The Haunted (28 page)

She found the supernatural aspects of the various accounts disturbing. She knew that most of it could be put down to the superstitions of the time and the fears that probably befell all sojourners through what were then unexplored lands.

But …

But in her mind, as she read, she imagined the area as it must have appeared back then, without the buildings, without the people, without the roads, and in her conception, the focal point of the horrific events was the land on which their house now stood.

Of course, that was ridiculous. No church had ever been constructed on that spot. Still, the events described in those histories possessed an unnerving correlation to the events that were transpiring between the walls of
her own home, and thinking about them left her feeling cold and anxious.

She was determined to bring it up to Oscar when she saw him, and, luckily, they both arrived early to the courthouse, which gave them a chance to talk. He, of course, wanted to go over the particulars of the hearing, wanted her to once again walk him through everything that was going to happen, as well as reassure him that they would eventually emerge victorious. Hand-holding was an important component of the practice of law, and though they’d had the exact same conversation just last night, they did it again until his nerves were soothed and he was ready to play his role.

With some extra time to kill, Claire saw her opportunity and cleared her throat. “Oscar,” she said cautiously. “I’ve been reading the material you provided me. These stories about evil spirits and haunted places …”

He waved her away. “Justifications. A way to rationalize the murder, brutality and atrocities committed by first the Spanish against the native Americans and then the English against the Spanish. Don’t worry. They won’t hurt our credibility. History texts are full of references to ghosts and demons and the supernatural. It was how the people in those days explained events and phenomena they did not understand—if you read some of the accounts of the California Gold Rush written by the men of that time, they would curl your hair. Often such stories are excuses for bad behavior, defenses for violent societal overreactions that seem indefensible to us today. And, in this case, they were used to justify the slaughter of opposing societies.”

Claire nodded, as though in agreement. She wanted to pursue this line of questioning, but chose to wait until after the case had been decided before probing any
deeper. She could not afford to engender any doubt in her client, and she knew that by asking what she really wanted to ask, she would risk losing Oscar’s confidence. It was clear that he disbelieved in the supernatural and put no stock in any paranormal explanations. If she indicated that she felt otherwise, it might make him think that she was unstable.

Maybe she was.

At home, Julian and the kids had eaten by the time she returned.

“How’d it go?” Julian asked.

“Good,” she said. “The deposition went well, and the district is already indicating that they might be willing to settle. We have a strong case, and they know it.”

“That’s great,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said, though without much enthusiasm. She opened the door of the refrigerator and took out a head of lettuce, intending to make herself a salad.

“What’s wrong?” Julian asked.

She looked at him. “You know what’s wrong.”

“There hasn’t been anything—”

“Don’t,” she told him. She chopped the lettuce, got out some tomatoes and carrots, and he wandered back out to the living room, where Megan and James were fighting over control of the TV.

Both of the kids went to bed early, while it was still a little light out. Granted, the days were long and it didn’t get dark until sometime between eight and nine, but it was totally out of character for either of them to voluntarily go to bed at this hour, and Claire had a sneaking suspicion that they wanted to be asleep before night truly fell.

She didn’t blame them.

Julian was watching a movie on HBO. She watched it
with him for a while, and when she was sure the kids were asleep, she told him about what she’d been reading, the historical accounts of ghosts and demons and unexplainable phenomena. He was skeptical, of course, but not that skeptical, and she knew that while he wanted to disbelieve, he probably did not.

“It has to be connected to what’s happening here, to us,” she said. “It makes sense that if those sorts of things were occurring on this land hundreds of years ago, they’re probably affecting what’s going on now.”

“What is this, a monster movie?” he tried to joke. But he knew as well as she did that what was going on was closer to that reality than anything else, and when she stared at him disapprovingly and said nothing, he apologized.

They were too far along to pretend that they were overreacting to a settling of the house or similarly rational events that could explain what they were going through. This was bigger than that, more concrete. Multiple people had seen a ghost walk down their hallway and into the living room. It was time to look for real answers, not logical explanations.

They talked about it for a while, not really coming to any conclusions, agreeing only that they needed to investigate the situation more, watch the kids carefully and be very, very cautious.

Julian was tired, had a headache, and went to bed early, but Claire was wired and wide-awake. She worked on a few pretrial motions for the Seaver divorce and tried to determine the starting point for a settlement with the school district. Her mind wandered, though, and she found herself thinking about something she’d read, a strange small detail she’d come across in two of the books, the one written by the farmer and the one penned by the Mexican historian.

As a test, Claire went outside. Everyone in the house was asleep, so she unlocked and opened the front door very quietly, closing it behind her. She walked onto the lawn, then to the sidewalk. She had been out after dark before, but she’d never had any reason to study the sky. Now, however, she looked up.

The night was black.

No stars.

She tried to recall whether she’d seen the moon since moving to their new home and couldn’t.

Shivering, she walked down the sidewalk until she was in front of the Ribieros’ house, where she stopped, looking up.

The Little Dipper and Orion’s belt were right where they were supposed to be, and a half-moon hovered just above the roofline of a house across the street.

She’d been afraid this would happen, on some level had
known
it would happen, but the sheer concrete fact of it took her breath away. This wasn’t some nebulous experience that could be interpreted in many different ways. It was a measurable truth: the moon and stars could not be seen from their house.

Why this was the case, she had no idea, but she walked very slowly along the sidewalk, looking up all the while. The sky was clear and beautiful, the kind she remembered from childhood. She expected to find a specific cutoff point beyond which the stars and moon could no longer be seen, but instead the lights in the sky did a slow fade, as though they were gradually being obscured or turned off. By the time she reached the boundary of her yard, the sky was jet-black.

What did this mean? No answers suggested themselves, but the scope of the phenomenon left her feeling small and helpless. This was far bigger than just having a ghost in their house. She walked down the sidewalk in
the opposite direction, and the same thing recurred: the moon and stars gradually reappeared as she moved away from her yard.

She returned to her driveway and stood there for a moment, not sure whether she wanted to go back inside. At the moment, however, she felt safer inside than out, and she stepped onto the porch, opened the front door and walked into the living room—where the lights suddenly turned on, revealing the laundry basket sitting in the center of the floor.

From the kitchen area, she heard a door swing open and hit the wall. Hard.

The door to the basement.

She couldn’t deal with this now, and she ran quickly down the hall to the bedroom, not bothering to check the cellar door, not bothering to turn off the lights in the living room. Breathing hard, she closed the door behind her and instinctively pressed her back against it to prevent anything from getting in. She thought about waking Julian, thought about telling him to go upstairs and get the kids and have them sleep with them for the night, but she saw him on the bed, and both her fear and those thoughts fled instantly from her mind. For he had decided to sleep naked, and had kicked off the sheet and blanket. He was on his back and his erection stuck straight up in the air.

Forgetting everything else, she walked forward, stripping off her clothes before climbing onto the bed.

She sucked him while he slept, working feverishly on his erection, and he came in her mouth, still asleep.

She swallowed, masturbated, then closed her eyes and dreamed of a world where there were no stars, no moon, no sun, and the sky was always black.

Once again, Julian spent the better part of the morning trying to look up information about their house, their street, the town. His deadline was real and it was nearly here, but Claire wanted him to investigate further and try to find out what he could about the history of their property. She wouldn’t specify what she hoped to do with such knowledge, but he knew how her mind worked, and knew she probably had a plan. Although whether that plan was to sue the realtor and the seller for not revealing that their house was haunted, or whether it was to perform some sort of ritual to exorcise the ghost, he couldn’t say.

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.”