Kyler Fey

A few random phone pics that I snapped one after the other in a couple seconds, pics of Luca Belcastro, our team’s new-ish camera guy. He seemed almost to dance as he placed his equipment in the grand foyer and the dining room of the so-called “House of Belial.” Totally unbothered by whatever force was causing interior shutters and cabinet doors to open and slam shut and making the chandelier lights flash, Luca laughed. “You quiet down now!” he scolded. He looked happy—and very pretty—and I felt a warm impulse to take pictures of him. How is it even possible that none of us noticed when Luca was just somehow gone?

Photo #1, subject Luca Belcastro, taken 11/20/26 in 8 Flora Place, the so-called “House of Belial,” as documentation of Case #077 of the Paranormal Work Group [excerpt from Kyler’s case notes]

Viewed on the large monitor in the viewing room by Dathan, Shannon, Keiko and myself. We all reported a sense of being somehow unable to fully focus on the image of Luca, or a sense of his image slightly moving or vibrating within the background of the picture. Keiko says she thinks that he turns slightly away from the camera. Shannon thinks that he steps forward, as if coming closer to the camera. I don’t see that effect. My perception is more like Keiko’s. Dathan doesn’t appear to want to discuss it at all, and he just says “same” when I restate what I saw.

Our team meeting is listless, adrift. None of us recall seeing Luca at any point after the pictures were taken. Other than me, no one even has a solid recollection of Luca even having been in the house that evening. But I took seven pics of him, I say firmly, as if trying to reattach the other members of the team to solid reality. The time/date data on those photos matches that evening in that location. Dathan looks exasperated—and very tired—and he says “No one is arguing with you about it. We just don’t remember it. That’s all.”

He says, that’s all: merely three of the four of us just not remembering something like that from only a couple nights ago. But it’s not just their memories, I realize: I can’t recall anything else about Luca from that night except for him having been in view of my camera for a few seconds. A few seconds of being amused by him but nothing before or after. If he’d come to the house with us that night, I probably would have driven him there in my car, and he probably would have left with me as well. Maybe even came with me back to my house. I might even have tried to engineer it this way because I’ve kind of been crushing on him, and I think he was maybe feeling the same. Dathan had teased me about this a few days earlier. He’d said, “You can’t hide that shit from me, Kyler. You look at him exactly the way you looked at me when we first met.” I don’t like to be teased like that, and I try really hard not to smile, and I just blush. 

But I did not bring Luca to the House of Belial that night, nor did I take him away from it. I had no sense that he was even missing until later that night when I uploaded my pics to our team server. Which I did just because that was our procedure: upload any data taken inside an investigation site even if it seems totally irrelevant to the investigation. I would have at least glanced at the seven pictures when I uploaded them, and I am very certain that they did not look fucked-up.

Photo #2, subject Luca Belcastro…[excerpt from Kyler’s case notes]

This one is weirder, more unpleasant than the first one. We all agree on that, but we’re also all seeing different things. To me, the image is desaturated, almost black-and-white. Luca seems to nod slowly at the camera, not quite making eye contact with it. He’d be so pretty if his eyes weren’t solid silver. Keiko again sees Luca turn away from the camera, but this time he doesn’t turn back. He faces a wall. “If I look away for a couple seconds and then look at it again, he’s facing forward again, and then he turns again. And stays that way until I look away again.” Dathan says that he’s seeing something similar, but that Luca does eventually turn around. Neither of them see silver eyes. Shannon says that she sees Luca turn to face the wall. And then step into it somehow and vanish entirely from the image. “I can restart it, like Keiko said, if I look away for a bit.” Then she wonders, quietly as if just to herself, if Luca could have “no-clipped.” From our reality. She notices Dathan’s scowl and adds, “It’s a concept from video games.” Dathan says he knows that, and that it’s fucking stupid. Shannon leaves. Keiko goes after her.

I tell Dathan that Luca was not found at his home—a loft apartment downtown—and no one can find anyone who has heard from him. The police say they’re trying to find out if any family members have seen him, but they don’t have any news yet. Because they haven’t found any family yet. And I don’t want news from the cops anyway: nothing they would come up with would be good. I’m scared. Dathan tells me to calm down. He says, “Luca is somewhere. We’ll know soon. It will be fine.”

