by Mark Lukens
He helped Helen clean up after dinner, and she seemed normal again. Not overly nervous, not any more nervous than she should be while living in a haunted house. He was beginning to feel a little silly accusing her and Robert of hiding a child in the house, and he thought about asking Paul not to say anything to them just yet.
Danny went up to his room after he was done helping Helen with the kitchen. He opened one of the books he had brought that Paul wanted him to study. But he couldn’t get into it. He plugged his earbuds in and turned on his iPod.
He left the lamp on next to his bed, stretched out, and closed his eyes.
CHAP†ER †HIR†Y
Danny was in the swirling dark waters again, trapped in his seatbelt as the car sank down deeper and deeper into the liquid blackness. The lights from the dashboard and the headlights flickered, they were about to short out and leave him alone in the suffocating darkness with his dead sister behind him and his dead mother floating in the seat next to him.
A hand brushed against his hand.
Cold, dead flesh.
A pale hand.
His mother’s face floated in front of him. Her eyes were wide open in alarm, and her mouth worked frantically like she was trying to tell him something as the water flooded her throat …
†
Danny’s eyes popped open and he sat up in bed.
The lamp beside the bed was off, but the room was just beginning to lighten up from the morning sun beaming in through the window.
Why was the lamp off? Why did he keep turning his lamp off in the middle of the night? He didn’t think he would do something like that.
Was someone else turning it off?
He shook the stupid thought away and shivered. The room was cold. Not cold enough for him to see his breath, but cold enough to make him tremble.
He jumped out of bed, dressed only in his thermal underwear and a thick pair of socks. His pants and shirts were folded over the wooden chair that Paul had sat in when they had talked about the attic yesterday.
He checked his iPod. It was six thirty in the morning, still very early, but late enough to allow the bluish light to drift in through the window. The dark blue light reminded him of being under the water.
Underwater.
Danny shivered again.
He had been dreaming about the accident again. But he hadn’t gotten much further in the dream. He hadn’t learned anything new.
He walked back to his bed and wondered if maybe the electricity had gone out or the lightbulb in the lamp had burned out. He twisted the little black knob on the lamp and the bulb lit up.
Well, there went that theory. Now he was back to the fact that either he or someone (or something) else was turning the lamp off in the middle of the night after he fell asleep.
The house was silent. He listened for a moment, but he didn’t hear anyone else moving around in the house. But it felt like someone else was awake. He didn’t know why he felt that way, but it was such a certainty.
He walked over to the bedroom window just to get some blood circulating through his body and warm himself up a little. He crept across the floorboards, but none of them creaked much.
Outside the window a blanket of snow lay over the fields all around the house. Snow painted the trees in the distance, and it covered everything else in sight. The sky looked dark blue, but it was lightening up on the horizon beyond the trees, pushing the darkness back across the sky. He stared down at the snow near the house and thought he saw tracks in the snow—a set of footprints.
Small footprints.
Maybe someone had taken the garbage cans out or something.
But he knew that wasn’t right, and he knew that he was just grasping at theories now and trying not to see the obvious—those footprints in the snow were made by that little girl.
Danny stared down at the footprints and then shook his head and forced himself to look away from the window and the cold panes of glass.
Maybe it was another vision. Maybe the footprints weren’t really there.
He looked back out the window, expecting the footsteps to be gone—nothing left but a pristine sheet of snow.
But the footprints were still there—a track of footprints alongside the house, starting from one corner and disappearing to the other corner and out of his view. Like someone was circling the house.
He tore himself away from the window and went back to his bed. He crawled under the covers and took the shoebox out from underneath the bed. He wanted to look at the photos of his mom and sister again. He wanted to see them again like they were when they had been alive, not like they were in his dreams—dead and floating in the murky water.
The flashes of his dream hit him like a hammer again.
It seemed like he was beginning to remember some of the accident, but something was still holding him back from remembering everything. There was something else about the accident that was too terrible to remember, he felt certain about that.
Maybe he was holding back the memories himself because he still didn’t want to recall the terrible moments of that day. Even though he kept seeing that part in his dreams, the part when he was trying to free himself from the seatbelt, he still had unanswered questions: there were still things he couldn’t remember. Had he seen the blond-haired man before the crash? He thought he had, but he couldn’t remember actually seeing the man. And he couldn’t remember how he had gotten out of the car once it was underwater.
How had he lived when his mother and sister had died?
A pang of guilt hit him—a familiar feeling, and he pushed back the tears that threatened, and he swallowed a lump down in his throat.
He curled up on the bed, pulling the covers over him. He opened the shoebox. He looked at the photos—one after another. He looked at his mother’s ring. His sister’s cell phone that was dead right now and needed to be charged up.
And then his heart skipped a beat.
He rummaged through the box, sitting up quickly, the blanket falling off of his shoulders.
