The Haunted

In the morning, she awoke early, because she forgot it was Saturday and thought she had to go to work. She considered going into the office anyway—she did have a brief to write—but both Megan and James had complained lately that she wasn’t around enough, and Claire realized that she ought to be here when they came home. How many summers would she have left with them? They were getting older, and soon they wouldn’t even want her around. She should take advantage of the situation while she still could.

Julian had always been an early riser, and he was up already, no doubt making himself breakfast while watching CNN. Morning wasn’t morning to him unless he could catch up on overnight world events.

Getting out of bed, Claire checked her panties, thankful to see that the bleeding had stopped, but she was still sore when she went to the bathroom. She flushed the toilet, then washed her hands and looked at herself in the mirror, moving in close. No matter how much moisturizer she used, she could not get rid of the small lines that had started to sink in around her eyes, bracket her mouth and accent her chin. Julian, she’d noticed recently, had a few gray hairs coming in not just on his head but on his chest, and what had been merely a seasonal paunch was now his permanent year-round stomach.

They were both pushing forty-five, and she realized that in a little more than five years they would be fifty. That was scary enough by itself, but what was truly frightening was that fifty no longer seemed old to her. In her mind, she felt no different than she had at twenty-five or thirty, and it seemed like only yesterday that she’d been in college and fifty had seemed like the age of a grandparent. Just last week, though, she’d read of an actor dying at the age of sixty-five and found herself thinking that that was way too young.

Her stomach growled. She was hungry, and thought she might make herself an omelet or—

Something moved behind her.

Claire swiveled around, startled. But there was nothing that could have moved, only the bathtub and wall. Besides, if something had been there, she would have seen it in the mirror.

So why did she feel as if she wasn’t alone?

Because she wasn’t.

She glanced around. There was someone in the bathroom with her. She could feel him, even if she couldn’t see him.

Him?

Yes, it was a man. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she did. Just as she knew that he was blocking the door, that she would run into him if she tried to leave the room. What would happen at that point, she had no idea, but it was definitely not something she wanted to find out.

“Julian!” she called.

And it was gone. As quickly as that. A second before, the small room had been filled with another presence, and now she was alone. Whatever had been there had disappeared. She knew it with the same unfounded certainty that had told her it had been blocking the door.

Swiftly, before it came back, she opened the door, flinging it wide. She expected to see Julian sprinting down the hall toward her, or, at the very least, to hear his stomping footsteps at the front of the house as he sped over to rescue her. But there was no sign of him and no sound save the muffled drone of television news. He hadn’t heard her cry, and she wondered what would have happened to her if she had not scared the presence—

man

—away. In her mind, he looked like that creepy figure from her dream, the one in the corner of the basement, and though it was morning and light out, she shivered.

Was their house haunted?

She didn’t like the basement, and James, she knew, didn’t, either. Her dad had had a nightmare about it, and he was one of the most rational people on the planet. Then there was the record that played by itself and the laundry basket. …

Claire told herself to calm down. Julian was right. There was probably a rational explanation for all of it. She was just overreacting and reading import into ordinary occurrences because … because … Well, she couldn’t think of a reason, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one.

Her slippers were next to the toilet, and she slid her feet into them before heading out to the kitchen to make that omelet. But as she looked down at her feet, something in the corner of her eye caught her attention.

There was a face in the toilet.

Now she was being crazy.

Probably. But there was a face nevertheless: eyes formed by twin deposits of calcium from the hard-water, off-white against the porcelain of the bowl, and a smiling mouth by the curved edge of the water itself. The mouth wavered as the water moved, giving the rudimentary features an unnerving semblance of life.

Had it been there moments before, when she’d used the toilet? Claire wasn’t sure, but she didn’t think so, and its seemingly sudden appearance upset her more than it probably should have.