Haunted Houses

by Robert D. San Souci

  During the time it had taken him to climb down and reach the spot, the level of water had dropped a bit. Now he could make out just above the surface of the restless water what was clearly the hatchback of a blue station wagon. The license was North Carolina in design. Two red oval taillights were visible, one a bit higher than the other, as if the car had come to rest tilted at an angle. Unless the driver had jumped for it as the car crashed through the growth above, Danny doubted anyone could have survived the plunge. He had a hunch the car was solidly wedged between the rocky walls of the stream. Even if someone had made it into the water alive, the side doors of the car were probably jammed shut, and there was no sign that the back hatch had been released.

  He lay flat on the wet stone to get an even closer look. Oddly enough, the back window seemed to have curtains—gray, lacy ones. Leaning dangerously far down, he could just make out that they weren’t curtains at all—they were spiderwebs.

  He pulled back from the rim and stood up as quickly as he dared. Then he began his retreat along the path. When he reached the road, he ran as fast as the mostly uphill way would allow.

  The family van was parked on the gravel turnaround in front of the house.

  “Mom, Dad,” he called into the silence of the living room. A moment later, his father charged down the stairs.

  “Where have you been?” he demanded. “I was just about to call the police. Isn’t it enough that we’ve got Marissa to worry about, without you adding to it?”

  Andrew’s anger was beyond anything Danny had expected. “I went for a short hike, and I got lost.”

  His father’s face softened a bit. His voice just sounded tired now. “You shouldn’t go off wandering. Your mother has been frantic.”

  “Um, how’s Marissa?” the boy asked.

  “Mom’s with her now. The doctor put her on antibiotics, but she’s running a fever. She sleeps most of the time, but when she wakes up, she’s really out of it. The doctor said if there isn’t a change soon, he’ll hospitalize her.” Now Danny could hear real worry in his voice.

  “Dad, there’s a car in the water—” the boy began. But his dad didn’t hear, having already started upstairs to check on his wife and daughter.

  Uncertain what to do, but thinking it best to stay out of his parents’ hair, Danny wandered into the kitchen. He was starving after the day’s adventure, and there was no one to warn him about spoiling his dinner. He slathered two pieces of bread with mayonnaise and, feeling devil-may-care, fixed himself a bologna, olive loaf, and Swiss cheese sandwich, with double portions of all the fillings. Taking the sandwich and a big glass of milk out onto the back porch, he sat in one of the old wooden rockers.

  As he ate, the shadows crept from underneath the pines around the house, and he found himself listening for the sounds of scuttling legs or the tickle of a small, furry touch on the back of his neck. His eyes strayed upward. The sheltered roof space overhead was thick with cobwebs. He couldn’t be sure in the fading light, but he thought he saw dark shapes moving behind the screen of webbing.

  He gobbled the rest of his sandwich, washed it down with the last of the milk, and went inside, vowing that he’d return tomorrow, armed with a ladder, a broom, and a full can of insecticide, and make the porch a spider-free zone.

  Dinner wasn’t much—just a thrown-together salad, some soup, and a plate of cold cuts. Danny wasn’t hungry, and his parents, worried about Marissa, didn’t notice his lack of appetite. They gave him a halfhearted warning about not wandering off and remembering that the woods held often unexpected dangers.

  He mumbled agreement—they were clearly too preoccupied with Marissa’s condition to get worked up over his earlier disobedience.

  His mother hastily cleared the table and then said, “I’m going up to check on her.” His dad remained, sipping his coffee, staring out the window at the moonlit pines.

  It seemed a good time to tell of his discovery, so Danny began to talk about the accident scene he was sure he’d found. At first his father didn’t seem to be tuning in, but the more details Danny provided, the more interested he became. He didn’t seem to notice that Danny’s tale of detective work was quite different from his earlier story of getting lost on a hike.

  “What color did you say the back part of the car was?”

  “Real dark blue—like Uncle John’s car.”

