The Haunted

by Michaelbrent Collings

  She took another step toward the stereo. It was like leaning into a storm. Or no, that wasn’t it. It was like she was trying to push into a crowd, to occupy space that had already been staked out by someone else.

  The stereo grew louder as she walked toward it. Too loud. She felt like her eardrums were on the verge of bursting, and she wondered fleetingly if it was possible for sound to kill a person.

  She thought it might be.

  Finally, though, she made it to the stereo. She stabbed her finger against the power button so hard that she thought it likely she was going to end up with a bruise tomorrow.

  The music cut off. In the aftermath of the onslaught of sound, the silence was almost painful. She could hear her breathing, ragged as a torn cloth. Her pulse thundered through her ears. And that was fine. Because as long as she was hearing her breath, as long as her heartbeat was audible, it meant that the noise that had been attacking her had abated.

  She felt her stomach, surprised that the baby hadn’t jumped at the sound. But it was peaceful. Sleeping so deeply within her that the noise had failed to penetrate its cocoon of safety.

  Sarah swallowed thickly. Her throat felt sticky and dry at the same time.

  She looked up as another thud rattled through the house. Cap was still working. Hadn’t he heard?

  On the heels of that thought, the stereo shrieked to life again.

  ***

  Cap pushed a steamer trunk up against the shelving that lined one side of the attic. Dimly, he was aware of the sound of music coming from below. Sarah must have hooked up the stereo. That was good, he thought. Maybe a bit of music to accompany the final celebration he had in mind for tonight.

  The music sounded a bit odd, but he figured that must be because he was hearing it through two floors of the house. The sound must be bouncing all over the place. It sounded like a funhouse sound track.

  Then, as suddenly as it began, it was silent again, only the sound of his breath and the rasping scrape of cardboard on wood as he continued shuffling things around.

  Guess she decided not to listen after all, he thought.

  The sound blared again.

  “On or off, dear?” he said to himself.

  He glanced down the stairs, and was surprised to see that the door to the hall was closed. He was concerned for a moment, then realized he was getting himself in a tizzy over what was probably nothing. Lots of houses had doors that shut on their own, either because they had tension hinges that swung them closed automatically, or just because they were hung poorly and tended to open or close on their own.

  He bent back to the box.

  Nothing to worry about.

  ***

  Sarah turned off the stereo almost instantly. And this time, she didn’t just hit the power button. Rather, she reached down and yanked the power cord from its outlet. There was a flash of blue electricity arcing as the connection between the plug and the wall outlet was broken, and the radio died.

  She stood still, the cord still clenched in her fist, half expecting the stereo to blare to life again. It didn’t.

  But though the stereo had been stilled, the room was not silent. A new noise scraped through the air. It was quiet, barely a whisper, but in spite of that she felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle to attention. She looked around, once more trying to find the genesis for a sound that should not have existed in the first place.

  The sound was strange and low. It made her think of dark things crawling through soil, bony fingers reaching up to push through the dirt that had been packed above them, undead things reaching up to find light and life again.

  Stop it.

  She moved to the end of the living room, then stepped through a swinging door that led to the kitchen. Shadows reigned in the room. Some light streamed through the kitchen windows, but not much. The moon had not yet risen, and few stars added their brightness to the clear air.

  She flicked on a light before walking into the kitchen. She felt a bit silly doing it, like she had suddenly reverted from grown woman to small child, frightened to step into the basement without making sure the light was on first. But she didn’t feel silly enough to stop herself from reaching out and hitting the light switch.

  The light that illuminated the kitchen was warm and soft, coming from recessed bulbs that peeked out of the ceiling every few feet. The kind of light that went well with homemade meals and laughing families. But the light didn’t warm her. She stepped into the room, cocking her head to listen for the mysterious noise. A part of her wanted to ignore it, but a larger part of her wanted to find out what it was. Because if she didn’t know what it was, it could be anything. Anything at all. And she couldn’t stand that. She had to know, so that she could convince herself that nothing was amiss, and hopefully put to rest the pervasive feelings of strangeness that had gripped her through the day.

  As she stepped into the kitchen, the sound faded. It wasn’t in here. Somewhere else.

  She turned back around and pushed open the door to the living room.

  The lights in the living room were off.

  Didn’t I leave them on?

  She knew she had, but allowed herself to think that perhaps she was mistaken; that she had automatically turned off the light in the living room as she walked out. That sounded like her, didn’t it? Trying to conserve energy and keep the power bill at a manageable level?

  She reached through the doorway and turned the lights back on. She was trembling.

  “Hon?” she called out. Maybe this was all some elaborate prank by Cap. It wouldn’t be beyond him to want to scare her. But she didn’t think so. This didn’t feel like him. It felt too angry. Too real.

  As soon as she spoke, the undercurrent of sound that had been rasping like sandpaper across her mind was suddenly gone. She breathed in relief and stepped back into the living room.

  And the sound started again.

