The Haunted (44 page)

A figure detached itself from the gloom, a vague dark shape composed of swirling shadows that nevertheless stood there, watching them, perfectly still.

“Is that Dad?” James’s voice was hushed, and she heard the devastation in it. She had never in her life seen a look of such complete and utter despair on another human being.

It mirrored exactly the way she felt.

But no, that was not true. She was older; she was an adult. She had lived through a death before and come out the other side. She could handle this. She had done it before. But James was just a boy, an unusually sensitive boy, a boy who was much closer to his father than most children his age. Julian, too, had been closer to James than most fathers were to their sons. Probably because of Miles. He had been there for James every hour of every day of his life, the buffer between his son and the world, and the two of them stood staring at each other now, the shadow and the child, each suffused with a sadness so overwhelming it was palpable.

“Mom!”

Megan came through the doorway, a look of confused determination on her face, as though she’d done everything in her power to get here—but didn’t know why. Claire had no idea how her daughter had gotten out of bed, but she had, removing the monitoring clips from her fingers but leaving in the IV and dragging the rolling IV stand with her.

Where were the nurses?

It didn’t matter, Claire realized. Physically, medically, her children were fine, and what was happening here was so far beyond the scope of everyday reality that such a question was meaningless. The reason the nurses weren’t here was because they weren’t a part of this. It was not for them.

For a brief moment, the shadow in the center of the room grew less vague, more solid.

“Dad?” Megan said.

There were no details visible, and Claire could barely see through her tears, but she recognized the contours of the form. “Yes,” she told her children.

And then …

It was gone.

Claire. Megan. James.

He saw all three of them. Megan and James were asleep, but the arrival of his presence awakened Claire.

She saw him, too. She knew him.

He remained in the hospital, calling to them, gathering them to him, watching them, even as the rest of him moved outward, spreading thin, past the boundaries of the town, past the surrounding plain, into the desert, into the sky, into the earth. It was a nanosecond. It was a year. The others, all of them, fought him every step of the way, the power that bound him to the place of origin refusing to let
go.

Stretching.

Stretching …

And then the link was cut.

He snapped back, all of him. His family was safe. And for the briefest fraction of a second, he saw them again.

And he knew they saw him.

For the last time.

Before he was gone.

Just like that, the hospital room was back to normal.
Everything
was back to normal, and a nurse came in to escort Megan to her room, apparently oblivious to all that had just occurred. Megan and James were crying. Claire was crying. Was it over? Was all of it over? She was filled with the certainty that it was, and she called Diane and her mom, asking whether they could watch the kids. As soon as they arrived at the hospital and she’d told them what had happened, and Diane was safely ensconced in Megan’s room, her mom in James’s, Claire drove the van over to their house, her heart sinking as she saw her parents’ Civic in the driveway.

She knew Julian had come here.

The front door was unlocked and wide-open. The second she stepped through it, she heard music. Julian’s music. A record was playing. She didn’t remember the name of the album, but she recognized the song—“Girl of My Dreams” by Bram Tchaikovsky—and she ran upstairs, buoyed by a sudden hope.

Dashing down the short hall, she ran into Julian’s office. The room was empty. The stereo was on, but it had obviously been on for a long time, probably for hours. It was just that the “repeat” button had been pushed—she saw the little red light—which meant that each time the
needle reached the end of the record, the arm lifted up, moved back and started again at the beginning.

“She’s the girl of my dreams. …”

Claire turned off the stereo.

The house felt … empty. There was nothing here, no spirit, no monster, no creature, no consciousness. She was all alone, and she was filled with the certainty that it was Julian who had done this, who had exorcised the house. How, she had no idea. But in the end he had figured something out.

And it had killed him.

Even thinking the thought was like a stab through her heart.

Claire wandered into James’s room, then Megan’s, overwhelmed by the prospect before her. How was she supposed to raise them both by herself, without any help? Despite her frequent complaints that she did everything, she knew in a way that she never had before that it wasn’t true, that they had always
both
raised the kids together.

Until now.

“You bastard,” Claire sobbed, though she didn’t know whether she was speaking to Julian or to the house that had taken him.

She knew it was wrong to be mad at Julian, but she
was
mad at him. There’d been no reason for him to come over here. They could have taken off, moved to another town, another state, someplace where they could not be found. Even if they had left the house untouched, abandoned all of their furnishings and belongings, lost every dime they had, ended up poor and living in a cramped apartment, they still would have been together. They would have still been a family.

“Fuck you!” she yelled, stomping down the stairs. This time she
was
addressing Julian. “Fuck you, you selfish bastard!”

She went through the first floor of the house, room by room. On the dining room table was a box of pictures, and next to the box was a photo of Julian and James taken at the county fair, the two of them sitting on canvas sacks and speeding down a giant slide in adjoining lanes: Julian laughing, James screaming. She would never see Julian laugh again, Claire realized, and she stared at his face in the picture as though trying to burn the image into her brain so she would never forget it. Picking it up, she brought it to her mouth and kissed it.

