Anglerfish

By Noel Hansen

The stairs weren’t there the last time that Stephen had been in this room. The room was empty of furniture and decorations; it didn’t even have curtains on the windows. A set of stairs would be difficult to miss. And yet here it was, a set of stairs going up, set into the wall to the left of the door.

Stephen drops the equipment he had been carrying to the room, and formulates a plan of action. He sets up the video camera and tripod he was going to set in one of the corners of the room to focus on the stairs instead. He places the motion sensor on the wall opposite the stairs to pick up anyone entering or exiting the stairs, and sets the directional microphone at the bottom of the stairs, to pick up any noise. Then he activates the battery pack he had brought and connects all the equipment to it, and sets up the transmission device to send the data to the nearby router downstairs (which in turn will direct all data to servers they have back in Verne’s garage). He has gone through this setup dozens, maybe even a hundred times before. He had gotten it down to a science. He fumbles now, and occasionally curses his own clumsiness.

When he finishes, he hurries out of the room and down the stairs. He looks around for his co-workers, and seeing none in his initial visual sweep, hurries outside to the waiting van. He hops in the passenger seat and pulls out his phone, then dials his co-worker Opal.

“What is it?”, Opal asks.

Stephen, out of breath and gripping the armrest so hard its leaving marks, replies: “Opal y-y-y-y-y-you need to finish up whatever you are doing and get out of there right now. Something is going on and you are probably safer out here. I’ll explain when you get back.”

Stephen hangs up and waits in the van for Opal to come out, trying to stop himself from hyper-ventilating. All this time searching, and finally its here and he is more terrified than he has ever been in his life. The “be careful what you wish for” irony is not lost on Stephe, but he now has more pressing issues on his mind.

Shortly Opal appears at the front door, a tripod slung over her shoulder, a big black bag hanging from her other arm. She closes the door and walks slowly to the van. She opens the back and tosses the excess equipment in before walking around to the front and getting in the drivers sider.

“What is it?”, she asks Stephen, obviously annoyed,

“There were stairs-”, Stephen starts.

“Yes, the house has stairs, what of it?”, Opal interrupts.

“There were stairs on the second floor, in one of the rooms. They weren’t there before”, Stephen replies, his face pale.

Opal’s face scrunches up and her eyes narrow at this information. She walks to the back of the van where the team's equipment is set up. She slides in between the racks of tape recorders; sensors to detect changes in light, sound, temperature, and movement; parabolic microphones; EMP sensors; and various collected pieces of video equipment to the computer and router setup that is hooked up to the vans internal electrics.

Once on the computer, she brings up the house's floor plan as they were given by the couple who hired them, as well as a document containing various information about the house such as year of construction, square footage, and information about electrical and heating systems. She also opens up a program that shows streaming footage from all the cameras they have set up so far, showing her everything that is happening in the house (on a five second delay) as the footage is being captured and saved to a rack of hard drives sitting next to the monitor.

She brings up the cameras for the second floor, and compares them to the floor plan document, tabbing between the document, the document with info on the house, and the cameras. She does this multiple times, saying nothing, her face stoic and seemingly unfazed (though the rapid tapping of the fingers of her left hand on the table indicates otherwise). Without a word, she turns back to the front of the van where Stephen is sitting. This entire time he has been watching her, wringing his hands over and over as a grimace lays plastered on his face.

“Yep, something is going on here. Its a good thing the Lawrences aren’t planning on coming back anytime soon, because we couldn’t safely allow them to return now anyway”, Opal says, her expression unchanging as she runs her hands through her hair.

“What do we do now?”, Stephen says while glancing back at the house.

Opal stands there in the back of the van in front of the computer, hands on her hips, biting her bottom lip. She is silent for a moment, her eyes focused on nothing, deep in thought. “Call it in, I suppose”, she finally says after several minutes.

