Spooked

 

S.G. Browne

The telephone rang, a scream in the night.

Donna Baskin woke up, fear flowing through her veins like ice water. She stared at the phone that crouched on the table like some dark nocturnal creature, waiting for it to ring again. The phone remained silent.

Out of the corner of her eye, Donna thought she saw a shape drift across the room and vanish into her closet. She lay motionless, watching the pool of darkness beyond the open closet door. After several minutes, she relaxed, convinced that what she’d seen had existed in the waking twilight between sleep and consciousness. Besides, if anyone had come into the room, Trevor would have started barking. Donna could see the shape of the German shepherd sprawled out on the floor next to the California king.

To her right, Barry lay sleeping. After more than six years, Donna still found herself admiring her husband: enjoying his face and his movements and how peaceful he looked when he slept. She studied him now, watching his chest rise and fall, listening to him wheeze in a soft melody that would eventually escalate into a symphony of snores. Donna hoped she wouldn’t have any trouble recapturing sleep before the maestro started conducting his overture, but first she had to pee.

She slid from beneath the covers and stepped past Trevor, shuffling across the carpet into the adjoining bathroom: a pristine, white-tiled, guesthouse of a bathroom with a sunken two-person bathtub and a skylight directly overhead. More than the hardwood floors in the living room, more than the island in the kitchen, more than the spiral staircase: the bathroom had been the feature of the house that convinced Donna she couldn’t live anywhere else. Barry had been convinced by the asking price, which had been so unbelievably low that he’d been able to trade in the Nissan for a new Volvo.

“We’d be fools not to buy it,” he’d said.

“I know,” Donna said, the night before they’d made their offer. “It just seems like they could get almost twice what they’re asking. What if there’s something wrong with it?”

“Honey, the only thing wrong with the house is the fact that we’re not living in it.”

They’d moved in two weeks ago. On the first few nights, the full moon beamed through the master bathroom’s skylight, lighting up the bathtub and white tile with an almost transcendent glow. Now, on the first night of the new moon, the bathroom existed in deep, graveyard shadows that huddled in the corners and spilled across the floor.

Donna shuddered, then hastily finished her business and hurried out of the bathroom. She wasn’t easily spooked. As a kid she’d never imagined there were monsters in her closet or tigers under her bed; teenage ghost stories around the campfire never left her wide awake. Tonight, however, she’d suddenly developed a case of the creeps.

When she reached the bed, she noticed Trevor had deserted his post, probably to go downstairs to get a midnight snack. Donna wondered if the German shepherd ever woke up in the middle of the night and imagined he saw things that weren’t actually there.

Sleep didn’t come easily. Donna kept seeing flickers of movement at the edges of her vision as she listened to the house settle, creaking and groaning. She was unable to shake the feeling that the noises she heard were caused by someone stepping on loose floorboards. More than once she sat up in bed, her eyes fixed on the open bedroom door, certain she’d seen someone in the hallway. Eventually, she drifted off into a light, fitful sleep.

She awoke to the loud, shrill scream of the telephone.

Donna stared at the phone, her heart pounding against her chest like an ardent fist. The phone rang a second time, then a third. Donna reached toward it hesitantly, wondering if she should answer. Halfway through the fifth ring she picked up the phone, its peal reverberating for several seconds through the house.

“Hello?” she croaked.

No one answered.

“Hello?” she said again, waiting for a response. But all she heard was a child’s voice, a girl’s voice, faint and distant, like a crossed line or a bad connection.

Out of the corner of her eye, Donna saw movement. She cried out and fumbled for the bedside lamp, turning the knob and sending a soft wash of light across the room—not enough to completely dissolve the shadows, but enough to dispel any shapes or figures she’d imagined crouched in the far corners. Nevertheless, the feeling that someone else was in the house clung to her like wet, dead leaves.

Donna reached for her husband to wake him, to ask him to take a quick look around and assure her she was just imagining things. That’s when she realized the bed beside her was empty.

