Poltergeist

by James Kahn

  “No, goddammit, you sit down!” She shouted much louder than either of them expected, and it startled them both. She lowered her voice, and went on. “I mean . . . just stand right there. And just . . . just have an open mind.”

  Carol Anne walked in, looking cranky. In her hand she carried a San Diego Charger football helmet; on her face she carried a frown. “I’m hungry,” she whined. “Mommy didn’t made dinner.”

  “We’ll go to Pizza Hut, all right?” Diane shouted. She caught herself again, made herself calm down.

  For the first time, Steve noticed the chalk marks on the floor. Arrows, squares, numbers, like alien hieroglyphics. He had the sudden, sinking fear that Diane was losing her mind.

  “Diane—what is going on with you!?”

  Diane’s lip trembled, her breathing quickened, but she held up her hands as if to say, “I’m fine.” Then, with a sense of purpose that would not be undermined by the unreality of the situation, she grabbed a kitchen chair and placed it in the center of the floor, each leg within a circle of chalk.

  “Okay,” she whispered loudly, as if she possessed a huge, psychotic secret. “Okay, now, watch! Watch! Ready? Watch!”

  She let go of the chair, and stepped aside. Her eyes remained fixed on the piece of furniture. Steve’s eyes oscillated between the chair and Diane. He started to walk toward her, but she held her hands up and almost shouted: “Stop! Look!”

  He watched in disbelief as the chair began to tremble. More and more it vibrated, until it started moving forward—slowly at first, then picking up speed until it shot completely across the floor and stopped in front of Steve.

  Diane’s eyes widened in a grin of hysterical victory. Carol Anne yawned and rubbed her eyes.

  Steve kneeled by the chair, felt for wires, checked for magnets. Nothing. He looked up at Diane, his eyebrows furrowed in question.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she grinned feverishly, ready to share her secret now. “Look. Carol Anne, show Daddy.”

  “I’m hungry,” the child grumped.

  “Don’t argue!” Diane snapped.

  Carol Anne saw discussion was futile. She put on the football helmet and sat down inside a large chalk circle near the sink. Steve walked toward the girl, but Diane held him back. All at once, Carol Anne began to tremble.

  Just like the chair, she vibrated for a few seconds, and then shot across the floor into Diane’s waiting arms.

  “Oww, that burned,” Carol Anne complained, rubbing her butt. “I don’t want to play anymore.”

  “Well?” Diane rasped at Steve triumphantly

  “What the fuck is this?”

  “You try!” Diane looked almost possessed.

  “What?”

  “You won’t believe what it feels like.”

  “Okay, so what’s the gag? Where’s the magnet?” He looked behind the kitchen door. He looked under the sink. He looked at Diane and yelled with helpless belligerence: “I hate Pizza Hut! I hate surprises! And I don’t understand what the hell’s going on around here!”

  Diane almost wept to find out she wasn’t imagining it all, to find out Steve was just as mystified as she was. “I knew I couldn’t possibly explain it to you—you’d have thought I was nuts. So I showed you instead. But don’t ask me how, or what, or how—just help me figure out what to do.”

  It began to dawn on Steve. “You mean . . . there’s no gimmick?” he whispered.

  “Not from in here. Maybe someone’s getting cute with some big new generator out there or something . . .”

  “What are you talking about, generator—what kind of generator could . . .”

  “How should I know? I’m no electrician.”

  “I wonder if what happened last night could have anything to do with this.”

  “No shit.”

  “Yeah, some kind of disturbance in . . .”

  “Daddy, Daddy!” Carol Anne called out—she’d inadvertently walked across one of the chalk arrows, and was now sailing full-tilt across the kitchen floor.

  Steve opened his arms just in time to catch her, whereupon she giggled furiously, as if he’d thrown her into the air himself.

  “Now can we get pizza?” she asked.

  “Evening, Ben.”

  “Freeling. Ms. Freeling.”

  The three of them stood on Tuthill’s back porch. The two men kept their hands in their pockets; Diane kept her arms folded.

  “TV’s off in here. If your set’s acting up again . . .”

