House of Dark Shadows

  “Where were you?” Mom asked.

  Toria looked confused by her tone. She pointed. “In that bedroom, right there.”

  “But I looked, honey.”

  “I didn’t see you either,” Toria said, shrugging. “I think the room used to belong to a little boy.”

  “See?” David said, slapping Xander’s arm with the lightsaber. Dad said, “Come on down, sweetheart. It’s time to go.”

  “Ahhh,” she complained.

  “Come on.” Dad approached Xander. “What did you want to show me?”

  “Nothing, never mind,” Xander said. They were leaving anyway, and what would Dad say about shoe prints in the dirt? Exactly what Xander already considered: that they were left by someone looking for a house, just like they were. No biggie.

  At the 4Runner, Xander looked around. The house was easy to spot now that he knew it was there, but he could also see how they had missed it the first time. The woods were shadowy and so was the house. He noticed there wasn’t any trash caught in the bushes at the edge of the forest. Or beer bottles scattered around. He thought that was funny, since a dead end like this was exactly what high school kids looked for in a party place. Either there were too many dead ends in these backwoods or too few teenagers looking to party. He didn’t want his family to be the only litterbugs, so he snatched up the crumpled property listing his father had discarded and pushed it into his pocket.

  All the way back to the motel—a good ten minutes, at least—the car buzzed with ideas for making the house their home. Dad said it needed, first and foremost, a thorough cleaning. Mom wanted to paint, recarpet the floors, and stain the wood. Toria knew exactly which bedroom she wanted. And David grumbled about not getting a chance to scope out the upstairs. Only Xander remained silent. If they were really going to live there, he hoped his uneasiness about it went away. He didn’t think he could feel this way—all tight inside—24/7.

  CHAPTER

  nine

  SUNDAY, 11:11 P.M.

  Everyone else was asleep except Xander and David. They were lying in bed, facing each other.

  “I don’t know . . . just a feeling, like in . . .” Xander thought for a moment. “Star Wars. You know, when Han Solo says, ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this’?”

  “Didn’t they all say that?” David whispered back. “Luke and Leia and . . .”

  “My point is the feeling, not who said it.”

  The only light came from a sodium vapor lamp that illuminated the motel parking lot. It slipped in where the curtains didn’t quite meet and cut a shimmering line over the boys’ bed. It was almost too quiet to sleep. No car horns or sirens. No hum of the city, which you didn’t notice until you got away from it. Mom’s rhythmic breathing told Xander she was fast asleep. Dad’s slumber seemed less peaceful, and he didn’t quite snore, but his breathing was loud. Xander imagined lions sounding like that. Toria was a quiet sleeper except for an occasionally rolling over. He wasn’t sure which one of them was doing it. Something in the room ticked: not a clock, but like a car engine cooling down. Or like someone sitting in the corner of the room making noises with his lips.

  For an hour Xander had had been listening to the subtle sounds, unable to get the house out of his head. He had tapped David on the shoulder and whispered his name. It had taken several proddings to wake him. Finally, the boy had rolled over to face Xander. Xander had asked him if he had sensed anything weird at the house. David had thought about it. He’d said it was a little creepy but couldn’t offer any specifics.

  Now, David said, “So what, you don’t like the house? You don’t want to live there?”

  Xander was torn. There was a lot to like about the house: its size, that it was so isolated in the woods, that it looked cool.

  If they had to live in Hicksville, they could certainly find worse places than that house. But then . . .

  “When I was outside, before we went in, it felt like someone was watching me . . . someone inside the house,” he said.

  “You think it’s haunted ?” From the glow of the lamplight, Xander saw David’s eyes grow wide.

  “I don’t know, but you know how in scary movies something is watching somebody or sneaking up on them, and the person feels it?”

  David nodded.

  “It was like that.”

  “You’re scaring me.”

