The Haunted

by Bentley Little

  “In his office.”

  Megan bounded up the steps two at a time, eager to tell him about the movie.

  But her father was not in his office. The room was empty, and, frowning, she moved past the doorway, walking all the way in, checking to see whether he was in one of the corners or crouched down behind the desk. In the back of her mind, though she didn’t want to admit it, was the fear that he had collapsed, had a stroke or heart attack or something and was lying on the floor, dead.

  There was a strange clicking sound coming from his computer, and she walked around the side of his desk, grateful to see that he was not on the floor. He was probably in the bathroom, she thought reassuringly as she glanced at the monitor.

  Hi, Megan!

  The words were in the middle of the screen, and she might have thought her dad had typed them if they hadn’t started dancing as she watched: growing, changing colors, bouncing up and down.

  The words disappeared.

  I saw U.

  She froze, the rhythm of her heart accelerating as the new text emerged, bright red against a light blue background. In her mind, she saw the face in the mirror, the figure in the steam. She thought of the message on her phone: I C U Megan.

  “Hi.”

  She jumped at the sound of her father’s voice, letting out a sharp, startled yelp.

  “Whoa.” He was coming through the doorway, but he backed up comically in the face of her reaction. “I guess you saw that horror movie, huh?”

  “Actually, we did,” she admitted. “But …” That’s not what scared me, she was about to say. And then she looked at the computer screen and saw only a series of free-floating icons that her dad was obviously using for his current job.

  “But what?”

  She shook her head. “I thought I saw something weird on your computer.”

  He grinned. “There’s always something weird on my computer.”

  “That’s not what I meant …” she began. She thought about telling him what she’d seen on his screen, thought about describing her experience this morning in the bathroom, but trying to make him believe she’d encountered something spooky right after she’d returned from seeing a horror movie was near impossible, and it was probably better if she brought it up some other time. She’d get only one shot with a story as out-there as this, and if she didn’t convince him the first time, she’d never be able to do it. She didn’t want to ruin her one-and-only chance.

  So she smiled at him and changed the subject. “That was a good movie,” she told him. “It was creepy.”

  “Did you get scared?” he teased.

  “A little.”

  He bumped her shoulder. “Think I can convince your mom to see it?”

  “Sure,” she said, playing along. “And have her bring James.”

  They both laughed.

  But she still felt chilled, and even as she was joking around with her dad, she kept her eyes on his computer.

  Fourteen

  Saturday.

  Robbie was late coming over, so James went up to the headquarters by himself. The place was shaping up. The skeletons he’d found had been cleaned up and arranged on a low shelf made from a wood plank balanced atop concrete cinder blocks. The shelf was to the right of the bookcase, which was now filled with unwanted magazines they’d scrounged from their respective houses. Robbie’s dad had given them an old typewriter, which they’d placed on top of the bookcase next to a stack of plain white paper and a toy magnifying glass Robbie had taken from his brother’s room. The exercise bike was next to the window, and the traffic cone sat in front of the secret compartment, marking it and blocking it. Today, Robbie was bringing over his chemistry set, which would help make the headquarters look like a real crime lab.

  If he ever got here.

  James glanced around. They needed a clock, he decided, so they could tell what time it was.

  He sat on the floor for a few minutes, thumbed through an old issue of People magazine, read a movie review, found a few pictures of starlets on the beach in bikinis, then stood up, restless. Standing near the window, he listened for the sound of Robbie’s car, heard nothing, then opened the trapdoor and climbed the ladder downstairs.

  He walked into the backyard. His parents had gone to The Store, leaving him in Megan’s hands. Not an ideal situation, although if the two of them stayed out of each other’s way until their mom and dad returned, there shouldn’t be a problem.

  James looked toward the house, where his sister was hopefully minding her own business and not spying on him.

  He was about to walk out to the front yard and wait for Robbie there, when his attention was caught by the hole he had dug in the ground.

  It was back.

  How was that possible? His dad had made him fill it in last weekend. The work had been hard—much harder than digging it had been, for some reason—but afterward, it was as if a great responsibility had been lifted from his shoulders. The unwanted compulsion to eat dirt that had been plaguing him since the opening of that secret compartment had disappeared, and along with it the weird mixture of defensiveness and guilt that discovery of the compartment had engendered.

  He’d been grateful to his dad, and the week had passed quickly and uneventfully.

  But last night he’d had a dream. In it, he had dug a tunnel from the garage to the basement, eating the dirt as he made his way under the yard, feeling it enter his body through one end and pass out the other as though he were a worm. Now, he saw as he approached the hole, there actually was a tunnel, or the beginning of one, and he felt within his chest a familiar stirring.

  Perfectly round, as though bored by machine, the hole was probably three feet across and went down at least that far. At the bottom were bugs, dozens of them, black, unrecognizable insects that had probably been beetles before being squished into the amorphous mass that coated the floor of the pit. A narrow passage, barely big enough for him to slide through on his stomach, had been burrowed into the side of the hole, heading toward the house.