He made himself slow down.
It had to be here.
It was thin and dainty. It might be hiding down in a corner of the shoebox, curled up like a tiny snake.
Danny threw the covers off of him and smoothed out the sheets, creating a large space for him to work. He took out the contents of the shoebox one by one and laid them on the sheet of the bed.
And after all the contents were out and accounted for, he knew it was true. His mother’s necklace with his sister’s charms on it was gone.
He got off the bed and searched underneath it. He even took the lampshade off the lamp and brought it down under the bed, giving him more light to see with.
The necklace wasn’t under the bed.
He put the contents back into the shoebox and tore the blankets and sheets off of the bed. He shook them out. No necklace hiding among the sheets.
He checked his suitcase and duffel bag three times. He checked the closet floor, the dresser drawers, the pockets of all of his clothes—even the ones he hadn’t worn yet.
Panic set in.
He had lost the necklace. Oh God, no. Please.
But he couldn’t have lost it. And if he had misplaced it, the only place it could be was inside this room, which he had just spent the last hour searching.
Then another thought occurred to him.
Someone had taken it.
Danny put the sheets and the blankets back on the bed, making a half-assed attempt at remaking the bed. He shoved his shoebox into his suitcase and put it away in the closet.
And then he got dressed quickly. The room was much brighter now with the sun’s rays beaming in. For once it wasn’t cloudy outside.
He thought about pounding on Paul’s bedroom door and letting him know that there was a thief in this house. They had been invited here to help, and someone had stolen from him. They had stolen the most precious thing he owned. He felt a terrible loss about the necklace, but he also felt a fury rising
inside of him.
Danny left his bedroom and stood in the hallway. He was very still, listening to the silent house for a long moment. No one else seemed to be awake yet.
He crept down the stairs to the first floor hallway. Maybe he would find Helen in the kitchen making more of her waffles on her waffle maker. If she was in there, then he would confront her. He had decided that he would ask her if she might have found a gold necklace, and then he would gauge the reaction on her face.
But Helen wasn’t in the kitchen.
No one was up yet.
He went to the mudroom off of the kitchen and looked out through the glass on the back door out at the snow-covered driveway which was indistinguishable from the grass because the snow covered everything. Paul’s Ford Bronco sat next to the white Dodge Durango.
A scraping noise from behind him startled him—it sounded like a shoe scuffing the floor.
He whirled around and saw Paul standing in the kitchen. He was dressed in his usual dark clothing and his black boots. He wore long sleeves that hid the array of tattooed crucifixes, religious symbols, and Scripture quotes decorating his skin. His dark hair was a little unruly and looked like it had been wetted in a sink and hastily smoothed down. His dark eyes were fixed on Danny.
“I was going to make some coffee,” Paul said as if he needed a reason to be standing in the kitchen.
But he didn’t make a move towards the coffee machine.
“The necklace,” Danny breathed out. “My mom’s necklace. It’s gone.”
Paul just stood there. No reaction.
“My mother’s necklace,” Danny said a little louder. “The one I kept after the funeral. The one with my sister’s charms on it. It’s gone. It was in my shoebox with all of the photos and now it’s gone.”
“Maybe you misplaced it …”
“No,” Danny barked out. “I wouldn’t have lost it. I didn’t even take it out of the room.”
“I could help you look for it.”
“I already looked through my room three times. Every square inch of it. It’s not there now. Someone had to have come in my room and taken the necklace.”
“Danny …”
“Something’s wrong here. There’s something very wrong with this place. With these people here.”
Paul nodded like that was the whole reason they were here.
Danny heard the shuffling of feet on the stairs and then in the hall. Robert and Helen entered the kitchen. They were dressed but they didn’t seem fully awake.
“Morning,” Robert said.
Danny burst into the kitchen from the mudroom. “My necklace is gone,” he blurted out.
Robert and Helen stared at Danny, and then looked to Paul for help.
†
Paul explained everything, trying to calm Danny down. Robert and Helen nodded and cooed in all the right places. They offered to help search for the missing piece of jewelry as if it were a child’s trinket that had been carelessly misplaced somewhere.
Danny searched Robert and Helen’s faces as he told them about the necklace, trying to see some kind of evidence that they were guilty. But their acting jobs were flawless. He saw nothing on their faces except compassion—fake compassion.
They all did a quick search of the house even though Danny assured everyone again that he never brought the necklace out of his room. They came up empty. How could they find anything in this house that was a wreck with all of the remodeling supplies and tools scattered about in every room?
Helen made breakfast an hour later as Father Hopkins and Father Severino arrived.
Two more suspects, Danny thought even though he wasn’t sure when they could’ve been up in his bedroom. Yet he still couldn’t rule them out.
After Danny picked at his breakfast for twenty minutes, he told everyone that he was going to look around again.
No one protested. They all seemed to be relieved that he was leaving the kitchen.
