David Golemon - The Supernaturals

He didn’t know how long he leaned over the sink, but it was long enough for him to develop a kink in his back when he finally straightened. After running cold water from the tap and splashing his face, he turned and took two quick steps to the small kitchen table and its one orphaned chair. He sat and pressed his palms to his eyes as hard as he could.

It was only then he realized that he had not thought of Summer Place in over two months. He had mentally blocked it from seeking its strong handhold on his mind, and he had done so without any psychology tricks learned in practice or school. He had just been working and, finally after years, sleeping.

But there would always be someone in the world willing to throw his life for a loop because of what happened to him. He chuckled to himself — not a good sign if he was on the other side of the couch, but he laughed nonetheless. What happened to him ? He laughed again. He looked around the dreary kitchen. What happened to him? At least he had a dump of a kitchen to go to. His former student would have been happy to have just that. Instead, he had been eaten alive. Kennedy froze in mid-laugh, and then thought for a brief moment. The laughing slowly gave way to sobbing, as these outbursts usually did. He knew himself as a once-strong man, a former football star. Now he was reduced to crying in his kitchen over the thought of a house that just wouldn’t die.

Kennedy fell into a deep sleep at the table. Unlike most nights, tonight he had cried himself to sleep without the need for alcohol.

At three in the morning, he came awake just long enough to stumble to his foldout couch — it had not been made up from the day before, or even the day before that — and collapse. Gabriel was well on his way to reliving that night long ago when he tried desperately to save his lost boy and the sanity of his remaining students from an entity, an enemy, that could not be defended against.

As he drifted back to sleep with that night surrounding him once more, he knew that Summer Place was a live thing, a hungry thing, and somehow he also knew that dinner service was once more being offered at the Pennsylvania retreat.

The house was once again awake, and very hungry.

Greg drove the van over the uneven blacktop that wound around the furthest reaches of the estate. He had turned off the state maintained highway and onto the private road that led to Summer Place.

Kelly sat in the front seat with a road map and her cell phone — and the phone’s GPS, which was telling her that the road map was mostly wrong. Paul Lowell sat in the backseat with Jason Sanborn, who had his ever-present water bottle in his right hand and his pipe clenched in his teeth. Every once in a while he would give his goatee a fatherly swipe of his hand.

“With all the money this damn family has, they could fix these roads!” Greg said angrily as he swerved to miss a large pothole in the macadam.

“I’m not really convinced that Lindemann has that much money.”

Greg looked over at Kelly and then quickly back to the road.

“You mean he went through the family fortune in less than twenty years? That had to be something in the range of a billion dollars.”

“Bad investments, four wives, and the collapse of the base company back in the seventies helped drain most of it away. At one point, right around the time of the Kennedy fiasco, Wallace was flat broke. Only the death of the original Lindemann’s brother’s granddaughter bailed him out of his financial straits. She left him her small fortune of twenty million. He’s been scraping by ever since,” Kelly said facetiously. “The real fortune was left to the Lindemann philanthropic foundations in New York and Philadelphia — more than a billion dollars, untouchable to Wallace. That must kill him, to have that much money being doled out to the poor, museums, and art galleries.”

“Jesus Christ,” Sanborn said, almost to himself.

Greg looked in the mirror and Kelly glanced at Jason in the backseat.

“Did you see that?” Jason asked, pointing up ahead, “Through the trees?”

All of them strained to see what Jason was pointing at. As the van slowly came around a bend in the road, they saw it. There, through the thick pine trees, was Summer Place.

“My lord, it’s gorgeous!” Kelly said.

Greg slowed the van to a stop. The house sat in a large cleared valley below them like some turn-of-the-century countryside painting. The yellow painted wood slats of the main structure were trimmed in white, making it gleam in the sun. The large pool sparkled and the yellow and green striped awnings and deck chairs around the brilliant blue stood out starkly against the marble white concrete.

“I have never seen a private residence this large look this gorgeous and homey,” Jason mumbled. He glanced worriedly at the back of Kelly’s head.

Behind the pool, the giant barn and stables were impeccable in their red and white paint. But it wasn’t the beauty of the grounds that gave them pause; it was the four-story structure of Summer Place itself that held their fascination. It dominated the small valley. The wraparound porch was spectacular and the high-pitched gables bordered on gothic. The grounds were trimmed and clean and they could even see one of the caretakers off in the distance making the last run of the season on the grass with a large tractor-mower.

“This looks like a resort, not someplace where people have come to die,” Paul said, leaning over Kelly’s seat.

Greg placed both arms on the steering wheel and looked at the house sitting two miles distant. “It looks like something from a Walt Disney movie.”

“Yeah, just as scary, too,” Jason said.

Kelly didn’t answer them. She was looking at the numerous windows that lined the second and third floors of the house. The house had twenty-five bedrooms, but at this moment with their high vantage point above the property, it seemed so small. Her eyes roamed to the windowless fourth floor and the upper reaches of the gabled roof. The many angles caught the sun and she crooked her head and smiled.

“You’re not getting the same vibes I am, boys,” she rolled her head and then closed her eyes. “This is the place where dreams come true.”

Greg looked over at the blonde woman who had carried them from Cincinnati to LA — a woman who had never missed a beat as far as the show’s creativity went. Now he looked at the creator of Hunters of the Paranormal as if she had gone off the deep end.

“We don’t need dreams here, Kelly, we need nightmares.”

She opened her eyes and looked over at him with her perfect left eyebrow raised. “The sweetest of dreams can turn into nightmares, Greg, far more often than you realize.”

Thirty minutes later, the van sat idling at the fifteen-foot-high wooden front gate. The crisscrossed beams of hewn wood were thick and looked as effective as steel. A small guard shack sat empty on their right, its glass still sporting the streaks of someone’s cleaning rag.

Greg honked the van’s horn several times and succeeded only in startling birds from the green hedges and trees that had yet to taste the first real frost of fall. The hedges lined the front gates and the long, high fence that encompassed the main drive. Fancily trimmed, they were sculpted to look like the parapets of a castle. Behind them, the never-ending tree lines fronting the Pocono Mountains enclosed the house like tall guardsmen, and were just as unflinching.

The sound of an approaching tractor stopped Greg from honking a third time. As they watched, it slowly wound its way around the large barn and onto the main paved drive. Kelly’s eyes went from the young man sitting atop the tractor to the main doors of the house that sat underneath the largest portico she had ever seen outside of a grand hotel. The long row of stone steps that led to the large double doors was clean, straight, and recently washed down.