  Xander looked at his brother. If scaring him would make David more aware, more sensitive to the house’s weirdness, he decided maybe freaking him out was a good thing.

  “Remember Supernatural, that TV show?”

  David nodded. They’d watched it together a few times.

  “Those guys face off with vampires and werewolves and ghosts, but they’re not afraid, they just do it.”

  “You think vampires live in the house?” The pitch of his voice had risen a notch. He was starting to sound like Toria.

  “I’m not saying that.” He closed his eyes. He wasn’t sure what he was saying, what he wanted. A brother in arms. Someone to validate his unease. He hoped something more would come from waking David than just spooking him. “Listen, just keep your eye out, okay? If you see anything weird, just let me know.”

  “Weird?” David paused a moment. He said, “You mean, besides you?”

  Xander could sense more than see David’s smile. He wished he could be more like that, easygoing. But then, David hadn’t seen what Xander had seen.

  CHAPTER

  ten

  MONDAY, 8:52 A.M.

  In the morning, Dad announced he was heading out to talk to the real estate agent about the house.

  “Can I come?” Xander asked.

  “You’re not ready, are you?”

  “He hasn’t even brushed his teeth,” Mom said. She was sitting on the rollaway, brushing Toria’s hair.

  Dad rolled his eyes at Xander. He gestured toward the door with his head. He tiptoed to the door and opened it quietly—as if anything could happen secretly in a twenty-by-twenty motel room, never mind the flood of sunlight that opening the door brought in.

  Grinning, Xander grabbed his T-shirt, socks, and sneakers and hurried out. As he pulled the door shut, Mom called, “At least get some gum.”

  In the car, Xander asked, “You didn’t notice anything strange about the house?”

  Dad took his time to answer. “I think it’s a special house, Xander. We wouldn’t buy it if it weren’t.”

  Xander bristled. Now he knew how it felt to be like Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers—a person who knew something was wrong but was chalked up as crazy because he couldn’t prove it. He couldn’t even count the number of movies featuring that character. If it happened so often on film, it must be pretty common in real life, right? He had the brief image of himself in a white padded room, arms bound by sleeves that tied in the back, yelling through a little window in the door. “I’m not insane, really!” Nurse Ratched would slam the window shut and his cell mate, Jack Nicholson, would tell him to shut up.

  He said, “No, I mean—”

  “You mean the sounds?” his father asked.

  Hope flared in Xander’s gut, feeling a little like when a roller coaster reaches the peak of a tall climb. “Yeah! The sounds.”

  “I think all that creaking and groaning was just the house settling, or getting used to having people in it again.”

  The roller coaster stalled. “Yeah, settling.”

  Dad cleared his throat. Xander noticed the skin on his forehead and around his eyes wrinkle in thought. Dad said, “And the way the sounds seem to trick you.”

  Back on the coaster. Xander smiled. “You noticed that?”

  His dad threw him a glance. “Of course. I mean, how many footsteps could Toria have taken to get from one end of the house to the other? It’s big, but with all that noise, you’d have thought she was running in place.”

  Xander hadn’t considered that. If that had been the only trick of sound, he might have been able to accept that explanation. He could tel
l his dad didn’t buy it either. “What about . . . other things? Like noises coming from a different direction than they should have?”

  For a moment, Dad was unreadable. Xander waited like a man for a verdict. Finally, Dad nodded. “That too,” he said quietly.

  Xander felt tension fall away from his chest like a bandage that had been constricting his lungs. The way his dad had said it was all he needed to know: there was something weird about the house. Something that had made his father uneasy as well. And if the house’s strangeness revealed itself through sound, then why not visually too? How Dad had appeared to move instantly from one side of the house to the other, the silhouette that had looked like David in the doorway upstairs. Weren’t these just the eyeball equivalent of the tricks on his ears?

  “Why is it like that?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, Son. I really don’t.”

  “But . . . doesn’t it bother you?” Obviously not, since they were heading to a real estate agent to buy the place.

