The Dark Man (21 page)

I’m only wearing a pair of basketball shorts, and after the frozen tundra of the room, the warmth feels good on my skin. The concrete balcony is pebbled and prickly under my feet. The white plastic chair, still temperate from the day’s heat, bends when I sit and prop my legs up on the glass table. I spot a few lights of trolling fishing vessels, along with a tanker or two heading north toward the Chesapeake Bay, and I try to sit peacefully as the waves crash against the shore.

I go over the three visits to the Hampstead farmhouse in my mind again, trying to make sense of the connection to Chelsea, the demon that affected her and Craghorn both, and the vicious, malevolent, but not demonic, entity residing there.

He, the old farmer I spoke with, may not have anything to do with Chelsea or the demon. Maybe he was just sharing information with me.

The first visit, the two Class-A EVPs: “
I know what you want
,” and “
Chelsea … Hopper
.”

The second visit, nothing. It happens.

And then, this last visit. Wow.

How did I end up there to begin with?

The short version goes like this: I got an e-mail from a young lady named Deanna Hampstead about a month ago. She said that I should call her “Hamster,” because everyone else did, and that she’s our number-one fan. Or, rather, she admitted to being Mike’s number-one fan, but since he wasn’t available on the Internet, she figured I would be just as interested in performing an investigation at her family’s abandoned farmhouse.

The thing is, I get about, oh, 437 of these e-mails each week, and it’s often a huge burden on my time to sift through every single one of them myself. So I’ve hired a personal assistant, a young man named Jesse who lives in Albuquerque, to read through them all and pick out the ones that appear to come from actual detectives in need of assistance. He then follows up with a reply e-mail to assess the validity, and if it’s a real case, he passes it along to me for review.

I was up late one night after having watched this bogus “Where Are They Now?” piece on some trashy TV show where they once again compared my good name to a certain German dictator from the past—I laughed, but it didn’t mean it wasn’t hurtful—and insomnia was inevitable. I decided to give Jesse a break and sort through a few hundred e-mails myself, and fifteen minutes in, I ran across a subject line that read: DON’T U KNOW SOME1 NAMED CHELSEA?

That sweet child’s name might as well be tattooed on my forehead, and I hadn’t had a thorough reaming in a good while, so of course I clicked. This is what it said (spelling mistakes hers):

Dear Mr. Ford A. Ford,

I am Deanna Hampstead but u can call me Hamster since all my friends do. I’m 13yrs old. My fam owns an old farmhouse close to where u live. I think. Ur in Oregon now? N E way, that’s what your site says. Biggest fan here of GC and was always in luv w/ Mike Long. #1 fan on earth. I couldn’t find him on the web, so I wrote 2 u. N E way, u are an inspiration and made me want to hunt ghosts. I went with my cousin Em and we hunted 1 nite. U would not believe what we caught! EVP of a man and my mom sez it’s her Papa Joe, her granpa.

Truthfully, it hurt my eyes, and my head, trying to decipher what young Hamster was trying to say. Kids these days. But I’ve always had a soft spot for the younger fans since their minds are such clean slates, unburdened by maturity and skepticism, so I continued reading.

I nvr would have believed it if I hadn’t heard it with my own 2 ears. (Y do ppl say it that way? Course u heard it w/ your own 2 ears. How else would u hear it?) N E way, it was SO cool. We listened and he said, “Ford … ghostman” and we were like WHAT SHUT UP. And Y is that cray cray? Papa Joe died in 1983. Mom says he was a mean ol cuss.

Now she had my attention, obviously. I’ve had plenty of spirits and demons call me out by name, but rarely, if any, who just happened to pass over to the other side twenty-plus years before the show first aired.

Me an Em—me is Em backward—funny! N E way, we asked him more ?s and all he would say was, “Ford … ghostman.” He musta said it 8 more times b4 we left. We said, “Ford and Mike from that show, right?” And then he said, “Yes. Chelsea. Danger.”

After reading that, I said, out loud, as a fully grown, adult male human being: “What?! Shut up. That’s cray cray.”

N E way, I have it all on tape. I dunno if u would want to but my mama says u should come talk to Papa Joe because it could be important! I think so 2 b/c Chelsea was like the gurl from that live show u did, right? Here is our phone and email but prob don’t call after 9 since Dad gets up early for work. Pls tell Mike he’s the best ever! And u 2 obv.