“Barry?” she said, her voice rough and trembling. The house answered in a series of creaks and groans.

“Barry?” she called out again, louder this time. Still no response. She noticed Trevor hadn’t returned from his midnight snack and wondered if her husband had joined her dog downstairs. Barry had been known to fix a midnight snack of his own.

Silently she slid out from beneath the covers, slipped on a nightshirt, and stepped across the bedroom into the hallway, turning on the light and listening for any sound of her husband or Trevor. All she could hear was the rhythmic ticking of the grandfather clock in the downstairs foyer.

Donna approached the head of the spiral staircase, passing one of the guest rooms. From inside the room she thought she heard soft, high-pitched laughter, but when she reached inside and flicked on the light, she saw nothing but an unmade double bed, a dresser, a desk, and a handful of boxes still in need of unpacking. The door of the walk-in closet stood open like an invitation, a rack of clothes disappearing into shadows that seemed unusually deep, as though the closet extended beyond its walls. She closed the closet door before leaving the room with the light still burning.

After checking the guest bathroom, she descended the stairs while her eyes adjusted to the gloom that pervaded the floor below. She didn’t see any glow from the kitchen filtering into the foyer or downstairs hallway and she didn’t hear the expected opening and closing of cupboards or the rattling of dishes.

“Barry?” she whispered. “Barry, are you down there?”

When she reached the bottom of the stairs, Donna checked to make sure the front door was locked before she crept down the hallway into the kitchen, flipping on lights as she went. In the kitchen, she turned on the overhead fluorescents, lighting up the blond pine cabinets, white counters, and white-tiled floor. During the day, with natural light filtering in through the windows, the kitchen radiated a warmth that filled Donna with a sense of tranquility. Even after sunset, the room offered a comfortable, charming atmosphere. Now, in the middle of the night, beneath the stark glare of the fluorescents, the kitchen felt cold and sterile, like an autopsy room in a morgue.

Fingers of panic brushed at the back of Donna’s neck. She didn’t see any food on the counters or any sign that Barry had come into the kitchen, nor did she see or hear anything to indicate her husband or Trevor were anywhere downstairs, let alone in the house.

Where could they have gone?

The sound of something scratching on wood sent a fresh column of chills crawling up Donna’s spine.

She turned toward the noise, her eyes wide and searching, her heart thundering in her ears. Beyond the kitchen, past the front hallway, a short flight of stairs dropped down into the family room, where a truncated hallway branched off past a study, ending at a door that led into the garage. It was from this direction that Donna heard the persistent scratching.

“Trevor?”

She took several steps toward the stairs, listening. In between the scratching, she heard what sounded like Trevor’s low-pitched whine.

Blowing out a sigh of nervous relief, Donna hurried down the stairs into the family room, turning on the light as she walked along the hallway past the study. She didn’t know how Trevor had managed to get into the garage or where Barry was, but she’d feel a hundred times better looking for her husband with a ninety-pound German shepherd at her side.

Donna slid back the deadbolt, then opened the garage door. She expected Trevor to come bounding gratefully past her, wagging his tail, knocking her over with his trademark enthusiasm. Instead, in the glow thrown off by the hallway light, Donna saw the vacant concrete stoop where Trevor should have been. For an instant she thought Trevor might have run behind the Volvo or the Honda, playing one of his games that often made him seem more human than canine. That thought vanished when she looked into the garage.

Beyond the door, the garage sat dark and empty. No Trevor. No Barry. No Volvo or Honda or stacks of unpacked boxes or mountain bikes hanging from the rafters. There weren’t any rafters. Nor were there any shelves or walls or windows. Instead, a vacant gloom extended out in all directions.

Deep within the shadows, Donna heard whispers. And laughter, high-pitched and unearthly. A large shape rushed out of the darkness just before she slammed and locked the door.

