The White Night (5 page)

“But let me tell
you this, goddamn it, that thing that attacked her? That
demon
? It
doesn’t deserve to win. It’s not going to win. Everything I have done over the
past two years, since that night, has been to make my soul right with the
world. Yeah, I could use a little redemption. Maybe that’s selfish. Maybe part
of that is about me, but I have to do that to get through the rest of the days
I have left. So I don’t care what you think. I don’t care what your producers
think. I don’t care what the rest of the world thinks—if I do decide to do that
documentary, if I do decide to get back into the spotlight and take that demon
down, it won’t be because Mike Long, or Carla Hancock, or you, or anyone else
talked me into it. It’ll be because Chelsea
deserves
some peace. And
just like I earned my shame, I’m going to earn my redemption. It’ll be because
I worked hard and absolutely not because of exploiting that little girl’s
story—again—to get it.”

I march away,
leaving Lauren Coeburn behind in the downpour, regretting everything I just
said. Sure as shit, the only thing she’ll take out of that entire tirade is me
saying, “I deserve it!” That’ll be the lead story. That’ll be the quote across
the top of every tabloid tomorrow morning.

I don’t turn
around. Ulie does. He whimpers like he knows something.

CHAPTER FIVE

Mike Long

I find Dakota Bailey
standing at the bottom of her beachside steps, feet buried in the sand, arms
crossed and shaking as she stares up at the large white mansion in front of
her. A home. A prison.

Ford was always
distrustful of houses, haunted or not, until he’d gotten to know the rhythm of
one. It used to bug the shit out of me, like how back during the glory years of
Graveyard: Classified
, he’d insist on arriving at our next shoot at
least three or four days ahead of time so that he could familiarize himself
with the place we were investigating. Sort of like how you gingerly dip a foot
in water, no matter what the temperature, until you get used to it. He never
seemed to care that I had a growing family to consider, and all those extra
days on the road had deepened the divide between my wife, my children, and me.
“Safety first,” he’d say. “It’s for your own good, dude. We don’t trust a place
until we do, remember?”

Ford Atticus Ford.
Always right, always wrong. I wonder what he would do if he were here right
now? Probably try to hit on Dakota.

I can’t say I’d
blame him.

Disregarding the
situation, somewhere down inside my mind, where instinct, hormones, and the
desire to procreate with the best of the species intersect, my lizard brain
takes over while I take her in. Briefly, I’m overwhelmed by the sheer
celebrity-ness
of her, and then I glance down at her toned and tanned legs in a pair of salmon
pink yoga shorts, tracing my eyes up to a matching sports bra.

She looks exactly
like she did on the show. Long, lean, beautiful, and ready to run a marathon,
which is exactly how she stays so thin, even after working in a kitchen and
being around all that delicious food day after day. I remember that from the
show, specifically. She’s a runner. Boston and New York marathons each year.
They did a profile piece during her second season showing how she had qualified
for the main Ironman triathlon in Hawaii. Amazing.

There’s
her
kind of in shape, and then
my
kind, which is why I huff and puff up
beside her. I dropped the extra pounds. I’ve defined a muscle or twelve, but my
cardio sucks.

She’s so focused
on the menacing house that she doesn’t hear or see me coming, and then emits a
shrill yelp when I say, “Dakota?”

“Oh, shit, you
scared me,” she says, putting a hand up to her forehead. She keeps it there,
forming a shield over her eyes, as she turns toward the rising sun. The smile
is forced, I can tell that easily, because her bottom lip subtly vibrates. “You
got here fast.”

I salute her, and
hold on to my bravado and pride for about three seconds before I double over,
trying to deeply inhale my way back to a natural breathing pattern. “You… You
okay? On the phone… Sounded like…”

“For now, at least.”
She puts a hand on my back, pats me. “Hey, raise up straight. You’ll never get
a good breath like that. Take it in deep, from here,” she says, poking at the
center of my abdomen.

I obey the orders,
remembering that it’ll open up my lungs if I put my hands behind my head. The
cordless phone that I managed to haul with me goes into a thigh pocket of my
cargo shorts, and I stand there, grimacing. “You saw something in there?”

