I only met Erin Gault once. I was called in to do a forensic interview of the girl as part of a 72-hour observation period before she was turned over to juvenile justice and sent to a detention center based on the warrants that had been taken the day before. Stepping into the room with her, I felt a wave of sadness and confusion wash over me.
Erin was sixteen and small for her age—her chart put her at 5’4 and just over ninety pounds—and when she looked up, her expression wasn’t that of a hardened killer or a deranged monster. It was that of a very frightened and fragile young woman flinching at the sharp edges of a hostile world. And yet…and yet according to what I’d been told, two days before she had butchered her entire family.
This had happened at their home—a two-story house in a pleasant neighborhood outside the city. The yard was always cut, the family was well-liked and well-thought of, and even as I sat down across from her, I’d learned of no hint of trouble within this family prior to their deaths. No domestic calls, no reports of the children acting out at a school, nothing other than a break in a couple of years earlier. It didn’t rule out abuse, of course, and abuse was a common catalyst in these kinds of scenarios, but only one of many. My hope was, through talking to Erin, I could learn why she had done these terrible, terrible things.
I introduced myself. Explained that while this interview was part of an observation period for her safety, it was also part of the ongoing investigation. That while I wasn’t law enforcement, anything we talked about wouldn’t be privileged and might be used against her later on. She nodded and said that was fine, that she’d talked to her appointed lawyer and guardian about it already, and she was ready to answer any questions I had.
We went through the initial rapport building and introductory questions, and Erin was cooperative enough—she was still skittish acting, her eyes frequently darting to the walls before lighting back on me for a few moments as I asked my next question, but she seemed happy to have someone to talk to, even if it was a stranger. I took her through initial questions about her family—who they had been, where they worked, how she got along with them. Erin grew very sad during this part, sniffling and pausing frequently without ever shutting down or refusing to answer. I had this idea of her carefully threading her way through a canyon of guilt and pain and bad memories, though whether she was recalling the murders themselves or something that precipitated them, I couldn’t say. Still, when I asked the opening, non-suggestive questions related to any kind of abuse, there were no indications of reluctance or defensiveness or lying. Just a soft no, nothing like that. No one has ever hurt me like that. I could be wrong, but I believed her.
So I decided to try a different approach. Rather than drill down into the murders themselves—what she remembered, could she explain what had happened and why—I simply asked what else she wanted to tell me. The transcript that follows details that portion of my conversation with Erin Gault.
So Erin, part of my job is getting answers to certain questions. But I also want to know what you have to say. So let’s take a break from me quizzing you, okay? What do you want to tell me? Anything at all about whatever you like. Something that’s on your mind or important or that you think I need to know. This won’t be your only chance to tell me stuff during our interview, of course, but I’m interested in hearing what you want to talk about. I’m going to grab a drink while you think about it. You want anything?
Um, no. Thank you.
Okay, honey. Be right back.
That’s better. Any thoughts on what you’d like to tell me?
Yeah. Yeah, I know what I need to tell you. It probably won’t help you understand, but it’s true and I need to tell somebody. If you’ll listen.
Of course I will. Go ahead.
I’d never tried astral projection before. I…I’d heard of it, sure. Watched videos about it when I was bored, that kind of thing. But my friend Hugo, he was always the one really into that shit…um, stuff. He would try to do seances, had read books on trances and ESP, he even tried to do a spell a couple of times. I went along with some of it, sure, but I never believed in any of it. It was just to make him happy because, you know, he was my friend.
Sure, sure. And did he get you to try astral projection?
Yeah. This was like…a month ago? We were up in his room—his mom wasn’t home, which is the only reason we could be up there like that. Not that…we weren’t hooking up or anything. I think maybe he likes me a little, but we aren’t like that. I don’t like him like that.
Okay. I understand.
But he is my best friend. And when he told me about this new book he’d read on astral projection, it sounded kind of cool. Almost just like meditation or something, right? Something real instead of the ghost stuff he was usually into. And when he asked me if I’d try it with him, I said yes.
So we laid down on the floor of his room, side-by-side but not touching. And he talked to me, told me what to picture, what words to repeat in my head. Said that I didn’t need to concentrate—that the book said it wasn’t about holding on, it was about letting go.
At first, I just felt sleepy. But then I felt something…kinda shift? Like my brain wasn’t my brain anymore. Or like it wasn’t made of meat anymore. It was just steam, floating around, thinking my thoughts as I went down.
Because that was the thing. It wasn’t like a lot of those videos I’d watched or things Hugo had told me. I wasn’t floating above my body or flying through the ceiling to go travel somewhere. I was going down, deeper inside myself, or that’s what it felt like. It…It was like…It was like the waking me was a door, okay? And I’d somehow opened the door and found a house on the other side. Some huge, secret house that wasn’t built up like a regular house. Like my…my family’s house. It was built down, and it went on for a long, long way.
