The Haunted

Thirty-one

Claire was at her office and had just answered an e-mail from the school district’s attorneys when the phone rang. It was Diane. Her sister was calling to tell her that their father had phoned, asking Rob to go with him to Claire’s house. “You know Dad. He said he needed a witness to prove to, quote, that pansy Julian, end quote, that your house wasn’t haunted. Luckily, Rob was at work and wasn’t home, so I answered the phone. I told him not to go, but …”

“Yes. We know Dad.”

“I’m with you on this, Claire. I don’t like that house. Now, after everything that’s happened …” She drew in a loud breath. “I don’t think Dad should go there. He’s getting old, and … I just think it might be dangerous.”

“It is dangerous. But it’s daytime and he’ll only be there for a few minutes. I think he’ll be okay.”

There was a weird pause on the other end of the line, and Claire’s heart lurched in her chest. “Di? There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“After Dad hung up, the phone rang again, and when I answered it, there was this voice. It was all deep and spooky, and it said, ‘He’s a stupid old fuck.’ That’s it. That’s all it said. Then the person hung up. I checked the caller ID, and … it was your number. At your house.”

Claire was filled with a sensation of panic, but she managed to keep her voice calm. “You stay there. I’ll get Julian, and we’ll go and see what’s up.”

“I’m going, too.”

“Di …”

“I’m going, too. I’ll call Mom; then I’ll meet you there.”

“Okay, but if you get there before we do, just wait until we arrive. I think it’s better if all three of us go in together. Safer.”

“Gotcha.”

There was no way Diane would make it there before she did. Their house was the next street over on the other side of the park. Call Mom? “Shit,” Claire said aloud, and quickly dialed her parents’ number, hoping to get through before her sister. She did. Her mom answered the phone and Claire asked to speak with Julian. She kept all traces of worry out of her voice—she’d let Diane explain to their mother what was going on—but as soon as Julian came on the line, she told him exactly what had happened and asked him to meet her in front of the house. She was expecting an argument, probably because it involved her dad, but Julian agreed right away. His voice had changed its tone after she’d repeated what Diane had said about the phone call from their house—

He’s a stupid old fuck

—and she could tell that he was as worried as she was.

“I love you,” she said before she hung up, and meant it.

Claire was the first person to arrive at the house, and when she saw her parents’ car in the driveway, she knew she couldn’t wait around for Julian and Diane to show up. She had to rush in there and get her dad out.

For some reason, however, her key didn’t seem to fit in the lock, and she was still fumbling with it—in between bouts of pounding on the door and yelling, “Dad!”—when Julian swerved next to the curb in front of the house, driving her father’s old truck. Diane was mere seconds behind him.

Julian tried her key, then his, but when neither seemed to work, he led them around the side of the house to the backyard.

Where the kitchen door was not only unlocked, but open.

Claire’s heart skipped a beat, restarting its rhythm at a much more rapid pace. This couldn’t be good. “Dad!” she called.

She hadn’t expected an answer, and she didn’t get one. On the white cement of the patio, she saw muddy footprints. Or muddy prints of some sort. They were clumpy and ill defined, and it was impossible to tell whether they came from a shoe, a foot, a claw, a hoof or something else.

They led into the house.

Julian and Diane had to have seen them, too, but neither of them said a word. Claire stepped past her husband. “Dad?” She walked inside, Julian and Diane right behind her.

The mud disappeared. Before her, the kitchen seemed perfectly normal, nothing out of place, exactly as it should have been. Despite the promise of the muddy prints, the clean kitchen was not really a surprise. What was a surprise was that the living room appeared to be in impeccable shape as well. She could see it through the doorway, past the dining room. From Julian’s description, she had expected broken lamps and overturned furniture, but from what she could tell, the room was immaculate.

Julian noticed it, too. “What the hell … ?” He hurried over, turning about, an expression of complete confusion on his face.

That should have been good news, Claire supposed, but somehow it scared her far more than a trashed room would have. They were dealing with something here that could change things. Julian was right. It wasn’t a ghost. Or wasn’t just a ghost. For the being that occupied this house was able to destroy objects and put them back together again. Its powers were not merely supernatural but godlike, and she realized that there was no way they could ever hope to fight against something like that. She discarded once and for all any thought of vanquishing the spirit. She just wanted to find her dad and get him out of here. After that, she didn’t care what happened to this place. It could burn to the ground for all she cared. In fact, burning to the ground would be the best possible outcome. She wouldn’t have to live with the guilt of pawning this evil place onto another unsuspecting soul, and they might even get some insurance money out of it. But what would happen after that? The land itself was cursed. Any new home built on the same spot would have the same problem. And what if the entire neighborhood was razed? What would the city do with the land? Expand the park? Put in a shopping center? Each of those was a disaster in waiting. The only useful possibility she could foresee would be a landfill, but the council certainly wouldn’t have one in the center of town.

