Chapter One

When my eighth-grade algebra teacher kicked me out of her class and into remedial math, she told me I was the dumbest “smart kid” she’d ever met. I countered that she was the worst “worst teacher” I’d ever met. Which probably just confirmed her sentiment.

Somewhat to spite her, twelve years later, I dedicated my Fields Medal to her.

Still, given the events of the rest of my life, I figure she was maybe onto something after all.

***

The night was perfect in almost every way. Thunderstorms surrounded us, clouds pushing right up against the stratosphere, stealing daylight as the world turned into a green nightmare. But that’s what we were looking for. Everyone else near Brownsville had hunkered down, finding a place to hide from the obvious storm on the horizon.

But not us. Two men standing strong.

Well, one of us was standing strong. Julian. He was the strong one. Always had been. And the beautiful one. That wasn’t fair. I mean, life isn’t fair, I get that. I’d even say I understand that concept particularly well.

Julian would claim it was unfair in my favor. I could see that as well. I got onto the Dean’s List without trying, all while maintaining a BAC nearly as high as my GPA. Meanwhile, Julian had me tutoring him, the school tutoring him, and the unofficial “official” Football Team Curve. Even still he only squeaked by in any subject involving numbers.

But that night didn’t have any football, numbers, or tutoring on the horizon. Just storms. And the real reason we were there. The reason we’d traveled from our home cities to the middle of the country in a surprisingly robust 1984 Ford Econoline van was standing right in front of us. Well, mostly standing.

The house had a decided lean to it, some obvious structural issues, and likely would have been condemned if there were anyone willing to approach the place. But the house seemed to have an air to it. A sense of foreboding that kept people away.

Well, most people. Not certain idiots who were approaching it quickly, almost giddily.

The creepy house towered over its neighbors and had a strange amount of lawn surrounding it compared to the rest. Though, calling it lawn was being polite. It was more like they let nature run amok in an acre lot amidst an otherwise normal subdivision, minus the trees.

Said trees were largely contained in the back yard area, where it looked like quite a few could bear nuts or fruits or something. They were laden with food. No one had come to grab them, not even birds or squirrels. Instead, the trees just dropped their seeds into the ground where they rotted. At least, that was my assumption—I hadn’t gone to the back of the yard to check.

Cracked, uneven sidewalks crisscrossed in front of the place with grass growing out in fits and starts. There once had been a path leading to the front door, but even that had been obliterated by grasses and the perpetual onslaught of nature.

The house was big—a veritable mansion at the time it was built, somewhere in the mid-1800s. Three stories with a tower that must have impressive views of the surrounding farmlands. Or at least what was once farmlands, but was now filled with cookie-cutter houses, big box stores, and strip malls. While the windows were small, I could see two that were filled with stained glass. Mostly filled; some had clearly been broken over the years.

A carriage house sat back and to the left at the end of what had once been a driveway. It was closer to a gravel path these days.

“You still want to do this?” Julian asked.

I looked over at my best buddy. Well, over and up, considering Julian was such an overly large man he seemed to be made out of a different mold of human. Muscles upon muscles, his clothes barely managing to contain them. His brown skin taut and veins bulging everywhere. His face was clean-shaven, his black hair slicked back, pomaded to the point that the rain beaded up and rolled off the hair without doing a damn thing to his coif. He was a gorgeous human being who wouldn’t be out of place on either a comic book cover or an all-male Vegas revue.

“I do,” I said.

Then there was me. I was not exactly good-looking. I knew that. I was a 6, with occasional gusts up to 6.5 or even 7. I wanted a mustache, but I couldn’t really grow one. Didn’t stop me from trying, though. Also, I had this strong feeling I’d been born in the wrong time, so I maybe tended to dress as if I were an extra in MacMillan and Wife. Don’t worry—none of my friends know that show either. But I could wear a suit well, so I did wear a suit. Almost all the time. A three-piece on the day in question. My eyes were blue, my skin was an unhealthy white because I spent the majority of my time under fluorescent lights, and I was sorely in need of a haircut as my blond hair covered more of my face than was polite.

Lightning struck nearby, the thunder punching through the air with physical force.

Julian jumped.

“You really want a shot outside the house?” Julian asked as the rain started falling in earnest.

I nodded.