The small garage is nearly full when Stephen arrives the next morning. He places the compostable paper cup holder and its contents, as well as his own beverage, on top of a box of magazines that is sitting next to the open door, as he watches the others bent over a setup of monitors. Opal is there, intense as always, bent almost in half staring at the screen, her face so close to it she looks like she is about to crawl inside; Jerry is standing next to her, his arms crossed, his right foot rapidly tapping the ground, his ponytail bouncing up and down like he is listening to a song only he can here. Wilma is off to the side, at the keyboard, their elbow resting on the arm of their wheelchair, chin in their palm and fingers covering their mouth as if they are trying to hold back vomit. Behind all three stands their boss Verne, towering over the group, his hands in his pockets and his head facing the ceiling. None of them have noticed Stephen’s arrival.

He clears his throat to get the group's attention. Nobody moves, except for Verne, who turns his head down and around until he spies Stephen, then motions him over to the monitors with a slight nod of his head. Stephen grabs the drinks and walks over.

He arrives and squeezes in between Opal and Jerry to place the beverage holder on the table for everyone. None of the group seems to notice, however; they all just continue to look at the screens. His task finally complete and his sense of duty satisfied, Stephen takes a sip of his beverage as he finally turns to view the screen. The only thing on the screen is that familiar open door from the other day. Seeing it captured on film makes him shiver, makes the coffee he is sipping turn sour on his tongue and his guts roil like a pot of boiling water. The wrongness of it gives him the feeling that he should look away.

“Its not on the plans, its definitely not in the plans”, Wilma says, startling Stephen a little. “The owners gave it to me, and I checked and double checked. They confirmed that it wasn’t there when they left, and the dimensions of the house itself don’t support its existence. There just isn’t enough room for a full stair of that size to be there, and there is only a crawlspace in the attic.”

“And we are sure it isn’t, say, an optical illusion of some sort? A very sophisticated one? It isn’t like anyone has gone in there to check, or even touched it”, Jerry remarks, a scowl of concentration on his face.

“Its real”, Stephen stammers. “y-y-y-y-y-y-you can tell that it is real, it feels real when you are next to it. There is even a little draft I could feel coming from the door. It was a little cold, and had a foul odor.”

“I don’t understand it”, Opal says, her eyes not moving from the image of the open door on the screen. “There was nothing about this in any of the ghost hunting books, nothing in the trades. I have never heard stories from others in the industry about something like this. It doesn’t match with any known haunting type, it is completely outside of all theories about ghosts and hauntings!”

“Do you think this is what is causing the nightmares the Ricardos were experiencing?” Wilma asks. ”And all the other stuff too, the paranoia, the strange smells, the noises…” they trail off, remembering what the owners had reported to the company when they filed the paperwork to conduct an investigation: the night terrors, the distant sounds of a baby crying, the water damage in walls with no pipes. All perfectly explainable by normal means, but also all potential signs of a haunting. Except for what they had mentioned about the paranoia, the feeling that someone, nearly every night, is entering their house. And, of course, now the door.

“Well, it sure as shit isn’t the plumbing, that was fine when I checked it earlier that day”, Jerry says, spitting into a nearly black water bottle he is holding in his right hand at the end of the sentence.

Everyone silently stares at the screen for a few seconds longer. Verne sucks his teeth, his sign that he is about to speak. Everyone turns their heads to look at him.

“Well, it wouldn’t do to move too quickly on this. Who knows what this is. We need more information before we take any action. Lets put some more cameras up in the house, and I mean ALL around the house. I want cameras in every room, streaming footage all day to these servers. I want cameras on the outside of the house too; something tells me that, considering the nature of the Rircardos anxieties, we will want those. Put mics in every room too, I want to know if we hear so much as a mouse squeaking, and temperature readouts, hell give it the works. We bought enough of this shit at that warehouse sale”, he needs at the crates beside him as he says this, “we might as well get some use out of it.

“Set up alarms too, set them up on anything. Any more than a 5 degree temperature dip we should know about, anything so much as moves we should know about it. We don’t have to worry about pets or people mucking things up either. And Wilma, look into the history of this place. Let us know what you find”. After finishing, Verne turns away and walks out of the garage to light up a cigarette.

Jerry turns and begins loading the boxes into the truck that's sitting outside. Opal helps him, while Wilma turns to the computer and begins typing away. Stephen just stands there, and takes another sip of his coffee before helping the others load up the truck. The drinks on the table go cold.

