House Haunted

by Al Sarrantonio

  “Stay here until the ship arrives in New York. If you don't, I'll take you back to Chambers House. Understand?”

  Choking, wanting to weep, Ricky nodded.

  “Good,” the female voice said. It softened, the grip on his neck turning to caress. In the darkness, the hand touched his face.

  “Don't cry, Ricky boy,” the voice said, suddenly sweet. “Your dream is going to come true.”

  12. BRENNAN

  Ted Brennan turned on his meter at three o'clock in the afternoon and found that the batteries were dead. “Shit,” he said, carefully removing one of the dangerous lead cells, which sparked meekly as it came away from its contacts. He had spares; he remembered bringing them with him, but he couldn't find them. After rummaging through his camera bag, his briefcase, the gadget bag that he kept the meter in (the most logical place for replacement batteries—therefore, the least likely place for them to be: and, of course, they weren't there), he gave up and was feeling into the pocket of his raincoat, which was draped over a chair in the living room, for cigarettes, when his fingers came across the plastic bag containing the extras.

  “Bully for serendipity,” he said to himself, sarcastically. He ripped open the battery package and pulled the cells out.

  He spent the next five minutes smoking, trying every possible combination of alignment before he got the batteries to work.

  He was about to light another cigarette when he suddenly remembered his father's simple statement: “You smoke, you die.” Those four words had worked better at making him at least think about stopping than all the antismoking campaigns and all the born-again nonsmokers he knew: the same assholes who had chain-dragged two or three packs of Camels a day in medical school, on top of whatever weed was around, and laughed when anyone—especially any doctor, tried to tell them what they were doing to themselves. They weren't doing shit, seemed to be the response; they were twenty-fucking-four years old and the only thing that was going to kill them was if the president pushed the wrong button on his bedside table while fumbling around for his teeth, and blew all the medical students and all the people in all the world, straight to atoms. Which was pretty much out of their hands.

  But Ted Brennan was thirty-eight now, along with all those born-again jerks who had formerly been friends (they were born again about everything, it seemed—kids, conservatism, even religion), and some of the messages of middle age were getting through to him.

  “You smoke, you die.”

  The image of his father, the famous surgeon, lying wasted to whiteness on his hospital bed at the age of fifty-seven, his lungs riddled with healthy cancer cells eating him alive, pointing to Ted's own cigarette pack but pointing just as well to all the two-packs-a-day he himself had smoked over forty years of his addiction, rose into Ted's mind. The weary gesture that went with the statement, which held so much more than a deathbed warning about smoking, got through to Ted.

  “Ted, I'm sorry,” his father had said.

  “Please tell me.”

  His father had tried to rise on the bed, couldn't find the strength. He'd fallen back, exhausted, pale as the sheets that engulfed him. “I can't.”

  “I have a right to know.”

  His father had nodded, wearily. “Yes. But my promise. . .”

  You smoke, you die . . .

  Brennan crushed the second cigarette out, which he had unconsciously lit while deciding not to smoke it.

  Back to work.

  With a grunt, he rose and went back to the bedroom.

  All the windows were open; had been, the landlord, Beauvaque, told him, since the girl had left two days before. Beauvaque had done nothing but whine from the time Ted had tracked him down in his top-floor apartment—the best in the building, facing out over the Rideau Canal. The land-lord's apartment had smelled of heavy perfume. A lot of cats were moving around in it. Beauvaque wore a flowing paisley robe, and his eyes, outlined in eye shadow, showed nothing as Ted explained why he wanted to see the apartment. Then, holding his slim white hand out, giving Brennan what was supposed to be a soulful look, which had come across as sad and calculated, Beauvaque had dropped the key into Ted's palm.

  “The police wouldn't like it if they knew I gave you this, sugar,” the landlord had said. “You do appreciate this?”

  “I certainly do.” Ted had answered, leaving the landlord as quickly as possible. He had expected a return visit from the man by now, but so far he had been left alone.

  The batteries in place, Brennan turned on the meter.

  “Jesus,” he said to himself. The meter reading was higher than he had ever seen it.