Danny went out to the hall. He was about to check the sitting room and dining room again. Paul had suggested that maybe Danny had stuffed the necklace down in his pants pocket and hadn’t remembered it. Maybe he had lost it during one of their tours of the house while they blessed and prayed.
Maybe, Danny had told him, but he didn’t believe it. But what if Paul was right? Danny had been seeing nightmarish visions and he couldn’t tell who was real and who wasn’t real anymore. He didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t true anymore. He didn’t know who to believe and who not to believe—not even himself. Maybe he had been turning off his lamp in the middle of the night. Maybe he had taken the necklace out of the shoebox in the middle of the night while he was asleep.
Everything was becoming so jumbled in his mind, a blur, everything spiraling out of control.
He decided that he was going to retrace every step he had taken in this house since he had gotten here. He was going to check in every corner, along every baseboard, down in every heating vent.
He had to find it.
After deciding to start his search in the sitting room near the front of the house, he walked out into the hallway. But then he stopped when a noise from the living room startled him.
Danny looked back at the archway that led into the kitchen. No one had come out. Hadn’t they heard that noise from the living room?
Danny walked over to the archway of the living room. He entered the murky room with all of the boxes, bags, and furniture stacked up in the middle of the floor. If he had dropped the necklace in here, he thought he might never find it.
He stood there for a moment in the darkness, staring at the furniture stacked up in the middle of the room like it had been collected quickly for some kind of strange interior bonfire.
And that made him think of something else …
The attic.
He had forgotten about being up in the attic. Was there any way he could’ve had the necklace with him then? Could he have wrapped it around his wrist or stuffed it into his pants pocket without really remembering it?
Another scuffling sound from deep in the living room alerted him. It had come from the other side of the room and it sounded like a shoe scraping the wood floor. It was a light and cautious sound—a sneaky sound.
Someone was in this room with him, hiding among the furniture and boxes. Danny was sure of it.
He listened for a long moment, frozen in place, even trying to hold his breath. But he didn’t hear any other sounds.
He crept around some of the boxes, making his way towards the other side of the large room towards the wall of curtained windows. He was sure that this was the area where the sound had come from.
And then he stopped.
There was someone hiding behind the wall of musty drapes that covered the bank of windows. He saw a pair of hard shoes peeking out from the bottom of the drapes; they were black patent leather shoes that were dull and scratched now, a pair of girl’s shoes with a pair of girl’s socks above them that were soiled with stains. One of the socks drooped down like the top had lost its elasticity.
It was her, it was the girl he had seen before, the girl with the scraggly hair that hid her face and made her look like some kind of wild animal.
He took slow, cautious steps towards the wall of drapes. The girl’s feet moved a little and he could see a slight movement behind the drapes, like she was fidgeting with something in her hands. He could even hear her breathing. He swore he could see the minute movements of the drapes from her breaths.
After a few more agonizingly slow moments, and a few more footsteps closer, Danny stood only a few feet away from the drapes.
The girl behind the drapes was very still. She knew he was there in front of her now.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Danny whispered.
The girl still didn’t move or make a sound. It seemed like she wasn’t even breathing now.
He expected her to run, but she remained behind the drapes.
“My name is Danny,” he told her.
“I know,” she whispered.
She knew him?
“What’s your name?” he asked as he risked one more careful step closer.
For a moment she didn’t answer, and then:
“Melissa.”
“Okay,” Danny breathed out. He chanced a peek back at the archway out to the hallway but there was no one there watching him.
He looked back at the drapes in front of him. He was so close now he could nearly reach out and touch the drapes.
The girl was fidgeting again like she had something in her hands. There was a bulge in the drapes where her hands were together in front of her, clutching something.
“I’m glad to meet you, Melissa.”
She didn’t answer.
The small talk didn’t seem to be working. Maybe he should try some more direct questions for her.
“Why are you hiding, Melissa?”
She still didn’t answer, and she was fidgeting even more now.
Her hand shot out from behind the drapes and there was something in it—a folded piece of paper.
Danny stared down at the folded paper in her hand. The paper looked old, a little yellow like it had been found buried in a box or behind a wall somewhere.
She wanted him to take the paper. She was giving it to him.
“You want me to have that?” he asked, not wanting to grab it out of her hand and scare her.
No answer from Melissa.
Danny reached out with a trembling hand and took the paper from her hand as gently as he could.
He opened the folded piece of paper and read the two words that had been scrawled there in childlike handwriting, written in red crayon. He stared down in horror at those two words.
A noise from the hallway.
He turned and looked at the archway to the living room. He could hear Paul and the others hurrying from the kitchen to the living room like something had alerted them.
Danny looked back at the drapes, but the girl was gone. He hadn’t even heard her leave.
Paul entered the living room, working his way through the maze of furniture and boxes.
