The Haunted

by Michaelbrent Collings

  “Easy, Miss Technologically Handicapped,” Cap answered. He held up a bundle of wires and connectors that appeared to be the duplicate of the ones he had just attached to the television. “I’ll go up and hook the feed into the television in our bedroom, too. So anytime we want to check in on the little dude –”

  “Or little girl,” she said, feeling a deliciously silly thrill at the look Cap shot at her. Before meeting him, she would not have believed that you could see someone be irritated at you and still love them so much. But it was true. She couldn’t stop herself from loving him. Like he was some kind of benign drug that she had become hopelessly addicted to.

  “So any time we want to see the little boy we just turn on either TV to this channel, and voila!”

  Sarah hugged him. “So oo is my big stwong technowogy man after all,” she said.

  Cap pushed her away. “So you’re going to make fun of me and then think you get access to lovin’?” he said. He turned his back on her. “No way, no how. Full love embargo, baby.”

  Sarah sniggered. “Yeah, like that’s going to last.”

  “What?” said Cap. “I have the iron self-control of....” His voice petered out as he apparently couldn’t think of a properly scathing way to finish his sentence. Finally he settled on, “… of a thing made of some kind of iron. And that has self-control.” He stuck out his chest like Superman.

  And, to her, he was. In fact, he was better. He was her Captain America.

  A thought struck her: “What about sound?”

  “Sound?

  “We still need to be able to hear the baby.”

  “Ah,” he said, and put a finger to his chin as though thinking about something monumentally important. “Well, you can listen to the sound either through the television, or….” Cap moved his hands around in a circle like a stage magician proving nothing was up his sleeve. Then he produced a white speaker receiver from his pocket. “You can use this,” he said, extending the speaker to Sarah with a flourish.

  She took it. It was the kind that could be plugged in or could run on batteries. A belt clip meant that she would be able to take it with her wherever she went, and there were a series of lights on the front of the speaker. She knew that the lights were visual representations of the sound: the louder the baby got, the more lights would turn on. That was nice in case she didn’t want to hear static all the time, but still needed to know if the baby was crying out or such.

  “My hero!” she cried as she slipped the clip onto her belt. It felt good there. Right. She was a mother. Or at least a mother-to-be.

  In that instant, the view of the baby’s room that had lit the screen flashed and disappeared suddenly, replaced by static. Cap picked up the TV remote again and pressed a few buttons, but nothing happened. The view of the baby’s room did not return.

  “Maybe I spoke too soon,” said Sarah. “Should have said ‘my technologically handicapped hero.’”

  Cap grunted and clutched his chest as though the statement had wounded him to the quick. “I’ll fix it,” he said.

  He disappeared behind the television. She could hear him moving connectors around.

  The living room was suddenly utterly silent. Even the static the television was showing was noiseless. The only sounds were the muffled scrapes of metal on metal as Cap tried to work his magic.

  The static on the television set was almost hypnotizing. It felt to Sarah as though the feeling of being watched that had plagued her so for the last day had returned. The eye of the monster that had been staring at her was the television, a square and unblinking vortex of malevolence. It never closed, and she suddenly felt trapped in front of it. A tiny creature in the eyeline of a massive predator.

  The static swirled and whirled, black and white pixels dancing and colliding like a monochromatic mosh pit. Sarah leaned in close to the television, as though she was being reeled in by some force that was beyond her control, beyond her ability to counteract.

  Her nose was almost touching the screen.

  Then there was a tiny, almost inaudible click, and the static disappeared, replaced by the shot of the baby’s room. Sarah tensed automatically. This would be the perfect moment for something to jump out of the television at her, or for some kind of monster to appear on the screen.

  But nothing did. The baby’s room was just a baby’s room.

  Cap emerged from behind the television.

  “What was wrong?” said Sarah, not moving from her position in front of the TV.

  “I don’t have the foggiest,” answered Cap. “Everything was connected nice and tight. I jiggled a few of the cables, so maybe that’s what did it.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Weird, though.”

  “Yeah,” said Sarah. “Weird.”

  9

  The Second Day

  5:58 pm

  ***

  Sarah picked up a plastic trash bag. Then another. Then she managed to grip a third, though her arms felt so heavy she wouldn’t have been surprised if she couldn’t move.

  She took a step, and then put the bags down. She could hold them. But she felt a strange pulling sensation in her belly when she took that first step. She couldn’t tell if it had been Brackston-Hicks contractions, the false contractions that most pregnant women experience as their body prepares itself for the tremendous effort it will have to make when actually having the baby; or if it was something else. Something less healthy and more ominous.

  She remembered a terrifying moment with Cap some nights before. She had been laying in bed when she rolled over and heard a tremendous crack from her pelvis. Cap was up and out of bed in an instant, ready to take her to the hospital. It had sounded that bad.

  Luckily, it didn’t hurt nearly as badly as the sound might have indicated. She called her ob/gyn doctor the next morning, and found out that every pregnant woman’s pelvic bones stretch apart as the pregnancy develops. Hers had apparently just crammed the entire process into a ten second window. The cracking had been her pelvic bones shifting massively.

