The Haunting of James Hastings

by Christopher Ransom

  Shapes and shadows weaving through trees, sod grid yards, out onto the expanse of the park with the dying baby trees. Two men ahead of him, using the playground for poor man’s camo. Rick closing like he’s got pupils big as eight balls night vision. Three, then four men and maybe a woman bursting from their hidey holes. Converging on the same narrow gap, a hole in the culvert wall. Into the wild, no more suburbs, just land. Weaving through rocks and cactus and dry river beds, pure terror.

  My feet slipping, legs pumping, heart pumping faster, my lungs burning under enough moonlight to see their dark skin, his massive head jumping like an antelope.

  The pistol swinging at my side, my finger inching closer to the trigger as I catch up to the black hulk of him cutting across the desert, the shouts of his prey as they realize there’s nowhere left to go. One trips, another stops to help, the whole train piling up. He’s shouting, they’re surrendering like border jumpers, knees in the dirt, hands behind heads, and he’s rounding them up, master of ceremonies now, Emcee Rick, huffing and puffing and waiting for me to bring up the rear. I’m ready to surprise them all.

  The gun coming up, my gun, the tableau waiting to unfold.

  The buffalope in my sights. His head exploding in a pink mist.

  Psychological safety - off.

  30

  I didn’t shoot Rick, though in retrospect I should have. It would have saved us both some trouble.

  I did take the gun and exit the car, run around the house, trip over a plastic rain gutter and nearly slam face first into the grass before I emerged around the back. I heard him chasing them, shouting and firing his gun into the air (I hoped), and after another minute of running across the raw desert that lay just on the other side of all this false suburbia, I cramped up. The stitch lit up my side like a purple flame and I stopped, bent over and threw up into the rocky sand. I was dehydrated and lost and my head was throbbing like it had its own heart.

  I wiped my mouth and walked back to the car. I thought of stealing it, but only slipped the gun into my waistband and wandered off down the street. I didn’t want to know what Rick was up to. Chasing immigrants or squatters - the Crawlers, people like me the night before - was my guess, though why he cared I could not imagine. No one was paying him. It was probably simple blood sport to him, a hobby, a way to feel powerful and needed after being downsized from the prison. I knew guys like him from Ghost’s security entourage. They were police academy rejects, looking for new, less regulated venues to exercise power.

  The cool desert air cleared my head somewhat and I began to sober up, a little. I walked for ten minutes before I realized I was lost again. All of the houses looked the same as the ones on the streets near Annette’s house, but I could not find her street. I couldn’t even remember the name. I kept walking.

  What was left of my internal clock told me it was maybe 9 or 10 p.m. But the fact that the neighborhood was once again dead quiet well before midnight only disturbed me further. I could not escape the feeling I was being watched. All of the houses had eyes of black windows, and it occurred to me that there is nothing so sad and uniquely abhorrent as an empty living room behind a window with no curtains.

  How many are really still here? I wondered. How many are afraid to come out after dark? Were they afraid of Rick? Or just people in general? The country didn’t used to scare me. I grew up in the country. There’s that myth that the city is more dangerous, and I suppose it is, per capita. But at least when you start screaming, there’s someone around to hear you. They might rush to your aid, call 9-1-1, or ignore you - but at least you will be heard. Out here, if someone chose to liberate my soul, my screams would be reduced to canyon echoes.

  I had been walking for almost twenty minutes when the creeping suspicion that I was being watched became a certainty. I stopped and looked around. I focused on the spaces between the houses, the gaps behind bushes, under abandoned cars. I saw no one, but the nape of my neck was stiff and the flesh along my arms visibly prickled. I turned around on the sidewalk.

  The boy was standing behind me. He was approximately a hundred feet back, on the same sidewalk, unmoving. He wore the same black sweatshirt with the hood up and pulled low over his brow. Black pants, hands hidden. He seemed very small, shorter and thinner than he had appeared last night. I stared at him for a minute, waiting for him to do something. He did not take a step or even raise his head.

  I turned away and began walking, continuing as if he were of no concern. I listened for the sound of his feet slapping on the sidewalk, any sort of shuffling noises, but the only footsteps were my own. It seemed important to let him know that I was not going to be cowed again. I willed myself not to look back, but it was excruciating. I decided I would count my footsteps until I reached one hundred, and then turn back. My lips moved with the count. Somewhere around twenty-five, I revised my goal down to fifty. A light breeze swept by. I wiped my nose and kept walking. I stubbed my toe on a ridge in the sidewalk and kept walking.

  ‘Thirty-six, thirty-seven . . .’ I counted under my breath. At forty I stopped and turned around.

  The boy was once again motionless, and had closed the gap considerably. He now stood less than fifty feet away, perhaps as close as thirty. I hadn’t seen him come to a halt. His head was still down, the hood up, his chin the only suggestion of a face, but the jaw was clean white. His feet were close together, as if he were balancing on a flagpole, and the things protruding from his pant cuffs looked like two bars of white soap. The folds of his black sweatshirt revealed portions of white letters stamped across his chest. I made out an S and something near his shoulder that might have been an L or an I. I don’t know why it mattered, but I needed to know what was printed on his sweatshirt.