  “No, no, uh uh. Nothing like that. We were wondering . . . although this is going to sound strange coming from me . . .”

  “I doubt it,” muttered Tuthill.

  A moment of awkward silence. The Freelings stared at their feet, getting more embarrassed by the second.

  “You been noticing anything . . . funny, lately?” Steve broached the subject uncomfortably. What he didn’t want most of all was for his jerk neighbor to think he was going around the bend.

  “Funny like what? Funny ha-ha or funny strange?”

  “Like . . . disturbances,” Diane tried to explain.

  “You mean like . . . vandalism?” Tuthill looked perplexed. Moreover, he began to look suspicious: he’d moved to Cuesta Verde to get away from all the nuts and yo-yos in the city—why did he seem to find them wherever he went?

  Steve was sorry he’d ever come. Diane tried to sound supremely casual. “Oh, like dishes of furniture moving around by themselves?”

  “I don’t care, we’ve just got to keep this thing in the family,” Steve said quietly but firmly. “Did you see the look on Tuthills face? We’re lucky he didn’t call the wagon then and there.”

  He sat in bed beside Diane later that night, feeling foolish and confused. She looked at him dubiously. He pursed his lips. “All right, then. In the morning I’ll call someone in.”

  “Call someone in?” she whispered. “Who, for instance? I’ve already checked the Yellow Pages. Furniture movers we got already. Maybe if we looked under weird happenings . . .”

  “Okay, okay.” Steve held up his hands. “I have a plan. I have a plan. Something’s occurring here that we can’t explain. I just feel ridiculous . . .”

  “There’s nothing to feel ridiculous about . . .”

  “Well, how the hell did you feel with Tuthill staring at us like we’d lost our marbles? What do you think Teague would say if Tuthill mentioned something?”

  Thunder rolled in from the west, momentarily flickering the image on the television screen. Diane smiled. “He’d probably say you’d lost your marbles.”

  “So what do you want to do? Call an exorcist? The police? A seismologist? What?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Steven. Besides, you just said we should keep it in the family.”

  “Right. Okay. Let’s wake the kids. No big deal. Let’s wake them, spend the night at the Travel Lodge, and not come home until it’s safe.”

  “Now you’re scaring me. Don’t try to scare me, Steven.”

  “I’m not trying to scare you. I’m trying to unscare me. Look, it’s probably just the weather. It’s this weird electrical activity. Maybe everything’s magnetized.”

  “The weather, huh? Magnets, huh?” Madness in her eye. “What’s this, then?” She stood up in bed and pointed to the strange stain high on the wall. It was bigger now.

  “It’s a spot,” Steve suggested.

  “A spot. A spot that wasn’t there yesterday. A spot our dog has been fixating on since this morning. A spot I can’t . . .”

  “All right, all right. Now you’re trying to scare me!”

  They stared at each other in frazzled silence a moment, then burst into nervous laughter.

  “What the hell.” Steve shook his head. “Probably that lightning hit the damn wall last night, and we’re all electric zombies now.”

  Diane laughed until she was near tears, and curled in his arms. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly natural explanation. I lived with it all day, and nothing bad happened. It’s just a
nother side of nature. A side we’re simply not qualified to comprehend. We’re just overreacting--we’ve made everything much too important.”

  “You’re probably right,” he agreed then paused. “The whole thing is just so damn weird.”

  Robbie lay grimly in bed, under the covers, watching the tree backlit by stark spears of lightning.

  “One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . .” he whispered. Ominously, the thunder mumbled in its ancient, throaty language.

  Outside, the tortured branches of the oak pounded and scraped the window under the tormenting gale. The sky was a gray, black shroud.

  Another streak of lightning fired the air. Somewhere, a power line must have bent under the force: the closet night light flickered, and went out.

  “One . . . two . . . three . . .”

  A great boom and rumble shook the house, rattled the glass. The wind keened like a mourner, and in the next ignition of lightning pulled the branches of the tree forward with terrible meaning.

  “One . . . two . . .”

  BADOOM! The building seemed to cringe. Carol Anne tossed fitfully in the other bed, as Robbie lay absolutely motionless under the covers—hoping the tree-monster wouldn’t see him.