  A flare of hope went through him. Maybe—

  Take it easy, Ted.

  He had been through this kind of thing enough times before. Often what started out as a routine poltergeist event showed some quirk that promised more—but, inevitably, the house of cards built on hope would tumble down, and he would be left with anything from a hoax to another paranormal event with no proof and no chance that it was part of what he sought. The standard always remained, in the end, just that—standard.

  Still, he knew that soon, maybe this time

  Take it easy.

  Standard, if anything, was the way this had looked up until now. Laura Hutchin's own notebook, which Beauvaque had hidden from the police and given to Ted, had maintained that there had been poltergeist activity the first night: drawers pulled open, silverware scattered, a message, seemingly from her parents, carved into the wooden counter in the kitchen. Even what had followed was standard enough, pointing to something worse than a hoax: a disturbed person acting out a psychosis in a paranormal framework.

  The single time he had met Laura Hutchins, two weeks before, she had impressed him as neurotic. She had haltingly, and with some embarrassment, asked him if it was possible to contact her dead parents. She said there was an apartment her aunt and cousin had lived in in Canada, and supposedly it was haunted; she had rented it and perhaps she could contact her parents there. She had read an article about him in a magazine.

  Brennan had given her the usual two-minute lecture about how he couldn't help her, maybe she wanted a medium; though in his opinion mediums were fun, but completely full of shit; he had politely listened to her stupid questions, then sent her on her way explaining that he was interested only in one certain type of paranormal event connected with one specific type of haunting, and that if she came across such a thing, she should certainly contact him, but otherwise please leave him alone. Along with her phone number, and the number of the apartment in Ottawa she insisted on giving him, he had described her in his logbook, as he did every-body who came to see him; a quick thumbnail sketch: Laura Hutchins, 5'4”, brown hair, brown eyes, nice breasts, serious demeanor, embarrassed but neurotically determined about contacting dead parents, nothing concrete to give me. Gave lecture, explained that popular articles like one she read about me were unauthorized bullshit. Obsessed enough to keep trying.

  That was all he knew of Laura Hutchins until he got back from a promising trip to Phoenix (a hoax, it turned out) to find a particularly frantic phone call from her on the tape machine. She had at least been smart enough to identify herself, leading him back to the thumbnail. The taped message was nearly hysterical: “Dr. Brennan, I've . . . just gotten off the phone with my boyfriend, oh, God, I hope the tape goes long enough, he's very mad at me, but I think I've found what you're looking for. I'm in the apartment in Ottawa I told you about, where my aunt and cousin died. I've only been here tonight and I've gotten a message; there were knives and forks scattered and—oh, damn, the tape is o—”

  The tape ended there, but she was a smart girl and called him right back. She sounded more worked up now, barely identifying herself and going right back into it: “I . . . the knives and forks were out of the open drawer, and the drawer was pulled out [stopped to regain breath, sobbed a little, losing control; a count of ten and then she regained control]. Okay, I was on the phone with my boyfriend, Peter, and
I had a waking dream, a hallucination as I was holding the phone. I saw my M and P—that's my mom and dad—I was with them, back home, when I was younger, and I was with my father, and M called both of us for supper—”

  The second tape recording ended, followed immediately by a third. “Damn!” she screamed, then, “Oh, God, and then I put the phone down and I saw the kitchen counter next to the phone and it said 'Soon Love, M and P' on it; M and P are my mom and—[More hysteria, real crying, and he thought he heard her tell someone “No!” but he couldn't be sure; she had pulled the phone away from her mouth for a moment. She continued talking, rapidly.] They're my mom and dad, and Peter hung up the phone. I know he's going to come up here eventually; we had a fight—oh, God, I'm scared! The lights are going—[“No!” he heard distinctly this time as she pulled the phone away again] The lights are on and off! I heard something in the other room.” [Brennan had replayed this tape fifteen times, gone so far as to have it analyzed, but there was no other sound in the background.] “I just want to see them again! I want to tell them—oh, God, what's happening in here! Lights outside the window, too! Like lightning—”

  He had run through the rest of his messages quickly, looking for any more: one call from his ex-wife (“Money! Money!”—His answer: “Fuck you! Fuck you!”), a computer voice from his bank trying to get him to take out a home equity loan. Then at the end of the tape, two days after the first calls (his wife had called again, reminding him that forty-eight hours had passed and that the rest of eternity would pass before he got to fuck her again), a final message from Laura Hutchins.

