The Poor and the Haunted Read online

  “What?”

  “Lie down. Just rest. When you’re feeling better we’ll vacuum this up, figure out where it came from, and talk to whoever made the mess.”

  What was Jimmy going to say? There’s a demon in the house? My father was possessed and that’s why he killed himself? The demon in our closet is going to take me back to Oklahoma? Jimmy could not bring himself to say any of those words. As a grown man, he said the word possession to Carlisle. But he could choose to cut Carlisle out of his life. He had done it before.

  Jill, on the other hand, was his wife. Words spoken in a marriage cannot be unspoken, so he wasn’t about to say, “I think I’m becoming possessed by the family demon.”

  “Okay,” Jimmy said. “You’re right. You’re right. I’ll lie down.”

  Jill pushed her husband toward their large bed. She reached down, grasping the bottom of his shirt as he put his arms up in the air. After his shirt was removed, she untied his shoes. As she undressed him, she could feel the tight wires in his body go a little slack. She kissed his forehead before pulling the sheet and blanket up to his chin.

  “I love you, babe,” she said. “Get some rest, and we’ll figure this out.”

  She closed their door and stepped out. Jimmy heard her pick up the spilled groceries and descend the stairs.

  Jimmy stared through the dim light of an air-conditioned bedroom in 2019. Jimmy stared at a barn door in 1997. Jimmy lay on a bed, his naked back sweating into twelve hundred threads. Jimmy stood sandwiched between a rusty Firebird and an old farm truck. Jimmy heard a twelve-year-old girl getting dropped off in the suburbs after volleyball practice. Jimmy heard a twelve-year-old girl saying “Kay” as he placed headphones over her ears and played a Cyndi Lauper song. Jimmy saw a mother’s face as Jill kissed his forehead and tucked him into bed. Jimmy saw his mother’s face as she told him Kelly wouldn’t be allowed to leave their prison of a home.

  Jimmy was in his Arizona home, crying and clutching a bedspread. Jimmy was inside a barn in Oklahoma, walking toward his father’s corpse.

  He sat bolt upright in their bed. He bent over and put on the same sweaty t-shirt he used for his morning run, the same one Jill just removed. He grabbed his wallet from the nightstand and placed a single credit card in his pocket. He then bent down and laced up his Nikes before walking over to the second-story window that faced their street.

  Right outside the window was the roof covering their porch. Eight feet down from the porch roof was their front walkway.

  Jimmy listened for a moment for the sounds of his wife’s footsteps.

  Nothing.

  He pulled up the blinds as quietly as he could. The window raised easily, the sills in Estancia Estates always oiled, always smooth.

  Jimmy Lansford was a 37-year-old man who believed a demon was stalking him. Even worse, he knew he was not the man he once was. Demons or not, he had become the monster he feared most: an unstable parent. If he couldn’t fix it, if he couldn’t control his own life, he at least needed to understand what was happening.

  He climbed through their bedroom window, careful to land on the roof above the porch. Though he was visible to anyone who looked, the eight-foot-high walls around each house long ago conditioned his neighbors to ignore what occurred outside the boundaries of their quarter-acre kingdoms—especially if it involved a neighbor in need. In his neighborhood, people knew a crazy-eyed man standing on his own roof meant you looked away and drove faster. Of course, they knew it without being told. This specific scenario was definitely not addressed in the HOA’s bylaws.

  He knew he could not linger.

  Jill and now Jessica were home, and Jonathan could arrive any minute. The nearest Walmart was almost five miles away, but he figured he could find what he needed there.

  It was one hundred and four degrees, fall having cooled the weather from its summer highs that could soften blacktop and close the airport. He stood on the porch roof for a moment, the sun beating down on his disheveled head. He closed his eyes, inhaling car-heater hot air in his throat and nostrils. Jimmy stepped to the edge and did the one thing he found almost impossible to do.

  He jumped.

  Of course, he half-expected to never touch the sidewalk, to soar upward until the pressure and lack of oxygen popped his skull like one of Jessica’s ba-woons.

