Each property took them farther from the school but never so far that he couldn’t bike it when he had to. If he got a car, he wouldn’t care if they found a place in the next county. In fact, he was starting to get into the tight, winding roads that snaked away from Pinedale in four directions. He could easily see himself behind the wheel of a ’68 Corvette convertible—327-cubic-inch engine, tuned exhaust, four-on-the-floor—nudging the speedometer on each turn until the tires squealed in fear.
Dad consulted a stack of property listings, which he had printed from a local Realtor’s Web site. He put the car in gear and backed out of the gravel driveway.
Mom turned in the seat. “So what do you think so far?”
“I liked the one with the river,” David said quickly.
“Will I get my own room?” Toria asked.
“You will,” Mom said, and the way she said it made Xander ask, “What about us?” He and David had shared a bedroom for twelve years, and he’d thought if anything good came out of the move, it might be finally getting his own room.
“It depends,” she said. “These houses really aren’t that big.” “I noticed, but there’s lots of land. Could we add on?”
“Hey!” David said, clearly liking the idea.
“Whoa,” Dad said, “additions are expensive.”
Xander rolled his eyes. Everything was expensive. When Dad started talking costs, it meant it wasn’t going to happen.
Dad switched on the blinker to turn left, waited for an oncoming car to pass, then pulled the 4Runner onto a narrow, paved road. The forest here was especially dense. They crowded the road and in spots formed leafy tunnels through which Dad drove.
“What if we do it ourselves?” David asked.
Dad glanced back. “Do what?”
“Build our own bedrooms.” His big grin told Xander he had all sorts of ideas for a room. Xander shook his head at David and mouthed the words no way.
“I don’t think so,” Dad said. After a moment, he said, “You know, maybe.” He smiled back at David. “That’s not such a bad idea.”
David made wide eyes at Xander, whose face was slack in disbelief. Dad hadn’t even said he’d think about it. “Not such a bad idea” in Dad-talk was yes.
The 4Runner pulled onto a dirt road. While David rambled on about skylights and secret rooms behind hidden panels, Xander studied the forest on his side of the car. Foliage and shadows limited visibility to twenty or thirty feet from the edge of the road. He would be the first to admit that he knew as much about trees and the woods as he did about Thailand, but he couldn’t help but think that there was something different about this forest. The leaves of different trees seemed to sway in opposing directions, more like they were controlled by the trees themselves than by the wind. Shadows shifted oddly. The darkness rushed at the car, stopping just feet from the forest’s edge, then it pulled way back, exposing gnarled trunks and spindly branches deep within the forest. It reminded him of the surf, flowing in and out, but much quicker and without a discernible pattern. He knew the swaying leaves and branches, as well as the clouds, could cause the weird shifting of shadows, but still something about it left him uneasy.
City boy, he thought. Freaking out over the trees’ shadows. Man, I gotta get over this.
CHAPTER
seven
SUNDAY, 11:43 A.M.
The road simply ended. No cul-de-sac. No sign like the ones they had seen before: “Private property. No trespassing.” Or “No motorized vehicles beyond this point.” Just road . . . then trees.
Dad pulled to a stop and looked around. He rolled down the window and listened, as though the house would some- how make itself known. Wind in the trees, nothing more.
He picked up the listing page and studied it.
Mom leaned forward to squint through the windshield.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” she asked.
Dad nodded.
She reached for the paper, but he was already crunching it into a ball. He tossed it out the window.
She said, “Maybe it’s out of sight. With all these trees . . .”
“Nah.” He shifted into reverse and backed up. Shifting again, he drove sharply toward the side of the road, then reversed again.
“Three-point turn,” he told Xander.
“I know. We covered that in—” Xander stopped. He was gazing into the woods and saw a line too straight, something too flat to be natural. “Wait. I think I see it.”
“What?” Mom said. “The house?” She looked back at him, then to where he was staring. David and Toria clicked out of their seatbelts and crowded up against him to look.
“I . . . think so,” he said. He opened the door and stepped out. Toria nearly tumbled out after him. Dad killed the engine, and they gathered at the end of the road.
“I see it!” David said. He ran into the woods.
“Hey!” Dad called. Too late: David was already gone. All of them plunged in, crunching over pine needles and dead branches.
Twenty paces in, Xander saw it and wondered how they had missed it from the road. It was two stories high, and it was capped by a steeply pitched roof, from which two dormer windows protruded. A covered porch ran the length of the front, casting the entry door and entire lower level in shadows. The supports were ornately carved columns. Occupying the left front corner was a round tower that rose slightly higher than the rest of the house. It wasn’t really round, though. It was an octagon, with only five sides showing. At the tip of its tall spire was a black weathervane. As Xander watched, an unfelt breeze made it turn; it squeaked like a mouse caught in an eagle’s talons. The exterior paint—whatever color it had once been—had been washed gray by years of weather and neglect. It seemed to Xander to be as much a part of the surrounding forest as the trees themselves.
“Oh, Ed!” Mom exclaimed. “It’s a Victorian.”
