The small space Clementine and Abby entered was made even more claustrophobic by the huge bank of monitors and audio/visual equipment spread out on a cheap plastic folding table, giving the ancient room an anachronistic vibe. Seated at the table was a pudgy, bespectacled man about Clementine’s age, who gave off a faint odor of Cheetos and Red Bull.

He stood, the hems of his khaki cargo shorts plunging below his hairy knees, wiped a sweaty-looking hand on his thigh and extended it to Clementine.

“You must be the reporter,” he said, his deep, silky voice at odds with his disheveled appearance.

“Clementine,” she replied, taking his hand in her own. “Reindeer Run Free Press. ‘Yesterday’s news tomorrow.’”

He laughed, his soft belly shaking under a Led Zeppelin T-shirt.

“Hey, newspapers are the last bastion of real journalism in an increasingly crazy world,” the man said. “Plus, I love reading the funny pages. Except for Marmaduke. Fuck Marmaduke.”

“Agreed. He’s the worst. I’m more of a chinchilla person myself,” Clementine said, still shaking his hand. “And your name is..?”

“Ah, yes. Pete Frambois. Though most people just call me Frambo.”

“Short for Frambois, I assume?”

Pete withdrew his hand, a look of confusion darkening his face.

“Huh,” he said, as if pondering this information for the first time. “I always thought it was short for ‘Fat Rambo,’ on account of my ability to kick ass and eat potato chips. But I guess your way works too.”

Clementine was surprised to find herself genuinely laughing, an all-too-rare occurrence while on the job. Or just in general, for that matter.

“What’s so funny?”

Declan and Jackson had entered while Clementine chatted with the squishy nerd known as “Frambo,” whom she decided she liked quite a bit. Joining them was a tall, stocky woman with a tight ponytail. While she wasn’t substantially larger than Declan or Jackson, her dour expression and tightly crossed arms made her seem relatively vast in the tight space.

Clementine shifted her laptop bag behind her, allowing Abby to scooch in closer. The shorter woman’s shoulder bumped into Clementine’s chest, prompting an apologetic grin from Abby.

“Just bonding over our mutual hatred of cartoons featuring anthropomorphized Great Danes and their incessant hijinks,” Frambo said, looking over his shoulder at Clementine. “On that note, fuck Scooby-Doo, too. Goddam coward.”

“Agreed. Although to be fair, I too am primarily motivated by snacks.”

Frambo and Abby chuckled along with Clementine, and Declan’s face soured with a look of betrayal. But it was fleeting, and his pompous demeanor soon took over.

“Excellent,” he said, clapping his hands together like an elementary school teacher who had finally gotten his pupils to stop eating paste for a minute. “So you’ve met Peter, our tech guy. Don’t let his goofy, err, ‘business casual’ exterior fool you. He’s actually a consummate professional and a hell of a tech.”

Frambo raised an eyebrow at “goofy,” but otherwise remained stoic through Declan’s half-flattering assessment of his abilities.

“Abby,” Declan continued, “is kind of our intern. We brought her on to be my assistant, but she’s really been a huge help in getting our system set up. We’ve got 32 cameras set up throughout the house, and without Abby, we’d still be setting them up.”

Abby smiled shyly.

“Jackson over here is our spiritualist. He’ll be overseeing our attempts to contact the spirit realm to ensure there are no, uh, complications or dangerous interactions. He’s basically got a PhD in the occult.”

Frambo cut in. “But in real life he’s got a Bachelor’s degree in literature.”

Jackson narrowed his eyes at Frambo, but said nothing.

“And this ray of sunshine over here is Callie Grace. We’re all going to have handheld cameras throughout the night, but she’s going to be our principal photographer. She’s --”

“Am I going to be quoted?” Callie cut in. “Because if I’m going to be quoted, you have to tell me. I took a journalism class at Coe two semesters ago.”

The look Callie shot Clementine should have been disarming. Callie looked physically capable of taking out everyone crammed in the tiny room, and had an easy weight advantage over everyone but Frambo. But Clementine finally had her reporter legs under her, and wasn’t going to be intimidated. Instinct told her flattery was the way to approach this situation.

