Julian walked down the steps while Claire and Diane waited at the top. “Roger?” he called.
“Dad?” they yelled together.
There was no response, but Julian spent several minutes moving boxes aside to make sure he—
his body
—wasn’t hiding somewhere down there.
The basement was empty, and Julian came back up. The three of them passed by the deserted laundry room, then moved out into the hallway and on to the master bedroom. It was daytime, but the drapes were drawn, and Claire turned on the lights. They were all calling for her father yet receiving no response.
“The bed,” Claire said, pointing.
“That was me,” Julian said, embarrassed. “I didn’t make it.” He flipped up the covers, though, just to make sure no one was under there, then dropped to his knees, lifted the ruffled skirt and checked beneath the bed, shaking his head as he stood to indicate there was nothing.
Claire moved over to the bathroom and turned on the light in there as well.
Her heart leaped. On the floor, she saw the muddy prints again, threateningly brown against the lightness of the white tile. The mirror was fogged up, as though someone had just come out of the shower, and on the clouded glass was the imprint of … a face, she supposed, although it did not look like any face she’d ever seen. The elements were all there—eyes, nose, mouth—but they were in the wrong place, in the wrong order, and the scary thing was that for a brief moment she didn’t know why they were wrong, because she couldn’t remember where those parts were supposed to go. It was not until she saw the blurry contours of her own face in the corner of the mirror that she remembered the nose went over the mouth, and the two eyes were above that. For a terrible second, that awful face had seemed … right.
Behind her, Diane saw the same thing and let out a short, sharp cry, which sent Julian running over from the closet where he’d been searching.
“What is that?” Diane wanted to know, but neither Claire nor Julian had an answer.
“Let’s just find your dad and get out of here,” Julian said grimly, and the three of them hurried out of the bedroom and up the stairs.
“Roger!” Julian called.
“Dad!”
“Dad!”
He was not in Julian’s office, James’s room, Megan’s room or the bathroom. They saw nothing unusual upstairs, and though Claire thought she heard a weird tapping in Julian’s office, it might have been her imagination, since neither Julian nor Diane heard a thing.
As agreed, they went out to the garage together, but by now what little hope remained in Claire of finding her father had vanished. She didn’t know where he was or what had happened to him, but something had certainly occurred, because he seemed to have disappeared.
He was not on the ground floor of the garage, they saw instantly. Julian went up to the loft by himself, and though he stayed up there several minutes longer than she thought he should have and returned looking pale and shaken, he claimed that he’d seen nothing out of the ordinary.
“So he’s not here,” Claire said.
“Maybe he went home,” Julian suggested.
“His car’s still in the driveway.”
“Maybe he walked away. Or got scared and ran.”
“We need to go to the police,” Diane announced.
“The police aren’t going to believe—” Julian began.
“I don’t give a shit what they believe. My dad is missing, and it’s their job to find him, and if they happen to discover the existence of ghosts on the way, well, good for them. But Dad’s gone. And we need to get him back, no matter what it takes.”
Claire agreed, and instead of arguing the point, she grabbed her sister’s arm with one hand, Julian’s with the other, and pulled them both out of the garage. Just in case. Once in the driveway, she took out her cell phone and dialed 911. She looked up at the sky, wondering why the sun and clouds were visible from here but the moon and the stars were not. Did it mean something?
A police dispatcher came on the line. “What is your emergency?”
“My father’s missing. He disappeared about an hour ago—”
“Excuse me, ma’am,” the dispatcher said, and there seemed to be a tone of smirking condescension in her voice, “but an adult male is not considered missing until he has been gone for forty-eight hours. Your father has been out of contact for one. I suggest you wait. I’m sure he will turn up later this morning.”
“You don’t understand,” Claire said. She saw the anxious expression on her sister’s face. “He disappeared inside our house.” She hadn’t intended to bring any of this up, hadn’t wanted the police to think her crazy and not take her seriously. But there wasn’t going to be any action taken to find her father for two full days, and she knew she needed to spell everything out. Still, she had to be careful what she said. “We’ve had some incidents at our home recently,” she began.
“Vandalism,” Julian whispered.
“Incidents of vandalism,” she said more confidently. “Someone shut off our lights and attacked my husband in our living room. This is the same house,” she added with sudden inspiration, “where an intruder named John Lynch committed suicide several days ago.”
Julian gave her a thumbs-up.
Now it was her turn to be condescending. “I’m sure that crime is in your records,” Claire told the dispatcher.
“You may report the assault and file a claim regarding the vandalism. Although, since they occurred previously, neither incident is considered an emergency. I can transfer you to an officer who will take your statement and arrange a meeting. As for your father, a person has to be missing for forty-eight hours before the police can open an investigation.”
“Transfer me,” Claire ordered.
She spent the next five minutes trying in vain to convince a Lieutenant Weiss that he needed to come out to their house to investigate, finally giving up and handing the phone over to Julian, who alienated the officer in record time and ended up turning off the phone in anger and disgust.
Diane was crying. “What do we do?”
