"Doesn't look haunted," he thought.

---

He had a feeling it was going to be a bad day. Decking the floor manager who had been riding his ass for the last six months pretty much confirmed it. He went home before they could fire him from the printing press, before they could call the cops. Sitting in the squalor of his basement apartment, drinking the last of his paycheck, he looked in the mirror.

He didn’t like what he saw, this reflection of Brent Stover. No past. No future. Just the sorry now. Thirty-four years of nothing hung on him like an invisible shroud—unseen, but always felt.

Brent saw disappointment and failure in that face in the mirror. Every day was a monotonous repetition seen through that reflective window. “Some day,” he thought, “I should break that thing.”

#

He awakened to the dim, drape-filtered glow of the next morning with sour whiskey in the back of his throat and acid in his stomach. He crunched down a couple of the antacids he kept on the nightstand by his bed.

Laying there in the brightening gloom, he wondered what he dreamt about. He heard or read somewhere that people had dreams every night, but only remembered a few of them. He couldn’t remember any. Brent wondered if he dreamt of his parents, what they looked like in those frozen mental images that his own mind denied him.

The phone rang by the bed. Brent picked up.

“The check’s in the mail,” he said.

“Hm,” the gravelly voice on the other end replied. “I must be talkin’ to the right man, then.”

“Who’s this?”

“My name is Titus Johnson.”

“Nice name.” Brent heard a slow sigh like the guy had heard it a hundred times before.

“Why don’t you call me Mr. Johnson? You Brent Stover?”

“Yeah. But I got no money to send you.”

“Dammit, son. I’m callin’ about work. Somebody at the press gave me your name. Said you might need a job.”

“Did they?” Brent smirked. “I suppose you could put it that way.”

“Well, look. I got something real easy. Like a security guard, but all you got to do is sit on your ass for forty dollars a night. Think you can handle that?”

“I imagine I could.”

“Good. I need someone tonight. You come by my place at five. I’ll give you the details.”

Brent wrote down the address and hung up. He caught a glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror on his way to take a piss. He didn’t stop to look.

#

Johnson lived in a doublewide carcass of a mobile home on the outskirts of town. Brent could see that the man was a collector. His lot was littered with old cars, appliances, sheds, and a menagerie of scruffy cats and dogs.

As Brent parked his truck and moved along the odd maze of relics, a scrawny black man in battered khakis and a dirty white undershirt emerged from the trailer.

“Stover?” the aged man called out as he shuffled forward in filthy slippers. He leaned heavily on an old cane and eyed Brent with uncertainty.

“Mr. Johnson.” Brent held out his hand. Johnson looked him in the eye and shook his hand slowly as if Brent might be lying to him.

“Huh,” Johnson said finally. “Look, I been thinkin’. Maybe you don’t want this job. It’s mighty boring. Long stretches of nothin’ to do.”

“Mr. Johnson,” Brent sighed. “I got rubber bands holding up my socks ‘cause the elastic’s shot. The only reason my landlady hasn’t kicked me out is ‘cause I have sex with her. My bank account is running on fumes. That truck,” he nodded over his shoulder, “is going to be repossessed if I don’t make a payment. I’ll take the job.”

Johnson smiled grimly. “Thing’s tough all over.”

“So, what do you need guarded?”

Johnson handed him a crumpled piece of paper from his pants. “That’s the address. I need you to sit in that house, sundown to sunup. Make sure nobody messes with it.”

“Messes with it?” Brent asked.

Johnson shook his head and fumbled in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. He lit one and exhaled.

“Mm. Kids and vandals and all. Place got a history.”

“History? As in haunted?”

“Some say. Aint’ nobody stayed there but a year since the seventies.”

Brent snorted and started towards his truck. “For forty dollars a night I’ll watch your house for you, Mr. Johnson.”

“Ain’t you scared?” Johnson called. 

“Buddy, I’m too broke to believe in ghosts.”

#

Brent stood in the street and unloaded his backpack from the truck. The sun was dipping past the mountains, casting the town into a gray twilight. Fifty-feet away sat the house.

“Doesn’t look haunted,” he thought. It was a small two-story rectangle with a garage tacked on the end. Couldn’t have been more than fifty feet on a long side.

The first story was yellow brick. The second was faded white siding topped by a sloping, gray-shingled roof. The window frames were shedding ancient white paint and the front storm door was rusting into tissue paper. 

