Read The Haunting of James Hastings for Free Online Page A

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.
     
    I pressed the TALK button again.