“I don’t know,” Julian said helplessly. “Does Rob know anyone who has contacts at the police department? Maybe we can get some help through a back channel—”
“I don’t think so,” Diane said, taking out her own phone, “but I’ll ask.”
Rob didn’t, and, from Diane’s side of the conversation, it didn’t sound as though he believed a word of what she was telling him, but he promised to ask around and see whether maybe someone he knew knew someone who could help them get some traction with the cops.
Diane hung up. “What do we do now?” she asked.
Claire looked over at the house. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.
As they passed by her dad’s car, she felt a pang, wondering whether she would ever see her father again. He was rough, and he was mean sometimes, and he hated Julian, but she loved him, and she didn’t know what she would do without him. Her parents were both getting on in years, but she had never really considered, seriously considered, what she’d do if one of them died. Now she realized that if her dad died, it would not just affect her emotionally, but would require her and Diane to take care of their mom. Her dad was the one who ran the household, did all the shopping, paid all the bills and made most of the decisions. If something happened to her dad, she and her sister would have to take up the slack.
Claire immediately felt guilty for even contemplating such mundane, practical considerations, and she pushed all such thoughts from her mind before telling Julian and Diane to meet her at her parents’ house, and climbing into the van. She wanted to cry, wanted to dwell on her unhappiness and wallow in it, but luckily driving required concentration, and her emotions were once again under control as she pulled into her parents’ driveway.
All that hard-won discipline threatened to crumble, however, as soon as she walked into the house, saw her mom and knew she would have to explain that her dad was mi
ssing. A more enlightened parent might let her kids in on the conversation, too, but Claire’s instinct was to keep them away from this as much as possible, and she told Megan and James to go into their rooms while she talked to Grandma.
She didn’t know where to start. Diane was already crying, but Julian stepped into the breach and informed her mom that they’d just come back from their house. “We were looking for Roger. He went over there this morning to prove me wrong, I guess, and show me that our house isn’t really haunted. He called Diane first to ask whether Rob wanted to go with him, but Rob was at work. After he hung up, she got another call, a weird call, and we went out there to make sure he was all right. His car was parked in the driveway, but he wasn’t in the house or in the yard or in the garage. We couldn’t find him.”
“He disappeared,” Claire said, touching her mom’s arm. “He was just … gone.”
Her mother seemed confused. “He can’t have just disappeared.”
“He did, Mom. I don’t know how, but he did.”
Diane was nodding. “That house is haunted. I’ve never experienced anything like it. The bathroom was all fogged up, and there was a … a face in the mirror.”
Their mom started to cry.
“We called the police,” Claire said, “but they can’t do anything until he’s been missing for forty-eight hours.”
“What do we do?” her mom asked.
That was the question. Claire had been going over possibilities in her head, but the truth was that there weren’t a whole lot of options. This wasn’t a situation where the choices were self-evident. She’d never encountered anything even remotely similar, and doubted that anyone else had, either. Even if the police were to get involved, she doubted that they would be able to find her dad. He had been taken by the same creature that had attacked Julian, and whether her father was alive or dead, they would never discover what had happened to him unless they figured out how to stop whatever lived in that house.
Whether he was alive or dead.
Her vision grew blurry as the tears threatened to come. She forced them back. She needed to be strong right now. For her kids, for her mom, for herself.
“Maybe he’ll be back later,” her mom said. “Maybe he’ll be back in time for dinner.”
Either she didn’t understand what was happening or didn’t want to face it. Claire nodded. “Maybe,” she said.
“Maybe,” Diane echoed.
But he wasn’t.
Thirty-two
“What the hell are you doing?”
Jumping at the sound of her mother’s voice, Megan cut herself.
Deep.
She’d thought the bathroom door had been locked, and she was sitting on the toilet, pants down, steak knife in hand, making small, light incisions on the inside of her thigh, just above the knee, when the door swung open. Startled by her mother’s shout, Megan let her hand slip, the knife drawing not just across the surface of the skin but slicing through fat into muscle. The pain was incredible, and she cried out, her eyes tearing up even as they caught the stricken look of horror on her mom’s face.
“Megan!”
She hadn’t been doing it to make herself unattractive this time. She’d been doing it … Well, she didn’t know why she’d been doing it. It had seemed like a good idea ten minutes ago, but now, with the blood gushing down her leg onto the linoleum, she realized how crazy it was. She reached for the toilet paper, pulled and pulled until she’d unspooled enough for it to pile into folds on the floor, then grabbed the entire mass of tissue and shoved it against the flowing cut, shocked to see how quickly the blood soaked through.
Her mom was screaming, calling for her grandma and her dad, and in seconds they were there. Megan was in so much pain that she wasn’t even embarrassed for them to see her with her pants down.
“Oh, my God,” her dad said.
By this time, her mom had soaked a washcloth in cold water from the sink and was pressing it against the wound, having tossed the toilet paper aside.
“I’ll get ice,” her grandma said quickly, and now Megan knew she was really hurt, because James was standing in the doorway and she didn’t even care.
She’d never felt such intense agony, and she was no longer crying, because she was gritting her teeth against the pain, squinting her eyes so tightly she could not see.
