The Haunted

Robbie was late coming over, so James went up to the headquarters by himself. The place was shaping up. The skeletons he’d found had been cleaned up and arranged on a low shelf made from a wood plank balanced atop concrete cinder blocks. The shelf was to the right of the bookcase, which was now filled with unwanted magazines they’d scrounged from their respective houses. Robbie’s dad had given them an old typewriter, which they’d placed on top of the bookcase next to a stack of plain white paper and a toy magnifying glass Robbie had taken from his brother’s room. The exercise bike was next to the window, and the traffic cone sat in front of the secret compartment, marking it and blocking it. Today, Robbie was bringing over his chemistry set, which would help make the headquarters look like a real crime lab.

If he ever got here.

James glanced around. They needed a clock, he decided, so they could tell what time it was.

He sat on the floor for a few minutes, thumbed through an old issue of People magazine, read a movie review, found a few pictures of starlets on the beach in bikinis, then stood up, restless. Standing near the window, he listened for the sound of Robbie’s car, heard nothing, then opened the trapdoor and climbed the ladder downstairs.

He walked into the backyard. His parents had gone to The Store, leaving him in Megan’s hands. Not an ideal situation, although if the two of them stayed out of each other’s way until their mom and dad returned, there shouldn’t be a problem.

James looked toward the house, where his sister was hopefully minding her own business and not spying on him.

He was about to walk out to the front yard and wait for Robbie there, when his attention was caught by the hole he had dug in the ground.

It was back.

How was that possible? His dad had made him fill it in last weekend. The work had been hard—much harder than digging it had been, for some reason—but afterward, it was as if a great responsibility had been lifted from his shoulders. The unwanted compulsion to eat dirt that had been plaguing him since the opening of that secret compartment had disappeared, and along with it the weird mixture of defensiveness and guilt that discovery of the compartment had engendered.

He’d been grateful to his dad, and the week had passed quickly and uneventfully.

But last night he’d had a dream. In it, he had dug a tunnel from the garage to the basement, eating the dirt as he made his way under the yard, feeling it enter his body through one end and pass out the other as though he were a worm. Now, he saw as he approached the hole, there actually was a tunnel, or the beginning of one, and he felt within his chest a familiar stirring.

Perfectly round, as though bored by machine, the hole was probably three feet across and went down at least that far. At the bottom were bugs, dozens of them, black, unrecognizable insects that had probably been beetles before being squished into the amorphous mass that coated the floor of the pit. A narrow passage, barely big enough for him to slide through on his stomach, had been burrowed into the side of the hole, heading toward the house.

James jumped in, hearing and feeling the bugs crunch beneath his shoes. Grimacing, he kicked them to the edges and cleared a space before the tunnel. He knew it was crazy even as he did it, but he couldn’t seem to help himself, and he dropped to his knees, then ducked down and pushed his way into the opening headfirst.

It was pitch-black. He couldn’t see a thing. For all he knew, there were bugs galore in the space ahead. Beetles. Worms. Or something worse.

But he pressed on, wriggling into the narrow tunnel, arms at his sides like the Grinch slithering and slinking through one of the Whos’ houses. The earth smelled good, and he breathed deeply, the scent of the soil and its olfactory lure overriding the utter lack of light and helping him overcome his trepidation. He wriggled in farther—

And dirt fell on his rear end and the backs of his legs—the only parts of his body still sticking out into the hole.

He waited in place for a moment, not moving, thinking that his squirming feet must have jostled free some loose earth. But though he remained still, soil continued to rain down on the lower half of his body.

“Hey!” he cried. “Stop it!” But his voice sounded muffled even to himself, and he doubted that the sound of it even escaped the tunnel.

The dirt continued to fall. Faster.

Someone was trying to bury him.

Someone or something.