The Invisible World

by Nora Fussner

Genres: Ghost; Horror

Synopsis

"An eerie and virtuosic debut" (Helen Phillips, author of The Need) about a paranormal investigations TV show that loses control of its subject as they investigate a haunted house
 
Eve is a frustrated young artist and the owner of what she believes is a haunted house. Sandra is an overworked producer at Searching for . . . the Invisible World, a paranormal investigations show perpetually on the brink of cancelation.
 
When the show descends upon Eve's home, they’re intent on creating just another staged spectacle. But, unexpectedly, the crew encounters some very real activity—shelves collapse, electronics go haywire, a cameraman disappears in the dead of night. Meanwhile, the show’s teenage ghost hunter Caitlin is caught up in the unexplained events, convinced she’s glimpsing the “other side” and desperate to make contact—even if it means putting the investigation, and herself, in jeopardy.  

As the terror mounts, it's up to the show’s harried, skeptical producer, Sandra, to create order from the madness—or will the madness take her, too?

Release date: September 26, 2023

Publisher: Vintage

Print pages: 320

Sample

DAY 1

 

There came a moment in every ride when the crew fell silent, the name-calling and conspiracy-theorizing tapering off as the van’s occupants turned to the windows and the undistinguished beauty of the towns they were passing through. As a group they had been as far north as Maine and as far south as the Carolinas. While the more unusual scenery—the Connecticut coastline, for instance, surprising first for its existence, then for its interminableness—might have inspired contemplation among the crew, it was the small towns that most often urged silence, those little hamlets and villages that looked the same in each state. Just a mile or two from the van’s destination, marked by white signs, these were towns of clapboard houses close to the road, worn libraries, accountants and orthodontists, parking lots just four cars wide. Small parks with World War II memorials, hair salons with posters fading to blue in the windows, that one spot on the corner perpetually available to rent. Sure, some had a preponderance of seafood restaurants, others antiques stores—no one in the car, not even the most city-boosterish among them, would claim that all of small-town America was exactly the same—but overall these towns had more in common with one another than they did with the major cities of their own states.

What quieted the TV crew was not the towns’ paucity of services, but their sense of contentment in the face of such deprivation. The van typically held five to seven men, Brooklyn and Queens dwellers all, who were accustomed to Thai delivery until eleven thirty p.m., dropping their laundry off and picking it up in order to spend their free time discussing Korean films over hops-heavy microbrews in clean but divey bars in which any patron sitting nearby might overhear and understand their references.

The towns the show landed in existed without hybrid pastries and taxis summoned via smartphone; they were practically the wilderness for their lack of convenience, and yet they had enough for the people who resided in them, and cars pulled away from the grocery store onto the road with no air of resignation about the lives they had chosen. Were they really so bored, these men in the car, that anything less than “secret, pop-up” could no longer move them, when the people in these towns had probably eaten at the same diner every Friday for the last thirty-eight years, and loved it?

But these people weren’t happy, the crew managed to remind themselves before resuming their banter, before easing to a stop in front of the house the GPS had been steering them toward. They wanted a change, and that’s why they had called a reality show. They had no idea, without the guidance of producers and directors and marketing people from New York, how the hell to make that change happen.

 

***

 

Sandra needed only the last few minutes of the four-and-a-half-hour ride from New York to Ninebark to review the episode file. The old white farmhouse that Patrick, her director, pulled up in front of, though not without its charms, was merely this week’s set of tasks. She scanned the couple’s profile and keywords jumped out at her: “shadow figures,” “objects moving,” “noises.” Enough to put the Hawthornes through the motions.

“What did Research find on the house?” Sandra asked Patrick, looking through the dossier again.

“What does it say?” Patrick clearly hadn’t read it.

“It doesn’t.”

Patrick shrugged. “I guess they didn’t find anything.”

Sandra exhaled, in a controlled way. A haunted house without a ghost story was just an assortment of random occurrences, cabinet doors banging shut for replicable reasons, temperature fluctuations due solely to drafts. No one would watch a show about that. There had to be something.

“Ready?” Patrick asked, professionally whitened teeth agleam.

“Let’s do this.” Sandra got out of the car and walked up to the house. The front door was unlocked, as Sandra so often found them. “Hello? Mrs. Hawthorne?”

