Slattery Falls Read online

  Slattery

  Falls

  “Slattery Falls brings a fresh and exciting resonance to the classic haunted house tale. The cry in the night, the word on the wall, the horrors underneath... all become palatable and personal under LaFaro’s masterful execution. A chilling story to be savored by lamplight in the thick, black hours of night, by an author of tremendous talent and heart.”

  — Ronald Kelly, author of Fear and Undertaker’s Moon

  “Brennan LaFaro’s Slattery Falls is a fast-paced tale of friendship and ghosts, love and curses. I adored the relationship between Travis, Elsie, and Josh, and the grim mystery that leads them to the titular town kept me turning pages long after midnight.”

  — Todd Keisling, Bram Stoker Award-nominated

  author of Devil’s Creek

  “Brennan LaFaro strides onto the scene, his voice already firmly established in this compulsively readable debut. Slattery Falls is part coming of age, part love story, and all heart—the kind of ghost story that keeps me in love with the sub genre.”

  — Laurel Hightower, author of

  Crossroads and Whispers in the Dark

  “Slattery Falls is not just a story about ghost hunters, or haunted houses, it’s a gripping supernatural mystery with characters we care about. Written with energy and style, and packed with genuine chills.”

  — Tyler Jones, author of Criterium and Almost Ruth

  Slattery

  Falls

  by

  Brennan LaFaro

  Copyright © 2021 Brennan LaFaro

  Front Cover Design by Kealan Patrick Burke

  Interior art by Bob Veon

  Formatted by Kenneth W. Cain

  Edited by Kenneth McKinley

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the authors’ imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  For Dallas and Dustin,

  My reasons for wanting to leave this world a better place than I found it.

  Part One

  A Glass Can Only Spill What It Contains

  Chapter One

  When you’re about to investigate one of the most notoriously haunted houses on the East Coast, there are certain expectations. One revolves around thunder and lightning—the dark and stormy night trope. Yet there we were, traveling to the Weeks House in the middle of a cool, quiet August day. No sound. No fury.

  I may have been misleading when I used the word ‘investigate’ before. That implies a sense of formality, a bit of professionalism, and truth be told, our crew was pretty far from that. We jumped through a few more hoops than usual, even had to start a ghost hunting business, like you’d see on TV. All to get permission to access this humble abode.

  The name we registered, you ask? “Here Ghost Nothing”. Can’t believe that wasn’t taken. We made promises about monetized YouTube videos, and a book in the works that wouldn’t be complete without a trip to Massachusetts’ foremost location for all things paranormal. There’s also a signed piece of paper out there saying the owners wouldn’t be liable for any harm that befalls us to balance out the page count of that book I’m never going to write. Unless you count the document, you now hold in your hands.

  If you’re thinking, oh my, that is quite an elaborate ruse to gain access to a piece of property, you’re right. First prize. But we do what we have to, and this time it was worth every ounce of effort we put in. At least I think so, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Some people hike on the weekends. Some people stay in and toast to forgetting the miserable work week they just suffered through and the next five days they’re about to endure. Josh and I broke into a haunted house for the first time in college, and discovered a mutual affinity for avoiding the typical on-campus lifestyle and the eight-dollar twelve-pack. We attended the University of Connecticut in Storrs. He studied in the program for Animal Science, and I majored in Psychology.

  One Friday night, my roommate dragged me to an off-campus party. Showing up fashionably late guaranteed that almost everybody was pretty well wasted and not worth holding a conversation with. The lone exception looked like the human embodiment of Eeyore. The depressed donkey, right? Josh was tall and lanky with long, brown, curly hair that puffed out from under a backward Mets hat. His darting eyes and deer-in-the-headlights look broadcast to everyone in the vicinity that he wasn’t sure how one acts in polite society.

  After a series of abandoned conversations, I made my way over to the interesting-looking loner who had spent the better part of the last hour nursing a can of Coors.

  “Travis. Morland,” I introduced myself.

  The reaction I got to my greeting made me think of a ghost that had gotten so used to going unnoticed, it doesn’t know what to do when it finds itself the center of attention. He had been blending in with that wall so well until I had the audacity to ruin the illusion.

  “Josh,” he said, watching his shoes carefully. “Josh Costa.”

  “Joshua Costa. You kind of look like you don’t want to be here,” I said, grinning.

  “Josh,” he said. “Not Joshua. Everyone just calls me Josh.” His eyes continued moving every which way, desperately avoiding a meeting with mine. “I live here, so really it’s all these people I don’t want to be here.” At this, he came dangerously close to cracking a smile, and a bit of color returned to his cheeks.

  “My roommate, Chris. He wanted to have a few people over and two became four became this.” He gestured around the room, beer still in hand, to showcase an occupancy that must have violated some fire code or another. “I thought about going out, but that seemed like giving up. Admitting defeat, if you will.”