So I started to go down. And I could see it in my head as I went, though it was weird. Kind of like seeing it, but kinda like feeling it too. Maybe like how a bat feels stuff with their sonar? I don’t know. But I could tell I was going downstairs to a lower floor, and then another, and then another. The rooms were all empty and dark, but I could still see, and I wasn’t scared. Just curious and excited, because I could tell this wasn’t just my imagination. I was really doing something, really going somewhere.
I went down and down, and the rooms started to get weirder. The walls were the wrong shape, and the floors would seem longer or shorter than they should be. I started to find doors that were closed, where they’d all been open, and it got harder and harder to push through. Still, I was determined. This was all really cool and special, and it made me feel really happy because it made me feel special too. I know this all sounds dumb, but I’m telling the truth.
I trust you, Erin. I don’t think it’s dumb at all. Go on, please.
Okay. Thanks. Um, so I get to the point where the rooms are moving some. Like the walls change places and corners don’t stay where they were, and sometimes it feels like I’m in something alive, like the rooms are breathing around me. It’s a bit spooky, but I don’t want to give up. I have this idea that I’m close to finding something really important, so I keep going.
That’s when I find the green door.
Everything else had been kind of gray? Like an old movie or something. No colors, or maybe it was just because it was all so dark. But that door wasn’t dark. I could see it from across the room when I came down the stairs—a little bit of glowing green like an emerald. Winking at me, saying come here, come here. So I went.
The door was different than the others. They had all been plain. They reminded me of the doors in our house, I guess. Just regular doors. But this one was all carved and polished, with a big brass knob and in the middle of the door there was a picture. It was carved into the wood, and it kept changing as I watched. I…I don’t remember what it was now. It was so many things, and I can’t keep them in my head. But I know it made me happy and afraid at the same time. And when I grabbed the knob, it was hot on my hand. Hot enough I was afraid it might burn me if I wasn’t quick. So I turned it. The door opened. And I went on through.
I wasn’t in a house now. The floor was rock, and I couldn’t see any walls to the side or in front of me. Maybe it was a cave, I don’t know. It went on for a long time. It felt like I’d been walking for hours by then, but I wasn’t tired, and I wanted to see what was next. I started to see light ahead—I was close to…I think it was a field? A field that was bright and blue with red grass and white trees that grew in every direction. Up and down, side to side, weaving through each other as they went. Except they weren’t just trees, they were buildings. This was some huge, beautiful city, some kind of impossible place like where fairies might live. I felt this pure kind of…this sounds cheesy, but it was joy. Joy and like, longing. Like I finally had found something really special and true. I was about to start running toward it when I stopped.
There was a noise behind me. Something had moved somewhere in the dark.
I could feel myself starting to panic as I turned around. Its eyes were on me. Six glowing golden eyes like spinning coins, drawing me in, draining me of that happiness and hope. I couldn’t move, but the darkness moved around me, shifting the light of that bright living city behind the…the gloom of the thing that was now blocking my way.
I didn’t know what it was, but I kind of did too? I think its like this little dog we used to have, Puppers. He had never been out in a bad storm, but he still knew to be afraid of them. Like he could smell how dangerous it was. I…I could tell how bad this thing was. So I ran.
Running there wasn’t like real running. I made my way back way faster than I went down, too fast, and I could feel that thing behind me. I…I should have taken more time. I should have made sure I shut the doors behind me, but I was scared. So…so scared then, and…
Do you need to take a break?
No, I…No, I want to finish it. So you understand. I…I went all the way back up, and when I opened my eyes, I was back in Hugo’s bedroom. He was sitting on his bed with a worried look on his face. He told me that the astral projection stuff hadn’t worked for him—he’d tried for a few minutes before giving up. But I’d been laying there for nearly two hours. At first he’d thought I’d just gone to sleep, but when he couldn’t wake me up, he’d gotten scared, but was also worried about waking me up if I really was doing it. Said he was giving me a few more minutes and then he was going to try to wake me again before calling someone for help. He laughed when he said that last, but he wasn’t joking, not about any of it.
He asked me what had happened, what had I seen, but I told him I needed to think about it first and then we could talk. Hugo didn’t push it, though I could tell he wanted to. Now that he saw I was okay, he was getting more excited again, and he was disappointed when I told him I needed to head home.
Because I wasn’t okay. I remembered all of that I just told you, and my heart was still beating like I was being chased by that thing with the glittering eyes. It was two days before I got any sleep, and even then it was never good rest. Hugo kept texting to check on me and see if I was willing to share what had happened yet. I lied, telling him I was fine. After a week, I’d changed my mind about telling him about it too. I just lied and said I didn’t remember anything. That I must have just fallen asleep.
