The Haunted

by Bentley Little

  In the end, they surrounded the remaining villagers, herding them into a corral, women and children mostly, but a few old men as well. The younger men, the husbands and fathers, were all dead, and their families were crying, screaming, wailing. A young girl, no more than twelve, tears streaming down her face, raised her arms to him, begging for mercy for herself and her mother. The volunteers paused, looked at him questioningly.

  Kit glanced back at the tumbledown cabin at the far end of town.

  “Open fire, boys,” he ordered.

  1921

  New Mexico had been a state for nearly a decade now, but the civilizing influence that should have come with the change had not made it to Jardine. As sheriff, Luther Dunlop was in a perfect position to judge such things, and in his considered opinion, the town was more lawless now than it had been while still part of a territory.

  Particularly on Rainey Street.

  Sitting at his desk, Luther thought about the murder that had just occurred there, about the man whose body had been taken away to the mortician’s. He had never seen such savagery before. And the fact that a beautiful young woman had done it—to her own husband, no less—made his blood run cold. For when they had found the gentleman, his manhood had been severed and shoved into a sort of pouch that she had carved into his stomach. His nipples had been sliced off and placed there as well. Apparently, the man had bled to death, but what none of them could yet figure out was why he had not fought back against his wife, why he had allowed her to do such a thing. For he had not been restrained in any way, and even the worst of the injuries might not have been fatal if treated in time.

  The fact that she had been able to do this at all defied common logic.

  Luther sighed. He didn’t like Rainey Street. He would never admit that to any man alive, but it was true. Something about the road made him feel uneasy. There’d been three killings and fifteen fights resulting in injuries on Rainey over only the last three months, a statistic that would give even lawmen in Chicago pause.

  But it wasn’t just the violence that bothered him. He could handle violence; it came with the job. No, it was the feel of the place. Sometimes when he drove down that street, he grew nervous for no reason, and more than once, when no one else was in the motorcar, he purposely took a detour down another street, when taking Rainey would have been more convenient.

  The telephone rang just as Luther was taking his flask out of the bottom drawer of his desk. He quickly unstopped the cork and took a quick drink before answering: “This is Luther Dunlop.”

  There was no one on the other end of the line.

  “Hello?” he said, but was greeted by silence.

  Luther hung up immediately, jerking his hand away from the telephone as though it were contaminated, convinced that the call had come from the murder house, though there was no evidence to even suggest such a thing.

  Had it been silent on the other end of the line, or had he heard whispers? The more he thought about it, the more he was certain that someone had been whispering, though he could not for the life of him figure out who or why.

  The young wife who had committed the murder, Angie Daniels, had been arrested and was safe in a cell, but just to make sure, he went back into the jail to check on her.

  He stopped at the edge of the doorway, shocked.

  Mrs. Daniels had taken off all of her clothes and was standing in the center of her cell, completely naked. There were two other prisoners in the jail—both men, both drunks—and he would have expected them to be whooping it up, egging her on, or, at the very least, staring. But they had both turned away and were backed into the far corners of their own cells, facing the walls as though frightened.

  She turned her head to look at Luther, and what she said made no sense, though it scared him.

  “I was in the room where things grow old.”

  She did seem older to him now than she had when he’d arrested her, and though ordinarily he would have given her a stern warning and ordered her to put her clothes back on, this time he turned around, closing and locking the jail door behind him.

  The telephone rang again, but he was afraid to answer it, and let it ring.

  He walked outside to clear his head. In his mind, he went over the way Mrs. Daniels looked at the house and the way she looked just now in her cell, trying to figure out what seemed different about her, why he thought she now looked older. Was it because of what she’d said? That bizarre nonsensical statement?

  I was in the room where things grow old.

  Or was it because she was naked, because, without her dress and girdle, parts that had been held in were allowed to fall out?

  No. It wasn’t just her body. Her face looked more lined. And her hair seemed grayer. Luther had no idea how that was possible, but it was true, and the fact that the other prisoners were afraid of her made him think that they’d noticed the same change in her that he had.

  Inside the station, the phone stopped ringing, and moments later, his deputy returned from accompanying Mr. Daniels’s body to the mortician’s. Jim Sacks wasn’t much of a deputy and was as dumb as dirt, but Luther was sure happy to see him now. He explained what was going on in the jail, and Jim had a reaction that was completely and utterly normal: he grinned and said, “I want to see that!”

  The deputy’s response gave him courage, and Luther followed Jim into the building. Jim got his eyeful, then turned official and ordered Mrs. Daniels to put her clothes back on, which she did. Out in the office, the deputy winked, slapped him on the back and said, “Thanks for waiting for me. That’s some woman, huh?”

  Luther had a difficult time sleeping that night. He had no dreams, but he kept waking up, and each time he did, he was filled with the growing certainty that he had done something he should not have or had forgotten to do something that he should have. It was a vague worry but a very real one, and he awoke in the morning tired and unrested, the feeling still hanging over him.

