The Haunted

His parents were still asleep, but Megan was up, and he went back inside, intending to show her what had happened, but at the last minute, he changed his mind. She was sitting on the floor of the living room, leaning over the coffee table as she ate her Honey Nut Cheerios, and the way she looked up at him when he walked in, the worry he saw on her face, made him decide against telling her anything.

He turned away, heading back into the kitchen, where he made his own breakfast of cocoa and toast, which he ate while staring out the window at the yard.

Both he and Megan had been walking on eggshells for the past week, spending as much time as possible at their friends’ homes, not using phones or computers, not saying anything within the walls of their house that could be overheard by … it.

He was living the most stressful existence imaginable, and if he didn’t have a heart attack, he was going to get an ulcer. He and Megan avoided each other, afraid to communicate by either speech or note, and for the first time in his life he was really looking forward to the beginning of school. The chance to be away from the house nearly all day, five days a week, sounded like heaven, and already he was considering joining after-school clubs, programs or teams in order to stay out even longer.

His dream was to move again—even returning to their old neighborhood would be better than this—but he could figure out no way to facilitate such an outcome. His parents seemed to like it here, and, after they’d invested so much money in the place, it was highly unlikely that they’d be willing to give it up.

He did tell his mom and dad when they woke up several minutes later, showing them through the window what had happened. Still afraid that he was being watched, that his every word and gesture were under scrutiny, James did not editorialize, did not indicate that he was frightened or that he thought anything out of the ordinary had occurred. He just stated the facts, letting them draw their own conclusions, hoping those conclusions would be the right ones. But his parents looked at each other as though they’d already known about this, or at least knew what had caused it, and instead of the shock and disbelief for which he’d been hoping, there was only a grim matter-of-factness as they talked about how much work it would be to replace the plants.

Megan came into the kitchen to rinse out her cereal bowl, heard what they were talking about and looked out the window for herself, but she said nothing, offered no opinion, simply shot James a quick frightened look and then moved on.

He had to talk to someone; he couldn’t keep everything bottled up like this forever, and later that morning, he finally told Robbie about all that had happened.

But he told Robbie at his house.

They were hanging out in Robbie’s room, and the conversation drifted around to the headquarters and their detective agency, which neither of them seemed to be very excited about anymore. James sensed some ambivalence in his friend, maybe even a trace of fear, and without preamble, he said, “My house is haunted,” and blurted everything out. The words tumbled from his mouth as though poured from a pitcher, events out of sequence, descriptions over thoughts over feelings. He received no ridicule, just nods of acknowledgment that told him his friend had some of the same misgivings and had experienced the same sorts of feelings he had.

James had started with the text threat on Megan’s phone, and he ended with it as well, explaining for probably the third or fourth time that he was afraid to even think bad thoughts in their house. “Like that Twilight Zone,” he said, although Robbie didn’t get the reference.

“I knew there was something wrong,” Robbie admitted. “All that stuff with the dirt. It’s why I didn’t want to do that anymore.”

James thought of their headquarters, of the displayed skeletons he had unearthed, and he shivered. “Yeah, but I have to live there.”

“What are you going to do?” Robbie asked seriously.

James shook his head. “I don’t know. What can I do?”

“I think you should tell your parents.”

“I’ll be dead. It said, ‘I’ll kill you both.’ There’s no room for interpretation of that.”

“But can it?”

“I was almost buried alive!”

Robbie leaned forward. “But you did that to yourself. Okay, maybe it somehow got into your mind and made you want to go into that hole, but it couldn’t come out and get you. No one in your family’s been harmed. I don’t think it can do it.”

James remembered the panicked, desperate feeling of having the dirt fall in on him and shook his head. “No.”

“Then tell them outside your house, like you’re telling me. When you’re at the store with your dad or something.”

For a brief second, there was a ray of hope. But it quickly faded. “Then my dad would try to do something. Or tell my mom. And it would know. And then it would get me. Me and Megan.”

“What do you think it is, anyway?” Robbie asked. “A ghost? Some sort of demon? What?”

“I don’t know.”