The Haunting of James Hastings (5 page)

Read The Haunting of James Hastings Online

Authors: Christopher Ransom

Tags: #Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Suspense

 
She stood, not meeting my gaze. I followed her to the front door. Why did I feel like I was disappointing her again?
 
‘Hey.’ I touched her shoulder. She flinched, then regarded me with her mistrusting deer eyes. ‘This weekend. Maybe we can go drink some bad Chianti and have a sing-along at Cheese & Olive’s.’
 
She smiled. ‘I’d like that.’
 
I nodded. ‘Cool.’
 
‘Yeah, cool.’ She tensed up, debated it, then awkwardly kissed me on the corner of my mouth.
 
I watched her scuttle across the lawn. She glanced back as she met up with the sidewalk and waved.
 
I waved back. ‘What do you make of that one, Stace?’
 
In the silence that followed, I regretted addressing my wife aloud.
 
 
Four days after Mr Ennis was wheeled out of his home, two men dressed in gray work pants and shirts emptied his belongings into a moving truck. The commercial cleaning crew - six Hispanic women and an Asian guy with a clipboard - swept through after the movers. A forty-something white man who may have been Mr Ennis’s son appeared, pounding a For Rent sign into the lawn with a rubber mallet. As he was doing this, his cellphone went off. He removed it from his pocket and spoke to someone for fifteen minutes. He clamped his phone shut and slipped it into his pocket, shaking his head and smiling ever so slightly. He then removed the For Rent sign and hucked it into his truck bed, not bothering to wipe the dirt clods from its legs.
 
I slept in late the next morning and missed a phone call from Lucy. Her message said, ‘Hey, James, I know you’re sleeping but I just wanted to let you know I spoke to the ME. Our friend died of a heart attack. He had a history of heart disease, so . . . yeah. No flowers, either, but that doesn’t mean you can’t bring me some. Just kidding. I don’t need flowers.’ Snorts and snickers of embarrassment. ‘Okay, looking forward to Saturday, so I hope you’re warming up your vocal chords. Call me.’
 
I meant to. I really did. But other developments averted my attention, and I did not call Lucy Arnold back.
 
This turned out to be another mistake, one of the bigger ones.
 
4
 
The era of the balcony was over. I began to wonder how much I could get for the house. I guessed I had about seventy thousand in home equity, and half as much in my checking account, where it was earning all of one point in annual interest and shrinking by five thousand a month. Three thousand went to the mortgage, the other two to bills and beer. I had enough to start over somewhere decent, and I decided I would call our realtor, David, the next morning.
 
I was on the covered front porch, having a smoke and a beer, when I noticed a small silver and orange U-Haul van parked in front of Mr Ennis’s house. The cargo hold was bare save for a pile of gray moving blankets and a wooden rocking chair resting on its side. The metal gangplank was up, jutting from the truck’s tail like a bladed tongue, suggesting the movers were done for the day. Or the new owner, since U-Haul implied you were not sipping martinis while a paid crew took another year off their backs. The sun was setting tiredly. There were no lights on inside the house. If the new residents were unpacking boxes or hooking up the television and dialing for that moving day pizza, I couldn’t see them.
 
I blew a stream of blue smoke at a fly and swallowed the last of my beer. I was turning to go spend the rest of the night on the couch when I heard a screen door creak and then spring back into place with an obnoxious clang. On the heels of this racket, a woman’s voice -
 
‘Ow, watch it. For fuck’s sake.’
 
Ooh, an angry one.
 
I waited, expecting her husband or some kid in tow to trot back to the truck and retrieve her rocking chair. But the woman who materialized on the small porch only stood and stared at the quiet street. Her chest, shoulders and hair were just a shape above the ragged juniper bushes until she listed to one side and twirled slowly into the porch light. When she stretched her arms above her head, I was able to make out a loose tank top over her snug t-shirt, one breast in the shirt bulging from the tank. Though covered, the breast gave the impression of an accidental spill that had yet to be noticed by its owner. It was a purposeful wardrobe malfunction, designed to attract attention. This was very Los Angeles, like the whale tail thong that ‘accidentally’ rides above the waist of the pants.
 
She bent over and raised a bottle of wine, pulling a respectable measure down and wiping her lips with her forearm. She hiccuped in silence and looked down as if just now realizing it had come to this. I could not see her hands. With the slightest quiver of her arm, the wine bottle shot into view, arcing high over the porch railing and into the polluted pink sky before falling back to earth where it disappeared into the juniper bushes. A damn good-looking broad, littering like it was the seventies.
 
Oh baby
, feeling my buzz,
I just fell right the fuck in love with you.
 
Her need came at me in a warm pulse. Somehow I knew she was alone and not thrilled to be here. Someone had driven her from her last home and this was the last stop before things went from bad to beyond redemption. I imagined a boyfriend with four motorcycles and a fierce left jab.
 
She turned, facing me across the expanse of grass and driveway between us. I waved my beer can at her halfheartedly. ‘Hello,’ I said too quietly for her to hear. My porch light was not turned on, so I guessed she had no way to know I was smiling.
 
She slumped and turned away. Her screen door creaked and slammed itself home for the night.
 
Nice roll, Hastings. Another gutter ball.
 
