The following is a chapter from the follow-up to Hunting For Witches — Salem’s Burning
Tyler stared anxiously at the TV, the noisy bar surrounding him almost deafening. Everything he’d been up to since graduation had been leading to this: the night when the first trailer would air for Ghost Bros: the TV series.
The network had told him that the trailer would be revealed to the public that very night, and, to celebrate, he arranged a special get-together at a raucous dive bar in downtown Boston. Those that received the invitation were the rest of his team of investigators that were involved in the series. There was Leon, the cynical, neck-bearded paranormal enthusiast who served as Tyler’s co-host; Leon’s girlfriend, Raven—a plus-sized Betty Page type who was the show’s resident “psychic”; Jay, a butch lesbian chick who dressed like an auto mechanic—tech whiz extraordinaire; and, rounding out the group: Sammy, a skinny beanpole of a girl who always seemed to have her long mousy brown hair covering half of her face—she was the show’s research assistant. The group wasn’t a paranormal “dream team” by any stretch of the imagination, but Tyler had grown exceptionally fond of them through the shared enthusiasm for what they were doing. It was all for one and one for all with this team, and he loved the fact that the motley crew was like a plucky band of underdogs in comparison to most of their ghost show rivals—like Eddie Specter and his testosterone-fueled Ghost Warriors gang.
Tyler and his colleagues were already several drinks into the evening when the commercial finally aired. The spot mainly featured shots of Tyler and Leon running through dark hallways, barking at spirits and swearing like sailors, with all of the cuss words bleeped out for broadcast. A male voice-over promised “more chills” and “more thrills” in every episode, and when the commercial ended with a shot of Tyler and Leon standing back to back with the Ghost Bros logo behind them, everyone threw their arms up and cheered in celebration.
“Woo! That’s what I’m talking about!” Tyler howled. “Ghost Bros: Season One is in the can, baby! We shot the bleepity-bleep out of that bleep!”
“Hell yeah, we did, you miserable bastard!” Leon slurred belligerently. “Dirty, miserable—”
“Whoa there. Settle down, Leon,” Tyler said. “This ain’t a rally.”
“Sorry, man.”
Tyler raised his shot glass and turned to the smiling faces all around him. “Here’s to many more seasons of craziness, and thrills and chills… You heard the voice. Now let’s all get wasted and make some bad decisions!”
“W00t!”
This was it. All of Tyler’s dreams were coming true.
And yet, he wondered…
Why was he trying so hard to feel satisfied?
Hours later, after all the bars had closed, Tyler emerged from a black-out to discover himself barfing in an alley with Sammy fidgeting close to him, her hands tucked into the sleeves of her hoodie.
“Tyler?” Sammy asked meekly. “Are you OK?”
He dusted himself off and turned dizzily to the street.
“Top of the world, Sammy. Super-duper.”
As Tyler moved to join her, he glanced at the sky above him. The glowing moon poking through the dark clouds overhead reminded him of how the skies had looked in Little Salem. In many ways, he felt like he never left; everything that happened there was so intense that ordinary life now seemed to pale in comparison. The run-in with Ada and her gang, the conversations with spirits, the encounter with the Mysterious Ones—all of these experiences were incredibly tough to walk away from and return to a rose-colored life right after. Modern scholars were still scratching their heads over the string of mysteries the Ghost Bros had uncovered, but on a personal level, Tyler was convinced he had stumbled upon something that was deeply meaningful, and he hungered to uncover something new of equal value and significance.
Tyler and Leon’s recent ghost hunts weren’t exactly groundbreaking. Investigating something that went bump in the night or a “benign shadowy presence” was all a joke when compared to the discoveries that were made during that fateful spring break several months earlier. And there were still plenty of questions that remained—questions about the Scarlet Council and about the missing diary rumored to have conjured the horrible entities he filmed into existence. Tyler also had plenty of questions about Ada—like why she had traveled to Little Salem to begin with. He never learned about all that had transpired between her and Ashton, and he had little knowledge of what had become of either of them. Since the beginning, he was always very straightforward about everything he had witnessed whenever he discussed these experiences, but he would have been the first to admit that many things still bewildered him and that he didn’t have the full picture.
During their final conversation together, Ashton had told Tyler that many of their experiences were connected in a manner that he was never fully able to comprehend. The only thing he could decipher from this exchange was that there was a much bigger puzzle in play. Whatever they had stumbled on, they had only scratched the surface, and he had no idea that a minor discovery would soon be propelling back into familiar waters, proving once and for all that all he had uncovered in Little Salem was only the tip of the iceberg.
When Tyler returned to his team, he found Raven supporting her drunken boyfriend while squinting at something unusual across the street. “Yo,” Raven said. “Check out that weird building.”