  James jumped in, hearing and feeling the bugs crunch beneath his shoes. Grimacing, he kicked them to the edges and cleared a space before the tunnel. He knew it was crazy even as he did it, but he couldn’t seem to help himself, and he dropped to his knees, then ducked down and pushed his way into the opening headfirst.

  It was pitch-black. He couldn’t see a thing. For all he knew, there were bugs galore in the space ahead. Beetles. Worms. Or something worse.

  But he pressed on, wriggling into the narrow tunnel, arms at his sides like the Grinch slithering and slinking through one of the Whos’ houses. The earth smelled good, and he breathed deeply, the scent of the soil and its olfactory lure overriding the utter lack of light and helping him overcome his trepidation. He wriggled in farther—

  And dirt fell on his rear end and the backs of his legs—the only parts of his body still sticking out into the hole.

  He waited in place for a moment, not moving, thinking that his squirming feet must have jostled free some loose earth. But though he remained still, soil continued to rain down on the lower half of his body.

  “Hey!” he cried. “Stop it!” But his voice sounded muffled even to himself, and he doubted that the sound of it even escaped the tunnel.

  The dirt continued to fall. Faster.

  Someone was trying to bury him.

  Someone or something.

  In his mind, he saw the terrible grinning man from his dreams, the one he’d spotted in the window of his dad’s office, furiously throwing dirt into the hole in an effort to entomb him here forever. This was a trap, and he’d fallen for it, and he wondered whether the dirt would be packed down, the grass replaced, everything put back perfectly just the way it had been so that he would never be found. His parents would search for him, the police might think he’d been kidnapped or had run away, and all the time he would be buried here in the backyard, rotting.

  Turning into a skeleton like the animals he’d found.

&nbs
p; James tried to quell the panic rising within him.

  He had to get out of here.

  Now.

  With a burst of energy, he shoved himself backward, using his shoulders to propel his body, since his arms were pinned uselessly to his sides. In the hole, his shoes dug into the beetle-coated earth, and he tilted his ankles, providing enough leverage for his knees to find purchase. As dirt continued to fall heavily down, he squirmed and twisted his body rearward through the confined passageway until finally his hands were out of the tunnel and able to help push him free.

  He was half-submerged in loose dirt, and a huge clump of soil fell on top of his head as he emerged from the tunnel, nearly knocking him flat. Grit stung his eyes and got in his nose, and now the dirt in his mouth did not taste good at all. He shook his head to get it out of his hair and used a hand to wipe off his face. The sides of the hole were collapsing, and he clambered unsteadily to his feet. He could see no one in the yard, but he didn’t have time to look around, because one entire section of the pit fell in on him, knocking him sideways and forcing him to his knees. He was pinned by the heavy earth in an awkward position, with one hand above his head and the other trapped beneath his tilted body.

  He was going to die.

  He knew it as surely as he knew his own name. One more shovelful of dirt or one more collapsed wall and he would be gone.

  Frantic, he bent his free arm and began desperately clawing at the surrounding soil in an urgent attempt to free himself. Luckily, the side of the wall that had him pinned was solid, not loose, and he was able to pull out one chunk and then another, tossing them onto the ground above. The earth was shifting around him, almost like a miniquake, but he managed to liberate his other arm, and then both hands were feverishly yanking out hunks of dirt as his legs tried in vain to kick themselves out from under the weight holding them down. His efforts revealed a fault line in the compacted soil, and his clawed fingers pulled the two halves apart at that point, allowing him to wriggle up and out, just as the rest of the hole fell in on itself.

  He emerged breathless and weak, flopping exhaustedly on the ground, alive only because he had managed to escape at the very last second. If he had been even a hairbreadth slower, he would be dead right now.

  Breathing heavily, limbs shaking from both exertion and fear, he looked around the backyard, trying to see whether he could find out who—

  what

  —had tried to kill him, but the yard was empty.

  James hurried into the house. He wanted to tell his dad what had happened. Well, he didn’t want to, but he had to. Something was going on here, and his parents needed to know about it. Maybe they could do something; maybe they could—

  Protect him.

  He felt reassured just thinking the words. His mom and dad probably still weren’t back, but he intended to wait for them inside, and as soon as they returned, he was going to tell them everything, from the man in the window to the secret compartment in the headquarters to the animal skeletons to the dirt eating to the mysterious hole that had lured him in and then tried to kill him. He didn’t know what they could do about it, but they were adults; they would take care of it.

  He walked through the back patio, pulled open the screen—

  —and the kitchen door slammed shut.

  It barely missed hitting him in the face, barely missed crushing his fingers against the doorjamb. If he hadn’t moved his hand at the last second, he would have been seriously injured. Angrily, he turned the knob and threw the door open again, already shouting out Megan’s name.

  But she wasn’t there.

  James stopped, looking around, confused, but not as confused as he would like to have been. His sister hadn’t been the one who slammed the door on him. No, someone—

  something

  —else had done it. And it hadn’t been a prank. The door pusher had wanted to hurt him.

