were almost ready to wrap up for the night.  

They hadn’t planned to stay there for much longer than two hours that night, and that Ivy needed that to be the case.  Trudging up and down that staircase had worked up a sweat, and worse, a thirst.  She tried to be “cautious” and only take small sips out of a water bottle so she could keep her mouth from getting dry, but soon the bottle was empty.

And by now, Ivy NEEDED to pee.  Her kidneys mocked her insolence as they continued to fill her already achingly-full bladder.  Worse, they did this with a torturously slow dribble.  Whatever footage the team had gathered, at least half of it must have shown Ivy bobbing, bending, and full-on pee-dancing.  She was in such agony that she didn’t care when she caught Troy’s camera pointed directly at her wiggling ass and arched back.

She needed to pee so badly that even the “ghosts” weren’t really bothering her any more.  Tears streamed down her cheeks as she awaited Petra’s return from her solitary run-through.  Only Ivy would go into the attic.

“Holy!—” Troy exclaimed as he grasped at his agape mouth with utter disbelief.  His shaking hands fumbled around his pockets and around the monitor in the dark trunk as he looked for his walkie-talkie.  “P-Petra, you need to come out here!”

“What did you see?!” Drew threw himself onto the keyboard and mouse as he rolled back the footage.  “N-no fucking way…”

Petra’s voice crackled through the shitty speaker with the same question.

“Apparition!” Troy shouted before he realized he hadn’t pressed down the button.  “A-Apparition!  You have to see this!”

“Look, right as she rounds the top of the stairs.  There.”  Drew stabbed the spacebar.  His fingernail clicked against the plastic screen as he shuddered with a mixture of fear and excitement.

“What?”  Petra jogged up to the back of the SUV only to be rendered completely speechless once she saw the monitor.

“Th-that’s… creepy,” Troy said, finally breaking the silence.

Ivy, who had taken a seat in the SUV to await her turn, mumbled a wavering “mhmm”, despite not really paying attention to what her team had just caught.

The screen displayed a half-interlaced frame from the first-person footage of Petra’s head-cam.  It was a shot from the top of the stairs leading to the second floor, looking in the opposite direction of the bathroom.  The team had left the folding staircase to the attic down for easy access.  It was right behind that staircase, visible through the gaps beneath each step.

“I am so glad I didn’t see that.  I was heading to the bedroom.”  Petra said, apparently overwhelmed by the image.

“Guys, that is the clearest image I have ever seen.” Drew backed away from the screen.  “It’s completely irrefutable. Something is standing at the end of the hall.”

“You can even make out the face.”  Troy now used the cursor to trace over the elements, circling again and again like a fly looking for a place to rest.  And based on the look of that thing, a fly would most certainly not be out-of-place. “I swear — that looks like it’s fucking screaming.”

“Please d-don’t!”  Petra shielded her face from the image, as if reality was settling in piece-by-piece.  “I don’t want to look at it anymore.”  She stepped back around the truck.

“Who’s going in next?” Drew asked, perhaps rhetorically as the paleness overtaking Troy indicated that he had exactly no intention of volunteering.

“ ‘Kay, g-guys,” Ivy started with gulp.  “I-I know you want t-to do this whole ‘everyone goes in alone’ thing—” She paused to squeeze herself.  “B-but, I’m literally gonna explode, here.”

“We’re not leaving early, so no, Ivy,” Petra said monotonously as she held the steering wheel and stared out the windshield.

“I’m not going in there with that!” Troy said from the back.  “Sorry, not sorry — there is no way!”

“Troy—” Petra started before she was cut off by Ivy.

“Yep, thought so.  S-so how about this?  What if I go in there and d-do the attic and we just haul it to a fucking gas station when I’m done.  I’ll get all the cameras too.”

Petra looked back over the seats to the men still staring at the monitor.

“P-please.  I p-promise I won’t even rush it — I-I just need to know we’ll be out of here soon!”

Petra sighed as both Drew and Troy shook their heads.  “Fine.”

“You can’t send her in alone with that!  D-did you even look at this yet, Ivy?!” Troy protested.

“N-nope.  And, honestly… I d-don’t care.”  Ivy said through gritted teeth.

“Seriously, Petra?”  Drew asked, resigned.

“Well, she doesn’t believe in ghosts.  We might as well give her the opportunity to get to see a real one,” Petra responded with the slightest grin.

“Yep!  Th-that!  And, I got salt!”  Ivy said with a smile, freeing up a single hand to shake the bottle like a tiny rattle.  Whatever her team had “captured” was probably just another misinterpreted shadow or something…  She could debunk that later, after she had a chance to pee.

~~

True to her word, Ivy didn’t rush her part of the investigation.  She really couldn’t, given the fragility and fullness of her exhausted bladder.  In through the front door.  Up the really creaky staircase.  Past the taunting, unusable bathroom.  Turn left.  Clomp-clomp-clomp up the steep attic stairs, and she was in position.

