Haunted Houses

by Robert D. San Souci

  “Geez, it’s cold in here,” he complained. He began massaging his upper arms. The others noticed the chill, too, but weren’t really bothered by it. And, they knew, Mikal always had to have something to complain about.

  “I think we need everyone’s finger on the planchette, Mikal,” said Sarah.

  After pushing his eternally slipping glasses into place, the boy reluctantly placed his finger beside the others.

  “Is it gone for good?” asked Troy. He was speaking only to the other kids, but the planchette suddenly veered to no.

  “Are you—some of you—Tom and Geena Crowley? Those were the people who died,” Sarah whispered to the others.

  Yes.

  “Who else is with you?”

  M-A-N-Y.

  “Are they ghosts, or what?” Sarah wondered aloud.

  N-O-T D-E-A-D. N-O-T A-L-I-V-E.

  “None of this makes any sense,” said Jerry.

  “It’s kind of like a riddle,” said Troy. Then he suddenly called into the darkness, “Are you a vampire or a zombie?”

  The planchette didn’t move.

  “You are so dumb,” said Jerry. “You can see vampires or zombies. You can’t see whatever’s here.”

  “What are you, then?” asked Raymond, clearly tiring of the verbal runaround.

  M-A-N-Y.

  “I don’t think whatever we’re in touch with is the sharpest knife in the drawer,” said Raymond, who had lowered his voice so the others could barely hear.

  The planchette suddenly twitched and began swiveling back and forth across the Ouija board. Stopping to spell out the same word over and over: MANYMANYMANYMANY.

  Mikal tried to pull up his finger, but it was stuck to the wooden triangle like it was superglued. The others tried to yank their fingers free, too, but the bit of wood held them fast.

  “It’s gone nuts,” said Raymond.

  “It’s like my little sister’s Talk to Me Teddy when something went wrong with the computer chip inside. It kept going, ‘My-name-is-Teddy-my-name-is-Teddy-my-name-is-Teddy,’ until my father tried to fix it and that was the end of Teddy.” Sarah finished with a giggle that sounded more anxious than amused.

  “Tell it to let go of my finger,” said Mikal, sounding like he might cry. But the planchette, tugging their fingers, zigzagging back and forth, up and down, across the board, kept insisting, MANYMANYMANYMANY.

  “Stop!” shouted Sarah, but the thing only moved faster.

  “Make it stop!” Mikal screeched. He stood up suddenly, forcing the others to stand also. The planchette, removed from the board, twisted and turned like a living thing. “Ouch!” cried Mikal. “It hurt me where I cut myself earlier. I’m bleeding.”

  Now the others could see some small smears of red on the planchette.

  “Let go, let go, let go,” Mikal yelled. Then he batted at the planchette with his free hand. The thing flew across the room, disappearing into the darkness. They heard a soft chunk as it hit the far wall.

  They were all pointing and staring at their freed fingertips.

  “It took off some skin—just like Krazy Glue,” said Sarah.

  They had all lost a spot of skin, but only Mikal was bleeding. The gash in his finger seemed much worse now.

  “I think,” Raymond said dazedly, “I think we’d better just bag this and go home.” The others could see that he was shaking, but they all felt just as jittery.

  Raymond leaned over as if to gather up the board, then had second thoughts and kicked it viciously into the outer dark. A moment later, the box followed.

  “Let’s go now!” he said.

  They looked into one another’s pale faces. Only Jerry had turned to glance at where the board had gotten to. Now he said in a strained voice, “Um—Houston, we have a problem.”

  The others turned to where he was pointing.

  In the dark center of the room, faint shapes were taking form, like wisps of pale smoke hardening gradually into vaguely human shapes. The two nearest them were clearly a wild-eyed man and woman. Their skin and clothing were horribly burned.

  “It’s them, the Crowleys,” said Sarah, her own voice getting shriller, as if she were bottling a scream. “I saw a photograph on the Internet.”

  “But who are the others?” asked Jerry. “They don’t exactly look like people.”

