The Haunted

by Bentley Little

  Downstairs, he heard the front door open and close, heard the happy voices of Claire and James, and he shut off the computer, satisfied that—for the moment, at least—the house was clear. He took the steps two at a time, and—

  The first floor was empty.

  There was no one else home.

  Julian heard voices again, from the living room, and goose bumps prickled on his neck and the skin of his arms, making him shiver. Even this close, the voices still sounded like Claire and James, and a wave of despair washed over him as he wondered whether that meant they were dead. Claire had walked to work this morning, and in his mind he saw the two of them crossing the street on the way home and being hit by a drunk driver or a car with bad brakes, James flying forward and cracking his head open on the asphalt, Claire crumpling as the bumper forced her down, tires rolling over her midsection, crushing her organs and bones.

  Numbly, he stepped into the living room. His worries about Claire and James vanished. Whatever spirit was here, it was not one of them. There was a heaviness to the atmosphere, a palpable malevolence that would never be associated with either his wife or his son. He could imagine this thing imitating them, though, trying to make him believe they were here, trying to torture him.

  His first instinct was to flee, but he forced himself to stand his ground, and he looked carefully around the room. There was nothing to be seen, nothing out of place, no visible apparition, but there was a bad energy suffusing the living room, making the light seem darker, making the furniture seem old and creepy.

  And it appeared to be emanating from the fireplace.

  Once the most impressive aspect of the living room, perhaps of the entire house, the oversize fireplace now just seemed threatening. The opening was like a maw, and it was much blacker than it should have been at this time of day, black enough that it seemed to go back farther than the wall of the house, black enough to hide the presence of unspeakable creatures. Julian reached out and switched on the ceiling light, but it did nothing to further reveal what lay hidden in that space.

  Slowly, nervously, cautiously, he stepped forward.

  He heard the voices. They were male and female, young and old, but they weren’t James and Claire. They weren’t even speaking real sentences. Like the man’s voice he had heard in Megan’s room, they were saying actual words but not in a way that made sense.

  “. . . mail slot luggage …”

  “. . . first come table slime …”

  It was a conversation between crazy people, delivered in competing monotones, and it was coming from within the fireplace. Close now to the hearth, Julian crouched down to peer into the opening.

  A whoosh of air flew over him, around him, past him.

  Only …

  It wasn’t air. There was volume to it, heft, and a sentience that he sensed but did not understand.

  Then it was over. The room was back to normal; the fireplace was just a fireplace; there were no more voices. Seconds later, the front door opened, and Claire and James did walk in. Julian went over to greet them, grateful and unexpectedly elated that they were here and alive.

  Claire frowned at him. “What’s wrong with your hair?”

  James laughed.

  Julian reached up and patted the top of his head. His hair was sticking up where that thing had blown over him. He used his fingers to comb it back down. “Wind,” he lied.

  “It wasn’t windy—” Claire started to say, but she caught his look over James’s head and cut herself off. “Oh.”

  They discussed it later, though he downplayed his description of the event and left out his real reaction completely. The kids were in another room, and before Claire could quiz him further, he quickly told her what he had learned at the library. She seemed excited to hear that there was a history of death and violence on their street, though he had no idea how she could possibly use that information to help solve their problem, and for the first time her sense of hope seemed stronger than her fear.

  He almost told her about the face on his computer screen, but at the last moment decided against it. Enough had happened today already, and he chose to let it go.

  They made love that night, and it was normal, tender, comfortable, the way it used to be. There were no bizarre urges, no inexplicable compulsions, no external pressure of any kind. He could almost believe some of their more recent encounters had never happened, and they fell asleep holding each other, happy.

  * * *

  Julian was awakened after midnight by the sound of laughing. It was soft, whispery, and might in other circumstances have been mistaken for the rustling of wind outside. But he knew it for what it was and sat up in bed, listening to the eerie laughter as it swirled around their bedroom, then left through the door and moved down the hall.

  There was nothing he wanted more than to hide his head under the covers, the way he had as a child, and wait for morning. But Megan and James were upstairs alone, and he immediately pushed off the covers and hurried after the noise.

  It was in the kitchen now, and he went there, turning on the lights as he did so. He saw nothing in the kitchen, but the door to the basement was open, and from the room down there he heard laughter. It was louder now, less whispery, and though he had not been able to determine anything about its character before, the laughter definitely sounded masculine to him now.

  Julian looked around for a weapon. It obviously wouldn’t help against something unseen, but it would make him feel braver, and he opened the middle drawer and settled on that old standby: the carving knife.

  He was about to proceed to the basement door when something outside caught his eye. Through the window above the sink he saw movement, and he flipped on the patio lights just in time to see the little garage door close. He stood there for a moment, unsure of what to do. The smart thing would be to call the police. But he wasn’t sure this was something the police could help with, wasn’t sure that whatever had gone into the garage was … human. Of course, if it wasn’t human, the smartest thing to do would be to stay here in the house.

