The Haunted

Eleven

Claire was in her office when Pam Lowry walked across the street from Cool Kids Clothing, carrying a sack lunch. The two of them sometimes ate together when business was slow, but although today’s heat had depressed foot traffic downtown, Claire was actually pretty busy. There was a lot of research to do, a lot of paperwork to fill out. Still, she had to eat, and she was grateful for the company. She’d spent the morning alone on her computer, typing, without so much as a single phone call to interrupt her, and it had given her a newfound respect for Julian. She didn’t know how he coped with that sort of routine every single day, although he was by nature a far less social and far more solitary person than she could ever be.

“Hi,” Pam said, walking into the office. “Busy?”

“No,” Claire lied.

“I needed to see another human being. I’ve had exactly one person come into the shop so far today, and that was a guy asking if he could use my phone.” Pam sat down in her usual spot in the client chair across from Claire’s desk and opened her lunch sack, withdrawing a wrapped sandwich.

“And I don’t even have an air conditioner like you do, just an old fan.”

Claire glanced over at the humming window unit struggling to cool the office. “Oh, yeah. We’re state-of-the-art here.”

“Be grateful for what you have.”

Claire got up and went to the square minifridge against the back wall, took out one of the Lean Cuisines she’d stored there and popped it into the microwave atop the counter.

“So,” Pam said, biting into her sandwich, “do you have any juicy gossip? Any big divorces I should know about? Adulterous affairs?”

“I couldn’t tell you even if I knew.”

“You always say that.”

“Sorry.”

“I have one.” Pam paused. “David.”

Claire turned away from the microwave. “David Molina?”

The other woman nodded.

Claire glanced out the window and across the street. The paperback rack was on the sidewalk out front, but the bookstore door was closed, presumably to keep out the heat. “What did you hear?”

“It’s not what I heard. It’s what I saw. Or what I noticed.” Pam took a sip from her Diet Snapple bottle. “A fairly attractive, very buxom blond woman has been spending a lot of time at the bookstore the past week or so. She’s there every other day, at least. And she always comes around lunchtime. She stays around an hour, and as far as I can tell, she’s never bought a book. I’m surprised you didn’t pick up on it.”

“I try not to look over there too often,” Claire admitted. “David always seems a little too—”

“Flirty?”

“Intense,” Claire said. “Anything beyond ‘hello’ gets a little uncomfortable for me.”

“Me, too.” Pam turned around. “Oh, the door’s closed. She’s probably in there now.”

“He’s married, isn’t he?”

“Oh, yeah. With three kids.”

Claire offered up a wan smile. “Well, if his wife ever needs a lawyer …”

The microwave rang, and she took out her lunch, carrying it back to her desk. She returned to the fridge for a Mountain Dew before settling down in her chair.

“So,” Pam asked, “when’s the housewarming party? It’s been, what, a month? How long are you going to wait?”

Things had been so hectic, what with work and settling in and the kids being off from school, that Claire hadn’t even thought of having a housewarming party.

Pam must have read as much in her expression. “Come on! You have to do it!” she said. “We all want to see your new place.” She leaned forward conspiratorially. “Besides, you’ll get free gifts. Kitchen supplies and alcohol. It’s a win-win.”

Claire laughed. A party did sound like fun, and for the next twenty minutes, they discussed the prospect, bouncing ideas off each other until Claire was so enthusiastic that she had no choice but to announce that she’d do it. She set a tentative date of next Saturday for the party, but told Pam not to say anything to anyone else until she talked to Julian and everything was finalized.

Through the window behind Pam, the door to David’s shop opened, and a top-heavy blonde Claire would not have pegged as a reader walked out of the bookstore onto the sidewalk, smiling happily. Seeing where Claire was looking, Pam turned around. “That’s her,” she confirmed. “A little out of David’s league, isn’t she?”

They looked at each other. And laughed.

That night, both of the kids were gone—James to Robbie’s house and Megan to Zoe’s—and for the first time in a very long while, Claire and Julian had an evening to themselves. They could have gone to a movie, could have gone out to eat, but domesticity had made them lazy, and they decided to stay in, eat leftovers and watch HBO, which was showing a big movie from last fall that they’d missed in theaters.