  The wind rose to gale force. Ozone suffused the air like after-burn. Lightning seared the night once more, accompanied simultaneously by a monumental CRASH, and a blast of wind. The giant oak appeared to become apoplectic—like a tortured creature, it twisted forward, thrusting its grotesque limbs out . . . until with a tremendous gust of rain and crashing glass, the limbs burst through the window, into the bedroom. Robbie screamed.

  Carol Anne jumped awake, as another chorus of lightning turned the night into a raging cold furnace. Long, fingerlike twigs at the end of the great branches tangled the screaming boy like rotting skeleton hands—and as the tree swayed in the wind, lifted him out of bed.

  Carol Anne started to scream. The rest of the family ran through the bedroom door just in time to see the engulfing tree-arms yank the boy up and out the broken window into the demented night. Diane gave an anguished shout, barely heard over the roar of the storm. After one paralyzed instant, the three of them—Dana, Steve, and Diane—ran out of the bedroom and tore downstairs, leaving Carol Anne where she was.

  The kitchen door was blocked by falling debris, so they had to run around the side to the patio. Steve slid open the glass door, and they rushed out into the weather. They were immediately soaked, and buffeted by the eighty-mile-per-hour gale. As they looked up into the straining knobbly tree, they could barely see Robbie tossed and trapped in its topmost branches. In the surreal light of the electrical discharges, the boy looked as if he were being eaten alive. Steve began to climb.

  Upstairs, Carol Anne huddled in terror against the headboard of her bed, held there partly by the velocity of the wind rushing through the shattered window. Dumbly, she stared at the half-open closet door. The light in the closet was growing brighter.

  Horribly bright, with almost nuclear intensity, the sick-white hue of a neutron star. The color of television light.

  Carol Anne screamed, but no sound came from her mouth. The terrible wind began spinning loose objects across the room, in frenzied vortices, into the glare of the closet. Then, slowly, larger objects started to move—chairs, radios, pillows moved inexorably toward the open closet, as if they were being inhaled, and swallowed. Carol Anne hugged the clown doll, but it only smiled.

  The bed began to move.

  Carol Anne dug her fingers into the mattress, screaming, crying, nearly unhinged with fear.

  But she didn’t begin to know fear until she heard the wail of the Beast. It was a low, insane sound, a sound unlike anything she’d ever heard, the sound of bedlam. The Beast in the closet.

  It covered the sound of the storm. It pulled Carol Anne’s bed toward the light.

  Battered by a wall of wind, Steve finally reached Robbie. The boy was being strangled by an increasingly constricting tangle of twigs and vine. Steve felt almost as if he were drowning. Rain lashed him. Each time he extricated one of Robbie’s arms or hands, another would become enmeshed in the slippery lattice.

  Diane was halfway up the tree herself by this time, trying to help free the others. They all kept slipping, though—the bark was covered with some saplike ooze that made traction impossible. It almost smelled like blood.

  Dana watched from below, wringing her hands and desperately wishing them all free.

  Everything in the room was being drawn into the cyclonic vortex of the closet. Carol Anne was lifted off the bed, but hung onto the bending frame, flapping like a flag in a hurricane. Unbelievably, the clown was not affected. It just sat on the floor where Carol Anne had dropped it, staring up, smiling, as the wind tore at her. Finally she could hold no more, and, with the slenderest vacuum noise, was slammed into the brilliant hole.

  A moment later the bed gave way, flipped into the air, and flew across the room, smashing the closet door shut with Carol Anne inside, and barricading it against being reopened.

  Steve tore violently at the myriad branches that enveloped Robbie, as the wind rose to maniac heights. Then, with a final thunderous explosion of light, all three—Steve, Robbie, and Diane—were thrown to the ground. Moments later, the entire tree was uprooted with a single loud crunch, and sucked into the demon night.

  And suddenly the storm stopped.

  The four Freelings lay in a pile on the muddy earth, numb, buzzing, spent.

  Suddenly Dana pointed to the horizon and shouted: “Look, Mom . . . Dad!”

