Abby's Christmas Spirit Read Free

he had stood staring at her retreating form for so long the sister dressed in black moved close to him and hissed, “What are you looking at?”
    It had snapped him out of his haze and he’d left with the tour.
    He’d found the house charming that day, its inhabitants a little odd.
    Tonight there were no inhabitants but him, and it was just cold and gloomy. The lights were back off now that the equipment was on and he was bored. Restless.
    And his dusty house had mice because he kept hearing a rustling sound coming from behind the stairs, back by the kitchen.
    “I hear something from the back of the house,” he told the camera set up in front of him, trying to inject enthusiasm and urgency into his voice. It really was time to wrap up his show. In eight seasons he had yet to really see anything that would convince him ghosts irrefutably existed and it was getting harder and harder to sound anything but skeptical. “I’m going to check it out.”
    As he moved down the hallway with a hand held camera, he paused to listen. There it was again. He veered left towards the dining room, trying to get his bearings. He knew this room intimately. In his dreams he always laid her down on the walnut table and kissed her thighs. But she didn’t exist and he needed to set this house and thoughts of her aside. He probably needed some meds too, now that he thought about it. How normal was it to dream about the same fantasy woman for as long as he had?
    There was a door to his left and he pulled it open. There was nothing in it but shelves, a closet or pantry of sorts. The floorboard creaked behind him. He turned around, looking at the floor for signs of rodents scurrying, but he saw nothing.
    “I’m hearing strange and unusual sounds. Like footsteps.” Or a house settling. But the noises were good for the editing. It would make his house more appealing to the right buyer. Someone who wanted a haunted house in a haunted town.
    He had the sudden sensation that someone was watching him, the hairs on the back of his neck standing up. Darius turned around slowly, scanning the dark. With his own eyes he couldn’t see a thing but through the camera lens he had a green view of the room. There wasn’t anything there.
    “Hey, uh, Darius, you copy?” It was Trent, on his radio from the van outside where he monitored the cameras and sound equipment.
    “Yeah, I’m here.” He was wearing a mic clipped to his waistband. “What’s up?”
    “The camera in the kitchen just went out. And so did the one in the hall, which is totally weird. Can you check on them?”
    “Sure.” That was weird. For even one to go out was rare, but two? That was virtually unheard of.
    “Holy crap. The bedroom just went out! What the hell is going on?”
    Darius sighed. For the first time since he was fourteen and had gotten into a college prep private high school, he felt tired. His ambition had sputtered. He had a massive amount of money, three houses he was hardly ever in, a business corporation comprised of extensive media and merchandise holdings, and he was bored. Just plain old bored and maybe a little tired.
    It pissed him off. He didn’t do miserable. Or brooding. He went for what he wanted and he got it.
    The problem was, at the moment, he didn’t seem to know what he wanted.
    But as he moved toward the kitchen, he realized the most logical explanation for why the cameras had gone out would be if someone were in the house, messing with him.
    The thought actually excited him. A burglar would liven things up.
    Which circled him back around to the thought that he did need some serious medication if the thought of going a round with a possibly armed intruder got his juices flowing.
    “I just played the film back to see if there was an explanation for them going out and there most definitely is,” Trent says. “There’s a chick in the house.”
    “A woman? Are you serious? I thought maybe it was Jim or someone screwing with us.” But there were no