Inside I flicked on every light as I floated through the main floor: dining room, living room, gallery, sun room, laundry, both first-floor bathrooms and kitchen. Light was good, light was essential. The house was too large to live in alone, and the downstairs had become my domain. The bathroom had a shower, I kept a basket of clothes in the laundry room, and the living room lived up to its name spectacularly. I made my bed on the couch and dozed off.
 
 
The home phone trilled, startling me awake. I don’t answer the phone most days, but I arose with the hope it might be Lucy Arnold calling to chat about the arrival of our new neighbor. I was hoping to draw out some gossip on the son from Barstow, why he had cleaned the house out so quickly, and who this new tenant might be. I marched over and stared at the cordless cradle on the end table. The time was 1.28 a.m. and the small gray screen read CALLER UNKNOWN. On the fifth ring I picked up.
 
‘Hello.’
 
The connection was there, but no one spoke. I thought it might be one of those automated bank reminders that dials through a database of customers and patches a service representative through only after the machine has recognized a voice. Were the computers calling in the middle of the night now?
 
‘Hello?’ I repeated.
 
Normally I would have clicked off after three or four seconds, but something told me to wait. I sensed a person there, listening, huddled in a darkened room.
 
‘Can I help you?’
 
‘I want her back,’ a man said. The voice was as thin and lifeless as any I had heard, the voice of a disgraced violin tutor after three glasses of Chardonnay.
 
‘Who is this?’
 
‘I want her back.’
 
‘Who?’ I said. ‘Who’s calling?’
 
‘I want her baaa-
aaack
.’ The voice cracked, on the verge of tears. ‘Please bring her back to me, please. I’ll do anything you want.’
 
One of Lucy’s cast-off suitors? The rejected masher or some other nut job who’d been stalking her? Had some psychotic lover seen us together again and decided to turn his aggression on me? Was he even now watching her, me, the house?
 
‘Oh, Stacey,’ the man wailed. ‘I’m so sorry I wasn’t there, please come back—’
 
I slammed the phone down, jamming the OFF button with my thumb until the handset skittered off the cradle and fell to the living room’s hardwood floor. I was shaking, and almost regurgitated the dregs of my Mexican beer dinner. I recognized the voice on the other end of the line.
 
It belonged to James Hastings.
 
I stared at the machine that had just reproduced my voice as if it were a small vessel sent to earth, designed to deliver an organic evil that was even now waiting to hatch in my living room. Black molded plastic, some microchips and wires, a fibrous speaker pad and microphone. It was only a cluster of dead matter, chemicals and compounds, things dug from the ground and brewed in a lab. I knew this, and yet it might as well have been a giant black spider with gleaming red eyes. I felt . . .
invaded
.
 
I stared at the caller ID screen. It was blank now, of course, because no one was calling. But there were two little plastic arrows next to the gray screen, one pointing up and the other down. I pressed the down button and stared at the number. 310-822—
 
‘Bullshit,’ I heard myself say. It was our home number, my home number.
 
The time stamp was 1.28 a.m., precisely one minute ago.
 
How do you dial yourself? I remembered playing that game as a teenager. You did a sort of double click thing with the hang-up tab, waited for the second dial tone, then dialed your own number and hung up. No, that wasn’t it. You didn’t even have to dial your number. Back then, all you had to do was double-tap the hang-up tab and then leave it depressed and after about three seconds your own phone would ring. Could phones still do that?
 
I picked the handset off the floor and set it on the cradle and waited for ten seconds. I lifted the handset and pressed TALK twice, heard the pause and the second dial tone, then hung up. Thirty seconds passed, then a full minute, then two. The phone did not ring. I tried it again. The phone did not ring. Maybe cordless phones didn’t work that way, or maybe the phone company had discontinued the feature due to too many pranks. I was considering calling the phone company to ask how I could call myself when the phone rang again.
 
I rocked back on my heels and reached for it, but hesitated. I checked the caller ID screen again. It was my number. I picked up the handset and pressed TALK. I held the phone to my ear. I did not speak.
 
There was a connection. I could not hear anyone.
 
After half a minute or so, my mouth unglued. ‘Hello?’
 
No one replied.
 
‘Hello?’
 
You were only imagining it. You’re still drunk.
 
‘Who is this?’ I said. ‘Are you recording me? Listen—’
 
A woman sighed heavily, and for a long time. ‘AAAAaaaaaaahhhhhhh . . .’
 
It was not a sigh of pleasure or distress. She sounded as though she were being forced to make some ill-defined vowel sound for an instructor, or a doctor holding a wooden depressor on her tongue, shining a light down to her tonsils - and it made the skin of my arm crawl.
 
The line went dead, and immediately following the barely perceptible click there was a single
thunk
above my head. Something had just fallen to the floor. Or been dropped. Something that might have been a phone, my phone, the one I never used any more and which had been charging in the darkness of the master bedroom for almost half a year.
 
Someone was in the house.
 
I took four steps with the phone in my hand, then realized I was a coward and was not going to march up the stairs and confront anyone. I did not own a baseball bat or any other weapon. The police. Call the police, I thought. Call Lucy Arnold and tell her to round up her brethren, we have a situation.

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