Keiko convinces Shannon to come back to the viewing room to look at Photo #3 with the rest of us. “It’s getting worse,” Shannon says. “He’s just standing there shaking, juddering, but sometimes he doesn’t have a head anymore.” Dathan also sees Luca as decapitated or as missing his face. I’m glad that I do not, but what I do see is like a jump-scare in a movie: he’s looking away from the camera and then abruptly turns toward it and leaps forward. His eyes are silver again and his lips are a black slash across his face. I see Keiko wipe away some tears. She says she doesn’t want to look at any more of these pictures today. And she leaves. Shannon follows.

Photo #4, subject Luca Belcastro…[excerpt from Kyler’s case notes]

Dathan finally, after trying to dodge my questions about what he saw in Photo #4, says this: “It’s not so much what I saw. It’s what I heard.” He pauses for a bit and adds, “It was like hearing an EVP. But it wasn’t coming from anything. Not like it would sound from the DR60. Or, actually it did sound like that but it’s like it was playing inside my head from no apparent source.” This is alarming. Auditory hallucinations would be a new phenomenon of the pictures, a leveling up in what can happen to us as we view them. As much as I do not want to, I decide to go back into the viewing room and look at Photo #4 again and see if I, too, can experience this EVP-like phenomenon. But I exit after probably less than a minute because I am again sickened by the impossible way that Luca seems to reach toward me with bruised and broken arms and stares at me with silver eyes. But I don’t hear anything. I return to Dathan and ask him if he thinks there was actual speech in what he heard, if he had any sense of what the voice phenomenon was saying. He tells me that he can’t keep talking about it right now, that it’s fucking with his mind. “I’ve called Gerri and Portia. They’re coming by tonight. Please stay if you can.” Of course I’ll stay, I assure him. Our friends Gerri and Portia are experts in EVP. Dathan tells me that he wants to see if they can record something. In the viewing room with Photo #4.

______

“Don’t play it again,” Dathan says. “I can’t stand it anymore.” I agree. The noise from the recorder is deeply sickening. Portia asks, “But does this sound like what you heard inside your head during your experience?” Dathan nods and says he thinks so. “And can you hear any words, any recognizable language in it?” Dathan gets agitated now and says he thinks he does but he doesn’t want to repeat it. But I press him to do so, and finally he says, “It says to kill you, Kyler. It says to kill Kyler. It tells me to do it.”

Gerri reaches for Dathan’s hand and clasps it and says, “Just stay calm about that. That may be what you think you heard but that’s in no way definitive of anything. And I can tell that you guys are clearly stressed out. We’re going to load this recording into our voice analysis software and try to filter out a lot of this noise and see if we can hear what you think you heard, Dathan. Or hear anything at all. I will say that I can’t detect words in this, but the overall effect of it is quite alarming. It feels violent somehow.”

Portia concurs and asks us, “Have you guys heard of an EVP recording called File 10?” We say we have not, so she explains: “A few years ago the guys from the podcast Astonishing Legends did an investigation in the so-called ‘Sallie House’ in Atchison, Kansas. It’s an infamously haunted house, like Amityville-level. Some people who lived there in the 1990s claim to have been assaulted by all manner of supernatural activity. Anyway the podcast guys put a Panasonic RR-DR60 recorder like yours in a particular room in the house and left it unattended for a while to see if it would pick up anything. They recorded several likely EVP files, but one in particular—the one they called File 10—was…different. One of the guys played it back and he was so rattled by it that he fled the house. He was absolutely terrified by it. And it is a very unsettling recording. Some people think they can hear words in it, and others feel a sense of anger and malice and maybe evil from it.” She sighs and adds, “This recording that we made here sounds to me a lot like File 10.”