As he walked across the yard he noticed the dingy, yellowing blinds obscuring every window in the place. Odd for an empty house. There were no signs indicating that the place might be for sale. 

Across the street, houses showing signs of life sat watching him. The guy next door was rinsing off his car in the driveway. Brent nodded at him and opened the squealing storm door. He rattled the key around in the lock of the heavy wood door beyond until it shuddered open.

Inside, there was a short hall with the living room on the left and a set of stairs leading up on the right. Down the hall ahead, he saw the cracked and dirty linoleum floor of the kitchen.

Overall, he thought the interior had held up pretty well. The paint was mostly intact except for a few cracks. The beige carpet in the living room was a little worn. The place smelled musty, though, like a basement with a condensation problem. He made a tour of the house while the faint light still filtered in through the blinds.

There was nothing left on the first floor save a battered couch in the living room and a quiet refrigerator in the kitchen. He opened it and stuck his hand inside. Room temperature. Johnson hadn’t kept he power hooked up. Brent hoped the water was still on. He didn’t like the idea of pissing in the back yard in the middle of the night.

He checked the bathroom just off the kitchen. No water. He sighed and rubbed his eyes, then went upstairs. 

There were three small bedrooms running the length of the upstairs hall and another bathroom at the end, facing out. Rust stains in the tub, he noted.

The dark had moved in, so Brent pulled his flashlight out of his backpack and made his way back down to the living room. He sank into the couch, which felt more like a mound of soft clay than a piece of furniture.

He reached into his pack and removed a small battery-powered camp lantern. He had brought along a few magazines and a cheap little radio. He turned it on to kill the silence.

Brent munched on a sandwich he had packed while he leafed through a car magazine. Before he knew it, night had settled heavy outside the windows. The lantern cast its pale-blue fluorescent light in a small circle. 

“This is gonna’ be a long-ass night,” he sighed to himself. He couldn’t imagine anyone taking the time to vandalize the place. And as far as haunted houses went? There wasn’t anything remotely spooky here, unless he counted the hard-water stains in the toilets. It was just lonely and empty.

He lay down on the sofa. If anyone tried to get in he was sure he’d hear it, and he left the lantern on. He drifted off listening to the crappy country music twanging softly from the radio.

It was a tight sleep—uncomfortable and oppressive. In the darkness of his mind (or had the lantern gone out?) he felt someone standing over him. The radio hissed out incomprehensible whispers.

Was it the near sense of the dark or the certainty of a dream that told him the figure leaned down to stare at him? He jerked upright when he felt something raining down on his face…and squirming.

The lantern still cast its sad light. The radio still sang quietly. There was no one there but Brent. He reached up to wipe at his face. His hand came back covered only in sweat.

“Jesus,” he breathed. So that was a dream. He didn’t care if he never had another. He watched his hand tremble. Johnson’s talk about this place being haunted, that’s all it was.

He heard the refrigerator door open in the kitchen, the crack and hiss of a can being opened.

“Who’s there?” he yelled and bolted up. 

The lantern light ended at the dark passage to the kitchen. He fumbled for his flashlight and flicked it on, illuminating the bare walls of one corner of the hall. Brent hung back in the living room.

“You better get the hell out of here!” he roared. Silence. “I mean it! I’m calling the cops!” Shit! He had forgot his Tracfone.

There was still no sound from the kitchen. Brent inched closer. “I mean it….”

He slid to the wall and peered into the room. The glare of the flashlight played on the empty kitchen. The back door was closed.

Brent walked to the door and found the deadbolt locked. If there had been someone in here and they slipped out, they had to have a key. 

“Bullshit,” he said. “There’s nobody here. I’m still waking up.” Something on the floor in front of the refrigerator glimmered in the flashlight’s beam.

He bent down. It was an old-fashioned pull-tab from a beer or soda can. He shook his head. He hadn’t seen one of those since he was a child. He picked it up from the floor and could smell the faint tang of alcohol on it. 

Brent threw the fridge door open and felt inside. Still warm. He looked at the tab in his hand.

“Ghost beer? Give me a goddamn break,” he thought. He just hadn’t noticed in on the floor before, or it had been forgotten under the fridge and…and what?

“No,” he said to the tab and himself. “I don’t believe in this stuff.”

And what was there to believe, really? He had a bad dream and thought he heard a noise. Was that what people called a haunting?