As something thumped against the door from the other side, Donna backed away. Unable to speak or breathe or think, she was lost in a void without sensation, without reason. Then she heard a shriek—an angry, inhuman shriek—and she fled into the study, groping for the phone, knocking the handset off the receiver and on to the floor as something began to pound relentlessly against the garage door.

Her fingers fumbled over the keypad in an attempt to dial 911. After pressing the wrong buttons, she tried again, sobbing and gasping, struggling to maintain control, not realizing until she’d dialed 911 three times that there was no dial tone, no tone when she pressed the buttons, nothing but the empty sound of silence. At first she thought the phone line was dead, then she heard the faint sound of a dog barking, and a man’s voice, muffled and distant, calling out for help.

“Barry?” she gasped into the mouthpiece.

Seconds later, the lights went out.

From out in the hallway Donna heard another shriek, followed by a loud crack. She screamed and dropped the phone, running out of the study and stumbling down the hallway through the darkness, her breath coming out in choked, rapid gasps as the garage door began to splinter behind her.

The darkness swirled around her like a fog, distorting her perceptions, turning the short hallway into an endless corridor that stretched out in front of her. She ran her hand along the wall, groping her way forward, searching for the corner, suddenly aware of the cold, damp, rough surface beneath her touch that felt like stone instead of plaster.

Behind her, Donna could hear the garage door threatening to break apart, certain that at any moment it would tear loose of its hinges, taking her sanity with it.

She stumbled through the hallway, praying for this to be a nightmare, praying that she would wake up in bed with Barry snoring beside her and Trevor asleep on the floor. She let out a sob that was quickly followed by a second, stopping the third one before it could take hold and double her over in a useless, wailing heap.

Up ahead, a dim light seeped into the darkness and Donna could see the ragged outline that marked the end of the hallway. She ran toward it—aware that the hallway had stretched to more than twenty times its normal length and that the opening looked like the exit to a cave and that she couldn’t see any furniture in the family room or any sign that the family room still existed. She didn’t have time to think or understand. She only wanted to get out of the hallway, out of this nightmare, and out of the house.

She never saw the shape crouched along the base of the wall.

Donna cried out as something grabbed her by the ankle, sending her sprawling forward, knocking the air from her lungs. She sat up, turned around, and saw a dark shape sliding toward her.

“It’s lonely down here,” a voice said, the words seeming to bubble up through a thick, oozing liquid. “It’s sooooo lonely.”

Donna opened her mouth and tried to scream, fighting for breath, struggling to get away, kicking against whatever had its fingers wrapped around her ankle. Soft, wet, smacking sounds came out of the darkness. The stench of decay surrounded her.

Something cold and slimy brushed against her thigh and she screamed, kicking out again. Her foot connected against flesh that burst like a rotten egg. The thing holding her let out a grunt and the fingers fell away.

Scrambling to her feet, Donna ran down the hallway, trailing frantic sobs behind her. Twice she fell and scraped her knees, not on gray Berber carpet but on hard, packed earth. When the hallway finally ended, she turned the corner and scrambled across a pile of stones that had replaced the short flight of stairs. The stones shifted and her ankle caught, twisting, as she fell into the kitchen. Her right knee cracked against a slab of granite and Donna cried out in surprise and pain. Reality unraveled like a frayed bandage.

Donna stared into what had once been the kitchen. The table and chairs were gone, along with the counters and cabinets. Nothing remained, not even the walls or the ceiling. Instead, through swirling drifts of fog, she saw a short, circular stone wall that looked like an opening to a well, out of which emanated a soft, eldritch light: like the glow of a distant moon of a distant world. From somewhere deep inside the well, Donna heard a dog baying.

“Trevor?” The name came out in a choked whisper.

In the cave behind her, the pounding culminated in an explosion of wood as the garage door ripped away from the frame, unleashing whatever was on the other side in a fury of shrieks.

Screaming, Donna staggered away from the well toward the front door, past the spiral staircase that had turned into a dead, twisted, fallen oak tree, its branches reaching up beyond the second floor that no longer existed.