  “God, Dr. Brennan, please listen to me! Come here, please! There. . . [part missing, a hiss spot] . . . things I see! I ... [hiss/miss] . I can hear her talking to me! Her voice! She says she'll take me to M and P. Her voice is cutting into my head like a knife! She. . . [more hissing till the tape runs off].”

  That was all. A sound analysis had shown nothing out of the ordinary: in the kitchen the faintest of hums, from the refrigerator. G.E. Model, probably. An intermittent tapping sound, semi-rhythmic, the girl tapping her fingernails nervously on some surface—the kitchen countertop, the wall. Nothing else.

  So the question became whether to follow up or not. The Phoenix trip had depressed him. There was probably nothing to this, either. She sounded like a kook, and he would just be wasting his time.

  Still, there had been one sentence on the tape that intrigued him: “She says she'll take me to M and P” And that insistent little pressure in the back of his mind, pushing him on . . .

  He decided to follow up. But when he'd called Laura Hutchins on the phone, he'd gotten a disconnect message, and when he arrived in Ottawa, he discovered she was missing.

  Brennan had asked the landlord point-blank about anything strange ever taking place in the apartment. Beauvaque had been evasive. “The apartment's been unavailable for quite a while,” he said vaguely. “If I hadn't known that Hutchins girl's aunt and cousin, I wouldn't have let her have it.”

  “Laura Hutchins told me the apartment was haunted—”

  “I wouldn't know about that,” Beauvaque had snapped.

  Was Laura Hutchins crazy? Possibly. Brennan had talked to her roommate and found that Laura had been depressed since her parents died, the year before. The roommate had hinted that Laura had been too close to her parents, that they had smothered her—an explanation for her obsessive-compulsive behavior. The roommate also said that Laura and Peter had fought over her parents, and that the fights had gotten worse.

  He had come to Ottawa expecting to find the thumbnail sketch all too right, the voice on the telephone messages faked or delusional. He had expected to find overwhelming evidence of a psychotic episode.

  He had fully expected to find another in a long line of dead ends.

  Up until he had turned on the meter, he had still expected that. But now he had . . . hope?

  Maybe this was the one he was meant to find—

  Take it easy, Ted.

  He did a slow circle around the bedroom. When he passed the closet, the needle jumped even higher. He pointed the meter at the closet, and 'the meter reading held, more than three quarters of the way up the scale.

  “Jesus.”

  There was a cold, empty, unpleasant feeling in the pit of his stomach. It was as though his insides had been scooped out and filled with ice water.

  A mixture of elation and fear.

  He paced slowly toward the bedroom closet. He checked the meter reading; it was rising. The icy feeling became stronger.

  He stepped into the closet.

  The meter reading went off the scale,

  Instantly, Brennan's head was filled with a blinding flash of light. It was as if someone had set off a flare behind his eyes. He stumbled back out of the closet. His legs found the bed, and he fell onto it.

  He blinked furiously, a spot like the burn from a flashbulb filling the middle of his vision. When he closed his eyes, the spot flared green behind his eyelids; when he opened his eyes, he could see clearly around the edges for a moment, and then a blackness settled into the middle of his sight and spread outward.

  He coldly realized that the effect was not going away. Something moved in the room.

  He pushed himself up on his elbows and blinked furiously at the closet. Green flash, sight at the edge (a figure dashing out of the closet at him?) and then blackness.

  “Jesus.”

  There was commotion around the closet—scratching, something tapping on wood.

  “Get away! Keep away from me!”

  Something jumped onto the bed.

  Brennan flinched. He felt the brush of fur against his side. He strained his eyes to see.

  “Get away!” He swatted at the thing as it moved against him.

  His hand struck something solid, covered in fur. It hissed, falling from the bed.

