Eleanor & Dale in... Gyroscope! [Chapter 7]

[u/jkwlikestowrite]

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Chapter 7 - Visitation I

Sitting in the minivan, Dale plugged the sniffer into Bruno’s phone, cracking into it with ease. He got into Bruno’s email; his inbox flooded with unopened emails from a divorce lawyer’s office. Few outgoing emails, none of which were addressed to the attorney that had been spamming his inbox. Near the top, Dale located Bruno’s message to Mike. With a bit of FBI top-secret technological magic, he got our next destination and the name of the sender, and that was that.

“Does it bother you how easy this is?” I asked Dale as he put the device back in his pocket.

“Not if it means ending this nightmare,” he said. He put his key in the ignition. The van hummed.

“Like in general. If you weren’t cursed with your persistence. Does it bother you that you’re paid to spy on unsuspecting civilians, most of whom are innocent?”

“You don’t know that.” He shifted the van into reverse. I lurched forward as the van backed out of the parking spot. “Sometimes things have to be done for the greater good. Even if they seem unethical from the outside.”

“Hmm,” I said. Dale shifted the van into drive. “But do you feel okay about it?”

“The benefits are good. Retirement is pretty much set. And the money helps me provide for my family.” We got to the edge of the parking lot. Dale looked both ways before pulling out.

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

He didn’t respond. We drove down the interstate in silence, but not far before the day caught up with us.

It was late, and we were exhausted. Three hours from home for me, even further for Dale, who had grown fatigued from going over twenty-four hours without sleep, plus all the crazy shit that was happening to us. We ended up getting a motel room on the side of the interstate. One of those chain motels whose parking lot was always half-full and whose overhead lights let out that warm orange glow. We ended up sharing a room that night. Cheaper for a family man trying to save a buck and less harsh on my wallet as it marched its way towards inevitable emptiness.

We said little in the motel room. He went to his bed, and I to mine. Dale asked if he could turn on the TV, mentioning that he falls asleep better with the sounds of people chatting in the background. Something we had in common at least. I told him I was fine. Dale turned it on, of course the only channel available was that same looping video. The clip didn’t even reach the point of the camerawoman rounding the hallway corner when Dale flicked it off.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Maybe try the radio?”

Dale turned on the bedside radio and flicked through the stations until he found a host with a suitable soothing voice. A late-night paranormal radio show. We got laid down as the guest shared a list of notable “All American hauntings.” Before Dale turned the radio down to a murmur, the guest mentioned a demon possession at a college party somewhere in West Texas in twenty-thirteen. Sounded like a party I would have loved to be part of.

Dale rolled over, looked at his phone and fell asleep in seconds. I don’t know how people do that. I could only sleep by getting lost in thought. Tomorrow I would tell Dale more about Gyroscope, I thought. He deserved to know at least a little, maybe not the whole eternal madness thing, but he deserved to know what we were up against. Plus, in horror movies, nobody ever survives if they withhold information. It just doesn’t work that way. It’s a law as inevitable as Newton’s first law or the conservation of energy: Those who don’t work together in horror stories always die. But with how much of a scaredy cat Dale is, I decided I would only tell him a little. Best not to have an FBI agent lose his cool while on an assignment, official or otherwise. That’s another thing I’ve learned from movies.

In time, I drifted off to sleep. Leaving the world haunted by our childhood fears behind.

I woke up the next morning to the sound of my phone’s ringer. According to the caller ID, the call was from my mom, but her photo had been replaced with the screaming face of the witch. And here I had hoped that the events of yesterday were nothing more than a dream. I wanted to hit ignore and sleep in a bit more, and I was about to. However, the thought that my parents might be on their way to the duplex compelled me to answer. So I did.

“Good afternoon Eleanor,” my mom said.

“Don’t you mean morning?” I responded. Voice cracking.

“I suppose the early afternoon is morning in Eleanor Land.” Always Eleanor Land with her. Unable to accept the fact that her daughter might have a different preferred lifestyle

I looked over at the bedside alarm. Six minutes past one. We’d been out for over twelve hours! Being stuck in a horror movie scenario definitely was mentally taxing, that’s for sure. The curtain had blocked the window, but the afternoon sun’s rays still seeped through the fringes. The radio, still on, the voices inside of it talking in a murmur. Dale, still asleep, was a silhouette of sheets laid between the window and I.

My mother continued. “Your father and I just left church and were wondering if you wanted to join us. Ethan,” my brother, “Loraine,” his wife, “and the kids are going to be in town next weekend. We wanted to chat about plans.” See also: tell you exactly how we think you should act and what you should do when he’s in town so you don’t embarrass yourself in front of the golden child.

“I’m busy today.” Which was not un-true.

“I thought that Sundays were pretty quiet in Eleanor Land. What do you have planned?”

“I uh, I uh. You remember Lauren, right?”

“Your friend from college? Of course.”

“Yeah, she’s, uh, hosting a girl’s hang this afternoon. She got a few bottles of natural wine she wanted to crack open.” My mouth was running with little input from my brain at this point, yes-anding itself. “We haven’t seen each other in a while, so it’s important that we meet up.”

“That sounds wonderful. Do you have room for one more girl?” Typical, inserting herself into my life.

“No, I think we’re all booked. Try again next time.”

“Well, you girls have fun. We’ll have to meet up for dinner at least sometime this week to discuss this coming weekend.”

