The Haunted

It was a chickenshit plan, the coward’s way out, but Julian justified it by telling himself that it would be wrong to stress out Claire even more. She was already freaked about the house and practically jumping at her own shadow. She was also troubled by the fact that, despite all of the modern research options at their disposal, neither of them had been able to dig up any significant information about their home or property. Her mental and emotional plates were full to overflowing. He didn’t want to add to her burden.

The garage was clear, as was the yard, and Julian closed all windows, locked the back door and walked out to the sidewalk in front of the house, scanning the neighborhood for a sign of anything unusual.

Nothing.

He went back into the house. He hadn’t found a baseball bat, as he’d originally planned, although he knew there was one somewhere in the basement or garage amid the surplus clutter of their storage items, but he did go to his tool chest and take out a hammer, just in case he needed a weapon. He doubted that he would have to use it, even if Lynch came back, but it couldn’t hurt to be prepared.

Julian still had that deadline and had been planning to spend the morning catching up on all the work he’d let slide lately, but the news about Lynch had thrown him off, and once upstairs in his office, he found himself staring dumbly at the screen, not an idea in his head. He reviewed the last changes he’d made to the page, thinking that a walk-through of recent work might help get his thoughts on track, and it seemed to help. He found a mistake he’d made, corrected it, and was suddenly back in the game. He knew what he needed to do next, and he knew how to get the result he wanted.

Then he heard a voice from the hallway.

A man’s voice.

Julian stood, heart pounding, and grabbed his hammer, clutching the handle tightly. His first thought was that John Lynch had somehow gotten into the house, although he had no idea how that was possible. But as he cautiously approached the doorway, he could hear the voice talking—it had not stopped talking—and though he could not make out individual words, he recognized the tone and cadence.

It was the voice he had heard talking to Megan while she was asleep.

A chill crept up Julian’s back all the way to his neck. He entered the hallway, half expecting the murmuring to be silenced, but instead it grew louder, and once again it was coming from Megan’s room. He looked toward her doorway. It was daytime, but the hall was in shadow, and the hint of cool sunlight that emerged from the open doorway of his daughter’s bedroom made the surrounding corridor seem that much darker.

His hand hurt, but Julian refused to loosen his grip on the hammer. He continued moving forward slowly, not wanting to alert whatever it was to his presence. He could discern every third or fourth word now, but they made no sense.

“. . . comforter … canyons … cinnabar … sleep …”

Reaching Megan’s door, he peeked his head around the corner. There was movement in her mirror, a whitish blur that moved too fast for him to see, and then the voice was gone. From the opposite side of the house, not from his office but from farther out, the backyard, perhaps, came faint high laughter.

Hammer in hand, Julian explored Megan’s bedroom, then James’s room, then the bathroom, then his own office. But he found nothing, heard nothing, saw nothing.

Maybe they needed to find some sort of exorcist.

A month ago, a week ago even, he would have laughed at the absurdity of such a thought. But then was then and now was now, and Claire was right. Something was wrong with their house and they needed to do something about it.

If there was a ghost in Megan’s room, a male ghost, did it … he … spy on her at night while she slept?

The thought was untenable, and Julian decided then and there that he and his daughter were going to exchange rooms. It might not help, it might be a complete waste of time, but this was the second instance when he had heard a man’s voice in Megan’s room, and this time he had also seen something in her mirror. There was no way he was going to allow her to spend another night in there.

In the back of his mind was the idea that, as Claire had said, they should sell the house. No room was probably safe. But that thought was muted, and did not possess the urgency it should have.

Claire.

For some reason, the image in his brain was one of her naked and spread wide, shaved in the way she had not been since having kids. Suddenly, he was erect and aroused, and before doing anything else, he went into the bathroom, pulled down his pants, knelt on the floor in front of the toilet and masturbated. He finished quickly, spurting into the bowl and flushing it, and after buckling his pants, he called Rick and Patrick and asked whether they could come over to help him move some furniture.

Rick was always up for playing hooky—besides, the print shop was his own business; he could do whatever he wanted—and Patrick was planning to take an early lunch anyway, so his two friends came over, and within an hour, they had the furniture of the two rooms switched. Claire and Megan returned just as they were finishing, and though Megan reacted with shock and dismay—at least until Julian pointed out that her new room would be bigger—Claire merely looked at him with an expression indicating that, while she might not know the specifics, she did know why he was making this change.

Claire offered to feed Rick and Patrick, but Patrick said he needed to get back to work, and Rick said he was just going to grab a burger on his way to the print shop. The two men left, with Julian’s heartfelt thanks, and Megan went upstairs to hang up her posters and redecorate, leaving Julian and Claire alone in the kitchen. She started making sandwiches while he explained about the voice he’d heard. He made no mention of John Lynch, but he didn’t need to—this new news was frightening enough as it was.

“Maybe the kids should sleep in our room,” Claire said.

“Then where would we sleep?”

“Maybe we should all sleep in our room.”

Julian shook his head. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it? We’re living in a haunted house. We should get out of here, leave and never come back. But if we don’t, we need to start making some accommodations to the situation.”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

“I don’t like their being upstairs, that far away from us.”

The truth was, he didn’t, either. But there was little they could do about it—that was how the house was built—and while he intended to take every precaution, he said nothing to Claire, not wanting to frighten her even more.

The whole embrace of secrecy, this willingness—no, desire—to keep Claire out of the loop was not like him. He had never acted this way before in his life, and this line of thought seemed foreign to him, not his own. A dull pounding in his temple suddenly flared up into full-fledged pain. Thinking about this subject was giving him a headache. He squinted against the throbbing, trying at first to ignore it, then told Claire that his head hurt and he needed to take something for it. She nodded. She was grimacing herself, and they both went into the kitchen, where they found a bottle of Tylenol behind the vitamins in the spice cupboard.

The two of them made lunch together the way they used to, an assembly line of turkey sandwiches, before calling Megan to come down and eat. Now over the initial shock, Megan was excited by the possibilities of her new room, and she chatted happily through lunch, describing how she was thinking of putting a plant by the window so the bedroom would be more “green.”

Lunch was nice, and his headache had subsided, but immediately afterward, Claire started opening windows around the house to let in fresh air. “This place is stuffy,” she told him. “Don’t you think it’s stuffy?” She opened the back door so air could come in through the screen, and Julian found himself going out to the patio to scan the yard for any sign of John Lynch.

The new plants Claire had bought and planted the other day, he noticed, were all dead.

He needed to go to the hardware store and buy a lock for the gate that opened onto the alley. He should have done so after they first moved in, but it hadn’t seemed very important at the time. Now anything he could do to make entry into their yard more difficult was top priority.

It occurred to Julian that a neighborhood watch might be a good idea. If he could get other people on the street to keep an eye out for Lynch, act as a sort of early warning signal, they might be able to avoid another incident. The only person he felt comfortable approaching was Cole Hubbard, and he walked through the side yard,