Photo #5, subject Luca Belcastro…[excerpt from Kyler’s case notes]

Our attempted group viewing of #5 is a mess. We all see something different, and we all see something horrible. I don’t want to write about what I saw. I can’t. Keiko describes a sense of Luca’s body somehow collapsing inward on its self and becoming a tunnel of bone and blood and sinew. Shannon tries to run out to throw up in the bathroom. She doesn’t make it and vomits into a trash can. Dathan leaves the room and goes back to the workshop after saying something like, “I’d originally planned to ask that we stick it out and view #6 and #7, but I don’t think any of us can stand that right now.” No one argues.

Dathan figures out the next morning that the seven pics of Luca look strange—or terrifying—only to the four of us who were in the house that night. Somehow this never even occurred to me. He gets a kid, one of  Shannon’s students in her experimental photography seminar (and one with whom he’s hooked up with a few times), to come by and look at them. And when it’s determined that the kid does not see anything weird about them, he enlists the dude to make more versions of them to see if the effect on the four of us survives different iterations. The art student prints the photos onto photo stock paper in color and black and white and with a sepia-tone filter. He takes Polaroids of the prints to see if putting them into an analog medium does anything to them. He points a Hi8 camera at them and makes a loop, three seconds of each pic, one after the other in sequence and then in reverse sequence. And this repeats a few times. Dathan digs up an ancient opaque projector from somewhere in the bowels of the arts building so that we can project the prints onto a white screen.

By myself, I try the new iterations #1 and #2 only, because those are the easiest ones to deal with. I still have no hypothesis as to why the photos become more unmooring as one goes further into the sequence, but it’s a consistent pattern for the four of us who have examined them. The color printouts of the digital photos don’t seem to behave differently than the electronic original on the monitor. The black and white versions feel somehow more stable. Picture #1 in black-and-white at first appears entirely normal but after a few seconds Luca’s image starts to shudder and vibrate again. The sepia versions of #1 and #2 evoke a strong nausea even though the images themselves don’t seem to behave any differently than in the other versions. 

The Polaroids are ultra-weird. In #1, Luca turns fully around and then back to face the camera, and he smiles and blows a kiss, which I have not seen in the other iterations. In #2, he seems to rush at the camera then jump back, and then he does it again, his eyes solid black now. I put these back into their folder after just a couple seconds. 

But the worst iteration by far, displayed on the big monitor, is the Hi8 video. I can barely stand to glance at it at all, and the entire time I let it run I am gripped by a mounting sense of terror and claustrophobia, and I realize that I am crying. I start to leave the viewing room so I can find Dathan and ask him to turn it off for me because I’m afraid to even get near the camcorder, as if it’s guarded by a rattlesnake. But, despite how frightened I am, I know that this is absurd. Because what if the effect of the tape could extend beyond the room? What if it would stay with me in particular until it was shut off? Or—most horribly—what if the act of fleeing the room causes the effect of the tape to attach to me permanently, clinging to me forever anywhere I go until I lose my fucking mind?

Looking away from the screen, I force myself to touch and then shut off the camcorder. The oppression vanishes immediately. I hear knocking at the door. “Kyler!” Dathan yells. “Are you okay?” The door isn’t locked. But I know why he didn’t want to just walk in. He knew what I was doing in here.

I open the door. His eyes look exhausted. He says, “Did you watch the Hi8?” I don’t answer. But he knows I’ve seen it. He says, “It’s very…wrong.”

It occurs to me to wonder how the pictures would look on my phone as compared to how they appear to us on the big screen or in the Polaroid versions. “What do you mean they’re not there?” Dathan wonders. I’d uploaded them to the server that night and never thought to look at them on my phone again. “I don’t understand it. They’re just missing. You can see in my image numbers a seven-image gap. They’re not in deleted files. Also, I don’t delete anything. Like ever. I still have email from twenty years ago. I still have porn clips that I spent hours downloading on dial-up internet. I have my high school valedictorian speech.” He doesn’t say anything else.

Shannon and Keiko decide that they’re not going to look try to look at photos #6 and #7 after having been so repulsed and frightened by #5. They’ve seen enough. And they decide to leave town. It’s Thanksgiving week and they’re traveling to Shannon’s parents’ home. For quite a while now they’d been an amiable ex-couple kind of like Dathan and me, but now they seemed to be clinging tightly to each other.