  “Get—!”

  “What is all this now?” a voice said. Brennan strained his eyes at the bedroom door. Fighting the edges of his vision, he saw a shape.

  “What's going on here,” the shape said. “Did he hurt you, Muffin?”

  “Who is it?” Brennan shouted.

  “Dr. Brennan, are you all right?”

  With relief, Brennan recognized the voice: the landlord, Beauvaque. “I . . .” He waved his hands before him. “I can't see.”

  “My Lord,” Beauvaque said. Brennan tried to blink sight into his eyes (green flash, total blackness now; the green flash fading to black). He felt the weight of Beauvaque sitting on the bed; felt Muffin, the cat that was with him, move against his side, purring . . .

  Fighting panic, Brennan said, “My retinas may have been burned out.”

  “Let's have a look,” Beauvaque said.

  Brennan acquiesced. Soft hands pressed lightly around his eyes, holding them gently open. He could feel the other man staring closely into his own eyes.

  “I can't see anything wrong with them.”

  Beauvaque took his fingers from Brennan's face. Brennan stiffened as the other man squeezed his shoulder.

  “Listen to me, Dr. Brennan. I used to be a nurse, in a real hospital. I'll take care of you.”

  Brennan sensed embarrassment.

  “No touchy-feely, if that's what you're worried about, sugar. I'm not like that.” Beauvaque snorted. “Come on, let's get you up.”

  With Beauvaque supporting him, Brennan got to his feet. He began to walk. He felt like he had been reborn in a world without light.

  “We're coming to the door, Dr. Brennan.”

  He felt himself walk through the bedroom door.

  Brennan felt himself leave the apartment, felt the rub of Muffin against his leg.

  “My equipment,” he protested, turning to look blindly back into the apartment.

  “I'll get it later,” Beauvaque said.

  They stopped, and Brennan heard the landlord rattling keys, closing and locking the apartment door. “Right now let's worry about your eyes.”

  Brenn
an leaned on the other man for a moment as they stepped onto the elevator and quickly pulled back. He felt very tired and upset.

  “Dr. Brennan, you're shivering!” Beauvaque said.

  Suddenly, Brennan didn't mind the other man's closeness. He leaned into Beauvaque, and Beauvaque put his arm around Brennan's shoulder and held him.

  “Poor boy,” Beauvaque said, opening the door to his apartment.

  In Beauvaque's bedroom, in the midst of the odor of cat and strong perfume under an army of quilts and blankets, Ted Brennan fell asleep sightless, shivering, with terrible fear and hope in his head.

  13. EAST

  The woman with hair on her chin came for him at seven o'clock. She usually came for him at eight. He was still curled asleep on his hard bed, face toward the damp wall, arm thrown over his face. He was dreaming about a turtle, a marvelous slow turtle, a dark clean shade of brown, with green mottles within its shell sections. It was as beautiful as painted ceramic, and its leathery legs, fresh from the water, were as clean as the rest of it. There was a spot of bright orange behind its wizened head; its eyes were like two tiny dark smooth pebbles. It blinked a dinosaur blink and moved from beach to a clean cut of green grass.

  The turtle pulled into itself, becoming only a perfect piece of pottery. Jan started and blinked open his eyes. He saw white light against the walls instead of accustomed darkness.

  He lifted his arm away from his face and turned his head over, yawning awake, to find the face of the woman with hair on her chin inches from his own.

  She smiled at his surprise. He waited for her to lift her head away, but instead she lowered it, twisting her mouth sideways and opening it like a little animal and putting her mouth over his.

  He jerked his head back, meeting the solid dampness of the wall behind him. She lifted her mouth slightly from his and said, “Don't.”

  He lay back and let her continue to kiss him. Her kiss was like dry paper. He thought of the remains of fallen leaves after their burning. Her eyes were open, looking into his. They were beautiful eyes, round, limpid, a shade between amber and chocolate. He found himself responding until she adjusted her mouth against his and he felt the curl of her chin - hairs against his cheek. He suddenly wanted to vomit. But again she sensed his feelings. Once more she lifted her face from his and said, “Don't.”