The Haunted

by Bentley Little

  “No!”

  “What is it, then? You didn’t go through all this effort for nothing.”

  “I can’t tell you yet. Just … just trust me.” Before her friend could respond, Megan was taking out her key and walking up to the front door. Her heart was pounding. She really didn’t want to go in, but …

  She turned the key in the lock, opened the door.

  The two of them walked inside.

  Everything was where it was supposed to be. Nothing had been moved. She wasn’t sure why this surprised her, but it did. The morning was bright, and sunlight streamed through the windows, but Megan turned on the light in the living room anyway.

  Something about the house had changed.

  She couldn’t put her finger on it, but the feeling she got from being here was different from what it had been before. Not better, necessarily. But different. The discomfort she felt now seemed less intimate, less immediately threatening, although it was still there. She said nothing to Zoe, not wanting to frighten her friend, but she could tell that Zoe felt something, too.

  It wasn’t gone.

  She’d been hoping everything would be back to normal and they could all return and live happily under one roof. Her disappointment was overwhelming, and it was all she could do not to cry in frustration. But fear overpowered disappointment, and Megan realized that even with the light on, the living room still seemed dark. She had no desire to go deeper into the house, to go upstairs or down the hall or into the kitchen. She wanted only to get out of here, and was about to tell Zoe that they should do just that, when the lights went on in the dining room. And then the kitchen.

  “Megan?” Zoe said nervously.

  Upstairs, something heavy fell to the floor, shaking the whole house.

  “Megan?”

  The danger was palpable. She wasn’t supposed to be here and would get in trouble for coming over, especially when no one was home, but that didn’t matter. She was worried for her dad, and she immediately sent Zoe outside while she wrote her dad a quick note, using a pen and the back of an envelope she found in a pile of mail on the coffee table:

  Dad,

  Zoe and I stopped by while you were gone. Don’t tell Mom.

  We heard a loud noise upstairs and the lights came on by themselves.

  You need to get out of here. You can’t stay. It’s dangerous. Please!

  I’ll call you when I get back to Grandma and Grandpa’s. Leave your cell on. Don’t stay here, Dad.

  Please! I don’t want anything to happen to you. I’m scared. I love you.

  —Megan

  She left it where he would be sure to see it, leaning the envelope against the TV screen in the living room.

  There was another loud noise from upstairs, a thump, followed by a high-pitched whistle that could have been a teakettle, could have been a bird, but was undoubtedly something else.

  She hurried outside, closing and locking the door behind her, then looked around for Zoe. Her friend was nowhere to be seen, and, worried, Megan called her name. “Zoe!”

  There was an answer from the backyard, and it was with a feeling of dread that Megan walked up the driveway and around the side of the house. It had been wrong to come here, and she wished now that she had just listened to her parents and stayed away. Something could happen, and if it did, no one knew where she was.

  Zoe was standing by the back fence, by the gate that led out to the alley. “Your yard’s dead,” Zoe said, motioning in front of her. “Don’t you guys ever water it? All your plants …”

  “They died overnight. We don’t know what happened.” She was about to say that it was probably some disease, but she decided not to lie. She wanted Zoe to know what was going on, wanted someone besides her family to be a witness.

  Her friend seemed to sense that it was something serious and significant, and it was with a solemn expression that she walked over the dead grass to meet Megan.

  Megan told all. Well, not all. There wasn’t time for that. She wanted to get out of the backyard and away from the house as quickly as possible, so she didn’t go into too much detail. But she told Zoe that the house was haunted and hit the highlights, including the guy who’d committed suicide in their garage. Zoe had been frightened enough by the Ouija board and the sleepover that she didn’t require a lot of convincing, and when Megan said that she’d tell her the whole story later but that right now they needed to get out of there, Zoe didn’t argue.

  She did, however, pause. “Wait. I hear music. Maybe your dad’s home.”

  Megan heard it, too. It was coming from the house, and it sounded like one of her dad’s records. Joe Jackson? Elvis Costello? Graham Parker? Someone like that, someone he’d taught her about. But her dad wasn’t home, and there was no way—no logical way—that his stereo could have been turned on. She listened carefully, and the lilting tune wafting from the open upstairs window of her dad’s office gave her chills. She recognized it now. Joe Jackson. “It’s Different for Girls.”

  Was that some sort of message?

  The music disappeared.

  The open upstairs window? Whenever her dad left the house, he always made sure all doors and windows were closed and locked. She looked up, sensing movement behind the screen. A figure was standing there, looking down at them. It was too dark to see any details, but she could make out a backward yellow baseball cap.

  It was the man who’d killed himself in their garage.

  Screaming, Megan ran down the driveway toward the street. Zoe was screaming right behind her, and she grabbed the handlebars of the bike, kicked up the kickstand, leaped onto the seat and started pedaling. Megan kept running. Neither of them slowed down until they reached the park.

  Zoe reached the park first, and was already off her bike, walking it, when Megan caught up.

  “Told you,” Megan said, breathing heavily.

  Zoe, trying to catch her breath, just nodded.

