Haunted (8 page)

Late the next morning I folded laundry in the living room, occasionally glancing at the television, while Rosa finger-painted a colourful creation in the family room. When lunch time approached, I saw Kammie and Matt racing up to the front porch for their break from school. I picked up the last pair of socks, turned off the television, and went to the front door to greet them. Matt was very excited because he had brought home a Magic-Eye three-dimensional book from the library and was eager to show it to me.

As I carried a platter of sandwiches from the kitchen to the dining room table, a bright light in the far corner of the living room caught my eye and I turned towards it. The candle holder was glowing brilliantly, and its images were dancing around the walls. All three children were in the family room, and Kammie and Matt had not been in the living room since they had come home for lunch. None of them would have lighted that candle anyway; they all knew they were not allowed to play with matches, which were kept in a high cupboard out of reach.

I stood amid the piles of recently folded laundry and watched as the candle's flame jumped about erratically inside its glass container. I knew the candle had not been burning since the evening before. Not only was it impossible for the small tea candle to have blazed for that long, but it had not been burning while I had folded clothes that morning only a few feet away. The fact that the candle had seemed to ignite by itself was disturbing enough, but the intensity of the flame it produced was really alarming. I blew out the candle, carried the holder into the kitchen, and doused the candle's waxy remains in a cup of cold water to make certain it was no longer flammable. Then I threw it away.

Kammie was with the dog out in the backyard and I was at the refrigerator getting some milk when I heard Matt call for me from the dining room. “Just a minute,” I answered, and poured milk into three small glasses.

Again I heard him call, this time a bit more urgently. I walked to the dining room doorway and waited to hear what he wanted, but he did not look up from his Magic-Eye book.

“What did you want?” I asked.

“I didn't want anything,” he said.

“You just called me twice, when I was in the kitchen,” I reminded him.

Matt slowly shook his head and looked sincerely puzzled.

“I heard you call Mommy too. It was your voice,” said Rosa, coming into the dining room.

“I didn't hear anything,” said Matt, going back to his book.

Rosa and I looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders. We had both heard a little boy call for his mother, and we had both assumed it had been Matt in the next room. No windows were open to let in a voice from outside, and it had definitely seemed to come from the dining room where my son was sitting. When Kammie came back into the house, I asked her if she had been the one who had called me, but she shook her head. And, in answer to my next question, she informed me that she had not heard anyone calling for their mother. So, as Matt insisted that he had not spoken, we dropped the matter and went on with our lunch.

While we ate, Matt peeked at his book, trying to make the hidden pictures in it appear to him in three dimensions. He was growing frustrated because he could not quite figure out how to make it work. He was so engrossed in the book that he accidentally knocked his glass of milk off of the table and onto his lap. I took the book away, mopped up the mess on the floor, and told him to go upstairs and quickly change into clean clothes. As Kammie was already finished with her lunch, she went upstairs along with Matt to brush her teeth and get ready to return to school for the afternoon.

Rosa was busy colouring a picture in the living room, seated at a little table-and-chair set just inside the opened doors that led in from the foyer. I was putting the lunch dishes into the kitchen sink when I heard a loud commotion on the stairs. Glancing down the hallway that ran from the kitchen to the foyer, I saw a small blond-haired boy dressed in gray leap off of the stairway, run across the foyer floor, and then rush into the living room. Piper, asleep in the kitchen, bolted up at the loud noise and dashed excitedly towards the child, wanting to play with him. I impatiently hurried down the hall because there was no doubt in my mind that Matt had just raced into the living room when he was supposed to be getting changed for school. I was also forever warning them not to run on the stairs.

Rosa, who was still colouring, looked up in surprise when I hurried into the room.

“Where did Matt go?” I asked her, quickly looking around the living room.

“He isn't in here,” she said.

“Rosa,” I replied, “I saw him run in here two seconds ago. We don't have time for games; the kids are going to be late for school. Where did he go?”