The movie was good but not as great as the hype and box-office receipts would have suggested, and afterward Julian turned off the lights and closed up the house while she went into the bedroom. She hadn’t done laundry for a while and this morning had found herself without fresh underwear, so she’d continued to wear yesterday’s panties. It made her feel dirty, which made her feel sexy, and she took off her clothes and sat down on the edge of the bed, waiting for Julian.

Their sex life had definitely gotten better since they’d moved to the new house. She wasn’t quite sure why, although she’d read somewhere that a new environment often acted as an aphrodisiac. While that probably was the reason, emotionally it didn’t feel quite right. There’d been an electricity to their encounters since moving here, an almost newlywedlike hunger and excitement that being in a new location could neither explain nor account for.

Seconds later, Julian walked through the door and stopped, surprised that she was naked, though he’d no doubt assumed they’d be having sex tonight.

She spread her legs wide. “Taste it,” she ordered. “Taste my dirty pussy.”

He did, and she held his head hard against her until she was finished, grinding into his face until his cheeks and nose and chin were glistening.

He was hard, she saw when he stood, but she wanted him harder, and she knelt down and sucked until his erection was quivering and she could taste the first salty drops of semen. Pulling her mouth away, she got on her hands and knees.

“I want it in my ass,” she said.

He was too rough and it hurt, but she liked it, and when he reached around the front and cupped her crotch in his hand, rubbing it with his palm, the pain and pleasure mingled in an exhilarating crescendo that erupted in one of the strongest orgasms she’d ever had.

Afterward, she felt guilty and ashamed, embarrassed, though those were not the emotions she usually experienced after sex. Of course, this was not the type of sex she usually had, and unfamiliar feelings were probably to be expected. Still …

Going to the bathroom, there was blood, and she grimaced in pain, wondering what had come over her, what had come over them, feeling slightly uneasy about the way she’d been carried away. She spent too much time on the toilet, then too much time in the shower, and when she came out of the bathroom, Julian was dead asleep, the TV on and turned to an old Clint Eastwood movie. She switched it to the Travel Channel and got into bed beside him, making it only until the first commercial before falling asleep herself.

She dreamed of meeting a man in a basement dance club. She was younger, a teenager, and she danced with him but didn’t like him, and eventually ended up giving him her cell phone number just to get him to go away. Seconds later, in that compressed time so characteristic of dreams, she was in the basement of her own house, this house, only she was still a teenager and she lived here with her parents. The basement was empty save for a tree stump with an ax in it.

A sudden ringing startled her, and she realized that she was carrying her cell phone. She turned her palm up, looked down and saw a text message.

Take off your pants.

Startled, frightened, she looked up from the screen.

And saw a tall, creepy man standing in the corner, grinning at her.

In the morning, she awoke early, because she forgot it was Saturday and thought she had to go to work. She considered going into the office anyway—she did have a brief to write—but both Megan and James had complained lately that she wasn’t around enough, and Claire realized that she ought to be here when they came home. How many summers would she have left with them? They were getting older, and soon they wouldn’t even want her around. She should take advantage of the situation while she still could.

Julian had always been an early riser, and he was up already, no doubt making himself breakfast while watching CNN. Morning wasn’t morning to him unless he could catch up on overnight world events.

Getting out of bed, Claire checked her panties, thankful to see that the bleeding had stopped, but she was still sore when she went to the bathroom. She flushed the toilet, then washed her hands and looked at herself in the mirror, moving in close. No matter how much moisturizer she used, she could not get rid of the small lines that had started to sink in around her eyes, bracket her mouth and accent her chin. Julian, she’d noticed recently, had a few gray hairs coming in not just on his head but on his chest, and what had been merely a seasonal paunch was now his permanent year-round stomach.

They were both pushing forty-five, and she realized that in a little more than five years they would be fifty. That was scary enough by itself, but what was truly frightening was that fifty no longer seemed old to her. In her mind, she felt no different than she had at twenty-five or thirty, and it seemed like only yesterday that she’d been in college and fifty had seemed like the age of a grandparent. Just last week, though, she’d read of an actor dying at the age of sixty-five and found herself thinking that that was way too young.

Her stomach growled. She was hungry, and thought she might make herself an omelet or—

Something moved behind her.

Claire swiveled around, startled. But there was nothing that could have moved, only the bathtub and wall. Besides, if something had been there, she would have seen it in the mirror.