Was there any reason in particular that you chose not to tell Hugo about what you’d seen?
Yeah. I started to see holes in the walls. Just little things at first, little red, rotten spots like a cold sore or an ingrown hair, but on the wall. Not a particular wall. It might be at school in the locker room. Or on the side of the house. Or in my bedroom. But it would be there, this little raw, bumpy hole that I could tell no one else could see or touch. And every day it got bigger.
What was it?
I don’t know for sure. But after a month, I saw the hole somewhere almost everywhere I went. Not always in the same spot, but always somewhere around. It was following me, and it was getting bigger. The edges of it looked black now, like it was burned or dying, and there were little bubbles of white all long that rotten part that would move a little. Not like the way the rooms breathed—this was wrong feeling, a sick little shudder that made my brain hurt when I saw those pus bags or whatever start to shift. I got so I was afraid to look around much, and I was so tired by that point, I found myself falling asleep randomly. Losing time.
She looked up from the table, her eyes red and her lips pressed thin as she met my gaze. “And then one night, I woke up covered in blood. My parents’ blood. Jake’s blood.” Her face began to crumple. “I thi…think I’m done now.”
Nodding silently, I reached out and patted her arm. I wanted to comfort her. Her story wasn’t true, of course, some fantasy she had constructed to cope with the horrors of what she had done and experienced, but I had little doubt that she believed it herself. Whatever crimes she had committed, she was a very disturbed girl who needed treatment, and when I left the interview room, I was determined to help her get it.
The next day I got the call that she had killed herself.
That was nearly three years ago. A day hasn’t gone by since that I don’t think about Erin and feel a measure of guilt, questioning if I could have done something different that might have helped more. Wondering if there was some missing puzzle piece that would give the whole thing shape and make more sense.
Then I got a call from Bill Burke.
Bill had been the primary investigator on the Gault case. He was a good cop and a good man, and having worked with him on several cases over the years, I had a sense of how deeply disturbed he was by how everything had turned out with Erin. It had been over a year since we’d last talked, and when he called, I assumed it was about a new case.
“No, nothing like that. I actually retired last week. In fact, that’s why I’m calling you now. I wanted to call before, but I told myself there was no sense putting my job at risk. No one here wanted to hear what I had to say, and I worried that telling you might only stir things back up again.”
I knew what he was talking about without him saying. “This is about Erin Gault, isn’t it?”
I could feel his weariness as he sighed into the phone. “Yep. I…well, I know I told you some details of what happened before you went into the interview with her, but I had some more ideas I kept to myself. Some of that was confirmed the next week when we got the autopsy reports back.”
“Okay. Like what?”
He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Like only one of the Gaults was killed in their sleep. Her little brother Jake had his throat slit, and based on the injury, the arterial spray in the bedroom, and the lack of defensive wounds, it’s likely he never woke up.”
“Shit. Well, I guess that’s better than the alternative.”
“Yeah, I guess it is. But the doctor also said that both of the parents had been stabbed multiple times in the neck and chest, with additional defensive wounds on their hands and arms. The dad died in the hallway. The mom in the master bathroom behind a locked door that had been broken in.”
“Oh God.”
“I know. But that’s not all. The blood spray on the walls…our crime scene guy thinks they were standing up when they were trying to fight her off. And were still standing up when they started getting stabbed.”
“Okay.”
“The significance of this to me is that the stab wounds were all at a downward angle. Now Rex Gaunt was a six foot tall, two hundred and fifty pound man. Clarice Gaunt was five foot seven and weighed about one fifty. Yet somehow this little ninety pound girl that was barely five-four managed to not only overpower them when they’re fighting but stab them like she was taller than they were.”
I felt my mouth going dry. “Oh no. So you think she didn’t do it? Someone else was in the house?” I felt tears welling in the corners of my eyes. “Fuck, that poor girl, she…”
“No, I think she did it. At least in a manner of speaking. She was covered in their blood, the two knives only had her fingerprints, and there is no trace of any other person being in that house.”
“Yeah, maybe so, but if what you’re saying is true, how could she possibly…”
“I know. I thought the same thing. Even after she…well, after Erin was dead, I still went through all the evidence. Went back to the crime scene, subpoenaed phone records, the whole nine yards. I was already getting static for wasting resources on a closed case, but I didn’t care. I was half-convinced from the autopsy report that someone else had done the killings, and I wasn’t about to let it go until I was sure one way or the other.” His voice had grown rough with emotion. “It took a few days, but I finally got a disc in the mail with cloud video from the Gault’s streaming security cameras. They had put two outside and one inside after a break-in a couple of years earlier, and my hope was that it would give me the proof I needed to show what had really happened the night of the murders.”
