GHOST PORTAL (#1 GHOST PORTAL series)

TWO

"Warning; what we're about to show you may be disturbing. View at your own discretion."

A woman popped up on Jessamine's screen; she was recording herself, using a phone-camera, from what Jessamine could tell. Her big, chocolate eyes were wide with excitement, her breath blowing into the receiver. Luscious brown locks of hair flew over her tanned face, and she swallowed a few of the strands as she looked into the camera.

"This is it," she said, her voice deeper than Jessamine would have expected; smooth like silk, but with a sudden sticky sweetness like honey.

The woman panned the camera towards where she'd been walking—the exit of a forest, apparently. Heavy branches drooped over, cloaking the passage in near obscurity, almost making the exit impossible to see. But she'd seen it, and was strolling over to it. Her steps were cautious, but she was still breathing heavily, anticipating what she'd find. Had she been hoping for a street? A population?

Clumps of bushes lined the path she was on; a path barely wide enough for a car, covered in dirt and twigs that snapped under her weight. It was daytime, but light was fading, so it might have been early evening, possibly later, depending on when this video was recorded.

She shoved away the curtains of hanging branches and what looked like swaying vines and traversed the exit, arriving into a clearance of some sort; a circular area surrounded by high topped trees—pines and birch? Jessamine was no tree expert, but those resembled those one would find in a northern California forest.

The trees and the surrounding green scenery weren't what caught the eye most—it was the house that the woman's camera had panned to that sent sudden shock-waves through Jessamine's body. She couldn't explain it, but the vision of the house, standing there as if staring back at her with its invisible eyes, stilled her, suffocated her, surprised her. It looked familiar; had she seen it before? Had this house been discovered by some other famous paranormal investigator at one point, and broadcast all over the news?

She shook it off, but couldn't fight the ominous sensation developing in her gut, the questions popping in her mind.

"Whoa," said the woman, her earlier honeyed voice now lower in her throat, a bit distant, subdued.

She didn't move much closer, remaining right at the border between forest and clearing, keeping the camera focused on the house. It was big—bigger than what one would expect to locate in the woods—but with that abandoned air, that appearance of neglect, with chipped paint and worn-out white wood and rusty-looking doors. The windows were all boarded up, and the boards had sinister drawings on them—hard to tell what they were or what they said from where the woman stood.

The front door was made of a dark cherry shaded wood, and the woman zoomed in on it. It was scratched, like claw marks a dog or a cat would leave when demanding to come back in.

She zoomed out to showcase the entire area—the house, stark white in a field of flattened, browned grass, encircled by tall, scruffy trees with branches reaching heavenwards, and that swung slightly side to side in the wind.

"Ooh," said the woman, seemingly repressing a chill. "Bleep, this was not what I was expecting at all."

Despite the sky above indicating that it was, indeed, still daytime, there was a darkness that swept over the area; so sudden, one might have blinked and come back to find that night had fallen. As if a tide of obscurity had washed in through the trees and taken hold of the house and its surroundings and painted everything in shades of black and gray.

"What the..." The woman again zoomed onto the house, but not on the door this time; she concentrated on one of the boarded up windows. "Did I see that right?"