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.
“Most of the voices and scraping came from the back of the house and the structure that used to be there,” Steve said. “Should I show you?”
“Sounds good.”
“What if you hear anything? Shouldn’t you bring some of your equipment?”
Although their appearances on cable TV had done wonders for getting exposure and some funding for MEG, it also made people like Steve expect a whole lot from scouting trips like this one. Just to put those expectations to rest and keep on good terms with potential clients, all scouts carried the bare minimum wherever they went. Jarvis took a handheld digital camera and audio recorder from his inner jacket pockets and showed them to Steve. That was enough to make Steve nod anxiously and hurry toward the back of the house.
“Only a few rooms on the upper floor were actually used by the Lancroft family,” Steve said as he slipped into a voice that would have been perfectly at home on a tour bus. “The ground level was for staff and visitors, while the basement levels were used to house the more docile patients. The main points of interest are in the old East Wing.”
Ducking beneath some half-assembled scaffolding, Jarvis said, “This place doesn’t look like much of a reformatory.”
“There weren’t a lot of patients, really. Not by our standards. Maybe only a couple dozen or so were here at any given time, and they probably never saw this house after they were initially brought here. After that,” Steve said as he made it to the end of the cramped hallway, “they spent their time in the East Wing.”
Once out of the hallway, Jarvis was led into what had once been a kitchen. Cracked counters were blanketed in layers of dust and nailed to walls or merely propped up where they’d once been. An iron stove, a table, and a few chairs were still in recognizable shape, but the rest of the room was completely trashed. A few sections of new drywall had been stacked nearby, but weren’t nearly enough to fix the gaping section of wall that had crumbled off the back of the mansion. The hole was covered in the same plastic that sectioned off many other rooms of the house, and it flapped with every passing breeze. The tattered bottom edge of the plastic scraped against a floor that could very well have been on the wrong end of a bombing run.
Jarvis stepped forward and made sure it was all right to walk through one of the many rips in the plastic sheet that formed the back wall. Once he got a nod from Steve, he walked through the plastic and into the backyard. To be fair, it was more of a back field. “What’ve you got back here?” Jarvis asked. “Four, five acres?”
“Three and a half, actually,” Steve replied. “But the East Wing only took up one.”
However bad the mansion looked, the East Wing looked worse. At least the mansion still had the general shape of a building. All that remained of the East Wing was several large piles of rubble that formed a barn-sized heap. Some sections of the heap were so covered by dirt and overgrowth that they looked as if they’d been reclaimed by the nearby hills.
“I’ve heard scraping and voices from over there,” Steve said as he pointed toward the heap. “Since there’s supposed to be at least two levels of basement under all that, the surveyors told us to stay away until they were certain there wasn’t going to be a cave-in. That was enough for me to keep from getting any closer than this.”
“That and the scraping, huh?” Jarvis asked with a smirk.
For once, Steve didn’t return a smile. “That’s right,” he said with a single nod.
There was enough loose dirt to give the air a gritty texture that caught in Jarvis’s nose and formed a crunchy layer between his teeth. “Where did you hear those sounds?” he asked.
“I was walking around the rubble, looking for anything that could be salvaged. According to the records we found, the East Wing was demolished somewhere between 1910 and 1915. It was a very modern scientific facility for its time, but all the equipment was said to have been left behind. Some of the rooms had ceilings that opened up to let in the sunlight. Those rooms were supposedly buried and a few patients were left down there when the structure fell. Ever since then, there’s always been stories of ghosts.”
“I’ll bet. Can I get a closer look?”
“We should stick to the perimeter. The surveying crew started in on this spot a few months ago, but we haven’t gotten any results. There’s a lot to dig up.”
Jarvis nodded as he continued walking forward. “I was a contractor for thirteen years before taking this job, so I know my way around messes like this one.”
Even though Steve didn’t seem comfortable with Jarvis continuing to walk onto the rubble, he wasn’t about to rush forward to stop him.
After all the dark corners Jarvis had looked into, the feeling of being near something truly supernatural was unmistakable. It wasn’t anything as simple as a chill or hairs standing up on the back of his neck. It was something deeper and more primal. Perhaps it was the same thing that made deer snap their heads up as danger approached or that caused every cricket within earshot to stop their chirping at the same exact instant.
Like most people who lived or worked so close to such things, Steve had also gotten familiar with that sensation. “Creepy, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. What’s that hole over there?”
Steve kept his hands clasped casually behind him and leaned forward. Making a face, he shrugged and replied, “Don’t know. I haven’t stepped foot out here since the surveyors told us to stay away.”
“And how long ago was that?”
“A month or so. Too bad you couldn’t get here sooner. We could’ve crawled all over there if you’d arrived before the surveyors came. They must be on vacation or waiting for supplies, because I haven’t heard from them for a while.”
“Sorry about the delay,” Jarvis said. “We get a lot of different calls.” He kept walking toward the hole, which was a black pit just big enough for a refrigerator to be lowered through it. The entrance to the pit was tucked at the bottom of one of the slopes made up of cracked bricks and powdery mortar. Everything from beams to copper pipes stuck up from the debris, making the East Wing look as if it had been crushed beneath the heel of God rather than knocked over by mere mortals. “Is it all right if I get a look inside?”
Steve winced. “It may not be safe and we may be liable for any accidents. Speaking of which, I really should