“Did it?”
“You tell me. I just sent you a link to the cloud folder I uploaded it to.”
“Can’t you just tell me? I don’t know if I want to watch it, and I won’t even know what I’m looking for.”
“You’ll know. I showed it to my bosses, and those sons-of-bitches saw it too. They just didn’t want to admit it or deal with it. Told me to turn over everything and get back to work on my active cases. I did, but I kept a copy too. Maybe just so I could do this. Share it with you, so I wasn’t the only one who knew what happened that night. Just go check your email, Paul.”
I went to say more, but he had already hung up.
I’ve written this account for my own records and to put my own thoughts down on paper, but also maybe so it can be shared some day. I’ve tried to recall everything accurately, and I think for the most part I’ve done a good job. My memory of the video, which I’ve now watched dozens of times, is perhaps the clearest of my memories, and yet it is also the one most clouded with emotions. Confusion, sadness, and most of all, fear.
So I’ll end this account with my summary of what I observed in that video, free of any editorializing or follow-up commentary. I’ve had no luck reaching Bill again, and my own speculations are just that—the flailings of a desperate mind wanting to apply reason to the impossible. Trying to shut doors that have already been left open far too long.
So I leave it to you, the reader, to draw your own conclusions from what is described below.
The video is from the interior security camera, which has apparently been positioned in a high corner of what looks like the Gaunt’s living room. The living room is dark, but the house has an open floor plan, and the camera also shows a large kitchen lit by a hanging light over the sink. No people are visible at first, and overall the scene is still.
Then Erin enters from the right, wearing a white t-shirt and blue shorts. She enters from the dark of the living room, so at first it’s hard to notice how strange she seems. Parts of her body are blocked by furniture and shadow, and it isn’t until she passes into the kitchen that I can see that her head is lolling to one side as though she is asleep or unconscious. Despite this, she makes her way over to the kitchen counter and pulls two large knives from a butcher block. Blade pointed down in each upheld hand, her silhouette looks like a drowsing praying mantis as she glides back toward the right on a path to exit the kitchen for some other room or hallway. It’s at this point that I notice the smoothness of her motion, and a moment later that I am able to see her lower legs and feet for the first time. My first panicked thought is that she is somehow walking on tip-toe, like a ballerina. But I pause and rewind it several times, and no.
Her feet aren’t touching the ground at all.
Judging the height of the things around her and her own shadow, she looks to be floating about a foot off the ground, her motion forward smooth and seamless even as her head rolls and her arms lift and sway in a strange, almost boneless fashion. It was that incongruity that caught my attention after the initial shock and fear wore off.
That was what led me to have the video cleaned up further by a friend of mine. She complimented whoever had done the special effects—said that even after studying it, she wasn’t sure how they’d done it. I just thanked her and hung up the phone.
The enhanced video was clearer, but no less disturbing. I could see finer detail now, like how Erin’s eyes were closed when her faced turned toward the camera. Or how the floor creaked softly at times, despite the girl’s feet being free of the floor.
Or the slight rustle of her shirt’s fabric and compression of her skin in a dozen different places along her arms and legs and torso. As though she was being carried along by some unseen thing, her limbs worked like a marionette as she drifted toward the night that would end her family, her joy, and her life.
I paused the video in that moment, just a second before she passed into the dark, and I studied it for a long time, looking for some hint of the thing that had caught her and was using her so cruelly. Aside from the carry marks, at first I saw nothing. And then there was something new, motion on the frozen frame.
Two lines of twinkling gold turned toward me, looking out from that captured moment of that terrible night. I wanted to believe it was a glitch of my computer or my fraying imagination, but I knew better. I know I intend this to be an objective observation, but I know what I saw and felt. Those golden lights, those eyes hadn’t been there before. And they weren’t just looking toward the camera.
They were looking at me.
I don’t understand any of this, and I want no further part. I’ve erased my versions of the video, but I now realize it’s not enough. This thing wanted to be seen and known, otherwise it wouldn’t have been. And if I can’t show others what I’ve seen, telling them will have to do.
So perhaps this enough. And perhaps you feel tricked as you reach the end. I did tell you I would end this with my description of the video, after all. Unblemished by my own conclusions. My own sleepless terrors. And I am sorry for that deception, I truly am. But my hope is that if I satisfy it, it will leave me alone.
Because I’ve started losing time. Waking up places I don’t remember going.
And sometimes, more frequently in the last few days, I have started seeing them. Erin’s holes. Or maybe it’s all just one hole. A rotting necrosis in the skin of the world as something pushes its way through.
I’m watching it as I write this.
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