The Haunted

by Michaelbrent Collings

  The bedroom door shuddered as something thudded against it. Handprints, black and smoking, appeared on the surface of the wood. Then a long line bisected the door, a smoking demarcation that ran from top to bottom. A moment later, and another smoking furrow appeared, this one running perpendicular to the first at eye level. The door was now separated into four uneven quadrants, the lines smoking and hissing.

  The phone rang. Sarah looked at it. It was on the floor, one end of it splattered by vomit. The sound of its ring seemed so normal, so real, that it was desperately out of place in this caricature of reality that she had somehow fallen into. She looked at the phone dully, and realized that the chanting had stopped when the phone rang. As though the electronic tone had chased away the phantoms, Ma Bell a reality too strong to be overcome by anything as simple as a demonic invasion.

  Sarah looked at her husband. Cap was looking back at her. His eyes flicked to the phone, as though unsure how to react to it. She didn’t blame him. Her own mind seemed to be momentarily stalled. For the time being, inaction seemed to be the best course of action.

  The phone rang again.

  Sarah bent down and picked it up. She lifted up the phone. It rang once more as she did so, and she hit the “talk” button as she held it to her cheek, heedless of the vomit it had been laying in.

  “Hello?” she said. Her voice quivered.

  There was silence on the other side of the line. But it was not the silence of an empty line. It was, rather, the silence of expectancy.

  Then the chanting came. Not from the hall outside, or from beyond the walls of the house this time, but from the phone’s speaker.

  She threw the phone down with a scream. It fell to the floor then bounced twice, hitting the wood hard enough it should have shattered. But it did not break. It fell face down, in one piece. She could still hear the chanting coming through the phone handset. Low but still there, its message tinny but still somehow audible.

  … get out leave get out flee get out leave get out….

  Then the phone flipped over. All the kinetic energy from her throw had been dispelled, she was sure of it. The phone had been motionless, all inertia gone. But it somehow turned over, moved by an unseen force that was beyond her ability to comprehend –

  (though a part of her knew a part of her was coming to understand a part of her was sure what was happening and shied away from it because it was too horrible it was worse than The Before though linked to it linked to it but far far worse)

  – and flipping over so the speaker faced upward. The chanting was still coming from it, only louder now, unmuffled by the floor. Below the chanting, other sounds could be heard, low mutterings and unearthly snufflings that strengthened the fear already burrowing into her heart. The door was thudding as something pounded on it, then she could hear distant slams – it sounded like all the doors in the house had burst open and then clapped shut again. The sound was too much, too much. Sarah screamed, and the scream was lost in the din. She was voiceless, a soundless ghost in this world of noise and fury.

  Her eye caught the television screen. It still showed the baby’s room. The baby’s mobile was going crazy, swinging around, the various toys on it slamming into each other as though propelled by a hurricane. The picture that had been on the baby’s wall but now sat broken on the floor suddenly flew into the air and knifed across the room before smashing to pieces against the opposite wall.

  Somehow, the violence on the screen was the worst. The baby’s room had been invaded, and she knew that she would never again be able to look at the place as safe. There would be no sanctuary for her child. This was like –

  (The Before)

  – her worst nightmare come to life. She cringed against Cap. “Do something,” she screamed, but she didn’t know if he could even hear her over the noise.

  He must have. He seemed to go insane, slamming himself against the door over and over, hitting it as though the door had caused all of this, as though the wooden portal was the source of all misery in the world.

  “Leave us ALONE!” he screamed. He backed up and rushed at the door again, slamming against it with the entire side of his body. The door resisted him, and he bounced off. He scooped the fireplace poker up off the floor and began hitting the door with it.

  “Leave us alone leave us alone leave us alone leave US ALONE!” He shrieked, and his voice was like a competing chant, fighting off the one that was telling them in an inhuman language to abandon their home, to leave their house, to flee from life itself. He pounded the poker into the door, and chips flew off it, biting at Sarah’s cheeks. But she didn’t look away. She was transfixed by the sight of her husband hitting the wood time after time. She felt like to look away would be to surrender. To lose hope and die.

  “Leave us the hell alone!” he shouted one more time, and hit the door a final blow with the poker. The dull point of the metal rod smashed through the door, lodging in the solid wood. As it did, all sound ceased. The chanting stopped, the smell disappeared. The phone died, and there was not even a dial tone left behind. The television flickered off.

  There was only the sound of the rain. Soothing. Normal. And in its own way, this frightened Sarah as much as the assaults against her mind and body that she had just suffered. Because she had a moment in which she dared to hope that she and Cap and the baby she carried would make it through all this. And nothing was so terrible as a slim chance of survival. The instant where the end of the tunnel is glimpsed is the worst time to be hit by a train.

  Cap looked at her, and she could tell he was stunned by the sudden respite.

  “Turn the TV back on,” he said. His voice was hoarse from screaming. He sounded like he had been gargling nails.