So why did she feel as if she wasn’t alone?

Because she wasn’t.

She glanced around. There was someone in the bathroom with her. She could feel him, even if she couldn’t see him.

Him?

Yes, it was a man. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she did. Just as she knew that he was blocking the door, that she would run into him if she tried to leave the room. What would happen at that point, she had no idea, but it was definitely not something she wanted to find out.

“Julian!” she called.

And it was gone. As quickly as that. A second before, the small room had been filled with another presence, and now she was alone. Whatever had been there had disappeared. She knew it with the same unfounded certainty that had told her it had been blocking the door.

Swiftly, before it came back, she opened the door, flinging it wide. She expected to see Julian sprinting down the hall toward her, or, at the very least, to hear his stomping footsteps at the front of the house as he sped over to rescue her. But there was no sign of him and no sound save the muffled drone of television news. He hadn’t heard her cry, and she wondered what would have happened to her if she had not scared the presence—

man

—away. In her mind, he looked like that creepy figure from her dream, the one in the corner of the basement, and though it was morning and light out, she shivered.

Was their house haunted?

She didn’t like the basement, and James, she knew, didn’t, either. Her dad had had a nightmare about it, and he was one of the most rational people on the planet. Then there was the record that played by itself and the laundry basket. …

Claire told herself to calm down. Julian was right. There was probably a rational explanation for all of it. She was just overreacting and reading import into ordinary occurrences because … because … Well, she couldn’t think of a reason, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one.

Her slippers were next to the toilet, and she slid her feet into them before heading out to the kitchen to make that omelet. But as she looked down at her feet, something in the corner of her eye caught her attention.

There was a face in the toilet.

Now she was being crazy.

Probably. But there was a face nevertheless: eyes formed by twin deposits of calcium from the hard-water, off-white against the porcelain of the bowl, and a smiling mouth by the curved edge of the water itself. The mouth wavered as the water moved, giving the rudimentary features an unnerving semblance of life.

Had it been there moments before, when she’d used the toilet? Claire wasn’t sure, but she didn’t think so, and its seemingly sudden appearance upset her more than it probably should have.

Opening the cupboard doors beneath the sink, she took out the scrub brush and a spray bottle of Lime-A-Way. She coated the sides of the bowl with foaming suds, but before she could even start scrubbing, the froth began dripping irregularly down the porcelain, forming Alice Cooper eyes and an ever-widening smile, not merely maintaining the face but giving it a mocking, defiant appearance. She scrubbed the toilet as hard as she could, putting her back into it, spraying more Lime-A-Way, and more, and more, but the face remained, and though she told herself it was nothing, wasn’t really a face, was just a coincidence, an arbitrary confluence of hard water mineral stains, she realized with a sick sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach that those eyes would be looking straight up at anyone who sat on the toilet.

She was going to make sure the rest of the family did not use this bathroom.

Especially Megan.

Putting away the brush and cleanser, Claire started down the hallway toward the kitchen, intending to tell Julian everything, but her eye was caught by the newel post of the staircase, and, on impulse, she walked past the kitchen doorway and headed up the steps, wanting to make sure there was nothing … strange in the kids’ bathroom upstairs.

At first glance, there wasn’t.

She checked the toilet first, and while it wasn’t as clean as she would have liked (she’d have to talk to the kids about that), there was no face. She looked in the sink, glanced around at the walls, peered into the mirror.

All clean.

Relieved, she exhaled deeply. She let her gaze wander over the remaining sections of the room.

The face was on the shower curtain.

It was there for only a second—long enough for her to identify it as the same one in the other bathroom, long enough to note that it was formed from abstract design elements on the curtain itself—and then it was gone, rendered invisible by a minute shift in perspective or a slight change in light. She screamed anyway, a gut reaction, and this time Julian heard her. In seconds, his heavy steps were thundering up the stairs.

“Claire!” he called.

She stepped into the hall.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded, heart still pounding. But his presence gave her courage, and she went back into the bathroom to once more examine the shower curtain. She looked at it from the left, from the right, from straight on, from a crouched position.

He followed her in. “What in the world are you doing?”

Claire stood, faced him. “Maybe we shouldn’t have bought this house,” she said.

“What?”

