The Haunted

Claire immediately felt guilty for even contemplating such mundane, practical considerations, and she pushed all such thoughts from her mind before telling Julian and Diane to meet her at her parents’ house, and climbing into the van. She wanted to cry, wanted to dwell on her unhappiness and wallow in it, but luckily driving required concentration, and her emotions were once again under control as she pulled into her parents’ driveway.

All that hard-won discipline threatened to crumble, however, as soon as she walked into the house, saw her mom and knew she would have to explain that her dad was missing. A more enlightened parent might let her kids in on the conversation, too, but Claire’s instinct was to keep them away from this as much as possible, and she told Megan and James to go into their rooms while she talked to Grandma.

She didn’t know where to start. Diane was already crying, but Julian stepped into the breach and informed her mom that they’d just come back from their house. “We were looking for Roger. He went over there this morning to prove me wrong, I guess, and show me that our house isn’t really haunted. He called Diane first to ask whether Rob wanted to go with him, but Rob was at work. After he hung up, she got another call, a weird call, and we went out there to make sure he was all right. His car was parked in the driveway, but he wasn’t in the house or in the yard or in the garage. We couldn’t find him.”

“He disappeared,” Claire said, touching her mom’s arm. “He was just … gone.”

Her mother seemed confused. “He can’t have just disappeared.”

“He did, Mom. I don’t know how, but he did.”

Diane was nodding. “That house is haunted. I’ve never experienced anything like it. The bathroom was all fogged up, and there was a … a face in the mirror.”

Their mom started to cry.

“We called the police,” Claire said, “but they can’t do anything until he’s been missing for forty-eight hours.”

“What do we do?” her mom asked.

That was the question. Claire had been going over possibilities in her head, but the truth was that there weren’t a whole lot of options. This wasn’t a situation where the choices were self-evident. She’d never encountered anything even remotely similar, and doubted that anyone else had, either. Even if the police were to get involved, she doubted that they would be able to find her dad. He had been taken by the same creature that had attacked Julian, and whether her father was alive or dead, they would never discover what had happened to him unless they figured out how to stop whatever lived in that house.

Whether he was alive or dead.

Her vision grew blurry as the tears threatened to come. She forced them back. She needed to be strong right now. For her kids, for her mom, for herself.

“Maybe he’ll be back later,” her mom said. “Maybe he’ll be back in time for dinner.”

Either she didn’t understand what was happening or didn’t want to face it. Claire nodded. “Maybe,” she said.

“Maybe,” Diane echoed.

But he wasn’t.

Thirty-two

“What the hell are you doing?”

Jumping at the sound of her mother’s voice, Megan cut herself.

Deep.

She’d thought the bathroom door had been locked, and she was sitting on the toilet, pants down, steak knife in hand, making small, light incisions on the inside of her thigh, just above the knee, when the door swung open. Startled by her mother’s shout, Megan let her hand slip, the knife drawing not just across the surface of the skin but slicing through fat into muscle. The pain was incredible, and she cried out, her eyes tearing up even as they caught the stricken look of horror on her mom’s face.

“Megan!”

She hadn’t been doing it to make herself unattractive this time. She’d been doing it … Well, she didn’t know why she’d been doing it. It had seemed like a good idea ten minutes ago, but now, with the blood gushing down her leg onto the linoleum, she realized how crazy it was. She reached for the toilet paper, pulled and pulled until she’d unspooled enough for it to pile into folds on the floor, then grabbed the entire mass of tissue and shoved it against the flowing cut, shocked to see how quickly the blood soaked through.

Her mom was screaming, calling for her grandma and her dad, and in seconds they were there. Megan was in so much pain that she wasn’t even embarrassed for them to see her with her pants down.

“Oh, my God,” her dad said.

By this time, her mom had soaked a washcloth in cold water from the sink and was pressing it against the wound, having tossed the toilet paper aside.

“I’ll get ice,” her grandma said quickly, and now Megan knew she was really hurt, because James was standing in the doorway and she didn’t even care.

She’d never felt such intense agony, and she was no longer crying, because she was gritting her teeth against the pain, squinting her eyes so tightly she could not see.