  They stood there for several moments, staring at each other, frightened, and it was not until a Hopi woman on the outskirts of the Kachina festival smiled at them, motioning toward a table full of little wooden dolls representing demigods and demons, that they started moving again, passing through the festival to the other side of the park and Old Main.

  Twenty-nine

  Julian met Claire for lunch again at her office, bringing takeout tacos this time, and it felt just as awkward as it had the day before. He didn’t think she was still mad at him, but there was not much talk while they ate, and when they did talk, the conversation seemed forced. He hated this feeling of estrangement, but he knew that the only cure would be for him to leave the house and stay with her and the kids at her parents’ place, and that he was not willing to do.

  At least, not yet.

  Although … he was not sure why. After his experience last night—an experience he was definitely not going to tell her about—he should have been falling over himself to get out of there. But something was keeping him in the house. He told himself that it was the hope, the possibility, that he was close to finding out what was really going on and figuring out a way to stop it. But he didn’t believe that, and whenever his mind even approached the subject, he quickly steered it in another direction. He didn’t want to think about what he was doing or why.

  Lunch today didn’t last as long as it had yesterday. They both avoided talking about the big-ticket items, and their efforts to discuss small stuff were downright painful. Julian didn’t jump up and leave immediately after finishing his tacos, but shortly after she finished and he sucked the last of his Coke through the straw, he stood, wadding up his napkin and throwing it in the wastepaper basket. He told Claire he still had to finish work on that Web site and had better get going, and they parted amicably but without hugging.

  He was outside and had just unlocked the driver’s door of the van when Claire stopped him. “Julian?”

  He looked up to see her standing in the doorway of her office. “Yeah?”

  “I don�
��t want you to stay there. You’ve proved your point. Whatever it was. You’re a big macho guy, and you’re not afraid of anything.”

  He felt himself hardening against her. She must have sensed his antipathy, because she quickly added, “I’m just afraid for you. It’s dangerous there. And you have two kids, you know. They should be your priority.”

  That hit him where he lived, and he tried to come up with a response that made sense, but she was right. Nothing was more important than Megan and James.

  Still …

  “Something’s happened,” he told her. “Something’s changed. You’re not there, so you haven’t noticed it, but it’s like …” He tried to verbalize what he’d been feeling. “You know how the basement used to be creepy? It’s not anymore. The garage is. It’s like this new ghost somehow deposed the old one. I don’t know what it is about our house that makes the spirits of dead people hang around, but it seems like the people who die there stay there. At least until someone else takes their place. And right now, the guy who killed himself in the garage is our ghost du jour.”

  Claire gave him a hard stare. “You think that’s cute? You think you’re being funny?”

  “I’m not trying to be. I’m sorry. But I think I’m onto something here. I think I might be able to—”

  “I don’t care if you find a way to exorcise every single ghost in every haunted house in the country. It’s not worth the risk. You have two kids who need you. I need you. That house is just a house. We sell it, get rid of it, find another. People do it all the time for all sorts of different reasons. It’s not a big deal. Let it go.”

  They’d attracted attention. A couple who’d just exited the sandwich shop were walking slowly down the sidewalk, pretending not to look or listen but doing both. In the van’s side mirror, he could see the owner of the used-book store across the street pausing in his rearrangement of the outside paperback rack to watch.

  Julian didn’t want to talk in front of them, and he moved back onto the sidewalk, where he stood in front of Claire, putting his hands on her shoulders. “I’m close,” he told her.

  “No!”

  “Yes.”

  She pulled away from him and went back into her office. He thought of following her, but she wasn’t going to change his mind, he wasn’t going to change her mind, and it was probably better if they didn’t get into a shouting match right now.

  He walked back to the van and got in. The bookseller was arranging his paperbacks again; the couple from the sandwich shop had left. Julian backed into the street. Intellectually, he knew Claire was probably right, but emotionally, it felt wrong, and he drove home convinced that he had made the correct decision.

  The sight that greeted him when he pulled onto Rainey Street was completely unexpected.

  Every single house was up for sale.

  Except theirs.

  He’d been gone for a little under an hour, which hardly seemed to be enough time for something like this to have happened. Of course, every For Sale sign was from the same real estate agent at the same real estate office—Randolph Wilson at RE/MAX—so it would have been easy for the agent to have simply gone down the sidewalk planting signs. And for all Julian knew, some of these sales may have been in the planning stages for days or weeks or even months, and the realtor may have just found it more convenient to list them all at the same time. But that hardly seemed likely. What seemed most probable was that, like Cole, the rest of his neighbors had been frightened and had all decided to move at once.

  Julian drove slowly, looking to see whether anyone was home. A lot of people weren’t. The Allreds’ car was still in their driveway, but he doubted that either Spencer or Barb would talk to him. Harlan Owens’s red Jeep was parked in his driveway, and his pickup was on the street in front of the house, so he was definitely home. Julian didn’t know Harlan well, but he knew him enough to speak to, and after parking the van in his own driveway, he walked down the street to Harlan’s house.

