The Haunted

clouds and dim light lent the house a gloominess she’d never seen before, and a chill passed through her as she noticed that none of the lights were on. There was a perfectly logical explanation for that—James liked to watch TV in the dark, and her dad’s office faced the rear of the house and was not visible from here—but she could not help thinking that the house was empty, that everyone was gone.

Dead.

She refused to even go there.

Still, she stood for a moment on the front stoop, listening for sounds. If the house was empty, she was not walking in. Luckily, she heard her dad’s music from upstairs—he liked to crank it up when her mom was out—and, relieved, she went inside. As she’d suspected, James was lying on the couch in the darkened living room, watching cartoons, an open package of Doritos on his chest.

“Is Dad upstairs?” she asked, though she already knew the answer.

“In his office.”

Megan bounded up the steps two at a time, eager to tell him about the movie.

But her father was not in his office. The room was empty, and, frowning, she moved past the doorway, walking all the way in, checking to see whether he was in one of the corners or crouched down behind the desk. In the back of her mind, though she didn’t want to admit it, was the fear that he had collapsed, had a stroke or heart attack or something and was lying on the floor, dead.

There was a strange clicking sound coming from his computer, and she walked around the side of his desk, grateful to see that he was not on the floor. He was probably in the bathroom, she thought reassuringly as she glanced at the monitor.

Hi, Megan!

The words were in the middle of the screen, and she might have thought her dad had typed them if they hadn’t started dancing as she watched: growing, changing colors, bouncing up and down.

The words disappeared.

I saw U.

She froze, the rhythm of her heart accelerating as the new text emerged, bright red against a light blue background. In her mind, she saw the face in the mirror, the figure in the steam. She thought of the message on her phone: I C U Megan.

“Hi.”

She jumped at the sound of her father’s voice, letting out a sharp, startled yelp.

“Whoa.” He was coming through the doorway, but he backed up comically in the face of her reaction. “I guess you saw that horror movie, huh?”

“Actually, we did,” she admitted. “But …” That’s not what scared me, she was about to say. And then she looked at the computer screen and saw only a series of free-floating icons that her dad was obviously using for his current job.

“But what?”

She shook her head. “I thought I saw something weird on your computer.”

He grinned. “There’s always something weird on my computer.”

“That’s not what I meant …” she began. She thought about telling him what she’d seen on his screen, thought about describing her experience this morning in the bathroom, but trying to make him believe she’d encountered something spooky right after she’d returned from seeing a horror movie was near impossible, and it was probably better if she brought it up some other time. She’d get only one shot with a story as out-there as this, and if she didn’t convince him the first time, she’d never be able to do it. She didn’t want to ruin her one-and-only chance.

So she smiled at him and changed the subject. “That was a good movie,” she told him. “It was creepy.”

“Did you get scared?” he teased.

“A little.”

He bumped her shoulder. “Think I can convince your mom to see it?”

“Sure,” she said, playing along. “And have her bring James.”

They both laughed.

But she still felt chilled, and even as she was joking around with her dad, she kept her eyes on his computer.

Fourteen

Saturday.

Robbie was late coming over, so James went up to the headquarters by himself. The place was shaping up. The skeletons he’d found had been cleaned up and arranged on a low shelf made from a wood plank balanced atop concrete cinder blocks. The shelf was to the right of the bookcase, which was now filled with unwanted magazines they’d scrounged from their respective houses. Robbie’s dad had given them an old typewriter, which they’d placed on top of the bookcase next to a stack of plain white paper and a toy magnifying glass Robbie had taken from his brother’s room. The exercise bike was next to the window, and the traffic cone sat in front of the secret compartment, marking it and blocking it. Today, Robbie was bringing over his chemistry set, which would help make the headquarters look like a real crime lab.

If he ever got here.

James glanced around. They needed a clock, he decided, so they could tell what time it was.

He sat on the floor for a few minutes, thumbed through an old issue of People magazine, read a movie review, found a few pictures of starlets on the beach in bikinis, then stood up, restless. Standing near the window, he listened for the sound of Robbie’s car, heard nothing, then opened the trapdoor and climbed the ladder downstairs.

He walked into the backyard. His parents had gone to The Store, leaving him in Megan’s hands. Not an ideal situation, although if the two of them stayed out of each other’s way until their mom and dad returned, there shouldn’t be a problem.

James looked toward the house, where his sister was hopefully minding her own business and not spying on him.

He was about to walk out to the front yard and wait for Robbie there, when his attention was caught by the hole he had dug in the ground.

It was back.

How was that possible? His dad had made him fill it in last weekend. The work had been hard—much harder than digging it had been, for some reason—but afterward, it was as if a great responsibility had been lifted from his shoulders. The unwanted compulsion to eat dirt that had been plaguing him since the opening of that secret compartment had disappeared, and along with it the weird mixture of defensiveness and guilt that discovery of the compartment had engendered.

He’d been grateful to his dad, and the week had passed quickly and uneventfully.

But last night he’d had a dream. In it, he had dug a tunnel from the garage to the basement, eating the dirt as he made his way under the yard, feeling it enter his body through one end and pass out the other as though he were a worm. Now, he saw as he approached the hole, there actually was a tunnel, or the beginning of one, and he felt within his chest a familiar stirring.

Perfectly round, as though bored by machine, the hole was probably three feet across and went down at least that far. At the bottom were bugs, dozens of them, black, unrecognizable insects that had probably been beetles before being squished into the amorphous mass that coated the floor of the pit. A narrow passage, barely big enough for him to slide through on his stomach, had been burrowed into the side of the hole, heading toward the house.

James jumped in, hearing and feeling the bugs crunch beneath his shoes. Grimacing, he kicked them to the edges and cleared a space before the tunnel. He knew it was crazy even as he did it, but he couldn’t seem to help himself, and he dropped to his knees, then ducked down and pushed his way into the opening headfirst.