She felt guilty for being mad at him, and though she had no idea whether his ghost or spirit or whatever part of him lived on after death could hear her or was even around, she spoke to it, addressed it, as she began running from room to room.

“I’m sorry,” she cried. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. …”

They sold the house. They left New Mexico. They moved to California, where the weather was mild, the cities were large and the ocean was close. Where Julian had been born and raised and had always wanted to live.

The horror was over, James knew, but it had not ended. Not for them. They had to live with the consequences on a daily basis, and while it was not something they ever discussed, maybe not even a conscious decision that had been made, they did not return to Jardine. And when Grandma or Aunt Diane, Uncle Rob and the cousins wanted to see them, those relatives had to come out to the coast, where his mom took everyone on sightseeing trips to the beach and Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm and Universal Studios.

But the family did not fall apart. Megan did not become promiscuous, and neither she nor James turned to drugs. They both did well in school and graduated near the top of their classes, and if they were a little more subdued than most of their peers, a little more introverted and introspective, it did not impact their lives either socially or academically. They actually ended up being closer than most siblings, certainly much closer than they had been before.

When James was a senior in high school, he and
Megan and his mom made a pilgrimage to Jardine. Enough time had passed, and while he wasn’t sure which one of them had come up with the idea, all of them were curious to go back.

They drove, taking turns, making it into a three-day road trip, stopping off and spending one night in Tucson, one night in Ruidoso, seeing sights along the way. It was as though they were preparing themselves, psyching themselves up for the return, and James, for one, was grateful for the extra time.

Jardine had grown, and he didn’t remember it as well as he thought he did. The streets seemed unfamiliar, and even the old downtown, where his mom had had her office, was not as he recalled. In his mind, one of the buildings had been on the opposite side of the street, and the city hall at the end of the block had not been there at all, even though, clearly, it had.

His mom was driving, and she went around the edge of the park (smaller than he remembered) and pulled onto Rainey Street.

James recognized their house immediately. Like everything else, it looked different in person than it did in his memory, but though it had been painted another color and now had a wraparound porch, the old tree was still in front, restored to its former glory, and there was a tire swing hanging from one of the lower branches, just like in the old days.

They parked on the street and got out of the car, none of them saying a word, and he looked up at what used to be the window of his bedroom, recalling how he and Robbie had stood there and spied on the passersby. He wondered what had happened to Robbie and whether his friend still lived in town.

His gaze moved to the right, to the garage. What had happened to the salvaged items they’d left in the loft
when they’d moved, those furnishings and knickknacks he and Robbie had scavenged for their headquarters? Probably the people who’d bought the house from them had thrown everything away, thinking it junk.

It
was
junk, James supposed.

To everyone except two twelve-year-old boys planning to start a detective agency.

He was filled with an almost overpowering sadness as he thought about the time his dad had helped them bring the broken exercise bike up the wooden ladder through the trapdoor.

He looked around. Memories of his dad were all over the house and yard. He’d known that already, of course. It was one of the reasons they were here. But he hadn’t expected it to feel so immediate or so emotional.

He remembered the time Megan had told him that his dad was ashamed of him because he didn’t like sports. In his mind, he could hear his dad’s voice, telling him, “You are who you are. And whatever you like or don’t like is fine with me. Everyone’s different.” It had been the perfect thing to say, and he recalled how his father had smiled and said, “If I didn’t know by now that you hate PE and like playing video games, I’d be a real moron.”

He had not thought about his dad’s voice in years, was not sure he would have been able to call it to mind before this moment, but now it was as clear to him as if he’d heard it yesterday. In his mind, he could see every detail of that scene: the way his dad had been sitting at his desk, the clothes he’d been wearing, the light in the room, the smell of the house. He was transported back all those years, and the feeling was at once wonderful and awful.

“You’re my son,” his dad had said. “I love you no matter what.”

James wiped the tears from his eyes.

His mom grabbed one hand, Megan the other, and, grateful, he squeezed both.

“Should we go up to the door?” Megan asked. “Tell them we used to live here and see if they’ll let us look around?”

“No,” their mom said, “this is fine,” and her voice was calmer than James would have expected, as calm as he had ever heard it.
Content
, he thought, and that was not a description that usually applied to his mother. Coming back here, seeing the house, had done something for her, and he was glad that they had made the trip.

“We’d better get going,” his mom said a few moments later, after they’d had time to take it all in. “Your grandma’s waiting for us.”

“Okay,” Megan said.

They got back into the car. James was the last one in, and he looked out the window at their old home as his mom started down Rainey, watching it recede until they turned onto another street. He knew that, in the years to come, he would return to this place, where so much had happened.

And he would think about the time when he was a boy.

And remember his dad.