The job of wiring the house is done after a few hours. Since Jerry was the tallest out of the group, he handled most of the work of placing and securing the cameras and sensors in the corners and hallways of the house, while Stephen and Opal handled running the wires through the house and setting up the transmission equipment in the garage that will send the video feed back to the teams servers in Verne’s garage.

After the final camera is in place, Jerry calls Wilma and confirms with them that all the devices are in the right place, working with them to test that they are reading correctly. Stephen and Opal sit in the van, silent, while he does this.

Saying nothing, they just stare out the windows; Opal in the driver's seat, staring at the street, Stephen in the passenger seat, staring at the house. Occasionally Stephen sees Jerry through the open windows, moving from room to room. Time ticks on. On one occasion he thinks he sees Jerry in two different rooms at once, but the image is so brief that Stephen brushes it up as a trick of perception. He sighs and starts tapping on the door of the van. Silently he turns to Opal, who is still staring out the window at the empty late-afternoon street.

“Hey Opal?”, Stephen asks.

“Yeah, what is it?”, she replies, not evening turning her head.

“Got a question, if you don’t mind?”, Stephen says, stopping his tapping on the car door.

“Shoot”, Opal returns.

“Its… Do you feel the others respect me?”, Stephen says.

Opals hand clenches at hearing this. “What makes you say that?”, she says.

“I don’t know, I just… Nobody seems to want to listen to what I say or pay attention when I try to do something nice for them. I am not expecting them to be my friends or something, but… I dunno. Just something feels off when I talk to them.”, he says glumly.

Opal turns around and looks Stephen directly in the eyes. “Look man, I got you this job after your last thing fell through and things started to come apart because I thought you could do it. I know you, they don’t. The hard truth is, nobody owes you their respect, you aren’t owed anybody’s trust, okay? You have to earn both, you can’t be passive and expect it to fall in your lap. That is just one of those hard lessons you gotta learn sometimes”.

Stephen doesn’t reply to this; no emotion crosses his face. He just turns back to face the house and stares undaunted by the afternoon sunlight hitting the front windows, his fingers once again tapping out an uneven rhythm on the plastic of the van door. Opal turns back to the window, this time choosing to stare at the pavement directly outside the driver's side door.

Stephen arrives to Verne’s garage the next day groggy. He barely slept at all last night; not from nightmares, from his mind racing. It felt like he just couldn’t stop thinking, even though his mind was not absorbed with anything particular. As his fiance turned over in his sleep next to him, he just stared at the ceiling, feeling like he was about to cry because his brain wouldn't quiet.

He rubs the sleep from his eyes and walks to the center of the room. He is alone, the first one, besides Verne, who has arrived. Verne is sitting at the computer, watching something on the screen. It appears he is combing through the footage from the house, inspecting the instances where the sensors tripped and captured video and data of disturbances.

Stephen walks over, curious as to what he is viewing. He stops part way over, scrunching up his face; Verne smells terrible, like he has not showered and has been up all night, reviewing footage and marinating in his own juices. Concerned for Verne, he starts walking over again and gently places a hand on the man’s shoulder.

“Hey Verne, watcha looking at there? We get some good stuff?”, Stephen says, concern seeping into his voice.

“This is…”, Verne turns to face Stephen and starts for a moment, eyes wide, his expression unreadable, then stops. His eyes narrow, his faces hardens, and he turns back to face the computer screen. “This is getting complicated”, he finally finishes, slightly quieter now.

Stephen looks from Verne to the computer screen and gives it a good look. He stomach churns as he recognizes the image of someone entering the Ricardo house. The image is blurry, but it appears to be a man, slightly taller than average, with nice clothes and short brown hair, though no facial details can be spotted from this distance. The image captured on screen shows him opening up the front door, about to walk inside.

“Stephen, did you guys lock up the house on the way out yesterday?”, Verne says, an edge of panic in his voice.

“Uh yeah, we definitely did. Or Jerry did anyway, but I saw him double check the locks like he always does when we leave”, Stephen replies, unable to take his gaze away from the horror of suburban violation on display in front of him.