He thought of that Dickens story. What had Scrooge said? “A bit of bad beef.” Or in this case a piece of funky lunchmeat in his sandwich. He laughed to himself—until he heard the footsteps upstairs.

There hadto be someone else in the house. Maybe they slipped in the back door, snuck past him in the dark. They weren’t even trying to be quiet. A door slammed above.

“You son of a bitch!” Brent grated as he ran to the stairs and dashed up. He shined the light down the hall. All the doors were open, just as they had been. The hall was quiet. Brent exhaled in frustration.

Wait. What was that? A faint scrabbling from the bedroom, far down the hall on the left. Brent crept down the hall and into the room.

There it was—a scratching from the far wall. He stalked over and knelt down, put his ear to the cracked paint.

“Rats,” he thought. Of course. That would explain a lot. He banged on the wall with his fist. The scratching ceased. “Just some damn rats.”

Brent went back downstairs. He sat on the couch and counted off the hours until the sun rose.

#

It was some time around noon, in his own bed, when the phone pulled him from a hazy half-sleep. Johnson’s voice greeted him before he could speak.

“Brent?”

“Yeah?”

“Oh,” the old man sounded relieved. “How you doin’?”

“All right.”

“How’d it go last night?”

“Easiest forty bucks I ever made.”

“You still in for tonight?”

“Hell yeah. Why not?”

“Nothin’ strange happened to you?”

“I think you got rats in the walls. But if that’s your haunted house, I’m not impressed.”

“Heh,” Johnson laughed. A fuzzy hiss burned across the line. “What?” the old man asked.

“I didn’t—“ Brent began. The static cut in again.

“Naw,” Johnson said fearfully. “Naw!”

“Mr. Johnson, are you talking to me?”

“Listen, son. I got to go. You be careful tonight.” He hung up.

Brent stared at the phone in his hand. He shrugged and set it in the cradle. 

“Old guy’s goin’ crazy.” He rolled onto his side and went back to sleep.

#

Tracfone on his hip, Brent opened the door to the house and set his baseball bat in the hall. He made a quick check of the rooms before the sun set. The pull-tab was on the kitchen counter where he had left it. The upstairs rooms were undisturbed, the back door locked. 

He walked around the perimeter of the house in the twilight. There were places in the bushes where someone could hide without being seen from the windows. He’d keep that in mind.

Back in the house, he sat down on the sofa. He set the bat across his legs, the flashlight next to him.

“Let’s dance,” he said out loud, and then laughed to himself.

He watched the light outside dwindle to darkness. He sat there for hours, listening. Nothing happened.

“Fuck it.” He turned on the lantern, set the bat aside, stretched out, and started to read again.

He found that he couldn’t pay attention, though. The dark pushed in on the dome of light cast by the lantern. The air grew tight as if reality were being squeezed around the little bastion of illumination.

“Jesus!” He threw the magazine down. What was it about this place that got to him so much? 

A child laughed from the stairs.

Brent froze. His head slowly craned towards the sound. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the little white face in the shadows. As he continued his inevitable turn, he prayed that the face would fade, just a trick of the light. It didn’t.

There was a young boy, no more than three-years-old, peering at him from behind the rails of the banister. There was no way the child could have gotten without Brent’s knowledge. Every door was locked, every window drawn, every room barren. And yet, here was the boy.

Brent leaned forward. “How did you…?”

“Brent,” the boy said. The child knew his name! 

He started up from the sofa. “Damn it! Who let you in here?” he roared.

A startled look flashed across the boy’s face. He ducked back into the dark. Brent heard him scamper up the stairs. 

“Hey!” Brent grabbed his flashlight and dashed after him. “Come here! Kid! You shouldn’t be in here!”

He heard the boy run down the hall, into the room on the left. Brent ducked in after him. He spun in a circle. There was no one there.

“Fuck!” Brent hurled the flashlight against the wall. “What the hell?” He ran his hands through his hair and stalked back and forth just inside the door.

He had been right behind the kid. He’d seen him in the flashlight’s beam just before he dove into this room. 

Breathing hard, Brent slid down the wall and tried to calm himself. “Just seein’ things. Hearin’ things. Somebody’s messin’ with me.”

There was something in the beam of the flashlight. It looked like some kind of card. He crawled over to it, picked up the card and the flashlight.

