My Fucking Nightmare

Zak wanted to meet me at one of the restaurants Brian already took me to in the city. I knew a couple of the waitresses which let us have a small discount. Zak only laughed after we were seated and pulled his menu awkwardly up to his face. “So I see you’re already getting the star treatment.”
“It definitely has its perks.” I didn’t need to look at my menu. They had a killer club sandwich and I wanted to keep it simple for my guest. He offered to pay anyway as any gentleman would. I found him attractive to an extent, but relatively quirky. He wore more leather than my boyfriend did. His hair was jet black, only a couple inches in length, and slicked back with gel. The colour definitely wasn’t natural since his eyebrows and beard stubble were a lighter brown at best. Around his neck he wore various crosses and pagan insignia. I really hoped I wasn’t about to waste a week of my time with this whole Travel Channel bullshit.
By the time the waitress came around to take our orders, we only began to delve into small talk. I ordered quickly with Zak following close suit, rushing the waitress off so we could begin to discuss the small details of the trip. I assumed he wanted to start slow. “Well, I don’t know how much about us you were told. We’re a group of three paranormal investigators who have traveled all around the globe looking for evidence of the supernatural. You might have already seen us on television. But that really doesn’t matter, because you’re going to be our star.”
“Oh, and why is that?”
He bent over the table and clasped his hands together. “Well, we were given the option of two other writers in the area. None of the others really fit our criteria. Plus you wrote several really interesting stories already on goth-looking bands from L.A. so we decided to give you a shot. We’re definitely not to be taken lightly in the paranormal community and you seem on the more serious side, so I think we made a good decision.”
I chuckled. “Well, I am a bit sceptical of all that ghostly stuff. You’re gonna have to do a really good job to convince me otherwise. That being said, I am very open-minded. And I’m very mature. So my disbeliefs and wariness won’t factor into the story.”
“Well, I appreciate that. We’re not that fresh into the business. We’ve been around a while. So people have heard of Ghost Adventures. I am very emphatic about what we do. It affects you very personally, you know, this line of work. It’s very emotional and I think that to understand what we do, you have to not only believe in it, you have to feel it for yourself. You know, have your own paranormal experience.”
I sipped my coffee and pondered the idea a little bit. “Does that mean you have a personal experience that made you do this? I’m sure you’ve mentioned it somewhere along the line before, but to make this a good story I have to actually start from the very basics. Any and all information you give me would be preferred for a better result.”
“Jeez, you sound like a psychic.” He laughed and pulled his hair back with his hand. “Well, uh. I was a kid when it happened. Not like, super little, but I was young enough to believe in something beyond death, you know? So I was fucking around with this camcorder. It was brand new, I got it for Christmas. My parents spent a lot of money on it. And I was pretty proud, like any kid would be. I used it for everything. Taped all the time. Breakfasts with my family, weekend housework. I used to pretend to do documentaries on my family. Ugh, they’d get so annoyed too.” He chuckled. “Well, one day I was gone off around the neighbourhood. Rural Vegas, super nice, lots of people around. But I went into this apartment building that one of my friends at the time lived in, and I could just…immediately feel like something was off. Like really, really off.”
I was interested. Not so much interested that I absolutely had to know the whole story, but it was all part of the job. I could tell he was determined to sell this thing to me, so I was patient. “He lived on the top floor of this complex. And it was really peculiar cuz all the other houses were so new and so big, you know? So we’re roaming around this complex and my camera is rolling, and it’s later in the afternoon so the sun is setting and it’s getting darker inside. Well, I don’t quite remember what it looked like. But I definitely heard my name being called by a woman. An older woman. Like, just imagine how an old woman sounds like, right?”
Zak paused to catch his breath. I could definitely see the hairs raised on his arms, regardless of how warm it was in the restaurant. He seemed pretty spooked. So, he continued. “I started following the voice of this old woman. My friend and I stumbled across some kind of storage room with this barely functioning light switch. Creepy as shit. And at this point it was all red flags, like totally time to get out of there. So I was sweating, damn near shitting my pants. But we had to get closer to whatever the hell it was that we felt.”
“So your friend felt it too, is what you’re telling me?”
“Yeah, yeah. My friend felt it. He was just as spooked as I was. But we were so drawn to this energy, to this mystery that we were almost paralyzed. And I remember jumping out of my goddamn skin. Guess the door slammed behind us and the light went off, so I turned on the camera and just saw this face. It did belong to an old woman, kind of witch-like. How they make them in the movies. And man did we get the hell out of there. Oh, god. It was wild. To this day I still have the footage. It’s in the van with our equipment. I’m so scared to even touch the thing in case it gets erased or whatever.”
I was a little more interested than I was at first. I wanted to see the footage for myself now. “It wasn’t an analog camera, was it?”
He shook his head. “No, no it was one of those that needed the film tapes. Like the shitty eight millimetre kind. I dunno, whatever those were. Remind me to show you the footage when we get to the van later. Any thoughts?”
“Well, your friend saw this too? Or was it too dark to see?”
He sniffled and crossed his arms. The hairs were still standing up and his pupils were large and fixed. “Well, it’s a really distant memory but I’m pretty sure it was too dark to see in plain view. I had analysts all over the world, some of the best, look through the footage and verify what I captured and they haven’t been able to debunk it. I mean, for a sceptic you’ll just have to see for yourself.”