Dakota squints up
at the house, hands on her hips. Her hair is back in a ponytail, minus a few
loose strands that flail in the breeze like the beachgrass beside us. A seagull
squawks, swoops over the roof, and is gone. Low waves crash, once, twice, three
times, and then slide back into the ocean before she finally speaks. “I’m
almost scared to even talk about it, Mr. Long—”

“Just Mike.” I
want her to have that level of familiarity with me. I want to be “Just Mike” to
Dakota Freakin’ Bailey.

“Yeah,” she says,
as if it’s not really registering. “Mike.”

My name sounds
fantastic coming out of her mouth. Like honey on a—

Dude. Stop. She’s
scared. She’s vulnerable. She called you for help.

Go away, lizard
brain. Business. Professional.

Dakota Bailey
needs you.

Right?

It feels good to
be
needed
, if only from a distance by someone who is officially a
stranger. I haven’t felt that in so long. Toni needs me to hang a heavy picture
frame or to change the oil on her car. Or to take the kids to school when she
has a spa appointment early in the morning. Those are chores, not needs, mind
you. It’s different.

Feeling like a horny
old man, even though we’re not too far apart in age, I take one last look for a
mental snapshot, then tuck my bestial instincts back down into the recesses of
my mind. Time for business. Yards away, up those rickety wooden steps, then
through the double doors bordered by two massive bay windows, there’s trouble.
What kind and how strong remains to be seen.

“What’s up there?”
I ask. “Full-bodied apparition? Black, swirling mass?”

When she opens her
eyes wide in agreement, nodding, I notice that they’re the color of a robin’s
egg. They glow like a neon sign. They’re mesmerizing.

“That’s it,” she
says, voice cracking. “How did you know?”

“Standard stuff
for someone who sounded as scared as you did. And you were trying to
communicate with it, so, yeah. I figured it had to be something loosely
tangible.”

She holds her hands
up. “Remember how that kid from the Peanuts always had a black cloud hanging
over his head? No, wait, even better—on that show,
Lost
, they had that
black swirling mass that tore things up in the jungle? It reminds me of that
thing, only smaller. Like a baby-sized version of that thing.”

“Does it feel
threatening?”

“Like it’ll hurt
me?”

“Yeah.”

“It hasn’t yet.
Whatever it is, it’s terrifying.”

“I’m sure it is.”

She holds her
question in for a beat, then asks me, “You’ve seen things like that before,
right?” It’s saturated with hope. A plea.

“All the time. I
could count off fifteen of them right now.” I try to slip into professional
mode the way Ford used to do during client interviews. He was always so smooth
about that aspect. He’ll claim he’s not that much of a people person when the
cameras aren’t tuned on him, but I think that’s just an excuse to be an asshole
whenever he feels like it. He’d schmooze the clients for the cameras, while I
dutifully stood there taking notes and nodding my head.

Later, while Ford
would be off somewhere making a van rock with Melanie—back before they were
married for a short while—or when he was with another crew member while he was
still married to her, I would be busting my ass to get the equipment set up
along with the rest of the crew. That was good for me, all the hands-on jobs.
They kept me focused and into it.

I rip through a
round of questions for Dakota, trying my best to remember what Ford would ask
during each episode. You would think that stuff would be carved into my memory
like Moses with a sharp chisel. Instead, for a couple of years I blocked out a
lot of those memories on purpose. Less anger that way. Rather than dwelling on
how Ford and Carla ruined everything for the rest of us, I focused on going to
the gym where I lifted heavy things and put them down, again and again. The
repetition, the effort, they were my therapy.

Dakota tells me
that she bought the house and moved down here for a while because she had been
through an atrocious breakup that cast a fat, black cloud over every aspect of
her life. She lost interest in
everything
.

In addition to the
breakup, the hustle of New York City and the crazy, suffocating energy of her crowded,
humming restaurant had become overwhelming. Any time she had tried to get
creative with new dishes they sucked donkey balls—her words exactly—and for
months they were uninspired and lackluster. A handful of bad reviews had hurt
the restaurant’s numbers and her pride. She needed out for a while, at least
until the city concrete no longer felt like quicksand.

“I didn’t quit,”
she says, “but I handed my spatula over to my sous chef, told her the ship was
hers, and that I’d be back one of these days. I thought my investors would flip
their minds.”

“Did they?” I ask.

“Nope. With the
slop I’d been serving for six months, I think they were relieved. I had to get
away, so I bought this place and ran. The whole thing was sort of like my
Eat
Pray Love
moment. I needed a break from life, and I needed to rediscover
myself.”