  It led her through the living room. She felt like she was in some kind of hypnotic trance. She wanted to leave off the search for whatever was making this strange noise, at least long enough to go get Cap and rope him into looking with her. But she couldn’t. Instead she walked through the living room, barely glancing at the now-silent stereo tower that crouched like a strange black bug on the rug. She followed the sound, the strange sound, the other sound.

  The other sound.

  As she thought about it, she realized that whatever the sound turned out to be, it was truly an other sound. Something not her. Not Cap. Alien. Perhaps malignant, but at the very least unhappy. It didn’t belong here with them.

  She thought again about turning away from the sound, about going up to the attic and getting Cap. But she realized that even if she decided to do that, she’d still have to go through the living room and into the hall. That was where she was already headed. So why not just go into the hall and see what happened then? She could decide what to do when she got to the foot of the stairs.

  A part of her realized that she wasn’t making much sense. She had already decided to follow the sound. She didn’t have a choice, any more than a fish could ignore a bright lure in the water, regardless of the hook set into it.

  She entered the hallway. It was long and narrow, a passage with several doors. They were all closed.

  Sarah walked forward, and could almost feel the hook set itself firmly in her mouth, ready to drag her out of her safe pond at any second.

  She knew somehow that the noise wasn’t coming from any of the doors that lined the hall. But she couldn’t just walk past them. Ugly images of strange creatures springing out of the dark rooms after she passed by, jumping on her from behind and clawing bleeding furrows in her back, sprung unbidden into her mind. She had to check the rooms out first.

  She went to the first closed door and turned the handle. She swung it open with a push, the door disappearing into the darkness beyond. She reached in and turned on the light. It was a bathroom. Sink. Toilet.

  Bathtub.

  The batht
ub was the old-fashioned variety, a large vat that was not set into the floor or wall, but rather sat upright on four bronzed feet. The feet themselves were fashioned to look like paws of some kind, perhaps those of a bear, thick and with the hint of claws peeking out of the metal fur. A curtain hung around the outside of the bath, obscuring the inside of the tub.

  She didn’t allow herself to think about what she was doing, just darted out a hand and ripped the curtain aside.

  For an instant she thought she saw something in the tub. But it was gone before she had more than the barest sense of what it might have been. Just a vague feeling of something there.

  Then it was empty. White porcelain gleaming in the room’s bright light.

  Movement caught her eye. She turned, and saw her reflection in the mirror set above the small sink to her left. She could also see a bit of the hallway in the reflection, and though she could see nothing there, she had the feeling that something had been there a fraction of an instant before.

  The whispering noise, that scrabbling-rasping-scratching noise that she had come to find, grew slightly in volume. Not much, not enough to hear what it actually was, but enough that it made Sarah feel slightly nauseous. Nor could she attribute the sensation to her pregnancy. Her nausea months – what Cap called “puke time” – were long past. Besides, when that had been happening, it had always been a sour taste at the back of her throat, a subtle malaise that spread gradually through her body until she felt herself running to the bathroom to hunch over the toilet. This was different. It was more like someone had a hand in her guts, pulling and twisting them in ways they weren’t meant to go. She actually looked down for a moment, half-convinced she might see a ghostly arm embedded in her body, a demonic creature pulling the unborn child from within her.

  But there was nothing, of course. Just her pregnant belly. Just the baby.

  The noise wouldn’t go away. And she couldn’t stop looking for it.

  Two more doors to go.

  She opened the next one. She gasped without meaning to, and stepped back in surprise. The room was full of ghosts!

  And as fast as the thought flitted through her head, it was gone. Not ghosts. The items in the room, furniture and various boxes, were half-covered in sheets and moving blankets that appeared almost luminous against the darkness. It looked almost as though the previous occupants of the house had been in the middle of painting the room when they had moved, leaving the job half-finished in their haste to leave.

  As she had done in the bathroom, Sarah reached into the room and flicked the light switch. This time, however, no bulb flickered to life. All remained dark. She took a timorous step into the room. Walking into any dark space, especially one littered with objects that could provide myriad hiding spots, was not something she wanted to do, but the strange compulsion that had gripped her before still held sway over her movements.

  The sound faded almost immediately when her feet crossed the invisible demarcation between the room and the hall. She turned around with relief and reentered the lighted corridor, swinging the door closed behind her. She didn’t want to leave it open at her back.

  One door left.

  Another room full of objects half-covered by sheets and moving pads. A sewing machine was set up on a sewing table, but the normally homey objects did nothing to quell her fear or slow the speeding patter of her heartbeat. She touched the light switch, and this time the light – thankfully – turned on. She stepped into the room.

  And froze.

  One of the sheets had moved. Not much, but it had definitely shifted slightly. Too much to be her imagination. Too much to ignore.

  Sarah stood still for what seemed like a million years. A sudden pain raced through her and she felt her uterus contract. She gritted her teeth. Another dubious pleasure of pregnancy: periodic contractions as her body readied itself for the inevitable exertion and trauma of birthing the child. She knew it would pass, but it was never pleasant. Her stomach felt as hard as a rock, and she felt an intense need to urinate.

  The feeling passed, and she was almost sad about it. At least for that instant, the instant of discomfort, the sound she was following had lost its grip on her. But now it was back. She had to figure out what was going on.