  His father suddenly got up and went to the desk in the corner of the living room. A minute later he pulled out a file folder. He brought it back to the kitchen table. He rummaged through it, and finally drew out a color photo. “Blue like this?” he asked, sliding the photo across to Danny.

  It was a picture of their summer house. Danny remembered being shown it when his parents were first arranging to rent the space. The photo had a picture of the Mertons—a sixtyish couple—in the driveway, smiling and waving. Between them and the house, the boy could clearly see the side and back of a deep blue station wagon with oval taillights.

  “Do you think—” Danny began.

  “I don’t know what to think. I’d hate to find out this is the reason the Mertons never checked in with us when we arrived.”

  His father took the photo back, studied it a moment longer, and then got his cell phone from the desk. Danny heard him asking information for the number of the local sheriff’s office. He couldn’t hear more, because his father walked out onto the front porch and closed the door behind him.

  When he returned a few minutes later, he simply said, “The sheriff is sending out a deputy to check first thing in the morning. He says it would be hopeless to investigate in the dark. And, if it is the Mertons’ car, it’s too late for a few hours to make a difference. He’ll come to the house first, for you, so you can show him the exact spot where you spotted the car. Now I’m going up to look in on the girls.”

  Danny stared again at the photo. It saddened him to think that, if there was a body—no, bodies—in the car, it wouldn’t be some nameless, faceless accident victims, but might well be the two friendly looking people in the photo.

  The deputy was at their door at eight-thirty. Danny, eager to help and excited to be a part of a police investigation, had been dressed and ready to go for an hour. His parents hardly seemed to register the deputy’s arrival: Marissa had had a restless night, and they were debating taking her back to the doctor.

  Danny’s father spoke briefly to the officer and gave him the photo they’d looked at the night before.

  Danny showed the officer where he thought the car had torn through the underbrush before going over the edge. The man jotted some notes, then had Danny lead him to the path along the river. To the boy’s disappointment, the man ordered him to stay put while he investigated what he, too, now seemed convinced was a crash site.

  When he returned twenty minutes later, Danny saw that he seemed shaky. The boy suspected the last bit of water-slicked trail had gotten to the deputy, the way it had scared Danny the day before. But he said nothing.

  On their way back to the patrol car, the deputy said, “Gonna be a bear fishing out that car—probably need a crane.”

  Danny wanted to watch the retrieval the next day, but his parents refused. Marissa was not much better; he had to go with them to the doctor’s office, where he realized he’d left his Sony PSP at the house, so he had to poke through old copies of Today’s Health and Wellness for Kids or just pace up and down impatiently.

  There were still police cars, an ambulance, and a monstrous crane that blocked the road for a while when the family returned home. Around dinnertime, the deputy drove up and asked to speak to Danny’s dad “in private.”

  They went out on the front porch. Marissa was asleep upstairs, and his mother was fixing dinner, so no one had noticed when Danny stood beside a partly open window to hear what the deputy had to report.

  “It was Sam and Ida Merton,” the man said. “They must’ve missed the turn, sailed off the cliff. Never had a chance. Car was pinned between two rocks like it was caught in a vis
e. Nearly broke the cable before we hauled it up. Odd, since Sam had driven that road since Hector was a pup.”

  “Maybe he had a heart attack,” Danny’s father suggested.

  “Could be. Everything will be checked out. Looks pretty much like an accident, clear and simple. Only funny thing: The inside of the car was filled with spiderwebs.”

  “Spiderwebs?”

  “Yeah—covering all the windows. Bodies wrapped in them, too. And there were plenty of spiders—bigger than any I recall ever seeing—in the car. Drowned, of course. The car was filled with water. Someone suggested that it might have held some air pockets long enough for the spiders to get in a little last weaving. But what so many were doing in the car is a puzzle. I suppose it’s possible they contributed to the accident, though that’s pretty unlikely. Well, it’s up to the medical examiner now.”

  The two men exchanged a few more words, then the deputy left. Danny was innocently playing his PSP at the dining room table when his dad came back inside.

  He asked about what the deputy had said, but his father didn’t want to talk, giving him only vague answers, and then went for a quick check on Marissa before their meal.