Tyler gazed across the way at a modest skyscraper made of dark stone. He could see why it had captured his friend’s interest: the building held a distinct aura of creepiness due to the outdated style of its ostentatious art deco presentation, sitting like an odd duck amongst several buildings that were much newer and more ordinary.
“Dude, that’s…kinda weird,” Tyler mumbled.
Before they noticed what they were doing, the group started crossing the street as if being pulled toward the stranger building, noting that it was indeed quite old but was fairly well preserved.
“Crazy. This thing must be a hundred years old,” Leon said.
“Check the cornerstone for mason insignia,” Tyler suggested.
“Check the what for the what?”
“All these old buildings used to be built by Freemasons,” he explained. “The building’s cornerstone often contains a Masonic message or symbol.”
“Like the eye and the compass,” Jay noted.
“Exactly.”
Tyler broke into a nervous grin as the group sprang into action. It was all just a bit of harmless fun, but he couldn’t resist looking further into anything out of the ordinary and got a massive thrill from doing so. While Sammy checked the corner on the far right, Leon checked the corner on the far left. He used the camera flash on his smartphone to give him a better look at what he was seeing, which proved to be something much more interesting than some hidden Masonic insignia.
“OK, that is definitely not a compass,” Leon muttered.
Tyler staggered over to have a look, noticing a strange design etched into the cornerstone—what looked like the head and torso of a smiling cartoon goat surrounded by a scaly circle, the initials OOP directly underneath.
“It looks like a goat,” Raven noted. “In a circle? Wow. Creepy.”
Leon pointed at the image as the others gathered around it. “See those initials? OOP. What is this place?”
Tyler stared at the dark stone reaching for the stormy sky above him, feeling strangely unnerved but not wanting to show it.
“I don’t know…”
“All right, dudes. Stop tripping,” Raven said. “It’s just some weird building. Let’s go find some street tacos.”
Several minutes later, the group was standing outside a food truck. The greasy late-night grub hit the spot, but everyone was still thinking about the peculiar symbol on the cornerstone.
“I’m gonna find out the truth about that building,” Leon told Raven. “Mark my words.”
A little way off, Tyler stood with Jay.
“You and Leon getting on OK?” Jay asked him.
Tyler rocked his head back and forth. “Yeah, we on. I mean… Our chemistry on the show might be a little off.”
Jay flashed an understanding smile as consolation. “It’s not the same as with you and Ashton. Whatever happened to that guy?”
A part of him may have wanted to go into the detail, but in the end, Tyler chose to keep his feelings close to his chest. “Dude, who knows. Dude just thinks he’s too high class for the ghost hunting business. But that’s cool. I’m sure he’ll find his people someday.”
With the mention of Ashton, Tyler’s thoughts started to drift elsewhere, and he seemed to forget all about the strange building. Leon, on the other hand, was unable to let go of the discovery. Leon was used to diving deep into an investigation. While Tyler was in Little Salem, it was Leon who provided him with the information on Enochian that allowed him to learn more about the freaky book McAllister was searching for and its connection to the summoning circle in the hotel attic. The portly paranormal fanboy had a keen nose for research, but he still felt like he was under a lot of pressure to prove his own worth. It was Tyler and Ashton who had captured the footage that secured them the TV show. They were the original Ghost Bros, and Leon wanted to show that he had just as much value in the investigation department as Ashton.
By the middle of the following day, he had done some heavy research online and was searching a used bookstore. His phone was pressed to his ear when he received the first clue that would lead him down the rabbit hole to the answers he was searching for.
“Yeah, Hall of Records? Yeah, I called earlier, wondering if you had any information on... Exactly. Weird building from the 1940s. I wanted to know who arranged the build for that thing.”
Leon took out a pen and started writing on his hand. “Fanta-Sea Studios? That’s F-A-N-T-A-dash… Sea like the thing that fish swim in? OK, and an LLC... Ozzy Ozarius Productions.”
His jaw dropped in stunned realization. “OOP.”
Leon quickly thanked the person on the other end of the call, eyes darted around the store with excitement. Moments later, he was engaged in a diligent search through the shelves in the Entertainment section. “Ozzy Ozarius. Nothing. Nothing. It’s like this guy was erased from history...”
At first, it appeared he was out of luck until he found an old book titled, The Motion Picture Industry—The 1940s. He blew the dust from the cover before flipping to the index. There, he found several pages devoted to the man in question. When he located the page he was searching for, he started reading aloud:
“One of the most popular film producers of the 1940s. Renowned for blah blah blah blah blah...”
Speeding through the material, Leon turned to a page featuring a black and white photo of a middle-aged man with short, slicked-back hair, a pencil-thin mustache, and a nervous grin. The man was dressed in a suit and sitting at a desk, his posture suggesting he was someone of high prestige. But what was most peculiar about the photo was what was hanging on the wall behind him: a framed painting of a circle that was broken on the left side with the paint dripping down the canvas. This was an image that Tyler was frighteningly familiar with, but Leon was still in the dark about such things. All he knew for certain was that the image gave him the willies.