  “You’re making a stand, then. That’s quite noble.”

  “I’m a regular General Custer,” said Josh with a nervous shrug. His gaze wandered the room again.

  We’d said nothing of importance to each other, and yet something inexplicable kept me rooted there. I liked him immediately.

  Chapter Two

  The wall didn’t come down for a while, but when it did, Josh and I talked for a long time. Shot the shit about anything and everything. It turned out we had almost nothing in common, but he didn’t have many friends at UConn, and I had few good ones. One of the many interests we did not share was the paranormal. Supernatural fiction, true accounts, you name it and I was clueless about it. My expertise began with Ghostbusters and ended with Ghostbusters 2. When future conversations would head down such rabbit holes, Josh cited cases, locations, and details off the top of his head. You could blame me for being impressed with this ability, for being drawn in and intrigued, for all the shit we got into over the next ten years. Probably hold me accountable for all the breaking and entering, too. My bad.

  The first time we ever checked out a haunted house was during the fall of our third year. We’d been hanging out for a year, and Josh invited me to come stay at his family’s house in Coventry over the long Columbus Day weekend. We spent days watching movies and relaxing. Josh’s mom and dad were good people, if a little removed. They are the rare late forties couple whose marriage still works, and they seem to still love each other. Josh acted distant toward them, but I’d gotten used to seeing that out of him, a
nd thought nothing of it.

  The Costa household was pretty spacious, considering it was just the three of them, and his parents left us to ourselves. We did little that first night, a few beers each, the tour of the town, and Josh filling me in on what it was like to grow up there.

  Out of the blue on Saturday, Josh asked if I had ever heard of Nathan Hale, or the Hale House. I’d noticed signs when entering town declaring Coventry the home of Nathan Hale, but beyond a glimmer of recognition from high school U.S. history, nothing rang a bell.

  “Nathan Hale was a spy during the Revolutionary War,” he told me, speeding up as he came to the parts he found most exciting. “One of the good ones, actually. On our side, is what I mean. Long story short, he gathered intelligence from the British and they eventually caught and executed him for it.”

  “Executed?”

  “Yeah, hanged. In Manhattan at the age of twenty-one.”

  “Jesus,” I said and opened another Sam Adams, my way of saluting another hero of early America.

  “Jesus is right. He’s the guy who said ‘I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country’. Supposedly, anyway. By the time those words got back to anybody who mattered, they had been across so many sets of lips that it was like trusting the end of a game of telephone.”

  “Purple monkey dishwasher.”

  Josh ignored my witty Simpsons reference and continued on.

  “No one believes he single-handedly impacted the outcome of the war or anything, but the colonies regarded him as a bit of a folk hero, and Connecticut named him the official hero of the state at one point.”

  “I didn’t know that was a thing. I don’t even know if Mass has one.”

  “Samuel Whittemore.”

  “Now how the shit do you know that?”

  “As you can imagine, the hero worship gets multiplied many times over in town, and the Hale House has museum status. It’s even open to the public. The funny thing is, he never even lived in that house. His family bought it a few months after his execution.”

  “You’re kidding. So what appeal is there to visiting the house that Hale never even saw, never mind grew up in?”

  “It’s haunted.”

  “Oh. That’ll do it.”

  “And we’re going tomorrow.”

  Chapter Three

  Josh spent the rest of the night filling me in on all things Hale. I relaxed some when he told me the house was open to the public for tours and such through the end of the month. Even though Nathan Hale never lived there, his family went to great lengths to fill the house with his stuff. Anything for a buck, right?

  I was less relieved when Josh told me we would go in without a guide. Not to mention our private tour being scheduled for several hours after the museum closed. I might have mentioned something about breaking and entering earlier.

  Apparently this house was relatively tame, at least as far as haunted houses go. Reported ghost sightings limited themselves to appearances from Hale’s family, but not Hale himself. I sat through a lengthy lecture about how this lends credence to the story because people looking for a tale to sell more tickets are certainly going to claim to have seen the ghost of the house’s namesake.

  People rarely see ghosts on the grounds and are more likely to hear footsteps on unoccupied floors or coming from outside, rattling sounds from the basement, and the occasional disembodied voice. Josh told me the hauntings don’t appear malevolent, and the museum doesn’t have any trouble keeping staff on. You can learn a lot about a haunting from turnover, apparently.

  When I asked how we would get in, he said not to worry about it and moved on, which honestly made me worry about it more. Usually when Josh gets started on one of his interests, changing the subject becomes a real problem. I remember not pushing him though. Over the last decade, I trust Josh more than almost anyone else, and by the time we broke into Hale House, he already had my confidence.