  The next morning, Danny set to work freeing the back porch of spiders, which he linked to the deaths of their landlords. From the kitchen he could hear his parents’ debate over continuing to stay, given the Mertons’ accident and the slow response of Marissa’s illness to the doctor’s prescriptions, though she was improving.

  Standing on the stepladder, Danny liberally sprayed the canopy of webs with insecticide, waited a few minutes, then, moving the ladder to one side, raked the webs with the broom. He was grimly satisfied to see shriveled-up spiders fall like rain onto the floorboards. Most were small, but some were distressingly large. Some of the bigger ones were still twitching and seemed to glare at him with their multifaceted eyes. These he quickly slammed out of existence with his trusty broom. When the webs were down and the spiders dead, he swept all the remains off the porch.

  His mother stepped out onto the porch. “Thanks for helping, hon,” she said, clearly meaning only sweeping up. “Your dad is on the phone with a nephew of the Mertons’. We’ve decided to go home tomorrow. This trip has turned into a nightmare.” She gave him a thin smile. “Great summer, huh? Summer bummer is more like it. We know you’ll be disappointed, but we’ll make it up, I promise.”

  Danny shrugged. Finding the car had seemed exciting. But finding out it was the Mertons inside had been awful. And he wasn’t going to be sorry to leave this spider-infested house behind.

  “We’ll leave early tomorrow,” she said. “Marissa should be well enough to travel by then.”

  “I’ll be ready.”

  He was, in fact, pretty well packed before he went to bed. He felt relieved to know they’d be leaving this freakish place behind.

  But his good feeling didn’t bring a good night’s sleep. Danny tossed and turned as his dreams grew more and more confusing and disturbing. Sam and Ida Merton rose out of a silky, shiny river in front of him, where he sat on the edge of the stream, dangling his feet. They hovered in the air, their movements herky-jerky, until he saw they were really puppets dangling from the arms of multilegged, shadowy puppeteers. Then he was in the dining room of the Merton house, where his father was trying to talk into a cell phone but kept complaining that he couldn’t hear—when suddenly the phone split apart and a torrent of spiders poured out, covering his father and the tabletop. Then his mother was warning him not to go into the woods, where the trees were clotted with spiderwebs and alive with the rustling of a million furry bodies. These suddenly began dropping in a black rain on him as he ran along a path that grew narrower and narrower. Then he was in the backseat of a sinking station wagon. In the front seat, Marissa, her back to him, was singing

  There was an old woman

  Who swallowed a spider

  That wriggled and jiggled

  And tickled inside her.

  Water began gushing into the car. It was thick and gray with floating web strands, and they were swarming with tiny spiders. The car was flooding; he could no longer hear or see Marissa. He was awash in a sea of spiders. He opened his mouth to scream and swallowed a mouthful of chill water thick with spiders and webbing.

  Danny woke up gagging and choking and coughing. Like he had swallowed something. But then he decided it was only a part of his dream—and a dry throat—at work. The digital clock showed 3:14 A.M. Only a few hours until they’d load themselves in the van and head home.

  His throat still felt scratchy and coughy. He decided to go down and get some ice water from the fridge. When he stepped out into the hall, it seemed darker than he remembered. He glanced at the ceiling light. It was swathed in spiderwebs, the gray veiling so thick that it cast the upstairs hallway into semishadow. Now, as he looked around, Danny saw that spiderwebs festooned everything—pictures on the wall, light fixtures, the odd table or shelf lining the hall. The webs were all over. He touched his fingers to a wall, and they came away web-sticky. His bare feet, he found to his horror, were picking up clots of spiderwebs that covered the floor, like a second carpet.

  How did all this happen so fast? Danny wondered. It grossed him out. When he stopped and listened, he could hear the scuttle-flutter of countless spider legs overhead, underfoot, all around. But he couldn’t see the creatures—just their webs.

  Marissa’s door was ajar. Suddenly fearful for his sister, he nudged open her door.