  She picked up the remote and thumbed the power button. The television stayed dark, the blank eye of a corpse that would not be resurrected. She walked to the television and tried to turn it on manually. Her hands shook as she reached for the small button on the side of the set. She fumbled for a moment, then found it and pressed it.

  Nothing. The television was dead.

  She glanced at the baby monitor. The LED light was dark. No sound came from the speaker.

  A flash of lightning illuminated the room. Sarah and Cap both looked at the bedroom window automatically, but nothing was there. Neither ghostly face nor dark-robed beast stood at their window to torture them. Rain alone was there, streaking platinum lines across the glass, beading from the panes and then falling into oblivion.

  Cap turned slowly to the door. He moved stiffly, as though he had strained every muscle in his body. He looked at the poker. It was still embedded in the door, a metal stake through a heart of wood. He gripped the handle of the poker and worked it like a lever, up and down up and down up and down, until finally it started to come loose from the door with a crackle of shearing wood.

  The poker left a hole behind. A two-inch peephole. Cap leaned toward it.

  “Honey, don’t,” said Sarah. Her voice was louder than she intended, as though she had been deafened slightly by the recent tumult. She lowered her voice to a whisper and repeated the words.

  Cap held up a hand to silence her. He leaned in close and peered through the hole. He looked out for what seemed an overly long time to Sarah. She suddenly knew that whatever had been in the hall was out there still, just waiting for such an opportunity. She imagined a dark claw stabbing through the hole in the door, a talon that would puncture Cap’s eye and then pierce his brain. The image was so strong that she almost gasped with the strength of it.

  Cap leaned back. He was fine. Still alive, still with her.

  He sighed in some semblance of relief. Sarah also felt her body loosen a bit, though tension coiled just beneath the surface of her skin, ready to jolt her back to action if needed. She doubted she would ever completely relax again.

  Cap unlocked the door. He swung it open.

  The hall was empty.

  They waited there, absolutely still. Cap kept his hand on th
e door, and she knew he would swing it shut again at the slightest hint of danger. There was nothing. Only the steady drum of rain on the roof, the turbulent pounding of her pulse.

  After a few minutes Cap stepped gingerly into the hall. She followed closely, not wanting to leave the meager safety of the bedroom but even less willing to let him brave the corridor alone.

  The doors that lined the hall all hung open. The contents of the rooms were visible in the moonlight and the strokes of lightning that still appeared periodically, accompanied by the distant clap of thunder. The rooms had been violently tossed, their contents strewn about as though buffeted by tsunami waves that had receded and left behind only the destruction of their passing. It was a terrible sight, but Sarah felt comforted. She was startled by this, but only for a moment. She realized that the comfort she felt wasn’t derived from the carnage in their home, but from the feeling in the air. The sense of danger was gone. The perception of threat had disappeared. Whether it would stay gone or not she could not say. She didn’t know if this was the end of the storm or merely a temporary reprieve, but she was for the moment able to breathe normally again.

  “Do you feel it?” she murmured.

  Cap nodded slightly, his head going up and down so quickly it was almost a tremor. But she could see that his face had slackened. Gone were the terrible fear and the even more frightening rage she had seen there.

  All was calm. All was empty. They were alone.

  Cap darted past her, going back into their room. Sarah felt a thrill of fear as he left her. What was he doing? In her gut, she knew that he would never desert her, but still… people did crazy things when they were afraid. And there was no doubt that what they had just been through had terrified them to the core.

  The moment stretched into forever, a Mobius strip of fear, her thoughts running in a circle:

  Did he leave me?

  He wouldn’t.

  But he left.

  But he wouldn’t leave forever.

  Then where is he?

  I don’t know.

  Did he leave me?

  The thoughts went through her head what seemed like a million times. She wanted to go back to the bedroom after him, but her feet seemed like they were nailed down. She couldn’t move.

  She heard a tinkling noise. Her body clenched again. What new horror was coming? What else could possibly happen? And where was Cap?

  The delicate clinking came again, and this time it brought her husband with it. He held the source of the noise in his hand: their keys. He must have been gone only a second or two, if that, getting the keys off the dresser.

  “Come on,” he said. “We’re leaving.”

  She felt relief. No heroics, no pretending that what was happening was just a figment of imagination or the creation of a hysterical mind. They were just going to run.

  Good.

  But even as she thought it, she knew that it wouldn’t be that easy.

  16

  The Third Day

  2:53 am

  ***

  Cap held his wife’s hand firmly in his own. He wouldn’t let go. Couldn’t let go.

  Not again. Not ever again.

  He wondered where those words came from. He knew it was something from what Sarah called The Before, but cast the thought out of his mind. He didn’t have time to think about things like that. He had to get his wife out of the house. Keep his family safe.

  Still, in spite of his sense of urgency, he went slowly, cautiously. He could feel a change in the air around them, like the sudden clarity after the static discharge of a lightning strike. The threat was over for now. But he didn’t feel like rushing down the stairs. The thought of an ambush was front and center in his mind. So every movement down was slow, cautious. Like walking through a minefield, examining every potential step for signs of danger.

