The Haunting of James Hastings

by Christopher Ransom

  When one important player in the scene drops out, does the house experience a vacuum to compensate for the loss? We enter a house for the first time - for a dinner party with friends, with a real estate agent showing a vacancy - and we feel its character instantly. This is a warm house, we say. Or, this house feels sad, empty. How do we know? What part of us resonates to the house so assuredly, so quickly?

  The vessels are everywhere. Your wife’s voice in your voicemail. The dent in the notepad from her last letter. The bits of data stored from the deleted text message, the residue of her fingerprint oil on the keypad she used to type it. The depression in the pillowcase. The memory of the bedroom, where you made love and left your heart on the ceiling. The ring around the bathtub that never comes clean, no matter how many times you scrub it.

  Your wife’s blood in the alley. Your wife’s reflection in your new girlfriend’s hair.

  Whose human silence had I heard on the home phone? How had I called myself to replay my own grieving from six months ago? Had I mistaken another man’s grief for my own? Or had the . . . call it an anima, the conspiring energy inside the house . . . translated a message from Stacey? Were these mere echoes from earlier potent events, or was Stacey reaching out to me, reminding me that I had taken a vow of forever?

  If the emotions and spirits inside us can embed themselves into a house, there must be a technology, organic or manufactured, that can release them. When fate aims a laser at the grooves of our spiraling grief, what do we become? Most importantly, if Stacey was the music, which one of us was the clay pot?

  The house? Or one of the people inside it?

  I woke with my cheek stuck to the living room’s wood flooring, which peeled away with a tacky sound as I got to my knees. There were drops of blood, but not enough to pool. I rubbed my cheek and traced a trail of dried crust that ran in a crooked line up to my eyebrow, where my fingers stumbled into a hard knob. I hissed, turning slowly, a chill setting deep into my bones. I needed a hot shower. As I shuffled through the foyer on my way to the stairs, a warm draft enveloped me.

  The front door was wide open, the last of the day’s light thinning on my porch.

  18

  I shut the door and took the front stairs without hurry. My body ached as if I had been in a bar fight. I trudged by the landing’s porthole window without stopping - I did not want to see any reflections, my own or hers - and continued up the second set. The hallway was empty. Halfway to the bathroom my pace further slowed, just as it had when I found Annette conked out in the tub. I had also been very near this door when something slapped me on the back. I opened the bathroom door, half expecting to see Stacey sitting on the toilet, embarrassed and angrily waving at the closet, needing a new roll of paper.

  The bathroom was even darker than the rest of the upstairs, its single window of frosted bricks a blurry charcoal shade. The flap of shower curtain still dangled free of the last three rings. Annette must have grabbed the curtain for balance as she fell. But what caused her to fall? She had blamed exhaustion . . .

  The rabbits were in their frames, black and white against a green hillside. Did they have a sex? Is that why Stacey had liked them? Had she thought of them as boy and girl, husband and wife? I reached back and ran my hand up the wall, flipping the light switch. The bathroom light did not turn on. I swept up and down twice more, but the spiral fluorescent energy-saver bulb (the kind that was supposed to last five years) in the ceiling socket did not respond. An electrical short, then.

  I crossed the bathroom until I was close enough to touch the paintings. The rabbit at the bottom might have been female. She had softer eyes and a bit more of a feminine aspect to her shoulders and hindquarters. The small puff of a white tail. The nearly identical rabbit above her was a tad longer, sleeker, possibly younger or male. Little green eyes on both of them, but one visible in profile. There was nothing remarkable about them. A mediocre talent had been commissioned by one of the catalog companies. The same twin paintings were probably hanging in ten thousand homes across America. Whatever had triggered Annette’s reaction, it had been borne of her bruised mind, not these paintings. I was turning toward the mirror when the bathroom light began to glow.

  My stomach dipped and I turned, expecting to see someone standing in the doorway, one hand on the wall switch, the other raised and ready to slap me again.

  There was no one in the doorway. The gases inside the fluorescent bulb were brightening the room as they warmed. I did not remember the house having electrical problems. We had put some money into the plumbing, replacing the old knob and tube with new copper, but the electrical had been updated and passed inspection before we signed papers. I was certain of this because I recalled the inspector, a tired old guy named Robert Knapp who wore a plaid-lined Baracuta jacket, a thick class ring that seemed desperate, and bifocals over his inflamed nose. Very knowledgeable fellow, was Knapp. Helpful, polite. He had a cold that day and spoke like he had a throat full of milk. What was the phrase he had used? Oh yes, ‘The electrical is up to par, or better.’

  Maybe not so up to par after all, Bob.

  What had I come here for? A shower? I could do that downstairs. I never used this shower any more. I allowed a minute to pass without moving or speaking and my ears began to ring in the silence. It was very faint until I tuned into it, then growing louder, a faraway but approaching whistle. The sound of a tea kettle reaching steam. Where had I heard this before? I was still trying to remember as I returned to the paintings.