After staring at the old photo for several moments, Leon crossed to the front counter, displaying his find to the curmudgeonly book clerk behind the register.
“Hey. Ever seen this before?”
“No. Should I have?”
Leon referred to the writing under the photo. “Ozzy Ozarius. ‘One of the most popular film producers of the 1940s.’ How come I’ve never heard of him? How come we’ve never heard of this guy?”
The cranky middle-aged clerk rolled his eyes with annoyance. “Because it was the 1940s? Jesus, kid—how old do you think I am?”
Leon reached into his pocket to pay for his purchase. “I’m going to find out who this guy was,” he asserted. “Why no one remembers him, why he seems lost to history. And I’m going to find out what that crazy circular symbol means as well!”
“OK, buddy,” the clerk said and handed him his receipt.
Once the transaction was concluded, Leon exited in a hurry, passing a young bearded man in a black business suit with his face in a vintage porno mag. The lanky young man had overheard the conversation and grumbled under his breath.
“Shit.”
Hours later, after day had turned to night, Leon called up Tyler from his nerd cave—a studio apartment in Roxbury packed to the gills with collectible action figures, colorful posters, and shelves of DVDs. Leon was sitting at his computer following an unsuccessful day of scouring the internet for any information he could find on Ozzy Ozarius, Fanta-Sea Studios, and OOP.
“Ozzy Ozarius. The guy was, like, world-famous in the 1930s and 40s and now? Now? It’s like he never existed! There’s no mention of him on the internet or in any book I’ve been able to locate—except the one I’m holding in my sloppy, Dorito-covered fingers!”
Tyler frowned ambivalently on the other end of the call, his eyes locked on the violent video game he was playing. “Dude, I think you’ve been sitting in the dark too long. Maybe the book’s just wrong, and the dude wasn’t such a big shot after all.”
“Oh, cut the shit, Tyler,” Leon snarled. “Something smells. And do you know what the weirdest thing of all is? In the one picture that exists of this guy, he’s sitting at this desk with this weird painting behind him. A picture of, like, this eerie, drippy, painted circle. It’s the craziest thing. It looks like it was hung while it was still wet.”
Tyler turned pale instantly.
“Is the circle red?”
“Is it red?” Leon scoffed. “How would I know, doofus? The picture’s in black and white! It’s really weird though. Like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
Tyler tossed aside the game controller and grabbed his keys. “Leon? Stay right there! I’m coming over.”
“You’re coming over? Why? Is there something you know?”
Leon never received an answer, staring dumbfounded at his phone after realizing that Tyler had hung up. Barely a single moment had passed when he turned his head to the front door following the sound of a light knock.
“That was quick,” Leon muttered. He went to the door and peered out the spy-hole, noticing a young bearded man flashing a badge to his observer.
“Yeah? Who is it?”
“Health Inspector. Checking on reports of a gas leak.”
When Tyler arrived at Leon’s, it was already crawling with police. At first, he was held by the doorway while an overworked detective asked him a series of questions, his eyes darting all around him at the herd of cops, CSI tech, and crime scene photographers combing the apartment.
“Three bodies,” the detective told him once the interrogation was concluded.
“Three?”
The detective nodded and pointed to a trio of corpses at various places. “Shot the security guard, drowned the girlfriend in the toilet, then he bashed his head in with his computer and shot himself in the mug. An open and shut case.”
Tyler gazed at the bloody scene in total bewilderment. The nightwatchman by the entrance—that was a complete stranger, but Raven’s inert body was unmistakable. Her head had been shoved into the toilet bowl. As for the third body, it was definitely Leon’s, but his face was unrecognizable. Caved in from several blows from the computer hub prior to a gunshot at point-blank range. The idea that he would have drowned his girlfriend, shot some stranger, and then smashed his face in with a heavy object was ludicrous. But before Tyler could start to argue, he found himself being hustled out of the apartment while a man wearing a camel-colored trench coat watched his dismissal with a stony expression.
Tyler’s mind was racing when he joined Jay and Sammy in the hallway and informed them what the police had told him.
Jay frowned with disapproval. “I don’t like this.”
Sammy agreed. “None of it adds up! This smells like a cover-up!”
“But why? Why do this to Leon?”
Tyler answered in an edgy monotone.
“Ozzy Ozarius.”
“Who?”
“Something to do with Ozzy Ozarius.”
Tyler’s blood was pumping, racing with fury at the loss of his friend but also the thrill of a new mystery unfolding.
“And I’m not going to rest until I’ve put all the pieces together.”