  Behind the ghostly Crowleys, the glowing figures were tall, misshapen, showing a hand with too many fingers and what wasn’t a foot, but a hoof, like on a goat or horse. “I think one of them has horns,” said Troy, and he began to laugh in a really unnerving way.

  “I think I get the ‘Many’ part of it—there must be twenty or more,” said Sarah, so softly the others could barely hear her.

  “That guy with the burned uniform next to the Crowleys, he must be the fireman who died,” added Raymond. “And none of them are really alive, but they’re not dead and gone, either. That’s why we were told they were alive and dead at the same time.”

  “And the . . . others?” asked Troy.

  “Soul snarers,” Sarah said. “They must have snagged the Crowleys and that other poor guy before they could get away.”

  Mikal, his voice flat, as if all the fear and complaint had been leached out of him, said, “I just remembered. From Bible class. There’s a part where Jesus chases away a devil. And when he asks the devil his name, he says Legion.”

  “What are you telling us?” demanded Raymond, never taking his eyes off the silent figures.

  “ ‘Legion’ means ‘many,’ ” said Mikal.

  “And there are a lot of them,” said Sarah. “I don’t know what the Crowleys were doing when they died, but I guess they got way more than they bargained for.”

  The shapes were flickering now, like a TV screen when a satellite dish needs adjusting. The mouths of the three human figures were open in soundless screams. The vague shapes behind them laughed silently. It was like someone had pushed a mute button somewhere.

  “Okay, okay, here’s the plan,” said Jerry. “Plan B: Ditch!”

  They ran for the front door, praying that it wasn’t nailed shut. Behind them, the room was suddenly filled with intense blue light that flickered and felt charged with electricity like the air during a thunderstorm. Above the crackling, they could now hear howls, shrieks, laughter. They didn’t dare look back.

  Troy was first to reach the door. He yanked on it. To their collective relief, it swung open, and they dashed through. A moment later the door slammed shut behind them.

  They ran halfway down the block before they stopped to catch their breath and be sure no ghosts or demons had followed. None had. It was later than seemed right: Dusk had fallen. Headlights of cars passing in the street showed an empty stretch of sidewalk; a single cat glanced at them, then continued on its way.

  “We made it!” gasped Raymond, who was leaning down, hands on knees, catching his breath.

  “Where’s Mikal?” Sarah asked. A quick glance around revealed only four frightened friends.

  “He must still be in that place,” Raymond answered in a worried voice. “We gotta go back.”

  “No way!” said Troy.

  Raymond glanced at Jerry, who said nothing, just backed away, shaking his head, palms out in a back-off gesture.

  “Well, I’m going back,” said Sarah. “Besides, all our bikes are there.”

  “You saw those . . . those . . . things!” Jerry said. “I’m not going back—at least not until the sun is up. Maybe not ever.”

  “We have to do something, tell someone, call the police,” Sarah insisted. “You know Mikal. He could be scared to death, even if the things don’t hurt him directly.” She dug into her jacket pocket and pulled out her bright red cell phone. She punched 9-1-1.

  Jerry made a grab for the phone, but Raymond held him back. The other boy complained, “She’s calling the police. She’s gonna get us all so busted.” To Raymond, he sounded like a bigger whiner than Mikal had ever been.

  “Don’t you think Mikal is a
little more important than whether you get grounded?” Raymond asked in disgust.

  “I want to report a lost kid—well, not exactly lost, but he’s in trouble.” Sarah’s words were tumbling out. The operator on the other end of the line had to keep asking her to slow down and talk clearly.

  “I’m outta here,” said Jerry, running off down the street, with Troy right behind.

  “Jerks,” muttered Raymond.

  “The police are on their way,” Sarah reported. “I said I’d meet them in front of the apartment and tell them what happened.”

  “We’ll meet them,” said Raymond, taking hold of his friend’s hand.

  “Mikal will be all right, won’t he? I mean, if the police get him out fast?” asked Sarah, as they walked toward the burned-out building.

  “Sure,” Raymond promised in what he hoped was a convincing tone of voice. In the distance they could hear sirens racing closer.

