The Haunted

At ten o’clock, an orderly arrived to escort her mom out. Promising to return first thing in the morning, she gave Megan a kiss on each cheek and a kiss on the forehead “for protection,” the way she had when Megan was small, and they both blew each other another kiss as she backed out the door.

Feeling alone and a little sad, Megan sniffled, wiping tears from her eyes. But a nurse arrived almost immediately to administer a checkup, and after using the bedpan, Megan found that she was suddenly extremely tired. There was nothing she wanted to watch, but she left the television on anyway, turning down the volume until it was white noise.

She closed her eyes, letting the indistinct murmuring lull her to sleep.

She awoke in the middle of the night, the curtains pulled not only on her left but on her right, to block the sights and sounds of the corridor outside her room so she might sleep in peace. High on the wall, her television was still on, but no movie or show was being broadcast. Instead, the monitor was white with black letters moving from left to right across the screen.

It looked like the screen of her cell phone.

Megan squinted at the message through bleary eyes, then quickly reached for the remote control. She pushed the red “off” button, pressing it over and over again, but the television refused to obey.

I told you, Megan, the words repeated, I will kill you both.

Frantic, she pressed the button that called for the nurse.

It didn’t seem to be working, because no one came. She wanted to get up and out of bed, walk down the hallway until she found someone to help her, but she was connected to the monitors, and a plastic tube dripped medicine into her wrist.

On the other side of the curtain, the snoring had stopped.

Was the man dead?

She needed to calm down. The words on the TV were just that: words. They couldn’t hurt her. They might frighten her, but they couldn’t cause her any harm. She took stock. Did she feel like cutting herself or hurting herself in any way? Did she have any suspicious or unusual thoughts? No.

Megan glanced up at the screen again, and the words were gone. An infomercial was being broadcast, some type of cleaning product.

Maybe she’d imagined the whole thing.

She closed her eyes, settled back down. Just the possibility that it had all been in her head allowed her to forget about it and fall back asleep. Which she did almost immediately.

She dreamed of the man with the yellow baseball cap. He was in a small, primitive shack, a wooden hut with no furniture and no windows, and he was roasting her grandpa over a fire in the center of the floor, preparing to eat him. Her grandpa was screaming, his clothes and hair burned off, sweat and blood oozing from his reddening skin, falling sizzling onto the flames. He was tied to a spit of some sort, and every so often, the man in the yellow cap would turn him over and poke him with a fork to see whether he was done.

When she awoke, the curtains had been pulled back, the snoring man’s bed was empty, and sunlight was streaming through the window. She called for a nurse, used the bedpan, ordered breakfast, endured a checkup and was told she was doing well.

The chairs next to her bed were empty and remained empty. She kept looking from them to the doorway. Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. Twenty. A half hour. Forty-five minutes.

Her breakfast arrived—cereal, toast and orange juice—and she started eating. She was worried but pretended to herself that she wasn’t.

Finally, just after her tray had been removed, her mom arrived.

Alone.

Crying.

Thirty-three

His grandparents’ house seemed lonely. Grandpa was missing, Megan was in the hospital, and his mom was staying with her. Only he, his dad and his grandma were home for dinner. His dad bought pizza in an effort to cheer him up, and let him watch The Simpsons instead of the news, but it didn’t really work. It made him feel sadder, in fact, made him more aware that things weren’t normal, that everything was out of whack.

He didn’t really understand what had happened to Megan. He’d seen her in the bathroom before her parents rushed her to the hospital, and it looked like she’d stolen a steak knife from the kitchen and was using it to cut up her legs. Had she been trying to kill herself? What would have happened if Mom hadn’t walked in on her? Would she be dead?

Did the house make her do it?

That was what he really wanted to know, but she hadn’t been awake when he went to see her, so he’d been unable to ask. He remembered what it had felt like when he’d been compelled to dig, when he’d obsessed over holes in the backyard, and he needed to let her know that he understood, that he knew what she was going through.

He didn’t like the fact that she’d been cutting herself here at Grandma and Grandpa’s. As far as he was concerned, that meant there were two possibilities, neither of them good. Either whatever lived in their house had the power to reach all the way out here to make them do what it wanted. Or they’d been infected and carried within themselves a part of that thing, which could manifest itself at any time.

Both thoughts terrified him.

Throughout dinner and afterward, he kept examining his every thought and movement, as well as the words and actions of his dad and grandma, looking for any sign that they had been influenced or corrupted in any way. He saw no evidence of it, but that didn’t assuage him. It could happen at any moment, and he became more and more worried as time passed and nothing weird happened. It had been almost twenty-four hours since his mom had found Megan bleeding in the bathroom, and he was on edge, waiting for something like that to happen again.

After The Simpsons, King of the Hill came on, then Family Guy, then The Simpsons again; then his dad told him it was time for bed.

James got up from the couch and looked down the long, dark hallway. The guest room he’d been using was at the far end. “I don’t want to sleep in that room,” he said.

His dad started to say something, probably that there was nothing for him to be afraid of, but they all knew that wasn’t true, and when his grandma spoke up and said that he could sleep in her room—she and his grandpa had separate beds—James looked over at his dad, and his dad didn’t object.

His dad went with him while he got his pajamas out of the guest room, and stood outside the bathroom while he changed. His grandma had put new sheets on the bed and had brought over the blanket he’d been using from the other room. He said good night to both his dad and grandma, giving each of them a hug, then got into bed, leaving the door open and the hall light on. It took him a long time to fall asleep, and he was still awake an hour later when his grandma came in and got into her bed. He pretended to be asleep, however, and eventually he did drift off.

In his nightmare, it was midnight and he was back at their house. He had gotten up, thirsty, and walked downstairs to the kitchen to get a drink of water, which made no sense because he always kept a water bottle next to his bed. But he got a drink from the kitchen sink nevertheless, then went over to the basement door, opened it and walked down the stairs. Only the basement wasn’t scary. There was no sign of that grinning man in the corner, and whatever it was that had made the cellar creepy seemed to be gone.

It was the garage that was scary now.

He knew it instantly, and he walked up the stairs and outside, through the backyard, past small holes packed tightly with the bodies of dead animals, and plants so desiccated they resembled the skeletons of misshapen creatures. Both garage doors were open and the building was filled with light, but even the light was scary, and he