Verne is silent at this for a little while, still staring at the screen.

“We need to review the rest when the others get here. There is much more. Things are escalating.”, he finally says.

The rest of the ghost hunting group arrives in about a half hour or so, Wilma wheeling themselves up from the bus stop down the road, Jerry pulling into the driveway in his constantly wheezing pickup truck, and Opal carefully parallel parking her car across the street before walking over. Verne makes the group wait until everyone is there, then turns to the computer without a word, pulls up a video, and clicks the “Play” button.

The video is a actually a string of videos; it is all the disturbances captured by the cameras that night, played one after the other. The video begins showing the camera that was setup on the outside of the house, showing a figure walking into the yard from the street. The figure is shrouded in shadows and doesn’t trigger the house's motion sensor lights. The figure walks to the door and opens it, as if it was unlocked. It moves into the house, where cameras from the hallway get a more direct view.

The figure is still blurry and distinct features never appear; various parts of its body changing colors and textures, and times growing shorter and at times growing larger. The group is unable to tell any distinct features of the figure; at times it appears like its a man, at times it appears like its a woman, at times it appears as neither. It is constantly shifting, as if multiple images of a person were layered on top of each other or a crowd of people were all occupying the same space and walking in the same direction, all overlapping.

The figure walks through the house and up the stairs, seeming to walk with purpose. At the top of the stairs to the second floor and turns at enters the room with the mysterious door. It then walks into the door and up the stairs beyond it. At that point the video ends. The group stands in silence for a minute, each individual left to their own thoughts.

Jerry eventually pipes up. “Is that the only disturbance?”, he asks.

Verne nods, to which Jerry grimaces.

“It didn’t trigger the intruder lights on the outside of the house, yet we still got footage of it. How?”, Wilma wonders aloud.

“Must be, hmm…”, Jerry mutters to himself.

“What was that?”, Wilma asks.

“Oh I was just thinking, must be something besides motion triggered things. We rigged up all the sensors to the cameras, so the computer system would know when anything was changing, not just motion. So it must be that whatever this is caused some other disturbance”, Jerry replies.

“Yep, it would appear it triggered the sound sensors, mainly. We didn’t get readings on anything else, I was up all night combing through the data. The neighborhood was damn quiet all night, so any little disturbance was picked up”, Verne says.

He turns to the computer and brings up an audio file.

“Here is what it sounds like”, he says and then clicks the “play” button.

What sounds like a recording of a distant crowd comes through the speakers. There are distinct voices overlapping, but no words can be caught; yet there is the definite idea that a language is being spoken, though what language (or languages) is not clear. It reminds Stephen of when he was young, laying in his bed listening to his parents argue downstairs; he could hear his mothers voice and his fathers, and he could hear tone, and he could even understand that they were speaking the same language, but no words or meaning were ever clear.

Verne clicks pause on the audio. Everyone is startled by this move, as if they were a sleep-walker woken in the middle of the street.

“There is also this”, he remarks, and brings up the video from before.

This time, instead of playing the video in full, he clicks through the video frame by frame. When they get to the point where the being enters the house and is more clearly seen, the group understands why Verne wanted to show them the video like this. In each frame, the being appears to be a separate person: sometimes a tall man, sometimes a short woman; sometimes light skinned, sometimes dark; sometimes fair-haired, sometimes completely bald.

After demonstrating this for a number of frames, Verne pauses the video again and turns to look at the rest of the group.

“So”, he says. “Thats the extent of it. Nothing about this is any of the books, nothing even close. This is a one of a kind, as far as we know. So all previous rules of engagement are gone, we gotta start from scratch with this.”

“Do you have a plan? We can’t just leave this thing in the Ricardo’s house, who knows what it would eventually do to them”, Opal says.

A grin crosses Vernes face. “I do indeed.

“First off, we need more sensors. All over the house, and more cameras too, I wanna see all the angles on this thing. Get every sensor we got in there, and I want someone in here watching all night, so we can see this thing live.

“I also wanna try and block its path; lets move the couch in front of the stairs or something, I wanna see how it reacts. Maybe some other furniture objects too, nothing too fragile, just maybe some chairs, something we can put back real easy.

