The Haunted

Twenty-seven

After calling to make sure Claire and the kids were all right, talking to each of them in turn and assuring them he was okay, Julian made himself a turkey sandwich for dinner and ate in front of the TV while he watched the nightly news. He missed his family, but he was glad they weren’t here. If he had any sense at all, he would have left as well, shoving a For Sale sign into the grass of the front yard and hightailing it out of the neighborhood as quickly as he could.

But he could not do that.

Why? What did he have to prove?

That he wasn’t a coward.

Julian carried his plate and cup into the kitchen, placing the dishes in the sink. He thought of Miles, and had the sudden urge to see a picture of his son, to once again look upon the little boy’s face. He could see it in his mind, of course—the blond bowl cut, the wide green eyes, the mouth that was almost always smiling—but he wanted to look at a photograph, to view not just a memory but a tangible object, a real recording of the boy in a specific place at a specific time.

No one was home, so there was no need to be discreet, and he went down to the basement and began digging through boxes, searching for the photo albums that they kept hidden, the ones they never showed Megan or James, the ones they wanted to save but never looked at.

It took him a while to find the photo albums, and halfway through his search, he realized that the basement did not seem scary to him. Had it ever—or had he just accepted the verdict of the rest of his family? He wasn’t sure, but he knew that he was alone in the house, it was night, and he was down here and not afraid. There was something reassuring about that, and he found himself able to fully concentrate on his search for Miles’s picture without being troubled by any of the usual distractions.

Finally, after what could have been one hour, could have been two—he’d lost track of the time—Julian found, at the bottom of a Hefty bag, beneath Claire’s old maternity clothes, a familiar green album with the gold-embossed word Photos on the cover. Even the sight of the photo album made his heart lurch in his chest, caused him to catch his breath, and he stared for a few moments at the green cover, steadying himself, building up his courage. Finally, he took a deep breath and opened it.

Miles was right there on the first page.

He’d thought he’d have to go a little way in, past pictures of Claire that he’d taken while they were dating, past their wedding and their first apartment. But nothing was in chronological order, and the photo that greeted him immediately upon opening the album was one of Miles that he’d taken at the beach that last summer, when his son was four. Miles was sitting in a hole that they’d both dug together in the sand, looking up at the camera and grinning. He was holding his little blue plastic pail, and there was a smear of sand on his cheek where he’d rubbed it with his dirty hand. He had on his Thomas the Tank Engine bathing suit, and his blond hair was sticking out in every direction. In the upper right corner of the photo, just past the rim of the hole, were Claire’s feet.

Julian didn’t realize he was crying until it became hard to see, and when he wiped his blurry eyes, he felt wetness on his cheeks as well.

He turned the pages until he found another picture of Miles, this one taken at his fourth birthday party. Miles was wearing his little suit, hair neatly combed, standing behind a pile of wrapped presents, and smiling. This was the way Julian saw his son in his mind. He used his fingernail to pull up the edge of the clear plastic sheet that covered the photos on the page, and drew the sheet back, peeled off the photograph and put it in his shirt pocket.

He missed Miles. It was a loss that time had not softened or made easier, and there was a physical pain in his chest right now, as though his heart actually ached. The depth of the hurt was why he and Claire never discussed their first son, why he tried so hard to live in the present and not think about the past. He knew from a lifetime of media exposure that such an attitude was probably unhealthy, that it was always better to let emotions out than keep them in, but he didn’t feel that way. This was the approach that seemed to work best for him, and while it might not be politically correct or socially acceptable, it was how he had chosen to do it.

It kept the guilt at bay.

He’d thought more about Miles in the past month than he had in the last thirteen years. It was the house’s doing, and Claire was right: once or twice, at the beginning, he had considered the idea that it was the ghost of their son who was haunting them. But that was obviously not the case, and with that possibility excluded, he was left with the discomforting memories that thoughts of Miles dredged up within him.

Memories of Miles’s death.

Julian closed the photo album, closed his eyes, tried to get his mind to go somewhere else.

It wouldn’t.

“Daddy!”

It was the last word Miles ever said, and it remained as fresh in his mind today as it had when his son shouted it, two terrified syllables that cut straight through his heart and would be perfectly preserved in his brain until the day he died.

As a college student, as a young man, Julian had enjoyed hiking. He’d belonged to the Sierra Club, had met one of his former girlfriends on a club-sponsored hiking trip, and had enjoyed taking Claire on backpacking excursions to various wilderness areas throughout the state. Even after they had Miles, they’d continued hiking on weekends, although, necessarily, closer to home.

