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“This room is clear, Lieutenant,” one of the men said as the three of them stepped out of the first bedroom.

“Keep going. We have a lot to check.” He turned to one of the troopers. “The trooper in the vent — his name is Thomas?”

“Yes, sir. Andy Thomas,” the man replied.

“Thomas, are you all right in there?” Jackson called out toward the vent.

“Hell no, it’s hot as hell in here, and — wait, wait. What the hell is this?” His voice echoed inside the vent. “Oh god — what the—?”

Jackson brushed by the officer standing beside the stepladder.

“Are you going to tell us what the hell you’re doing?” he called out angrily.

“It looks like a speaker or something, and uh…a little box with an antenna on it. But it’s covered in, I don’t know, puke or something.”

“All right. Gather it up and keep going.”

“No can do, Lieutenant. The vent drops — oh, shit, it drops straight down and then up from here. I guess I’m at the junction where the vent peels—”

“I don’t need a description. Get that speaker, or whatever it is, and get the hell out of there.”

As Lindemann turned the key in the next door along the hallway, a piercing scream emerged from the room and the door flew open toward him. Wallace was so shocked that he screamed as well, and fell backward into the three state policemen standing ready to enter the room.

Jackson turned around, his small service revolver drawn. A blur of motion shot through the door and into the mass of stunned men. The state trooper standing next to Jackson knocked over the ladder getting his nine-millimeter out. He aimed it at the blur, wide-eyed.

“No!” Jackson yelled and slammed his hand down on the trooper’s gun.

Damian Jackson stared, shocked, at the boy who was trying desperately to crawl down the hallway. His hair was ghostly white and he was jabbering in incoherent words.

“Jimmy — Jimmy Johansson!” he called out, but the boy kept up his gibberish and started crawling even faster.

Jackson stepped around the stunned troopers and Wallace Lindemann. In a few long strides he reached the boy, grabbing the back of his jeans to pull him to a stop. When the boy screamed again, it froze the blood of every man in the hallway. When Jackson turned Jimmy over, he saw that the boy’s eyes were wide and the whites were blood red. He was shaking uncontrollably and he smelled as if he had soiled himself. His fingers were broken, twisted and bloody, and scraps of flesh hung from his knuckles. All of his fingernails with the exception of the thumbs were curled back like banana peels. Yet despite all his injuries, it was the color of his hair that had the men standing over him staring in rapt fascination.

“My God.” Wallace Lindemann choked. He turned away from the boy and shoved through the line of police to vomit against the baseboard.

A loud crash sounded. The police turned with their guns drawn and pointed at the heating vent. Thomas was on the floor behind them, having fallen out with his hands full of speaker and receiver.

“Who moved the goddamn ladder—” The sight of four guns pointed at him made him close his mouth. He swallowed, staring down the barrel of the nearest weapon. “I take it I missed something?”

* * *

It was close to 2:30 AM. The crew of Hunters of the Paranormal watched the ambulance carrying Jimmy Johansson drive away from the estate with a Pennsylvania State Police car for escort. Kelly could see Eunice and Charles through the ambulance’s back windows, trying desperately to get their son to respond to them.

“Jesus Christ.” Harris Dalton rubbed his forehead. “What happened to that kid?”

“His hair…what the hell could do that?” Jason Sanborn asked. He stared wide-eyed after the red and white ambulance lights as they went through the main gate. He tried to light his empty pipe with shaking hands.

“Whatever took Paul and Kyle, the kid must have seen it,” Kelly said. “He was in the room right across from where they were. He had to have seen something.”

Harris was tired of Kelly speculating without as much as a thread of evidence. She was taking this disaster far too calmly for his comfort, considering that she had two people missing and a teenager that seemed to have gone insane. Before Harris could say anything to her, a trooper approached them.

“The Lieutenant is in the main dining room. He wants to see you — all three of you.”

Kelly, Jason and Harris slowly followed the trooper inside, each of them with their own personal reservations about going into the brightly lit, cheerful-looking Summer Place.

“The fucking house almost — well, it feels sated, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s not as bad as it was earlier.”

“Kelly, I’ll tell you one time only: cut that crap out. Stop writing script for the goddamn show.”

Kelly looked at Dalton, but decided to let it go.

As they entered the main dining salon, past two troopers standing on either side of the double doors, they saw Damian Jackson with his coat removed, sitting on the edge of the long polished table. He was drinking a cup of coffee. Wallace Lindemann was pacing not far away with a large drink in his hand, talking on a cell phone. They could hear the ice tinkling in the glass from his shaking.

Jackson stood and placed his cup on the table. “Come on in. I have a couple of questions for you.”

Lindemann, without missing a beat, tucked the cell phone between his neck and shoulder and shot forward, lifting the cup and placing a piece of paper under it as a makeshift coaster. The policeman looked from the owner of Summer Place to the cup of coffee and shook his head. Lindemann had vomited on a ten thousand dollar Persian rug runner, but freaked out over the chance of getting a cup ring on his table.

Kelly turned on a small tape recorder and made sure that the lieutenant saw her do it.

“First,” Jackson said, “I want the tape that reportedly shows this…this, incident.” The falsity of his smile was clear, and its intent also.

“Well, we—” Dalton started.

“The tape was accidentally erased when we tried to show it to New York, sorry,” Kelly cut in smoothly. She matched Jackson’s glare.

“Is that right?” the lieutenant asked Jason Sanborn, and then turned to Harris Dalton.

“I never saw it and I don’t know anything about it,” Jason answered truthfully.

Dalton tried not to shift his eyes toward Kelly, who was standing her ground like the greatest liar in the world. He tried with every effort to hold his temper in check. Then he reminded himself that he was a television man — regardless of what he thought of Kelly, that tape was great television.

“I’m afraid she’s telling the truth,” he said. “However, we will supply you with it, nonetheless. We are gong to make a copy of the erased tape and send it to New York. Maybe our technicians will be able to get something off of it. If we do, we’ll shoot you down a copy.”

Jackson didn’t respond, but Kelly and Dalton both saw the man’s jaw muscles clinch under his smile.

“Okay, you can play it like that, if that’s the way you want it. But let me warn you, if I see that damn thing on television and I don’t have a copy of it sitting in my crime lab, I’ll get arrest warrants for all three of you for withholding evidence from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”

Kelly tilted her head, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Dalton suspected she knew exactly what size shoe it was going to be.

“Now, maybe you can explain what this is.” Jackson reached behind him, and with a handkerchief, picked up the small speaker and the miniature transmitter.