I remember checking the clock, seeing that it was half past 1:00 a.m. and contemplating calling regardless. I was so amped that I had my cell in my hand, finger hovering over the call button, before better judgment prevailed.

I waited until the next morning. I called. I spoke to Carol Hampstead, Hamster’s mother, and after a few rounds of, “Holy crap, you’re a celebrity! Hon, get in here! We got that Ford guy from that ghost show on the phone,” it was fairly easy to get permission for an investigation. Multiple investigations. As many as I wanted, as long as I promised to give them credit or mention the family if I ever got back on television again.

Funny, isn’t it? They didn’t want their fifteen minutes of fame. All they wanted was to serve me a nice dinner, ask a few behind-the-scenes questions about
Graveyard: Classified
, and to hear their names on television if the opportunity ever came up.

They live less than thirty miles from my home, just outside of Portland. The primordial family farmhouse is another six miles beyond that, nestled in a field and backed up against a small, rolling hill.

And here I am. Sitting on a balcony in Virginia Beach, Virginia, roughly three thousand miles away from that farmhouse, roughly fifteen hundred miles away from Chelsea Hopper’s former home, having battled the same demon, thinking about the incredible EVP that I caught on my third visit, and how it’s all connected over so many miles and planes of existence:

“
It’s coming … Chelsea … Key … Save … the people
.”

What’s coming? The demon? And was he saying that Chelsea is the key to something? To what?

And what am I saving the people from? And who are these people?

As the orange glow of the sun warms the eastern horizon, I’m left with more questions than answers. At the moment, the biggest one of them all is, should I tell Mike about this?

Mike and I each grab a handful of blueberry mini-muffins, an apple apiece, and two cups of coffee from the continental breakfast table before we dart out the door. Well, I dart, and Mike drags along behind me, grumbling about how he’s not beholden to Detective Thomas, and he doesn’t see why he should have to be in a hurry to get to the station.

By the time the buzzing vibration of my phone woke me up on the balcony at a quarter after nine, the detective had already left seven messages asking what had happened, and did we have any information for him. In addition to that, he had some bad news about Dave Craghorn and wanted to discuss things in person. I was to bring Mike, too, since he had become peripherally involved in the investigation.

Before I dozed off, just as the sun was peeking over the horizon, I had made up my mind to tell Mike about Hamster, the Hampstead farmhouse, and Papa Joe, yet as we whip around curves and weave through the nigh-impenetrable Virginia Beach work-commute traffic, it’s clear that now is not the right time. There’s too much to explain, too many implications to discuss, and I’d have to parry too many of his queries about my stance on the documentary.

Meanwhile, we inhale our muffins and apples while I curse at the other drivers, and I manage to slog through half a cup of the worst coffee I’ve ever tasted. Frankly, it tastes like demon piss, which I would expect to be a mixture of sulfur, charcoal, coffee beans that have been scrubbed across the anus of a dead horse, and hazelnut.

Mike’s grimace when he sips at his cup is the only confirmation I need that he feels the same.

The station is pulsating with activity, more than I expect at nine thirty in the morning on a random Thursday, with hookers and the homeless, old ladies and tattooed bikers stationed throughout, and it takes a good five minutes before the desk sergeant comes back around to his post. I explain who we are and who we’re there to see. He’s unimpressed. I can tell by the way his lip goes up into a slight Elvis sneer along with the restrained eye-roll that he thinks I can’t see.

Sergeant Hobbart—and I so desperately want to make a hobbit joke—points to a row of lime-green plastic chairs along the wall, the kind that are attached by a length of metal on the bottom, and tells us to have a seat, that someone will be with us shortly.

Before we can move to the horrid chairs that look less comfortable than a bed made of cinderblocks, Detective Thomas pokes his head through a doorway to our right. “You two, follow me.” There’s no welcoming smile, only the hard posturing of a serious man, and it’s then that I wonder if
we’re
in trouble for something.

He holds the door open farther, and Mike gives the space in front of us a wide-armed sweep. “After you.”

We don’t go to Detective Thomas’s desk, where I expected we would be led, and instead, he points into a bare room, with a bare table, three chairs, and the sanitized glow of two fluorescent bulbs overhead. Along one wall is a giant mirror.