“It’s up to you. We can keep things off the record if you want. But I don’t think this story plays as well if I have to write around one of the key members of the team.

“Plus,” Clementine said, nodding over at Abby, who now seemed very comfortable nestled up against her side, “I really don’t want this thing to be about just a bunch of dudes sitting around trying to commune with the dead. I need you and Abby to keep things interesting.”

Callie seemed to consider this for a second. Then shrugged.

“Fair enough. You can quote me. Besides, if Declan sees his name in print too many times, his head will probably explode.”

If Frambo, Declan or Jackson were annoyed by Clementine’s comments, they didn’t show it. Instead, Declan just steamrolled forward with his well-rehearsed schtick.

“I started Reindeer Run Paranormal Society three years ago with a simple, yet fiendishly complex mission: Obtain evidence that humanity is more than – are you recording? Maybe you should be recording.”

“Oh, right.” Clementine fumbled with her bag, accidentally elbowing Abby in the ribs. She retrieved her slim, efficient digital recorder from the front pocket of her computer bag and clicked it on. “OK, go ahead.”

“Yes. Um, so I was saying.” Declan cleared his throat, and Clementine caught Frambo rolling his eyes. “My mission. My mission was to, um, obtain evidence that humanity exists as something more than our physical selves, that consciousness is more complex than firing neurons and synapses and chemicals. The energy from which springs forth thought, emotion, love – that isn’t something that can be contained by these short-lived, fragile meat suits we’re all forced to endure.

“Let me start from the beginning.” Any traces of hesitation now were gone. Declan was an actor, and this was his stage. And he’d been preparing these lines for weeks. “When I was a child, no more than 9, I lost my stepfather during a boating accident.

“He was a blue-blooded factory man, a lifelong union guy who believed that if your work week wrapped up in fewer than 60 hours, you were basically a communist. He provided well for his wife and stepson, whom he accepted as his own.

“Jeffrey’s one vice, if you can call it that, was the river. He loved being out on the water, sometimes fishing, sometimes just drinking a cool beer while watching the sun set behind the sandbars. It was where he was happiest, and because he sacrificed so much for us, my mom and I were perfectly content to let him enjoy that as much as possible. So even though we didn’t have much, we had a boat.”

Huh, Clementine, thought. Maybe she had pegged Declan all wrong. He had initially struck her as a pampered fool, a man whose path to an entitled adulthood was paved for him by many enablers. It wasn’t the first time she’d been wrong. It didn’t happen often, but there was a chance she’d whiffed on this one.

But, just as she was assuring herself that she’d keep an open mind going forward, Frambo cut in.

“Wait, what? Dude, your mom is an oncologist. Didn’t you grow up in Barrington Heights? Your pay grade has to be United States senator or above to even get through the gates. I delivered a pizza there once and the house literally had a servant’s entrance.”

That was an exaggeration, Clementine thought, but only a slight one. Barrington Heights was Reindeer Run’s nicest subdivision, shielded from the modest poverty of the rest of the community by a giant wooded hill. It was a green oasis in the largely industrial town, which essentially collapsed alongside the millworking industry in the 1920s. Recovery had been slow to non-existent, depending who you asked. Most were too depressed to ask.

Declan looked livid.

“What does that have to do with anything? That was just my address, dude. Just because I didn’t grow up in a fucking trailer training rats to pick pockets for me doesn’t mean I didn’t struggle. I had scoliosis, man. Like, I didn’t have to have surgery or anything, but it was uncomfortable.”

Frambo had thrown up his hands in submission, and would have backed away, if not for the flimsy table stacked high with expensive electronics behind him.

“Sorry man. You’re right. I was just bustin’ your chops. You know me. I see a chop that’s intact, and I gotta, like, bust it. Or whatever.”

Declan’s face was still red, and he looked as if he had plenty more to say to Frambo. But his eyes turned to a mortified Clementine, still holding out her recorder, and he caught himself.

“It’s fine. No big deal. We like to riff on each other, don’t we Frambo?”

