The Haunted

She was smart, though, and tenacious, and she had a much better chance of figuring a way out of their predicament than he did.

Of course, she didn’t want him to be looking up things here, in the house, not after what had happened to her. But it was daytime and he was feeling brave.

Besides, part of him wanted something like that to happen to him.

As was often the case with Internet research, Julian ended up scrolling through a list of articles and sites that had nothing whatsoever to do with the subject at hand. And chances were that when he did find pertinent information, it would be a brief generic overview, the equivalent of a Reader’s Digest article.

It was his job to design Web pages, but even he had to admit that there was a lot of useless crap out there on the Web.

After fifty fruitless minutes, Julian reset his parameters to narrow down the search, but there were still some twenty-eight thousand hits, and it wasn’t until the fifth page that he found one that even applied: an official town Web site sponsored by the chamber of commerce that, in a bid for tourist dollars, played up the local history angle. There was nothing mentioned about hauntings (although with the popularity of so many ghost-hunter shows on cable, that would definitely have been a draw), but the site did describe Jardine as a former frontier town populated by the likes of the legendary Kit Carson and originally founded by the Spanish.

It wasn’t much, but it was a beginning, and Julian hoped to expand upon that with subsequent references in other linked sites.

No such luck.

He scrolled through Web page after Web page for the next hour without encountering anything even remotely helpful. Finally he decided to take a break, and he went downstairs, where, miraculously, Megan and James had found a show to both of their liking and were lying down on the living room couch and floor, respectively, watching television.

Julian did his fatherly duty and chided them for watching too much TV, telling them that, when this show was over, they had to turn off the television and find something else to do. They muttered their assent, and he went into the kitchen, where he grabbed an apple and a can of Dr Pepper.

Back in his office, he took some time off to write an e-mail to his client, detailing everything he’d accomplished so far, setting up an excuse for himself should he miss the deadline, which looked increasingly likely. He paused, reread what he wrote before sending it, took a sip of Dr Pepper—

—and the text on the screen moved.

As he watched, uncomprehending, individual letters separated themselves from words, moving up, moving down, moving out, the pixels that created them flattening and shifting, coming together in a dark mass that slowly resolved itself into a face.

The face of the ghost who had crashed their party.

The man who had died in their basement.

Julian pushed his chair away from the desk as the face looked up, looked down, looked around, then pressed against the monitor, grinning. It looked for all the world as though someone were actually trapped behind the screen, and Julian recoiled at the unnerving reality of the illusion.

Then the face became pixilated, broke apart, losing mass, losing color, fracturing into fragments that once again rearranged themselves into his e-mail message.

Julian reached over and quickly turned off his computer before backing away again, more unnerved than he would have expected to be by such an experience. He stood, then paced around the room, taking deep breaths, thinking. Maybe Claire was on the right track. Maybe there was something connecting the haunting of their house to events in the past, and maybe the thing in this house saw what he was trying to look up and wanted to scare him away.

Just as it had her.

He was scared. No doubt about that. But he also didn’t seem to be getting anywhere with his research, and it occurred to him that a more fruitful approach might be to check the library. Public libraries often had books and documents pertaining to local history, as well as reference librarians who themselves were repositories of information. He glanced at the Beatles clock on his bookcase. It was just after eleven. Julian paused for a moment, deciding what to do, then headed downstairs.

The kids were still camped out in the living room. “All right,” he told them. “Turn it off.”

“But the show’s not over,” Megan complained. “You said we could wait until it was over.”

James had already used the remote to shut off the TV.

“Come on. Let’s go.” Julian took the key ring out of his pocket, jingling it so both kids could hear.

“Okay,” James said, getting up off the floor.

“Where?” Megan asked, suspicious.

“Out for lunch. We’ll go to McDonald’s. Then I need to stop by the library and look a few things up.”

Megan wrinkled her nose in distaste. “McDonald’s?”

“Taco Bell, then.”

“I want McDonald’s!” James announced.

“We’ll flip for it. But come on; we gotta go.”