  His heart beat hard, but not as hard as he would have expected. Surely after everything that had just happened, he ought to be about six inches shy of a heart attack. But he felt strangely calm, all things considered. As though some part of him knew that their survival depended on his ability to maintain his composure. Having someone depend on you changed your life, in more ways than one. Not least of the changes was the realization that more than just your future was at stake. Cap knew that some people fled from such responsibility, ran from relationships and marriage like they were a consuming fire. But not him. He thrived on the fact that others needed him. So now he was going to make sure that he got Sarah through this. Whether he stayed alive or not was immaterial. His family was everything.

  They got to the bottom of the stairs. Cap looked around. As with the upstairs bedrooms, the doors that lined the downstairs hall were open, the doors hanging askew like rotten teeth. In the oft-recurring lightning flashes, he could glimpse the contents: destroyed and thrown asunder, just like the things that had been upstairs. Their house was a wreck.

  It didn’t matter. They were leaving anyway.

  He and Sarah went to the front door. He threw it open quickly, as though fearing that his nerve would fail him if he moved at normal speeds. The door completed its short arc, opening wide. A light mist of rain that had somehow made its way through the shielding cover of the porch splashed into the house.

  A figure stood on the porch. Cap screamed and raised the poker, though he knew it wouldn’t do any good. The things attacking them were otherworldly in nature, that much was abundantly clear. So how could he think – even for a moment – that a mere fireplace poker would do anything? But it was all he had, so he swung it.

  And in the same instant, something knocked his hand aside. The poker swung wide of its mark, hitting the frame of the open door at an angle that stole all the power from his swing. His arm went numb with the impact. He couldn’t fathom what would have caused him to miss so badly, but then realized it was Sarah. She was screaming at him.

  “Don’t, Cap, no!”

  He stared at her dumbly for a moment, uncertain why she would have stopped him when all he was trying to do was protect her from the threat – the ungodly thing – at their door. Then he realized that what was on the porch was different than any of the other things that had threatened them. It had no marks of mayhem upon its face or body. No sign of death at all. No, this man seemed alive.

  Just like them.

  The man on the porch had his hands raised protectively in front of him. He kept them there a moment, clearly unsure whether Cap was going to attack him again.

  “It’s okay,” said Sarah. Cap wasn’t sure whether she was talking to him or to the newcomer.

  No matter whom she was addressing, the visitor’s hands dropped to his sides and Cap could see him clearly. The man’s face was round, with eyes that were small. Not beady, though; rather they looked as though God has put them on as something of an afterthought after spending the better part of a day working on the man’s cheeks and smile, both of which were full and rosy-colored. Several extra chins sloped below the one he had been born with, and his neck hung in folds above the white and black of the Roman collar cinched around his throat.

  “Are you going to try to hit me again?” said the priest, and a smile pulled at the edges of his wide mouth, “Or can I come in?”

  Cap was struck dumb by the request. To have a visitor in the middle of the night, this night? It was just one more strange event in a night that was by no means normal, but for some reason his mind balked at processing the other man’s question with any kind of speed. Perhaps he was in shock from the tension and terror he and Sarah had been through. Or maybe he was just so used to acting in a sheer blind panic at this point that his mind was no longer able to understand things of a non-life threatening nature. Either way, he couldn’t speak for a moment.

  It wasn’t until he felt Sarah’s hand tighten on his shoulder that something clicked and he found his voice again. “No,” he said. The car keys were in his pocket, and nothing stood between his family and safety. No time to waste. “We’re leaving.”


  “Leaving?” said the priest. He sounded surprised. This struck Cap as being almost unfair. If someone was going to call on him in the middle of the night after he had been attacked by otherworldly powers, what right did that person have to be surprised at anything, much less at the idea that he was – very sensibly – running away?

  Cap didn’t reply. He put the poker down beside the door, then walked out onto the porch. He looked around. The mist was still thick, but seemed less ominous. No frightening figures from beyond the grave showed themselves.

  And the shadowed figure, the dark thing, was nowhere to be seen. This felt like the most important thing to Cap. He wasn’t sure why the black creature scared him so much worse than the others, but it did. He intuited that the maimed and homicidal specters – if that was what they were – were actually less dangerous than the creature that was so fearful it came cloaked in darkness, as though even light itself was terrified to fall upon it.

  That made no sense. The dark being had not specifically moved to harm him or Sarah. Not like the killer with the stovepipe hat. But Cap couldn’t deny the feeling that of all the dangers of the night, the most dangerous was the one clothed in night itself. He felt that, bad as they were, the ghosts had been born of an existence similar to his. They were not like him now, but once had been.

  The dark thing was different. Demonic. It seemed to be from another plane of existence, an alien creature whose motives were confined to the destruction of Cap and Cap’s loved ones.

  But none of the threats were here. It was now or never.

  Cap gestured to Sarah, and she joined him on the porch. Like him, she spent a moment looking around. She looked like a skittish colt, wide-eyed and terrified of dangers unseen.

  She nodded, and Cap knew she was ready. He took her hand. It was warm. It made him feel like they just might make it through all this.