  Instead, he plummeted straight to the ground, scraping his knee hard against the concrete. He stood up, saw the blood sacrifice to his pressure-washed front walkway, and ran—first with a limp and then steadily faster as he reached the main road to Walmart.

  To say Jimmy ran through hell would not be an exaggeration. He had already run seven miles before the temperature crossed one hundred degrees, experienced out-of-body travel, had a breakdown, and climbed out of his bedroom window before leaping to his sidewalk. That was before his feet pounded the ground for several more miles.

  Every breath brought still hotter air into his lungs. He felt like he had swallowed the entire car heater, the angles sliding down his throat like blurry YouTube videos of snakes eating cows. The blacktop next to the sidewalk seemed to push even more hot air toward him, and every passing car showered him with a fine, painful spray of dirt and gravel. Sweat rolled down his face, mixing with the tears in his eyes.

  Jimmy didn’t stop running until he burst through the front doors, the elderly greeter too shocked for her scripted hello. He ignored her completely and grabbed a bottled water from the first cooler he saw. He would pay for it on his way out, he told himself. Once steadied and hydrated, he headed toward the section he needed, passing men’s toiletries, the makeup aisle, and the seasonal summer section where they sell floaties shaped like turtles and high-powered squirt guns.

  Then, in aisle twenty-one, two shelves up from Candyland and three feet over from Pictionary, he found what he was looking for:

  Ouija, by Hasbro.

  He turned around and headed for the checkout, bypassing the opportunity to pay for the Ouija board using the self-service scanner. It was not typically the sort of mistake one lives to regret, but specialized regret was something Jimmy specialized in.

  The young mother ahead of him buying feminine hygiene products and ear infection medication for her baby was, perhaps, having an even worse day than Jimmy—though he took no notice. He was sweating profusely and smelled like death.

  It was his turn to pay. The cashier took a glance at the sole item on the checkout belt and looked at Jimmy, who ignored the cashier’s look. If Jimmy was worried about impressing anyone, he would not have jumped out of his window and run five miles to Walmart for a Ouija board.

  “Did you see a price on these?” The cashier asked.

  “No,” Jimmy said.

  “Because the barcode isn’t working,” the cashier said, scanning the item again. He looked at Jimmy in an accusatory way, as though Jimmy wanted any hassles or snags in his midday purchase of a Ouija board.

  “I think they’re nineteen or twenty dollars. Something like that.”

  “Something like that? You don’t know?”

  Jimmy could be profane, though almost never in public, and almost never with strangers. On this day though, he would not tolerate judgment from a young man who made his living passing board games and lunch meat over a bar code scanner. Jimmy leaned in, close enough only he and the cashier heard what he was about to say.

  “I don’t know what it costs, dipshit. Why don’t you ask the fucking thing?”

  Jimmy raised his lip, revealing a sharp canine whitened by dental lasers and an adulthood of rigid dietary choices.

  The cashier did not recoil.

  He did not even blink.

  For young Andrew Ferguson, this was a
day he long waited for. He had bills to pay and three quarters of a high school diploma. He wasn’t stupid, though. He was a human being and deserved better than the way he was treated by assholes wearing hundred-dollar shoes.

  Assholes, in other words, like the sweaty, smelly asshole hassling him about a Ouija board.

  Andrew picked up the phone near his register, the one connected to the store’s PA system. He looked Jimmy straight in the eye and did not hesitate.

  “Price check, can I get a price check on lane seven? Price check on a Ouija board,” he stopped for a moment. His face had the dead-eyed look of a gunslinger who has waited his whole life for this particular shootout. “Price check. Lane seven. Middle-aged man needs his Ouija board. Price check. Aisle Seven.”

  There are few things that can make the bustling hub of capitalism that is a suburban Phoenix Walmart on a Saturday grind to a halt like a price check on a Ouija board. Reactions across the store varied. One elderly woman kissed her cross necklace and headed straight for the exit, sure the end was nigh.