  Later that week, Mrs. Daniels was transferred to the county seat at Amarejo, and for that Luther was grateful. She’d kept her clothes on after that first incident and hadn’t done anything strange since—he even thought she looked young again—but he was glad to see the last of her just the same, and around town things began to seem calmer, more pleasant.

  Until the following Tuesday.

  Jim was the one to take the call. Luther was eating lunch at Bob’s Diner, and he knew from Jim’s face when he saw the deputy hurry in, looking for him, that this was bad. Jim didn’t even want to explain what had happened in front of the other customers, and Luther accompanied him outside, getting quickly into the car as Jim told him that a woman had been seen hanging her children from her front porch.

  Luther didn’t believe it at first. As more and more homes were fitted with telephones, young men and unstable adults had begun using the instrument for pranks, and this sounded to him like one of those instances.

  But when they turned onto Rainey Street, Luther knew instantly that it was true, and it was he who spotted the house. “There!” he said, pointing. Jim pulled the car to a stop at the front yard of the house.

  The woman had already strung up two of her children. They hung from ropes attached to a beam on the wraparound porch, twisting slightly in opposite directions, eyes bulging and mouths open in dark purplish faces. The remaining three children sat on a porch swing, sobbing. She was tying a rope around the neck of the smallest one, preparing to hang him, too.

  Why weren’t those kids running away? Luther wondered. Why weren’t they screaming for help?

  He knew why, though.

  It was Rainey Street.

  Both Luther and Jim leaped out of the car and ran up the porch steps, pistols drawn. “Stop right there!” Luther ordered.

  The woman ignored him and tightened the noose around her son’s neck.

  Luther pushed her to the floor, away from the boy, grabbing the rope from her hands, and Jim held her down. She was screaming incoherently, spit flying fro
m her mouth as she jerked her head from side to side, yelling out nonsensical words. Her hair was wild, her eyes wilder, and she looked like someone who had escaped from an insane asylum. He recognized her, though, had seen her about town, and he wondered what had happened to turn her like this.

  Other neighbors were gathering around to see what all the commotion was about. The two children—one boy, one girl—were still hanging from the beam, but the sight of the dead kids did not generate the reaction he thought it should. There was very little reaction at all, in fact. The purple-faced corpses might as well have been duffel bags for all the interest that was shown in them.

  Luther looked down the street in both directions. It was an evil place, he thought, though the nature of that evil seemed different every time he was here. It was as though each killing, each death, changed the street, gave it a new character. Last week, after Mrs. Daniels had murdered her husband, the street had seemed angry, a location where rage ruled and violence was the accepted response to any misunderstanding. Today, however, it was a realm of craziness, where it seemed perfectly reasonable for a mother to hang her children in front of her house and leave them dangling like butchered lambs.

  But the uneasiness he felt here remained constant. Luther liked nothing about this place, not the street nor the sidewalk nor the yards nor the houses.

  Especially one house.

  He glanced over at it now. It was an address at which nothing illegal had ever happened, a quiet, nondescript residence where an old widow lived by herself. That widow, Mrs. Hernandez, was the one who had called in about the Daniels murder. He had talked to her afterward, asking what she had seen, and she’d seemed a nice enough old lady, but he had conducted the interview on her porch because he did not want to go into her house.

  The house frightened him.

  The weird part was that he wasn’t frightened by any one particular thing. No, it was the overall atmosphere of the house that made his skin crawl, that set his nerves on edge. It wasn’t what had happened here but what could happen here that scared him. If there was a source for the evil on this street, an origin point from which everything else spread out, it was this house. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he did, and he was glad that he wouldn’t have to go over there today.

  Jim had handcuffed the woman, who was still spitting and screaming, and hauled her to her feet. “Do you want me to take her in?” the deputy asked.

  “No. I’ll do it. You watch those kids. Take them into the house or the backyard. I’ll send Mrs. Biederman over to get them; then I’ll come back and we’ll cut those other kids down, take them over to Jake’s.”

  “Why do you think she did that?” Jim wondered, looking at the two hanging children.

  Luther shook his head, said nothing.

  But he knew the answer

  It was Rainey Street.

  Twenty-seven

  After calling to make sure Claire and the kids were all right, talking to each of them in turn and assuring them he was okay, Julian made himself a turkey sandwich for dinner and ate in front of the TV while he watched the nightly news. He missed his family, but he was glad they weren’t here. If he had any sense at all, he would have left as well, shoving a For Sale sign into the grass of the front yard and hightailing it out of the neighborhood as quickly as he could.

  But he could not do that.

  Why? What did he have to prove?

  That he wasn’t a coward.

  Julian carried his plate and cup into the kitchen, placing the dishes in the sink. He thought of Miles, and had the sudden urge to see a picture of his son, to once again look upon the little boy’s face. He could see it in his mind, of course—the blond bowl cut, the wide green eyes, the mouth that was almost always smiling—but he wanted to look at a photograph, to view not just a memory but a tangible object, a real recording of the boy in a specific place at a specific time.