“Pure Queen Anne,” Dad agreed.
Tendrils of mist slithered over the forest floor, around the base of trees. Xander noticed that some of it had climbed the porch pillars and drifted, almost invisibly, over the shingles of the porch roof. It reminded him of an old TV series Dean’s dad had bought on DVD: Dark Shadows. It was about a creepy old house and a vampire who lived there. Barnabas, Xander remembered.
David was standing farther in, halfway to the house. His head was bent back as he took in the tower, tall as a silo.
Mom said, “I think it used to be green, with darker trim.”
“Makes sense,” Dad suggested. “One of the original tenets of Victorian architecture was that homes blend in with their surroundings.”
Xander hung back as his family moved forward as one.
Something on the ground caught his eye and he stepped over to it. Off to the side, away from where they had walked, shoe prints were pushed into an area of soft dirt. The prints approached the house at an angle. Xander scanned back toward the road, where they came from, then toward the house, but did not see any other prints. He wondered how long ago they had been made. They seemed fresh, undamaged by rain or wind or scampering animals.
The back of his neck tingled and he knew—knew!—he was being watched. He spun toward his family, but their attention was on the house. He scanned the windows, expecting to see someone looking out or a curtain falling back in place. But he saw nothing like that: no faces, no moving curtains. The feeling of being watched stayed with him. He thought of Barnabas again and a shiver ran up his spine, like a spider with cold feet.
His family had reached the steps leading up to the porch and double front doors. The wood creaked as they climbed, and Xander half-expected one of them to crash through the rotting boards.
“Is anyone home?” Toria asked.
“I don’t think anyone lives here, honey,” Mom said.
“Why not?” David said. “It’s cool.”
Wind blew through the treetops, and the weathervane squeeeeeeaked. Xander looked up at it, and it rotated slowly to point at him.
W
ithout knocking, Dad pushed open the door and walked in. Mom followed, then David and Toria. To Xander, it looked like the house was eating them, just popping them in, one at a time.
“Hey!” he called to the open doorway. He felt uneasy but didn’t know why. It was just an old house in the woods. And the footprints could have been left by the real estate people or someone else looking for a house. He walked toward the front steps. A breeze blew past him. It was cold, and it came from the house. He looked up at the eaves, where the roof hung over the sides of the house. It looked taller, this close. He had the sense that he had not walked up to the house, but it had walked up to him, a monster sizing him up.
David’s voice drifted out to him, saying something was cool. He ascended the steps. They groaned and creaked. At the open doorway, he stopped. A curved staircase followed the wall to the second floor high above the first. To his right, a wide doorway serviced a dining room. He could see two chairs, part of a table, a buffet, and cabinets on the far wall. The doors pushed straight into the walls—pocket doors, Xander knew they were called. They were what David had thought was cool.
To his left another archway led to a study or library. Its walls were lined in shelves that were packed with dusty books. Straight ahead, beyond the foyer, a hallway led to a room where the family was gathered. From their words, he assumed they were in the kitchen: “Here’s a pantry.” “Beautiful cabinets . . .” “There are dirty dishes in the sink!” “Gross!”
Furniture, books, dishes in the sink. If the items themselves suggested someone still lived there, the setting quickly corrected that misconception. Cobwebs clung to the corners where the walls and ceiling met. Dust coated the floors, showing where his family had walked as clearly as if they had traipsed over the smooth beach sand. Wallpaper curled off the walls like peels from a banana. Several banister spindles were broken or missing. Grime lined the fancy carvings in the wood on the banister, around the doors, the doors themselves. Gaps wide enough to stick a finger into had formed between several planks in the hardwood floor.
“Xander!” Dad called from the kitchen. He beckoned to him. “Come on! Check this out!”
He stepped fully into the house. The air inside was cool on his skin. He turned, expecting the front door to close on its own. But it stayed open, as it was supposed to. He shook his head, chiding himself for letting an old house spook him.
He walked toward the kitchen.
Behind him, the front door slammed shut.
CHAPTER
eight
SUNDAY, NOON
Xander spun around to stare at the door. It had closed on its own.
And only after all of us had come in, he thought.
From the kitchen behind him, his dad said, “Isn’t this incredible?”
“Did you see that?” Xander asked, pointing at the door, but when he stepped into the kitchen, it was empty.
“Whatta ya think?” Dad asked.
Xander turned around to see his father coming toward him from the direction of the front door. His mouth went dry. “Weren’t you just in the kitchen?”
“I was. I walked around. You okay?”
“No, I mean . . . yes, but . . .”
His dad tilted his head. “Xander?”
“There’s something going on.” He was looking past his father to the front door.
“Going on?” Dad asked.
“Something strange. First I heard you in the kitchen, and uh . . .” Xander’s head was swimming. “Then the front door slammed . . . by itself.”
“It’s an old house,” his father explained. “Hinges start to sag and that causes doors to close on their own. Have you seen the round room, the one in the tower?”
Xander shook his head.