  She felt like that right now, like she had the instant before her pelvis made that horrible noise. She didn’t want to risk doing anything wrong – anything that might harm either her or the baby – so she put the bags back down and stood very still.

  After two full minutes, neither the sound nor the pain had repeated or returned, so she judged it safe to pick up the trash bags and continue with what she had been doing. She walked slowly, though, almost gingerly. She wasn’t going to take any chances harming the child. Not ever.

  She went through the living room, into the hall, and marched heavily up to the front door. It had not managed to stay in one place all day long. If you closed it, it opened. If you opened it, the thing apparently had an attack of agoraphobia and shut itself.

  Normally this would have bothered – even terrified – Sarah, but at this moment she viewed it as a godsend. She knew she had closed the door after her last trip to the trash can, but true to form it had swung open again. So getting through it with her hands full of slightly-too-heavy trash bags was easier than it should have been.

  She stepped out onto the porch, her footsteps pounding hollowly on the wood slats below her feet. There were a few wood steps to negotiate, the garbage cans sitting at the bottom of them. But Sarah only made it as far as the top step.

  The garbage bags fell from her suddenly nerveless grasp.

  Someone was there. Something.

  The thing stood only perhaps twenty feet away, but even though the sun had not yet completed its downward arc, even though spears of light still flashed between the limbs of the forest trees, she could make out no features. Vaguely man-shaped, it was covered in what seemed like a living darkness that wrapped itself around it in billowy waves of shadows. No face was visible.

  For a long time, Sarah just stared at the figure. She felt paralyzed. As though the creature had some power that enabled it to secure her tightly to her spot. She tried to step away, and couldn’t do it
. She couldn’t make her feet work, couldn’t get her legs muscles to respond. There were no bars around her, but she was in a cage, as surely as any animal in a trap.

  The figure slowly raised a dark arm. No hand was visible within the depths of its voluminous shadows. The arm pointed straight at her.

  Sarah couldn’t run. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t scream. Terror flooded through her, the dam that held back her darkest emotions cracking under the pressure of that single upraised arm.

  Sounds emerged from within the depths of the thing’s shadows. Whispers reminiscent of the ones that had led her to the closet last night issued forth, sibilant susurrations that made her skin go clammy in the same instant that gooseflesh rose all over her body. She wanted to run, but also wanted to stay, wanted to find out what the… thing… was saying.

  “What do you want?” she said. The words came out in a murmur, barely louder than the strange noises of the dark figure. Barely loud enough to reach her own ears, let alone those of the threatening figure before her. If it even had ears. Sarah had to admit to herself that she was not at all sure it did. And whether human or monster, there was no denying the palpable feeling of threat that came off it in almost visible waves.

  The whispering rose in volume, though it still remained completely unintelligible. The sounds were like those of English, the words linking and rolling into and over each other like waves against a beach. But she didn’t understand it. It was as though someone had put the thing’s words through a computer that mixed them up into gibberish.

  As the sound rose, Sarah felt all volition fleeing her. Then the figure – hand still upraised threateningly – stepped toward her, and the spell over her was broken. She turned and ran into the house, sprinting across the porch in a single long stride, then inside the hall in another. She spun around without stopping and slammed the door, locking it and then double locking it, sliding the dead bolt into place with a solid thud that was less reassuring than it should have been.

  A hand fell on her shoulder. It was the dark thing, she knew it. It had somehow beaten her inside. She screamed and pushed the hand away as though it were an insect of record size.

  “You okay?”

  The words only penetrated her panic-soaked brain after a long moment of confusion. Okay? Why would a clearly evil monster worry about whether she was okay?

  Then, gradually, she recognized the voice.

  It was Cap, looking at her with a face bereft of its usual humor. His face looked pinched and drawn tight as a skin over a drum. Two bright red fever spots stood out on his face, one on each cheek, and it looked to Sarah’s panicked mind as though he were himself already dead, a corpse laid out on some mortician’s slab, liberal use of rouge the only thing bringing color to his lifeless face.

  Sarah shook her head and gestured at the door. Cap moved her gently out of the way, then peered out the small window that was set into the side of the door.

  He opened it.

  “No, don’t!” she screamed, but she was already too late. Cap moved out the door and disappeared from her view as he stepped outside. He had left the tenuous safety of the home and now was gone. Forever, she suspected.

  A new noise came. Similar to the whisperings, but subtly different. Less alive seeming, less organic.

  A thud sounded outside. A heavy footstep.

  And then Cap stepped in. Holding the garbage bags that she had dropped when she saw the thing of darkness. They crinkled slightly in his grip, making the noises she had just heard.

  “You dropped these,” he said. Then, “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  Sarah had no answer for him.

  10

  The Second Day

  7:30 pm

  ***

  The atmosphere had changed. Gone was the pleasant anticipation Cap had felt in the air this morning at breakfast. Now, Sarah hunched over her dinner in silence. He had barely been able to coax two words out of her since she came inside looking so strange and stunned.