  “Marissa,” he asked in a whisper, “you okay?”

  He moved closer to the bed. His sister was a shadowy bundle on the bed. She didn’t seem to be moving. Has the infection from the spider bite gotten worse? he wondered. Should I wake Mom and Dad? He reached down to where the top of her head was just visible above the covers, to feel for fever—the way his parents did. Then he yanked his hand back as though he’d touched a live wire. Her skin felt dry and rough and sticky. In pulling back his hand, he caused the blanket to slip free, exposing what should have been—but wasn’t—her face. Her head was a featureless gray blank, like a discolored egg. Shaking, he peered closer and realized the figure of his sister was completely wrapped in spiderwebs. He started pulling away the clingy strands, but he stopped when he realized that his effort was useless. His sister’s face, under the web, belonged to a papery, hollow-eyed mummy, from which the life had long since been drained away.

  Screeching at the top of his lungs, he burst into his parents’ room, but stopped on the threshold. The bed, walls, floor, and ceiling were a churning darkness. The sliding glass doors, unshaded, were blanketed with a living curtain that the bright moonlight revealed as countless swarming eight-legged bodies of every size in restless silhouette.

  He felt a tickle, then another, then a dozen on his neck and arms. The first spiders were already claiming him as the dark mass advanced on him like an ebony sea at flood tide.

  Frantically brushing the advance scouts from him, he fled.

  Numerous webs had been strung across the stairway, but he pushed through the flimsy barriers, flicking off the weavers that sometimes clung to the bits of webbing that stuck to his face and chest and legs.

  The ground floor was a nightmare of webs. He windmilled his arms, always moving, struggling to where he thought the front door was hidden.

  A rustling, like a powerful wind through the treetops back home, alerted him. Glancing up, he saw swarms of spiders that had followed him downstairs seething across the overhead network of webs, clearly intent on cutting him off from escape. He ripped through layer after layer of the gray matting in front of him. And pulled apart the last strands. He grasped the front doorknob, ignoring the repulsive stickiness that coated it.

  Then he had the door open and was half running, half stumbling across the web-shrouded porch and down the steps onto the blessedly open road. He could think of nothing more than running. He dimly registered the family van, its windows and wheel wells web-choked. He thought of the Mertons running
for their lives in the car that the spiders had already claimed as their territory.

  He ran until he reached the main road and was nearly run down by a pickup whose driver stopped, collected the hysterical boy from the side of the road, and rushed him to the hospital. Which was where the deputy and sheriff came to start sorting out the story. As he drifted in and out of sleep in a hospital bed, he was aware of two things:

  The deputy repeating over and over, “Ain’t never seen nothing like that.”

  And the tickle in his throat that kept bringing him half awake, coughing, until the irritation moved deeper into him, and the worst of his coughing stopped, and he slept. He woke up once, and came partly alert long enough to realize the sensation had moved down into his stomach, where it wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside him.

  Dollhouse

  It was Katie who found the dollhouse in the basement of the family’s new home. She had been told to play outside while her parents and sister and brother unpacked cartons of clothes, dishes, kitchenware, and so on. But Katie was often not one to do as she was told. The basement—big and poorly lit and crammed with potentially dangerous things like rusty saws and a rake with a broken and splintered handle and such—was not a place she should be poking around in, her parents insisted. Their saying no just made going to explore that much more exciting.

  So she waited until her parents and her older siblings, Carla and Stuart, were all busy outside or at the other end of the house. Then she slipped through the basement door in the hallway and, closing it quietly behind her, hurried down the steep steps to the big space, where only a soft gray light seeped through high windows filmed with dust and cobwebs. At the bottom of the stairs was a light switch. She flicked it, and three dirty, fly-specked bare bulbs overhead flared into life, revealing the full extent of the jumble. Her parents had bought the house as a “fixer-upper.” They had done a lot of cleaning, repairing, and painting in the rooms on the first and second floors, where the family would live. But there was considerable work ahead just sorting out the basement junk and cleaning up what would, she knew, eventually become her dad’s workshop.