The Haunted

by Frank Peretti

  “So?” he asked. After his neurotransmitters connected, he wagged his head. “Eh, I dunno. That’s somebody’s house, you know?”

  Van Epps called from behind the tree, “Just open the door!”

  Tank looked for where the voice had come from. “What’s he doin’ back there?”

  “He thinks the place is haunted,” Brenda whispered.

  Tank’s face went blank. “Really?”

  “Perhaps you might justify your presence here,” I prodded.

  Tank acquiesced and went up the front steps with the rest of us in tow. I was about to advise the ladies to give the big fellow some room for safety’s sake—

  He simply turned the knob and the door creaked open. He gave us a puzzled look. I looked at Brenda and she shrugged back.

  “Hello?” Tank called.

  Of course, he hadn’t been here earlier. He hadn’t seen the apparition or heard all the background. He walked right in as if his mother lived there. Still nursing our trepidations, we followed.

  CHAPTER

  7

  Explorations

  We couldn’t find a light switch anywhere, and the daylight coming through the windows was quickly fading. Andi got out her cell phone and used the flashlight feature to produce a sharp beam she could play about.

  So what were we expecting? A decaying netherworld draped in cobwebs? A flurry of frightened bats and ghostly glows against the walls? Trapdoors, secret passages, mysterious wailings in the dark? As our eyes adjusted to the dim light and Andi helped with her cell phone, we found ourselves in a residence clean and furnished as if the housekeepers had just left and the owners were due home any minute. We could admire the entryway with its hall tree and grandfather clock; the ascending staircase with finely turned balusters and railing; the living room, furnished in Victorian style, and beyond that, the formal dining room with high-backed upholstered chairs, eight place settings, and jeweled chandelier. The place was benign, dignified, even welcoming.

  So what the deuce caused this trembling in my hands, this animal sense of being cornered? Power of suggestion? The eerie sight of our ghostly guide? Perhaps the darkness and the unknown.

  I handed Andi my cell phone. She activated the flashlight while I watched and found out how to do it—learning new technology from her was becoming a routine with me. Brenda and Tank got the same idea, and soon we were moving about like techno-fireflies, pinpoints of light casting stark shadows. I held my phone in both hands to steady the shaking, angry at the dread I couldn’t quash.

  A door clicked and swung open in the hallway. I heard a toilet flush. “Toilet works,” Andi reported.

  Well. Something normal. I was grateful.

  The next door she checked refused to open, apparently locked, but I stopped her from asking Tank to try it. Maybe it was the House’s effect on me, but I felt such a barrier should be honored. We were being invasive as it was.

  The floor of the entryway was slippery. I lowered my light to find a trail of drippings and wet boot prints leading toward the stairs. Perhaps only to remain the cold and objective investigator, I reached down, wetted my fingertip in the drippings, and put the sample to my tongue.

  Seawater.

  Brenda called from the kitchen. We gathered there like bees to a hive, lights hovering, snooping.

  On the kitchen table were a jar of jam, one of peanut butter, a loaf of bread, and an uneaten quarter of a sandwich left on a plate.

  Tank’s voice made us all jump. “Hello? Anybody here? Hey, we’re your friends, we won’t hurt you.”

  Something bumped somewhere in the House. I looked in each face and got a shrug, a wag—It wasn’t me.

  Brenda shook her dreadlocked head and laughed—at herself and us. “Somebody’s living here and we are gonna get busted.”

  “But it wasn’t here before!” said Andi.

  “You sure about that?”

  I interposed, “May we at least resolve the question of the old fisherman? We all saw him, did we not?”

  “Did we not?” said Tank. “Yeah, I didn’t.”

  “We do have his boot prints and water dripped on the floor—seawater, by the way—leading up the stairs.”

  Oh, the pall of doom that fell over Brenda’s and Andi’s faces! As for Tank, for some reason he just wasn’t getting it.

  It was my idea, so I led. Tank followed me. The ladies followed, but several steps behind. We agreed not to sneak, but to walk benignly up those stairs, calling hello as we went. Our lights went where our eyes went, meaning everywhere, and frantically.

