The Haunted

by Frank Peretti

  Even in the dark, Van Epps could tell we were out of kilter. “What happened? What did you see?”

  “Data we should only discuss by daylight and under calmer circumstances,” I insisted.

  “I didn’t see anything from out here,” he said. “I’m afraid I’ve wasted drive space on—” He went blank, eyes peering across the street.

  We turned.

  The House was gone.

  CHAPTER

  10

  A Heated Debriefing

  We gathered in the supposed safety of Van Epps’ home for the few remaining hours before daylight. We needed sleep, but of course we couldn’t get it.

  When morning came, our eyes were burning and our nerves were raw. We were in no condition to butt heads over findings and procedures. Tank, wiser than I’d given him credit for, went for a morning jog to depressurize. The rest of us entered into battle, our pointing fingers our swords and coffee cups our shields.

  “It’s gone,” said Van Epps. “And so is the opportunity! The House was yours and you let it get away.”

  Brenda’s crazed eyes and dreadlocks made her a veritable Medusa. “Now listen here, you—” She described him from a library of expletives. “You weren’t there! You didn’t see it, you didn’t feel it, you didn’t almost get killed!”

  “So where’s the data? How do we control this thing? Tell me!”

  “Whatcha got on your video besides three hours of static?” She turned to me and Andi. “Guy can’t even run a camera!”

  Van Epps came back at me, finger waving. “I did not desert my post!”

  Fearing Brenda might round the kitchen table to scratch his eyes out, I intervened. “The data can only be understood by calm and objective minds in the light of day—”

  “Oh, shut up!” She was just as angry with me. “Don’t give me that super scientist crap! You were about to piss in your pants.”

  “Yes! Yes, I admit being terrified, but that’s my point. On a human level—”

  She mimicked me, “ . . . on a human level . . .”

  Disrespect always sets me off. “On a human level we can’t trust our impressions because they are skewed by emotion.”

  Andi—my employee!—jumped in. “But emotions are part of it—they’re part of the message. We were supposed to be scared!”

  “We are not dealing with a message. We’re dealing with an explainable phenomenon, with observations, data, that’s all.”

  “The House was trying to get our attention!”

  “Well, see, now you’ve assigned it some kind of personality.”

  Brenda’s long fingernail pointed like a weapon. “She didn’t assign nothin’! She’s right, that thing’s talking and, baby, I’m hearing it and you’d better listen too if you want to save your sorry ass!”

  Van Epps had a mini-fit in his corner of the room. “So this is the team you brought?”

  How dare he? “I didn’t bring them!”

  He shot a glance at Andi.

  I pointed to Brenda. “Well, I didn’t bring her!”

  Brenda slammed down her coffee cup. “That’s it, man! I’m outta here!” She addressed Andi on her way to the hall. “This guy ain’t human and that’s why he’s missing the whole point!” She glared at me. “You got as much sense as a refrigerator!”

  She was looking for the closet to get her coat. The door she tried was locked. She struck it with her fist.

  “Other door,” I said.

  Andi perked up and went into the hall.

  “You’re not leaving as well?” I asked.

  She ignored me, preoccupied by that locked door.

  My cell phone—our phones were the only thing among us recharged—played Beethoven’s Fifth. “Yeah?”

  “Hey, howdy!”

  I was so emphatically, even dangerously not in the mood. “What is it?”

  He told me but I had to ask him to repeat it. He did.

  My world changed.

  Brenda was coming out of the hall, headed for the front door. I waved at her to stop. She flipped me off. “It’s Tank!” I tried again. “Please. Please wait.”

  Invoking Tank’s name worked. She rolled her eyes at the ceiling, but she stopped. Andi was all eyes and ears.

  I got a quick report from Tank, found out where he was, and ended the call.

  We had to come back from the brink. Hand raised and voice quiet, I said, “All right. We have more data. Now. Calmly, in the daylight, let’s agree, please, that we will hear all sides on this.” I made eye contact with Brenda. “And that includes me. I will listen to you.”

  Brenda sniffed in disgust and looked away, but she stayed where she was.

  “Andi . . . a word.”

  I led Andi into the living room, cautioned her to silence, and spoke into her ear. “Have you found any precedents for this, any case of a House . . . carrying messages, as you put it?”

  She seemed to be confessing. “No, but—”

  “I have some research I need you to do . . .”

  Andi went into the kitchen and asked Van Epps for his camera. Van Epps was about to protest, as I expected, but I deftly changed to a more pressing subject. “The House is back. It’s right down the street.”

  That worked. As if everything up to this point, especially our quarrels, was forgotten, we all poured into the street.

  I hardly had to direct everyone’s attention. I merely looked down the hill and so did they, and we saw the two-story Victorian sitting there as if it had been part of the neighborhood for years.

  I expected Van Epps would fly into a seething, four-letter rage, and so he did. So much for logical and practical. This was not the man I once knew, and that seemed to carry a message as much as anything else we were dealing with.

  “If you can grant us another chance,” I told him, “we’d like to go down there and complete what we couldn’t complete last night.”

  He eased just enough to scold me: “Well, make sure you do!” He waved us on and stormed back into his house. For a moment I saw him pulling back the front blinds to watch.

  “Andi, please get that information and join us when you have it.” I could see a protest forming and averted it. “It’s vital.”

  She went inside to fire up her computer.

  “So where’s Tank?” Brenda asked.

  “He’s in the House, even as we speak.”

  CHAPTER

  11

  Daniel

  It was a short walk, during which Brenda and I said not a word to each other. I felt it would be a long time before we did.

  Remarkable. The House appeared just as it had the night before: same yard, walkway, planting beds, everything.

  Except this time, Tank was standing in the front door, smiling and waving.

  I looked at Brenda and she afforded me a cold, wordless return. Even so, by her tentative gait up the walkway I could tell she felt the same familiar fear I did. We did not like this place.

  As for Tank . . . his comfort, his joy with the House was so incongruous as to suggest a meaning of its own.

  “Hey, y’all, come on in! I got someone I wantcha to meet!”

  Tank turned and went in as if we would follow him.

  “Well,” I said, “it scared us, but it didn’t kill us.”

  “First time for everything,” she responded.

  She’d said something to me. Bolstered, I ventured inside. She followed, giving a closet door a side glance as we passed through the hallway into the kitchen.

  Tank had taken a seat at the breakfast table, and there beside him, having a bowl of cereal, was the child. He was dressed in the same untucked shirt and jeans, and now that he was sitting with one foot boyishly askew, I noticed he was missing a sock.

  “Everybody, this is Daniel.”

  The boy looked up at us, munching on his breakfast, expression neutral. I smiled, stumbling over myself to be nonthreatening.

  Brenda seemed to have her own issues where a child was concerned. Her cold exterior gave w
ay to an abrupt and inexplicable sorrow that she fought back. At length, she took some deep breaths, then stooped to the boy’s level with a smile I’d never seen before. “Daniel, it’s great to meet you, baby.”

  Tank gestured toward an empty chair next to Daniel. “And this is . . . well, I called him Harvey but Daniel didn’t like that. So we don’t know his name.”

  Daniel looked up at an invisible someone sitting in that chair, a sizable person, judging from his eye line. I looked at the empty chair, at a loss. Nothing was ever going to be normal again, was it?

  Tank must have read my face. He laughed, and it was a kind laugh; I took it that way. “Oh, you’re all right. I don’t see him either. But Daniel does.”

  Daniel exchanged a smile with the friend who wasn’t there.

  Brenda asked, “Well . . . is Daniel . . . ?”

  Tank reached over and tousled the boy’s hair. “Oh yeah. He’s real.”

  Brenda pointed at Tank’s tattoo, the one featuring our motley four and this small boy.

  Tank shook his head in wonder. “Ain’t that wild?” Then he stood. “Hey buddy, we’re gonna go into the next room and talk a bit. You just finish up your breakfast, okay?”

  The boy gave Tank a smile of complete trust.

  Brenda and I went with Tank into the living room, and I noticed how much better I felt. Brenda seemed much more at ease as well. It could have been Tank’s carefree and comfortable manner, plus the fact that the living room—indeed, the whole House—was lovely in the daylight, not threatening or mysterious. In any case, I was thinking clearly, and that was indispensable.

  We stood in a tight triangle in the finely furnished room.

  “Is this the boy you saw last night?” Tank asked.

  “He’s the one,” said Brenda as I nodded.

  “I was out jogging, you know, and here he comes running out from between those houses just down the hill, and he’s looking scared like somebody’s chasing him, and I hollered, ‘Hey, bud, you okay?’ He acted like he knew who I was because he just came running to me with his arms out, and I picked him up and he put his arms around me and just hung on.

  “But—” Tank paused for effect and then wagged his finger to make a point. “I saw two people right on Daniel’s tail, and you know what? They were there last night, standing there with the other folks watching the House and watching us.”

  “A man and a woman?” I asked. “She had short black hair, and he was young, six feet tall, close-cropped hair?”

  “Wearing black. Last night and today. They must like black.”

  “Go on.”

  “I asked ’em, ‘Hey, you want something?’ but they just got out of there, didn’t say a word.” Tank made sure to meet our eyes. “I think they were up to no good. Daniel was scared of ’em, but now they had to deal with me so they took off. Good thing.”

  “Did Daniel know who they were?”

  Tank shrugged. “He didn’t say anything . . . but he doesn’t usually.” He hushed his voice and leaned in. “But here’s something for you: I was gonna bring him back to Van Epps’ place, and he wasn’t about to go there, either. Looks like he knows that place and he’s really scared of it.”

  “But this place doesn’t scare him at all?” Brenda wondered.

  “Hey, I tell you what, I was just trying to figure out what to do with him when, bammo, man, here’s the House, right here. He dragged me through the front door like he wanted to hide in here, so here we are.”

  I suggested, “So he’s the one who likes peanut butter and jam sandwiches?”

  “There’s food in the House, stuff that’s easy to fix. I guess he’s been living here, or hiding here.”

  “So . . . who is he? Where’d he come from?”

  Tank could only shrug. “Guess we could ask him.”

  We went back into the kitchen. Brenda had the heart, the gentleness to try the direct approach. “Hey, sweetie, we’re kind of wondering, just what are you doing here? Do you know why you’re here?”

  Daniel looked at his invisible friend as if for an answer. Then he directed a long, studying gaze at me and said, “Not yet.”

  Perhaps it was an answer to Brenda’s question. Strangely, I felt it was a message to me.

  CHAPTER

  12

  One Final Message

  Hello?” came a call from the street.

  It was Andi, planted timidly on the pavement. I beckoned from the front door. “Come on in, the coast is clear.”

  She kept eyeing the House, every step cautious as she came up the front steps and through the doorway. Meeting Daniel helped dispel her fears, though it left her as puzzled as the rest of us.

  “What did you find out?” I asked as we four clustered in the living room.

  Andi kept her voice low for the child’s sake. “I got a report from the assisted living facility. Clyde Morris must have been quite a crumb; they didn’t have anything good to say about him. But it’s kind of pitiful: They say he died from suffocation. Apparently he rolled over into his pillow and couldn’t right himself.”

  “And Gustav Svensson?”

  Andi nodded. “He was a real person, an old fisherman who lived on his boat in the harbor. People say he was a nasty old coot, but he died four days ago.” She took a breath, maybe to be sure she still could. “He drowned. But he had a blow to his head. Folks figure he slipped, hit his head, and fell off his boat.”

  We all met each other’s eyes as the pieces came together.

  “So,” said Brenda, “Mister objective, scientific, poo-poo-the-supernatural-stuff, what do you say now?”

  I knew she wanted to corner me. That wasn’t about to happen. “Whatever this is . . . it is what it is.”

  “Oh, that’s good, that’s real good.”

  “This is a scientific inquiry. Consequently, even though the means by which we acquire the data is open to question, the data itself could be true. Whatever this is, and however it works, we can’t rule out what the House seems . . . to be telling us.”

  Tank nodded toward the kitchen and young Daniel. “And still is. By the way, his last name is Petrovski. It’s written on his shirt collar, and there was a phone number under his name.” He handed me a torn corner of paper napkin with the number scrawled on it. I handed it to Andi.

  “I’m on it,” she said.

  “Okay,” said Brenda. “So, believing what the House is saying . . . who died from a drug overdose?”

  “Or still might?” I said. “And the files in Van Epps’ camera?”

  “Three folders, one hour each, nothing but static.”

  Brenda reiterated, “Guy can’t run a camera.”

  “And there is still . . .” I looked toward the door in the hallway that was locked the night before and, I guessed, still was. “One final message, wouldn’t you say?”

  Andi and Brenda exchanged a look. They were sisters on this one.

  Andi led the way to the door. “Have you seen this before, seen it elsewhere?”

  Clearly, we all had.

  “Looks just like the same stupid closet door that wasn’t the closet door back in Van Epps’ place,” said Brenda.

  I nodded. We were together on this. “You and I both mistook that door for the closet, and both times, it was locked.”

  “But here it is,” said Andi, “a direct copy, and locked just like the other one.”

  “Hold on,” said Tank. He spoke quietly again. “Daniel won’t use this hallway. He always goes the long way around, through the dining room, to get to the kitchen.”

  “We have our next step,” I suggested. I was just about to wonder how we might accomplish it when, to our surprise, a lawn mower started up in the front yard.

  “What the devil—” I started to say, but was interrupted by the clatter of a chair in the kitchen.

  Tank looked, then hurried. “Hey, bud! What’s wrong?”

  I caught only a glimpse of Daniel before he disappeared, terrified, inside a cupboard and closed the door afte
r him. Tank looked at us, then toward the front door, nonplussed.

  Neither I, nor Brenda, nor Andi, had felt comfortable closing the front door behind us, so it remained open, providing a framed view of the front yard. The mower’s operator passed across that view, eyes locked ahead of him, a death grip on the mower’s handlebar, pushing the mower for all he was worth.

  It was A.J. Van Epps.

  CHAPTER

  13

  The Prison

  Data? Van Epps had become an unnerving source of data by his very behavior. He would not stop mowing the lawn even as I chased alongside him, trying to engage him over the roar of the mower.

  “Behavioral Analysis!” he shouted to me, turning about and heading back across the lawn again. “We apply an input, such as doing the House a favor, such as mowing the lawn, and see if it triggers a response we can analyze, a change in behavior.”

  “A change in what behavior?”

  He wouldn’t answer me. I hurried beside him, almost tripping over the walkway, until I was tired of the game, the indirectness. “What are you afraid of?”

  He stopped, but left the mower running, I suppose, to ensure our privacy.

  “You can’t see it? That thing’s a predator, a—a vindicator! It has something against me, against all of us.”

  I refrained from saying You’re mad! but I certainly thought it, and I suppose he read it in my face.

  “Think what you will, but we—you and I—have become part of the experiment. It intends to take us like the others, and that means practical solutions, direct action.”

  He continued mowing, leaving me behind. I ran once again to catch up with him and called over the mower. “Do you have any gardening tools? We could help. We could weed the beds, edge the lawn.”

  That seemed to mollify him, at least for a moment. “In my garage. Help yourself. Please.”

  I signaled Brenda and Andi to come with me. We agreed with Tank that he should remain with the boy.

  In Van Epps’ garage we found the tools we needed: a large hammer and a crow bar. Within minutes the obstinate door in Van Epps’ hallway splintered away from its lock and creaked open.