It was a birthday card for a one-year-old, a smiling infant in a party hat on the front. Inside were lines to note the details of the event: name, friends, family, date, what you got and who gave it to you. Every entry was blank except the date—Brent’s first birthday, thirty-three years ago.

“You motherfuckers,” he said to no one. His mind raced with memories of the orphanages, the foster homes, the surrogate parents, years of emptiness.

“Fine!” he yelled. “Good one! Very funny! Is this what you wanted? To fuck with me?”

Someone had found out, dug through his past to find a way to hurt him. Maybe Scott, the manager he had punched. Maybe someone else. Somehow, Johnson was involved.

He hung his head, feeling beaten and tired. “You got me. I’m done. Come on out and have your laugh.”

The scratching started at the same place behind the wall, a few inches from where he found the birthday card.

“Brent,” the boy whispered from the air.

“What the fuck is this?” Brent screamed in anger. “What the hell do you want from me?”

A voice came from the darkness of the hallway. Not the child’s voice, but an utterance of rage, blood, and the dirt of the grave.

“Mine….”

Brent backed against the wall opposite the open door. His ears strained in the silence. At that cold moment, he was scared, his wall of disbelief starting to crack. He feared hearing that voice again.

“He’s mine!” it rasped.

“What…what do you want?” Brent stammered.

“This is my house! He’s mine!”

Brent couldn’t tear his eyes from the dark void beyond the door. But he knew if he saw a face or hand emerge from that blackness, he would leap through the window behind him.

The stink of rot reached him. The room seemed to vibrate in the cone of light he held. Whatever was out there had come into the room. He could feel it around him: hate, anger seething like an invisible vortex.

The voice spoke from in front of Brent. “You can’t take him from me….”

The flashlight was being pried from his hand. He struggled against it, trying to maintain his grip, but the force was immense.

As the light was ripped away from him, he fled. He looked back once, as the flashlight crumpled in midair. In the dying, flickering beam he saw a thing convulsing from the blackness—a man-shaped shadow that jerked and shrugged from the dark.

Brent sprinted down the hall as he heard the thing moving across the room. He was down the stairs, at the front door, fumbling open the lock. Something giggled and gibbered hysterically in that wicked voice, coming down the stairs behind Brent, ecstatic to be upon him.

The door opened. Brent threw himself out, knocking open the storm door, staggering across the front lawn. The oppressive feeling of the house was gone. He turned and looked. Whatever that thing was, it had stopped at the open door, seething in the shadows.

#

Titus Johnson opened the door of his trailer. He stepped out into the morning light, shooing away the strays that hovered outside. He tossed a bag of garbage to the ground and lit a cigarette, then paused and looked up.

Brent sat on the tailgate of his truck, watching the old man.

“Brent?” Johnson called. “Everythin’ ok, son?”

Brent looked at the sky and wearily slid off the tailgate.

“I think it’s time for you to tell me what’s going on, Titus,” he said as he approached slowly.

“What’d you mean?”

“Your buddy scared me pretty good last night. And that thing with the kid and the card? Very clever. You people did your homework. Must have spent a lot of money on street magic tricks. Why?” Brent stood in front of Titus, angrily clenching his jaw.

“But, son…I didn’t….”

“Who was in it with you? See, the only one I can figure is Scott from the press. How did you find out about me? I never told anyone.”

“Brent,” Titus shook his head. “You come on inside. I got to tell you somethin’.”

Brent stared at him, then stepped into the trailer. He leaned against a counter while Titus shuffled around the kitchen.

“Can I get you somethin’?’

“Just tell me what the fucking game is!”

“You watch your mouth!” Titus slammed his cane on the kitchen table. “This is still my home!”

Brent held his hands up. “Look. I just want to know why. Did someone force you into this? Who gave my name to you at the press?”

Titus shook his head helplessly. “I…I don’t….”

“Who?” Brent pressed.

“I don’t know anybody where you worked.” Titus’ eyes grew wide and scared. “It was the house.”

“The house?” Brent sighed. “Right. You want me to call the cops? Cause’ I think this is a pretty clear case of harassment.”

“It was the house!” Titus shouted. “It knows things about me! It knows what I done…in the war. Made me remember. Told me it was gonna’ show people what I did if I didn’t find you, make you go there.”

“Bullshit! Why would it want me?”

