The Haunting of Gabriel Ashe

by Poblocki, Dan

  GABE, FELICIA, MALCOLM, AND INGRID were all called into the principal’s office to give their version of the events. No one was in trouble apparently, except for Seth, but he had disappeared from the school grounds shortly after the chocolate milk incident. They all had to call home and tell their parents what had happened. Gabe went from class to class worrying that his new friends would hate him now. He had brought the monster into their midst. But moments after the last bell, Gabe found the group gathered at his locker.

  Mazzy was there too. “Everyone’s talking about what happened,” she said. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, totally,” Gabe lied. He felt his throat closing up as the group appeared to study his face. “I feel horrible for Felicia,” he said quietly, barely able to look at her. Felicia had changed her clothes and rinsed her hair. She wore a Slade School Spirit T-shirt that Mrs. Closkey, the school secretary, had given her. Malcolm had lent her his Red Sox cap. Felicia had tied the shirt at the waist so it bloused out. Despite the baggy fit and boyish quality of the outfit, it still looked cute.

  Felicia stared at Gabe for a moment, then laughed. “You can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Relief flooded Gabe’s lungs. “I thought you’d hate me now.”

  Felicia nudged his shoulder. “Everyone makes mistakes. Especially when you’re new. Now you know better,” she said. “We’re all about to head over to my house to hang out. You should totally come.”

  Gabe smiled. He could think of nothing else he’d rather do. “Sure. I just have to call my parents.”

  Later, after the sun had dipped below the western hills, Dolores picked Gabe up from Felicia’s house. In the car, when she asked him about his day, he told her that everything was fine now. She squeezed his arm.

  Dinner was waiting, as was his homework. His father and grandmother had already eaten and were together in the living room, watching a sitcom on the television Glen had recently purchased. Dolores carried Miri down the hall to join them. Gabe set himself up at the kitchen table, biting into a turkey sandwich and flipping through his textbook at the same time. He was deep into a reading about the American Revolution when the doorbell rang. He heard his grandmother get up and make her way down the hall. She called out, “Gabriel! You have a visitor!”

  Gabe’s skin went prickly. He knew who it was even before he came upon Seth on the front stoop. Seth was dressed in a light jacket. He’d shoved his hands awkwardly into the pockets of his jeans and shivered in the chilly air. Barefoot but for fuzzy slipper-socks, Gabe stepped outside.

  “I tried calling,” said Seth, “but your dad said you weren’t home. I just wanted to make sure he wasn’t lying.”

  “He wasn’t lying,” said Gabe. He reached behind himself, closing the door almost all the way. “I just got home a little while ago.”

  “What, I can’t come in?” said Seth.

  “Not a good idea,” said Gabe quietly.

  “Are you nervous that I’m going to throw milk at your grandmother?” Seth laughed. Gabe didn’t respond, and Seth’s smile dropped away. “Look, I’m sorry about today. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “You think?”

  “I didn’t mean to get you involved.”

  Gabe knew that was exactly what Seth had meant. “You’re in a lot of trouble. More than you know.”

  Seth shrugged. “Yeah, the school left a whole bunch of messages on our answering machine, but I deleted them before my mom could listen. I’m not too worried. I’ve had detention before.”

  “And that hasn’t stopped you from doing stuff like this?”

  “Uh, no?” Seth bit his lip. “But it also hasn’t stopped Felicia and all them from being nasty jerks either.”

  “You’re the one who threw milk all over her!”

  “And she deserved it!” He took a deep breath. “Gabe can make his own decisions,” he mimicked in a singsong voice that sounded nothing like Felicia. “What a bunch of baloney.”

  “So then you’re not sorry.”

  Seth sighed. “I’m only sorry that I put you in this spot. I know you like them for some strange reason. But…” He cleared his throat. “I don’t want them to take you away.” He quickly shook his head. “I didn’t mean…that came out wrong.”

  “They didn’t take me away, Seth. I went on my own.”

  Seth’s forehead crinkled. Gabe felt like he was standing on the edge of a precipice. And if he stepped forward…

  “I mean—” Gabe began. But the words felt like beestings. His tongue was suddenly thick, his mouth dry. “I’m not playing the Hunter’s game anymore.” Seth kept his face still, revealing nothing. Gabe thought of what the pastor had said after the fire, the bible quote, about putting away childish things. “I think it’s time we both, like, grow up, you know?”