Diane tapped her shoulder, and she jumped, startled out of her reverie.

“I’m checking upstairs,” her sister said.

“Not alone you’re not.”

“No one’s going upstairs,” Julian said, coming back into the kitchen. “We check the ground floor first. Together. If we don’t find him here, then we’ll go upstairs.”

“Dad!” Diane called at the top of her lungs.

There was no answer.

“He’s not in the dining room or the living room,” Julian said. “I was just there. We’ll check the basement, then our bedroom and the bathroom. After that, we’ll go upstairs. If we don’t find anything in the house, we’ll check the garage.”

“Dad!” Diane called again.

Julian walked over to the basement door, pulling it open. “I don’t understand it,” he told Claire as he flipped the switch to turn on the cellar lights. “The living room was trashed. That lamp on the end table was thrown at me, and it smashed on the coffee table. Pieces were everywhere. …”

“I believe you,” she said honestly, and that was all she needed to say.

Julian walked down the steps while Claire and Diane waited at the top. “Roger?” he called.

“Dad?” they yelled together.

There was no response, but Julian spent several minutes moving boxes aside to make sure he—

his body

—wasn’t hiding somewhere down there.

The basement was empty, and Julian came back up. The three of them passed by the deserted laundry room, then moved out into the hallway and on to the master bedroom. It was daytime, but the drapes were drawn, and Claire turned on the lights. They were all calling for her father yet receiving no response.

“The bed,” Claire said, pointing.

“That was me,” Julian said, embarrassed. “I didn’t make it.” He flipped up the covers, though, just to make sure no one was under there, then dropped to his knees, lifted the ruffled skirt and checked beneath the bed, shaking his head as he stood to indicate there was nothing.

Claire moved over to the bathroom and turned on the light in there as well.

Her heart leaped. On the floor, she saw the muddy prints again, threateningly brown against the lightness of the white tile. The mirror was fogged up, as though someone had just come out of the shower, and on the clouded glass was the imprint of … a face, she supposed, although it did not look like any face she’d ever seen. The elements were all there—eyes, nose, mouth—but they were in the wrong place, in the wrong order, and the scary thing was that for a brief moment she didn’t know why they were wrong, because she couldn’t remember where those parts were supposed to go. It was not until she saw the blurry contours of her own face in the corner of the mirror that she remembered the nose went over the mouth, and the two eyes were above that. For a terrible second, that awful face had seemed … right.

Behind her, Diane saw the same thing and let out a short, sharp cry, which sent Julian running over from the closet where he’d been searching.

“What is that?” Diane wanted to know, but neither Claire nor Julian had an answer.

“Let’s just find your dad and get out of here,” Julian said grimly, and the three of them hurried out of the bedroom and up the stairs.

“Roger!” Julian called.

“Dad!”

“Dad!”

He was not in Julian’s office, James’s room, Megan’s room or the bathroom. They saw nothing unusual upstairs, and though Claire thought she heard a weird tapping in Julian’s office, it might have been her imagination, since neither Julian nor Diane heard a thing.

As agreed, they went out to the garage together, but by now what little hope remained in Claire of finding her father had vanished. She didn’t know where he was or what had happened to him, but something had certainly occurred, because he seemed to have disappeared.

He was not on the ground floor of the garage, they saw instantly. Julian went up to the loft by himself, and though he stayed up there several minutes longer than she thought he should have and returned looking pale and shaken, he claimed that he’d seen nothing out of the ordinary.

“So he’s not here,” Claire said.

“Maybe he went home,” Julian suggested.

“His car’s still in the driveway.”

“Maybe he walked away. Or got scared and ran.”

“We need to go to the police,” Diane announced.

“The police aren’t going to believe—” Julian began.

“I don’t give a shit what they believe. My dad is missing, and it’s their job to find him, and if they happen to discover the existence of ghosts on the way, well, good for them. But Dad’s gone. And we need to get him back, no matter what it takes.”

Claire agreed, and instead of arguing the point, she grabbed her sister’s arm with one hand, Julian’s with the other, and pulled them both out of the garage. Just in case. Once in the driveway, she took out her cell phone and dialed 911. She looked up at the sky, wondering why the sun and clouds were visible from here but the moon and the stars were not. Did it mean something?

A police dispatcher came on the line. “What is your emergency?”

“My father’s missing. He disappeared about an hour ago—”

“Excuse me, ma’am,” the dispatcher said, and there seemed to be a tone of smirking condescension in her voice, “but an adult male is not considered missing until he has been gone for forty-eight hours. Your father has been out of contact for one. I suggest you wait. I’m sure he will turn up later this morning.”