“It knows somethin’ about you too. Don’t it? That boy, he’s reachin’ out to you.”

“What do you know about the kid?”

“He calls me. Talks to me.” 

“That static on the phone yesterday. That was him?”

Titus nodded.

“What does he want?” Brent asked.

“I think you best sit down and listen.” Titus sat down at the table opposite Brent. “I been landlord of that place since just after I got home from Vietnam. A married couple lived there. The Taylors. Always fightin’. Strange folk. Anyway, along about seventy-three, Mrs. Taylor had a baby boy…what’s wrong?”

Brent sat with his head in his hands. “I was born in seventy-three.”

“What month?”

“August.”

“Yeah,” Titus breathed. “Boy was born in August. A few years went by, things got worse between the mister and missus. Divorce, custody battle. Mrs. Taylor gets the boy—Andy, his name was. She moves out. Mr. Taylor, he gets Andy on the weekends.

“Then Andy goes missin’. Mr. Taylor says the boy was playin’ in the front yard one day, and then he was just gone. Wandered off or kidnapped. Cops all over the town, search parties up in the mountains.”

“How old was Andy when he disappeared?” Brent whispered.

“Oh, must have been about three by then. Never did find him. A month after Andy went missin’, nobody seen Mr. Taylor anymore. Late on the rent, not answering the phone, so I went to the house to look for him. I found him. Dead on the couch. Put a shotgun in his mouth. Empty beer cans everywhere. Stink…the flies had got to him…maggots boilin’ out the back of his head…Jesus.”

“Andy was three,” Brent said. “What happened to his mother?”

“Don’t know. She moved away after the whole incident. She knew Andy was gone and Taylor was responsible. What could she do?” He looked at Brent. “Somethin’ happened to you when you were three, didn’t it?”

Brent stared into space. “I didn’t know about it until years afterward. My parents gave me up just after I was born. I’ve been told they were junkies running drugs out of Philadelphia. They couldn’t be bogged down with a kid.

“One of my foster dads found out, told me when I was sixteen. My parents had been killed in a deal gone bad in seventy-six. I would have been three when it happened.”

“What does it mean?” Titus asked.

Brent laughed bitterly. “It doesn’t mean shit. It’s not real.” He stood up and tossed the keys to the house on the table. “I’m done with this.”

“But, Brent, you seen it!”

“This doesn’t happen.” Brent backed towards the door, angrily pointing at Titus. “I don’t believe in this shit! I don’t believe in this.” He turned and walked out, heading towards his truck.

“Brent!” Titus hurried to the door and called after him. “I don’t think it gives a shit what you believe, son!”

#

He sat and drank and thought in his apartment. Two boys born the same month, maybe the same day. Two boys born into bad worlds, violence and death creating some kind of crossroads at the age of three. Death circling around and in between. One living and one dead.

He laughed and drank more. So that was it, huh? That was the connection?

“Pretty sketchy if you ask me, Andy,” Brent said out loud. 

The card lay on his kitchen table. “Fuck you,” he said and knocked it to the floor.

The noon sun glared in through the window. Brent cursed it and staggered to the bedroom, lay down, and cried in his sleep.

The phone rang twice before it dragged him from sleep and he fumbled it to his ear out of habit.

White-noise hiss, the far-off sound of wind chimes.

He was awake now. His gut tightened and ice flowed in his veins.

“What do you want?” he asked.

Andy’s voice climbed from the static. “Find me….” The noise faded to a dial tone. Brent set the phone down. His mind was blank for a while as he calmed.

“Do this,” he thought. “Do this one thing in your life that means more than you’ve ever done. Even if you still pretend it’s not real, even if it scares you. Find him.”

#

He stood in front of the house for what he knew would be the last time. Brent looked at the setting sun and knew he didn’t have much time.

Tapping a crowbar in his hand, he advanced on the house. He put the bar to the door and pulled until the wood cracked and the molding splintered. The storm door squealed shut behind him.

Taylor had killed Andy, Brent was sure of it. Both spirits seemed bound to this house. He glanced at the ratty sofa in the living room and shivered. He had sunk into that thing two nights in a row. It couldn’t be the same sofa, could it? Brent shook it off.

He had an idea of where to start looking. He went upstairs to the last room on the left, where everything had happened so far.

He gritted his teeth. Taylor’s spirit was strong enough to pull the flashlight out of Brent’s hands and smash it. It could hurt him.