“Yeah man. All in good fun.”

“Yeah, all in good fun. Like that time you pissed yourself on the sixth-grade camping trip because Austin Engler convinced you he saw an anaconda in the lake.”

“Yeah, just like that. Pissed all over my damn self. Allie Carter and Jessica Downs called me ‘Pissy Pete’ for the rest of the school year. Broke my heart every fuckin’ time.”

Declan’s hue had lightened to a healthier shade of pink, and he appeared somewhat mollified. Meanwhile, Clementine felt her respect for Frambo tick upward even more. He seemed surprisingly good in a crisis for someone who looked like the type of guy who would scream obscenities at children who beat him in online video games.

“Right. Yes. Sorry. So, like I was saying, Jeffrey had a boat. And he loved spending time on that boat. And we loved spending time on that boat, because he loved spending time on that boat.”

“Of course,” Clementine said, attempting to demonstrate that Declan had her full attention.

“Then one Saturday,” he continued, his face still slightly rosy, “he didn’t come back for dinner. Which was unusual. He loved family dinners. ‘Family dinners are the backbone of American society,’ he used to say. Or something to that effect.

“So a few hours went by, our meatloaf and potatoes getting cold in the oven. Because we couldn’t eat without Jeffrey. I’m telling you man, he loved those family dinners more than anything in the world. No matter how hungry we were, we weren’t going to take so much as a bite before he walked through the front door. But, on that night, and every night since, he never did.”

Declan paused, probably for effect. And Clementine, though truly jaded, was surprised to find herself anxious to hear the rest of the story. Odds are the tale was approaching total bullshit – there probably was a Jeffrey and he likely had a boat, though the Norman Rockwell cheesiness had to be for show – but Declan spun an engaging yarn.

Satisfied that tension sufficiently had been built, the room quiet as a crowded elevator, post-fart, he continued.

“The police showed up the next morning and told us what happened,” Declan said, his voice just above a whisper, his eyes cast down at the floor. “Jeffrey’s boat had been found by a fisherman early that morning, run aground on some riprap. By the time the cops showed up at the scene, the fisherman had also stumbled across Jeffrey’s body, facedown about a half-mile down river. It had stormed that week and he got snagged on a big piece of driftwood. Otherwise we never would have found him.”

The whirring of computer fans was the only sound in the crowded room. Clementine wasn’t even sure the others were breathing.

“It wasn’t until a week later, after the funeral, after all my extended family members fulfilled their depressing obligations and gone back to their lives, that we remembered the meatloaf and potatoes. Still in the oven.”

Clementine glanced at Abby, whose big eyes were wet with tears. Even Frambo and Jackson looked subdued, their respective sarcasm and surliness forgotten in the wake of their friend’s tragic tale.

Finally, Callie spoke.

“Wait,” she said, consternation creasing her face. “So you didn’t cook anything for a week? Like, what did you eat?”

Frambo snorted, but quickly caught himself and turned it into a cough. Abby said “Callie!” sharply, and Jackson hid a smirk with his hand as he stroked his facial hair.

But Clementine was a trained journalist. She had learned to maintain a poker face while interviewing lawyers who argued that their child rapist clients were the real victims and politicians who claimed their votes against health care reform were due to compassion and integrity, not the fact that insurance companies had been lining their pockets for years. She had Declan on the hook, and she wasn’t going to let him fall back into defensiveness.

Rehearsed bullshit or not, he’d given some golden quotes. And as long as she could confirm that Declan had a stepdad named Jeffrey who drowned in a boating accident, her duty to the truth would be fulfilled. Who was she to call out a grieving stepson out on any possible creative liberties he’d taken with the narrative?

“Oh my goodness, that’s horrible,” she said, appearing so sincere it might as well have been genuine. “I’m so sorry.”

Declan’s eyes were narrowed at Callie, who, Clementine suspected, was genuinely curious about what the family ate while they mourned. But he returned his attention to Clementine.

“Thank you,” he sighed.

