Pre-Approved for Haunting by Patrick Barb

Author:Patrick Barb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company

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If the next client from 410 L.L. had asked me to deliver a report, I would have filed the exact same one I’d made back during construction. As far as I could tell, just because I returned to a finished house with walls, ceilings, state of the art kitchen appliances, a two-car garage, and that to-die-for open-concept living room/ dining room space, that didn’t change a damn thing when it came to my assessment of a potential haunting.

Or lack thereof.

I walked through the front door, having already wiped my feet free of dew-wet grass on a WELCOME HOME mat placed just so on the porch. I stepped into a foyer where a dog’s food and water bowls sat sentry near a leash hung beside the human occupants’ coats and umbrellas.

The glowing hum of suburban domestic tranquility always frightened me more than any fog-filled cemetery ever could. With cemeteries, you’d pull away the vines, read the names on the grave markers, and know all there was to know about its inhabitants. They lived, they died, and here they are forever.

Simple.

But when you’re taking off your boots because the client’s wife asked you to, and you’re trying to hold onto your equipment you carted in from your old beater station wagon—the sonar devices, infrared goggles, Geiger counters, etc.—you learn to forgive yourself for thinking maybe David Byrne was a prophet and onto something when he sang that eternal question: “How did I get here?”

I nearly tripped over the dog bowls when little hands came out of nowhere, each set paired with a couple of overeager little feet. All those limbs attached to little children with inquiring eyes and giggling mouths. They moved fast even when standing still. I couldn’t nail down their number. They came for my equipment with a singsong offer to “Let us help you with your stuff, Mister,” and they were gone before I could insist that they “Please be careful with those!”

I followed them, taking a more direct path than their own winding, weaving, and bobbing course. We moved down the front hall and across the main room. I watched them deposit each item, with as close to reverence as chocolate- and grass-stained fingers could hope to provide, onto a dining room table. I’d later learn the table had been repurposed from “a piece of the old dock.” I’m not certain which dock exactly, but I like to think it was one where kids had fished—not these particular children, of course, but certainly someone’s children at some point in time. I still think about those hypothetical fishing children, dropping their lines into murky black water from the ends of makeshift poles.

“Kids, why don’t you go watch some TV or play on your computers while the grown-ups talk, okay?”

At their mother’s command, the children obeyed. Not necessarily out of deference or fear, though. I got the sense they had been waiting for that signal, for the call to return to whatever sanctuary they’d claimed for themselves inside the walls of 410 L.

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