The Haunted

Julian didn’t want to talk in front of them, and he moved back onto the sidewalk, where he stood in front of Claire, putting his hands on her shoulders. “I’m close,” he told her.

“No!”

“Yes.”

She pulled away from him and went back into her office. He thought of following her, but she wasn’t going to change his mind, he wasn’t going to change her mind, and it was probably better if they didn’t get into a shouting match right now.

He walked back to the van and got in. The bookseller was arranging his paperbacks again; the couple from the sandwich shop had left. Julian backed into the street. Intellectually, he knew Claire was probably right, but emotionally, it felt wrong, and he drove home convinced that he had made the correct decision.

The sight that greeted him when he pulled onto Rainey Street was completely unexpected.

Every single house was up for sale.

Except theirs.

He’d been gone for a little under an hour, which hardly seemed to be enough time for something like this to have happened. Of course, every For Sale sign was from the same real estate agent at the same real estate office —Randolph Wilson at RE/MAX—so it would have been easy for the agent to have simply gone down the sidewalk planting signs. And for all Julian knew, some of these sales may have been in the planning stages for days or weeks or even months, and the realtor may have just found it more convenient to list them all at the same time. But that hardly seemed likely. What seemed most probable was that, like Cole, the rest of his neighbors had been frightened and had all decided to move at once.

Julian drove slowly, looking to see whether anyone was home. A lot of people weren’t. The Allreds’ car was still in their driveway, but he doubted that either Spencer or Barb would talk to him. Harlan Owens’s red Jeep was parked in his driveway, and his pickup was on the street in front of the house, so he was definitely home. Julian didn’t know Harlan well, but he knew him enough to speak to, and after parking the van in his own driveway, he walked down the street to Harlan’s house.

“Go away!” was the response he received when he knocked on Harlan’s door, and the words were spoken with such force and anger that Julian didn’t even try to argue. He stepped off his neighbor’s porch and headed back to his own house, glancing down the street in disbelief at the row of identical For Sale signs in each yard.

Maybe Claire was right, he thought. Maybe they should get out now. Leave and not look back.

But Randolph Wilson of RE/MAX had just made that harder. Who was going to want to buy a house on a street where every home was for sale? They wouldn’t be able to get back anywhere near the amount of money they’d sunk into the place. If they could sell it at all.

Julian unlocked the door and stepped inside. The mail had arrived in his absence, and he bent down to scoop the envelopes off the floor, where they’d fallen after coming through the slot. He glanced at the return addresses to see whether any of them were checks rather than bills, then went into the living room to dump them on the coffee table with yesterday’s mail.

Someone had been here. There was a note written on the back of an envelope, leaning against the TV screen, and with a pounding heart he walked over, picked it up and read it:

I will cut off Megan’s head and use it to decorate my mantel.

I will stuff James with straw and use him as a scarecrow in the garden. I will rape Claire until she likes it. And I will kill you when I am finished.

There was a scribbled signature at the bottom of the message, though it was indecipherable and he could not even tell with which letter it started. Was it from John Lynch? His gut feeling was yes, which meant that apparently he’d been wrong: Lynch’s ghost was not confined to the garage where he had killed himself.

Or had he killed himself?

Despite the unbelievable brutality of Lynch’s death, Julian had assumed from the beginning that all of his wounds were self-inflicted, an opinion with which the police seemed to concur. It was hard to believe that anyone could stab himself in the face the way he had and then go on to thrust the knife into his own throat. But there’d been no evidence whatsoever that anyone else had been involved or even present, and as one of the detectives had told Julian, a man committed to killing himself will go to incredible extremes in order to accomplish his goal.

The police had been looking for human assailants, however, and Julian wondered whether the killer of John Lynch had been human.

He should get out of here now, right now, head over to Randolph Wilson’s office—or even Gillette Skousen’s —and put this place up for sale immediately.

But he didn’t.

Music was coming from his office upstairs, a record he recognized but had not played in a long time. The Smiths. He caught a stray piece of lyric: “. . . such a heavenly way to die …”

Again, he knew he should leave. But he remained where he was, not fleeing the house, not going upstairs to investigate the mysterious music, but just … waiting.

And then the music shut off and everything was back to normal. Julian stood in place for several moments, but when he saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing, he began searching each room for anything that might be amiss. He started upstairs, but his office was clean, as were the kids’ bedrooms and the bathroom. The Smiths record was out and on the turntable, the orange album cover with its haunted-eyed street urchin staring up at him from the floor, where it had been tossed, but nothing else seemed out of place, and the room was quiet. He went downstairs, through the living room again, the dining room, the kitchen, the hallway, the bedroom, the bathroom. All clear. He saved the basement for last, but it, too, seemed completely normal, entirely free from all evil influences.

Evil?

It was a word and concept that had been floating around the periphery of his thoughts for a while, but he had never allowed it concrete residence in his mind until now. It fit, though. It was the word that best applied, and he had never felt so relieved as he did when he stood in the basement, looking around at the bags and boxes, sensing nothing unusual, feeling no fear.

Julian walked back up the steps, shutting the door behind him. He was thirsty, and he got himself a glass of water from the sink in the kitchen. As he drank, he looked out the window at the backyard. He knew what was next—the garage—and for the first time since starting his search, he felt real trepidation. Putting down his glass, he considered taking out a knife and bringing it with him, but a weapon wouldn’t be much use against a ghost, and he decided it would probably be better to leave his hands free.

He needn’t have worried. There was nothing out of the ordinary in either the main body of the garage or the upstairs loft.

Was it over?

That seemed too much to hope for, and, indeed, the note left by the TV and the Smiths record playing by itself indicated that whatever haunted this house was simply taking a breather. But he was encouraged by the fact that he hadn’t felt anything in any room he’d checked, and he thought it was possible that the ghost—or ghosts— had gone. Or perhaps writing the note and putting on the record had used up too much energy, and any entity was dormant now and had to recharge.

That was information that might be useful in the future.

He spent the rest of the afternoon actually working on the Web page he was supposed to be finishing, and was able to do so unmolested. There were no creepy messages on his computer screen, no mysterious noises in the house, no flickering lights, no murderous intruders, and after the first hour, he was almost able to forget that anything weird had happened here at all.

Almost.

For dinner, Julian heated up a frozen burrito in the microwave and ate it while he watched the news. Afterward, he phoned Claire and the kids, but the call did not go as well as it had the night before. Claire was still angry with him, and both Megan and James seemed resentful and withdrawn. He was hurt by their reaction, and after the conversation dwindled and sputtered to a stop prematurely, he almost went over to see them. But something kept him from it, and he sat there with the phone in his hand, staring into space, and by the time he put