It was on one of these treks, into the Santa Monica Mountains, that it had happened.

They’d been stupid to go that day at all. It was a Sunday, and though the Saturday before had been nice, for the entire week prior it had been raining. They should have known better.

But it had been a hard few days at work for both of them, and they’d wanted to get away from the city and out in the open air, if only for a couple of hours. Griffith Park would be too crowded, they knew, Angeles Crest too treacherous, so they’d opted for the Santa Monicas. They’d hiked there before, many times, liked the views and were familiar with many of the trails.

They were an hour in and pretty high up, Claire ahead, he moving more slowly, at Miles’s speed. He was letting Miles walk on the outside of the trail, though he’d never done that before. He’d also allowed the boy to walk without holding on to his hand, and he’d never done that before, either. Afterward, Julian asked himself why he’d been so negligent, asked himself a thousand times, but he had never been able to come up with an answer.

He remembered they’d been talking, he and Miles, laughing about something Oscar the Grouch had said on Sesame Street earlier that morning. And then, not more than a foot away from where he stood, the saturated ground under Miles’s shoes had given way, and Julian had watched in impotent horror as an entire section of trail slid down the side of the mountain, taking his son with it.

“Miles!”

Crying out, Julian dropped to his knees, leaning over the newly formed edge, expecting to see his son’s body sprawled at the bottom of the ravine below.

But Miles was only a few feet down, lying flat against the collapsed section of muddy trail, arms raised instinctively as though grasping for purchase.

“Daddy!”

He would never forget the look on his son’s face at that last second, the pleading, the fear, underpinned by the hope and belief that Daddy would be able to stop this and save him. It was a look that would haunt him until the end of his life, an expression of complete and utter trust, the purest faith he had ever experienced or ever would experience. But he had hesitated. He could have reached down and grabbed his son’s hands, but he’d been afraid that the section of ground on which he knelt would give way, claiming him, too, and he’d thought that it would be safer if he moved a little to the right first.

Then the mud had slipped, and Miles was swept away, tumbling down the slope, buried under an avalanche of sludge.

Claire was screaming, her piercing cries echoing off the walls of the canyon. He had no idea what she was doing, could only hope she had the presence of mind to go for help or call 911 on her cell phone. But he had no time for any of that. He was rushing down the side of the mountain, in defiance of all safety precautions and common sense, stumbling, falling, getting up again, crying out himself, keeping his eye on the sliding section of trail, trying to determine where under all of that mud and rubble Miles was located. He was pretty sure he knew the right spot, and when the slide stopped at the bottom of the ravine, he dropped to his knees and began digging frantically, using both hands to scoop up as much mud as he could, flinging it aside and immediately scooping up some more. He kept expecting to see his son’s fingers or glimpse the blue of his shirt, but he didn’t, and he dug deeper, aware in the back of his mind that the boy had been down there for too long, and filled with the growing fear that he was searching in the wrong spot.

He’d still been digging through the mud, sobbing, when the rescuers arrived, though he didn’t know when that was or how long he’d been there. Sometime later, someone had found Miles’s body, but it hadn’t been him, and all he remembered after that was kissing Miles’s cheek before the stretcher carrying him was lifted to a helicopter, the gritty, bitter taste of mud on his lips.

And Miles had been gone.

The next time Julian had seen him had been at the morgue, where he and Claire had been required to identify the body.

Pressing the palms of his hands against his eyes and taking a deep, shuddering breath, Julian willed himself not to cry. It took a while, but he managed to stem the tears, and, breathing slowly and evenly, he placed the photo album in the Hefty bag underneath the maternity clothes, putting everything back the way it was.

He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the photo he had put in there, looking at it.

“Miles,” he said aloud, and it felt good to say the name again. “Miles.”

Julian dreamed that night of the garage, and in his dream he climbed up the ladder to the loft, where dozens of animal skeletons were arranged over the crimson-soaked floor. The stick-figure cardboard cutout of the Wimpy Kid, still splattered with blood, was smiling at him and winking, pointing toward the broken exercise bike, on which sat a small human skeleton, pedaling slowly.

The skeleton was Miles.

Awakening to the fading sound of his own scream, Julian sat up, disoriented for a moment by the fact that he was alone in bed. Then he remembered where he was, where Claire and the kids were, and he settled back onto the pillow, wondering why he had decided to stay here, why he hadn’t gone with them. He’d had a reason, he knew, something besides the fact that he didn’t get along with her dad, but at the moment that rationale eluded him, and he worried that, as Claire had suggested, it was the house that had kept him here.

Or the garage.

For he sensed now that the locus of power, the source of whatever was going on, had relocated there from the basement.