  “That’s fine,” Seth said. He crossed his arms tightly, a deflector shield. “We can do something else when we hang out.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Not a good idea?” Seth’s voice echoed out into the darkness of the yard. “What, we’re not friends anymore?”

  “I-I guess not.” Gabe glanced at the sky so he wouldn’t have to face Seth. “Not right now anyway.”

  “Then when? In a month?” Gabe couldn’t tell if Seth was being serious, so he didn’t respond. Seth dropped his arms to his sides. He seemed to examine the stone stoop. Then, with a calm smile, Seth glanced up. “You’re going to be sorry about this.” His voice was flat. “The Hunter will come for you.” A breeze came upon the house from the nearby woods, rustling Seth’s hair in front of his face.

  “The Hunter will…come for me?” Gabe wasn’t sure if he’d heard correctly.

  “You and your new friends.” Seth nodded, as if he’d planned this speech all along. It almost sounded silly. Like the wicked witch threatening Dorothy in that old movie.

  Gabe chuckled out of nervousness. “You need help, Seth,” he said.

  Seth’s face turned red. He stared with an intensity Gabe had never seen before. “You’re the one who’s going to need help. Trust me.”

  Gabe felt for the door behind him, in case he needed to put it between them. “Really, Seth, I think you should talk to the guidance counselor or something. You’ve been through a lot. Your parents. Your brother—”

  “Don’t talk to me about my brother! You don’t know anything about him!”

  “You’ve never told me!” Gabe shouted back. Seth bit his lip, which had begun to tremble. “I-I’m sorry. But you can’t go around treating people like this.”

  “People can’t go around treating me like this! It’s not fair. It’s the opposite of fair. Felicia gets to live in a huge house with a pool and parents who give her whatever she wants. Mazzy shows up at school with her blonde hair and little pixie-dust smile and everyone just falls in love with her. And you! You say your family lost everything in that fire, but you end up living in a mansion with your famous grandmother. You all get whatever you want. Whatever you need. I have to be the way I am. No one is coming to save me. No one is going to fix everything! Don’t you get it?”

  The thing was, Gabe did get it.

  Seth hitched another breath, then added, “I thought we were friends.”

  The front door rattled open, but Gabe was so startled by Seth’s outburst that he didn’t turn around. He felt frozen, as if by magic—a spell he was no longer willing to believe in.

  “You boys all right out here?” It was Elyse. Gabe felt her thin fingers touch his shoulders, and he glanced briefly at her.

  Seth transformed. He stood up straight, wiped his eyes, then sniffed and smiled. “I-I was just leaving,” he said. “Nice to see you, Mrs. Ashe. Good night.” Before either of them could respond, Seth descended the front steps and sprinted off alone into the night.

  SEVERAL WEEKS LATER, Gabe’s parents took his grandmother into Boston for the evening, trusting him to care for his little sister. Malcolm had joined him for a horror movie marathon on his grandmother’s
new television.

  Miri, however, had other plans. She’d started screaming as soon as the adults pulled down the driveway and were out of earshot.

  “I’m so sorry,” Gabe said, sitting on the couch in the living room. Miri squirmed in his lap. “She hardly ever does this.” From the look on Malcolm’s face, Gabe worried that his friend might take off, leaving him alone in the big, dark house to finish out the night on his own. The boys had tried everything to console Miri. Food, music, television. Nothing worked. Usually during Miri’s tantrums, Gabe’s father distracted her with one of his puppets. But there was no way Gabe was fetching one of the fuzzy felt creatures from upstairs, not with Malcolm there.

  “Can’t we tranquilize her?” Malcolm stared blankly at the television program Gabe had turned on to entertain Miri. On the screen, a cartoon train tooted its horn. Hoo-hoo!

  “Yeah right. I wish. Maybe I should call my mom.”

  “What if we just put her in her bedroom and close the door?” Malcolm asked.

  “She might get even more upset.”

  “We could wait outside in the hall until she quiets down.”

  Miri whined and twisted in Gabe’s lap, releasing a series of melodramatic sobs.

