The Haunted

by Bentley Little

  She didn’t blame them.

  Julian was watching a movie on HBO. She watched it with him for a while, and when she was sure the kids were asleep, she told him about what she’d been reading, the historical accounts of ghosts and demons and unexplainable phenomena. He was skeptical, of course, but not that skeptical, and she knew that while he wanted to disbelieve, he probably did not.

  “It has to be connected to what’s happening here, to us,” she said. “It makes sense that if those sorts of things were occurring on this land hundreds of years ago, they’re probably affecting what’s going on now.”

  “What is this, a monster movie?” he tried to joke. But he knew as well as she did that what was going on was closer to that reality than anything else, and when she stared at him disapprovingly and said nothing, he apologized.

  They were too far along to pretend that they were overreacting to a settling of the house or similarly rational events that could explain what they were going through. This was bigger than that, more concrete. Multiple people had seen a ghost walk down their hallway and into the living room. It was time to look for real answers, not logical explanations.

  They talked about it for a while, not really coming to any conclusions, agreeing only that they needed to investigate the situation more, watch the kids carefully and be very, very cautious.

  Julian was tired, had a headache, and went to bed early, but Claire was wired and wide-awake. She worked on a few pretrial motions for the Seaver divorce and tried to determine the starting point for a settlement with the school district. Her mind wandered, though, and she found herself thinking about something she’d read, a strange small detail she’d come across in two of the books, the one written by the farmer and the one penned by the Mexican historian.

  As a test, Claire went outside. Everyone in the house was asleep, so she unlocked and opened the front door very quietly, closing it behind her. She walked onto the lawn, then to the sidewalk. She had been out after dark before, but she’d never had any reason to study the sky. Now, however, she looked up.

  The night was black.

  No stars.

  She tried to recall whether she’d seen the moon since moving to their new home and couldn’t.

  Shivering, she walked down the sidewalk until she was in front of the Ribieros’ house, where she stopped, looking up.

  The Little Dipper and Orion’s belt were right where they were supposed to be, and a half-moon hovered just above the roofline of a house across the street.

  She’d been afraid this would happen, on some level had known it would happen, but the sheer concrete fact of it took her breath away. This wasn’t some nebulous experience that could be interpreted in many different ways. It was a measurable truth: the moon and stars could not be seen from their house.

  Why this was the case, she had no idea, but she walked very slowly along the sidewalk, looking up all the while. The sky was clear and beautiful, the kind she remembered from childhood. She expected to find a specific cutoff point beyond which the stars and moon could no longer be seen, but instead the lights in the sky did a slow fade, as though they were gradually being obscured or turned off. By the time she reached the boundary of her yard, the sky was jet-black.

  What did this mean? No answers suggested themselves, but the scope of the phenomenon left her feeling small and helpless. This was far bigger than just having a ghost in their house. She walked down the sidewalk in the opposite direction, and the same thing recurred: the moon and stars gradually reappeared as she moved away from her yard.

  She returned to her driveway and stood there for a moment, not sure whether she wanted to go back inside. At the moment, however, she felt safer inside than out, and she stepped onto the porch, opened the front door and walked into the living room—where the lights suddenly turned on, revealing the laundry basket sitting in the center of the floor.

  From the kitchen area, she heard a door swing open and hit the wall. Hard.

  The door to the basement.

  She couldn’t deal with this now, and she ran quickly down the hall to the bedroom, not bothering to check the cellar door, not bothering to turn off the lights in the living room. Breathing hard, she closed the door behind her and instinctively pressed her back against it to prevent anything from getting in. She thought about waking Julian, thought about telling him to go upstairs and get the kids and have them sleep with them for the night, but she saw him on the bed, and both her fear and those thoughts fled instantly from her mind. For he had decided to sleep naked, and had kicked off the sheet and blanket. He was on his back and his erection stuck straight up in the air.

  Forgetting everything else, she walked forward, stripping off her clothes before climbing onto the bed.

  She sucked him while he slept, working feverishly on his erection, and he came in her mouth, still asleep.

  She swallowed, masturbated, then closed her eyes and dreamed of a world where there were no stars, no moon, no sun, and the sky was always black.

  Twenty-four

  Once again, Julian spent the better part of the morning trying to look up information about their house, their street, the town. His deadline was real and it was nearly here, but Claire wanted him to investigate further and try to find out what he could about the history of their property. She wouldn’t specify what she hoped to do with such knowledge, but he knew how her mind worked, and knew she probably had a plan. Although whether that plan was to sue the realtor and the seller for not revealing that their house was haunted, or whether it was to perform some sort of ritual to exorcise the ghost, he couldn’t say.

  She was smart, though, and tenacious, and she had a much better chance of figuring a way out of their predicament than he did.

  Of course, she didn’t want him to be looking up things here, in the house, not after what had happened to her. But it was daytime and he was feeling brave.

  Besides, part of him wanted something like that to happen to him.

  As was often the case with Internet research, Julian ended up scrolling through a list of articles and sites that had nothing whatsoever to do with the subject at hand. And chances were that when he did find pertinent information, it would be a brief generic overview, the equivalent of a Reader’s Digest article.