“We’re taking her to the hospital!” she heard her mom tell her grandma, and Megan opened her eyes to see her grandmother handing over a fresh hand towel filled with ice cubes. Her mom let the bloody wet washcloth she’d been pressing against the wound drop onto the floor, replacing it with the ice-filled hand towel. “Hold this,” her mom ordered. “Press it hard to stop the bleeding. Do you think you can stand?”
Grimacing, Megan nodded. The cold ice made the cut feel a little better.
“Stay here with James!” her mother said. Her grandma nodded.
With her dad on one side and her mom on the other, each holding a hand under her armpit to support her, Megan got off the toilet, still bent over, keeping the makeshift ice pack pressed firmly against the slice on her leg. “Make sure she doesn’t fall,” her mom said to her dad, and crouched down, taking over ice-pack duty and encouraging her to stand up straight. Megan pulled up her pants, pausing as her mom adjusted the hand holding the ice. She let out a sharp yelp as a flash of pain stabbed through her.
“Do you want me to carry you?” her dad asked.
Megan nodded.
“Maybe that would be better,” her mom said quickly. “I’m not sure we want that blood to be pumping.”
“Start the van and open the door,” her dad replied, grunting as he picked her up, one hand under her neck, the other under her knees.
Megan saw a steady stream of blood streaming over her father’s arm, saw a frightening amount of red puddled and smeared on the floor. She reached out and held the ice-filled hand towel against the cut while her mom ran through the house and outside.
“Megan?” James said worriedly.
“I’ll be okay,” she reassured him, though she had no idea whether that was true or not. The bleeding hadn’t stopped or even slowed down, and that was getting very scary. Had she sliced open a vein or something? Was she going to die?
“Where’s Grandpa?” she asked as her dad carried her down the hall.
“We don’t know,” he admitted.
“Is he dead?” Maybe that was why she’d been cutting herself.
It was an uncharacteristically blunt question to have asked, and her dad’s answer was equally blunt. “We don’t know.”
The house was reaching out, Megan thought. She and James should have kept quiet.
I will kill you both.
Even though they were away from it, they should not have revealed its secrets. Now they were going to have to pay. She started to cry, though whether it was over her grandpa or because of the pain or it was simply a reaction to the totality of everything that was going on, she could not say.
The van’s engine was running and the side door was open. Her mom was inside, laying towels over the back bench seat. Between both parents, they got her onto the seat and laid her down on the towels. They weren’t sure how to hook up the shoulder harness and didn’t have the time to figure it out, so her mom sat on the floor next to her, holding her in place and making sure she didn’t move while her dad slammed the side door shut, got in the front, backed quickly out of the driveway and took off.
Megan started feeling woozy on the way to the hospital. It suddenly seemed hard to keep her eyes open, and she closed them for a moment.
After that, sounds and images came in short staccato bursts, some of which remained in her brain, others of which were forgotten as soon as they appeared. A wheelchair. A bed. A curtain. A doctor. “She’s lost a lot of blood.” A shot. Her mom crying. A television. A Geico commercial. A nurse. A plastic bag hanging from a hook with a tube coming out of it. Beeping. Her dad in a chair, watching her. James. Grandma. Two doctors talking. Mom. Dad.
Mom.
Eventually, things sorted themselves out. She was in a hospital room, and it was daytime. Sunlight streamed through a window to her left, above a bed in which an old man lay snoring.
“She’s awake!” her mom said excitedly, and as weak as she felt, Megan had to smile. It was nice to hear her mom’s voice. Her dad was there, looking down at her, and a moment later a nurse was there, too, smiling, telling her everything was going to be okay.
Apparently she had lost a lot of blood because she had hit a vein, although, luckily, it was a small one; otherwise she would probably be dead. Doctors had repaired the damage and sewn everything up. The lost blood had been replaced, and she was being given some kind of medicine to make sure no dangerous clots formed. She would have to remain in the hospital under observation for a few more days.
“How … ?” She tried to speak, but her throat was dry and the word came out a croak. The nurse picked up a plastic cup from a tray that sat suspended to the right of the bed and placed a straw in Megan’s mouth. She sipped water through the straw, the coolest, freshest, best tasting water she had ever had. Her throat felt better, and she swallowed before trying to speak again. This time her voice was weak but clear. “How long have I been here?”
“Since last night,” the nurse told her.
Last night? She’d been knocked out for most of the time she’d been here, but still, it felt like days.
After the nurse left and the three of them were alone, save for the snoring man in the next bed, they were silent for a moment. Her parents looked at each other; then her mom cleared her throat, speaking in a careful, considered way that indicated she had spent time preparing her topic of conversation. “Honey? I know you don’t want to be here. I know this is hard for you, and I don’t want to make it any harder, but your dad and I have a few questions we’d like to ask you.”
Megan knew what was coming next.
“This was all an accident, I know. And I’m sorry I startled you and made you slice your leg open. I should have knocked first. But, sweetie, why were you cutting yourself in the first place?”
The Haunted Page 30