Brent put a hand to the wall where he had heard the noises and rapped. Could’ve been hollow back there. Hard to tell.

He stepped back to the doorway and looked at the wall. There was no window in that one. He peered around the corner, into the hallway. The bathroom was next door, facing out. There was a lot of space between the rooms to hide something.

Evening was creeping in. Brent took off his jacket and knelt down next to the wall in the bedroom.

“Here we go,” he said. What would he find? A corpse? Bloody clothes? He tried to steel himself for anything.

He plunged the end of the crowbar into the wall. As it pierced, he felt the house shudder.

He attacked the wall, ripping out sheetrock, joint tape, drywall compound. He could see Taylor’s repairs, concealing the hole that he had cut there years ago. 

Andy was beside him—a faint image, hands on knees, staring intently at the growing wound in the wall. The house groaned.

“He’s coming,” Andy whispered.

“Just hang on, kid,” Brent gritted. Sweat trickled down his face, stained his shirt.

He battered the wall until he revealed the crawlspace. It cut an immediate ninety degrees to the right, towards the bathroom. It was just a narrow tunnel between the inner and outer wall, stretching some fifteen feet. 

He reached back to his jacket and pulled out a small disposable flashlight. Leaning into the tunnel, he cast the light about. It looked like there was a larger opening down there, somewhere behind the shower stall.

“He knows you’re here,” Andy urged. “Hurry!”

Brent wasn’t keen on the idea of throwing himself into that confined space with a homicidal dead man looking for him. He gritted his teeth and crawled in.

It was stifling. Dust and cobwebs cling to him. Every foot seemed like a hundred. The blue gloom of twilight shone through the cracks in the outer wall of the house. The beam of his flashlight bounced as he crawled.

The small area he entered was no more than four feet on a side, but tall enough for him to kneel in. There was a bundle of sheets and black plastic tucked into the corner. Brent pulled out his pocketknife and sawed a slit through one end. He held his breath as his heart hammered.

There—a small, mummified foot connected to a desiccated leg that extended deeper into the bundle. The sad little toes…Christ; Andy was barely more than a baby. He had no desire to see more.

The air grew chill around him. Andy was kneeling by his side. “This is me,” the boy said with a strange innocence. He looked up at Brent.

“Yeah,” Brent said quietly. “Are you ready for this?”

Andy smiled and nodded. The light fled from his face as he looked down the tunnel. “He’s here.”

A shiver tickled down Brent’s spine. He scooped up the bundle and turned towards the crawlspace, one hand aiming the flashlight at the far end. He began to shake when Taylor crawled into the passage.

He moved like a nightmare—slowly, jerking. He was just as Titus described. Worse.

Brent could see that the back of his head was gone. It squirmed with rot and maggots. His eyes had become ruptured, black craters. He laughed darkly through a mouthful of teeth cracked and broken by the bucking of the shotgun.

“I told you,” Taylor said as he crawled closer. “He’s mine. You can’t take him. Nobody can take him from me!”

“Get out of my way,” Brent growled, anger and fear building at the same time. “I’m taking him out of here.” He readied himself as Taylor drew near. He felt his stomach flutter as the ruined head regarded him.

“She couldn’t take him from me. She never cared about you, boy!” Taylor yelled past Brent, at Andy. “She just wanted to hurt me.” He swung his face back to Brent and grinned. Then he was on him.

Taylor’s force knocked Brent onto his back. The dead man wrapped his hands around Brent’s throat and squeezed.

Brent let go of Andy’s corpse and the flashlight as he reached for Taylor’s arms. His hands passed through them. He raked at Taylor’s face, finding only cold air as the shade continued to strangle him.

“That’s not half fair,” Brent thought. “Not at all.”

“Motherfucker!” the dead man screamed. “Motherfucker! I’ll kill you!” Then he laughed—a breathless hitching sound of a thing gone mad.

The blood pounded in Brent’s ears. Stars flared in his vision. His head felt like it might burst.

Taylor was yelling at Andy as he throttled Brent. “She never gave a fuck about you! She never came to find you, did she? Don’t worry. Your friend can keep you company, now!”

Yes. Andy. Brent’s eyes rolled back, searching for the boy, finding his gaze.

“Maybe Andy….” Brent found it hard to think, now. “Maybe Andy can do something….” The dark closed around him.