  The meal itself was nothing to write home about. A pair of TV dinners. He had no idea how Sarah’s was, but his tasted like someone had shaped cardboard into the shape of an emaciated chicken breast and then poured liberal amounts of tomato sauce-flavored wax over it all. He picked at it for a few more minutes, hoping vainly to break the spell of dread that had settled over the house. Finally, though, he pushed the tray away from him and looked at Sarah.

  He gazed at her a long while, but she studiously avoided looking at him. Or anything else.

  “You want to talk about it?” he said. His voice sounded almost blasphemous in the muffling silence of the room. Like he had spoken out of turn at a church, or like he was an intruder on holy ground.

  Sarah laughed bitterly. The sound spoke volumes of her despair. Cap hadn’t heard her laugh like that in forever. “About what?” she said. “Me going crazy?”

  “No one says you’re crazy,” he said. He said it fast, meaning to reassure her, but realized almost at the same moment that he probably sounded like someone in denial more than he sounded like a voice of reason.

  Sarah looked over her shoulder. Out the kitchen window. Cap followed her gaze. The light in the kitchen was low enough that it didn’t cause an impenetrable glare or turn the window into a hazy mirror. He could see out, though dimly.

  The woods outside were dark. Thick mist started to roll off the trees, wraith-fingers pulling themselves slowly across the meadow. But inexorably, inevitably. The mist would soon ring the house, would soon cover it like a soft blanket and make the windows all but useless for keeping watch.

  “I’m seeing things that aren’t there,” said Sarah, and Cap didn’t have to look at her face to know she was crying. “That sounds pretty crazy to me.”

  “You just saw one thing,” Cap protested. He ached to reach out and hold her, but held himself back. She needed comfort for her mind, not for her body. Sometimes he could just hug her, and that was enough. Not this time, he sensed. What was happening now was something that no mere embrace could solve. “Just the one thing,” he repeated, “and it could have been anything. It could have been –”

  “What?” she interrupted. “What could it have been?”

  The words were a challenge. A dare.

  Cap had never walked away from a challenge in his life. At least, not that he could remember. But he knew that he was going to have to walk away from this one. Either that or lose. Because the fact was, his wife had seen something. And yet when he had gone to look, there was nothing there.

  He thought about telling her what had happened yesterday with the truck. Maybe that would make her feel better, to know that she wasn’t the only one to witness something strange. He rejected the idea almost as fast as he came up with it. He doubted adding one more strange occurrence to the devouring fire of her fear and confusion would do much to assuage her concerns.

  “What could it have been?” she asked again. And this time her voice was small, almost childlike.

  “I don’t know,” Cap finally admitted. He looked at his hands, seeking answers among the lines and wrinkles that creased his palms. No wisdom was written there. “Tomorrow we’ll call someone,” he finally said. “We’ll get you looked at.” The words curled his mouth. Nothing was wrong with Sarah. Nothing could be wrong with her, because if anything happened to her, if she had a brain tumor or was losing her mind, that would destroy him. Anything, any explanation, no matter how farfetched or frightening, was preferable to the idea of losing Sarah physically or mentally.

  “With what money?” she said.

  And there was that, he had to admit. Neither of them had insurance right now. They had saved up for the house, and had saved enough extra to take care of the costs of the baby’s birth. But they were stretched tight. Ordering batteries of tests on his wife – tests that would prove damning no matter how they turned out – was out of the question if they wanted to stay here.

  And that was another reality. Even moving out would cost them. It woul
d cost them time, and effort, and money. And he didn’t know if they had any of those available, let alone all three.

  For the moment, at least, they were stuck.

  11

  The Third Day

  1:54 am

  ***

  Cap sat up in bed. He had heard something. Something that had yanked him out of a strange dream, a dream of –

  (The Before)

  – strange places and people. Things that he had never seen before, yet somehow knew and understood. Then the dream fled, chased away by the sound.

  He didn’t know what it was, his sleep-fogged brain kept him from knowing the particulars of the sound that had jerked him out of his slumber, but he knew for a fact that it was a noise.

  It happened again. A low thud, then barely audible rasping, as though someone was moving boxes or furniture around the house. Cap thought about whether he should just ignore the noise and go back to sleep, or get out of bed and investigate. He waited for the noise to repeat. It was gone. He lay back down in bed, closed his eyes, and – there! It happened again. No thud this time, but the low raspy sound – almost like some kind of weird whispering, but with an alien undertone – resumed.

  Cap looked at Sarah. She hadn’t stirred, so the sound must not have made it through the walls of sleep that surrounded her tonight. He thought about waking her up, but decided against it. What was she going to do? Worry even more? Pitch herself into a nervous hysteria?

  No, he would handle this himself. Find out what the noise was coming from first, then decide if it was worth waking Sarah.

  He walked on bare feet over to the bedroom door and pushed it slowly open. The tiniest of squeaks accompanied the movement. But though the sound was fairly quiet, still it raked across his ears like talons on slate.

  The whisper-noises stopped. So did Cap, freezing in place halfway through the bedroom door.

  Then they resumed again. He stepped the rest of the way into the hall. He wondered for a moment what he thought he was doing. What if it was an intruder making those sounds? What if it was an armed man, come to rob them or worse?