“I’ve lost family members too,” Clementine said, wishing it was merely a lie to gain his trust. “It’s an impossible situation. The world ends, but people expect you to keep on living, to go to work, to go to school, to do the dishes. And then they get mad if you don’t grieve in the ways they expect you to. If you don’t cry, you’re awful, heartless. If you cry too much, you’re being melodramatic. And relatives either overstay their welcome or they’re too afraid to be there for you when you need them. Sometimes I wonder if it’s better to grieve alone.”

“It isn’t,” Frambo said solemnly.

Clementine turned to look at the pudgy tech guy with wide eyes, surprised once again at the apparent depth of his character. He wasn’t very good at being the cliched nerd to which his appearance suggested he aspired.

“Thanks,” Declan said again. “You’re right. We definitely all handle grief differently. Like sad snowflakes. Each one of us is unique.

“For example, my mom just got depressed. She was already a workaholic, but she threw herself into her job so completely that I was completely forgotten. She still loved me, that was obvious. But every minute she spent at home, where she, Jeffrey and I had shared so many happy times, seemed to drive tiny daggers into her heart. I was a teenager by that point. Still a kid, of course, but old enough to not begrudge her for it. She needed the distraction and purpose. But I needed something else.

“About six months after Jeffrey died, I was sitting in my room, working on some physics homework. I was only a sophomore, but I was already in an advanced-placement, senior-level course.”

That little tidbit seems totally relevant to the story, Clementine thought, resisting the seemingly ever-present urge to roll her eyes.

“Anyway,” Declan continued, “I was at my desk puzzling out this equation that my teacher couldn’t even solve, when I heard a knock at my door. I thought maybe my mom had come home from work early, so I didn’t think much of it. I just asked who was there and continued working. But there was no answer.

“Then there was a second knock. This one was a little louder, a little more insistent. I said, ‘Mom?’ but still no answer. So I got out of my chair and went to check.

“I’m not going to lie, at this point I was a little scared. My mother’s sense of humor is pretty sophisticated. She watches a lot of British comedies, you know. Anyway, I was pretty sure she wasn’t playing a prank on me. That’s not the sort of thing she’d think was funny.

“’Who is it?’ I called, suddenly realizing that I was home alone – or at least I thought I was alone – in a big dark house, in a neighborhood where everybody valued their privacy. If I was in trouble, if something was out there waiting for me, no one would hear me scream or call for help. I was totally on my own. Also, scared as I was, my rational mind was still intact. I wasn’t going to call the cops just to come investigate strange noises in my hallway. They’d probably have to give me a wedgie or something, just on principle.

“Besides,” Declan said, his face settling into a look of comically grim sincerity. “If there was someone – or something – out in the hall, the cops would never get to me in time.”

Callie shifted her weight, drawing Clementine’s eyes away from Declan for a brief moment. The big woman was checking her watch, having seemingly lost interest in the history lesson. Presumably she’d heard it before.

“’Who is it?’ I called one more time,” Declan continued, oblivious to the distraction. “And still no answer. Then there was a third knock. Loud and clear, no way I was imagining it.

“At this point, I’m panicking. Clearly there was something out in the hall, something that wanted my attention. I didn’t know if it was a burglar or a monster or my mom or a particularly ambitious Jehovah’s Witness. And not only was I on my own, but I was completely unarmed. Mom and Jeffrey didn’t like guns and I was never much of a sports fan, so I didn’t have so much as a baseball bat. I had a replica D’K tahg – that’s a Klingong warrior’s knife – but it was made of ceramic and wasn’t sharp at all.

“So I grabbed my sixth-grade science fair trophy and held it up like a bat. It wasn’t very heavy, but there were some poky bits on the end of it. I figured if I could hit the burglar or monster or missionary in the eyes or something, I could make a run for it.

“I reached for the doorknob with my left hand and turned it slowly, feeling for the moment the latch cleared the jamb. And then I flung the door open with a scream.”

As Declan spoke, he pantomimed violently opening an imaginary door with his left hand, nearly knocking Clementine’s recorder from her grip. He held that position for a few moments, not speaking, a look of dawning horror creeping across his face.