“And besides writing about all this, what is my job going to be this week? Experiencing first-hand what it is you guys do, what does that entail?” I had to admit, this was one of the creepiest interviews I ever did and whether it was the nervousness of his attractiveness or the fact that this shit really was creepy as hell, I was on edge the entire time.
He stopped for a moment to think. “Well, that’s entirely up to you. You can join us on our lockdown or watch the footage after we get it. I recommend doing it with us, since the lockdown is the biggest part of the experience. You get a better feel for what we do. Plus we’ve managed to convince a ton of sceptics like you that what we do is legit. But like I said, the decision is yours. It all comes down to whether you want to be spooked or not.”
“I’m pretty hard to spook, honestly. So I’ll do it I guess.”
“Good, good. Well, do you have any questions about the lockdown?”
I shook my head. At that point the waitress was bringing our food and a refill for our drinks. We began eating and slowly restarted our conversation. “Uh, we can always talk about the lockdown and stuff later on. Like on the road and stuff. I’d just like to know all the details of what hotel we’re staying at and stuff. My boyfriend and his buddies are all joining me so they just want to know where we’re staying.”
“If they want to stay in a haunted hotel, I guess. It’s the Riviera, and locals keep telling me that since it’s been closed down, Frank Sinatra’s ghost is pissed.”
Wait, what? “Uh, come again?”
“We were talking with the owner of the Riviera and they think the hotel is haunted by Frank Sinatra’s ghost. I shit you not.” I think Zak was becoming annoyed by my scepticism but I honestly wasn’t having it. “Guess we’ll have to see during our lockdown, huh. I just hope you’re able to handle it.”
“Tell me about the lockdowns, the basics. What you guys expect, and if your expectations are met or not. Give me some fundamentals before I dive into the heavy.”
He sat back against the cushion of the booth bench and cocked one eyebrow. “Well, uh. We usually do a few interviews with bystanders or anyone able to give us information on our lockdown location. In this case we’ll be talking with the owner of the Riviera, and whoever else is on scene at the time that can give us viable background information of what we’re looking at. Anything that can help.
“So after that, we set up all our equipment: cameras of all sorts including infrared, basic recording devices, microphones, motion sensors, magnetic field sensors. Just a crazy amount of stuff, really. And it all channels back to our guys in what we call the nerve centre. Where our tech crew analyze literally everything we capture. Now us three, my boys and me, we all carry cameras of our own and basically wander around with night vision. No flashlights allowed unless absolutely necessary.
“Then we just do what any ghost hunter would do: coax the spirits out of hiding, get them to communicate with us. By any means necessary. And it’s a horrific job. Like, we feel pretty much everything that happens. It’s all based on energy, whether you believe in the physical spirit or not. And we believe that energy carries emotion, feelings. Memories. You’ll probably see some of that once we begin.” His slow drawl was joined with his hands. He was like some kind of typical Italian man, constantly talking with his hands all over the place. He seemed so emphatic about all this stuff too. I wasn’t sure if he was nuts or if this shit was legitimate.
He mentioned they had a large enough crew for more ground coverage. And that nerve centre thing. I wondered if it would be far better for me to hang around there than accompany Zak and his crewmates. Exposure was one thing, but evidence of a real haunting was totally something else. “Okay, so how long are we gonna be in this place? And what happens with all your findings?”
“Well, we send anything we can’t debunk away to real professional audio-visual analysts. They’ll give us a better idea of what we see or hear on camera. Most sounds, like footprints, can be debunked because it’s usually one of us. Which is why we only allow three of us at most to be constantly moving around. Unless we’re all in one big group, anyway, which will be the majority of our lockdown at the Riviera. Uh, I’m hoping to be in there for at least six hours. The longer the better, so I suggest you get some really good sleep that day cuz staying up all night is really, really hard. Unless you’re used to it like we are.”
“I live with rock stars. I’m pretty used to having my nights and days mixed up.”
He nodded. “Well, how do you feel about it? And what kind of objective are you looking to write about?”
I sighed and scratched my scalp with anxious fingers. Boy, I did not want to fuck this up. “Well…I was hoping to not focus so much on the how rather than the what, you know? Like I’d want my readers to see that you guys are a legit group of people who want to prove to the world what you see. And I hope you can convince me because I’m very sceptical. I’m a writer. I go by facts. Cold, hard facts. So I hope that my readers and I won’t be let down by the findings.”
“I understand, Miss Sanders. I would like to try and be as convincing as possible but what we find is what we get, and there’s no promises. So I’d like for you to just try and humour us as much as possible based on the idea that we might, not that we will find something for you to work with. Ghosts are the new vampires, the new zombies. People are eating that shit up and they watch our stories so intently. So dotingly. We don’t take it for granted. We want people to see what we do, what we face on these journeys. We go into peoples’ homes, into their relatives’ homes. We look for what can’t be accounted for or explained with modern science, and it’s the mystery part that people come crawling back for. And I am more than excited to prove it to you, because I want nothing more than an article which could and would boost our fan base.”
I laughed, swashing back the last of my drink. “Well, Zak, I can’t wait to join you on your journey to the Riviera. Never been to Vegas, you know.”

Notes

Mmm not so much a filler this time... any of you Ghost Adventures fans?