A slim woman, dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, bangs faintly sticking to her forehead with sweat, came bouncing down the stairs. “It was open,” Sandra half apologized.

“No, no, we were expecting you!” She stuck out her hand. “Eve. Hawthorne.” Eve looked a bit younger than Sandra, which was not the only surprising thing about her. Instead of the frumpy, pleated-front pants and kitten sweatshirts Sandra had come to expect from these shoots, Eve wore an oversized, slightly asymmetrical T-shirt over expensive leggings, a luxury athletic brand Sandra herself had coveted. Eve looked like she might have even worked out in them.

“Sandra,” Sandra said. “We spoke on the phone. Meet Searching for…the Invisible World.” Sandra stepped aside for her crew, a stream of men bearing equipment, muttering among themselves as they set up tripods and lights, scanned for outlets. Eve watched them with a sort of detached fascination, not wincing as many homeowners did when they began taping cords to the floor or roughly handling end tables.

Sandra handed Eve a printed copy of the agenda for the week, though she’d emailed it ahead of time, and an FAQ for participants: “What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Reality Show to Descend on Your Home.” The show’s title was emblazoned across the top of the packet in a ghostly font. Eve gave it a tight smile, then folded it in half.

“Would you like the tour?” she asked. “Or should we wait until all this is ready?”

Sandra pushed herself to smile. “I’d love it if you could show me around.”

“The first place we noticed activity was the dining room.” Eve held out a hand for Sandra to go in first.

Production assistants trooped through the door, carrying blackout drapes to hang over the windows, a curtain against which interviews would be shot. Setup halted upon discovery of the spread that awaited them: coffee not in boxes from a franchise, but brewed from beans with provenance; bagels—real ones, not from the grocery store; pastries dusted with sugar. Rarely was the crew offered more than coffee. Someone had gone out of their way in a town with one grocery store to come up with whitefish spread and bialys.

Beyond the table, though, was what interested Sandra. A rumpled drop cloth lay

 on the floor, a ladder leaned near the window. They’d had months to prepare for the show’s arrival, but this room was half painted, baseboards unsanded, old carpeting torn up and wood floor beneath left splintery. Sandra, against her better judgment, bit.

“Do you two eat in here?”

“No.” Eve tilted her head. “Ryan doesn’t think it’s safe.”

“What does he think could happen?”

“He should probably be the one to tell you that, don’t you think?”

Irritation flashed through Sandra, then cooled. She’d been in television only a few years, but had known them all already: the subject-directors, the “reluctant” confessors, the girls who needed just a tiny bit of liquor to cry. She’d been an ersatz social worker, an emergency babysitter; she’d baked a wedding cake when a caterer got food poisoning. This—taking direction from Eve—was nothing.

“Do you agree with him?”

Eve screwed up her eyes. “I’m not afraid of what happened in here. Our experiences have been…different,” she concluded diplomatically.

Sandra nodded. “We’ll get set up and begin by interviewing you separately. We’ll start with Ryan.” She pointed to the agenda, folded up in Eve’s armpit. “We will try to keep this as disruptive as possible,” Sandra concluded, then corrected herself. “As little disruptive…keep this from being as disruptive as possible. I’m sorry. I haven’t had my coffee yet.” It was a lie; she’d had two cups on the road. But Eve gestured toward the table, and then, to Sandra’s relief, melted away.

Sandra walked the first floor of the house with a cup of coffee in one hand and her phone in the other, scrolling through the script with her thumb. The living room contained a sprawling sectional and those floating shelves Sandra only ever saw in catalogs. Like in the catalogs, the Hawthornes’ shelves held vases and art books. One room was ready for Architectural Digest, the other was a half-finished mess…Sandra sipped the coffee. It was good. She wasn’t sure why this, too, bothered her, why she hadn’t introduced herself to Ryan yet, why it was only Monday and she was already out of steam.

Have you tried turning it off and on again? she thought sardonically. She got into these moods sometimes. Behind her, a PA dropped something heavy, but she didn’t flinch.

***

 

TRANSCRIPTS courtesy Roving Eye Productions

Transcript: SIW-221a-1/CAMERA A, 10:15:13

INTERVIEW—RYAN HAWTHORNE

RYAN: How’s my hair?

Perfect. So start by telling me your full name, where you’re from, and what you do for a living.