It was another transparent attempt to build tension, not that Clementine especially minded. But apparently the moment had gone on long enough for Frambo.

“And no one was there!” he shouted over Clementine’s shoulder. “Probably because you took too long to open the door.

“No,” Declan said, dropping his arms in annoyance. “I mean, you’re right that no one was there. But that’s because there was never anybody there.”

He turned back to Clementine.

“Nobody alive, that is.”

Though the room was silent, Clementine thought she could hear Frambo’s eyes rolling back into his head.

“All I saw were two damp footprints outside my door. Just two. As if someone appeared there and vanished, without stepping foot anywhere else in the house.

“And I knew then that it was Jeffrey, that he had found his way back to me because he had something to tell me. But he couldn’t find a way. Because, despite all the scientific advances humans have made – the internet, cellular networks-“

“Streaming porn,” Frambo cut in.

“Those little cameras you can use to talk to your dog and give him treats while you’re at work,” contributed Callie.

“Antibiotics?” offered Jackson.

“Yes, yeah, whatever,” Declan said, his cheeks darkening. “That’s what I’m saying. We’ve gotten so technologically advanced that the entire world is connected, that we can rewrite our own genetics, that we can kill entire planets entirely on accident. But we still haven’t found a way to communicate beyond the veil. When the body’s gone, where does the soul, whatever that might be, go?”

“Mykonos?”

Five heads slowly turned to face Frambo, who began to flush under the scrutiny.

“What? If I’m a disembodied spirit unbound by the laws of physics, I’m not gonna hang out in Iowa for all eternity. Might as well go to the beach.”

An awkward, loaded silence settled over the room .

“To that point,” Frambo continued, “why do we always assume the decrepit old shanties are the chosen hangouts of the dead? Like, why would ghosts hang out here, where there’s probably a bunch of black mold. And I think I saw some rat shit in the corner. When you think about it, shouldn’t Disney World be like the most haunted place on the plan-“

“God damn it Pete!” Declan had once again turned a vivid shade of red, his ears lighting up as if he were an outcast reindeer.

“Sorry,” Frambo said, regret evident on his face. “Sometimes I just say things when I get uncomfortable. I also get a little gassy.”

“Maybe somebody should show me the house?” Clementine was profoundly uncomfortable, and was more than a little concerned about the air circulation in the tiny command center. “I’d really like to poke around. I grew up in Wheatland, but even there we’ve heard about the legend of Killer House. Did old man Keller really have a hidden dungeon?”

Callie snorted.

“I’ve been over every inch of this house at least three times. If there was a dungeon, I would have found it.” She looked over at Frambo. “And I probably would have stuffed Captain Potato Chip over there inside it, just to shut him up.”

Declan scratched his beard, grimacing slightly. Even among his friends, Pete Frambois apparently was best consumed in small doses, Clementine surmised.

“That’s a good point, actually,” he said, moving his fingers up to rub the bridge of his nose. “Callie does know this place better than any of us. She did all of the scouting for us before we showed up with the rest of the gear. Maybe she can show you around, give you an idea of how we do things.”

Clementine clicked off her recorder and smiled at Callie, who remained expressionless and impossible to read, like a paranormal romance novel targeted at teen girls.

“Jackson, why don’t you go with them? I’ve got to go over some stuff with Peter and Abby anyway.”

Judging from his expression – that of a man trying to pass a particularly jagged kidney stone – Frambo was not especially looking forward to that interaction. Clementine liked the slovenly, sweaty tech, but she was happy to remove herself from an uncomfortable situation.

“Yes, that sounds great,” Clementine said.

“Sure,” Jackson added, sounding not-at-all excited about the prospect.

“All right turds, let’s take a walk,” Callie said, shouldering her way out the door, not bothering to look back and see whether she was being followed. Jackson sighed, and walked after her, instantly disappearing into the inky darkness of the hallway.

“Good luck,” Abby said brightly. Clementine gave her a wink as she stepped out of the room and deeper into Killer House.

Next Chapter: Interlude one