  One young father answered his seven-year-old son’s question of, “What’s a weeja board?” by answering the question the boy had asked the day before, which was, “Where do babies come from?” He decided if one must choose, it’s easier to talk about sex than the devil.

  Shoppers clutched anything they could grab: a shawl, the cross dangling from their neck, a spouse’s hand. It was like a bad smell passed through the store.

  Jimmy looked around. Every single cashier and every single shopper, as far as he could tell, stopped to stare at the middle-aged man who desperately needed a Ouija board and a shower. A few people snickered, but most could tell Jimmy was not someone picking up the game for his kids to use at a sleepover. He looked like he needed it like Linda Blair needed it.

  Andrew Ferguson picked the phone up, preparing to ask for yet another price check. With Andrew’s lips six inches from the handset, Jimmy ran for it, his sneakers squeaking on the tile floor as he dodged families with carts stuffed to the brim. He headed for the exit, forgetting he was about to technically shoplift the bottle of water he never paid for. He ran through the automatic doors, not slowing down as he sailed through the parking lot before hitting the road that led to his home.

  The security footage that featured Jimmy Lansford in a Walmart was not just stored on a hard drive and forgotten. Security personnel, cashiers, and even supervisors gathered to laugh at the video. Right up to the assistant manager, every employee agreed Mr. Oujia Board had that one coming.

  But once Jimmy left the parking lot, his starring role in the day’s footage ended.

  No one saw the way he vomited along the side of the road, doubled over and snarling as cars drove by, spraying gravel on his shins. The cameras didn’t see the way he seemed to slink up to his own home, trying to avoid being seen by whoever was inside. They couldn’t see the way he opened the door manually, lifting it just enough for him to lie on his belly, the hot driveway burning the skin on his legs as he slunk into his own garage, like an animal trying to burrow its way into a space where it didn’t belong.

  Once inside his garage, no camera witnessed what happened next.

  But Jimmy’s observer did.

  The observer waited, aware its most important work would occur when Jimmy returned. The observer watched as Jimmy scanned the workbench along the right side of the garage. The tools kept there were clean and organized, with various saws, hammers, and shears hanging from hooks mounted to the wall. Both Jill’s and Jimmy’s vehicles were in the garage, their waxy shine showing Jimmy’s reflection as he moved toward the bench.

  The shine of the vehicles also revealed a smudge trailing a foot or so behind him. The smudge could easily be mistaken for a sloppy wax job done at the car wash Jimmy and Jill frequented—until it moved. The smudge paused as Jimmy rummaged through the contents of his work bench. As his right hand came back out of a drawer, the observer saw what Jimmy held in his fist.

  It was a large flathead screwdriver, the tip shiny and sharp.

  The headlights and taillights in the two cars pulsed softly, the displays on the radios briefly coming to life. Jimmy didn’t notice. The hair on his neck stood straight up. He didn’t notice that, either.

  The screwdriver was not as sharp as the tools one might find in an old farmhouse barn, but with momentum, it would do the job. Jimmy pointed the tip at his right eye. He opened the lids as far as they would go, taking in the scene before him: the workbench, the barely used saw hanging from the wall, bits and pieces of a life intentionally constructed to avoid Jimmy pointing something sharp and deadly at his eye.

  The pressure inside all eight tires sharply increased. Both car radios came on and stayed on. If anyone else walked in the garage at that moment they wouldn’t be able to hear themselves scream as the air filled with a sound-swallowing static. The static rendered the car radios as good as mute. The overhead bulb flickered and turned on, the light breaching the boundary of its glass casing, illuminating every black cavity in the structure, even the nooks and crannies of car guts, parts so concealed they should have resisted any light.

  Jimmy extended his arm as far away from his face as it would get, and then did a slow-motion, practice stab toward his eye, making sure the trajectory was correct.

  It was.

  Jimmy extended his hand again, and again swung the screwdriver toward his face, stopping mere millimeters from his eye. Though the screwdriver did not make contact, he could feel the weight of the steel on his pupil. He extended his arm again. The third time would do it. He would swing fast and hard with no intention of living life blind in one eye.

