The Haunted

he saw the deputy hurry in, looking for him, that this was bad. Jim didn’t even want to explain what had happened in front of the other customers, and Luther accompanied him outside, getting quickly into the car as Jim told him that a woman had been seen hanging her children from her front porch.

Luther didn’t believe it at first. As more and more homes were fitted with telephones, young men and unstable adults had begun using the instrument for pranks, and this sounded to him like one of those instances.

But when they turned onto Rainey Street, Luther knew instantly that it was true, and it was he who spotted the house. “There!” he said, pointing. Jim pulled the car to a stop at the front yard of the house.

The woman had already strung up two of her children. They hung from ropes attached to a beam on the wraparound porch, twisting slightly in opposite directions, eyes bulging and mouths open in dark purplish faces. The remaining three children sat on a porch swing, sobbing. She was tying a rope around the neck of the smallest one, preparing to hang him, too.

Why weren’t those kids running away? Luther wondered. Why weren’t they screaming for help?

He knew why, though.

It was Rainey Street.

Both Luther and Jim leaped out of the car and ran up the porch steps, pistols drawn. “Stop right there!” Luther ordered.

The woman ignored him and tightened the noose around her son’s neck.

Luther pushed her to the floor, away from the boy, grabbing the rope from her hands, and Jim held her down. She was screaming incoherently, spit flying from her mouth as she jerked her head from side to side, yelling out nonsensical words. Her hair was wild, her eyes wilder, and she looked like someone who had escaped from an insane asylum. He recognized her, though, had seen her about town, and he wondered what had happened to turn her like this.

Other neighbors were gathering around to see what all the commotion was about. The two children—one boy, one girl—were still hanging from the beam, but the sight of the dead kids did not generate the reaction he thought it should. There was very little reaction at all, in fact. The purple-faced corpses might as well have been duffel bags for all the interest that was shown in them.

Luther looked down the street in both directions. It was an evil place, he thought, though the nature of that evil seemed different every time he was here. It was as though each killing, each death, changed the street, gave it a new character. Last week, after Mrs. Daniels had murdered her husband, the street had seemed angry, a location where rage ruled and violence was the accepted response to any misunderstanding. Today, however, it was a realm of craziness, where it seemed perfectly reasonable for a mother to hang her children in front of her house and leave them dangling like butchered lambs.

But the uneasiness he felt here remained constant. Luther liked nothing about this place, not the street nor the sidewalk nor the yards nor the houses.

Especially one house.

He glanced over at it now. It was an address at which nothing illegal had ever happened, a quiet, nondescript residence where an old widow lived by herself. That widow, Mrs. Hernandez, was the one who had called in about the Daniels murder. He had talked to her afterward, asking what she had seen, and she’d seemed a nice enough old lady, but he had conducted the interview on her porch because he did not want to go into her house.

The house frightened him.

The weird part was that he wasn’t frightened by any one particular thing. No, it was the overall atmosphere of the house that made his skin crawl, that set his nerves on edge. It wasn’t what had happened here but what could happen here that scared him. If there was a source for the evil on this street, an origin point from which everything else spread out, it was this house. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he did, and he was glad that he wouldn’t have to go over there today.

Jim had handcuffed the woman, who was still spitting and screaming, and hauled her to her feet. “Do you want me to take her in?” the deputy asked.

“No. I’ll do it. You watch those kids. Take them into the house or the backyard. I’ll send Mrs. Biederman over to get them; then I’ll come back and we’ll cut those other kids down, take them over to Jake’s.”

“Why do you think she did that?” Jim wondered, looking at the two hanging children.

Luther shook his head, said nothing.

But he knew the answer

It was Rainey Street.

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