  “Okay,” Gabe said, shaking his head, exasperated. “Let’s at least try it.” He hugged Miri tightly, then stood. “Come on, baby girl. Upstairs you go.” As Gabe crossed the room, his sister went quiet. The lights in the hallway were off, but she pointed at the darkness beyond the doorway, staring as if she could see someone standing there. She gurgled something that sounded like, Ah-bah-bah!

  “Whoa,” Malcolm whispered. “What did you do to her?”

  “Nothing,” said Gabe, surprised.

  Miri seemed entranced. She smiled, then laughed inexplicably. Gabe felt his stomach drop. “Hello?” he said softly to the darkness. But there was no answer. Of course there was no answer. Outside, the wind gusted, forcing itself into the roof overhang’s hollow spaces, making a moaning sound. Malcolm hung back as Gabe stepped forward, reached around the door frame, and flicked up the light switch. Golden light filled the hall. Miri continued to coo, amused by something Gabe could not see.

  “I’m just going to run her upstairs,” Gabe told Malcolm. “Be right back.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Malcolm, stepping quickly forward.

  A few minutes later, Miri lay quietly in her crib, staring into the space directly above her. Gabe imagined that the screaming child he’d held only moments ago had been magically replaced with a changeling.

  “Aha!” Miri cried out. She giggled at the shadows.

  Closing her bedroom door, Gabe met Malcolm in the hall. He shook his head. “Kids are so weird.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Malcolm.

  Back in the living room, Gabe had just started the first movie, Night of the Living Dead, when the doorbell rang. Both boys jumped, then glanced at each other in confusion. It was only seven o’clock. Gabe’s parents weren’t due home for several more hours.

  Seth Hopper popped into his head. Gabe hadn’t spoken to him since the night he’d shown up on the front steps of Temple House. Seth had been suspended from riding the bus. In the hallways at school, Seth refused to acknowledge him. Gabe wanted to believe that Seth would try to change, that one day they could be friends again.

  The baby monitor on the coffee table crackled with a bit of static. Thankfully, the bell hadn’t woken Miri. Gabe raced to the hallway, in case whoever was out there pressed it again. Several silhouettes moved in the curtained windows on either side of the large front door.

  A zombie on the television in the living room moaned.

  Gabe latched the chain lock. Heart racing, he opened the door a crack. Someone on the other side pushed hard, throwing him off balance. The chain caught the door and it bounced closed again. He watched the knob rattle violently.

  Seth’s voice whispered in his memory: The Hunter will come for you….

  Gabe was about to call out for Malcolm, when laughter echoed just on the other side of the door. “Gabe?” spoke a female voice. “Was that you? I’m sorry!”

  A warm sensation flooded his face. Standing on the stoop, Felicia and Ingrid smiled. Mazzy was beside them, watching him guiltily.

  A hand fell on his shoulder, and Gabe turned to find Malcolm winking at him.

  “Surprise!” they all said at once.

  “WHAT ARE YOU GUYS DOING HERE?” Gabe asked, confused.

  “We were feeling left out,” said Felicia, stepping past him into the foyer. “So we asked Ingrid’s older sister to drop us off.”

  “You don’t mind,” said Ingrid, following Felicia into the house, “do you?”

  “Hi, Gabe,” said Mazzy, smiling sheepishly. “They talked me into it,” she added quietly so no one else could hear. Gabe sighed, then stepped aside, allowing her to pass as well. His parents would not be happy about this.

  Malcolm led the group back toward the living room. “Keep your voices down,” he said. “We just got his little sister to fall asleep.”

  “In a mansion this big,” said Felicia, glancing through doorways along the way, “do we really need to worry about that? She’s probably in another wing! Am I right, Gabe?”

  Gabe shrugged. “She’s just upstairs,” he said, trying to downplay the grandiosity of the house.

  Felicia paused in the living room doorway, waiting for the rest of them to catch up. “You don’t seem very happy that we came.”

  “Oh,” said Gabe. “N-no. I’m really happy. I just…didn’t expect it. Me and Malcolm already ate all the pizza.”

  “We don’t care about pizza,” said Ingrid. “We just wanted to see your cool house.”