Dathan is detaching batteries from a charging station and popping them into a series of black and silver cylindrical devices, each lighting up with a green LED collar as he does so. “What are you doing with those?” I wonder. The devices are bosonic degaussers. I think I know what he’s planning and I don’t like it. They operate under the as-yet-unproven theory that “stone tape” or some such other such physical medium holds haunting manifestations in a particular place. The degausser releases a charge that “deletes” the stored paranormal energy. In our line of work, we call this process a “fumigation.” It does work. Sometimes. Not every time though. He never does answer me, so I say, “You’re going back to 8 Flora Place, aren’t you?” Back to the House of Belial.

Finally he looks up from his work. “We’re not going to learn anything more by further investigating that place, so I’m going to fumigate it. And I hope that this will also end whatever the fuck these pictures of Luca are doing to us. I’m gonna blast the viewing room here, too, in case something followed us back here.”

“But what about Luca?” I say that and Dathan looks at me like I’ve just arrived from Mars. I say, “What if degaussing that house somehow does something unsafe for Luca?”

Dathan’s not having this. “Kyler! Luca is not in that house. I have no idea where the fuck he is, but he’s not there. Cops have been all over that place and have found no sign of him in there.” I wonder how well the cops searched though, because I heard that they were spooked by noises and unexplained movement of objects in there. Of course they were. That house is rotten with poltergeist activity. The previous residents said their kid had been demon-possessed. 

Dathan steps around his work bench and close to me. “Listen to me. I’m worried about him, too. But I don’t see how fumigating that house has any effect on his situation.” Then his mouth opens slightly as if he is about to gasp. “Oh, shit. I know what you’re thinking. No, Kyler. You’re letting Shannon wear on your mind. You’re thinking maybe he really did no-clip. And that if we fumigate the place it could close a door that he might be able to traverse. Jesus Christ. That’s what’s worrying you, isn’t it?”

I don’t deny it, but I feel deeply stupid and I blush hotly and I want to cry. Because I want to know where Luca is, and I want him to be safe, and I very much want the effect of the seven pictures of him to end. It must end, or we’re gonna go fucking crazy. “Okay, you’re right,” I say, maybe because I just want to believe him. “But I’m coming with you, you know.”

“No. Not necessary. And why? I’m just gonna set these things up, bomb that fucking place with them and leave.”

It’s my turn to be concerned about something he’s saying. Even if he didn’t think my help was necessary, why is he specifically telling me no? Typically he’d be fine with me coming along whether he needed me or not.  “You’re worried about what you heard in that EVP. That’s why you don’t want me around.”

He shakes his head. “Fuck, Kyler! It told me to kill you! Does that not worry you at all? Because it really fucks me up. I can hardly stand to think about it. I hear that voice when I’m trying to go to sleep. So I don’t want you near me when I am back inside that house. Inside its field of influence.”

I can’t stand this. I pull him into a tight hug. He resists at first, then yields, lets his body lean into mine. I say, “That fucking EVP that you think tells you to kill me was recorded here, Dathan. Remember? Here. If something wants you to kill me, then why wouldn’t it act on you right here? Right now?” I don’t loosen the hug yet and Dathan’s body feels smaller, softer than I’d remembered. It had been at least a year since I’d held him so closely. “Also,” I add, “it’s totally against policy for you to go do this by yourself anyway. There must always be at least two people present and within view of each other at any investigation site. No one is ever to be alone. That’s your policy by the way. You came up with it.”

I relax my arms and let him break out of the hug. “Goddamnit, Kyler. Fine. Let’s go get this done. I’d like to be out of there before dark.”

We’re in Dathan’s car on our way to the House of Belial for hopefully the last time when I receive a text from Portia: I wanted to share this with you first, before Dathan sees it. You’ll know better than I will as to how he may react. We clarified the noise in the Photo #4 EVP and we separated out a voice (that honestly sounds to us a lot like Dathan’s own voice) saying “kill Kyler” and “What do you mean? and something that sounds like “null space.””  I’m attaching the file. It’s up to you what you want to do with this information. If it’s at all helpful, Gerri and I can come back to your workshop and take him through our process of distilling that voice. Let me know.