“You don’t understand,” Claire said. She saw the anxious expression on her sister’s face. “He disappeared inside our house.” She hadn’t intended to bring any of this up, hadn’t wanted the police to think her crazy and not take her seriously. But there wasn’t going to be any action taken to find her father for two full days, and she knew she needed to spell everything out. Still, she had to be careful what she said. “We’ve had some incidents at our home recently,” she began.

“Vandalism,” Julian whispered.

“Incidents of vandalism,” she said more confidently. “Someone shut off our lights and attacked my husband in our living room. This is the same house,” she added with sudden inspiration, “where an intruder named John Lynch committed suicide several days ago.”

Julian gave her a thumbs-up.

Now it was her turn to be condescending. “I’m sure that crime is in your records,” Claire told the dispatcher.

“You may report the assault and file a claim regarding the vandalism. Although, since they occurred previously, neither incident is considered an emergency. I can transfer you to an officer who will take your statement and arrange a meeting. As for your father, a person has to be missing for forty-eight hours before the police can open an investigation.”

“Transfer me,” Claire ordered.

She spent the next five minutes trying in vain to convince a Lieutenant Weiss that he needed to come out to their house to investigate, finally giving up and handing the phone over to Julian, who alienated the officer in record time and ended up turning off the phone in anger and disgust.

Diane was crying. “What do we do?”

“I don’t know,” Julian said helplessly. “Does Rob know anyone who has contacts at the police department? Maybe we can get some help through a back channel—”

“I don’t think so,” Diane said, taking out her own phone, “but I’ll ask.”

Rob didn’t, and, from Diane’s side of the conversation, it didn’t sound as though he believed a word of what she was telling him, but he promised to ask around and see whether maybe someone he knew knew someone who could help them get some traction with the cops.

Diane hung up. “What do we do now?” she asked.

Claire looked over at the house. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

As they passed by her dad’s car, she felt a pang, wondering whether she would ever see her father again. He was rough, and he was mean sometimes, and he hated Julian, but she loved him, and she didn’t know what she would do without him. Her parents were both getting on in years, but she had never really considered, seriously considered, what she’d do if one of them died. Now she realized that if her dad died, it would not just affect her emotionally, but would require her and Diane to take care of their mom. Her dad was the one who ran the household, did all the shopping, paid all the bills and made most of the decisions. If something happened to her dad, she and her sister would have to take up the slack.

Claire immediately felt guilty for even contemplating such mundane, practical considerations, and she pushed all such thoughts from her mind before telling Julian and Diane to meet her at her parents’ house, and climbing into the van. She wanted to cry, wanted to dwell on her unhappiness and wallow in it, but luckily driving required concentration, and her emotions were once again under control as she pulled into her parents’ driveway.

All that hard-won discipline threatened to crumble, however, as soon as she walked into the house, saw her mom and knew she would have to explain that her dad was missing. A more enlightened parent might let her kids in on the conversation, too, but Claire’s instinct was to keep them away from this as much as possible, and she told Megan and James to go into their rooms while she talked to Grandma.

She didn’t know where to start. Diane was already crying, but Julian stepped into the breach and informed her mom that they’d just come back from their house. “We were looking for Roger. He went over there this morning to prove me wrong, I guess, and show me that our house isn’t really haunted. He called Diane first to ask whether Rob wanted to go with him, but Rob was at work. After he hung up, she got another call, a weird call, and we went out there to make sure he was all right. His car was parked in the driveway, but he wasn’t in the house or in the yard or in the garage. We couldn’t find him.”

“He disappeared,” Claire said, touching her mom’s arm. “He was just … gone.”

Her mother seemed confused. “He can’t have just disappeared.”

“He did, Mom. I don’t know how, but he did.”

Diane was nodding. “That house is haunted. I’ve never experienced anything like it. The bathroom was all fogged up, and there was a … a face in the mirror.”

Their mom started to cry.

“We called the police,” Claire said, “but they can’t do anything until he’s been missing for forty-eight hours.”

“What do we do?” her mom asked.

That was the question. Claire had been going over possibilities in her head, but the truth was that there weren’t a whole lot of options. This wasn’t a situation where the choices were self-evident. She’d never encountered anything even remotely similar, and doubted that anyone else had, either. Even if the police were to get involved, she doubted that they would be able to find her dad. He had been taken by the same creature that had attacked Julian, and whether her father was alive or dead, they would never discover what had happened to him unless they figured out how to stop whatever lived in that house.

Whether he was alive or dead.

Her vision grew blurry as the tears threatened to come. She forced them back. She needed to be strong right now. For her kids, for her mom, for herself.

“Maybe he’ll be back later,” her mom said. “Maybe he’ll be back in time for dinner.”

Either she didn’t understand what was happening or didn’t want to face it. Claire nodded. “Maybe,” she said.

“Maybe,” Diane echoed.

But he wasn’t.