The Haunted

“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.

A figure detached itself from the gloom, a vague dark shape composed of swirling shadows that nevertheless stood there, watching them, perfectly still.

“Is that Dad?” James’s voice was hushed, and she heard the devastation in it. She had never in her life seen a look of such complete and utter despair on another human being.

It mirrored exactly the way she felt.

But no, that was not true. She was older; she was an adult. She had lived through a death before and come out the other side. She could handle this. She had done it before. But James was just a boy, an unusually sensitive boy, a boy who was much closer to his father than most children his age. Julian, too, had been closer to James than most fathers were to their sons. Probably because of Miles. He had been there for James every hour of every day of his life, the buffer between his son and the world, and the two of them stood staring at each other now, the shadow and the child, each suffused with a sadness so overwhelming it was palpable.

“Mom!”

Megan came through the doorway, a look of confused determination on her face, as though she’d done everything in her power to get here—but didn’t know why. Claire had no idea how her daughter had gotten out of bed, but she had, removing the monitoring clips from her fingers but leaving in the IV and dragging the rolling IV stand with her.

Where were the nurses?

It didn’t matter, Claire realized. Physically, medically, her children were fine, and what was happening here was so far beyond the scope of everyday reality that such a question was meaningless. The reason the nurses weren’t here was because they weren’t a part of this. It was not for them.

For a brief moment, the shadow in the center of the room grew less vague, more solid.

“Dad?” Megan said.

There were no details visible, and Claire could barely see through her tears, but she recognized the contours of the form. “Yes,” she told her children.

And then …

It was gone.

Thirty-seven

Claire. Megan. James.

He saw all three of them. Megan and James were asleep, but the arrival of his presence awakened Claire.

She saw him, too. She knew him.

He remained in the hospital, calling to them, gathering them to him, watching them, even as the rest of him moved outward, spreading thin, past the boundaries of the town, past the surrounding plain, into the desert, into the sky, into the earth. It was a nanosecond. It was a year. The others, all of them, fought him every step of the way, the power that bound him to the place of origin refusing to let go.

Stretching.

Stretching …

And then the link was cut.

He snapped back, all of him. His family was safe. And for the briefest fraction of a second, he saw them again.

And he knew they saw him.

For the last time.

Before he was gone.

Thirty-eight

Just like that, the hospital room was back to normal. Everything was back to normal, and a nurse came in to escort Megan to her room, apparently oblivious to all that had just occurred. Megan and James were crying. Claire was crying. Was it over? Was all of it over? She was filled with the certainty that it was, and she called Diane and her mom, asking whether they could watch the kids. As soon as they arrived at the hospital and she’d told them what had happened, and Diane was safely ensconced in Megan’s room, her mom in James’s, Claire drove the van over to their house, her heart sinking as she saw her parents’ Civic in the driveway.

She knew Julian had come here.

The front door was unlocked and wide-open. The second she stepped through it, she heard music. Julian’s music. A record was playing. She didn’t remember the name of the album, but she recognized the song—“Girl of My Dreams” by Bram Tchaikovsky—and she ran upstairs, buoyed by a sudden hope.