Thinking about the nightmare he’d just had, he got out of bed, walked over to the window, pulled the curtains aside and looked across the backyard toward the garage.

Where the man who had killed himself was standing behind the window of the loft, staring back at him.

Julian let the curtain drop and ducked out of the way, moving to the side, heart hammering in his chest. He waited a moment, then pulled the curtain back and peeked around the edge of the window frame, hoping the figure would be gone. It wasn’t. The ghost of John Lynch, still wearing that backward yellow baseball cap, remained in place, staring at him across the yard, and in an attempt to prove his bravery, Julian opened the curtains all the way and stood directly before the window, staring back himself. He waited there for several minutes, expecting the figure to fade and disappear, but it did not, and the ghost staring back at him looked as solid as the man himself had been.

More annoyed now than scared, Julian closed the curtains again and decided to go back to bed. He should have been too terrified to sleep, but staring at Lynch’s ghost had given him courage. The breach across which they’d regarded each other seemed uncrossable, and he was pretty sure that the ghost was stuck in the garage and could not come into the house. The idea gave him comfort, and while it might not signal an end to their problems, it was at least a step in the right direction.

Climbing into bed, Julian put his head down on the pillow and pulled the top sheet over himself. He fell asleep almost instantly.

He did not dream.

He was awakened in the morning by the sound of a siren. It was loud, close, and then it abruptly shut off, and Julian went into the living room and peeked out the window to see a fire truck parked in the street, halfway in front of his house. In the Ribieros’ driveway, next door, was an ambulance with its back doors open, and red and blue roof lights still flashing.

Julian hurried back to the bedroom, slipped on some jeans and a Hawaiian shirt, quickly put on his tennis shoes, then walked outside just as two paramedics wheeled a gurney out of the Ribieros’ house and into the back of the ambulance. He couldn’t tell from this angle whether Bob or Elise was on the gurney, but he got his answer moments later when Bob emerged from the house with another paramedic who was jotting something down on a clipboard.

Julian didn’t want to intrude, so he stayed where he was, watching from the sidelines.

The surprising thing was that he was the only person from the neighborhood out here. Glancing around, he didn’t even see anyone peeking through their windows or out from behind a parted curtain. His neighbors, apparently, had no interest in what happened on their street, and he remembered how no one had come out to see what was going on when the police arrived to arrest John Lynch.

The ambulance left, siren off, which was hopefully a good sign, and the remaining firemen and paramedics put on their helmets and got onto the fire engine. Bob Ribiero locked up his house, saw Julian, glared at him, then got into his car and followed the ambulance down the street.

What was that about?

Frowning, Julian walked out to the sidewalk just as the fire engine pulled away. He’d wanted to ask one of the men what had happened, but he missed the chance by a few seconds and ended up watching the fire truck leave.

Once again, he looked around at the neighborhood houses and, this time, across the street, he saw Spencer Allred standing on his front porch. Finally, someone. Julian waved, walking over. At the sight of him, the old man looked as though he wanted to go back inside his house and hide, but he didn’t; he waited, and Julian walked up to the porch, stopping at the bottom step. He gestured toward the Ribieros’ place. “That was Elise,” he said. “I wonder what happened. Heart attack?”

“Your house,” Spencer replied.

Julian looked at him, startled. “What?”

“Your house happened to her.”

Julian didn’t know how to respond to that.

Spencer sighed. “It’s not your fault. It might not even be your house, exactly. This whole street is … off. But your house is at the center of it, and the Ribieros live right next door.” He thought for a moment, as though not sure whether he should say what he wanted to say. “You know, the reason some of us, a lot of us came to your party, your housewarming party, was because we wanted to see the inside of it for ourselves. And when it … when it ended the way it did … Well, let’s just say that most of us weren’t that surprised.”

Julian felt a thrill of excitement. “So you know something!”

The old man shook his head, backed away. “I don’t know anything.”

“You weren’t surprised? Why not? You do know something.” Julian moved up a step. “What’s going on here? What’s wrong with our house?”

Spencer reached the door. “I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. Forty years I lived here, minding my own business. That’s the only way to survive: don’t get involved.” He pulled open the screen door, stepping inside. “Now go home. Get away from here.”

“Spencer?” his wife called from inside the house.

“Coming!” he answered.

He closed the door.

Julian turned around. From this vantage point, there seemed nothing wrong with his house. Or the garage. But he knew better, and Spencer Allred did, too. Probably most of the homeowners on this street did, and as he walked back home, he wondered whether the ambulance siren had been off because Elise Ribiero was already dead.