  “And you,” said Mazzy, throwing a warning look at the other girls. “We wanted to see you too, Gabe.”

  Gabe couldn’t help but smile.

  “What about me?” Malcolm asked, looking hurt. “Didn’t you want to see me?”

  “Get over yourself, Malc,” Felicia said, chuckling. She headed toward the sound of hungry zombies and plopped herself down on the wide leather couch. “So…what are we watching?”

  After the movie ended, they were all giddy with fright. In the basement, the ancient boiler clicked on, and the house seemed to shudder. The group huddled closer together on the couch. Gabe and Mazzy bumped knees. He quickly fumbled to move away. Despite feeling guilty for having them here without permission, Gabe was glad that they’d come.

  Felicia stood. “Okay, Gabe. Time for a tour.”

  “A tour of what?” Gabe asked, happy for a distraction.

  “Dummy!” said Ingrid. “We want to see your house. Every nook and cranny.”

  “Oh,” said Gabe, rising and brushing himself off. This was the second time Ingrid had brought up the house. Doubt flickered briefly through his mind. Was this the reason they’d wanted to be friends with him in the first place? To see where his famous grandmother lived? To take a peek inside?

  “Okay,” he said, swallowing the lump that had risen in his throat. His father’s puppets were upstairs, off-limits. “But—but be quiet. I don’t wanna wake up Miri.”

  They started in his grandmother’s library. The group was mesmerized by the strange treasures that filled the bookshelves. Malcolm pawed at Nathaniel Olmstead’s books, the ones that Elyse had drawn covers for. “Oh my gosh, I love these!” he said. Felicia and Ingrid squealed at some of the more grotesque specimens on the shelves: luminescent beetles framed in shadow boxes, a baby doll made of cracked leather, a taxidermy snake half-coiled in mid-spring, with jaws wide open.

  Mazzy, however, stood at the window that overlooked the backyard and the woods beyond. “See something?” Gabe asked, stepping beside her. Looking out at the darkness, he remembered the figure he’d seen out there a couple months earlier.

  The Hunter will come for you….

  Mazzy shook her head. “I thought so, but no. Just the darkness playing tricks.” She didn’t sound convinced. Gabe felt a chill.<
br />
  A few minutes later, he led them through the maze of rooms on the first floor: the dining room, the parlor, the kitchen, an office, a den. Felicia begged to see upstairs. Malcolm shushed the group as they approached Miri’s door. Gabe briefly opened each of the bedroom doors, but when he came upon the closed door that led to his father’s workshop, he passed it by entirely.

  “Wait,” Felicia said. “What’s in here?” She reached for the knob. Gabe leapt between her and the door, almost knocking Felicia to the ground. She shrieked, then looked at him in shock. “Geez! Just kill me, why don’t you?”

  “Sorry,” said Gabe, trembling, ignoring his urge to shush her. “It’s nothing. A closet.”

  “A closet?” Felicia stared at the door, looking more intrigued now than she had been before. “Filled with what? Gold?”

  “Is your grandmother hiding something?” Ingrid asked, wide-eyed.

  “Just…towels,” Gabe answered, holding the doorknob so tightly that his knuckles had gone white.

  “Why can’t we see them?” Malcolm asked.

  “You want to see towels?” Mazzy asked.

  “No,” said Felicia. “But he’s acting really weird.”

  Gabe felt his mouth dry up. He glanced at Mazzy, who only looked back at him apologetically.

  Forget it, Gabe thought. What does it matter anymore? Seth Hopper had been right. They’d never wanted to be friends with him. If they’d only wished to see the famous Temple House, why not just show them and end it all?

  He began to turn the knob. Then, from downstairs, there erupted an earth-shattering boom. The house shook. Outside, the wind wailed an awful howl. The group tensed like they’d done during the zombie movie. This time, however, the fright wasn’t fun. Mazzy grabbed Gabe’s arm and squeezed.

  “What in holy heavens was that?” Felicia asked, turning slowly toward the staircase, her interest in the workshop door disappearing like a ghost.

  FROM THE TOP OF THE STAIRS, they could see that the front door had blown open in the wind. It had hit the wall so hard, the doorknob had left a slight impression in the wallpaper. Gabe shook his head. His father was going to kill him.