“I-is anyone here who’d like to speak with m-me?”  Ivy held out her tape recorder into the darkness.  She pointed her flashlight beam toward the static camera to orient herself in the pitch-black attic.  

“C-can any presence here g-give me a sign?”  This was followed by a loud bang or pop somewhere downstairs.  Ice filled Ivy’s blood, but she quickly disregarded the coincidence, “G-good!  Cool!  Th-thank you!”  She crossed her legs as she stood and bounced a bit.  “We are the Nips — also known as the false-positive-hunters…” she muttered to herself as sweat ran off her forehead.  She’d edit that out later.

“Is th-there anyone here?  C-can you do a bit more than just bang on some p-pipes?”  Ivy reversed the crossing of her legs, in a weak attempt at easing her immense discomfort.

“Nothing,” she said after a few seconds.  And things continued as such for the next ten minutes — she would ask a question to an empty, old attic, and wait for the nothing that followed.”

“Yep, yep.  ‘Kay.” Ivy chirped excitedly once she realized her solo investigation was nearly over.  “Pretty l-lame ghosts, guys,” she said as she turned to the static camera.

Ivy froze.  For the shortest moment, even her intense desire to urinate disappeared.  The beam of her flashlight cast toward the bottom of the tripod — aimed low so as not to blot out the IR lens. No words entered her mind as her temples pounded with an intense fight-or-flight collision.

Those weren’t supposed to be there.  They blocked the view of the wall behind them, and they themselves were wrapped in the shadow of the tripod.  They immediately dispelled any notion of “debunking”.

They were a pair of legs.

Ivy didn’t even scream — she couldn’t.  The feet hung inches above the floor, toes pointed downward as if limp in death.  The skin wrapped the bone tightly, emaciated like that of a mummy, and was a bruised gray in color.  But just at the knee, the circle of Ivy’s flashlight cut-off, leaving the body beyond an implied silhouette.

The door to the attic slammed shut, and this jolted Ivy back into consciousness.  She spun around, her flashlight flailing wildly as she searched for the attic door.

“Ivy— Ivy!  What is it? What happened?!” Troy shouted through the radio.

She whipped back around to the static camera only to see the plywood wall beyond.

“Ivy.” Troy’s voice went low, slow, and serious.  “Ivy.  You need your salt right now.”

She gulped as tears ran down her cheeks and she yanked the walkie-talkie to her lips.  “W-what?!  N-no, I’m leaving — Wh-where’s the fucking door?!”  

“Ivy.  Listen.  You need to draw a circle with your salt right now.”  This was Drew.

“N-no, I-if you just saw what I fucking saw!—”

“Ivy.  You can’t leave.”  Finally, this was the voice of Petra.  “It is just past the attic door.  Circle, now.”

Ivy again spun around, and angled the beam of her flashlight toward the floor in that direction, sheer panic taking hold as she realized her team could see what she could not.

“STOP!  Ivy, you do not want to see this.  Draw. The. Fucking. Circle.”  Again, this was Petra.

Ivy’s arms could barely coordinate as she dug into her pocket and secured the small bottle.  She had a difficult time spinning off the cap.  She had to breathe, and calm herself.  Before long, she was steadily pouring its contents out in a circle around herself.

“No gaps, Ivy.  It can’t have any gaps!”  Drew’s voice broke through the speaker.  Even he sounded panicked.

Ivy delicately sat down in the circle, subconsciously crossing one thigh over the other.

“G-guys, we really f-fucked this one up!”  Drew must have been squeezing the button on the walkie-talkie, because it squelched after this before his voice came through once again. “I-Ivy, y-you didn’t, uh…”  He paused, apparently to consult the rest of the team. “Y-you didn’t p-pee yourself when you saw it, d-did you?”

Ivy’s heart fluttered in the adrenaline, as a certain biological reality once again made itself known.

“N-no.”

“Good.”  This was Petra.  “You are safe as long as you stay in that circle and the circle remains whole.  Like, no gaps.”

“Ok…?!  What do I do now?!”  Ivy’s eyes darted fruitlessly around the dark room, but she didn’t move her flashlight knowing she wouldn’t be able to handle whatever lurked within.

“You can’t pee yourself, Ivy.”  Troy said this utterly deadpan.  “It’ll dissolve the salt… you have to hold it.”

Panic, again.  This time only tangentially related to the horror that surrounded her.  “P-please tell me you’re joking.”

“We are so sorry, Ivy…” Petra sounded utterly resigned.  “W-we had no idea it would come to this.”

“B-but…”

“We would have t-taken you to a store earlier if we knew.”  Drew sounded particularly upset.  “There’s gotta be something she c-can do!  Otherwise she’s gonna have to wait…” his words faded out as he moved away from the radio.

Ivy swallowed hard.  She squeezed her thighs together.  “How long?”  She dropped the walkie talkie onto the hardwood as the sound rustling rattled through the insulation in the eves.

“You have to wait… t-two hours.  Two hours ‘til sunrise.”  Tears rolled down Ivy’s cheeks as a raspy moan came from behind the armoire.