  I staggered back, blinking rapidly. The rabbit in the bottom painting had changed. Her single green eye had become a red marble with only a pinpoint of black for the pupil. I was certain it had been green only a moment ago, but now was the color of grenadine, darkening even as I stared at it. I kept blinking, expecting the light to stop playing tricks with my eyes, but it did not. The male above her was still black and white and his little eye was green, but hers was—

  Her red eye blinked. The black pupil dilated swiftly.

  I stepped back and to the right, growing dizzy, and the eye swiveled, following me. Not in the way quality oil paintings seem to meet one’s gaze from any point in a museum room. The rabbit’s red eye moved. First right and then, as I attempted to dodge its gaze, to the left, tracking me, toggling like a bearing. I moaned.

  The rabbit had taken on a glossy sheen, reddening as if fresh paint were thickening upward, outward from the body, soaking the fur. I continued to back away as its coat became completely saturated, until I found myself against the wall, away from the door I had been expecting to exit. The tea kettle piping was rising up through the canals of my ears, making it difficult to string together a coherent thought. I knew that if I were to cross the room again and reach up, my hand would sink through the glass plate - the glass that wasn’t really there now, if it had ever been - and come away wet, my palm smeared with her blood.

  The rabbit turned her head. Her lips pulled back, revealing two needle teeth and a black nub of tongue. Her expression was that of a hissing cat, her floppy ears tucked flat against her skull. She was screaming, shrieking loud enough to wake the dead, or maybe it was the dead trying to wake the living.

  I clapped my hands over my ears and jerked back, bumping my head against the wall. The collision seemed to rectify my perceptions, for in an instant the rabbit returned to her previous coloration, the effect being something of a flash card flipped by an invisible hand. Now she was black and white, her eye green and lifeless. The painting was just a painting, a false lure. The high-pitched whistle, however, did not cease, and I realized it was the sound of her screaming, and had not come from the rabbit at all.

  It was coming from the woman in the ballroom.

  19

  As I ran down the hall the screaming escalated and stopped abruptly, leaving only the familiar ringing in my ears. I halted, trying to understand what I was about to walk into, afraid of continuing only to discover that I was too late. I took three tentative steps, heard no further
commotion, and walked steadily to the double doors.

  They were locked. I yanked the knobs, the doors flexed outward, my hand slipped and they rebounded into place. I yanked harder.

  ‘Annette!’

  I did not know that it had been her screaming, but the alternative was unappealing. She did not answer. I banged on the door, stepped back, raised my leg and kicked as hard as I could and the doors blew open with a satisfying slam. The room was dark, and I kept one arm raised to ward off an attacker, should there be one coming at me from the darkness.

  When nothing did, I stepped to my right and found the switch, throwing on the chandelier flame bulbs.

  Annette was standing motionless in the center of the ballroom, with her back to me, arms at her sides. Her blonde hair was whiter than ever and she wore the yellow dress with pink and blue flowers on it.

  No, not quite. This dress was older but of the same style, not yellow at all, but faded pink, with green flowers instead of blue. This was the first dress, the one I had bought for Stacey at Anthropologie in the Grove two years ago. Annette’s legs were bare, her skin pale all the way down to the black flats. The shoes were crusted with dried dirt. In her right hand was the missing Glock, aimed at the floor. Her finger was wrapped around the trigger.

  Psychological safety. Finger on = safety off.

  ‘Annette?’

  Something was wrong with her body. She looked stiff and bigger, taller.

  ‘Annette? What are you doing?’

  Stacey laughed inside my head. Guess again, James.

  Annette turned in a half-circle. Something about her was—

  ‘Oh, God, no.’

  Lucy Arnold had dyed and cut her hair. She had found the gun - or stolen it. Her eyes were glossy black. Her lips were trembling and a loose string of saliva dangled almost to her collarbone.

  ‘Lucy? What are you - what happened?’

  But even as I spoke, I knew. I had hurt her feelings. She had seen me with Annette, carrying on like she didn’t even exist. Underneath Lucy’s sweet and shy veneer there lurked a psychotic, jealous stalker. All of the incongruities made sense now, the puzzle pieces falling into place. The woman Euvaldo Gomez had seen in the house weeks before Annette arrived. The little signs around the house, my underwear folded in the dresser. Lucy could have found the combination to the storage locker.

  She’s wearing your dead wife’s clothes. She’s fucking insane.

  ‘Lucy. I’m sorry, okay? Put the gun down now, please.’

  I stepped to the side, my hands raised, and saw our reflections in the giant mirror behind her. The aged glass was hiding something. I could feel it, drawing on me, us, the energy trapped inside the room. Lucy was trembling, her face blank. What had made her scream? What had she seen in the mirror that made her scream?

  The red rabbit. The real one, not the painting.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘We’re okay, everything’s fine. Will you hand me the gun?’

  No, I hit my head, is all. Annette’s mumbling about the red rabbit got under my skin. The power of suggestion. Stacey is dead.

  Deal with Lucy. She is a real person.

  ‘Lucy Arnold,’ I said, putting some force into it. ‘Officer Arnold, put the gun down.’

  She looked down at Stacey’s shoes, as if just now realizing she was wearing them and did not recognize them. The first one simply lay there as she stepped out of it. The second one was stubborn, caught on her heel, until she made a swinging motion with her leg and the shoe slid across the floor, pattering dully against the wall under the settee.