The floor trembled beneath her as something thundered through what had once been her dream house, shrieking and grunting, crashing up the pile of rocks. Donna reached out, her hands shaking, her sobs coming out in uncontrollable waves as she grabbed hold of the doorknob, the cool brass solid and real in her grip. With her other hand she turned back the deadbolt and yanked the door open, her mouth stretching into a scream for help that died on her lips when she saw the mist and shadows swirling across a vacant wasteland that stretched endlessly away from the front door.

Something grabbed Donna from behind. Before she could see what it was, madness rushed in, sweeping her away and dragging her down into darkness.

~

Detective Sid Hutchins stood in the hallway, studying the chunks and splinters of wood scattered across the gray Berber carpet. He looked up at the shattered frame where the solid-core door had stood before someone had apparently knocked it down with a wrecking ball.

His partner, Louis Towley, appeared in the garage on the other side of the doorframe and stepped into the hallway. “Well, there’s no sign of forced entry anywhere in the garage. Everything’s locked up tight.”

“So how did the intruder get into the garage?”

“Maybe he stowed away in the back seat of one of the cars and hitched a ride home with Mister or Mrs. Baskin.”

Hutchins rubbed his chin. “Yeah, but why would he wait until he had to break down the door to gain access to the house?”

Towley shrugged. “Beats me. Maybe he fell asleep in the car. My brother’s like that. Five minutes after the car starts rolling, he’s out.”

“Somehow I doubt this guy fell asleep.” Hutchins sifted through the debris with the toe of his shoe. “Anyone who could do this to a door had to be amped up on meth or something.” He turned away from the door and walked down the hallway. “In any case, he would have made a lot of noise breaking down that door, enough for someone to call 911.”

“The phone in the study was off the hook,” Towley said, following his partner up the stairs and into the kitchen. “Maybe they couldn’t call. Maybe they tried to make a break for it. That would explain why the front door was wide open.”

“If they did, you’d think one of the neighbors would have seen or heard something, people running out the front door, someone shouting.” Hutchins picked up an empty dog bowl off the kitchen floor. “A dog barking.”

“Yeah, well, so far we’ve come up with squat on that front,” Towley said. “None of the neighbors know a thing.”

Hutchins tossed the dog bowl on to the counter. “We’re not much better off.”

They walked outside and stood on the front porch, looking back into the house.

“Isn’t this the same place where that kid and her babysitter disappeared about a year ago?” Towley asked.

Hutchins nodded. “They’re still missing.”

“Foster and Durham had that case, right?”

“I think so.”

“Yeah. I remember Durham saying something about how the girl’s parents thought the house was possessed or haunted or something,” Towley said. “Claimed when they got home from dinner the night their daughter disappeared, the house wasn’t there.”

Hutchins shrugged. “It’s there now.”

They studied the house in silence.

“What happened to the parents?” Hutchins asked.

“I don’t know,” Towley said. “I think they moved away just as soon as the charges against them were dropped. Probably ended up doing some serious therapy.”

“You think there’s anything to what they said about the house?” Hutchins asked.

“It’s just a house,” Towley said.

Hutchins nodded. Yeah, it was probably just a house, though he wondered if the Baskins shared that point of view. He looked to the west and saw the sun sliding slowly beyond the horizon. “Come on. Let’s finish this up and get out of here. I’ve got leftover lasagna waiting for me at home.”

~

After conducting numerous searches of the house and interviews with neighbors and friends, the police still have no leads as to the whereabouts of Donna or Barry Baskin, nor have they found any trace of Trevor, the Baskins’ German shepherd.

The house remains unoccupied. All the furnishings and personal belongings have been removed, the phone service disconnected, and the power turned off. However, each month, when the last quarter of the moon wanes from the sky and dark shadows begin to pool in the corners of the master bathroom, a dim glow can be seen coming from the kitchen window. And if you listen closely you can hear voices, distant cries for help—like crossed wires on a telephone line.