The Haunted (43 page)

On an impulse, he moved into the living room, peeked out the front window. The grass on the lawn was green; the tree was leafy and shadier than it had ever been.

The yards across the street had been restored as well.

Julian turned around, seeing the spotless dining room and kitchen beyond. Now that he had made his decision, he was reluctant to carry it out. The emotional weight of what he was about to do came crashing down on him, and the only thing he wanted was to see his family. But if he tried to leave, he would be killed. He knew that intuitively and for a fact. Despite the deceptive calm in the eye of this storm, the picture-perfect fiction surrounding him now would be maintained only as long as he cooperated, as long as he did what he said he would do. Any deviation would result in death.

Still, he had a little time, and he went over to the cupboard in the dining room where Claire kept the boxes of photos that she had not had time to put into albums. He pulled out the top box and put it on the table, sorting through the pictures. He saw a photo of Megan when she was five, dressed as Princess Jasmine for Halloween; saw James at three, standing proudly in front of a fort he had built out of couch cushions. There were photos from a visit with Santa, from a trip they’d taken to the Albuquerque Zoo, from various birthday parties. He found one he’d forgotten about: himself and James at the county fair, going down the Super Slide side by side. Julian’s vision blurred as the tears came, and he’d never loved his wife or his children as much as he did at that moment.

He would never get to see Megan and James grow up,
he realized, never get to go to their weddings, never get to show them these photos when they were adults, never get to see
their
children. It was a whole world he was going to miss, a whole life, and he was overwhelmed by a sense of loss so profound that he dropped the picture on the table, refusing to look at any more photos.

It was time, he decided.

He just had to figure out how to do it.

Hanging was out. He was afraid to go that way, and it was probably the rudest, cruelest thing he could do to his family. One of them would have to find his body, and that would be an image that would remain with the person for the rest of his or her life.

Likewise stabbing himself, which he probably wouldn’t even be able to get through.

The old
M*A*S*H
song was wrong, he thought. Suicide
wasn’t
painless.

Poison was probably the best. Or an overdose. He went into the kitchen, looking through the cupboard where they kept the medicine and vitamins. There were a couple of leftover prescription bottles from some of the kids’ winter illnesses, but they weren’t a family that kept sleeping pills around or had any heavy-duty medications. Under the sink he found Drano, and in the laundry room was bleach, but both of those would be nasty, and he wasn’t sure whether they would kill him or he would throw them up and find himself in the hospital with a lot of explaining to do.

He returned to the cupboard to check again and found a full bottle of Advil as well as a bottle of the baby aspirin that Claire had him take with his vitamins. Could he overdose on those? He read the Advil warning label: “The risk of heart attack or stroke may increase if you use more than directed.”

Yessss.

It was the voice he’d heard before.

Apparently, he was being watched more closely than he thought.

Julian picked up the Advil bottle, then paused. Was his mind being read? It seemed that way. Which meant that it knew what he was planning to do and wasn’t worried about it. Did that mean his scheme wouldn’t work?

He didn’t dwell on it, thought about something else, the price of gas, the president’s poll numbers, trying to keep his mind clear so he wouldn’t be found out. Briefly, he considered running away, dashing out of the house and hauling ass down the street. But he knew that wouldn’t work. He’d
felt
the power of that thing. It had grown so strong that it had physically changed the interior of his house. It would kill him before he got out the door this time.

Then it would go after Claire, Megan and James.

He needed to put an end to it once and for all.

Julian got a glass out of the dish rack, filled it with water and opened the Advil bottle. It was almost new. The label said it contained a hundred tablets. He poured several into his hand, washed them down with water. Did it again. And again, and again, until the bottle was empty. Feeling nothing yet, he wandered through the dining room and into the living room.

He thought of leaving a detailed note, being completely clear and unambiguous, because he didn’t want there to be any questions or misunderstandings, didn’t want Claire or the kids to blame themselves. This was going to be tough enough for them without the added burdens of guilt and confusion. There was no time to sit down and write a letter, however. He needed to act quickly before
it
figured out his plan. That was why he was still trying to shield his thoughts, trying not to think about what he was thinking, trying to concentrate on
superfluous matters. His plan would work only if he was allowed to carry it out, if he maintained the element of surprise. He couldn’t waste time penning a letter to his family—and he couldn’t explain in the letter what he wanted to explain, because then
it
would know, too.

Besides, Claire and the kids wouldn’t know he had committed suicide. They would think that the creature in their house had killed him. As hard as that would be for them to accept, it was still better than the truth.

He looked to his left. On the sideboard was a photo he had taken of Claire and the kids at the hot-air-balloon festival a few years back. Claire had had longer hair, and was wearing jeans shorts that no longer fit her and a T-shirt that her sister had brought back from Santa Fe. James was missing his two front teeth, and Megan was smiling in that innocent way she used to have but that she’d lost sometime in the past few years. The picture made him sad, not only for what he was going to miss but for what was already gone.

He took out the picture of Miles he’d been carrying in his pocket, leaning it up against the balloon-festival photo. Miles was next to James, and when seen together, it was obvious the two of them were brothers.

Julian started crying. The tears burned hot on his cheeks, and he plopped down on the couch, feeling an odd lurch in his chest as he did so.

What was the last thing he had said to Claire? he wondered. It hadn’t been, “I love you,” though it should have been. It was something more mundane, like, “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” or, “Is there anything else you want me to bring back?”

He should call her now, say it to her, tell her that he loved her, but his cell phone was still in the car, where he’d thrown it on the seat, and even if the phones in the house worked, which was doubtful, his fingers weren’t
up to the task of dialing. They felt fat, like overstuffed sausages, and when he tried to wiggle them, he found that he couldn’t.