  There was no light switch at the top of the stairs, and the hallway was an unlit tunnel save for our cell phones. The boot tracks, now dark, wet imprints in the carpet, led to a doorway. I knocked. I called. There was no answer. I tried the door and it opened.

  There was only a dark bedroom on the other side. There was no light switch, and we found soon enough there was no occupant.

  “But isn’t this where the light was on?” Brenda wondered.

  Andi searched the ceiling with her light. There was no lighting fixture, no lamp in the room. “Well . . . it was a light, but that doesn’t mean it was an electric light. . . .”

  “Don’t, don’t do that.”

  Shining my cell phone and feeling with my hand, I carefully traced the boot prints to a wet spot in the center of the room. There, they ended.

  “Okay,” said Brenda. “Now how about we get out of here?”

  I wanted to agree, but Van Epps would be waiting behind his tree wanting data and trusting me to be the unaffected gatherer. “We haven’t learned anything.”

  Andi tapped off her light. “Save your batteries.”

  Our phones winked out, and despite my efforts, I felt the dark closing in on me and fear twisting my viscera like a seizure. Blast it! I could turn my phone light back on, but they would ask why; I could explain, but that would plant a suggestion that would skew our observations. It could also make me look like a coward.

  “So what now?” Andi asked. Her voice was weak. Perhaps she was feeling the same visceral reaction.

  I loathed the answer even as I spoke it. “If we leave for the night, the House may relocate. There are no lights and our phones can only provide so much. We need to go through this place in the light of day.” I felt I was delivering a line from an old horror movie: “We’ll have to spend the night.”

  CHAPTER

  8

  During the Night

  If I’d been given to flights of imagination, I would have imagined the House expecting our visit. Though it was early October, the House was pleasantly warm; though there were no lights, there was running water and the toilets worked; the bedrooms were fully furnished, the beds made up with fresh linens.

  “We are gonna get busted,” Brenda moaned.

  We laid out a plan, beginning with two escape routes should anything strange occur. There were four upstairs bedrooms; each of us would take a room and stand watch for a two-hour slot during the night while the rest slept—assuming any of us could sleep. We would remain clothed in case we had to make a sudden exit. If anything strange should occur, we were all within shouting distance.

  “Any questions?” I asked. There were none.

  I advised Van Epps of our plan. While I remained to monitor the camera, he drove home and returned with a chair, an extra coat, and a thermos of coffee. I left him at his station and returned to the House, the front door admitting me without resistance.

  We all said good-night.

  If I may personify, the House had a plan as well. We never saw the morning from inside those confining rooms or that dark hallway. The House saw to it.

  My two hours came first. Needless to say, I wasn’t sleepy. I found a seafaring novel on the nightstand and sat in a comfortable chair to sample it by the light of my cell phone. Less than one chapter in, I found Andi was right regarding cell phones as flashlights—the typical phone cannot last long as a typical flashlight. After one final look around the room
, I tapped out the light to save the phone’s battery.

  As I feared, the darkness closed in on me again. My insides tightened like a dishrag being wrung out. I felt like bait awaiting a predator.

  Blast this House! Blast this fear, this consuming, irrational phobia! What was the dark but the absence of light, and nothing more? What lurked in that darkness other than a bed, a nightstand, a picture on the wall? Nothing!

  I tapped my phone—my hands were shaking so badly it took several tries. At last, the tiny light came on, proving, of course, there was nothing there but a bedroom with its furnishings. I tapped the light off.

  Immediately, I knew, I just knew that darkness was a living, malevolent thing.

  Then the phobia brought delusion. The House could have spoken audibly, the impression was so real. I know all about you, said the House. I know all about you.

  Shades of my church experience: the ever-present thumb of God upon the back of me, the insect! I fought to regain mastery. No, I thought, and then I muttered, “No, there is nothing here. This is a figment of my imagination.”

  Oh? the House seemed to answer.

