The Demon Trap
Part 1
It was November, and outside, the leaves had already turned from oranges and yellows and reds to brown and were now mostly fallen off the trees. There were lots of trees between the entrance to the estate and the front door of the mansion, and the dead leaves completely covered the overgrown grass on the once manicured lawn and the driveway leading to the front portico. As Kevin Weissner stepped from his Lamborghini, leaves crunched under his $400 custom-made shoes.
Weissner stared at the mansion. He didn’t like it, and he certainly didn’t want it. He was only here because his financial advisor told him that buying a house was one of the best ways to avoid taxes and that it would be an excellent investment. Kevin liked avoiding taxes and making excellent investments, so here he was with a realtor touring an old mansion just on the edge of town. He had never had a home, although somewhere in his innermost being, he suspected that he might like a home. This monstrosity, however, had none of the warmth of a home.
An empty-headed woman met him at the doorway. She wore a polyester jacket over a thin shirt and a skirt. Her face was covered with a considerable amount of makeup. She would have been better looking for an overcoat rather than spending time applying makeup to her old and worn face, Weissner thought.
It was cold both inside and out. He followed the realtor on the tour of the house as she chattered endlessly about its many amenities, all of which needed to be either repaired or replaced. He shuffled along behind her, only tuning in occasionally to hear what she was saying.
The mansion was absolutely dreadful. When it was built in 1880, it had been the finest house in the city built by one of the wealthiest men in the state, but its grandeur had long passed. Recessions, depressions, wars, and successive generations of progressively more worthless offspring took their toll on the mansion’s stately elegance. By the 1960s, it was no longer inhabited. But it couldn’t be sold. The original owner’s great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren warred with each other over control of trusts and other assets worth more than a billion dollars. Those assets included this rundown mansion. After more than a decade of neglect, the various cousins and aunts and uncles were able to agree that the mansion should be sold. They decided to convert the property to cash so they could continue their decades-long legal battles for a few more decades.
Weissner was a tech guy. He had no knowledge of the mansion’s history and could have cared less. At the dawn of the modern computer age, printers operated by placing a series of dots on paper. These dots formed letters, but the letters looked like a series of dots. Weissner, however, invented a new technology that vastly improved the quality of the printing. Using laser technology, Weissner’s printer produced letters that looked like they had been typed. The Wall Street Journal called Weissner one of the most brilliant member of the new class of tech millionaires. Money flowed in faster than he could think of ways to spend it.
So now he was buying a mansion. The architects would redesign everything, and Kevin wondered why he had to go through this pointless exercise. His financial advisor told him he should see it, and that was the only reason why he was here. The realtor prattled on about this and that, escorting him from one floor to another and back and forth from one wing to the next.
In addition to being cold, it was dark inside the house. There was no electricity, and there hadn’t been for more than a decade. The bright summer sun was long gone. Outside, the sky was gray. Inside, the once elegant drapes that lined each window were now old and tattered allowing some ambient light into the house, but it wasn’t enough to illuminate the interior. Everything was shrouded in shadows.
As they walked up the stairs to the third floor, the realtor pulled a flashlight from her purse to show some of the house’s “better features”. Years of exposure to the cold of winter and the heat of summer had not been kind to the interior living spaces. Paint and wallpaper were pealing from the interior walls. The flashlight also illuminated a floor covered with a thick layer of dust. Dust bunnies rolled around the floor in no discernable pattern. It was disgusting.
There were no ‘better features’.
As they walked down one long hall, Weissner saw a door in the middle of the hall. It was the only door on that particular hall.
“What’s that room?” he asked pointing to the door.
The realtor paged through the notebook she carried. Finally, she closed the notebook and looked at him. “I don’t know,” she said, “It doesn’t appear on the floor plan. It doesn’t look like there is a room on this hall.”
“Of course, there’s a room,” Weissner replied somewhat annoyed. He walked over to the door, grabbed the brass doorknob, and tried to open it. The door was locked. He took the flashlight from the realtor and examined the ancient brass plate surrounding the doorknob looking for a keyhole, but there was no keyhole. Perhaps the door had been locked from the inside.