“You just didn’t
expect to do it with an angry ghost around.”

“Not in the
slightest. Don’t real estate agents have to disclose stuff like that?”

“If they aren’t
required to, then they damn well should be, huh?”

“Would’ve saved me
some sleep, that’s for sure.” It’s nice to see her smile while she examines her
toes and wiggles them in the sand. There’s no polish on them, and in fact, her
feet look fairly rough. Bruised with broken blisters. I guess marathons will do
that to an otherwise perfect example of lean perfection.

Mike, stop.
Professional courtesy, please.

After another
short round of data-gathering questions, like when she first saw it, had it
ever taken on a human form, had there been any sort of poltergeist activity or
was it just the black mass and blah blah.

I also ask her why
she hasn’t left yet, then take a tangential turn before I give her a chance to
answer. “That was always,
always
, one of the top questions from our
Graveyard
audience. People wanted to know why on God’s green earth some of our
clients—the people on the show—why they would continue to stay in a place that
was so unbelievably terrifying. Simple answer, though. Not enough money to
move, no family nearby. Maybe they can’t transfer jobs or just had other
obligations, you see. The easiest response is that they didn’t have a choice.
You
do. You’ve got the money. The freedom. So why stay?”

Dakota points at
her house and says, “Because I wanted to beat it.”

“Like how? By
yourself?”

“I know it sounds
ridiculous, and dangerous, but I didn’t want to run from anything else. I was
sick of myself. I was sick of losing at life. I was a winner for so long, and
then I just wasn’t anymore. That’s a hard pill to swallow.” She looks away,
flips a broken seashell over using her big toe. “Sorry. You don’t need to hear
all that.”

Oh, but I want
to.

She continues,
“Honestly, when I left New York, I felt like a coward. Like I’d deserted all
the people who were counting on me in so many different ways. Does that make
sense?”

“Of course.”

“And then I—everybody
says to pick your battles, and after all the shit that I had been through, I
picked the wrong damn one, you know? What in the hell was I thinking? Fight a
ghost? Are you kidding me?”

“I think you did
the right thing. You may not have beaten it, or even had the proper
tools
to beat it, but you tried. At least you weren’t completely living in fear like
so many others I’ve seen.”

“Not exactly. I tried
to fight it… I yelled for it to get out of my house. I burned incense. I had a
Lutheran pastor come by and say some prayers. I carried a cross around with me.
All that stuff, but I was still scared out of my mind. At first, it only showed
up every three or four days, just enough to make me think it was gone. Finally,
peace and quiet. Hallelujah! Sure enough, I’d wake up in the middle of the
night and see it floating over my head like it was watching me. Do you know how
creepy that is?”

“Another day on
the job, ma’am.”

She scoffs at
herself. “Dumb question.”

“I’ll forgive you
this time.”

She smiles through
her embarrassment and says, “You know what I did? I bought the boxed set of
your show, all ten seasons, thinking I might get some pointers.”

I can’t resist
smirking. I know how goddamn scary
Graveyard
could be. Even having lived
it, there have been times when I’ll catch myself watching an old rerun late at
night on The Paranormal Channel: I’ll say this for Carla Hancock and her team:
they were a talented group of people, capable of making something as innocuous
as a haunted ice cream parlor seem like it’s an open gate to Hell.

I ask Dakota, “And
how’d that work out for you?”

“Don’t laugh. I
was trying to learn.”

“Did you?”

“I made it through
the whole set. On the finale of whatever season it was—you guys were down in
that abandoned subway tunnel. So freaky. I don’t know how you did it.”

“Practice.”

“I did pick up a
couple of tips, and watching your show scared me so much, I’m sure all that
negative energy made it stronger. Gave it some juice, something. After that, it
got worse, started showing up every day, keeping me awake at all hours. Totally
miserable. I hit my breaking point and finally called you.”

“You did the right
thing. We’ll figure it out.”

Dakota says, “I
really don’t want to go back inside.”

I take another
look up at her oceanfront mansion. It looks friendly. It looks like someone’s
dream home. The graying, sagging wooden stairs could use some work, but the
rest looks like it’s worth the many millions she paid for it.

The only problem
is, there’s an uninvited guest.

A dead one.