  He’s either walking faster when I am not looking, or else he’s not walking at all.

  His hands were stuffed into the pouch, hiding something, and I felt certain it was related to his presence, something he wanted to show me. His apparent ability to find me wherever I was, indoors and out, was too complicated to rationalize right now, and the fact that I had Rick’s ankle piece was of no solace. I was nearing my wits’ end and there was nowhere else to go.

  Let him come. Let him follow.

  I turned and began walking again. He was close enough now that I should hear his footsteps, but I didn’t. We had been climbing a hillock within the subdivision for the past few minutes and I refused to let the incline slow my pace as I crested the top. I glanced at the houses to either side in hopes of recognizing one of them, but I could not concentrate. I was descending again, counting paces. I decided to catch him off guard. Sixteen, seventeen—

  I whirled. The sidewalk was empty. I scanned the yards in every direction. The boy was gone. I started to look away, but another shimmer of something on the ground made me stop. I looked down at the sidewalk. Seven black marbles, one white. Clustered in the form of a smile with two eyes - one white, the other black.

  He’d left them less than six feet behind me.

  Ten minutes later I found a familiar lane down into ‘the pit’ of more economical homes, and from there was able to make my way back to Annette’s house. The door was unlocked. I went into the kitchen and hooked a right, intending to check the garage to see if the car was there.

  ‘James?’ she said from the living room. ‘Is that you?’

  I felt caught, full of the familiar dread I had experienced those last few months when I returned home from being on tour. The creeping unease of walking into our home, wondering how much worse Stacey had gotten while I was away.

  I walked around the kitchen, into the living room. She was sitting on the couch, almost formally so, her hands flat on her thighs. Her white hair was parted in the middle and hung straight down, ragged at the edges. She was wearing a pair of pink flannel pajamas with chubby black sheep on them. Her skin was no longer the color of a trout’s belly. Some or all of her freckles were visible, but I did not count them. She was still pale, but even in the lightless room she
looked healthier, filled with some renewed vitality, as if the . . . condition . . . had passed.

  ‘Hey,’ I said. I did not turn the light on. ‘You’re up late. Feeling better?’

  She wasn’t looking at me. I could hear her breath coming in and out, like she’d been running around the house until I came in. At first I thought she was crying, but her voice was steady and her cheeks were dry.

  ‘I’m scared, James. I’m really scared this time.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘One of these days you’re going to get hurt. You might not come back.’

  ‘I’m fine. I was with Rick.’

  ‘Rick?’ she said. ‘Who’s Rick?’

  ‘Pretend cop Rick. Rick Butterfield. Your friend who dyed my hair.’

  She looked up at me with the eyes of a woman who has just survived a plane crash. ‘But where are we?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know whose house this is. Is this one of his houses? Did you put me here?’

  ‘Whose houses?’

  ‘Ghost’s.’

  There was a moment when it finally hit me. The moment when Stacey turned the corner and lost the ability to hide it. When I knew it wasn’t just a little too much ‘partying’ but a real mental illness, even if that mental illness was something as common as depression. The moment I realized this is a serious problem. It had hit me, not like a bucket of cold water, but from inside my veins. Everything in me thickened, hardening in self-defense. It was fear at first, then sadness, then loss. Because no matter how much I loved her I understood in a flash that a piece of her had died. That some or most of the woman I knew and loved may still be there, and what had been lost might one day come back, but that for now something, something as small as a toe or as large as her heart, had been stolen while I wasn’t paying attention.

  Days before she was killed in the alley, I had come home to find her standing on a short stepladder in the front hall, wiping down the shelf there with a moist rag. When I had asked her what she was up to, she had turned and looked down at me with a smile, and said, ‘Cleaning.’

  ‘The closet?’

  ‘It has to be clean or else they won’t come back.’

  When I chuckled and tried to play along and asked who ‘they’ were, her smile fell off her face and she said, ‘You know who.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  She had then descended the ladder and walked away as if I weren’t even there. I followed her into the kitchen, out onto the back patio. She lit a cigarette and sat in one of the lawn chairs, looking at the backyard.

  ‘Stacey? What’s going on?’

  She startled and looked back at me. ‘Oh, I didn’t hear you come in.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, irritated. ‘You did. We just talked in the hall. You were . . . Stace, come on. Really?’

  ‘Does it really matter?’ she had said. ‘Wouldn’t it be better if one of us just walked away?’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘It would be easier,’ she said, her expression languid. Stoned. ‘If you just left. Just go, James.’ She laughed and it was an evil laugh. ‘Go away. Go away.’

  Had we argued? Had I gone to her and stood with her? No, none of those things. I remembered now. I had stared at her a moment, staring into her bloodshot eyes full of magic pills, and I thought, You’re just like him. You’re just like Ghost. A fucking addict. My wife is a fucking addict and I don’t want her any more.