Mom’s voice called down from upstairs. Xander would have sworn she was in the kitchen a few seconds ago as well.
“Dad,” Xander said. “Doesn’t something about this place seem weird to you?”
“You mean the stuff, the dishes? Whoever lived here before did a poor job packing up, huh?”
“No, I mean really weird.”
“Like what?”
“Like . . .” Xander didn’t know where to start. There was the door shutting after he’d thought about it doing that very thing. His father had chalked it up to sagging hinges. But what about hearing Dad in the kitchen when he was somewhere else? And the chill he’d gotten outside, when he felt as though he was being watched?
“Ed,” Mom called again.
“Hold on a sec,” his father told Xander, holding up his index finger. He went into the foyer and started up the stairs.
Xander went to the front door and squinted at the hinges. They were dirty and rusty, but otherwise looked fine. The house creaked around Xander. He thought of the way dogs sometimes whimpered when you gave them special attention. He wondered if the house creaked all the time, maybe from constant settling or from the wind buffeting against it . . . or if it was responding to his family’s presence. Voices and footsteps streamed at him from the corridors and upper landing. He could identify each voice, but not the direction from which it came. He heard David in the kitchen again, but didn’t see anyone in there. Movement caught his eye, and he looked up to the second floor landing. A hallway disappeared to the left and right. Two doors were visible. One was open, and he saw David standing in the threshold, his familiar silhouette backlit by sunlight coming through a window behind him.
“David!” he called.
“What?” David said, almost beside him.
Xander jumped. David was standing at the foot of the stairs, having stepped out of the dining room.
“David!” Xander yelled, because he had to yell something.
His eyes snapped back to the figure in the upstairs doorway, but it was gone.
“What do you want?” David asked.
“I . . . were you just upstairs?”
“I haven’t looked up there yet.”
“But I just saw you up there.”
David gave him a funny look. “Not me. Look at this.” He stepped closer to show what he held in his hand. At first Xander thought it was a flashlight, and then he recognized it: a toy light-saber. The plastic red tube that represented the laser had broken off, but the cylindrical handle, with its decorative rings and On/ Off switch, was unmistakable. It was old.
“Some kid must have lived here a long time ago,” David said.
“Or came in to play.”
Xander heard excited voices coming from . . . somewhere.
“I really love it, Ed. I do,” his mom said.
“Even with all the work?”
“Yes, yes. How else could we afford something this big?
If we ever got into a house like this, it would have to be a fixer-upper.”
His parents were upstairs, but the voices seemed to be drifting from everywhere at once: the library, the kitchen, the second floor. Relief washed over him when they appeared in the upstairs hallway. Mom leaned over the railing. “It’s big, boys. Seven bedrooms!”
“Seven?” David said. “What would we do with that many?” “You can each have your own, for starters,” Dad said. “Your mother’s counting servants’ quarters up here . . .”
“Servants!” David said, tickled at the idea.
“That doesn’t mean we’re going to get any,” Dad said. “Besides, that room needs a lot of work, so we can’t use it. For now, anyway.”
In his excitement, David ran halfway up the stairs. “So, can we live here?”
Dad looked at Mom to answer. “We’ll see what we can do.” Xander felt his stomach roll over on itself. He wanted to get out of the house, but he didn’t like the idea of going outside alone. He thought of the shoe prints he’d seen. “Dad, can I show you something outside? It might be important.”
Dad looked at him curiously. He gave Mom a quick kiss and clomped down the stairs. “What is it?” he asked.
Mom stopped him. “Ed, where’s Victoria?” she said with that hint of worry mot
hers seem capable of conjuring at a moment’s notice.
Everything he felt about the house made Xander panic. Instantly, he yelled, “Toria! Toria!”
His dad gave him a puzzled look, then called for his daughter. Silence. Not even the creaking, which had seemed so loud and constant a few minutes before.
“Toria!” Dad called again. He looked up to Mom.
She said, “I haven’t seen her since we came in.”
“Check up there,” he said. He came the rest of the way down the stairs and turned into the dining room.
Xander went the other direction, through the library. He circled around and met up with Dad in the kitchen. When they returned to the foyer, Mom was coming off the last step, worry and hope etched on her face.
“Not down here,” Dad informed her. His voice had risen a notch. He appeared more concerned than Mom now.
“Ed—” she started.
Footsteps came from upstairs, running, growing louder.
All of them looked. The footsteps grew closer. They sound like Toria’s, Xander thought. A little girl’s. Please let it be her.
When the footsteps could not possibly get any closer, she still did not appear, but the pounding continued. Again, Xander glanced toward the dining room, the kitchen, the library. Considering the tricks of sound he had witnessed, he no longer assumed his sister was upstairs. And that was if the footsteps belonged to her.
“What in the world . . . ?” his father said.
“I looked up there,” Mom assured him. She called, “Victoria!”
Dad went to the stairs. He hesitated, as if fearful of what he would find at the top.
Toria emerged from the shadows of the upstairs hall. She stopped at the railing, all teeth and dimples. “Hey, guys!”