I haven’t been in one of these since the wee hours of the morning after Chelsea’s attack. “Uh-oh, what’s going on?”

Mike groans and says, “Fuck me, Ford. If you dragged me into—”

“Relax,” Detective Thomas interrupts. “You’re not under arrest. It’s just standard procedure since you two were the last to see Dave Craghorn alive.”

Mike says, “Excuse me?”

And I add, “Wait.
Alive
? Like past tense? Was he mur … mur …” I can’t seem to get the word out of my mouth. I cough and pretend like I have something in my throat so that the detective will finish my sentence for me.

“Murdered? No. Sit.
Sit
.” He points to the two chairs on the left side of the table, the ones facing the mirror and the camera mounted in the upper corner, and refuses to sit himself until we finally relent.

We do, and the tabletop is cold underneath my forearms. Mike leans back, hands in his pockets, leg bouncing in anticipation.

Detective Thomas grabs the chair opposite from us, spins it around so that the back of it is facing his chest, and sits down, grunting as he does so. He leans forward, arms across the top, clucks his tongue like my grandma used to do. I can’t help but feel as if he’s disappointed in us for something, yet it’s likelier that he’s frustrated with the situation.

“Mr. Craghorn,” he says, tapping one long, bony index finger on the tabletop, “was found last night at the first rest stop heading west on I-64, swinging from the rafters.”

I don’t know the area well enough to be familiar with the one he’s talking about, but Mike says, “But that’s a couple of hours from here, isn’t it?”

“Give or take.”

I can’t believe this. “Hanging? Are you
positive
he wasn’t mur … mur …”

Damn. Why can’t I get that word out? I’ve talked to dead people for over ten years now, both murdered and not. Perhaps it’s a different mindset, given the situation, and considering the fact that I was trying to help the poor bastard a little over twelve hours ago. I think—yeah—Dave Craghorn is the first person I’ve known that’s died since Grandma Ford passed six years ago.

Detective Thomas clasps his fingers together, nibbles at his bottom lip, and nods. “Look, I shouldn’t even be sharing this with you guys since
technically
the investigation is ongoing—and please keep your damn mouths shut since I could lose my job for this, okay?”

Mike and I nod. Of course we do.

“I just—” He interrupts himself with a cough that’s designed to mask emotion that gets the better of him. “It’s a damn shame, and I thought you should know. I’ve been working this case off and on for years now and Craghorn wasn’t a friend, but I felt for the guy. Right? Every indication says that no foul play was involved and that it was a suicide. Some woman up from Charleston found him swinging. Nearly gave her a heart attack. According to the reports, Craghorn was wearing the same clothes he had on when I saw him last, there was no luggage in his car, nothing, so it appears that he left you guys and bolted. And this lady, she said in her statement that there was nothing else but an overturned chair. You gotta figure, that late at night, he could’ve done it hours earlier.”

“Or,” Mike says, “if someone did it to him, they’d be long gone.”

“True, but nothing points to it.”

I ask, “Aren’t there security cameras there?”

“Nah, not at that one. That particular rest area probably hasn’t been updated since Lee surrendered at Appomattox.”

“Did they find a note? Anything like that?”

Detective Thomas nods and fishes in his pants pocket, and for a moment, I think he’s going to pull out Dave Craghorn’s exact suicide note. The butterflies in my gut swoop, swirl, and drop far into my nether regions.

He extracts a pair of black-rimmed, rectangular glasses from another pocket, then rests the bifocals across the bridge of his nose. “Before I let you look at this, did you notice him acting strangely?”

“You mean any weirder than he already was?”

“Beyond that. Out of
Dave’s
ordinary.”

I frown and tell him no. Mike does the same. I say to the detective, “No, he wasn’t
acting
weird, per se, but we both noticed something about him and wanted to bring it up to you.”

“Which was?”

“You knew about his scratches, right? All the supposed claw marks all over his body?”

Detective Thomas nods. “I didn’t tell him to strip down and inspect him from head to toe, but yeah, that shit looked rough. And you think the, uh, the
demon
did that?”

Mike looks at me, I look at him, and we exchange a simple questioning glance, silently asking each other which one should proceed.