  James stepped carefully into the kitchen, looking around. “Megan!” He called his sister’s name not out of anger this time but out of need, a desire to have her nearby. Maybe she couldn’t protect him the way his parents could, but she was older and braver than he was, and with two of them, they’d be better able to defend themselves against … against … whatever it was.

  “Megan?”

  There was no answer, and he moved forward, calling her name again. From the corner of his eye, he saw movement, and when he looked to his right, he saw the door to the basement swing slowly open. He wanted to scream, wanted to run, but he was frozen in place, and in the silence of the house, he heard footsteps, the heavy, deliberate footsteps of a man coming up the cellar stairs.

  The grinning man from the corner.

  Now he did run. He didn’t want to leave Megan all alone, but his mind tolerated no such conscious considerations. He was acting on instinct, pure animal fear, and he dashed out the door the way he had come, filled only with the need for self-preservation. Ahead of him, past the patio, was the collapsed hole in which he’d almost been killed, and at the sight of it, a bolt of terror shot through him.

  Afraid to remain in the backyard for even a second longer, he dashed around the corner of the house as fast as his legs would carry him, speeding down the driveway and out to the front yard, where, hopefully, his parents would be just pulling in. They weren’t. But Megan was sitting on the front stoop, looking down at her iPhone. She looked up at him as he hurried over. She’d obviously been out here for some time, and a cold shiver passed through him.

  She hadn’t been inside at all.

  He’d been alone in the house.

  No, he hadn’t.

  The cold intensified.

  Megan was not just looking at him, he realized. She was staring at him. Her face was white and her eyes wide.

  Like she’d just seen a ghost.

  He pushed that thought away. It was not what he wanted to be thinking about right now. Huffing and puffing from his brief, furious run, he stood in front of her, trying to catch his breath in order to tell her what happened. But before he could get a word out, she was standing and holding out her iPhone, that stunned look still on her face.

  She showed him the message on the screen: James will die if he tells.

  He suddenly understood her fear. He felt it, too.

  “What’s that mean?” she whispered. She looked furtively around, as if worried about being overheard. “Tell who? Tell what?”

  The message changed.

  Hi, James!

  He sucked in his breath. “Who is that?” he asked her. “Who’s texting you?”

  “I don’t know!” Her voice was still low, but there was a note of panic in it.

  Whoever—whatever—it was, was acting in real time. It knew he was here, knew he was looking at the phone. He turned his head from left to right, hoping to spot someone on the sidewalk or in the yard of one of their neighbors. But he knew that no one on the street was sending this, didn’t he? He’d nearly been buried alive, the kitchen door had almost crushed his hand, something had been coming up from the basement for him, and immediately after running out to the front yard so that the second after they returned he could tell his parents what had happened, Megan received the text, James will die if he tells.

  This wasn’t a joke. This wasn’t a coincidence. This was a warning.

  The dazed look on his sister’s face told him that she knew it, too.

  A new message appeared. I will kill you both.

  “Shut it off!” James told Megan. He hadn’t meant to shout at her, but his voice came out panicky and far too loud.

  His alarm jolted her into action, and she turned off the device, juggling it from hand to hand as though it were hot and burning her fingers.

  Before they could say a word to each other about what had happened or what to do about it, their parents pulled into the driveway. At the same time, Robbie’s dad parked next to the curb to drop him off. James turned toward his sister as his dad got out of the van, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes and fumbling
ly placed the phone in her pocket.

  It was rare for James and Megan to be standing together by the front porch, rare enough to be noticed, and, walking over, their father glanced from one to the other. “What happened?” he asked suspiciously. “What’s going on here?”

  James shot his sister a look, imploring her to answer for them.

  “Nothing,” she said. Her voice sounded a lot calmer and a lot more normal than it should have.

  I will kill you both.

  James looked guiltily away as his dad frowned at him. “Is that dirt on your clothes? Were you digging again?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “I’m talking to you.”

  I will kill you both.

  He noticed his dad examining his mouth, trying to determine whether he’d been eating dirt, and James wanted to cry, filled with a frustration that could not be expressed any other way. But Robbie was here, and he and Megan had been warned, and he managed to hold the tears at bay.

  Robbie started walking up just as Megan came under her father’s scrutiny. The heat off for a moment, James took the opportunity to hurry over to his friend. His mom was by the curb, talking to Robbie’s dad, and this was his chance to dodge both parents and avoid further scrutiny.

  “Hey,” Robbie said in greeting.

  James nodded. “Hey.”

  The third degree had ended, and his dad headed out to the street to see Robbie’s father. Megan remained where she was. James understood completely. Afraid to go into the backyard or over to their headquarters, he was equally leery of going back into the house. So he remained unmoving in the center of the lawn, waiting for his parents to finish talking and go inside before he took Robbie up to his room, where they could play computer games or do something normal.

  He glanced nervously toward the side of the house. He thought about telling Robbie what had happened—and he would, eventually—but his friend seemed subdued this morning, maybe even a little frightened. James’s brain was probably filtering things through its own prism, but, still, he didn’t want to scare Robbie off, and he decided that this was not the time to come clean.