  ‘If you don’t want to talk to me,’ I said. ‘That’s fine. But the drugs aren’t going to solve anything and I have a job to do.’

  ‘Good, go do it. No one’s stopping you.’

  And then I walked out, got back in my car, the S5 I bought her, and I drove to Shutters in Santa Monica. I checked into a single room and pretended I was on call, expensing it to Ghost. I sat in the bed and hid from my wife and I knew that she wasn’t crazy, that it might ‘only’ be depression at its root, but that by piling on the medications and trying to escape into a state of numbness she was killing herself slowly. Killing us, and for that I came very close to hating her.

  How close was it? A week before? Three or four days? Or the day before she backed into that alley?

  Did I call her family? Her friends? Lock her in the bedroom and sit with her?

  No, I had checked into a hotel seven miles away. And stared at the television, resenting her, her biology, our lifestyle and life. Resenting myself.

  ‘Who’s house is this?’ Annette had said. If she was still Annette.

  Don’t leave. You can’t leave now. She’ll die without you.

  I sat beside Annette on the couch and took her hands in mine. They felt like refrigerated dough.

  ‘It’s your house, Annette. Home, in Sheltering Palms. You remember? We came back together just a couple weeks ago, sweetie.’

  She gave me the same look I had seen in my bathroom. When she was propped up on the toilet, cowering from the rabbit paintings. After she hit her head. After something or someone made her fall. Was that when she began to change? Began to know me so well, what buttons to push? Yes, it had started as early as that. That might have been ground zero for it. That’s when it - she - got into her.

  ‘We’re all right. I’m here. Just focus on me for a minute.’

  ‘Who’s Annette? Why do you keep calling me that? I don’t like that name.’

  Please don’t do this. ‘That’s your name. You are Annette.’

  ‘Why are you lying to me?’ She turned her vacant eyes on me. ‘Who’s Annette, James? Is she your girlfriend? Does she go on the road with you?’

  I let go of her cold hands and moved away.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what you want me to do.’

  ‘I’m so cold. Aren’t you cold? I keep having the dream. Every time I die in them, I try to sleep but I wake up dead.’

  She was crying.

  ‘Let’s get you to bed,’ I said, leading her upstairs.

  Once she calmed down and fell asleep, I closed the bedroom door and made my way down the hall toward the second bathroom. I needed a shower. I needed to be alone. I needed sleep, but first I had to do something about my hair. She hadn’t even noticed it. What if Rick had been telling the truth? What if it had been this way for days, weeks? What if I had never changed? When was the last time I had looked in the mirror? In the house, when I saw the boy? Had it been white then, or turned white? No, no, no . . .

  I found the bathroom door, pushed it open, and arrived in a child’s bedroom.

  I stepped back into the hall and looked at the other doors. The upstairs hall had half a dozen of these generic faux-oak doors and they all looked alike, but this was the one that had been locked. Arthur’s room. The Bluebeard room. Someone had been in here recently.

  I glanced around and my eyes locked on a framed photo on top of the dresser. I went to it, holding up the 5 x 7. It was of Annette, younger, radiant, with redder hair. She was posed on a deck with the desert in the background. She looked beautiful and happy. Could have been two years ago or as many as seven. There was another photo on the dresser, fallen on its face. It was not in a frame, just a little wallet-size that had been propped against a wooden music box shaped like a sea turtle. I turned it over.

  The boy was maybe eight or nine, with a crop of brown hair. He wore a white dress shirt and tie under a blue blazer with a private school crest. There had been an attempt at a smile, but his mouth still hung open in a sagging oval. There was a forced happiness about him, the kind that emotionally neglected children try so hard but ultimately fail to conceal. I flipped the photo over, returning to the tiny, blue ink scrawl at the bottom.

  Aaron, Grade 5

  He was the boy I had seen standing in my backyard just weeks ago. The boy in the black sweatshirt who had been in the empty house two nights ago, then followed me just hours ago.

  Annette. Arthur. Aaron. A family of As.

  The wife was sleeping down the hall. The husband was
dead of suicide. What had happened to the son?

  31

  It was your average suburban boy’s bedroom, but one that, at first glance, did not contain much in the way of personality fingerprints. I was not a homicide detective. The thousand ways in which this boy Aaron was unique were lost on me.

  There was a poster of Big Ben Roethlisberger in a drop-back, arm cocked and ready to throw the pigskin to Neptune. A double bed with plain green cotton sheets and a thin peppermint-striped spread. Soccer cleats and mall clothes in his closet. Lots of toys, but I doubted they were much different from the toys of any single child born to parents with money. A science kit. A remote-controlled airplane and a space station thing hanging from the ceiling. Three dusty Track & Field Day ribbons from third grade tacked to a cork board. Plastic robots and manga books. Everything neatly displayed on shelves, waiting, preserved, nothing boxed up or stowed away. It was as if he had merely gone to bed a few nights ago and vanished before waking up.