  “Go away!” was the response he received when he knocked on Harlan’s door, and the words were spoken with such force and anger that Julian didn’t even try to argue. He stepped off his neighbor’s porch and headed back to his own house, glancing down the street in disbelief at the row of identical For Sale signs in each yard.

  Maybe Claire was right, he thought. Maybe they should get out now. Leave and not look back.

  But Randolph Wilson of RE/MAX had just made that harder. Who was going to want to buy a house on a street where every home was for sale? They wouldn’t be able to get back anywhere near the amount of money they’d sunk into the place. If they could sell it at all.

  Julian unlocked the door and stepped inside. The mail had arrived in his absence, and he bent down to scoop the envelopes off the floor, where they’d fallen after coming through the slot. He glanced at the return addresses to see whether any of them were checks rather than bills, then went into the living room to dump them on the coffee table with yesterday’s mail.

  Someone had been here. There was a note written on the back of an envelope, leaning against the TV screen, and with a pounding heart he walked over, picked it up and read it:

  I will cut off Megan’s head and use it to decorate my mantel.

  I will stuff James with straw and use him as a scarecrow in the garden. I will rape Claire until she likes it. And I will kill you when I am finished.

  There was a scribbled signature at the bottom of the message, though it was indecipherable and he could not even tell with which letter it started. Was it from John Lynch? His gut feeling was yes, which meant that apparently he’d been wrong: Lynch’s ghost was not confined to the garage where he had killed himself.

  Or had he killed himself?

  Despite the unbelievable brutality of Lynch’s death, Julian had assumed from the beginning that all of his wounds were self-inflicted, an opinion with which the police seemed to concur. It was hard to believe that anyone could stab himself in the face the way he had and then go on to thrust the knife into his own throat. But there’d been no evidence whatsoever that anyone else had been involved or even present, and as one of the detectives had told Julian, a man committed to killing himself will go to incredible extremes in order to accomplish his goal.

  The police had been looking for human assailants, however, and Julian wondered whether the killer of John Lynch had been human.

  He should get out of here now, right now, head over to Randolph Wilson’s office—or even Gillette Skousen’s—and put this place up for sale immediately.

  But he didn’t.

  Music was coming from his office upstairs, a record he recognized but had not played in a long time. The Smiths. He caught a stray piece of lyric: “. . . such a heavenly way to die …”

  Again, he knew he should leave. But he remained where he was, not fleeing the house, not going upstairs to investigate the mysterious music, but just … waiting.

  And then the music shut off and everything was back to normal. Julian stood in place for several moments, but when he saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing, he began searching each room for anything that might be amiss. He started upstairs, but his office was clean, as were the kids’ bedrooms and the bathroom. The Smiths record was out and on the turntable, the orange album cover with its haunted-eyed street urchin staring up at him from the floor, where it had been tossed, but nothing else seemed out of place, and the room was quiet. He went downstairs, through the living room again, the dining room, the kitchen, the hallway, the bedroom, the bathroom. All clear. He saved the basement for last, but it, too, seemed completely normal, entirely free from all evil influences.

  Evil?

  It was a word and concept that had been floating around the periphery of his thoughts for a while, but he had never allowed it concrete residence in his mind until now. It fit, though. It was the word that best applied, and he had never felt so relieved as he did when he stood in the basement, looking around at the bags and boxes, sensing nothing unusual, feeling no fe
ar.

  Julian walked back up the steps, shutting the door behind him. He was thirsty, and he got himself a glass of water from the sink in the kitchen. As he drank, he looked out the window at the backyard. He knew what was next—the garage—and for the first time since starting his search, he felt real trepidation. Putting down his glass, he considered taking out a knife and bringing it with him, but a weapon wouldn’t be much use against a ghost, and he decided it would probably be better to leave his hands free.

  He needn’t have worried. There was nothing out of the ordinary in either the main body of the garage or the upstairs loft.

  Was it over?

  That seemed too much to hope for, and, indeed, the note left by the TV and the Smiths record playing by itself indicated that whatever haunted this house was simply taking a breather. But he was encouraged by the fact that he hadn’t felt anything in any room he’d checked, and he thought it was possible that the ghost—or ghosts—had gone. Or perhaps writing the note and putting on the record had used up too much energy, and any entity was dormant now and had to recharge.

  That was information that might be useful in the future.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon actually working on the Web page he was supposed to be finishing, and was able to do so unmolested. There were no creepy messages on his computer screen, no mysterious noises in the house, no flickering lights, no murderous intruders, and after the first hour, he was almost able to forget that anything weird had happened here at all.

  Almost.

  For dinner, Julian heated up a frozen burrito in the microwave and ate it while he watched the news. Afterward, he phoned Claire and the kids, but the call did not go as well as it had the night before. Claire was still angry with him, and both Megan and James seemed resentful and withdrawn. He was hurt by their reaction, and after the conversation dwindled and sputtered to a stop prematurely, he almost went over to see them. But something kept him from it, and he sat there with the phone in his hand, staring into space, and by the time he put it back down, the news was over and Access Hollywood was on TV. He looked over at the clock, shocked to discover that a half hour had passed.