  Then she noticed the gun in her hand.

  ‘You don’t need that. I promise.’

  ‘Sh-sh-she won’t let me,’ Lucy said. ‘She’ll k-k-ill us both.’ Her expression did not change. Even with the stutter, she sounded as if she were reading the words from a script.

  ‘No, it’s not real,’ I said. ‘You’re safe. I won’t let anything happen to you.’ I offered my hand and stepped closer to her.

  ‘She m-m-made me do it . . . came to me in the n-night . . . whispered to me. Stacey’s not dead. She’s in the phone. She’s in my buh-bedroom. Here, she’s here. She’s eating m-me alive.’

  Beads of sweat dripped over my brow, stinging my eyes. I took two more steps, hands out, palms up. ‘It’s not real. You just got confused, sweetie.’

  Lucy’s body was rigid and the tears leaked down her face. ‘She m-m-akes me wear the clothes. Sh-sh-she said she wants to c-c-come back. I’m sssss-upposed to make her come back.’

  ‘Put the gun down, Lucy.’

  ‘She’s very, very mad at y-you.’ Her lips twisted into a snarl and she raised the gun at my face.

  I lunged and yelled, ‘Stop!’

  She screamed and the gun boomed overhead and Lucy lost all control. She clawed at me as I tried to grab her arms, but she was hysterical and slipped from my grasp. The gun dropped with a clatter, was kicked in the scuffle, and spun across the marble tiles.

  ‘Leave me alone!’ Lucy ran from the ballroom, shrieking. ‘She won’t leave me alone!’

  I stood still for moment, amazed I had not been shot. Her footsteps thudded down the hallway and pounding sounds echoed through the walls, as if she were bouncing side to side like a horse trapped in a burning stable.

  ‘Lucy!’

  I ran after her. By the time I reached the top of the stairs, the front door opened with a bang. I ran down as fast as I could and tripped on the third to last step, my heel slipping on the smooth wood as I went airborne. I hit the last stair ass-first, then the floor, and my tail bone twanged like a hot guitar chord. I rolled over in the foyer as the pain went up my spine. I was trying to stand when I looked up and saw Lucy running blindly down the sidewalk. She exited the frame at an odd angle, hewing west across Euvaldo Gomez’s lawn.

  I got to my feet and limped after her. I made it down the porch steps and glanced toward Mr Ennis’s house. Annette was standing beside her green ’69 with the driver’s door open, a paper bag of groceries under one arm, the sunglasses I’d bought her perched on her forehead.

  ‘What happened?’ she said, watching Lucy trot away, then glancing back at me in dawning horror. ‘James? What did you do?’

  ‘She’s out of control,’ I yelled without stopping. ‘Call the police! Now!’

  Annette’s mouth fell open and I broke west over Euvaldo’s lawn where one of his children, a girl of five or six, was standing in the middle of the grass, pretending to dig with a plastic spade. She threw her spade at me as I ran by and I had the absurd idea that this toddler had buried Stacey’s shoes, or dug them up.

  Back on the sidewalk, I spotted Lucy up ahead. She had a half-block advantage as she staggered into the middle of 21st Street. She was limping, her head bobbing.

  ‘Lucy! Stop!’

  She was less than fifty feet from Arlington, the cross street. What time was it? I couldn’t see traffic through the trees and over the parked cars. If it was rush hour everything would be reduced to a crawl and she would be spared. If it was not rush hour, the strays coming off the freeway ramp would be hauling ass, trying to make the light at Venice Boulevard. I gained speed and weaved onto the street. The usual line of cars were bunched almost bumper to bumper, the hundreds of commuters inching in slow surges.

  ‘James!’ a man yelled behind me.

  I recognized the voice as Euvaldo’s, but I did not stop. I was a hundred feet from her. She was weaving down the street like a drugged hitchhiker.

  I gained ground. Seventy feet. Fifty. ‘Lucy, stop!’

  She was going to run into a wall of parked cars in less than thirty seconds. Then what? Someone would see her. They would have time. Someone would help her—

  There was a turn lane on Arlington, a second slot to allow local traffic to exit into the neighborhood. I remembered this only after the black SUV rolling on chrome 22s leaned around the corner at more than thirty miles per hour, tires chirping as it straightened onto our street. The windshield reflected
black leaves from the trees overhead. I could not see the driver. Incredibly, the engine revved harder - the driver relieved, as we always were, to finally be off that fucking Ten - before he saw her.

  ‘No!’ I screamed, rushing forward with my hands thrown up.

  The Navigator’s bumper bit into her knees and lifted her legs a millisecond before the grill met her torso and lofted her higher, seemingly juggling her before shoving her forward like a snowplow. The driver stood on the brakes and the SUV nosed down in a crooked skid as Lucy Arnold was thrown off the hood and dragged down with a wet slapping sound. The Navigator’s front left tire crushed her hips, rode onto her torso, and smeared her head into the asphalt, sending a fan of blood and other cranial fluids across my chest and face before all of us came to a halt.