  “You are a lifeless structure of stone and wood,” I said, mostly to convince myself. “You have no mind, no plan, and you don’t know me!”

  I know all about you. I know all about you.

  I would not engage this lifeless thing in moral arguments; I would not justify myself to a pernicious phobia! I tapped my cell phone for precious light and locked my eyes on the painting over the bed: sailboats heeling on white-crested waves. Just look at the sailboats, I told myself. Happy. Alive. Tangible. Something real. A tether to sanity.

  The light began to dim to a yellow glow, weaker, weaker. I strained to see the painting—

  Before my eyes, like black mold growing in time lapse, tiny specks percolated through the wall, widened into patches that widened into areas, surrounded then covered the picture, thickening, ever thickening—toward me.

  I suppose it was logic, pragmatism, and yes, my own vanity that kept me in the chair, none of which deterred the phenomenon. It boiled out of the wall, an inky eruption. In the faint orange light from my phone I searched for the picture on the wall—it was inundated, gone. The bed disappeared next, then the nightstand. The presence obscured the top of the door, then the top half, filling the room, expanding downward. The closet was nowhere to be seen. As if with a diabolical mind, it saved my little corner for last, swallowing up the space on my right, on my left . . . above me.

  The light from my phone went dead.

  CHAPTER

  9

  Four Messages

  I had no thoughts, no theories, nothing left but instinct. I dropped to the floor because it was the only place to go. I rolled, groping about for bearings, trying to find the door.

  I felt a weight on my left shoulder, and then a painful compression as if something had taken hold of me. It was not by my choice that I ended up flat on my back, sightless in the dark, fighting, grappling, contacting nothing, while something directly above bore down with a weight that expelled the air from my chest. My very next breath . . . would not come.

  I pounded the floor, kicked, screamed without sound. As consciousness, as life itself, broke away in pieces with the passing seconds, I was lost to panic.

  I cannot say, for I do not recall, that I prayed. I cannot say what transaction, if any, may have occurred in the blackening remnants of my consciousness. I can only guess that for whatever reason, the House was satisfied, its message delivered. The weight lifted. Air rushed into my lungs. My reawakened limbs got me to the door, out of that room, and into the hall.

  The moon had risen, casting precious light through a window at the end of the hall. I thought only of breathing as I labored to my feet, leaning against the wall to support myself. My mind returned with the question of calling for the others—

  The very next door burst open and Andi, a dripping, spewing silhouette, tumbled into the hall, rebounded from the opposite wall, and collided with me, coughing, flailing as if drowning. I wrapped my arms around her to bear her up. She spewed water from her mouth and nose, splattering me, the wall, the floor, and I recognized the briny scent, even caught the taste once again, of seawater. She gagged, coughed, gasped for air.

  “Easy now,” I said, not wanting an explanation, only wanting to calm her, to save her. “Breathe, girl, just breathe.”

  She calmed, quit flailing as I held her, and with admirable intention drew several wheezing breaths.

  “That’s it, that’s it.”

  She was dripping wet as if plucked from the sea. Shivering. Her nose was running. Blood from a head wound streaked her face.

  She was my employee, but in that moment she could have been my daughter. I bolted into the room that had nearly smothered me. Defiant, not caring what the House might do, I tore the comforter from the bed and returned, throwing it over Andi’s shoulders. She wrapped it around herself, calming, breathing steadily.

  “All right?” I asked.

  She nodded, willing each breath. “I was in the ocean . . . the whole room was filled with water . . .”

  By now I was oxygenated and thinking again. “We’d better check on the others.”

  We knocked on Brenda’s door but didn’t wait for the answer we didn’t get. We found her flopped on the bed as if lifeless. We shook her, called her name, with no response. I felt the artery in her neck. She was alive but barely breathing. “Let’s get her up.”

  Taking her arms over our shoulders, we bore her from the room. She was limp, nodding off, muttering as if drugged.

  “Come on, walk,” Andi coached her. “Walk!”