Piper was now sniffing around the room and whining, as if she were still looking for the boy, too.

“Just you came in, Mommy,” Rosa said, looking at me with confusion.

It had only taken a few seconds for me to reach the living room doorway, but by the time I got into the room, the child had completely vanished. There was no way he could have left the living room without my seeing him.

“Matt!” I called out impatiently. “Where are you?”

I heard a small voice answer me from upstairs in Matt's bedroom.

“I'm up here,” he said.

When I looked at Rosa in surprise, she smiled at me and nodded her head in an “I told you so” sort of way.

“Are you dressed yet?” I called, knowing he could not possibly have finished changing his clothes if he really had just run across the foyer.

“Yes,” he called. “And I've brushed my teeth too.”

Kammie was a few inches taller than Matt. Her hair was a bit darker and quite long, and she had been wearing a red outfit that day. Still I reasoned that, since there were only the four of us in the house, it must have been Kammie I had seen instead of Matt.

“Was it Kammie who came in here just before me?” I asked Rosa. She shook her head and continued to colour her picture, unaware of my bewilderment. Given the speed at which that child had rushed through the doorway, he would have run right into Rosa's chair and table, and yet she had been oblivious to anyone except me entering the room.

“Kammie?” I called. “I'm up in the bathroom brushing my teeth,” my oldest daughter called down from the second floor. Matt came down the stairs at a safe pace, dressed in jeans and a green sweater, and started to put on his boots.

“Did you want me?” he asked.

“No, I just didn't know where you were,” I said, trying to make sense out of what had just happened so I could convince myself I was not losing my mind.

“I went up to get changed like you told me to,” he said, petting Piper who was now nuzzling up against him.

“I know. You're a good boy.” I forced myself to smile but noticed my hands were shaking as I opened up the front door. When Kammie came down the stairs, they both headed back to school.

I walked into the kitchen and picked up the phone, feeling the need to talk to another adult about what had just happened. I called Ted on his phone cellular and caught him as he sat in a lineup at a drive-through restaurant. He was having lunch on the road as his out-of-town meeting with a client had run longer than expected.

I told Ted about seeing the young boy run across the foyer.

“Do you want me to come home?” he asked, thinking I was frightened.

“No, I'm okay,” I answered, and was surprised to find that I actually was.

The fact that the presence was that of a small boy made that sighting different. It made me feel more sad than frightened that this child, who was perhaps even younger than Matt, was a presence in our home. The energy and rambunctious nature the young boy had manifested were just like those of any other youngster. I found nothing terrifying or threatening about him; he was apparently only the spirit of a child who was now no longer alive.

Sighting the boy was also much less scary, not only because it had taken place in daylight, but because he had not attempted to communicate or interact with anyone in the house. Matt and Kammie had not been aware of him on the second floor where I assumed he must have been before running down the stairway. And obviously Rosa had not seen him enter the living room. He had not seemed to notice that the dog and I were right behind him after he ran through the foyer, but both Piper and I had been very aware of his presence.

After the children were tucked into their beds that night, I turned on the lullaby tape I played for them at bed time. They fell asleep every evening to the soft music coming from the cassette player in the hallway. We all said our goodnights, and I was headed back down the stairs when the machine suddenly clicked off. The lullaby tape signified the end of play and the beginning of sleep time, so I thought perhaps Kammie was playfully showing me that she did not yet want to go to bed. I was a bit surprised, though, that she had been able to press the stiff button on the fairly old cassette player firmly enough to stop the tape.

“That's not funny,” I said as I turned to head back upstairs. I fully expected to see Kammie smiling impishly beside the machine, but she was still snuggled in her bed where I had left her only moments before. There was no way she could have got back into bed that quickly without my seeing or hearing her.

“Who turned this off?” I asked, after looking at the cassette player. The play button had disengaged when the stop button had been pushed down.

All three children peered out of their beds at me in the hallway and shrugged.

“I didn't,” they all said.

