Hologram: A Haunting Read online

  Her heart raced. Why is this happening to me? She was convinced that these lucid dreams were not hers. How could they be? Within them she experienced a Hammond of old, a world completely alien from the city she knew. Are they warnings? Of what? Is my child in danger?

  And lately, after waking from the dreams, as now—or even in just passing through a hallway or taking the stairs—she would detect the smell of rotting flowers. It was strong enough now to force her to the side of the bed. She needed to go about the business of the day. She needed to forget. Yet, more and more, she sensed that she was on a collision course with whatever force it was there in the house. The thought scared the hell out of her, made the tiny hairs at the nape of her neck tingle and rise. With each day that went by, each dream, she felt herself moving inexorably closer to something, to seeing, to confronting this—entity that possessed the house and commandeered her own dreams, substituting visions of terror.

  Kurt was right in thinking they should cut their losses and move. The dreams—and the other phenomena—most certainly had come with the house. And she knew that the settings for the dreams were right there in Hammond, a Hammond of long ago. She should listen to Kurt, the practical one, and pack it in. There would be other houses.

  But by the end of the week Meg had steeled herself despite her fears. She resolved not to be driven off by the unknown. Some part of the house still welcomed her, still cradled her in the warmest and most comforting way. When she sat in the bay, when she ascended the stairs to the first landing where the twelve-foot stained glass windows caught the western sun, when she stood at the French doors surveying the balcony and street below, feeling the breezes and even daring to incite the old vertigo—these were the moments that she felt complete peace, happiness, and at one with the house. These were the moments when she would risk everything—even her marriage—to keep the house.

  Meg worked hard to clear her mind of the dark fears, tried to ready herself for what was to come.

  In fact, she opened herself to it as if to a secret lover, as long as it didn’t prove to be a demon lover. She dared the force to communicate, to make itself known, to materialize.

  At least that way, she reasoned, it will be under my terms. Such was her logic in her strong moments.

  But what would be the consequences should some figure actually appear to her as she turned a corner or entered a room? How would she react?

  She trembled at the thought.

  Thoughts of the baby gave her the strength to fight off the dark possibilities.

  My baby. I will have my baby and the house. I will.

  “Any occurrences?” Kurt asked even before she had pulled out of the station lot.

  “Occurrences?”

  “You know exactly what I mean, Meg.”

  Each day, by phone, she had assured him that the house was quiet. Lying in person was more difficult. “No, Kurt. I told you.”

  “Any dreams?”

  “None to speak of.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means none.” Meg braked at the light.

  Kurt pressed the issue. “What about the dream in which you were holding on to a child’s hand?”

  “No, I haven’t had that one for a while.” This at least was the truth. The light changed and Meg accelerated. “Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, nothing. Never mind.”

  At that moment a softball rolled out onto the street and a young boy came chasing it. Meg panicked at once. Her dream of running down a young boy instantly replayed itself in her mind.

  “Slow down,” Kurt cautioned.

  Meg slammed on the brakes and the car immediately screeched to a stop.

  “Jesus Christ, Meg!”

  “Sorry.” She was aware of her own heart’s racing.

  “You nearly put us through the windshield. It’s a wonder we’re not sitting here with the airbags in our faces.”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “You overreacted. You don’t usually drive like that. Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Kurt was right. There had been plenty of time to slow. And the boy, it seemed, had not even intended to go darting into the street. Meg had given him a good scare, nonetheless. He stood frozen in movement, huge eyes on the car.

  Meg motioned him to retrieve the ball. He quickly did so and beat a hasty retreat.

  Shaken, Meg accelerated now.

  Later, Meg would think back to how the subject of her dreams had been aborted by the boy with his ball. She had had the distinct impression that Kurt had something to say about them. But what? And she dared not bring up the subject again, having lied so emphatically about not having had any dreams this past week.

  Instead, she talked lightly about the estimates for the kitchen floor and the work being done at the north end of the upstairs balcony where considerable dry-rot necessitated the replacement of the balustrade and balusters. The more she pushed forward, Meg reasoned, in improving the house, in investing in the house, the more it would seem theirs and the likelihood of moving would lessen.

  Meg had trouble sleeping. She had not encouraged any affection from Kurt, and he slept soundly beside her. How could she open herself up to physical intimacy when she had violated the intimacy of truth?

  She felt guilty. No marriage could survive on lies. Wenonah was right about honesty. What was a marriage without it? Meg came to the conclusion that she would have to tell Kurt about the dreams before the weekend was over.

  Yet, what would he do regarding the house? How could she tell him and not risk losing the house?

  She turned her head to study his face, angelic in sleep. Had she done him wrong by marrying him? Deep down, she knew that she had never gotten over Pete Stoltmeyer, not really. Was it obsession, this unrequited love of twenty years ago? Would she ever be free of it, free to love Kurt as he deserved?

  Had the child and the house become more important to her than Kurt? The question put her on edge.

  Eventually, she slept, fitfully.

  It was not a sound, she thought, that brought her awake. It was a sense of—what? Movement? Or perhaps it wasn’t a sense at all that set off an alarm within her. Perhaps it was just the knowing. She knew there was another—being—in the room. Her eyes tried to adjust to the dark, moving up to the ceiling in the far corner where there seemed to be the frayed outline of something gray against the black of the room. Meg could not trust her eyes or mind. What was it that hovered there?

  At that moment, however, her attention was drawn to the open doorway and to a glimmer of light that had come and gone before her eyes could fasten on to it. Meg lifted her head, peering down the length of the bed, past the bathroom, past the short hallway, to the square hall where the stairway up began.

  Forgetting for the moment the gray thing floating near the ceiling, she stared anxiously into the shadows.

  A noise now! Her heart quickened.

  She had mentally opened herself to the force within the house, encouraged it, hoping it could be persuaded to desist. Sometimes, Wenonah had told her, spirits need only to be asked to leave, sometimes all that’s needed is a positive reassurance, a kind of validation of their untimely death, earthly angst, or a wrong done to them.

  If this was indeed a spirit, what was it that stirred it?

  Meg had visualized how she would console it, reassure it, and then—ask it to leave—making her case that life was for the living and that she, Kurt, and their child now owned the house. It was their turn to live in it. And it was time for the spirit to move on, to pass peacefully and fully over.

  But now Meg held her thumping heart, regretting having opened herself to any such confrontation. She must have been out of her mind! What to do now? She thought she should wake Kurt. She was as frightened as she ever had been. Wenonah had
warned her about the danger of being captive to fear and it was her friend’s caution that stayed her hand. She would steel herself. All of these considerations came to her within in the flash of the moment.

  The noise had been a light thud, and now there came light, ever-quickening steps. Meg held her breath, straining every muscle to hear, to see.

  These were catlike steps, she suddenly realized, as a profile of Rex came into view, his white patches glowing against his gray and the night shadows.

  Running, he propelled himself onto the staircase and disappeared.

  Meg could hear the feline footfalls recede. She smiled to herself and sighed audibly at her fright and its release.

  But before she could put her head again to the pillow, another figure caught her eye.

  Quickly following Rex was what seemed a young child, a boy. He was dressed in white shirt and shorts, white shoes and socks. There was no clearly defined edge to him, merely a fuzziness of motion to the bone-white figure’s outline as it moved against the foil of the coal-black hallway.

  He ran—or rather moved—in a floating-like motion and although he was slower than Rex—or was her mind recording it in slow motion?—his movement was more graceful, completely soundless.

  He made for the steps, his arms outstretched in pursuit of Meg’s cat.

  ELEVEN

  The vision took only a few seconds. Meg stared in disbelief now at the black void. Beads of cold sweat were breaking out on her forehead. She strained, listening for further sounds, sounds that might validate what she had seen.

  Nothing.

  Had she only imagined it? She put aside the thought of waking Kurt.

  She felt for a moment now her mind pulling away, moving upward, away from her own body. She looked down, as if from the ceiling and saw herself pulling back the covers, sitting on the side of the bed, pulling on her slippers.

  The surrealistic moment passed and the next she knew she was on the stairs, one hand clutching at the neck of her pale blue negligee, the other gripping the wall railing. She had taken no time for a robe. At the landing, under the twelve-foot high stained glass triptych, she paused to negotiate her turn, her hand guided by the cap on the newel post, for the moonless night allowed for not a glimmer of light. Here, she could detect the distinctly dry smell of ashes, at once acrid and sickly sweet.

  Meg continued the climb. At the top of the stairs, she stopped and listened, mute as the little seated stone angel she had placed on the top stair.

  Moments passed. Silence.

  Suddenly she sensed movement coming at her from below at an accelerating rate. Somehow she knew at once it wasn’t Kurt. Her heart thundered in her chest. Turning about and looking down into the stairway, as if into an abyss, she saw, against the pitch black, the gray form that had been hovering in the bedroom. It was moving so fast in its ascent that there was no time to call out or even step aside. She drew in a breath that she thought might be her last as she prepared for the collision.

  At that moment the gray mass reached her and moved through her as if she were the incorporeal being, passing through her in a rush of wind and as if it were culled from the North wind, for it chilled every part of her.

  So—there were two—what? Entities? Beings? Ghosts?

  She stood there shaking from fear and from cold. When she looked into the dark upstairs landing, the thing had vanished. Or had it dissipated? She drew breath and nearly gagged on the stink of violets, rotting violets and what she thought must be the smell of death, the smell of evil.

  The next day she would wonder why she hadn’t turned tail at once, why she proceeded to move through the second floor, checking two of the three bedrooms and the two baths. But she knew the answer: Rex. They had been loving companions long before Kurt entered her life. She had to find him.

  Where is he? she wondered, holding back panic. She intuitively knew he was in danger—but where? Even if the child she had seen—glowing white and moving in a strangely fluid motion—were a phantasm, Rex had been real. That fact she did not doubt. And he had climbed those steps as if the devil were behind him.

  She came to the doors of the master bedroom. Opening them, she saw that it, too, was empty. But the smell of ash was here, stronger than in the stairway. She was getting closer to finding the child and, hopefully, Rex.

  The French doors, always secured at night by bolts at both top and bottom, stood open. Meg’s heart caught. The screen doors were open, as well.

  Without thinking, Meg moved toward them.

  As she stepped up and out onto the balcony, she looked both left and right. As she did so, the cloud cover conveniently shifted, allowing the moon to shed needed light, light that made the whiteness of the house glimmer eerily. From the weeping willow tree in the front yard came the hoot of an owl. Meg took stock. The balcony facing the street, the long section of the wrap-around configuration, stood empty.

  As she moved to the left, toward the corner and the side section of the balcony that overlooked the driveway, her hand holding to every column as she moved, Meg heard the shriek of Rex’s terrified cry.

  She turned the corner to see Rex huddled at the far end of the balcony where the rotting balustrade had been removed in preparation for the new. His back was humped high and his gray and white hair stood on end. His mouth opened in an angry hiss. His teeth flashed.

  The feline bravado, however, could not mask his deep fear and panic.

  Leaning toward him, arm outstretched in a gentle, pulsating motion was the figure of the boy in white, glowing whiter than the house itself. The air was thick with the pungently bitter scent of ashes. He was reaching out to Rex, who had backed himself to less than an inch from the unprotected edge of the balcony.

  The cat was cornered by the boy. It had nowhere to go. Perched on this precipice, he cried out now in utter terror, his head turning about and taking a quick assessment of the drop to the ground.

  It was a distance he had never attempted.

  Meg had observed Rex calculate his leaps and jumps hundreds of times, and they had almost always been executed beautifully—but now, from this height she was certain he would not survive.

  This thought came in a split second and with such certainty that she rushed toward her cat, her faithful companion of eight years, without a concern for her old vertigo. She prayed only that her quick action would not further alarm him, causing him to jump.

  She moved like quicksilver to the end of the balcony. The boy’s face turned toward her in a kind of astonishment. His mouth, so red against the paleness of his face, shimmered into what seemed a smile. She sensed immediately the boy had meant no harm to the cat.

  Rex held his ground. By the time Meg reached him, bending and scooping up into her arms his rigid, trembling form, the white luminescent form of the boy had vanished.

  Just as Meg stood and turned, looking for the child, clutching Rex, still terrified herself, she heard the cracking sound of the dry-rotted planks beneath her giving way.

  Sensing the danger, too, Rex pressed his little back feet into Meg’s chest for propulsion and leaped from her. While he landed on a safe and solid area of the porch, the planks beneath Meg’s feet were groaning and giving way.

  Rex’s jump had upset her equilibrium. Meg faltered—and looked down.

  In just a fleeting moment, it all made sense. It was as if a truth were revealed. Her vertigo, the childhood nightmares of falling, the sheer helplessness, the despair, the weightless stomach had all presaged this—the fall that would take her and her unborn baby to their deaths.

  She cried out.

  Or had she only thought that she had cried out?

  The floor gave way. She felt herself plunging toward the ground in a sensation that seemed to last forever.

  Down she fell, not as if she were falling from a second floor,
but as if it were from a skyscraper. She was living the old nightmare.

  Falling—falling—until—

  The sensation stopped abruptly. Inexplicably, she felt cushioned now, not crushed but cradled by something, someone. Who?

  She felt safe. Who had caught her, broken her fall?

  She felt as though she were being lifted. She longed to open her eyes, but couldn’t. It was if tiny weights were holding down her eyelids. And if she were to open her eyes, she thought, the danger and the terrible feeling of dropping off the edge of the world would return.

  The upward motion continued. She could detect once again the sickeningly sweet smell of decaying violets nearby. Then there was nothing.

  It seemed a long time before consciousness returned. When she opened her eyes, she felt stationary. Kurt was kneeling at her side, staring down at her.

  “You caught me? . . . How?”

  “No, I didn’t catch you, Meg. You must have fainted right here. Damn lucky you are. You’re so close to the edge that I nearly had a heart attack.”

  Meg saw that she was, indeed, still on the balcony, less than a foot from the edge. “I’m confused. You didn’t catch me? I didn’t fall from the balcony?”

  “No, Thank God! Do you feel all right? We should get you to ER.”

  “No. I think I’m all right.”

  “Well, we’ll get you to a doctor in the morning. Meg, what the hell were you doing out here?”

  “What?” She paused, carefully choosing her words. “Oh, I heard Rex crying. He was out here. He was terrified. Kurt, you know he’s a house cat.”

  “How’d he get out? The doors were closed and bolted. I checked them before I went to bed.”

  “I . . . I don’t know.”

  “Never mind. Let’s get you inside and down to bed. Grab me around the neck. I’m going to lift.”