“Have you considered the idea that it might be … haunted?”

Julian just stared at her.

“James doesn’t like the basement,” she continued quickly. “I don’t, either—”

“It’s dark,” he interrupted. “It’s small. It’s claustrophobic. But it’s not haunted.”

“Megan and her friends were all screaming—”

“They’re teenage girls on a sleepover who were playing with a Ouija board and telling ghost stories. What did you expect?”

“What about your record? And what about those things that keep getting moved around?”

“Are you serious?” He frowned at her, obviously annoyed. “You’re acting like a three-year-old. First of all—”

“I saw a face in the toilet downstairs. And on the shower curtain here.”

“Oh, my God …”

“The one in the toilet’s still there!”

“Show me.”

Grimly, they walked downstairs, Claire in the lead, Julian muttering disbelieving, disparaging remarks under his breath. When they reached the bathroom, the face was still there, and it looked as disturbing as ever.

Julian shook his head. “That’s just a stain. It happens to sort of, almost, kind of, semi-look like a face. But it’s like those people who claim to see Jesus in rusty drips on a water heater or Mary’s outline on a fogged-up storm window. Those things aren’t really there; people just want to believe that they are.”

He reached for her, but she pulled away. “I don’t want that face to be there! But it is!”

“Calm down. You got scared. You spooked yourself, and now you’re all rattled. I’m just trying to explain that there’s nothing supernatural going on here.”

“Don’t patronize me!”

“I’m not,” he said, in a voice indicating that he was. “But our house isn’t haunted, and that thing”—he gestured toward the toilet—“isn’t some ghostly manifestation. It’s hard-water deposits on porcelain. Whatever you saw upstairs was obviously some trick of the light. The basement—”

“The basement’s creepy.”

“Come on. Act like an adult, for God’s sake.”

“I don’t see you ever going in there.”

“There’s no reason to.”

“You know, my dad even had a nightmare about our basement.”

He threw up his hands. “Oh! Well! If your dad had a dream, then it must be true!”

“There’s something in this house, Julian.”

“No, there isn’t.”

“You’ve felt it, too, and you’re just pretending that you haven’t.” She glared at him, and there was a loaded pause between them. She saw understanding dawn in his expression. He knew what she was about to say. “What if it’s—”

“Don’t say it!” he ordered. “Don’t even think it!”

“We’re both thinking it!”

“No!” Julian spun around and strode away, not looking back, heading down the hall, through the kitchen and out the back door, letting the screen slam shut behind him.

Claire stood in place, breathing heavily. That was unfair, she knew. It was the first time she’d done something like that, the first time she’d used Miles in that way, and instantly she regretted it. She didn’t even know what had prompted her to go there. They’d had bigger fights before, over much more serious things, and she’d never felt compelled to drag that part of their past into it. This was merely a disagreement about weird incidents in their house. Why the hell had she brought up Miles?

She knew why, but she didn’t want to admit it, even to herself.

Walking into the kitchen, Claire saw that Julian had made coffee, and she poured herself some. Her gaze was drawn to the closed door that led to the basement, but she moved next to the sink and peered out the window. She expected to see Julian pacing around the backyard, but there was no sign of him, and she wondered whether he had gone into the garage or the alley.

She wasn’t the type of person who ate when she was upset—quite the opposite—but she knew she should have some food in her stomach, so she made herself some toast. She kept thinking Julian would return while she was eating, but he didn’t, and he still hadn’t come back into the house by the time she’d dressed. He wasn’t usually one to pout—that was her province—and his absence worried her, but she knew that if she went off looking for him and found him, it would set off a new round of arguments.

Returning to the kitchen, she glanced out the window again.

No sign of him.

In her peripheral vision, she could see the basement door, and though she was still frightened, still spooked, she was determined not to be intimidated. Gathering her courage, she strode purposefully over, grasped the handle and turned it, opening the door. Before her, the steps descended into darkness, and though she could not help thinking of that—

grinning

—man she’d dreamed about, she reached for the switch, turned on the light and started down.

There was no man, of course, only the sealed cartons and sacks of junk that they’d brought down here to store. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected to see, but looking around at the boxed overflow of their lives, the sense of foreboding she’d felt dissipated. Julian was right. There was nothing mysterious here. Only a small square room with a cement floor and walls that …

Frowning, Claire leaned forward.