“Establishes everything,” I added. “We go inside, anyone and everyone can say we faked the weather. And the weather is the thing. We’re trying to prove weather can affect things like paranormal activity. All this extra electricity in the air and just, you know, the power of the storm itself. It’s going to increase spectral power.”

“Maybe, but it might also fry our gear,” Julian countered with a sigh as he headed around to the sliding door on the van. “Nothing we have is particularly weatherproof, certainly not for this.”

“Shoot from inside the van. The sliding door should give you enough space.”

“What mic are you planning to use, then?”

“You go on-camera, then we ADR.”

“You sure?”

“No other way to do it. We can even add in a bit about the weather knocking out the mics or something along those lines.”

Julian gave a few nods, then wiped the water from his eyes. He slid the van door open and hopped inside quickly before shutting it behind him.

I turned my attention back to the Simpkins House. There were so many stories about the place that it was difficult keeping track of things. The history of the place was long and gruesome, with enough deaths and missing persons to make H.H. Holmes proud. But unlike Holmes’s Murder Castle, the Simpkins House wasn’t built with murderous intent. Rather, it was built to be a home for wealthy man moving to the prairie with his new wife, intent on starting a farm.

James Benedict Simpkins bought the land and built the place with money he’d bilked from fools back east, Boston mostly. He’d been something of a fraud—a financial genius in the worst ways—who lied and cheated his way to wealth. And then made off with it back in the days where it was possible to just disappear into the wilds.

By the time the law caught up with him, Simpkins had grown old, a model citizen of the town that grew nearby. No one believed—

“Greg-greg-greg-greg-ga regg, greg greg, Nick-a-lode-dee greg!” Julian roared.

This refrain somehow managed to get through to me on the regular—or, perhaps on the Gregular—and I snapped out of my reverie. I had a habit of getting lost in my own head. Useful in studies, in the lab, and in academia; not quite so much in the real world.

Looking over my shoulder, I saw Julian sitting behind a camera mounted on a tripod, safe—relatively speaking—within the van. The sliding door remained open to the weather, ready to shoot me and the house.

“Ready?” he yelled into the rain.

I nodded, then shook off copious quantities of rainwater. I brushed my Almost-Mustache smooth, tapped my pipe out, and turned to face the camera, plastering a smile across my face.

Julian raised a fist and held up three fingers. He dropped one, then two, then three, and pumped his fist.

I started walking across the front lawn, keeping my gaze focused on the camera.

“An oddity in an otherwise hot housing market,” I said, but then I stopped. “Hot or sizzling?”

“What?” Julian asked.

“Should I say hot housing market?”

“Yes.”

“—or sizzling?”

“Hot.”

“Got it. Resetting, then going,” I said, walking back to my starting point. “An oddity in an otherwise hot housing market, the Simpkins House has remained vacant for over fifty years, ever since the—”

“Sixty,” Julian interrupted.

“What?”

“Sixty years.”

“Sixty is over fifty. Still correct.”

“Sure is, but really?”

“Sixty, got it.”

I hopped back to my starting point and resumed walking.

“And sizzling,” Julian added. “You lose the alliteration, but it’s less generic sounding.”

I nodded, made the mental note to shift my lines, and then:

“An oddity in an otherwise sizzling housing market,” I said, “the Simpkins House has remained vacant for over sixty years, ever since the horrific slayings of the Simpkins family in 1961. That fateful night—”

“Dude. Do you ever bother to read the docs?”

“Of course. At least once. Mostly all the way through. What’d I get wrong? 1962?”

“Simpkins built the house. The Westmores died in ’61. But there were also the Millers in ’52, Carathurs in ’46, Schmidts in ’34, Fitzwilliams in ’21—”

“And Julian Venegas in 2022.”

Julian frowned. He flipped me off.

“I knew it was Simpkins who built the house. I was just thinking about that when, you know—bah, lots of names is all I’m saying,” I countered, moving back to one, and genuinely angry at myself. “I just got confused. And why the hell am I up here doing this shit when you’re so much better? You know this shit so—”

“You know why, Greg. We’ve had this chat. Can we—”

“I hate doing it.”

“Views are double when you do it, assmunch.”

“I suck at it, dickface. I hate talking to people.”

“First of all, fartbubble, you don’t suck at it. Two, you love talking to people. Three, you aren’t even talking to people! You’re talking to me.”