  But Mikal wasn’t all right. The rescue workers wouldn’t say anything to Sarah and Raymond, who were cross-questioned, then sent home in a police car. When their anxious parents learned what had happened, they were saddened and angry and threatened to ground the friends—“for this life and the next,” was how Raymond’s dad expressed it. No one believed anything about ghosts and demons. They thought the kids had been trying to scare each other and worked themselves into a panic that somehow cost Mikal his life.

  The newspapers reported the boy’s heart had just stopped, since there were no marks on him except for a cut thumb.

  “He died of fright,” Sarah said positively to Raymond as they walked home from school. They’d become better friends. By unspoken agreement, they kept away from Jerry and Troy, who seemed just as eager to avoid them.

  All their bikes were gone by the time a couple of parents volunteered to collect them from the alley. To Sarah and Raymond, this seemed a rough kind of justice, not worth complaining about. It was nothing compared to the guilt that didn’t end with the idea of Mikal’s death, but the horrible thought that he might now be a slave to the soul snarers.

  It wasn’t till much later that Sarah learned a final detail about what had happened that fatal night. She called Raymond, cell to cell, and when she was sure neither one could be overheard, she began, “Mona Greene’s uncle is a police detective. I guess he worked on Mikal’s case a little. Anyway, Mona happened to hear—”

  “Yeah, right,” sneered Raymond. “She’s a snoop.”

  “Just listen, will you? When they found Mikal, he was lying facedown on the carpet. Somehow the Ouija board was under his hand—the hand with his cut thumb, remember?”

  “Yeah, he made such a big deal out of a little scratch.”

  “It must have started bleeding again. Mona’s uncle said there was a little blood on the Ouija board. It looked like Mikal was trying to send a message, and the only way he could do it was to circle letters on the board with the blood from his cut thumb. But he only circled four letters. Wanna guess what they were?”

  “M-A-N-Y.” Raymond’s voice was so faint, Sarah could barely hear what he was saying.

  When she understood, she answered, “No.”

  “What four letters?” he asked, not really sure he wanted to know.

  “M-O-R-E,” she said.

  “Then it’s true,” Raymond said dully. “He’s one more soul they’ve caught.” He made a despairing sound. When he felt able to talk again, he found Sarah had already hung up. He kept the phone to his ear a minute more. A sudden, loud burst of static in his ear made him quickly disconnect. But before the sound was cut off, he thought he heard someone lost and crying, very far away.

  The Lodge

  The hunting lodge was a lonely looking building, with the forest pressing in on all sides. The dark wood of the walls, rows of vacant windows, peeling paint on the shutters—it all gave Valerie the immediate sense that her father and two uncles had made a BIG mistake in choosing this Wisconsin site as the place for the annual family reunion and hunting trip. She’d heard Uncle Stu sing the praises of the place, where he’d gone with a bunch of his buddies the previous spring. The hunting had been good, and Stu couldn’t wait to return. The prospect of good hunting made the place an easy sell to his brothers, Jim and Ed, Val’s father. Their wives had been doubtful. Val’s mother, Lynne, had argued for a return to the place on Little Bear Lake where they had stayed the year before. But the hope of scoring a deer like Stu had bagged (the antlers, when mounted on his den wall, had prompted nods and even an admiring whistle from his brothers) had made it a done deal.

  So here they were. Val could read big-time disappointment on her mother’s face; her unhappiness was reflected in the faces of Aunt Mae and Aunt June.

  Val climbed down from the SUV. Her older brother, Nate, who would be allowed to join the men for the first time this year, was all “Wow! This is great!”

  It was Val’s fourteen-year-old cousin Annabeth who put into words what she was thinking. “I can’t believe it! This is the worst!”

  “You’d better become a believer,” said Mae, her mom. “We’re in for the long haul.” She handed her daughter a stack of bedding. “Let’s get unpacked.” Annabeth’s discouraged sigh was loud enough to be heard all the way back to Madison. With a small sigh of her own, Val joined her family and relatives in moving suitcases and boxes into the lodge.

  The inside, to Val’s way of thinking, was no more promising than the exterior. The couches in the big living room sagged, the beds on the second floor were lumpy, the bathrooms needed immediate attention, and there were layers of dust and grime, complemented with spiderwebs everywhere. One day in this place seemed a stretch of the imagination; Valerie could hardly imagine a week.