  No one was home, so there was no need to be discreet, and he went down to the basement and began digging through boxes, searching for the photo albums that they kept hidden, the ones they never showed Megan or James, the ones they wanted to save but never looked at.

  It took him a while to find the photo albums, and halfway through his search, he realized that the basement did not seem scary to him. Had it ever—or had he just accepted the verdict of the rest of his family? He wasn’t sure, but he knew that he was alone in the house, it was night, and he was down here and not afraid. There was something reassuring about that, and he found himself able to fully concentrate on his search for Miles’s picture without being troubled by any of the usual distractions.

  Finally, after what could have been one hour, could have been two—he’d lost track of the time—Julian found, at the bottom of a Hefty bag, beneath Claire’s old maternity clothes, a familiar green album with the gold-embossed word Photos on the cover. Even the sight of the photo album made his heart lurch in his chest, caused him to catch his breath, and he stared for a few moments at the green cover, steadying himself, building up his courage. Finally, he took a deep breath and opened it.

  Miles was right there on the first page.

  He’d thought he’d have to go a little way in, past pictures of Claire that he’d taken while they were dating, past their wedding and their first apartment. But nothing was in chronological order, and the photo that greeted him immediately upon opening the album was one of Miles that he’d taken at the beach that last summer, when his son was four. Miles was sitting in a hole that they’d both dug together in the sand, looking up at the camera and grinning. He was holding his little blue plastic pail, and there was a smear of sand on his cheek where he’d rubbed it with his dirty hand. He had on his Thomas the Tank Engine bathing suit, and his blond hair was sticking out in every direction. In the upper right corner of the photo, just past the rim of the hole, were Claire’s feet.

  Julian didn’t realize he was crying until it became hard to see, and when he wiped his blurry eyes, he felt wetness on his cheeks as well.

  He turned the pages until he found another picture of Miles, this one taken at his fourth birthday party. Miles was wearing his little suit, hair neatly combed, standing behind a pile of wrapped presents, and smiling. This was the way Julian saw his son in his mind. He used his fingernail to pull up the edge of the clear plastic sheet that covered the photos on the page, and drew the sheet back, peeled off the photograph and put it in his shirt pocket.

  He missed Miles. It was a loss that time had not softened or made easier, and there was a physical pain in his chest right now, as though his heart actually ached. The depth of the hurt was why he and Claire never discussed their first son, why he tried so hard to live in the present and not think about the past. He knew from a lifetime of media exposure that such an attitude was probably unhealthy, that it was always better to let emotions out than keep them in, but he didn’t feel that way. This was the approach that seemed to work best for him, and while it might not be politically correct or socially acceptable, it was how he had chosen to do it.

  It kept the guilt at bay.

  He’d thought more about Miles in the past month than he had in the last thirteen years. It was the house’s doing, and Claire was right: once or twice, at the beginning, he had considered the idea that it was the ghost of their son who was haunting them. But that was obviously not the case, and with that possibility excluded, he was left with the discomforting memories that thoughts of Miles dredged up within him.

  Memories of Miles’s death.

  Julian closed the photo album, closed his eyes, tried to get his mind to go somewhere else.

  It wouldn’t.

  “Daddy!”

  It was the last word Miles ever said, and it remained as fresh in his mind today as it had when his son shouted it, two terrified syllables that cut straight through his heart and would be perfectly preserved in his brain until the day he died.

  As a college student, as a young man, Julian had enjoyed hiking. He’d belonged to the Sierra
Club, had met one of his former girlfriends on a club-sponsored hiking trip, and had enjoyed taking Claire on backpacking excursions to various wilderness areas throughout the state. Even after they had Miles, they’d continued hiking on weekends, although, necessarily, closer to home.

  It was on one of these treks, into the Santa Monica Mountains, that it had happened.

  They’d been stupid to go that day at all. It was a Sunday, and though the Saturday before had been nice, for the entire week prior it had been raining. They should have known better.

  But it had been a hard few days at work for both of them, and they’d wanted to get away from the city and out in the open air, if only for a couple of hours. Griffith Park would be too crowded, they knew, Angeles Crest too treacherous, so they’d opted for the Santa Monicas. They’d hiked there before, many times, liked the views and were familiar with many of the trails.

  They were an hour in and pretty high up, Claire ahead, he moving more slowly, at Miles’s speed. He was letting Miles walk on the outside of the trail, though he’d never done that before. He’d also allowed the boy to walk without holding on to his hand, and he’d never done that before, either. Afterward, Julian asked himself why he’d been so negligent, asked himself a thousand times, but he had never been able to come up with an answer.

  He remembered they’d been talking, he and Miles, laughing about something Oscar the Grouch had said on Sesame Street earlier that morning. And then, not more than a foot away from where he stood, the saturated ground under Miles’s shoes had given way, and Julian had watched in impotent horror as an entire section of trail slid down the side of the mountain, taking his son with it.

  “Miles!”

  Crying out, Julian dropped to his knees, leaning over the newly formed edge, expecting to see his son’s body sprawled at the bottom of the ravine below.