“And then I want someone there in the van as well, someone across the street watching at night. Part of me wonders if this thing is corporal, or just some unknown thing putting its image in the cameras. That seems impossible, but hey, this whole situation seemed impossible just a few days ago, so its worth a try”

“Makes sense boss”, Jerry replies. “Who is going in the truck?”

“I don’t care too much, so long as they don’t mind staying up. Lets draw straws, shortest one gets the truck, longest one gets the garage, middle length ones get a good night’s sleep”, Verne says.

He clasps his hands on his knees and stands up as he says this, then strolls out to the lawn and rips up 5 blades of grass. He breaks them up such that one is much shorter than the others, while one is longer. Verne mixes them together in his fist and holds them to the group. They each take turns drawing one piece of grass. Wilma gets the long one, while Opal gets stuck with the short.

The van is surprisingly cold at night. Opal is sitting in the front seat, wrapped in a blanket. She can’t find any position that is comfortable anymore after hours of sitting in the same place. It makes it easier to keep watch, but doesn’t make the duty of keeping watch any more pleasant. Especially this late at night, when she is used to being asleep.

Opal leans against the window, and pulls the blanket around her tighter. Her breath is fogging up the window, so she wipes it away. She reaches over for a thermos filled with hot coffee and pours herself a cup in the cap to warm her hands, and sips a little as she scans the street. People long ago stopped walking down the street, and cars stopped driving about an hour back. The night is quiet and still and clear.

Out of the corner of her eye, she spies movement. Someone is coming down the street. She swiftly brings up the binoculars that were sitting in her lap to her face, and leans over into the passenger seat, lenses almost flush with the window as she attempts to get a good look at the figure without putting herself in danger.

The figure appeared in her vision by walking around a corner. It looks exactly like it did on the recording; as if its a mass of people all walking at the same pace, in the same spot. It is a whirl of colors and textures. It is too much to take in at once; Opal keeps on feeling the urge to turn her eyes away from it, as if her brain is working overtime to process all the images it is seeing at once. And it is at once, because all the people inside this figure appear to be visible at once, but the sheer number of them coming into her brain means she can’t focus on any one individual. She can pick up bits and pieces of the details that define these people as individuals or would mark them out in a crowd; a flash of a gaudy necklace here, a painful limp there. But nothing connects in her brain, she cannot pick out anything specific.

She can tell that they are moving their lips as they walk, however. She picks up a parabolic microphone and quickly attaches it to a tape recorder and a pair of headphones, then rolls down the car window just a bit and pushes it through the gap at the creature to pick up all the sounds coming from that direction. She puts on the headphones, starts the recorder, and turns on the microphone just as the creature comes to the gate that marks the entrance to the Ricardo’s property.

As she turns on the mic, she is greeted with a blast of noise in her headphones and flings them off instinctually, then scrambles to pick them up again once she realizes what she has done. Cautiously she holds up one of the earpieces a little ways from her head and listens to the sounds coming through.

She hears a chorus of voices coming through, as if she was in the middle of a crowd at a sporting event. Voices of all sorts, male, female, and non-binary, can be heard. It has a similar effect to looking at the creature visually, all the voices are distinct yet the sheer number of them talking at the same time overwhelms. There is enough to pick up distinctive properties; Opal thinks she can hear a stutter in at least one of the voices. But she cannot pick out what they are saying, she can’t parse meaning from the mulch of sound that is coming to her.

While she is processing this, the figure suddenly stops its approach to the house right outside the front gate and the voices on the mic go silent. Opal grabs the binoculars to get a better look. When she brings them up, she sees the figure turn towards where she is sitting, as if it is looking at her. It then turns back around and enters the house, the voices resuming. Opal’s heart skips a beat

The next day has the entire crew gathered back at the garage to review the data and evidence gathered last night. On the computer screen they see a replay much the same as the previous night; the figure enters through the Ricardos’ front door, walks up the stairs, and enters the door in the second floor bedroom. When it comes to the couch that Stephen and Jerry had moved into the hallway, it simply walks over it without stopping. The extra sensors set up around the house provide no more clues; they have more angles on the figure now, but no additional data is gathered. There are no strange electro-magnetic readings, no changes to the wind or temperature in the house beyond what would be expected from opening a door, and movement and sound sensors pick up exactly what one would expect.