“Did you hear that?” Weissner asked the realtor.
She looked back at him with a look of bewilderment, but he was sure he heard it. It was a sound from inside the room, a human sound. Maybe a low voice, a whisper perhaps, but he could hear something. He thought he heard something like “Kevin” and “help” amongst the other indiscernible sounds, but he couldn’t say for sure if even those words had been spoken. There were definitely something.
“There is someone in there,” Weissner said.
“Sir,” the realtor replied, “no one has been here for ten years.”
“But the voice?”
She heard no voice but knew it was unwise to disagree with the client. “These old houses make lots of sounds. It’s probably the wind or something…” she trailed off.
The door wouldn’t budge, and Weissner no longer heard the sound. He decided to let the conversation go. Ignoring the realtor, he walked to one end of the hall and turned to the left into another hall and then entered the first room he came to, a bedroom of sorts. He peered out the bedroom’s window and looked toward the hall he had just left. The exterior wall extended at least ten feet beyond the long hallway with the door. There was clearly a room. A big one. But the room had no windows. A large room, locked from the inside, no windows. And most important, there was someone in that room.
He thought briefly about asking the realtor to help him solve the puzzle, but upon looking into her dull eyes, he realized that would be a futile exercise. Besides, he was getting cold and had better things to do. It was time to leave.
“Thank you,” Weissner said, as he turned and headed briskly to the front door. The realtor followed behind asking questions to invite polite conversation. He ignored her. From the realtor’s perspective, the showing had been a failure. The guy seemed oblivious to her beauty and her charm. He hadn’t asked any questions, except about that door, which was probably just to a closet. At no time did he show any interest in her or what she was saying.
When they got to the front door, Weissner walked over to his Lamborghini, got in and left without even saying goodbye. The realtor suspected she would never hear from him again, which was too bad. It would be a difficult property to unload. A few hours later, however, the rich guy’s lawyer called the realtor to begin the dance that would ultimately lead to the sale of the house.
As Weissner drove away, he could not get the thought of the voice, or whatever the sound was, out of his mind. The sound remained with him throughout the day and into the evening. He couldn’t hear the voice anymore, but he knew he had heard something. The more he thought about it, the more difficult the problem appeared.
One of Weissner’s more prominent character traits, some might say flaws, was an inability to focus on more than one thing at a time. Whenever he was confronted with a problem, he approached solving it with single-minded determination. In many circumstances this served him well. Other times, an insignificant issue would occupy all of his attention, sometimes for days at a time, until he arrives at a resolution. The door, the room, and the voice now triggered that obsession.
Finally, after midnight, he decided to return to the mansion and find out what was in the room. Once he made up his mind, he had to leave immediately, never considering any alternative. He never thought about waiting until morning or calling someone to go with him.
When he arrived, the shadows from his earlier visit were long gone now; everything was dark. Only the beam of his flashlight provided any light and then only to small parts of a room or a hall where it was directed at the time. Slowly, Kevin made his way to the door with the brass knob. The hall seemed longer than had before, more ominous, more like a cave than a hall. Something deep in his brain cried out for him to turn around and run, but he pressed on, obsession overcoming his flight-or-fight response to danger.
He brought a pry bar with him to force open the door. It was his house, or soon would be, so it didn’t matter if he damaged the lock or the doorframe. At the locked door, he decided to try the brass knob before using the prybar. He knew it was illogical. The door had been locked and the house was unoccupied. Nevertheless, he decided to give the door another try. As he grabbed the knob and twisted, the door opened and swung into the room.
A soft, subdued light emanated from the room. Strange, Kevin thought. There were no windows to allow light to enter the room and no electricity to light any lightbulbs, but yet he could see into the room. It was more like twilight than actual light, but he could see. At least he could see black and white and varying shades of gray. It was too dark to see any colors.
A strange odor assaulted him. It was not a pleasant smell. It was like a whiff of decay with a hint of copper. Perhaps an animal had crawled into the room and died. No one had performed any maintenance on this house for many years, so it was reasonable to expect that some vermin might now make this place their home. That would be the first problem he would solve once he owned the house — the eradication of vermin.
He set the prybar to the side and slowly entered the room.
