All Dolled Up!

Charlie

The next day, being a bit tired, I decided to take a short nap even during the night. Charlotte was reading up on something, and understood when I told her that I felt like I needed to hit the hay.

I drifted off, though almost immediately I felt something shaking me. No, it was not something, someone.

“Charlie! Charlie! Wake up!”

I opened my eyes to see Charlotte over me, looking very concerned. “Quick, wake up! This is an emergency!”

“This isn’t like that time a Nigerian Prince emailed you saying he had to escape the country and needed some emergency funds, is it?” I asked. I had helped her open up an email account just because it seemed like a neat idea at the time, though as you can imagine, given she had no one who would mail her or anyone for her to actually send a mail to, she only got spam and junk.

“No! Someone’s trying to break into the house!” she said.

Now, that got my attention as I got up. “Wait- someone’s in the house?”

“Not yet, but they’re going to!” she said. There was a venom in her voice that I wasn’t used to hearing - yes, the last time I had heard it was that night we had first truly met each other. “An automobile came up outside, and someone stepped out. They’re wandering outside, surveying the house! Quick! You need to get your gun!”

I was trying to process the first part of what she had said. Someone had come in a car at this hour? I checked my phone, it was about one in the morning. So it wasn’t a utility truck, and it wasn’t the delivery service who came once a week, as it was, this, wasn’t even the right night let alone the right time for that to happen. “Okay, so let me take a look.”

“Don’t you want to get a firearm first?” she asked. “What if they’re dangerous?”

“I doubt that they’re dangerous,” I told her. “And I don’t own a firearm anyway.”

“Eh? W-why wouldn’t you have one though? I would keep one if I could only get my hands on one.” I really didn’t want to know what she would do with a gun, though knowing her, it would only be used as a last resort to convince anyone too stubborn to not leave to finally get out. In other words, someone like me who didn’t get the hint that they were unwanted by the initial things she would do.

“Because it’s unnecessary,” I said. I felt that despite living in a remote house given the low crime rate of this area, though as I approached the window, I did wonder if maybe it was a smart idea to have gotten one. I had been considering it after Charlotte had dumped my monitors into the bathtub, though as I had learned later on that it had just been Charlotte and not an actual intruder the thought never really crossed my mind again.

I peered out the front window, and I saw what Charlotte meant. There was a van outside, and I saw the silhouette of someone standing outside the gate, seemingly pacing back and forth. I didn’t recognize the van at all.

“Do you think it’s just a salesman?” Charlotte asked.

“If it is a door-to-door salesman, I do indeed think in that case that I’d love to have a gun so I could shoot myself to avoid talking to them,” I joked. “Anyway, no one’s going to come selling things at midnight - and people don’t go door-to-door anymore in the Internet era.” I thought about calling the police, but I was quite a bit away from them. Not to mention whoever this was, they had not tried to break in or do anything yet. While suspicious, I couldn’t say they had done anything illegal yet. “Anyway, let me go ahead and see what this is about.”

“Don’t you want to take something with you at least?” Charlotte asked, after picking up the second largest knife from the kitchen, and handing me the biggest one.

“I thought you were against harming people,” I said.

“Yes, I’d rather scare them off if they were just people who walked in after ‘buying’ the place like you did. But this person is actually breaking in - and if anyone’s going to hurt you, I won’t hold back! I'd sooner put a bullet in their brains than see them so much as touch a hair upon your head!” Charlotte said. She pumped her fists, seemingly ready to throw hands at a moment’s notice.

“I uh, appreciate the support but I don’t think it’ll be necessary,” I told her. Also, rather than using her fists, she would be more effective at repelling a home invader if she were to instead smear herself with fake blood (or real blood though I had no idea where we'd get that) and then simply glare at them menacingly.

“If you think they’re threatening, come back into the house, and I’ll ambush them!” Charlotte shouted out as I walked out the front door.

I had refused the knife, but I was carrying a flashlight and pointed it after turning it on directly at the person. “Hello! Who is it?!” I shouted, definitely loud enough to be heard from this distance. If they were up to no good, they probably would’ve ran away the moment they saw the light, but they didn’t.

“Oh, hello!” whoever the person was shouted back. It was a male voice. “Ah, do you happen to live here?”

“Yes,” I told him. Was this someone whose vehicle had broken down or something along those lines? It was strange for that to happen right in front of my house though. “Um, what do you need at this time?”

“Oh, sorry for coming in this late - thing is that I’m a bit of a night owl myself, but an acquaintance of yours by the name of Matthew Parks mentioned that you were working the night shift and this would probably be an okay time to speak to you? I didn’t want to wake you up in the middle of the day, and I thought I’d just drive by but I didn’t see any of the lights on,” he answered. “I wasn’t actually sure you were home or not, and I was wondering whether I should call you in case you were asleep - but, looks like you found me!”

Matthew Parks? Did he mean Matt - oh yeah, with a jolt I remembered that that was what his full name was. “Well, yes, but it’s still a bit late. Mind coming around seven in the morning? I’ll still be awake then.”

“Oh, sure thing,” he said. “Sorry to bother you by the way, my name’s Samuel, but they call me Sam - Supernatural Sam, that is.”

I was about to head back when I heard that name. Supernatural? The man continued talking. “You might’ve seen the show by the same name - ‘Supernatural Sam.’ I go around looking for, well, basically anything out of the ordinary.”

The gears in my head turned as to what this guy was getting at as I remembered the last conversation that I had with Matt, and then I knew that I had to nip this in the bud. I walked towards him, and as I did, I got a better look at him.

He was dressed in the way that someone who ran a shop like Vanessa’s should’ve been dressed. On the face of it, he didn’t look too out of the ordinary with a plaid shirt and brown pants, but he wore a speckled bow tie and had a strange amulet worn around his neck. While he could’ve otherwise passed off for an ordinary businessman, his demeanor and certain aspects of his wardrobe made him look like a panelist at a conspiracy convention.

“Well,” I said. “I’ll have you know then that there’s really nothing that you’ll find here, Mr. Sam. Yup, we have no aliens, no gremlins, no ghouls, no Skinwalkers, no Sasquatches, or the like here. This is entirely a normal house, so I think you’re wasting your time and you should look elsewhere if you want to see something weird.”

“Oh, I can see how you’d think that,” he said, unperturbed and undeterred by what I had said. “For you see, this house has a long history. It was owned by the Evergreen family, who ran a textile business, but after a spate of bad luck they went bankrupt and had to sell the house. Several of their family members died mysteriously thereafter, and since then, the house has been passed around from buyer to buyer, with people claiming that weird things happen to them before eventually leaving.”

While my initial reaction to protect Charlotte was to ask him to leave - I paused as I processed what he had said. Charlotte’s entire family had died in mysterious ways? I tried to find out more information on them, but given they had lived in the era before the Internet, it had proven to be near-impossible. “Wait - how do you know so much about the house?”

“Well, I can’t take all the credit for that,” he said. “My team’s researchers always put in the hard work. Not to mention - didn’t you call the police when your house was ‘broken into’ earlier?”

“How on earth did y-” I began to ask him but then gave up midway. I had more important things to worry about. “Yeah, but it was likely just something random and nothing like that ever happened again.”

“But they never found who did it, did they?” Sam replied in a spooky voice. “How can you be sure that it wasn’t something… supernatural?”

“I highly doubt it-”

“Well, I see that you haven’t really bought what I’m selling, but perhaps I could interest you in a small monetary incentive?” he asked.

I paused at that. “What kind of incentives?”