He couldn’t move his left arm at all.

As his vision blurred, as he started to fade, he looked over at the pictures of his wife, his daughter, his sons. A final tear rolled down his cheek.

Good-bye
, he thought.

Struggling.

He was not himself anymore. There was no himself anymore. He grasped for purchase, trying to remember what he had been and figure out what he was now. He was a part of something but he was lost in it, sightless, adrift, with only the most rudimentary senses to guide him. Then he was touched and touching, energy flowing into him, through him, connecting him to everything, to all of it. The form he had taken was enormous and powerful, and he could sense within it the competing wills of the thousands who had come before him. He was them, they were he, and while this new form was unwieldy, almost ungovernable, he was determined to take charge, to be in control. It was imperative that he do so, though he could not remember why it was so important.

He stretched out.

There was no time here. Seconds could have passed or minutes or hours or days or months or years. It could be today, tomorrow or yesterday.

And suddenly …

He could see the house. He was in it, around it, part of it. He knew where he was and what he was and why he was here. In the living room, his body was still on the couch, where it had died, and he took care of it, made it
disappear so no one would be able to find it, so his family would not have to see his corpse.

His family.

Claire.

Megan.

James.

He knew instantly what had been done to them and what was planned for them. For the first time since
becoming,
he understood what he was supposed to do, what he had to do.

He remembered.

But he didn’t know how to go about it. He couldn’t shoot himself, couldn’t jump off a bridge, couldn’t even take pills or poison, the way he had before.

How powerful was he? he wondered. He reached out, saw the street outside, felt the other houses on the block. A police car drove by, and he touched the man inside, made sure that as he drove on he thought there was nothing unusual in the sight of all these empty homes and dead yards.

How far could he spread out? Could he reach all the way to the hospital? Of course he could. Megan had been made to cut herself and James had been taken, both in their grandparents’ house. So he needed to go farther than that, needed to stretch as far as he could.

To the breaking point.

That was it. He knew from everything he was and everyone who was here that it was the link to this spot that kept his form alive, that granted it power. He needed to leave, to sever all ties. If he could move from this location, he could break the connection off at the source. It would be like pulling the plug on an appliance. Whatever was left would dissipate, float away.

Already he felt resistance. John Lynch. Jim Swanson. The man before him. And the man before him, and the man before him …

He needed to maintain control. It was hard, but it was
possible. He was the newest and the strongest, and what he had become was what
it
had become. They were one and the same; that was how it worked, and he tamped down the other voices even as he moved away from the house, away from the neighborhood, through the town.

Stretching.

The lights in the hospital flickered.

Claire had been about to fall asleep. Maybe she
had
been asleep. But the sudden sputtering of the overhead fluorescents in what almost looked like a lightning flash jerked her wide-awake. She was in a modern hospital, in a room filled with expensive diagnostic equipment, with medical professionals hard at work throughout the building, yet she was filled with the same sense of dread she’d felt back at their house.

Frightened, she checked on James, lying asleep on the bed before her, then dashed down the corridor to Megan’s room in order to make sure her daughter was all right. She passed two nurses at the station between the rooms, but that didn’t make her feel any less uneasy. She knew what was going on. She’d experienced this before.

The hospital was haunted.

Where was Julian? He should have been back—she looked at her watch, shocked at the time—hours ago! Her heart felt like it stopped for a second. Something had happened to him. She didn’t know how, didn’t know where, didn’t know when, but it had, and she was almost hysterical as she ran back to the nurses’ station.

She stopped, taking a deep breath before she spoke
so she wouldn’t seem crazy. “I need one of you to go into room one twenty-eight and watch my daughter, Megan Perry. I’m with my son in one twenty-four. I’m afraid something might happen to one of them.”

The lights flickered again, the ones in the corridor, the ones above the nurses’ station, the ones in the rooms, and the nurses looked at each other worriedly. “I’m sorry,” the older one told her. “But we need to stay here and monitor all the patients. If there’s a power outage and the emergency backup comes on, we need to make sure there are no glitches or disruptions that could endanger one of them.”

There was no flickering this time, but Claire saw something worse, something that the nurses, looking down at the screens before them, did not see at all.

A twisted shadow, folding in on itself, moving from ceiling to wall to floor before sliding through the open doorway to James’s room.

“James!” she cried, running over. She screamed his name at the top of her lungs in the hope that one of the nurses would follow, but she heard no footsteps or cries behind her, and when she rounded the corner of the doorway, James was still sound asleep in his bed.

Couldn’t anyone hear her?

The atmosphere in the room was heavy, and though the lights remained on, they seemed dim and were unable to penetrate the darkness that had enveloped the walls and corners. James’s bed and the empty bed next to his were little islands of visibility amid the growing gloom.
Things
were moving, unidentifiable entities that were glimpsed only out of the corner of her eye. Below the beeps and pulsations of the machines were whispers, sibilant sounds that were not quite words but that still seemed to carry meaning.

She should have been more afraid than she was. But there was familiarity in the horror, a pattern or signature or underlying unity that was almost recognizable.

Was
recognizable.

“Julian?” she whispered.

Everything stopped. The movement, the sound, all of it.

She knew at that instant that he was dead, though she didn’t want to believe it, refused to let herself believe it. “No,” she said, wiping her nose. “It’s not true.”

“What’s not true, Mom?” James sat up, rubbing his eyes. He froze, looked around, instantly aware of the changed nature of the environment, knowing they were not alone in the room. Claire moved next to him, reaching out to hold his hand.