The Haunted

number, hoping to get through before her sister. She did. Her mom answered the phone and Claire asked to speak with Julian. She kept all traces of worry out of her voice—she’d let Diane explain to their mother what was going on—but as soon as Julian came on the line, she told him exactly what had happened and asked him to meet her in front of the house. She was expecting an argument, probably because it involved her dad, but Julian agreed right away. His voice had changed its tone after she’d repeated what Diane had said about the phone call from their house—

He’s a stupid old fuck

—and she could tell that he was as worried as she was.

“I love you,” she said before she hung up, and meant it.

Claire was the first person to arrive at the house, and when she saw her parents’ car in the driveway, she knew she couldn’t wait around for Julian and Diane to show up. She had to rush in there and get her dad out.

For some reason, however, her key didn’t seem to fit in the lock, and she was still fumbling with it—in between bouts of pounding on the door and yelling, “Dad!”—when Julian swerved next to the curb in front of the house, driving her father’s old truck. Diane was mere seconds behind him.

Julian tried her key, then his, but when neither seemed to work, he led them around the side of the house to the backyard.

Where the kitchen door was not only unlocked, but open.

Claire’s heart skipped a beat, restarting its rhythm at a much more rapid pace. This couldn’t be good. “Dad!” she called.

She hadn’t expected an answer, and she didn’t get one. On the white cement of the patio, she saw muddy footprints. Or muddy prints of some sort. They were clumpy and ill defined, and it was impossible to tell whether they came from a shoe, a foot, a claw, a hoof or something else.

They led into the house.

Julian and Diane had to have seen them, too, but neither of them said a word. Claire stepped past her husband. “Dad?” She walked inside, Julian and Diane right behind her.

The mud disappeared. Before her, the kitchen seemed perfectly normal, nothing out of place, exactly as it should have been. Despite the promise of the muddy prints, the clean kitchen was not really a surprise. What was a surprise was that the living room appeared to be in impeccable shape as well. She could see it through the doorway, past the dining room. From Julian’s description, she had expected broken lamps and overturned furniture, but from what she could tell, the room was immaculate.

Julian noticed it, too. “What the hell … ?” He hurried over, turning about, an expression of complete confusion on his face.

That should have been good news, Claire supposed, but somehow it scared her far more than a trashed room would have. They were dealing with something here that could change things. Julian was right. It wasn’t a ghost. Or wasn’t just a ghost. For the being that occupied this house was able to destroy objects and put them back together again. Its powers were not merely supernatural but godlike, and she realized that there was no way they could ever hope to fight against something like that. She discarded once and for all any thought of vanquishing the spirit. She just wanted to find her dad and get him out of here. After that, she didn’t care what happened to this place. It could burn to the ground for all she cared. In fact, burning to the ground would be the best possible outcome. She wouldn’t have to live with the guilt of pawning this evil place onto another unsuspecting soul, and they might even get some insurance money out of it. But what would happen after that? The land itself was cursed. Any new home built on the same spot would have the same problem. And what if the entire neighborhood was razed? What would the city do with the land? Expand the park? Put in a shopping center? Each of those was a disaster in waiting. The only useful possibility she could foresee would be a landfill, but the council certainly wouldn’t have one in the center of town.

Diane tapped her shoulder, and she jumped, startled out of her reverie.

“I’m checking upstairs,” her sister said.

“Not alone you’re not.”

“No one’s going upstairs,” Julian said, coming back into the kitchen. “We check the ground floor first. Together. If we don’t find him here, then we’ll go upstairs.”

“Dad!” Diane called at the top of her lungs.

There was no answer.

“He’s not in the dining room or the living room,” Julian said. “I was just there. We’ll check the basement, then our bedroom and the bathroom. After that, we’ll go upstairs. If we don’t find anything in the house, we’ll check the garage.”

“Dad!” Diane called again.

Julian walked over to the basement door, pulling it open. “I don’t understand it,” he told Claire as he flipped the switch to turn on the cellar lights. “The living room was trashed. That lamp on the end table was thrown at me, and it smashed on the coffee table. Pieces were everywhere. …”

“I believe you,” she said honestly, and that was all she needed to say.

Julian walked down the steps while Claire and Diane waited at the top. “Roger?” he called.

“Dad?” they yelled together.

There was no response, but Julian spent several minutes moving boxes aside to make sure he—

his body

—wasn’t hiding somewhere down there.

The basement was empty, and Julian came back up. The three of them passed by the deserted laundry room, then moved out into the hallway and on to the master bedroom. It was daytime, but the drapes were drawn, and Claire turned on the lights. They were all calling for her father yet receiving no response.

“The bed,” Claire said, pointing.

“That was me,” Julian said, embarrassed. “I didn’t make it.” He flipped up the covers, though, just to make sure no one was under there, then dropped to his knees, lifted the ruffled skirt and checked beneath the bed, shaking his head as he stood to indicate there was nothing.

Claire moved over to the bathroom and turned on the light in there as well.

Her heart leaped. On the floor, she saw the muddy prints again, threateningly brown against the lightness of the white tile. The mirror was fogged up, as though someone had just come out of the shower, and on the clouded glass was the imprint of … a face, she supposed, although it did not look like any face she’d ever seen. The elements were all there—eyes, nose, mouth—but they were in the wrong place, in the wrong order, and the scary thing was that for a brief moment she didn’t know why they were wrong, because she couldn’t remember where those parts were supposed to go. It was not until she saw the blurry contours of her own face in the corner of the mirror that she remembered the nose went over the mouth, and the two eyes were above that. For a terrible second, that awful face had seemed … right.

Behind her, Diane saw the same thing and let out a short, sharp cry, which sent Julian running over from the closet where he’d been searching.

“What is that?” Diane wanted to know, but neither Claire nor Julian had an answer.

“Let’s just find your dad and get out of here,” Julian said grimly, and the three of them hurried out of the bedroom and up the stairs.

“Roger!” Julian called.

“Dad!”

“Dad!”

He was not in Julian’s office, James’s room, Megan’s room or the bathroom. They saw nothing unusual upstairs, and though Claire thought she heard a weird tapping in Julian’s office, it might have been her imagination, since neither Julian nor Diane heard a thing.

As agreed, they went out to the garage together, but by now what little hope remained in Claire of finding her father had vanished. She didn’t know where he was or what had happened to him, but something had certainly occurred, because he seemed to have disappeared.

He was not on the ground floor of the garage, they saw instantly. Julian went up to the loft by himself, and though he stayed up there several minutes longer than she thought he should have and returned looking pale and