  They followed the line of her finger to the distance. It was a receding funnel cloud, just beginning to break up in the outlying hills.

  “A night twister!” Dana marveled.

  “It must have just skimmed us,” Diane nodded. “There wouldn’t be a house standing here if . . .”

  “Carol Anne!” shouted Steve.

  “Still upstairs?” They all looked at the shattered upstairs window.

  “My God!” Diane spoke softly.

  They ran into the house, but when they reached the children’s bedroom, they froze. Except for the two beds blocking the closet, and a few toys and broken bits of furniture, the room was stripped clean. Barren.

  Diane shrieked once, then she and Steve immediately started pulling at the junk. Robbie and Dana stood voicelessly in the doorway watching. E. Buzz whimpered at their feet.

  “Carol Anne!” Diane called, but there was no answer.

  They removed the last piece of debris, and pulled open the closet door.

  The closet was empty.

  “She’s not here!” Steve shouted. He was almost beside himself.

  “Carol Anne!” Diane called out. She ran to the broken window and called again.

  “I’ll check the kitchen!” said Dana.

  “Don’t go in there!” Steve warned. “I’ll check it. You look in our room.”

  “I’ll go.” Diane’s voice came in a rasp. “You look in the bathrooms.”

  They all ran out. All but Robbie, who simply stood, staring feverishly into the empty closet . . . empty, but for the stain high on the wall it shared with his parents’ bedroom. A stain in the shape of some kind of . . . thing. And far back in the corner, doubled over and grinning outrageously at him: the clown doll.

  Steve ran into the kitchen. The television was on, but the local transmitter must have been down—only static snow could be seen on the screen.

  “Carol Anne!” he shouted.

  Dana went into the downstairs bathroom. “Carol!” she called. No answer. The shower curtain was closed—she drew it back quickly: nothing there.

  Diane went through the master bedroom, the bathroom; looked in the closet, under the bed. Every exposed corner left her a little more frantic. “Oh Jesus Christ Almighty. Carol Anne!” The television hissed white static on the end table.

  Steve entered. “This is crazy. I’ve looked everywhere.”

  Suddenly, realization dawned on Diane�
��s face. “Oh my God. The swimming pool.”

  They broke into a run. Dana joined them in the hallway as they headed downstairs. Slowly Robbie emerged from his bedroom and walked into his parents’ room. Tensely, he stood in front of the television set.

  Dana, Steve, and Diane raced to the edge of the newly dug pool. The rain had softened the perimeter, though, and Dana’s feet began to slide with the shifting mud. The next second she was standing in the deep end, waist high in mud and rainwater.

  Steve ran in after her, and the two of them began plunging their hands into the quagmire, looking for the body. Diane sat down hard on the edge, just weeping and shaking her head. Her strength had reached its low tide.

  Robbie faced the picture tube, inches away, the bluish video glow flattening his features and his affect. For many minutes he lingered like that, then recognition flickered behind his eyes.

  Something registered. He squinted, first with half-awareness, then with growing terror, into the screen. Shadows. Whispers.

  An inarticulate moan passed his lips. Then he screamed. “Mommmmmmy!! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!”

  The sound of her child’s shout jerked Diane’s head up like a marionette on a string. In an instant she was on her feet, slipping over the ground, running into the house and up the stairs.

  When she reached the landing at the top of the staircase, she heard Carol Anne’s voice call out faintly from her bedroom. Diane’s heart jumped with relief, momentarily—her baby was here. Hurt, maybe, but essentially safe. She redoubled her speed into the bedroom.

  In the bedroom, Robbie stared into the television static. He was hysterical, holding his hair in his fists. Diane grabbed him and pulled his face up to hers.

  “What is it?” she strained. “Oh my Christ, what is it?”

  The static hiss on the television grew louder. Insubstantial images played across its face. Somewhere in the distance, a small voice filtered through: “Mommy . . .”

  Diane turned white as snow. “Carol Anne! Where are you?!” Frantically, she searched the room once more.

  “Mommy . . . Mommy . . .” The voice was faint, waxed; barely audible over the hiss of the television. E. Buzz crept into the room and growled at the set.