Introduction — Preternatural Investigator

  The Church does not send an exorcist first.

  Before a priest is permitted to perform an exorcism, someone else is sent to the house.

  Usually this happens after a family has spent several sleepless nights listening to footsteps moving through empty rooms—footsteps that stop the moment someone opens a door.

  By then, the fear has already taken hold.

  So the Church sends investigators.

  They arrive quietly. They listen. They ask questions the family may not have considered. They examine the house itself—its walls, its wiring, its hidden spaces.

  Their task is simple: determine whether the disturbance is fraud, illness, fear—

  or something preternatural.

  They are called Preternatural Investigators.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  At eighteen, Cid was not one of them.

  Not yet.

  He was only an assistant.

  His job was simple enough: carry the recorder, document sounds, and write down details others might overlook.

  Scratches in plaster.

  Footsteps in empty hallways.

  Voices that could easily be mistaken for the wind slipping through broken windows.

  Or something pretending to be.

  The senior investigator liked to say the work was straightforward.

  “Most cases are nothing,” he once told Cid. “Fear. Lies. Or people who want attention.”

  Cid wanted to believe that.

  In most houses, the explanation came quickly—loose floorboards, animals trapped inside the walls, pipes groaning as they cooled during the night.

  But fear could change the way people heard things.

  He had seen that before.

  Years earlier, back in Nicaragua, a friend had brought out a spirit board as a joke.

  At first, it was harmless.

  Everyone laughed as they gathered around the table, daring the glass to move.

  Someone nudged it.

  Another swore they hadn’t.

  The glass slid again.

  The laughter faded after that.

  Within a week, the voices started.

  Not loud. Not clear.

  Just whispers where no one stood.

  The Church would call that kind of thing a disturbance.

  Most families would call it something else.

  Cid still didn’t know whether monsters were real.

  But he remembered the sound of the glass sliding across the board when no one was touching it.

  And he had learned something important.

  Sometimes the first person to hear the sound in a haunted house is not the priest.

  It is the assistant holding the recorder.

  And sometimes—

  the sound answers back.