The cassette player had always worked reliably. I turned the tape on again and listened to the music play for several seconds. After convincing myself that I had put the tape in incorrectly or had not pushed the start button hard enough the last time, I started back downstairs, leaving the music behind me.

As I reached the foyer at the bottom of the stairs, I heard another loud click and the music again stopped playing. I raced up the stairs and found the hallway empty but the machine had been turned off once more. The children all looked at me in wonderment, and I hid my uneasy feeling so they would not be frightened. Twice more I left the cassette playing, and both times the machine clicked off as soon as I was halfway down the stairs.

“Why is it doing that?” Kammie asked.

“Maybe it doesn't want it to be bed time,” Matt laughed. He had been jokingly referring to the machine, but when I heard that innocent remark, I felt goose bumps rise all over my body and I shuddered slightly. I thought of the child I had seen earlier in the day. That was just the sort of thing a rambunctious little boy might do to try to delay going to bed.

I rewound the tape to the beginning of the lullaby and said in a soft but firm voice, “That's enough, now.” The cassette player worked perfectly after that.

That night, however, for the first time in a long while, we were jarred awake at three o'clock in the morning by a smoke detector sounding its alarm. Both Ted and I were more tired than frightened, and more frustrated than angry. Yet the jolt it gave us was still upsetting.

The next morning, after everyone else had left for the day, Rosa and I finished up our breakfast in the new family room. With its large windows and southern exposure, that room was the brightest in the house, and we spent a lot of time there. I would often put a CD on, and Rosa would dance around the room, song after song.

As I washed up the breakfast dishes in the adjacent kitchen, Rosa asked if I would put on the soundtrack from the movie Michael. We had recently watched that film, which was about an angel. She loved to dance to those songs, and when her favourite, “Spirit in the Sky,” came on, I went into the family room and danced with her. We laughed and spun each other around. When the song was over, Rosa asked if we could dance to it once more before we ran an errand and the other children came home for lunch. I programmed the CD to play the eleventh song, “Spirit in the Sky,” and again we laughed and danced along with the music.

When the song had finished playing, I turned off the stereo and asked Rosa to go to the bathroom and brush her teeth so we could go. I finished up in the kitchen, and just as I was about to lock the back door in the family room, I heard a click from the stereo in the opposite corner. Its monitor lights came on and “Spirit in the Sky” began to blare through the speakers at a much louder volume than before. This shocked me so much that it took a few seconds to even react.

Rosa, of course, rushed out of the bathroom, happily thinking I had turned the stereo on again so we could do some more dancing.

“Good,” she said. “I wanted to dance some more too, Mommy.”

I walked over to the stereo and turned down the volume. I knew I had turned it off. Rosa could not have touched it because she had been in the bathroom, and she and I were the only two in the house. If I had somehow caused it to turn back on accidentally, there was still no way I could have made it immediately start playing “Spirit in the Sky” as it had. That title was number eleven and the machine was programmed to automatically begin at the first song, no matter at what point on the CD it had been when it was turned off. And besides, I had not even been near it.

I thought again of the small blond boy I had seen the previous day. Perhaps that was his way of letting me know he wanted the dancing and laughter to continue. Maybe he enjoyed that song as much as Rosa did.

THE YOUNG GIRL

A
few weeks later, in the middle of a very cold February, Rosa looked out the living room window and excitedly reported that there was a little dog on our porch. I looked out to see a tiny white poodle sniffing around one of the pillars near our front door, shivering uncontrollably. I could see it was not wearing a collar, and I did not recognize if from our neighbourhood.

I opened the front door to try to persuade the dog to come inside until I could find its owner, but the noise frightened it. The poor little animal ran down the front steps of the porch and along the snowy street. Rosa and I slipped on our boots and coats and followed the poodle down the road to where it was huddled against a neighbour's parked car. It shivered as much from fear as cold, and when I kneeled down, it leaped into my arms and buried its snowy face in my warm winter coat.