The Haunted

by Michaelbrent Collings

  “I don’t know either.”

  They stood in silence for a long time. The latch jiggled one more time, then silence fell around them like a soft quilt of winter snow.

  “What do we do now?” Sarah said.

  Cap had no answer for her.

  21

  The Third Day

  4:06 am

  ***

  Sarah watched Cap. He was peering out the small window of the attic. His face shone dimly, illuminated by what moonlight remained. She could see his expression shift slightly as he clenched his jaw.

  “What’s out there?” she asked. She was afraid to know, but more afraid of the consequences of not knowing.

  Cap remained where he was, long enough she wondered if he had heard her. Then he turned away from the window, his face grim. “The shadow things are standing in a circle outside the house. Looks like they’re communing or something.”

  “Or getting ready to try for us again.” Sarah felt tears track down her face. “Why is this happening? Why is this happening to us?”

  Cap walked quickly to her. He took her in his arms, holding her tightly. His touch was comforting, but his words were not. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know.”

  Sarah let herself relax into his arms. She felt like sleeping. Just curling up and drifting away, going to a place where the things in and around the house could not follow her. She realized that this was a dangerous thought, a precursor to giving up and giving in, but she couldn’t chase it out of her mind. It would be so easy. So easy to just let the darkness take them, to succumb to the forces that had targeted her and her family.

  She tried to pull Cap closer, but her belly got in the way. She suddenly resented the baby she held. It was keeping her from her husband, it was making every step of this ordeal heavier and harder. Her strength was ebbing. She felt like she hadn’t eaten forever.

  “Is there anything to eat up here?” she said. The words came of their own accord. She let them. Wanting to eat was good. It meant that there was a part of her that still hadn’t given up. That wanted to live. To survive and find a way to thrive.

  A spasm passed through Cap’s body, almost like a silent hiccup, and she realized that it was as close as he could come right now to a laugh: a silent convulsion as he bit back a chuckle before it even left him. “Helluva time to want to eat.”

  A rasping noise filtered up from the stairwell. Familiar. The same noise that they had heard earlier, the sound of a ghastly parody of a baby clawing at the door. Cap let go of her and stood at the top of the stairs. “Get out of here!” he screamed.

  Silence greeted his cry. Then laughter, soft and almost innocent sounding. The sound seemed to mock Sarah as she pictured the pure laughter coming from the mottled, bloated face of the child-thing. It was obscene. Blasphemous. A creation that should never have come into being.

  “Come and playyyyy….”

  The laughter danced through the attic like Puck through a dark faerie wood. Then the sound was gone. The attic door rattled again. This time the sound was more frenzied, the rat-ta-tat-tat of wood against wood sounding like a machine gun in the closed area of the attic.

  Cap turned away from the door and crossed his arms as though refusing to acknowledge the existence of the things beyond it. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened them he looked calmer than he had.

  “Let’s look around,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “Beats me.” He shrugged. “Maybe we’ll find something useful up here.”

  “That proton pack you were hoping for before?” she suggested.

  “Stranger things have happened.”

  He certainly had a point. She went with him to the shelves that lined the attic walls. Boxes and other items were everywhere. Most of the unboxed items she dismissed instantly as being unhelpful, and she focused on the boxes. Cap, she saw, was doing the same.

  “Geez,” he muttered. “I don’t even recognize half this stuff.”

  After a moment, Sarah was in agreement with him. Panic and the accompanying disorientation that accompanied it had rendered their possessions suddenly unfamiliar. As though the ghosts had not merely ravaged their home, but had replaced their belongings with those of another family. She knew it was only her imagination, but the feeling persisted. She tried to shake it off. This was her house! The strange and dark forces at work around her might force her out of it, but they couldn’t force her to believe that she didn’t belong here. Those things were the interlopers, not her.

  She felt a bit comforted. Everything still seemed odd to her, she still felt displaced, but at least she hadn’t given up. She was still fighting.

  “Ah-ha!” Cap grunted. She heard a click, and a fluorescent camping lamp switched on. He must have found it in one of the boxes. The gray/white/blue gleam of the fluorescent bulbs illuminated the attic with a light that was bright but sterile. Harsh shadows slashed through the spaces behind the objects on the shelves, and carved into the skin of Cap’s face, leaving behind the clear outlines of his skull. She preferred the light to the darkness, but not by much.

  They turned back to their task. At first Sarah moved quickly, going through box after box, rapidly scanning the contents for anything that could be put to use. But soon she slowed as she began to despair of finding anything that would help them out of their predicament. What was she hoping for? A ghost trap? An old copy of A Homeowner’s Guide to Casting out Demons and the Dead that had been tucked up here and forgotten?

  The door rattled again. This time the sound was ferocious, the rattling noise of someone trying desperately to get into the room. Then the rattling subsided, replaced almost instantly by a low thudding as something threw itself against the door, smashing into it repeatedly.

  Cap stopped working. She saw him move to the top of the stairs. She remained where she was. Staring at the shelves. Motionless. She felt hope trickling steadily out of her, like fine sand through the neck of an hourglass.