  But he had a knife in his hand, his adrenaline was up, and Julian unlocked the back door and stepped outside. He was barefoot and in his pajamas, but that didn’t slow him down. The dead grass was cool beneath his toes as he moved stealthily toward the garage. He glanced from side to side as he approached, making sure nothing else was out here, looking up to see whether the lights in the garage had been turned on.

  He opened the door, then stepped back quickly, knife extended, but nothing leaped out at him. After waiting a beat, he moved forward, walking into the garage and turning on the light. He glanced around. Everything seemed to be in order; nothing looked out of place. Since the van was parked in the driveway, and the lawn mower and most of the gardening implements were in the storage shed, the garage was relatively bare. With the light on, it was easy to see everything within the open area, and Julian wondered whether he had been lured in here purposely. His grip on the knife tightened.

  No. Whoever—whatever—had gone into the garage had not known that he was watching. He’d caught someone—something—sneaking in and closing the door. It had not been part of some elaborate show put on for his benefit.

  Although the laughter had lured him into the kitchen …

  No. Something was here in the garage. He just couldn’t figure out where it had gone.

  His eyes alighted on the ladder.

  Upstairs.

  Julian’s heart started thumping. He knew he shouldn’t go up there. It was stupid. Possibly dangerous. He didn’t even want to do it. But he found himself walking over to the wall where the wooden ladder was attached. He looked up.

  The trapdoor was open.

  Why hadn’t he noticed that before?

  Upstairs it was dark. Beyond the square entrance to the loft, he could see nothing, only blackness. It was impossible for him to climb the ladder and still hold the knife in such a manner that it could be used, and he had decided to quit, go back to the house,
and return in the morning, when he could see and it would be safer. But he felt a drop of warm wetness hit his forehead, and he touched it with his finger and it was blood.

  Someone or something was bleeding up there.

  What if it’s James?

  The thought had not even occurred to him before this moment, but he realized with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that he had not checked on the children after being awakened by the laughter. It could be James. The area upstairs was where he and his friend played, their “headquarters.” He could have been the one sneaking into the garage and closing the door behind him.

  Julian wiped the blood from his forehead with his palm. A half-formed plan to wake Claire and call 911 was jettisoned immediately, and he quickly shifted the knife to his left hand, placing it in the crook next to his thumb so he could use his other fingers to grasp the ladder’s rungs. He sped up to the top, and only then, only when his head and shoulders were protruding from the floor of the loft and he was at his most vulnerable, did he realize that it couldn’t have been James. The back door of the house had been locked. If James had gone out first, the door would have been unlocked.

  Julian braced himself for a blow, but even as he winced in expectation, he was pushing himself up into the loft and frantically searching for a light switch or a pull chain attached to a bulb. He’d been up here only in the daytime, and only on a few occasions, so he didn’t even know whether there was a light in the loft.

  Nothing hit him as he got to his feet, and since he was next to a wall already, he pressed his right hand against it, feeling around, even as his left hand gripped hard the handle of the knife. Amazingly, his fingers encountered a switch, and he pushed it up as a shielded bulb in the center of the room turned on, bathing the loft in a light that was probably soft and weak, but that after the blackness of a moment before seemed as bright as the sun.

  Julian stood where he was, rubbing his eyes, and as soon as they adjusted to the brightness, he saw where the blood had come from.

  A dead body on the floor.

  It was John Lynch, the intruder he’d seen through the dining room window. Julian recognized the yellow baseball cap.

  “Oh, my God,” he whispered.

  The man had stabbed himself. Not just once but multiple times. In the face. A slice through his left cheek had widened his mouth to clown proportions; another in his forehead revealed skull beneath skin. What was left of his nose resembled chopped raw hamburger, and a hard stab near his right eye had continued down the side of his head and taken off a sliver of skin with hair, as well as a piece of ear. He had finished himself off by plunging the knife into his own throat, from whence it protruded now, the wound around the blade revealing a thin, ragged strip of ripped cartilage, blood covering not just the remnants of his neck but his arms, his chest and the surrounding floor. A thin rivulet ran across the uneven floorboards to the trapdoor opening, which was where it had dripped onto Julian’s head.

  There was even blood splattered five feet away on a stand-alone cardboard cutout for Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and the stench in the loft was so strong Julian marveled that he had not noticed it immediately upon coming up.

  He gulped in air, trying not to gag.

  How had there been no screams? How had the entire neighborhood not been awakened by Lynch’s shrieks of pain?

  Julian felt like screaming himself, and even as his brain was logically processing the information being fed to it by his eyes, he was scrambling back down the ladder. Halfway to the bottom, the lights winked off above him, and he realized that somewhere along the line he had dropped his knife.