Directly in front of her, above an overstuffed Hefty bag filled with James’s old Hot Wheels sets, was a darkened section of wall stained with patches of mold. Not unexpected in a damp cellar, but …

There was a face in the mold.

The same face she’d seen in the toilet. And on the shower curtain.

Claire stared at it. She knew how crazy this would sound if she told anyone—but it was true. And though the features in the toilet and on the shower curtain had been so rudimentary as to seemingly preclude specificity, this was the same face.

And it was smiling at her.

To her right, atop a junky card table that Julian for some inexplicable reason had insisted on keeping, were several old tools that someone had been sorting through and left out: pliers, a hammer, a screwdriver. In one smooth move, Claire picked up the screwdriver and strode forward, between the boxes, until she stood directly in front of the face.

It grinned.

Reaching over the bag of Hot Wheels, she used the screwdriver to scrape the face, feeling a rush of satisfaction as the features devolved under her hand. With her first swipe, she scratched off half of one eye, then part of the mouth, then a portion of the other eye, then another part of the mouth, until the mold no longer looked like a face. But she didn’t stop, and though she was pressing so hard on the screwdriver that her hand hurt, she continued scraping, bits of mold falling onto her hand, white scratches on the wall contrasting sharply with the dull gray of the surrounding cement.

Finally, Claire stepped back. She was sweating from both the exertion and the still, humid air of the basement, but she felt good as she looked at the spot where the face had been. She felt as though she’d accomplished something.

Walking back up the stairs, she found Julian in the kitchen, standing by the sink. He’d been looking through the window at the backyard, but he turned to face her as she closed the basement door. For a moment, both of them stared at each other, neither speaking. Claire saw from the look of devastation on his face how much she had hurt him, and she was about to apologize, but it was he who spoke first.

“I lied,” he admitted. “I do feel it. I have felt it.”

The words, completely unexpected yet gratefully welcome, acted like a ray of sunshine slicing through darkness. She felt as if a great burden had been lifted from her. She wasn’t alone; she wasn’t crazy. He knew what she was talking about. He understood.

But the pain in his face was almost too much to bear, and she was filled with remorse and self-loathing as she ran over and threw her arms around him. “I’m sorry,” she sobbed, hugging him tightly. “I’m sorry.”

“Me, too,” he assured her, and there was a noticeable catch in his voice.

She wasn’t sure their apologies were in any way commensurate, but she wasn’t about to hurt him again by bringing up anything to do with Miles. Maybe his unbending reticence and their unspoken agreement never to broach the subject weren’t psychologically healthy, but it worked for them, and the guilt she felt for crossing that line far outweighed any argumentative points she might have scored.

They remained in each other’s arms, not moving, not speaking, until the phone rang several moments later and she broke the embrace to answer it. Megan was calling, and she wanted to know whether she could stay at Zoe’s for the rest of the day. “They invited me to go with them to the water park,” she said. “I’ll be back in time for dinner,” she added quickly. “I promise.”

“Okay,” Claire told her. “Are you going to stop by and get your swimsuit?”

“I already packed it. I have it with me—” Megan abruptly stopped speaking, as if her mother had interrupted her, though Claire hadn’t said a word.

“Did you know about this ahead of time? Were you planning this all along?”

“I’m sorry. I should have told you. But I really want to go. I promise I’ll be careful. Please, Mom? Please?”

Claire couldn’t help smiling. “All right,” she said. “But no secrets next time, okay? You tell us everything that’s going on.”

“I will, Mom. I will. Thanks!”

Claire hung up the phone to face a quizzical Julian. “She wants to go with Zoe’s family to the water park. I said she could.”

He nodded his agreement, and they hugged once more. She gave him a quick kiss. “Everything good?” she asked.

He smiled wearily. “Yeah.”

Robbie’s father dropped off James an hour or so later, while she was weeding the flower beds out front, and as Claire watched her son get out of the car, thank Robbie’s dad for letting him stay over and then walk toward her up the driveway, she realized how big he was getting. He looked more like Julian now than he did her, though that hadn’t always been the case. It made her feel sad.

She stood at his approach. “Let’s go out for lunch today,” she suggested.

“Where?” James asked.

She smiled at him. “Your choice.”