I reply: I’ll need to get back to you later. And I need to wait til later to listen to the file. Dathan and I are on the way back to that house where I took the pics. We’re gonna fumigate it. Maybe that will stop all this fuckness.

The animating force in the House of Belial seems to be expecting us. As soon as we enter the gigantic foyer, cabinet doors and interior shutters start opening themselves and banging shut. The giant chandelier high overhead sways jerkily like it’s being moved by a giant hand. This is more poltergeist-style activity than I want to deal with right now. I remove a couple things from my bag: a tightly-wound wand of dried herbs and incense and a butane torch. I light the wand and walk the room with its flame and smoke and I say, “I evict you from this room. I deny you permission to act upon matter in this space. I take away your hands.” I throw the smoldering herbs to the floor and shout, “Be still!” The slamming diminishes considerably in volume and frequency though it not does quite stop. But I’ve been heard. It knows that I can reject its influence.

Dathan looks at me, into my eyes, for a moment. He says, “I need to do something also.” He withdraws from his bag a little chrome canister that I know holds coarse pink salt. He brings it close to me and scatters some of it in a wide circle around us. He says “Know that I have the authority to block any entities in this house and that I throw a perfect circle of protection around this man. Know that this circle cannot be breached by any force. Know that we do not fear you and that you cannot harm us.”  The chandelier stops flashing.

Questions to answer in Case #077 of the Paranormal Work Group, House of Belial [excerpt from Dathan’s case notes]

I hadn’t brought up this topic with the others, though Kyler kind of confronted me with it when he pointed out that the Picture #4 EVP was recorded in our viewing room. Question: how did the animating force of that goddamned house reach us at our workshop? I ask this because we have testimony that suggests that it can’t reach beyond the house. The property owners who fled the place have stated that their teenage son was possessed by an entity (“demon” in their words) that identified itself as the arch-demon Belial. When they decided it was time to leave the house, they had to somehow drag the boy down from the ceiling of his bedroom and wrestle with him until he was in the car. But as soon as they got just a short distance away from that house, the perceived possession ended. What’s different now? All I can think of is Kyler’s pictures of Luca. Are they somehow the medium that extends the influence from the house into our workshop miles away?

We climb stairs. We pass through an intense cold spot at the third-floor landing, and we ignore it. It was there the first time we checked this place out so it’s already been documented. “If we run into anything new,” Dathan says, “we’ll note it and it add to the file, but otherwise let’s drop these degaussers and do our thing.”

We place three degaussers each on the first, second and third floors. Dathan doesn’t think we need to bother with the attic or basement: “The mag-field will be large enough to cover those areas as well. And I don’t want to go up in the attic or down into that ungodly basement anyway.” The poltergeist, or whatever the fuck it is, plays once again at full blast now, hammering from inside the walls, raising and dropping windows, slamming shutters, flashing the lights and, by the sound of it, ejecting drawers from kitchen cabinets. I guess my command of silence wasn’t effective for very long. 

Back on the first floor, we pass through the foyer and back into the big dining room where Dathan had left the laptop that he will use to operate the degaussers. I get out another herb bundle and light it. “I command you to be silent! I remove your power to make noise! I deny you your voice!” The racket does, actually, settle down again. I say to Dathan, “It’s so active today. I’m worried it can fuck with the degaussers.”

He shakes his head. “It’s fine. We’ll just be a couple more minutes before we’re ready to activate. I just need to get each one of them on the Bluetooth.”

And then I see something in one red-and-gold-papered wall of the dining room. At first it’s as if a smoky haze clouds one tall section of that wall, and then the haze darkens into something more like stain, but the stain seems not quite attached to the wall. “Dathan. What is this?” He doesn’t seem to hear me, and I ask him again to look. He just stares unblinking at his laptop. Something’s wrong. He’s not moving at all. I take my phone out of my pocket and open the camera and aim it at the bizarre stain. Which, in the camera’s view, now looks like the opening of a dark tunnel and I shudder at the resemblance to the corridor of sinew and bone that Keiko perceived in #5. “Dathan!” I yell his name twice more and still he does not react. On my phone screen something changes again in the wall and I see a figure take shape, first as an opaque shadow which then, very gradually, resolves into more detail, into a human figure. Who smiles at me. And I snap an eighth photograph of Luca Belcastro.