  A few feet into the hall, Brenda jerked as if startled. Her legs went to work, bearing her up as her eyes opened and rolled about. “Whaz ’appenin’?” We propped her against the wall. “Whaddaya guys doin’?”

  Andi checked her arms. “Look!”

  Both arms bore the needle tracks of an addict. The vein in the crook of her left arm bore a needle mark that was recent, red, and swollen.

  For an instant I wanted to confront her, rebuke her for such wanton, self-serving, irresponsible—

  But then I noticed that Andi’s hair, silhouetted in the patch of light at the end of the hall, was wild again. “Excuse me.” I reached and felt it. It was dry.

  She felt it, then felt her clothing under the comforter, which prompted her to look once again at Brenda’s arms.

  The needle tracks were fading.

  And so was Brenda’s stupor. Her eyes focused. She stroked her arms. “Where’d the guy go?”

  “What guy?” asked Andi, her eyes inches from Brenda’s.

  Brenda recovered further and shook her head. “I was dreaming. Some guy shooting me up . . .” A wave of emotion. She covered her face.

  I checked for the wound on Andi’s head. It was gone, along with the blood that had streaked her face.

  And it was in that moment that I saw beyond her frizzy hair, stark in the moonlight at the end of the hall . . .

  A child.

  I froze. Brenda and Andi followed my gaze and were as stupefied as I was.

  He was a lad of ten years or so, dressed in jeans, untucked shirt, and tennis shoes. His backlit hair glowed like an aura around his head. Despite all our clamor, he didn’t seem frightened, but fascinated, studying each of us.

  “Please tell me you see that,” I whispered. I caught Andi’s, then Brenda’s eyes. Yes, their faces told me, they saw it too. We looked again—

  In that instant of inattention, the lad had vanished. Nothing remained at the end of the hall but an empty patch of moonlight.

  And then came the laughter. As if we had become the brunt of a cruel joke, from somewhere came a riotous, mocking laughter, the very stuff of ghost stories and horror movies. We all jumped, quivered. The ladies cowered against the wall, arms protective. I found myself in the center of the hallway, vulnerable on every side and spinning to look for . . . what? Surely not a ghost.


  But where was that laughter coming from?

  We looked about, narrowed it down . . .

  The last door, at the end of the hall. Tank’s room.

  This was not appropriate, not in keeping with anything we’d experienced. He’d scared years off our lives. What the devil could that big oaf be laughing about at a time like this?

  We hurried—I stormed—down the hall to the bedroom door. I rapped on the door so hard I hurt my knuckles.

  He was still laughing, whooping, hollering.

  I flung the door open and there he stood, enraptured, grinning, wagging his head in wonder as he looked all around the room at—

  We saw nothing but a dark bedroom.

  “This is so incredible!” he whooped. “Wow! Can you believe this?”

  “Believe what?” I asked.

  He wagged his head in spellbound wonder. “It is just so beautiful, so perfect!”

  His joy made Brenda feel no better. “He’s on acid or something.”

  “Look at that sky!” said Tank. “It just keeps going and going . . . and . . . you hear that music?”

  Of course, we didn’t.

  “Man, can they sing!” Then he sank to his knees in . . . well, a religious moment. “I can see Him! I can see Him standing right there!”

  “We need to get him out of here,” said Brenda.

  “We all need to get out of here,” said Andi.

  I’d had all the scientific inquiry I could bear for one night. “I heartily agree.”

  “You can’t see this?” Tank was desperate for us to share his experience.

  No. We couldn’t see it.

  “It’s heaven! It’s gotta be!”

  Of course there would be no tearing Tank away from his visions by physical force. We had to talk him back to earth, tell him we were concerned about safety, tired . . .

  Scared to the point of a complete emptying of our bowels, Brenda said—I’m paraphrasing.

  Tank was elated, satisfied, bolstered in every inch of his being, and that was a lot of inches. He came with us, talking about the flowers, the smells, the music, the joy of the place, the love he saw in “His” face. We got him through the front door and across the street to the woods.