Taylor screamed and rolled off of him. Brent’s body reflexively sucked air into his lungs. He rubbed at his throat and saw Andy straddling his father’s back, digging his fingers into the man’s empty eye sockets.

“Run, Brent!” Andy screamed. 

Brent scrambled for the body and dragged it down the tunnel after him. He coughed, his throat and lungs burning as he crawled.

He pulled himself from the hole and got to his feet. He heard Taylor roar, turned and saw him oozing through the wall. No sign of Andy’s spirit.

Brent struggled into the hall, clutching the boy’s small body to him. He forced his legs to move, running in a nightmare.

He made it to the stairs and felt Taylor crash into him from behind. Brent tumbled down the steps, skidding to a stop at the bottom. A stabbing agony lanced his side, flared in his neck, but he still clung to Andy.

Mindlessly, like a terrified animal, he ignored the pain of his body and ran towards the door. It was still open, but he crashed through the storm door sending a shower of glass and thin metal out onto the yard.

He lay there, staring at the night sky. He knew he was bleeding from the sharp fragments of the door lodged in his arms and chest. Brent looked back at the dark figure in the doorway.

“Fuck you!” Brent yelled. He looked down at the makeshift shroud in his arms. “You’re free now, kid. You’re free.”

Taylor’s scream of rage snapped his attention back. Brent gazed in horror as Taylor started to force himself through the invisible barrier holding him in the house. He contorted, flowed, strained against the air itself. One foot touched the ground outside the doorway.

“He’s mine!” the thing screeched.

There was fire next to Brent, the smell of cigarette smoke. Titus raised a flaming Molotov in one hand, standing uneasily with his cane.

“You stop this now, Mr. Taylor!” Titus shouted around his cigarette. “It’s time for you to go! Time to let Andy be!” He threw the firebomb.

It soared through Taylor, through the open door to shatter and blaze within. Taylor screamed, trapped between two worlds, flinching from the light. He dwindled and folded in on himself like a sheet of burning plastic, melting into nothing.

Brent and Taylor watched the house burn. Brent felt dizzy, very tired. He suspected that his wounds were deeper than he had first thought. He lay his head down on the ground and felt small fingers brushing through his hair.

Andy knelt over him, smiling. “You did it,” he said.

“I told you I would, kid,” Brent said in a fading voice. “I did this one thing,” he whispered. “Did it right.”

“Brent?” Titus turned toward him. “Who you talkin’ to?”

“Everything’s gonna’ be all right, Andy. You’ll see,”

“Oh my god, Brent. You’re bleedin’ everywhere!”

“You’ll see….”

“Brent! You stay with me now!” Titus yelled. “Brent!”

#

Titus stood alone at the gravesite. Dressed in his best gray suit, he watched the late summer sun glowing on the distant trees. The leaves were just beginning to change over to autumn gold and red. His eyes came to rest on the marker before him. He sighed heavily and leaned on his cane.

“I’m sorry, son,” he said quietly. “I shouldn’t have let it come to this. I should’ve done something, told somebody what I suspected a long time ago. No need to bring a stranger into all this.”

The wind blew across his face. He closed his eyes and let the breeze whisper in his ears.

“Ow! Dammit!”

Titus turned and watched Brent limping between the graves. One arm was in a sling, a leg in a brace. 

“You gonna’ make it?” Titus laughed.

“Give me that damn cane,” Brent chuckled. He lifted his leg painfully. “They never show this part in the movies.”

“Least you got that neck brace off.”

“Yeah. Hey, Andy.” Brent nodded to the gravestone. “Got ya something.”

He struggled to one knee and set a small teddy bear against the stone. 

“You need a hand up?” Titus asked.

“Nah. I’m all right like this.” He patted the green mound of grass beneath him. They were both quiet for a while.

“Hey, Titus. I’ve been meanin’ to ask you something,” Brent said. “How did you know, that night? How did you know that I was going back to the house?”

“Hell, son. Andy called me.”

“Of course.” Brent traced Andy’s name on the tombstone.

“You see him since?” 

“Nope. Give me a hand?”

Titus reached down to him. They were both breathing hard by the time Brent was standing.

“You figure out what it all meant, yet?” Titus asked.

“Yeah,” Brent nodded. He looked at the grave, the bear, the sun, the blue sky and white clouds. “Yeah. I think I figured it out.”