The Haunted

Seventeen

The plants in the backyard were dead.

Every last one of them.

James was the first one to discover it. He saw it initially from the kitchen window while pouring himself a glass of orange juice, and if he had needed any proof that the thing in their house had the power to carry out its threats, the simultaneous expiration of every single living organism between the house, the garage and the alley was it. Stunned, still in pajamas and slippers, he stepped outside onto the patio, looking across the suddenly brown grass to the spiny, leafless twigs that had been the rosebushes, and the dead hedges that ringed the border of the property. It was impossible, but he could see that it had happened, and he felt a chill in his bones as he surveyed the lifeless yard.

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.”

“But you must’ve thought about it.”

“Maybe it’s the house itself. Like in Monster House or something.”

“Maybe,” Robbie said thoughtfully.

“I just don’t know what we can do about it. Except move. And that’s not going to happen. Who knows? Maybe even if we did move, it would follow us.”

“We’ll think of something. Both of us are on the case now.” Robbie smiled. “The R.J. Detective Agency in our first and biggest mystery.”

James tried to smile back, but he didn’t feel like smiling. He wasn’t sure Robbie understood the scope of this thing. Sure, his friend believed him and was scared of the house, but this was big, this was deep, and there was no way two kids could stop something of this magnitude.

“I’m thirsty,” James said. “Do you have anything to drink?”

“Hawaiian Punch.”

They walked out to the kitchen, where Robbie’s mom was talking on the phone. After lunch, she was going to take them to go swimming, and if he played his cards right, James thought he might be able to finagle an invitation to dinner. He wanted to put off going home for as long as possible. Especially now. Spilling his guts to Robbie made him feel as though he’d broken the rules, and he couldn’t help thinking that he would be punished as soon as he got home. He dreaded the thought of returning.

He accepted a glass of Hawaiian Punch and took a big drink, then nearly choked as a terrible idea abruptly occurred to him.

What if he’d already been punished? What if Megan had just fallen down the stairs and broken her neck? What if he returned to find his parents dead? He was filled with a sudden need to call home and make sure everyone was all right. The compulsion was strong, but he resisted it. If he gave in, doubt and worry would rule him. He would never be able to leave the house without being certain that something awful was about to happen. He needed to relax, not think about it, enjoy the time he had away from home.

The fear would return soon enough.

Robbie grabbed a bag of Chips Ahoy! cookies, and the two of them returned to the bedroom, where they were planning to play games on Robbie’s computer until it was time to eat. Entering the room a half step behind his friend, James saw something he hadn’t noticed before. He suddenly felt cold. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing. A small reddish box was protruding from the top of Robbie’s bedspread, its upper third resting on the pillow.

Robbie frowned. “I don’t know.” He walked over, picked it up—

—and James saw the frightening face of the Old Maid on the cover of a battered box of cards. She was not smiling, as she had been on the card he’d found on his bed, but possessed instead the terrifying rage of the Old Maid he remembered from when he was little. The hag glared at him, and he felt like a kindergartner again, afraid of supposedly benign pictures that to him revealed sinister import.

“That’s weird,” Robbie said, but he didn’t seem overly concerned. “I never saw that before.” He turned the box over in his hand. “That old lady looks kind of creepy, huh?”

James nodded dumbly. He was filled once again with the urge to call home, the certainty that something horrible had befallen his family, and, finally, he gave in. His mom answered when he called, and she turned out to be fine. So did his dad. So did his sister. His mom seemed slightly confused as to why he’d called, so he made up an excuse, a weak fictional distillation of the truth, telling her that he’d heard a siren coming from the direction of their neighborhood and wanted to make sure the house hadn’t burned down. She laughed. “No, nothing’s burning,” she told him. “Don’t worry. Have a good time.”

But he did worry.

Robbie’s mom made them tuna sandwiches for lunch, then drove them to the Municipal Plunge, where they spent the better part of the afternoon playing in the water, leaving only when a lifeguard announced that the pool would be closing for a private party. They changed in the boys’ dressing room, and on the way home, Robbie’s mom stopped off at Dairy Queen, where all three of them got sundaes.

James stayed late at Robbie’s, and did try to invite himself to dinner, but they were going out for pizza with Max’s baseball team, and Robbie’s dad politely but firmly insisted that James had to go home.

He was dropped off at his house just after five, and, looking at the front yard as he got out of the car, seeing the tree with the tire swing, the green grass and full foliage, knowing that the backyard was brown and dead, he had the uneasy feeling that the house was putting on a show, presenting a cheery false face to the public while keeping its ghastly secret self hidden. He stared up at the structure. It had a porch and a door, windows and walls, the same elements all houses had. But were they arranged in an eerie way? Could you tell the house was bad just by looking at it?

No, not really.

That was the truth. He wanted to ascribe malevolence to the building, wanted to see a face in the arrangement of windows and door. But those things weren’t there. The truth was not that simple. The house was haunted, but it wasn’t alive. Whatever evil resided in this place, it lived in his home; it was not his home.

And it had control over the backyard.

“See you later!” Robbie’s dad called out.

“Thanks for coming over!” his mom said.

James waved at them as the car pulled away. Robbie, he noticed, hadn’t said anything. He, too, had been looking at the house.

James started slowly across the lawn, walking toward the front door, feeling like a man stepping up to the gallows, a fearful heaviness settling over him the closer he got to the building. Summer was nearing its end, but though it was after five, the day was still bright, the sun still fairly high in the sky. So there was no reason for the lights in the house to be on. But the fact that they weren’t made him feel anxious, and he took a deep breath before opening the front door. Would he find his sister lying on the floor of the living room in a pool of blood? Would his parents be locked in the basement, begging to be released? He didn’t know, but he pushed open the door, prepared for anything.

And saw Megan and his dad on the couch, she reading a magazine, he watching the news.

His mom was in the kitchen, where a light was on, and she’d obviously heard the door open, because she stepped into the kitchen doorway and looked at him from across the dining room, across the living room. “Why are you so late?” she wanted to know. “Did something happen?”

“No,” he said, and exhaled the breath he’d been holding.

“Is something wrong?”

He smiled at her, not a strong smile but a real one. “No, Mom. Everything’s okay.”