  It seemed a little better that night. The women collectively fixed a great meal of Aunt June’s killer lasagna, plus salad and loads of garlic bread. It was all topped off with a plate of Lynne’s lemon bars. Then the family adjourned to the living room, where the men—with much arguing and a lot of smoke—had finally got a decent blaze going in the fireplace.

  Her smaller cousins roasted marshmallows and Val settled herself onto a couch, between Nate and Annabeth, while the men told stories and cracked jokes—some of the jokes cut short with a warning word from one or another of their wives.

  At first the stories were recollections of past hunting or fishing trips—some quite funny, like when Ed had encountered a bear and the two had startled each other into running off in opposite directions. Annabeth rolled her eyes when her father, Jim, told for the umpteenth time about her near-fatal encounter with a rattlesnake on a forest trail. The three-year-old girl had thought the snake was a toy. She had been reaching for the hissing serpent, its rattles going full-tilt boogie, until her father, coming up the trail behind her, had stunned it with a hurled branch and yanked his daughter to safety.

  It all created a comfortable, if slightly boring, atmosphere. Even Val was feeling lulled into a sense that things might turn out not so bad after all.

  Then Stu said suddenly, “Didya know this place comes with a ghost?” Val instantly focused. Even Annabeth and Nate, teens who felt it was their duty to ignore most of their elders’ stories, became attentive.

  “Stu,” June warned, “don’t say anything that will give the kids nightmares.”

  Her husband made a face, but said nothing.

  “Is it a true story, Uncle Stu?” Val wondered.

  “Fella told it to me swears it was,” said Stu, clearly relishing how all eyes—except for two of the smaller cousins who were wearing marshmallow noses and giggling—were on him, waiting eagerly for his account.

  Smiling, Stu began. . . .

  “Back in the 1920s this place was a private hunting lodge. Belonged to a rich family—their name was Swendson—who’d come up here for the hunting and just to get away. Like we’re doin’! Sometimes they’d invite friends or relatives; sometimes it would just be the family and two, three servants—”

  “Not a bad idea, a few servants,”
Val’s mom interrupted.

  “Hey, Lynne—let Stu finish, will ya?”

  Valerie thought her father, Ed, sounded as eager to hear the story as Valerie.

  “Anyhow,” Stu continued, “one April, the family came up on its own—Dad, Mom, three older girls, and the baby of the family, four-year-old Alexander, his parents’ darling.

  “What happened was, on a morning soon after they had arrived, the girls went out for a walk. They hadn’t wanted to take ‘the baby’ with them, but their mother insisted when little Alex—who apparently could be quite a handful—threw a royal tantrum because he wanted to go along. It seems whatever Alex wanted, Alex got.

  “According to Martha, the oldest sister, they discovered a bird’s nest or rabbit burrow—something with baby birds or animals—and were so busy checking it out, they didn’t keep an eye on their brother, who wandered off. When they realized Alex was gone, the girls called and searched but couldn’t find him. At last, when it was getting late, they hurried home and told their parents and the servants. The family searched until after sunset. When it seemed hopeless, Mr. Swendson drove into town and alerted the authorities. Led by the sheriff and his deputies, the townspeople of Westmont turned out in force to search for the missing child. But the search parties came up empty-handed. It was as if the boy had vanished from the face of the earth.

  “All this time, the mother, Elizabeth, was growing more and more frantic. Days of searching turned into weeks, until, at last, the effort was called off. The conclusion was that the boy had fallen into one of the streams or into some sinkhole or simply that the remains had been carried off by a scavenger.

  “The official verdict was ‘death by misadventure.’ To date, no trace of Alexander Swendson has been found. But his mother refused to give up the search. She stayed on long after the first snows began to fall. People in town would often hear her distant voice up the mountain, calling ‘Al-ex-an-der.’ Finally, when winter arrived in full and she refused to give up her searching, her husband had her taken away and placed in a mental institution. They say she’d sit day and night by an open window in her room, calling ‘Al-ex-an-der’ over and over.