  All the lights in the garage went out.

  Willing himself not to panic, he reached the bottom of the ladder. Stumbling over his feet in the darkness, he found his way out of the garage and ran back to the house to call the police.

  Twenty-five

  “We’re moving,” Claire said flatly.

  “We can’t—”

  “Can’t what? Sell the house? Oh, yes, we can. I don’t want to hear any more of your rationalizing bullshit. I’m not spending another night in this place. We’re taking the kids, and we’re going to my parents’.”

  The police had just left, after several hours of questioning and investigation, and the four of them were gathered in the living room, sitting on the couch and the love seat, though Claire didn’t feel comfortable even doing that. She wanted no part of this house, and even if they had to unload it at a loss, even if they had to live in an apartment, she wanted to get rid of it. There was no way she was going to live in a place where someone had killed himself. And in such a gruesome way. Neither she nor the kids had seen the body—she had not allowed Megan or James to even look out the window when the covered gurney was wheeled out—but they all knew what had happened, and the very thought of such violence made her queasy.

  The fact that this was the second person to have died here in the past few years was even more disturbing. Of course, when you came down to it, unless you were moving into a new home, someone had probably died in virtually every house in the country, especially in those that were more than fifty years old. These days, a lot of people died in hospitals, but in her grandparents’ day, most people had probably died at home.

  Their house was not merely haunted, though. It seemed to be a death magnet, attracting people who were about to die or wanted to kill themselves, and there was no way in hell she would allow her children to be exposed to such an influence. Beyond the immediate fears, it was only a small stretch to imagine that influence expanding to include violence against others rather than just oneself. It might seem ridiculous to imagine Julian stabbing the kids in their sleep, or Megan or James beating their parents’ brains in with a baseball bat, but she was not willing to take any chances.

  “I understand how you feel,” Julian said. “I don’t think it’s good for the kids to be here, either. I think you should pack up, and I’ll take you guys over. But—”

  “No ‘buts’!” Claire shouted at him.

  “But I think I should stay here,” Julian finished.

  “What the hell for? You’re just being an asshole! We need to get out of here! All of us! Right. Fucking. Now!”

  She was aware that she was swearing in front of the kids, something that she had never really done before, something both she and Julian had always taken pains to avoid. She was aware, also, that they were staring at her in shock because of it. But the most important thing at this moment was to get far away from the house as quickly as possible, and she was willing to do whatever she needed to do to make that happen.

  “I think I might be able to—” Julian began.

  “You’re not going to be able to do shit! It’s over. We’re done. A man just killed himself in our garage. We have ghosts walking down our hall. There’s nothing to do but get out.”

  She hazarded a glance toward Megan and James. Neither of the kids looked surprised by news of the ghost, but they looked both frightened and worried, and that made her wonder whether they’d witnessed more than they’d told her. She faced them straight on. “Have either of you … seen anything here before?” she asked carefully.

  “I want to go,” James quickly responded.

  “Me, too,” Megan said emphatically.

  “Yes.” Claire nodded. She stood. “Come on,” she told Julian. “Let’s go.”

  She actually wasn’t sure how long she could spend at her parents’ house before their smothering drove her out, but even if she had to endure a week or two of her mother’s nagging or her father’s complaining before they found someplace else to stay, it would be worth it.

  She was not going to live in a place where a man had committed suicide.

  “I’ll drop you off,” Julian said. “Then I need to come back and clean up—”

  “The blood?” Megan said, horrified.

  “No,” he assured her. “The police’ll do that. I just need to check things out and make sure everything’s okay.”
>
  “And then you’ll come over to Grandma and Grandpa’s.” James’s voice was at once insistent, worried and hopeful.

  “We’ll see,” Julian said, but Claire could tell from the expression on his face that he had no intention of doing any such thing.

  “Stay if you want,” she said, her mouth set in a hard, straight line. “But we’re leaving.”

  When she arrived at her parents’ house just before dawn, after calling ahead to explain the situation and tell them that she and the kids were coming over to stay for a while, both her mom and dad thought that she and Julian were separating. Especially when Julian dropped them off and unloaded the luggage but did not remain himself. Neither of them said anything in front of Megan or James, but they both brought it up when the kids went into the guest rooms to unpack their suitcases. Her mom was worried, her dad happy, and though she told them, specifically, that there were no marital problems, she could tell they didn’t believe her.

  Claire understood why. She and Julian were not a perfect couple; they fought like everyone else. And back in Los Angeles, they’d gone through some pretty rough times. But they had never slept apart, not once since getting married, and even to her this felt emotionally like a separation. Her anger toward Julian only emphasized that feeling. She was furious at him for continuing to put himself in danger, even as she was afraid for him—and worried that the decision was not completely his.

  But all of this she kept hidden from her children and her parents. She had to be strong right now.