RYAN: My name is Ryan Hawthorne, born and raised in Ninebark, and I own and manage a car stereo store, Liquid Sound.

Let’s do that one more time because…

RYAN: I know, I already screwed up…

You’re doing fine. Just take your time.

RYAN: Okay, thanks.

One more time, tell us who you are and what you do.

RYAN: My name is Ryan Hawthorne. I have lived in Ninebark, Pennsylvania, all my life. I own Liquid Sound, a car stereo store.

Great. So Eve’s not from the area. Why did you decide to settle in Ninebark?

RYAN: First of all, Ninebark’s not settling. Let’s get that straight. I’m just joshing you. We moved to Ninebark because I already owned my store, I was already pretty set up when we met.

Try to say “my wife.”

RYAN: Yeah, sorry, I forgot.

No worries!

RYAN: My wife, Eve, moved with me to Ninebark because I was already settled in the area, my parents live here, and I already had my store.

Would you say you’re both happy in Ninebark?

RYAN: I can’t say Eve is happy; like, she doesn’t love it here. I’m sure she’ll tell you that. I’m sure you’ll get an earful.

But together, as a couple, I mean, your family is nearby, you said—does that make life easier?

RYAN: Does living near my parents make life easier…?

Let’s say “family.”

RYAN: Don’t say?

Let’s say.

RYAN: Okay. We ultimately came to Ninebark to live near family and make life easier.

Okay, great. Let’s talk about the house. When you first saw this house, tell me, what were your thoughts?

RYAN: I got a great loan, my buddy Mark down at the credit union hooked us up with a low-interest mortgage. So, yeah, I’d say I was pretty excited to buy this house.

Walk me through what you were feeling when you first pulled up to the house and saw it from the outside?

RYAN: It’s a house, I don’t know, it’s white. It looks like a good house to raise a family in.

Are you and Eve planning on raising a family in this house?

RYAN: I think you should speak to my wife about that. I’m not going to say anything on the record that will get me in trouble later, you feel me?

It would be great to get one sentence about what you said, though, that this looks like a good house to raise a family in.

RYAN: Just that part?

If you don’t mind.

RYAN: When I first saw the house, I thought it looked like a good house to raise a family

 in.

Transcript: SIW-221a-2/CAMERA A, 11:04:23

INTERVIEW—EVE HAWTHORNE

Thanks for sitting down with me, Eve. Let’s start by telling me your full name, where you’re from, and what you do for a living.

EVE: My name is Eve Hawthorne-Malone. I’m an artist and art educator here in Ninebark.

And where are you from?

EVE: New York, actually. Same as all of you.

We don’t typically refer to production in these interviews. We’re here to tell your story and share your experiences, but we won’t be interacting with you on-screen. I know this sounds a little silly, but try to pretend we’re not here.

EVE: An invisible crew.

Exactly! Pun intended. So let’s try that again, about where you’re from, then why you moved to Pennsylvania.

EVE: Before moving to Pennsylvania, I lived in New York for eight years. I moved there for college, to study art. I worked for a couple years while I built up my portfolio, then went back to school for my MFA. I met Ryan right around the time I graduated.

Question

EVE: We got married and bought the house pretty quickly. Not because—I wasn’t pregnant. Just “crazy in love,” I guess.

Question

EVE: I knew something was going on with the house before we moved in. But I wasn’t scared. I could tell that this house had, for lack of a better expression, something to tell me.

INTERVIEW—RYAN

About how long after you moved in did you start renovating?

RYAN: We didn’t do anything too extensive, to be honest with you. New coat of paint here and there, stripping wallpaper, staining some of the wood. Cosmetic stuff. Eve wanted a house that wasn’t going to suck up all of our time. I was more excited to get in and

get my hands dirty, but no, we didn’t do a ton of reno work.

My notes say you were sleeping in the dining room when you first moved in? You must have been doing something if you weren’t sleeping in a bedroom.

RYAN: That was because of the air conditioner. We only had one working air conditioner and we were painting the dining room and staining the floors in the living room. So we slept on an air mattress for a couple nights under the AC before we got another window unit for the upstairs.

Tell me about what happened in the dining room the first week, with the pictures.

RYAN: So the thing with the pictures was, I told Eve not to decorate before we finished the other work. You put all the furniture and rugs and shit down—sorry, sorry. Let me start that again. You put all the rugs down, then the furniture, then you decorate. But Eve has to hang pictures. She has this, like, fear of bare walls. But we’re still tearing up carpeting. We’re still painting. It didn’t make any sense to hang pictures.

