The Haunted

laptop that she was afraid to turn it on. She thought once more of that message she’d received this afternoon—

IL C U 2NITE

—and shivered. Her shades were all closed, but she checked them again anyway, making sure all cracks were sealed and no one could see in. The room seemed quiet, too quiet, and she turned on her iPod.

She knew that other sounds could hide under music, however, and rather than reassuring her, the iPod made her feel even more anxious. She was all alone up here, Megan realized, and immediately she turned off the music, dropped the iPod on her bed and sped downstairs to watch a TV show she didn’t like with her surprised but happy parents. And James.

Two hours of comedies and karaoke contests later, her nerves were calmed, her sense of normalcy restored, and her earlier anxiety seemed like a horrendous overreaction. It was time for bed, and both she and James said good night to their parents and headed upstairs to their bedrooms. For once, she was glad to have her brother with her, and though they didn’t speak as they trod up the steps, she was grateful for his presence and actually bade him good night before entering her bedroom and closing the door.

Often, Megan stayed up later than she was supposed to—that was the advantage of having a two-story house and a bedroom on a floor different from her parents’. She’d read or listen to music or even text her friends if they were still up. But tonight she was tired. It might have been only ten o’clock, but it felt like midnight to her. So she changed into her pajamas, walked down the hall to the bathroom, where she washed her face and brushed her teeth, then crawled into bed. Usually, she liked to sleep with the lights off, but this time she left the desk lamp on. She could hear James moving around down the hall, though he was supposed to be in bed, too. Under normal circumstances, she’d yell at him to go to sleep, threaten to tell their parents, but tonight she was grateful for the noise, and she closed her eyes and within minutes had drifted off.

She awoke in darkness.

She’d been lured out of sleep by the soft sound of an electronic beep, although she heard nothing now. Somehow her lamp had been turned off, and she chose to believe that one of her parents had come in to check on her and switched it off. The thought was comforting.

There was another beep, and Megan rolled over onto her side. She’d turned off her iPhone before going to bed, as she always did, but on the nightstand next to her she could see the light from the screen in the darkness. She sat up, leaning on her elbow, and looked over to see what was going on.

There was a message, white letters against a blue background. Bleary eyed, she read it, her heart pounding.

, it said. I C U!

Six

Julian had the Dream again, the first time in over a year, and he awoke sweaty and disoriented, not sure for a moment where he was. Then the shadowed features of the room resolved themselves into recognizable shapes —dresser, lamp, picture, chair—and he realized that he was in their bedroom, in their new house, and Claire was lying next to him. He quickly glanced over at her, and was relieved to see that she hadn’t awakened. Last time she had, and when she’d questioned him, he’d been forced to invent a fake nightmare to describe.

He had never told her about the Dream.

Julian carefully pulled the covers from on top of him and slid out of bed, padding over to the bathroom. Closing the door, he turned on the light, staring at himself in the mirror. He looked as wrecked as he felt, and he took a still-damp washcloth from the towel rack and used it to wipe the sweat from his face. His heart was thumping wildly, and he was grateful that this time the fear had overpowered the sadness. For the sadness generated by the Dream was almost more than he could bear, a deep despair that negated everything good that had happened in his life, that wiped out the joy of his wife and his children and brought him back emotionally to that dark, dark day.

The fear was bad, but it was far preferable.

He experienced that fear now, an emotional vestige of the Dream even more lasting than the nightmare images that remained in his head. It was terror and panic and impotence and frustration, all knotted together in a single overwhelming feeling that would not go away. It was the way he’d actually felt on that day, and though it was something he’d never forgotten, something that was never very far from his mind, the Dream always brought it into crystal-clear focus and made him relive it all over again.

His mouth was dry, and he picked up the plastic tumbler next to his electric toothbrush and got a drink of water from the faucet. He didn’t like drinking bathroom water, which always seemed suspect to him, but he was grateful for it now.

Switching off the light and poking his head back into the bedroom, he saw that Claire was still asleep. He would not be able to sleep for a while, maybe not for the rest of the night, and, not wanting to disturb her, he crept through the bedroom and walked out to the living room, where he turned on the television, hoping for something to distract him. News was good, and he switched the channel to CNN. But there was no real news, only an in-depth update on a fame-seeking woman who had gained notoriety for having a lot of children. He flipped through other channels and ended up watching a documentary about ice fishing for twenty minutes or so before shutting off the TV.

Still wide-awake, he decided to go upstairs and check on the kids: a habit left over from their early childhood that still gave him comfort. At the top of the steps, he heard murmuring from Megan’s room and smiled. She often talked in her sleep, one-sided conversations of several sentences, and while more often than not the words were gibberish, the sentences nonsense, occasionally he or Claire had been able to make out individual phrases that, when repeated to their daughter in the morning, jogged her memory and helped her recall her dreams. He moved quietly down the hall, careful not to wake either her or her brother.

The talking continued, and Julian frowned as he drew closer. That didn’t sound like Megan’s voice. It didn’t even sound like a girl’s voice.

It sounded like a man’s voice.

He sprinted the last few feet to his daughter’s bedroom and, frantic, panicked, pushed open the door.

She was asleep, in bed, alone. Enough light shone in from the hallway for him to see that there was no one else in the room, but just to make sure, he walked around to the other side of her bed and even crouched down on the floor to look under it. The talking had stopped, and he wondered whether he had imagined it. Probably not. Megan was a sleep talker. But some fearful part of his brain, stimulated perhaps by the Dream, had no doubt lowered her voice a few registers in his mind and given him the impression that a man was in her room.

Moving quietly, he opened her closet and moved his hands through her clothes, feeling along the wall to make sure no one was hiding there. No one was. And the windows, when he checked them, were closed.

Megan was safe and sound.

He bent over her sleeping form and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. If she’d awakened at that moment, she would have recoiled and told him to go away, frowning in disgust. He felt a small twinge of sadness as he recalled how she used to like him to kiss her, especially before she went to sleep at night. He missed that younger Megan and wished, not for the first time, that she never had to grow up and would remain his little girl forever.

He patted her back, then went over to James’s room to check on his son. The boy had kicked off his blanket and was sprawled out on his bed in what looked like a very uncomfortable position. Julian drew the blanket back up and kissed his son on the forehead. James wasn’t big on kissing, either, although right now he didn’t mind hugs. It was going to be sad when that changed.

Just in case, he searched James’s room for an intruder, too. And though there was no way anyone could have passed by in the hall without his seeing it, he looked through his office and the bathroom as well.

The upstairs was clear, all was safe, and Julian went back down the steps, returned to his bedroom, crawled