“Almost like the damn thing doesn’t exist”, Jerry remarks. “Like its just a recording, a tape being played back. But it still reacts to shit, we can see that.” Jerry finishes his ruminations by spitting a wad of a black substance into his bottle.

“And it looked at me, don’t forget that”, Opal says. The others silently nod at that.

“Well, w-w-w-w-what next?”, Stephen asks.

Everyone ponders this question in silence for a few minutes. Suddenly, Wilma speaks.

“We gotta send someone beyond the door, see what that thing is going towards. Would give us more clues as to what is going on, and to what this thing is”, they say, which causes Jerry and Verne to nod.

“If we send someone in with a line, we should be able to pull them back if things get dicey, and if we give them communication equipment we can know when to come get them. The thing hasn’t shown itself to be hostile or dangerous, yet”, Verne says. “To be fair though, we should draw straws like before”.

The group draws straws like they did for the van. Stephen pulls the shortest straw. When he does, all the others look visibly relieved. Except for Opal.

“Hey man, you don’t have to do this, you can just say no”, she says to Stephen when they are alone together, as the others are preparing the setup and equipment for later. She puts her hand on his shoulder, as if to comfort him.

Stephen sighs. “I think I need to, Opal. I think this is important. Something tells me this is important for me to do, I think it will be good for me. I think it will help me feel in control again, I haven’t felt that for a while”, he says to her as he takes her hand of his shoulder.

“Okay, I understand. You are probably right there. And don’t worry, I think it will be okay. The guys here have a good setup, and lots of experience with some nasty stuff, so I think they should know how to keep you safe, okay? So don’t worry”, Opal replies, a furrowed look on her face.

Stephen just nods at that and returns to his work. Opal walks off to help Wilma prepare. She can’t stop clenching her fists.

Stephen stands before the doorway, alone. A cord is tied around his waist and running out the room, down to the van outside where it sits on a spool. He was instructed to tug twice on the rope if he needed help. He holds a camera in one hand and has an audio recorder and various sensors tied to a belt around his waist. The sensors are there to get things like the temperature, electromagnetic readings, and various other measurements. Sweat is gathered under his armpits, and his hands feel clammy. He is having a hard time keep a grip on the camera.

He came out there to do this without telling his fiance he was going to; he didn’t want to worry him unnecessarily. And besides, he needs to do this; the others are counting on him and really he needs to prove he can do this. Or something like this anyway.

He takes a breath and steps on the first stair beyond the doorway, testing it with his foot. The material of the step looks like concrete. He puts his wait on it, and it holds. He proceeds up the stairs slowly, taking each step at a time, testing it with his foot before continuing. Partway up the stairs he remembers he brought the camera and starts recording, before continuing up the stairs. The walls of the stairs are bare, lacking even a handrail, and they appear to be made of the same, concrete-like substance that makes up the steps.

The stairs continue at a steep angle, steeper than one would expect for the stairs of a house. The roof is lost in darkness, the only source of light coming from the open door at the bottom of the stairs. Stephen shines his light at the ceiling to see it seamlessly connecting with the walls. The entire corridor is seamless, as if it was carved out of stone, but there are no marks to indicate any carving took place.

Stephen continues up the stairs. After 10 minutes he starts getting very tired; he feels like he is climbing a mountain. The idea of an invisible tower comes to mind, but the stairs are straight, without bend or curve. After a few minutes rest where he silently sits on the dark steps, illuminated only by his flashlight and sips some water, he continues.

After some more minutes of scaling, he sees a gray light at the end of the tunnel. He starts scaling the steps quicker once he realizes it is an end, taking each step two at a time. Soon, he arrives to find himself on the same street the Ricardos live on, emerging from the ground like the stairs he had just excited where a subway tunnel.