“I only like talking to people at parties when there’s been sufficient social lubrication. And I forget everything when I’m talking to the camera.”

“You forget more when you drink.”

“But I’m funny.”

“Only to yourself.”

“You know, if I were just talking to you, I wouldn’t have to explain all this shit you just explained to me.”

“Stow that nonsense and let’s get back to talking death and destruction and the worst aspects of humanity before we get sucked up into the green sky, got it?”

“Westmore in ’61.”

“Exactly.”

“An oddity in an otherwise sizzling housing market,” I began, “the Simpkins House has remained vacant for over fifty years, ever since the—”

“Sixty years.”

“Fuck. An oddity in an otherwise hot housing market—fuck. An oddity in an otherwise sizzling housing market, the Simpkins House has remained vacant for over sixty years, ever since the Westmore slayings in 1961. That fateful night—”

“Hold up,” Julian called out, sitting up straight, pushing the headphones against his ears.

“What now?” I called out, frowning.

“Siren,” Julian replied.

“I can’t hear it—” I started, but just as I did, the tornado siren started up. “Bro, keep rolling; it’ll read better. Or we take it out in post.”

“Or we’re taken out by a post, dude,” Julian bellowed back. “Gotta survive this shit to get views from it.”

“I doubt there’s an actual tornado here anyway.”

“Isn’t that the whole point of the siren?”

“Maybe? Or is it just a warning?”

“It is definitely a warning. A warning that there’s a fucking tornado!”

I was about to counter that the siren would go off if there were tornado conditions nearby, but that’s when I saw an actual real-life tornado in the distance. A slim tendril reaching down and touching the earth. Slightly worse was the giant funnel descending towards the cul-de-sac at the end of the block.

“Man, I was wrong!” I shouted and pointed up the block. “LOOK!”

Julian had to do a little gymnastics to get his bulk into a position where he could see the funnel touching down.

“Get in here!” Julian yelled, the wind already whipping into a new gear.

“We should go to the house!” I shouted back, thinking there might be some additional safety within a giant spooky mansion as opposed to a 1984 Ford Econoline. Heavy as the van was, there was still the outside chance it could get pulled into the sky.

“Get the fuck in here! The house looks like it’s about to fall down, and it might be full of murderous poltergeists.”

That was an excellent point, so I started sprinting. I dove into the van and Julian slammed the door shut behind me.

For a moment, it was quiet. Well, quieter. It still sounded like a train was heading our way.

“This is bad,” Julian said.

“Maybe not,” I countered. “It might—”

“We. Are. Fucked.”

“Totally a chance it passes us by—”

“It’s coming right at us.”

“Could change.”

“In the half block it has to go?”

“It’s moving slow. We could outrun it.”

“You want to drive out of here?”

“You have a better idea?”

Julian just stared at the tornado.

“I can beat the tornado,” I said as I pushed my way past the gear and crawled into the front seat. “If I’m wrong, I’ll sing the song,”

I flipped myself upright, not looking out the windshield, and reached my hand back to Julian.

“Keys!” I said, still studiously ignoring God’s finger of destruction that was busy pulling up the world all around us.

“In the fucking ignition!” Julian shouted.

I frowned, then fumbled around the steering column.

No keys.

The outside world was incredibly loud, like we were inside a machine shop while bulldozers rumbled by on every conceivable surface. Bits of the street were being torn up and tossed around like confetti. The rubble played a staccato Phillip Glass concerto against the steel side of our van.

A roof came off a house.

Some car flew through the second story across the street.

The van began to rumble and shimmy.

“Keys aren’t here!” I bellowed in frustration. I ripped off the steering column housing, trying to get to the wires.

I don’t think Julian heard a damn thing I said. He just stared at the catastrophe happening out the windshield.

Then the ground disappeared, and the van finally achieved its long-hidden dream of flight. It soared into the air with all the grace of a drunken hippo.

“Fuuuuuuuuck!” I yelled.

Julian’s knuckles went white as he held onto the one seat in the back of the van, all the gear sliding around.

“Was a good run with you!” I shouted.

“If it had to end,” Julian replied, yelling, “I’m glad it’s with you!”

“Still might land and live—”

“Let’s hope!”

That’s when something knocked three times against the sliding door.