  It was his job to design Web pages, but even he had to admit that there was a lot of useless crap out there on the Web.

  After fifty fruitless minutes, Julian reset his parameters to narrow down the search, but there were still some twenty-eight thousand hits, and it wasn’t until the fifth page that he found one that even applied: an official town Web site sponsored by the chamber of commerce that, in a bid for tourist dollars, played up the local history angle. There was nothing mentioned about hauntings (although with the popularity of so many ghost-hunter shows on cable, that would definitely have been a draw), but the site did describe Jardine as a former frontier town populated by the likes of the legendary Kit Carson and originally founded by the Spanish.

  It wasn’t much, but it was a beginning, and Julian hoped to expand upon that with subsequent references in other linked sites.

  No such luck.

  He scrolled through Web page after Web page for the next hour without encountering anything even remotely helpful. Finally he decided to take a break, and he went downstairs, where, miraculously, Megan and James had found a show to both of their liking and were lying down on the living room couch and floor, respectively, watching television.

  Julian did his fatherly duty and chided them for watching too much TV, telling them that, when this show was over, they had to turn off the television and find something else to do. They muttered their assent, and he went into the kitchen, where he grabbed an apple and a can of Dr Pepper.

  Back in his office, he took some time off to write an e-mail to his client, detailing everything he’d accomplished so far, setting up an excuse for himself should he miss the deadline, which looked increasingly likely. He paused, reread what he wrote before sending it
, took a sip of Dr Pepper—

  —and the text on the screen moved.

  As he watched, uncomprehending, individual letters separated themselves from words, moving up, moving down, moving out, the pixels that created them flattening and shifting, coming together in a dark mass that slowly resolved itself into a face.

  The face of the ghost who had crashed their party.

  The man who had died in their basement.

  Julian pushed his chair away from the desk as the face looked up, looked down, looked around, then pressed against the monitor, grinning. It looked for all the world as though someone were actually trapped behind the screen, and Julian recoiled at the unnerving reality of the illusion.

  Then the face became pixilated, broke apart, losing mass, losing color, fracturing into fragments that once again rearranged themselves into his e-mail message.

  Julian reached over and quickly turned off his computer before backing away again, more unnerved than he would have expected to be by such an experience. He stood, then paced around the room, taking deep breaths, thinking. Maybe Claire was on the right track. Maybe there was something connecting the haunting of their house to events in the past, and maybe the thing in this house saw what he was trying to look up and wanted to scare him away.

  Just as it had her.

  He was scared. No doubt about that. But he also didn’t seem to be getting anywhere with his research, and it occurred to him that a more fruitful approach might be to check the library. Public libraries often had books and documents pertaining to local history, as well as reference librarians who themselves were repositories of information. He glanced at the Beatles clock on his bookcase. It was just after eleven. Julian paused for a moment, deciding what to do, then headed downstairs.

  The kids were still camped out in the living room. “All right,” he told them. “Turn it off.”

  “But the show’s not over,” Megan complained. “You said we could wait until it was over.”

  James had already used the remote to shut off the TV.

  “Come on. Let’s go.” Julian took the key ring out of his pocket, jingling it so both kids could hear.

  “Okay,” James said, getting up off the floor.

  “Where?” Megan asked, suspicious.

  “Out for lunch. We’ll go to McDonald’s. Then I need to stop by the library and look a few things up.”

  Megan wrinkled her nose in distaste. “McDonald’s?”

  “Taco Bell, then.”

  “I want McDonald’s!” James announced.

  “We’ll flip for it. But come on; we gotta go.”

  “I gotta go,” Megan said, and headed down the hallway to the bathroom.

  Julian found himself still jingling his keys. He hadn’t realized how nervous he was, how much he wanted to get out of the house, until his daughter said she had to use the bathroom. James looked in that direction and started to say something, but Julian cut him off. “You can go at Taco Bell.”

  “McDonald’s!”

  “Whatever.”

  As soon as Megan finished, he ushered the kids out of the house, not relaxing until they were safely in the van.

  “You said we were going to flip a coin,” James said.

  Julian nodded. “We will.”

  “But how will we know where we’re going unless we do it first?”

  Julian pushed himself up from the seat in order to get a hand in his pocket. He pulled out a dime. “Okay, call it.”

  “Heads!” they both said in unison.

  “One person gets heads; one person gets tails,” he said patiently.

  “I want heads,” James insisted.

  Megan sighed melodramatically. “Fine.”

  Julian flipped the coin, called it. “Tails.”

  “Ha!” Megan said, pointing a finger in her brother’s face and grinning.