I hear voices but it’s like I’m hearing them from the bottom of a deep shaft:

“Are you sure we don’t need to call for an ambulance?”

“It’s fine. His vitals are all good. And he’d kill us if we sent him to the hospital for no reason.”

I feel a blood pressure cuff on my left bicep. I think it’s been periodically squeezing and then releasing for a little while. It sort of makes sense. I know that someone always has equipment like this with him. I think I feel a hand cup my crotch and someone says, “He didn’t piss himself this time. That’s a plus.”

And the other voice: “What does that mean?”

“He has a seizure disorder. It’s infrequent. Like maybe every two to five years.” That voice, I now realize, is talking about me. I try to climb the shaft toward daylight. “Hold this for a second.” And I feel one hand move away and another replace it. It’s pressing a steth against my chest.

And then a light is shining into my eyes, and I squint against it. I’m at the top of the shaft. I start to understand. Dathan peers into my eyes. “Are you back with us yet? If not, no hurry. Don’t be a hero.”

And I startle, fully awake, and before I can react to Dathan hovering over me, I see…I see…Luca. And he smiles down at me and says, “Hey, I’m ready to get the fuck out of here as soon as you feel like you can stand up.”

I know that it somehow makes no sense that Luca is right here talking to me, but I can’t piece together why I think that. But I remember something: “Did you activate the degaussers yet?” A crash of glass breaking on kitchen tile answers that question. 

“We were waiting for you to wake up,” says Dathan. “Just to be safe. I’ll hit it now.”

I stare at Luca, still confused, and he smiles at me and I don’t want to look away or even blink in case that makes him vanish again. I ask him this: “Where were you?”

He leans in close, his bangs brushing my forehead and he kisses my cheek. “I don’t know. But somehow you brought me back here.”

A loud electronic whine rises and rises and then cuts off abruptly and I can feel a prickle of static electricity all over my body and I smell ozone. The degaussers have discharged. They’ll do it two more times at intervals of fifteen minutes. 

“We can get out of here,” says Dathan, stuffing things including a blood pressure cuff back into his bag. “I’ll come back here tomorrow and pick up our shit. I can already feel that the fumigation is working. We don’t need to be here for the next two discharges.” And then Dathan informs me that he’ll be dropping me off with Luca at Luca’s place. “It’s already been decided, Kyler. I don’t want you to be alone tonight.”

I open my phone, find the message from Portia with the remaster of the Picture #4 EVP, and I delete it. We don’t need it anymore.

Appendix to case #077 of the Paranormal Work Group, House of Belial [excerpt from Luca’s case notes]

Kyler told me, once we got home, how long I had been missing in the perception of the rest of the team. I can say that I’m glad as fuck that it didn’t feel that long for me—like maybe three hours. I described for him a sense of total disorientation when I passed into wherever the hell I was for several days, but then a sense of getting my bearings back when I saw him and the other members of the team through what seemed like a series of hazy windows, and I understood that they were trying to see me, but it was somehow not working. Like I was glitching somehow. I described this to Kyler and he said, “Yes, that’s it exactly. The pictures.” I didn’t know what he meant but then he told me about seven pics of me that he took right as I was vanishing into that house. He thinks that maybe they worked like a tether, keeping me attached to the real world. But, as an unfortunate side-effect, they also brought along the extreme negativity of the 8 Flora Place haunting into our workshop. 

I needed to see the photos. Kyler said they’d somehow disappeared from his phone after he’d uploaded them to the PWG server. But there wasn’t anything stopping us from logging into the server and finding them there. He really didn’t want me to do this but he conceded to the reality that I was going to do it anyway. 

I opened all seven of the photos, and I can’t even imagine now what the other team members were seeing in them. They all look very normal, if perhaps a bit more flattering than a lot of snapshots of me. I think Kyler knows how to take a pic of a boy that he likes. He airdropped the eighth one to my phone and I told him I’d look at it tomorrow because right now we’re going to bed.

END