So you’re sleeping in the dining room on an air mattress. It’s the first night in your new home. You’re excited to be there: new home, you’re a lovely newlywed couple, and then what happens in the middle of the night?

RYAN: It’s the first week in our new home, it’s really hot, and we’ve only got the AC in one window. So we’re sleeping on this air mattress in the dining room, and I wake up and for some reason I look at the wall where the pictures were. And there are no pictures. I guess it was on my mind because I had been arguing with Eve to hold off on the pictures until we’re done everything else. But that girl gets what she wants—you know what I’m saying? I mean, she got me, heh heh.

How do you feel when you wake up and see the pictures aren’t on the wall? Are you scared, are you confused…

RYAN: I’m lying there, thinking, like, Where are the pictures? Did she take them down? It would be pretty hard for her to get up off the air mattress, take down some pictures, and then get back on without me waking up. So I look across the room, and there are the pictures—clear across the room, like they must have flew over our heads and landed on the other side.

That sounds really dangerous. That sounds like, you’ve just moved into this new home, and maybe it isn’t safe for you?

RYAN: Exactly. I’m lying there thinking, What if they had fallen? Those frames have sharp corners. What if some picture frame fell down in the middle of the night on top of our heads? That’s when I was like, this is freaky.

Did it make you question whether or not it’s safe to stay in your home?

RYAN: Sure. When you put it like that.

Can you give me one sentence that’s like…

RYAN: Okay, how’s this: If we can’t figure out what’s going on in our house, we’re gonna

have to move.

INTERVIEW—EVE

EVE: The pictures were down, yes. But they hardly flew across the room. We were in the middle of the floor, and the pictures fell, oh, five or six inches away from the wall. When we got up in the morning the pictures were on the floor. I hadn’t hung them with nails—you know those little plastic hooks with the sticky backs? They were only supposed to be temporary.

Question

EVE: Ryan did seem alarmed about it when we woke up the next morning. But we weren’t sleeping right there—the mattress wasn’t up against the wall where the pictures were hanging.

Question

EVE: That’s a bit dramatic, wouldn’t you say? It’s a house. Objects fall down.

Question

EVE: I’m not saying that—I’ve felt a presence in this house many times. But I never felt I was in any danger. This might sound strange to you, but to me it felt like something trying to connect.

---

After they’d slept together a second time, Eve decided to tell Ryan. There was something so giving about him, making love—from the moment she’d taken her shirt off he had been murmuring steadily, unable to control himself, exalting her voice, her breasts, the feel of her skin. She felt bathed in his attention, warmed by an otherworldly glow as he appraised her parts, finding none anything short of perfection. She had wanted to call out that she loved him, but that was ridiculous—it was their second date. She didn’t think she loved him, yet she was astonished in equal parts by him and by the fact that she, after two years debating art history and critical theory in a jargon used by 0.01% of the population, had no words for her feelings. She was grateful, and she wanted to give something to him. Afterward, as they lay on their sides, she ran a finger down the line of hair trailing his navel. He feigned self-consciousness, sucking in his stomach, and she laughed, then pinched the tiny bit of fat that was there. He seemed in no hurry to get dressed.

“Want to hear a weird story?” she asked, the faux casualness of her voice coming out wrong.

“Sure,” he said, and pulled her head to his chest.

She had told this story many times, to many lovers, in her head. She wasn’t sure anyone outside her family knew it, and she suspected many within her family had forgotten. The fact that she was sharing it with Ryan might have been the moment when she “knew.” She had the feeling then that she was telling a story she’d later tell as part of the mythology of their coupledom.

When she was ten, Eve’s father got a job offer in south Texas, and the whole family moved. For reasons she could not remember—distance, perhaps, or anxiety about aging—her grandparents moved with them. Eve’s parents, her older brother, Ben, and the family cat went in one car. Eve went with her grandmother, grandfather, and brother Simon in the second car. Her grandfather insisted on driving the whole way, as he did most family vacations. This was before cell phones, so the family mapped out the route ahead of time and identified motels where they would meet up at the end of each driving day. Her father had something of a lead foot and a death  wish when it came to tractor trailers, ...