  Chapter Four

  As far as preparation goes, there’s not much to tell. We traveled light then, and nothing about the routine ever changed. No cameras, recorders, EVP knick-knacks, infrared doohickeys. Josh held the opinion that such things were bullshit. His words, not mine, and I take it to heart when he curses, because it’s a rare occurrence.

  We brought flashlights, extra batteries, granola bars, water, and what I would later find out was a lock pick set, all packed away in a black messenger bag adorned with a Misfits patch. We waited until about 12:30, then headed out. I hadn’t thought to pack my criminal clothes for a weekend excursion in Coventry, so I borrowed a black hoodie and dark jeans and mentally prepared myself to see this bad idea through.

  We parked the car on a dirt inlet off Skinner Hill Road in the Nathan Hale State Forest and went the rest of the way on foot. It wasn’t long before we could see the house.

  Once we came out of the woods, it couldn’t have been over two hundred feet to the door. Even though the lighting was dim and there wasn’t a soul in sight, the open ground seemed to last forever. When we arrived at the main entrance, Josh knelt down and removed a slim case from the messenger bag. I stood watch while he set to work on the door, swinging my gaze from side-to-side, assuming an unaccounted-for night watchman would catch us any minute. The door opened with such speed and ease, this clearly wasn’t the first door he’d opened without consent.

  “There has got to be a great story about how and why you’re able to pick a lock so quickly and why you own a set of tools to do it with. You’ll have to tell it to me after we make bail,” I whispered.

  “They’ll never know we were here,” said Josh. The volume of his voice boasted a lot more confidence than I felt. “And… We’re in.” The door swung open, accompanied by the sound of hinges desperately crying for some WD-40. It occurs to me now that there should have been some kind of alarm, but I guess this was the type of museum that doesn’t worry too much about theft.

  We turned on flashlights and entered a large room full of antique furniture. I gently closed the door behind us while Josh crossed to the center of the room and sat on a couch that likely had two hundred years on us, slowly and with a sense of something like reverence.

  “We need to get our bearings before we go wandering around,” he said, finally seeing fit to match my soft tone.

  I nodded and made my way over to the couch and tried to echo the same careful way I’d seen him sit. His assertion that nobody would know we were there would not hold up if I decimated an antique sofa.

  “First,” he said, “we do not split up for any reason, inside or outside. There’s no reason for it and no possible positive outcome. Second. We should establish and clear the main floor before we do anything else. Anecdotally speaking, the second floor and basement is where we’re most likely to see or hear activity, so we want to treat this floor, this room even, as a base of operations. Kind of like a safe zone. Third, safe word. No jokes, Travis. I know you’re picking between three or four right now, and I understand the connotations, but it’s the best description of what we need. I propose we go with husky, the school mascot. If either us has to say it, we get out as fast and efficiently as possible, taking care to stay together. There are no reports of malicious hauntings here, but if we do this, we do it carefully. Oh, and this probably goes without saying, but don’t take anything. Thoughts, concerns, or questions?”

  “No, it all sounds... nope. Got it. Although I do resent you painting me as a thief who tells perverted jokes.”

  “If the shoe fits,” he said with a smirk.

  I was, admittedly, a bit in awe of him at the moment. Josh always showed himself to be a good friend, but a mouse of a man. I’d never seen him grab a situation by the balls and twist before. It wouldn’t be the last time.

  “Okay, good. Then we’re ready.”

  Chapter Five

  Even with the house’s isolation, we agreed it would be best to use flashlights and leave the overheads off. We made our way around the main ro
om we’d entered, poring over the details, and looking for anything unusual or out of place. At least, that was the plan. I caught myself searching for any sign of movement and making good, if excessive, use of my peripheral vision. When it felt like we had explored every inch of the room, Josh returned to his spot on the couch. With a steady voice, he said, “If there are any spirits here, please make your presence known.”

  We sat in silence for what felt like an eternity.

  “Does that usually work?” I asked.

  “What makes you think I’ve done this before?”

  “Literally everything.”

  “It’s always worth a try. Come on, next room.”

  We repeated this ritual in every room on the main floor, as well as a few outdoor areas where Josh said employees and tourists had seen figures in the windows. I don’t remember any other occasions where my senses were so heightened for such a long time. Not before the Hale House, anyway. After we left, I remember feeling exhausted, and the two of us slept until early afternoon the next day. It was a serious rush, though. I understood why Josh enjoyed doing this. Despite the adrenaline, we were gloriously unsuccessful so far and had already been there for over an hour.

  After the seventh or eighth location, Josh said, “Alright, we’re going upstairs.”

  Chapter Six

  I don’t want to bore you. I want to tell you about all the cool shit that happened upstairs, but nothing did. Not really. The house was a giant square, so I worried the upstairs might take as long to go through as the downstairs. By the time we explored the second room, we hadn’t seen or heard anything of note, other than a throw pillow reading “We’ll scare the Hale out of you!”.