  She felt again like she was an outside observer, watching as her hand reached forward to grab the corner of the sheet that had moved. It clenched a fold of the white cloth. She took a breath.

  She threw the sheet aside.

  And screamed as a mouse ran out from under the sheet with an aggravated squeal, clearly annoyed that she had ruined a perfectly good hiding spot.

  “Eww, yuck, ick, gross!” she shouted, her hands waving up and down in tight lines in front of her face as her body tried to find a suitable way to express its disgust. She danced out of the way as the mouse beelined for her feet, running between her legs and disappearing into the hall behind her. She shivered spastically, as though her body was trying to shake off the lingering traces of the rodent’s presence.

  As soon as she spoke, the sound she had been following, that strange, barely-heard whisper, ceased.

  “Hello?” she said, and was disturbed to hear how thin her voice sounded, as though she was not speaking in the safe confines of a room, but rather was directing her voice into a dark abyss. Her voice didn’t bounce off the walls as it should. It seemed to be swallowed up instantly, like the house was rejecting not just her, but her very voice. She felt like an alien, an interloper.

  No. This is my house.

  Curtains covered the sole window in this room. Moving on impulse, she marched across the room and flipped them open with a decisive flick of her hand.

  There was nothing outside. Only the dark sky, the grass. And the woods. The trees, their skeletal branches spearing through the darkness like black cracks in reality, reaching toward the sky like souls in agony.

  She turned away, letting the curtain fall shut behind her.

  The whispering returned.

  She walked back into the hall. The noise grew louder. Then louder still as she walked toward the foot of the stairs that led to the second floor. It was almost discernible. It sounded somehow familiar, a low volume replay of some nightmare only half-remembered. Somehow, it reminded her of The Before.

  “Hello?” she said again. She looked up the stairs to the second floor. The lights were all off up there. Darkness swallowed the stairs halfway up, a black hole that didn’t permit anything – even light – to escape.

  “No thanks,” she said to herself. Cap was up there, up above somewhere, but at the moment she felt supremely alone, and didn’t have the nerve to walk up into the neverworld of the second floor.

  “Hon?” she called. But she didn’t have much hope that Cap would hear. He was only in the attic, she knew, but for some reason that felt like he was someplace impossibly far away. She couldn’t rely on him to help her find what she needed.

  The whisperings ceased once more. A thud came from somewhere nearby.

  Sarah looked around. Where had the sound come from? She had already checked the rooms down here, so where….

  The closet. It was set under the stairs, a door that had been crafted to match the paint job and molding of the rest of the wall. She had walked right past it. Now, she backtracked quickly, standing in front of it.

  She looked around. No one else was in sight.

  The whisperings started again. And this time, there was no question where they were coming from.

  Sarah stared at the nearly hidden door. “If this is a joke, dear, you are not only not getting any loving tonight, you are sleeping on the couch.” She said it loud, though there was no hope at all that Cap was behind this. If nothing else, he didn’t have the patience for it. If it had been him, he would have popped out long ago, laughing hysterically at her fright.

  I should walk away, she thought. I should leave.

  But the very idea felt like poison.

  This is my house. I won’t leave.

  She
reached out and grabbed the small knob on the side of the door. She turned it.

  The whispers grew louder. Urgent. Something was wrong, they seemed to be telling her. Don’t do this. Don’t. They were urging her away. Warding her off.

  But she wouldn’t be swayed. She opened the door, feeling like a somnambulist in the grip of a hyper-realistic dream.

  Darkness was beyond the doorway.

  The whispers stopped. But she knew she had found their source. The air was expectant. The entire universe – a universe which consisted for the moment only of her and the house – seemed to wait for her to move.

  She leaned forward slightly, trying to peer into the closet. It couldn’t be more than a few feet deep. There wasn’t room under the stairs for more than that.

  So why couldn’t she see inside? The light of the hall seemed to literally stop before going into the closet, not daring to enter.

  She leaned closer. As with the rooms, she felt a longing to enter the space. But now, this close to whatever it was that had led her to this point, she was able to fight back the urge. She wasn’t going in there.

  But she couldn’t leave, either. She stood still before the dark portal, light on her side, permanent midnight beyond.

  Her arm raised before her until it was parallel to the floor below. Her hand was clenched into a fist, so tight that her nails dug into her palms, the tips of her knuckles hanging only inches in front of the strange line where even the light dared not cross.

  Slowly, her index finger extended. She pointed at the closet, then pushed forward. Slow. One-half inch at a time.

  Her fingertip moved into the darkness.

  And in the same instant, she heard it. Not the whispers, not this time. Though there was no doubt in her mind that they had come from here. Her stomach twisted again. She had a sickening moment where her bowels felt loose and thought she might lose control of her bodily functions. Because it was a voice. Not Cap’s. Not the voice of anyone she had ever heard before. Screaming. She thought she saw a flash of red in the darkness of the closet, and then even that was swallowed up in her mind by the overpowering strength of the sound. Three words that felt like shards of glass driving into her face, sharp and angry and deadly: