The Haunted

by Frank Peretti

  It was the doorway to the basement. Steep wooden stairs descended into a musty chamber of web-laced concrete, a netherworld of stacks, shelves, and piles of things unneeded and unused.

  Directly opposite the base of the stairs was another door, yawning open, hanging crookedly from its hinges. It had been barred shut, but the two-by-four bar had been broken like a toothpick; the door had been locked, but the lock now lay in bent and broken pieces on the concrete, leaving a hole in the door like a shark bite. Strangest of all, the door had been broken out, not in, as if a formidable beast had been captive but was now at large.

  We found a small room within. There was a bed with its covers askew, and a portable RV toilet. Some toys lay on the floor, some children’s books and a box of crayons on the bed. Andi found a single sock, clearly the mate to the one the boy was wearing.

  We regarded once again the door that had sealed this room, the concrete walls with no window, the cold, the silence, the prison cell size, and a silence fell over us.

  “Friend of yours?” Brenda said at last.

  Only to my horror and dismay. It took effort to find my voice. “I . . . cannot defend him.”

  “Defend him? What for? This is all . . .” She mimicked my voice, my manner. “Entirely pragmatic! A logical step! A practical means to an end!”

  “Enough—”

  “We’ll lock the kid up like a lab rat, purely for the sake of gathering useful data because after all, what are right and wrong but mere social abstractions?”

  “You’re not being fair—”

  “Fair? What do you know about fair?” She waved her hand over the whole mess before us. “I’ll tell you fair. If I was the House I’d be after him too, and I hope the House gets him!”

  She had me on the ropes, but Andi, like the proverbial bell, saved me. “Excuse me? Have you seen this?”

  She was referring to strange symbols the boy had scrawled on the wall of the room with a black crayon. It could have been a code, a language, I couldn’t tell. I looked to Andi, but she seemed perplexed.

  Until I remembered a phrase Van Epps had used: the handwriting on the wall . . .

  That triggered something in Andi. She gasped, looked at the strange squiggles again, then grabbed a crayon from the bed and began to copy them on the same wall, but in mirror reverse, from left to right. “Oh no . . .” she said. “Wow. Unreal. It’s in script, and he wrote it left to right. . . .”

  “Keep going, baby,” said Brenda.

  Andi finished copying, then pointed at the symbols as she read: “May-nay, may-nay, Tay-kel, oo-far-seen.”

  I now recognized it. “Hebrew.”

  Andi nodded. “Every Jewish girl learns her Hebrew. This is a quote from—” Then she laughed and wagged her head in wonder. “From the book of Dani’el!”

  Brenda was impatient. “So what does it say?”

  “Mene,” I began. “To count. Tekel: To weigh. Pharsin: to divide.”

  “The prophet Dani’el’s warning to the wicked king Belshazzar,” said Andi, her voice hushed with wonder.

  “Written by the hand of God on the wall of the king’s palace.” To Brenda’s questioning look I responded, “I was a priest.”

  Andi explained it. “God was telling Belshazzar, ‘Your days are numbered and they’ve come to an end; You’ve been weighed in the balance and found wanting; your kingdom is divided among your enemies.’”

  “So the boy Daniel has a gift,” I mused.

  “And one tough dude for a friend,” said Brenda, eyeing the broken door and then pointing to a high basement window still hanging open.

  “Harvey?” Andi asked.

  Brenda shuddered. “Man, I ain’t calling him Harvey.”

  “So as Earthsong told us, he escaped.” I recounted the “reading” of the fortune-teller. “A child thought to have a gift . . . he was consulted . . . he was a prisoner, but he broke his bonds and is free and people are looking for him.”

  Andi eyed the writing on the wall. “God spoke in different ways in the Bible. You know the stories: the burning bush, the donkey that talked to Balaam, Gideon’s fleece . . . the handwriting on the wall. I couldn’t find a precedent for a ‘house holding people accountable,’ but maybe the House is another way for God to speak.”

  “In which case, I’d say Daniel delivered. He spoke for the House, only Van Epps didn’t like what he had to say.”

  “And Daniel isn’t the first prophet to be locked up by somebody who didn’t like his message,” said Andi.

  “And Earthsong . . .” Brenda ventured.

  I was having the same thoughts. “She knew all about it—and she was careless enough to tell us.”

  Brenda muttered—maybe a curse—as her hand went to her head.

  “What?”

  “You okay?” Andi asked.

  “You wanted me to tell you if I got any more pictures. . . .” Brenda’s eyes closed as if viewing something in her mind. “I see . . . blood on the floor.”

  “Where?” said Andi, looking around.

  “In my head!”

  “The fortune-teller,” I said, my guts twisting.

  Their eyes asked for an explanation.

  “Your comments, Brenda, about Van Epps being unable to run a camera. We can say for sure he was minding that camera long enough to record three hours of static.”

  “But—” said Andi, eyes widening.

  “Exactly,” I said. “We were in the House for five.”

  CHAPTER

  14

  The Third Death

  I assigned Andi to a safe and neutral position behind a tree on a small bluff overlooking the House and, just up the street, Van Epps’ home. She was not to approach either one—which was fine with her—but to let us know if anything developed. In the meantime, she could follow up on the phone number Tank found on Daniel’s shirt collar.

  Brenda and I returned by back roads to Earthsong’s Psychic Readings to find a CLOSED sign hanging in the window. We knocked, we called out, we got no response. Brenda drew upon her street wisdom, gained admittance through a side window, and let me in through the front door.

  Upstairs, a sound system was playing psychedelic rock from the sixties. We ventured up the stairs to the living quarters, a dimly lit, cultural throwback with tie-dyed tapestries, black-light posters of Morrison, Hendrix, and Joplin, walls randomly splattered in pop-art colors.

  We found Earthsong on her bed, two fresh needle marks in her arm, the syringe on the nightstand. She had nodded off and fallen into a deeper and deeper sleep until she was dead.

  “Don’t touch anything,” I cautioned.

  “So here’s death number three,” said Brenda.

  “Murder number three, I’m afraid.” I used a pen from my pocket to press the sound system’s off button and immediately confirmed the stirrings I thought I’d heard downstairs.

  I went to the top of the stairs and called out, “Lady and Gentleman, she’s dead and we are witnesses; we have the child in our custody, and Van Epps will be convicted of murder. Now you can kill us and draw all the more attention, or you can abandon Van Epps right here, right now, and slink back under your secretive rock to fight another day.”

  Brenda, beside me, was clearly surprised to hear footfalls move through the building. We caught only the back of the man and woman going out the front door.

  “Our error, leaving that door unlocked,” I said. “They’ve been following us from the beginning. We’ve seen them before: scum from that Institute, damage controllers, trying to find Daniel and letting Van Epps know our every move—beginning with our visit to this very place. Earthsong thought you and I were them. That’s why she showed off so much—and said things she shouldn’t have.”

  “And Van Epps killed her?”

  I felt condemned by my own concession. “As you reminded me, it was the pragmatic, logical, practical thing to do. It stands to reason that perhaps she was his mistress, which explains how she knew about Daniel, his gift, how Van Epps hel
d him prisoner, and how he escaped. And being Van Epps’ mistress, of course she’d be jealous when Van Epps brought in Daniel to consult instead of her. So she was jealous of Daniel and high on heroin, which made her blabby—a liability. If she mouthed off so freely to you and me, who else might she talk to?

  “You noticed there were two needle marks? The first dose was administered by Earthsong to satisfy her addiction; the second fatal dose was administered by her lover, who knew where she kept her heroin—who no doubt supplied it in the first place, maybe in exchange for sexual favors. He was only minding his camera outside the House for three of the five hours we were inside. The other two afforded him the opportunity to come here, eliminate the risk of discovery, and return to meet us outside the House, his jacket freshly imbued with more of Earthsong’s incense, by the way.

  “As for Clyde Morris and Gustav Svensson, if we believe the pattern set by the House—which logic, not belief, compels me to do—it follows that the same person who engineered Earthsong’s death is also responsible for the other two.” I reached for my cell phone. “I would say it’s time to call the police.”

  In my hand, my cell phone played Beethoven’s Fifth. The screen told me it was Andi. “Yes?”

  She was so frantic I could barely understand her.

  “Van Epps! He’s trying to burn the House down, and Tank and Daniel are still inside!”

  CHAPTER

  15

  A House Afire

  At perilous speed we drove back to where the House . . . used to be. At that location we found a field overtaken by blackberries.

  Up the street, directly across from Van Epps’ home, the House stood rock solid even as smoke poured from the windows and flames licked about the porch. The can of gasoline for the mower lay on its side in the front yard, emptied. Van Epps was just coming from his garage with another can and some empty beer bottles.

  Andi ran to us as we screeched to a halt and burst from the car. “Tank and Daniel are inside!”

  Before I could get to him, Van Epps hurled a gasoline-filled bottle through the front window. An explosion of new flames followed, roiling and engulfing the living room, the walls, the furniture.

  I ran and stood between him and the House. “Are you out of your mind? Stop this!”

  As if I were not even there, he raged against the burning building. “Come after me, will you? How do you like burning? I’ll send you back where you came from, you filthy—”

  He grabbed another bottle and would have filled it, but I blocked the action and the bottle shattered on the street. “A.J., come to your senses! Look at what you’ve become!”

  For the first time he looked at me. “Become? Become? This is me, James! I am what I’ve always been, and this”—he indicated his arsenal of gasoline and bottles—“this is survival!”

  The ladies were screaming for Tank and Daniel. The House was becoming an inferno, the flames roaring up the sides, black smoke venting out the eaves.

  A chair crashed through an upstairs window, followed by a huge, smoking body. Tank! He plunged, rolled down the porch roof, took hold of a trellis as he pitched over the edge, and grabbed the autumn-deadened branches of a vine to break his fall. He landed and collapsed on the lawn, rolling in the grass to extinguish flames that I hoped had not ignited on him. The ladies and I were there instantly, checking him over.

  He was blackened by smoke and soot, bleeding from scrapes and cuts, wracked with coughing, fighting for air. Yet still he managed to cry, “Daniel! Daniel!”

  Flames were shooting out the window he’d just come through. Daniel. Oh, child! No one could still be alive in there.

  Andi shrieked, “Daniel!”

  I followed her horrified gaze across the street.

  Daniel! There he was, crossing the street, hand in hand with he-whom-we-were-not-to-call-Harvey . . . heading for Van Epps’ front door.

  “He made it, he made it!” Brenda shouted to Tank.

  Daniel met our eyes, our horror, with a look of such peace, I felt all reason leave me. Child, what are you doing?

  Van Epps caught sight of Daniel even as the boy went in his front door. Van Epps abandoned his pyromania and dashed toward his house, bounded up his stairs, burst through the doorway.

  No! Oh dear God, no!

  Tank was fallen, barely turned from the brink of death. The ladies were tending to him and hadn’t the strength . . .

  And for reasons only the heart, not the mind, can know, I ran for that door.

  CHAPTER

  16

  The Monster

  I bounded up the stairs two at a time. In one blurred moment I crossed the porch and burst through the front door—

  And into a cage with a monster.

  Van Epps held Daniel in a desperate grip, and a knife to Daniel’s throat. “Stop right there, James!”

  I stopped. I raised my hands. “A.J. This is—you must admit—highly irregular.”

  “But you must admit, entirely pragmatic!” His crazed eyes locked on the burning House; the glow of the fire played on his face. “A life for a life. I’m sure the House understands the concept!”

  “It would only be another murder!”

  “Murder?” He actually laughed. “Am I talking to James McKinney? Since when did murder become more than a social concept? Since when did you decide to be a hero?”

  I was struck dumb. What could I say? Where could I go from here?

  Van Epps was enjoying the upper hand. “Morris was a drunken, wife-beating wretch and deserved to die anyway. All I did was control the time of death.”

  To my own indictment, I understood his reasoning. “Controlling the conditions for observing the phenomena.”

  “And it worked: it produced a posthumous sighting and photographs of Clyde Morris; the House appeared again; we got the account from Morris’s widow.”

  “So what about Gustav Svensson?”

  “A blight on the face of the town! Constantly soiling the tourists’ experience with his foul temperament. Hated! So we needed observable, repeatable results. I took the necessary steps—and we got them.”

  I erred in taking a step forward. His knife went anew to Daniel’s throat. “Easy! Easy!”

  I took a step back.

  The knife stayed right where it was. “So don’t you see, James? Repeatable results mean predictability, and predictability means eventual control. Had we understood the House, we could have controlled it. We could have harnessed it.”

  “And turned it aside?”

  His glare was condemning. “Exactly.”

  I grimaced. A monster being reasonable. Another monster would have accepted his argument. I, at least, saw the logic in it. I felt sick.

  “I suppose,” I ventured, “Earthsong was only a complication?”

  “She . . . and the kid.” He waved the knife under Daniel’s nose.

  “He only delivered the message, A.J. Locking him up didn’t change anything and killing him certainly won’t.”

  “His life for mine, James. Behavioral control of that thing over there . . . until it burns to the ground.”

  “Not at such a cost! Never.”

  As if to confirm my words, there came a rumbling in the floor, in the walls, and then a shaking so severe the furniture danced. We fell. Daniel wriggled free. The noise shook my insides. Dishes, lamps, books showered down, and I felt I was riding the floor, fists clenching wads of carpet, as it heaved and bucked and the room spun about. Where was Daniel?

  I saw the knife, fallen from Van Epps’ hand and jittering upon the floor. I knew he would go for it, so I did. We collided in the center of the room, neither of us procuring the knife, both of us reduced to a savage brawl: rolling, kicking, striking—I even bit his hand. The degradation was appalling and my skills as a grappler nonexistent, but there we were, rabid animals in a huge tumbler, trying to kill each other.

  Somehow Van Epps got hold of me from behind, and as he compressed my throat and I fought for my life, an infinitesimal pa
rt of my awareness took note of four facts: the room had changed, my friends were shouting and pounding on the front door, Daniel stood safely in a corner, watching, and . . . Daniel was also watching someone else, his eyes expectant.

  Suddenly, Van Epps let out an oof, released me, and I tottered forward, turning in time to see him slam against the wall. That I would have such strength surprised me.

  The advantage, however, was now his. He had the knife again and charged like a raging bull. I may have ducked when he thrust the knife. I only remember tumbling onto the couch while he went flying over it and then let out a cry.

  I leaped from the couch, eyes everywhere, not seeing him—

  A groan came from the archway between the living and dining rooms. The couch blocked my view, but as I rounded it I found my adversary fallen, a pool of crimson spreading beneath him, the knife up to the hilt between his ribs.

  Only then, as I gasped for breath, did I realize the tumult and quaking had ceased. Only then did I recognize the dining room with its eight place settings and high-backed chairs. I was standing in the House. Except for the disarray Van Epps and I had caused, no harm was done, and not the slightest scent of smoke remained.

  As if by the House’s will, the front lock released, the door burst open, and in spilled Tank, Andi, and Brenda. Tank was scorched and tattered, but ready to . . . well, I suppose I beat him to it.

  Aghast, they took in the scene, from Daniel safe in the corner to the upset furniture to the body of Van Epps, unquestionably dead. Brenda stared in recognition at the pool of blood on the floor, then at me.

  “Duly noted,” I replied.

  “You’re bleeding!” Andi cried.

  Oh. A cut on my hand. Nothing deep or serious, but sufficiently dramatic. Even so, something else warranted my attention: an awareness, an urgency. “Get Daniel out of here.”

  “But—”

  “Tank, if you would, please.”

  Tank hurried over and scooped Daniel up.

  I could not say how I knew, and there wasn’t time to sort it out. “It isn’t over. Get out. Now.”