  Every needle on every dial on every instrument, from the old-fashioned speedometer in Jimmy’s car to the air pump Jonathan used to inflate basketballs, suddenly shot all the way right. The static abruptly died and was replaced by the sound of both cars playing a song from Jimmy’s childhood.

  Jill realized she hadn’t checked on Jimmy since tucking him in earlier in the afternoon. She opened the door, saw the empty bed, and briefly saw her worst nightmare float into her frontal cortex. She walked into their closet to see if Jimmy was there, hanging from the sturdy, expensive light fixture.

  Jessica sat in her room watching the new IT movie on her iPad with Finn Wolfhard in it. He was in Stranger Things, and Jessica loved Stranger Things. She secretly wished she could have had a Stranger Things birthday party, like she was a little kid again. The band her dad hired was cool, but she preferred a Demogorgon piñata.

  Jonathan was walking home, angry that Zach beat him at basketball. Jonathan knew why Zach won. It wasn’t because Zach was a better player. It was because Jonathan didn’t have his Kyrie Irving shoes with him. They were in the attic, covered in dried mud. He knew how much nice shoes meant to his dad. He didn’t want to let Jimmy down by mistreating something his dad couldn’t afford when he was the same age.

  The shoes had gotten muddy when he and Zach built a homemade Slip N’ Slide. He had been searching for one of his dad’s vintage ASU t-shirts, when he looked down and realized how much mud he’d tracked in the house. He had cleaned almost all of it when he heard his dad get back from one of the multiple runs he took that day.

  Jill in the closet.

  Jessica in her bedroom.

  Jonathan walking up the driveway, thinking about the lie he told.

  Except for Jimmy, that’s where all the Lansfords were when Cyndi Lauper and both car alarms sent them running toward the garage.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Summer 2001

  Unlike other students, Jimmy hadn’t returned home for Thanksgiving or Christmas. He couldn’t afford to. Everything extra he earned from his part-time job making milkshakes at The Chuckbox was sent back to K
elly, via Carlisle. His mother no longer qualified for welfare benefits. Diane’s two years had expired without her ever setting foot in a classroom or attending a single job interview. Though Jimmy’s money wasn’t much, he made sure to mail Kelly a little for food and school clothes.

  They agreed the moment Jimmy arrived back in town he would head straight to the tables in front of Derry’s. A table at Derry’s was the same spot, about a year earlier, where Carlisle and Kelly had convinced Jimmy to leave for Arizona State, even if he couldn’t bring his little sister. When Kelly and Carlisle staged their intervention, Kelly did most of the talking.

  “You have to go, Jimmy,” she said, Carlisle staying silent for this part of the conversation. “I’ll be safe, and mom won’t keep this up forever. I’ll be there, just…just not yet.”

  “I kind of want to be a cop,” Jimmy said, looking toward Carlisle. Though Carlisle agreed to help Jimmy get into the academy—if that’s what he wanted—the thought of his young friend having to deal with men like Roger Crowder on a regular basis made him hope Kelly could convince him to go.

  “It’s a full ride, Jimmy,” Kelly said. “Take it. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  Kelly reached across the table and put her hand in Jimmy’s, her fingers interlocking with his. Carlisle watched this display of affection. It was a mature gesture, and the sort of thing both Lansford children weren’t shy about. It was, like Jimmy’s discomfort with asking for favors, another reason why he loved them both.

  “Jimmy, I need to tell you something,” she said, holding his gaze. “’Member when I bit Ronnie in the neck when he was going to hit you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, if you don’t go, that day will seem like a picnic. Trust me, I will kick your ass.”

  Carlisle burst out laughing, and slapped Jimmy on the shoulder.

  “Buddy, I will help her. You want to be a cop here? Go get your degree and come back. They’ll make you chief,” Carlisle said, dabbing his eyes as his laugh trailed off. “Heck, they’ll make you my boss.”