  “What the hell are those things?” Cap said, loud enough that he was almost yelling. Sarah could hear frustration, fear, and fatigue warring for control of his voice. But she couldn’t bring herself to move, to go to him or try to comfort him or shelter him from the danger. What was the use?

  Then screaming came from the attic door. The shrieking of voices in pain. She wondered why, wondered what could cause even the undead to cry out.

  Then she heard it.

  The chanting had begun again. The low sound of the dark things that were somehow worse than even the ghosts pummeled its way through the thick wood of the door, then punched at her ears.

  Cap cried out in rage and pain, and clapped his hands over his ears. Sarah did the same, though her hands felt like lead weights at the ends of her arms.

  Through the din of the ululation, she also heard something hitting the attic door again. This time, though, it was harder. It sounded almost like someone was taking a battering ram to the door. She wondered how long it would hold; if the chair would prove sufficient to keep them safe.

  The chanting gradually quieted from a roar to a low wail. In spite of its decreased volume, though, it was still almost painful to hear. It picked its way into the crevices of her mind, trying to root out her fears, trying to bring her terror to the surface.

  The Before.

  She pushed that thought from her mind.

  She began going through boxes again, more as a distraction than because of any hope that she might find anything. Soon she abandoned all pretense and just began dumping the boxes on the floor. She dropped one box, moved on to the next. Then the next.

  Then, as she removed the third box, she heard a dull thud. Something had fallen. She put the box down and looked at the shelf she had taken it from. It was the top shelf, but she could barely see what had made the noise by backing up a step and rising up on her tiptoes.

  A book was there. It was brown, its cover looking like leather over cardboard or maybe even wood. She wondered
whose it could be. She knew it didn’t matter, that even wasting a single thought on something as mundane as a book was foolish, perhaps even reckless under the circumstances, but the book drew her eyes to it and would not let go.

  She pulled it off the shelf. It was heavier than it looked, and somehow solemn. For some reason she was reminded of a funeral she had been to as a little girl, watching a coffin lowered into the ground, never to see the light of day again. The coffin had been solemn in the same way the book was: holding the final remains of a person inside them, the period that punctuated the end of a human life.

  “What’s this, honey?” she asked.

  Cap paused his activity only long enough to glance at her. “Don’t know,” he said. “Found it unpacking.”

  Sarah propped the book against the edge of a lower shelf, letting the bottom edge of it rest on her belly.

  Pregnancy can be useful after all.

  She opened the book.

  The cover creaked as she opened it, confirming her suspicion that it was bound with leather. The first pages were blank, and she turned past them. They were thick and felt brittle, like ancient vellum from a past age. She could hear Cap moving things around on the shelves he was searching, as well as the chanting, but both fell away from her conscious attention as she turned to the first page with anything on it.

  It was a newspaper article. Cracked and yellowed with age. Written as though it had come from a time before computers, perhaps before mechanized presses of any kind. The headline read “House of ill Repute Burns Down In Spite of best Efforts By Local Fire Brigade, One Volunteer Killed.” The length of the headline alone was enough to convince her that she was looking at a clipping from a distant past. She scanned the article, wondering why she felt chills going up and down her spine. It was written in an inflammatory style, the author either never having heard of balanced reporting or not caring to use it in this instance. The focus of the piece seemed to be a vicious excoriation of those who would “stoop to utilize the Questionable Facilities,” without much ado about the fire itself, or the people killed in it.

  The article ran through a long column. It had been cut out of some newspaper, then pasted into the book and folded to fit the length of the tome. Sarah unfolded the paper as she read, and when she did her eyes were instantly drawn to a pair of pictures at the bottom. They were actually more like engravings, and she suspected that the newspaper article must have predated photojournalism. One of the engravings showed the outlines of a fat man. Even with only the bare outlines of the engraving to work from, Sarah felt like she was looking at a severe person, someone who lived in or perhaps even nurtured a constant state of anger. Under the illustration the caption “Dead Hero” stood out in small, bold lettering. Beside it was another engraving: a woman with most of her face hidden by a fan, as though the editor had demanded that whoever this person was, she be obscured from view as much as possible. The caption beneath this picture was less courteous than the first: “Negress Whore.”

  Sarah tried to scan the rest of the article, and managed to read that neither had died in the fire itself, but rather had been crushed when a portion of the roof caved in on them. But beyond that the words were just a series of black squiggles that danced meaninglessly across the page. Her eyes kept returning to the pictures at the bottom of the page. She didn’t know why, but she felt fascinated by them. Felt they were important somehow.

  She turned the page, and her stomach felt like it had dropped through the center of the earth.

  “God,” she whispered. She didn’t know if it was a prayer or a curse. Cap must have heard her, for he stopped pawing through the shelves and looked at her.

  “What?” he said. “What is it?”

  Sarah found herself momentarily mute. She couldn’t even say, “Come here,” but had to settle for waving him over.

