Marcus Pelegrimas - Blood Blade

“This extreme enough for you, dumbass?” he asked himself. As he got close to the plane and started tossing his things on board, he put on a smile and shouted to be heard over the propellers. “Any chance I could get you to swing past Seattle?”

The pilot grinned and replied, “Nope. But do me a favor and look around for some parachutes. The safety inspectors have really been busting my ass about that.”

It was a cold day. Rain threatened to fall from gray clouds that rolled across a harsh autumn sky. A single, navy blue van moved along a dirt road and pulled off onto a trail that wasn’t much more than a set of crooked ruts in rocky soil. As soon as the van was far enough along the road for the driver to spot the collapsed remains of the old mansion, he sped up, the wheels spinning faster, kicking up a gritty mix of dust, gravel, and dead leaves. On the back of the van was the lettering MEG BRANCH 25.

Steve sat in the passenger seat and was tall enough for the top of his balding head to scrape the roof. His rounded face had yet to display anything less than a smile as he told more than enough jokes to fill the drive from Madison. “That’s the place,” he said. “Park anywhere you like.”

The driver was in his mid-thirties, but had enough youthful energy in his eyes to make him look at least five years younger. His dark brown hair was buzzed close to the scalp and his face was clean-shaven. Finding a parking spot wasn’t difficult, and the driver pulled to a stop just off the faded old road that led the rest of the way to the mansion. “You say this place is haunted?” he asked.

Steve nodded. “I sure do, Jarvis,” he replied, using the driver’s name in a way that seemed well-intentioned but obviously didn’t set well with the driver. “I could tell you plenty of stories from several other people, or I could tell you a few of my own.”

Jarvis leaned over the steering wheel to get a better look at the rubble in front of him. No matter how much squinting or straining he did, he could still only see the sagging remains of a three-story mansion. The roof was full of gaping holes. One half of the building had fallen down altogether. Even the fence surrounding the place was rusted and broken in several spots. “What’s anyone even doing out here?” Jarvis asked. “The place looks pretty run-down.”

“Oh, it is. The property is still held by the original family, and they’ve been thinking about restoring the entire mansion. It’s a big undertaking, so a lot of consultants have been coming and going to get a look for themselves. Some members of the family just want the land cleared off and sold, so it’s become sort of a tug-of-war.”

Nodding as he removed the keys from the ignition and pushed his door open, Jarvis said, “Okay, let’s have a look around.”

“Don’t you want to take any equipment with you?”

“This is just a walk-through,” Jarvis said. “Our closest tech crew is in Minneapolis. I’m going out to Milwaukee on other business, so I thought I’d take a look at the place rather than stick you at the back of a six month waiting period.”

“Oh. All right. Do you still want to hear the stories?”

“Just tell me about your own personal experiences,” Jarvis replied.

That was enough to get Steve going. He excitedly recounted stories ranging from feeling like he was being watched when poking around in dirty old rooms to sightings of glowing orbs in hallways. He capped it off by describing a shadowy figure lurking in a particular section of the house. When he tried to get a closer look, he heard screams coming from the basement.

For a seasoned member of the Midwestern Ectological Group, it was all pretty standard stuff. Jarvis nodded and reacted accordingly when Steve got worked up about something, but he didn’t share the other man’s enthusiasm. All too often, old run-down houses were thought to be haunted when they were simply old and run-down. Rotting beams creaked. Animals nested in basements and attics. Old pipes moaned under proper weather conditions. For those reasons, all MEG branches sent scouts to potential sites rather than waste the time and money it took to dispatch an entire team and its equipment for a full investigation. In fact, Jarvis had some business in Milwaukee, so he was forced to take the job that would normally be handed off to one of the MEG rookies. So far, he was confident that he wouldn’t be there too long.

“All right,” he said as he got to the front of the mansion, “show me the spots with the most activity.”

That brightened Steve’s face and he immediately launched into another story about screams and other sounds that came from under the floor. By the time he was through with the basics of that story, both men had their hard hats on and were walking through the sturdy, imposing front doorway.

As he listened, Jarvis examined the old mansion with the help of a flashlight that could have easily doubled for a nightstick. It looked as if a few cleaning crews had been there recently to gather up the rubble that had fallen when the main staircase collapsed. Dirt was thick upon the tiled floor, and broken furniture lay strewn along almost every wall. The upper portion of the staircase was propped up by wooden supports that were too squared and clean to be anything more than a month or two old. Most of the flooring at the top of the staircase was gone, leaving a wide balcony overhead instead of a proper second level.

“You said a family lived here?” Jarvis asked. “Did anyone die here?”

“Plenty of people died here,” Steve replied with a quick nod. “Sometime in the late 1880s this whole property was turned into an asylum by a man named Jonah Lancroft. Depending on which of Lancroft’s decedents you ask, he was anything from a misguided, poorly trained doctor to an overpaid prison warden. Other members of the family say he was a philanthropist who tried to run a reformatory for the surrounding communities. You can guess which sides want the place knocked down and which want it restored.”

“Which side of the fence do you land on?”

“Oh, I’d love to see this place restored! I’m the one who thought about getting it officially declared as haunted, so there’d be some reason to keep it from being demolished. There’s already been plenty of interest from some of the Lancroft family in coming back here to see if they might recognize something of Jonah Lancroft himself.”

Jarvis nodded and immediately regretted asking the question. From this point on he couldn’t allow himself to believe any of Steve’s stories. “So you heard scraping sounds?”

“Yep. They came from the floor.”

“You’re sure there’s not just some animals scraping under the floor?”

“The sounds come from the places where workers have heard the screaming.”

“And you’re sure there’s no animals? I mean, there were a lot of farmhouses and woods around here,” Jarvis explained. “It could be damn near anything.”

Rather than put any more of his own claims to the test, Steve nodded and said, “That’s why we called MEG. There are plenty of animals around here, but they don’t seem to come too close to the place. In fact, we haven’t seen so much as a squirrel for weeks. We called you guys because nobody else will check up on all the other claims.”

“Like the voices, huh?”

“Exactly.”

Jarvis swung the flashlight toward the back of the foyer. Sunlight streamed through the holes in the roof, contrasting with thick patches of shadow. There was more than enough dust in the air to turn the light into a gritty fog. Because of all the years of construction work Jarvis had done before he could work full-time at MEG, it was easy enough for him to guess that the upper half of the mansion was a long way from being close to code.