The entire neighborhood is shrouded in fog though, and there is no sun. It is not dark however; the ambient light level is more like a foggy early morning, though without the promise of a blue sky to cut through the gloom.

Everything is silent, too. There are no ambient sounds of cars, no birds, no small animals. Stephen's own breath is like a deafening thunderclap in comparison. And the air smells stale; it smells like an attic that has been locked for years, without disturbance.

Stephen walks down the street, filming everything he sees. He starts talking to the recording equipment to keep himself company; the silence is eating at him.

“Everything appears similar to what it was down below, but there are no cars on the street”, he mentions to the camera. “Nor any sign of like whatsoever

“There is no dust though; something about this place makes me think it should be covered in dust, but it appears clean

“Things still feel like they should here; this grass still feels like grass down below. I had thought it was colorless at first, but getting close now I see that is just the light making it appear so. It does make me wonder how things survive here

“Approaching the Ricardos house now; I figure I might as well see what is in there. We found this place in their house down below, so maybe it makes sense that this would be some kind of focal point of this place or of the figure?

“I… huh, I thought I saw something behind me out of the corner of my eye. Something across the street from the house, like someone was staring at me as I opened the gate. I didn’t see anything though, must just be my paranoia

“In the house now, everything seems the same as when I came in. Going to the upstairs bedroom where the stairway appeared, maybe there is something there that would give us some answers

“There is a doorway here too, like the one before, and this one has its own set of stairs. I… I am not sure, but I think it makes sense to see where these stairs go too”

Opal leans against the van along with Verne and Jerry. Wilma sits inside the van monitoring readings on the house. Tapping her foot to a nervous rhythm, she checks her watch: it has been a few hours since Stephen went in and its getting late, it has already gotten dark. The cord in the truck continues to give slack however, so everything must be okay.

“Its getting late everyone. Should we send someone in after him?”, Opal mentions to the group.

“He should be fine; we haven’t heard or seen anything strange, and the cord is still going”, Verne replies.

“Hey, you guys see that?”, Jerry interrupts.

Over down the street, a figure has emerged from behind a corner and started walking towards them. While it is still a ways off, it appears to be constantly shifting and changing.

Upon seeing the figure turn the corner, Verne and Jerry bolt to join Wilma in the back van. Opal stands there for a moment longer than those other two, peering at the figure coming down the road, trying to see if it looks different or more dangerous. She too though heads to the vane and jumps in the passenger seat.

Opal, scared stiff and hiding on the floor of the front seat of the van, remains curious all the same. She peaks her head up to the window and sees the figure comes to the front of the house and stops in front of the van, then turns to enter the house through the front gate. Something about the figure looks familiar, but she can’t quite put her finger on why it does.

Shortly after the figure enters the house, she hears as gasp from the back fo the van. She crawls between the seat to the back.

“Whats the matter?”, she asks.

Wilma is staring at the screen, a stunned look on their face. Jerry is standing behind them, slack-jawed. Verne, face pale, turns to Opal.

“It closed the door behind it”, he says.

Opal stands in her basement, staring at the snapped cable. There is a clean cut at the end from where the door closed on it. Opal nudges it with her foot, this last connection to Stephen. It makes her feel sick to see it just sitting there, to not have gotten rid of it after they tried and failed to get the door open again.

She has been reviewing the information gathered during their investigation these past few months, trying to find something to do. She got it all from Verne and Wilma after the incident at the Ricardos. It is a puzzle without a solution; there are too many pieces missing. Opal went through all the footage of the figure frame by frame, to see if anything could be found. The only thing she figured out is that Stephen shows up in several frames, along with about 30 other individuals she has been unable to identify, and showed up ever since they first encountered the being. The being has not returned; they have waited the past week to see if it would come back, but there is not even a whisper of its return.

Shortly after the incident, the Ricardos sold the house to a property developer who had it razed. Upon the destruction of the house, nothing was found behind the door; beyond was just a blank, unpainted, unfinished concrete wall. The pieces of that wall were used to line the little garden the next owner of the property added out front. The ghost hunting crew disbanded at around the same time, each going their separate ways, though not before Opal was stuck with the unenviable task of breaking the news about Stephen to his fiance.