  Cap walked to her, crossing the space between them in two quick steps. She angled the book so he could see. And in his sharp intake of breath she heard confirmation of what she had seen herself. It wasn’t a dream, it wasn’t a fevered vision of a terror-strained imagination. It was all too real.

  This page, like the previous one, was devoted to a news article. The typeface was different on this one, but like the first, it was written in an old style, probably produced on a hand-powered printing press.

  “Murder Most Foul,” the headline screamed. It told a story of a man who had killed several people during a murder spree before coming back to his home and committing suicide. But the story barely registered on her. Rather, it was the picture that hung in the middle of the article like a dark spot in a cloud.

  It was their house.

  The forest was different, less obtrusive in the background than it was now, as though it had been allowed to grow rampant and wild in the intervening decades. There was no carport on the side, and a small building that she assumed was an outhouse or a toolshed stood near the rear of it. But it was their house, she was sure.

  She couldn’t manage to pull away from the hypnotic effect of the picture. Not even when Cap managed to whisper, “That’s here. That’s our house.” She remained silent, feeling suddenly lost, her grasp on reality slipping away from its moorings. It was only when Cap turned the article over that she was able to stop looking at the picture. And that was only because a new one was revealed, one more horrifying than the faded photo of their home.

  It was a man. Tall, gaunt. Eyes that were almost black. He looked not merely angry, but furious. A madman from birth, psychotic to the core.

  A stovepipe hat perched atop his head.

  It was the killer.

  “No,” Sarah whispered. “No no no no no.”

  Cap turned the page. She wanted to tell him to stop, to throw the book away or burn it or destroy it some other way, but never look at it again. She couldn’t force the words out.

  The next page was newer, though she if she had to guess, she would have placed the cutting as being from the early 1900s. This time she barely glanced at the headline – “Dunhill Robber Captured” – before focusing on the photo insert. The picture showed a man standing atop a gallows. A dark mask covered his face, but she could tell from his clothing that she was looking at someone she had seen walking the halls of the house.

  The hanged man.

  And almost as bad, the gallows stood directly in front of what she again recognized as her own house.

  “That looks like it was built right in our front yard,” said Cap, clearly thinking along the same lines as she was. She heard shock in his voice.

  He turned the pages. Faster and faster. All were covered in clippings and pictures.

  A picture of a boy. “Tragedy on the Hill” the headline screamed, and Sarah didn’t have to read the article to know that the boy had died of a gunshot wound.

  Another image, this one of a man she recognized as the ghost who had been stabbed through the eye.

  And another.

  And another.

  And another.

  She didn’t recognize all of them by sight, but all were somehow familiar. As though she had seen them in a crowded room, people that didn’t make a mark on her memory, but nonetheless had left their stamp on her subconscious. And she suspected that, just as Father Michael had said, by failing to cast out the spirits that had invaded her house, more and more would come to them. If they weren’t already here.

  She was dimly aware that she was hearing something. That damned chanting. It still poked her, pushed her, but she was so focused on the contents of the book she held that the noise seemed to have lost some of its power.

  Cap was reaching the end of the album, still moving quickly through the thick sheets of paper and the pictures and words featured on each. Then he stopped. The chanting seemed to swell when he did.

  Sarah’s mouth dropped open in shock.

  “Local Priest Commits Suicide.”

  The picture showed a jolly-faced man. Fat and happy-looking, but apparently driven mad in his lonely home atop a hill
.

  “Father Michael,” she whispered. Some of his words suddenly sounded in her mind. “I’m the local priest,” he had said. His voice echoed the words of the headline announcing his death. That must have been how he reappeared on the roof, though she had been sure he had died hanging beside their stairs: he could hardly be killed if already dead. And she suddenly realized another thing: though there were no houses anywhere within walking distance, he had arrived without a car. She hadn’t thought of it in the stress and insanity of the moment, but there was literally nowhere he could have come from. Nowhere but this very house.

  Local indeed.

  “He was…?” Cap’s voice petered out and he didn’t finish the sentence, though Sarah knew exactly what he was trying to say.

  “I guess,” she said quietly.

  “How come he looked normal?” said Cap after a moment.

  “What?”

  “The others were all wounded. They looked dead. He didn’t. Why?”

  Sarah shrugged. “Maybe he was different. Because he was a priest. Or maybe he hadn’t accepted what happened to him. Maybe he hadn’t moved on.” She read some of the article. Snapped her fingers.

  “What?”

  She pointed at the second paragraph of the clipping. “He died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Ran a hose from his car into his study, shut the door, and died at his desk.”

  “So?”

  “So, he wasn’t wounded because he died without a mark on him. I think carbon monoxide poisoning is a fairly peaceful way to go.”

  “But wouldn’t he have been blue-faced or something?” Cap pressed.

  “We only saw him in the dark,” she responded.

  “Then what happened after he fell?” he demanded. “Off the roof, when those… things… got him?”

  Sarah had no answer.

  There was a sudden tapping sound, and Cap looked up.

  Sarah didn’t. She turned the page.

  22

  The Third Day

  4:35 am

  ***