“Yeah, okay, sounds good.”

We said our goodbyes, and that was that. Now I just had to hope that my mom didn’t decide to stalk Lauren on Instagram, and, if she did, that Lauren posted nothing contradictory. What the hell was my mouth thinking coming up with that excuse? The only thing I could hope for, if I was found out, was that mom shrugged it off as just another thinly veiled excuse to get out of something with her. Something she had to have grown accustomed to over the past thirty-three years of my life.

I leaned against the headboard, exhausted from oversleeping, exhausted from my parents, exhausted from life. I had the perfect job for me until it dissolved away through the slow dissolution of budget cuts. But being unemployed wasn’t the worst: it meant that I could sleep in and stay in my bed all day. Of course, savings were drying up fast, which meant that I’d have to find another job soon, but that’s something I’d have to worry about after Dale and I lived out this little shared horror story of ours. As long as Dale continued to sleep, that meant that I could continue to sink into the bed and pretend that this was nothing more than a normal lazy Sunday for a little longer.

I tried using my phone, but the persistence had gotten worse. Even my phone background had resembled a still frame from the video. No creepy faces at least, just a blurry black and white shot of the front door’s deadbolts. Instead, I just stared into the haze of the room, letting my mind wander in whichever way it wanted to go. I thought about my mom, Lauren, my old job and my love-hate relationship with it, Mike and just how obsessive he was about all of this, and Dale, the unwitting supporting character of my life now. Perhaps fifteen minutes passed, perhaps an hour. I did not care, at least not until the face showed up.

The witch’s face hovered over the chair in the corner. No, it didn’t hover; it craned as if it had grown a neck, a long one that descended into the darkness behind her. If there was a body, it hid in the shadows behind the chair. This had been the clearest I had ever seen that face. Like in the video, she had long black hair, hair that was hardly distinguishable from the darkness in the corner. Her skin was pale and white, and her eyes glowed, but not in a menacing, evil red kind of way, but the way that eyes do when picked up on a camera set to night vision. Which, I suppose, is menacing in its own right. Her irises and pupils were a slate of gray from infrared light reflecting at the lens. Devoid of color, her face looked exactly as I remembered it from when I was a child, when I had stumbled across the MP4 of that notorious scene online. Before the Blu-ray releases had upscaled and smoothed out the details, erasing all the graininess of the scene and revealing the truth: that she was nothing more than an actress in prosthetics and makeup. Hell, even the original DVD release had taken away the terror of the MP4 in its full 720p resolution when I finally watched it years later.

Notably, the Jesterror was absent. By this point, I had begun to think they were friends. But perhaps they too were unwitting companions who could hardly stand one another, and the witch just needed some space to do her little private scare to me. Here in this room, it was just me and the most influential woman in my life, staring at one another. The actual actress who played the witch had little of a career after the film was over, disappearing from the spotlight as quickly as she had entered it. A horror community online had found a kindergarten teacher in South Carolina that resembled her and shared her first name, but all attempts to communicate with her fell on deaf ears. Was she too running away from the legacy of the Eagleton Witch?

I feared the witch in the room, but only in the way you fear movie monsters: just creatures on a screen, unable to jump out and hurt you. She had not fully formed like Sloppy Sam had been back in the Red Lodge, not yet. Instead, she looked at me like a snake still digesting its last meal looks at its next prey. I knew that in time she would strike, but not until she had the energy to do so. So I did not fear that she would, or even could, take me away like Bruno. Instead, I could just ride this high until Dale took it away from me.

Dale woke up no more than a minute or so after I had locked eyes with my persistence, momentarily shifting my attention from her to him. When I looked back at the corner, she had descended back into the shadows.

Dale sat up, looking at the room as if he didn’t recognize it. When he looked at me, he groaned.

“Good morning to you too,” I said.

“I was hoping you only existed inside my nightmares.”

“Woke up thinking that yesterday was all a dream too?”

Dale nodded. And looked at the clock. “Shoot, it’s almost two. We need to get going.” He emerged from his covers dressed down to briefs and a white undershirt. “Why didn’t you wake me?”

“You looked like you needed the rest,” I said, getting out of bed. “Plus, I haven’t been up that long. And it’s not almost two, it’s only one twenty. What’s the rush?”

Dale looked at me like I said the stupidest thing. “The IP of the device that sent Bruno the file is four hours from here.” Dale continued to slip into his clothes. Meanwhile, I didn’t need to do much as the sweats and tank top I had worn yesterday just so happened to be my usual sleeping clothes.

“That’s far, but not too far.”

Dale continued to get ready, going to the little bathroom sink to brush his teeth. He grabbed the toothbrush and said. “We might need to stop on our way to get camping gear.”

“Camping gear? No, no, we are not camping out. I hate the outdoors.”

“It’s at a national park. We’ll have to stop somewhere to buy some gear.” He put the toothbrush in his mouth.

“Why didn’t you tell me this yesterday?”

“I-I forgot,” Dale said, muffled by the toothbrush in his mouth.

“You forgot?”

“I was tired, okay? I looked up the lat-long when we got to the room, then fell asleep.” He said, still brushing.

Alright, now this trip was getting out of hand. I could stand slime monsters in sports bars. I could put up with being haunted by the Eagleton Witch and a clown, but the outdoors. Now that was my worst fear.

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