  “Taco Bell it is.” Julian drove to the fast-food restaurant, where they ate a reasonably harmonious meal before heading over to the library. James parked himself in front of one of the computers and Megan wandered into the young-adult stacks, while Julian went over to the reference desk to talk to the librarian. As he’d suspected, the library did have a lot of items dealing with local history. There was actually a closet-size “history room” that held nothing but books, brochures, pamphlets and magazines related to the history of Jardine and Tomasito County. Most of the items could not be checked out, but they could be studied in the library, and Julian pulled out two volumes that looked promising: the relatively recent New Mexico Ghost Stories and the considerably older Tales of Tomasito County. Behind a glass case were stacks of old newspapers, and he asked the librarian whether he could look through them, but she said the papers were in fragile condition and were kept in the case for protection. There was microfiche of the newspapers available, however, and a viewer near the computers, and she showed him the file cabinet containing the microfiche, explaining how they were organized by year.

  Julian couldn’t spend all day in the library, and even if he could, he still wouldn’t be able to read everything. So he skimmed the books, neither of which was as helpful as he’d hoped, before grabbing a handful of microfiche and sitting down to scroll through the headlines of Jardine’s early days. The newspapers didn’t go back as far as he wanted—maybe not enough people could read back then—but he began at 1900 and started working forward.

  Megan came up while he was still halfway through the year 1901 and asked whether she could go to her friend Kate’s house for the afternoon. Kate was standing next to her; the two had obviously run into each other.

  Or they had purposely planned to meet here.

  It was impossible to keep up with the cell phone shenanigans of teenage girls.

  Kate smiled shyly. “Hi, Mr. Perry.”

  Julian looked from one to the other. “You can go,” he told Megan. “If your mom is home,” he said to Kate.

  “My mom’s right here. Mom!” she called.

  There was a chorus of shushing from annoyed patrons, and the librarian at the front counter frowned at her, but seconds later, Kate’s mother was standing before him, and the two of them talked over logistics. She and Kate were going to The Store first, but then they were going home, and Megan was welcome to come with them.

  “What time should I pick her up?” Julian asked.

  “Oh, I’ll drop her off. What time do you want her back?”

  “Five o’clock,” Julian decided.

  After saying their good-byes, his daughter happily went off with her friend, and Julian paused for a moment to check on James and make sure he was all right. Sitting between two other boys, his son was deeply engrossed in the cartoony mayhem of a computer game, and, satisfied, Julian went back to his microfiche.

  Sometime later, Julian became aware that a person was standing behind him. Assuming it was another patron who wanted to use the microfiche reader, he was all set to apologize for hogging the equipment when he turned to see James standing there. In a first, James said he was tired of playing games and wanted to leave. Usually it was the other way around, and Julian glanced at his watch, shocked to see that it was almost three o’clock. He hadn’t really come across anything useful yet, and didn’t want to feel as though he’d wasted the entire afternoon, so he said, “Ten more minutes.”

  “I’m bored, Dad.”

  “I know. But …” He had a sudden idea. “Hey, do you want to hang out at Mom’s office?”

  James’s face lit up. “Yeah!”

  Perfect. Claire could watch James, while he could continue looking through these old newspapers. Julian took out his cell phone. He wasn’t supposed to use it in the library, but he leaned into his carrel, close to the microfiche reader, and called Claire, speaking softly. He explained the situation, and she agreed to come by the library to pick up their son.

  While he waited, James checked his summer reading program status on the wall chart and picked out another book to read. Julian continued to scroll through headlines, but before
he’d gotten past another month, Claire was there. James hurried over with his new book. “You rescued me,” he declared with exaggerated gratitude.

  Julian stood. “Thanks,” he told Claire.

  “Any luck?” she asked.

  “There might be something. That’s why I want to stay a little longer.”

  “I don’t,” James announced.

  Smiling, Claire put an arm around her son. “Why don’t we get some ice cream?” she suggested.

  He grinned. “Excellent!”

  “Do you want me to pick him up when I’m finished?” Julian asked.

  Claire shook her head. “We’ll meet you at home.”

  She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek; then the two of them were off, and Julian turned back to his newspapers. The “something” he had told her about turned out to be a pattern. It wasn’t anything specific, probably not anything they could even use, but for a period of years in the early 1900s, the majority of murders and violent crimes seemed to take place on their street. He didn’t think it was a pattern that had continued through the present day, but he thought about the man who’d died in their basement and wondered whether other deaths—mysterious or not—had occurred in or around their house over the decades, unrecognized by the newspapers.

  It was getting late, and since he finally had something he could show to Claire, Julian decided to call it a day. He shut off the machine, picked up the pieces of scratch paper on which he’d scribbled notes, and started to put away the stack of microfiche.

  “I’ll take care of that,” the reference librarian said, walking over. “We like to refile everything ourselves, just to make sure it’s all in the right order.”

  “Okay. Thanks.” He handed over the microfiche sleeves, as well as the two books he’d looked at, and left the library, heading home.

  He was the first one back, and he was glad of that. Before Claire and James returned, before Megan was dropped off, he went through every room in the house, even the basement, looking for anything even slightly out of the ordinary. He was more creeped out than he wanted to be or than he would ever let on, but he was the husband, he was the father, and he needed to make sure that it was safe for his family to be here. He even went into his office and turned on the computer again, waiting to see whether anything weird showed up on his monitor, and he was gratified when, after he accessed several different screens and retyped his e-mail message, nothing did.