  Dad smiled at Xander. “Not yet.”

  CHAPTER

  eleven

  MONDAY, 9:28 A.M.

  Kathy Bates, Xander thought. Not the homicidal loony from Misery but the little-too-happy, bubbly Bates from Rat Race. That’s who the real estate woman reminded him of. Like Bates, there was plenty of her. She seemed to find everything funny regardless of who said it or how unfunny it was.

  “Ooh . . . you just rolled in from Pasadena!” She laughed -her whimsy at the use of the word rolled or at Pasadena, Xander couldn’t tell. “And you’re looking for a house?”

  Mr. King smiled, the way people do when they’re waiting for a punchline. “Well, actually, I think we found one.”

  “Just go ahead and make my job easy, will ya?” she said and lowered herself into the chair behind the office space’s single desk. She positioned a keyboard in front of her and said, “Which one?”

  “At the end of Gabriel Road.”

  She looked up and somehow kept her smile while forming a perplexed expression. “Off of Highway 3 . . . and Rem Way?”

  A bulge the size of Xander’s thumb appeared between her eyes. “I don’t think . . .” She started typing, squinting at the monitor. Xander turned to look out the big front window.

  Across the street was some kind of lumber mill. Whole trees, stripped of branches and bark, were piled into stacks the size of office buildings. Someone was using a fire hose to spray water over the logs. Perhaps it was to keep them from burning up at the slightest spark. It didn’t look safe to Xander.

  A paper cup tumbled by in the parking lot, and Xander remembered. He pushed his hand into his pocket and pulled out the crumpled property listing his father had tossed away. It was exactly what Kathy Bates needed. He unfolded it and smoothed out the wrinkles. But this wasn’t the house on Gabriel Road. The picture was of a smallish cabin they had not seen. Dad had tossed it out the window, frustrated that it had led him to nowhere. That was before Xander had seen the house in the shadows. Could Dad have been looking at the wrong property listing? he wondered. If so, how had they found the house?

  Another thought occurred to him, and it chilled his skin. What if the house’s power was so strong it made Dad see something on the page that wasn’t there? Or maybe it had even changed the page after getting them there.

  That’s called paranoia, Xander thought. Stop it!

  He crunched the paper back into a ball. He tossed it into a wastebasket by the desk.

  “There’s nothing here. I’m sorry,” Kathy Bates said. Then something dawned on her. “You’re talking about the old Konig place!”

  “Konig?” his father said. He glanced at Xander.

  “That ol’ rundown place?” she laughed. “I didn’t know it was for sale. Was there a sign?”

  “No, but . . .”

  Xander said, “There was a property listing.”

  “Really?” She squinted at him as though he had just said his name was Johnny Depp.

  “Off the Internet,” his father said. “I think it was your Web site.”

  She shook her head. “Not mine. Not if that property was listed. But then we all share the same listing service, so I don’t know . . .”

  “Is it for sale?” Dad asked.

  She laughed. “Well, my daddy used to say everything is for sale. Let me look into it.” She looked at Xander, then back to Dad. “It’s pretty rundown, you know. Nobody’s lived there for . . . I don’t know, thirty or forty years. Way before my time.” She leaned over her desk—as much as she possibly could—and whispered, “The man who lived there . . .” She looked again at Xander. “Well, I shouldn’t say.”

  Dad turned to leave.

  Xander knew he had no patience for rumors. Xander had no such qualms. He said, “What about him, the man who used to live there?”

  Happy to have Xander’s ear, she said, “They say he killed his wife.”

  Xander took a step back. He threw a shocked expression at Dad, who had turned back, interested.

  “Schoolteacher. Just disappeared. After the authorities started asking questions, the man and the rest of his family vanished.”

  “Family?” Xander said.

  “Little boy and girl. I don’t know how old. Sweetest family in the world, if you listen to the old folks around here.”

  Xander was stunned. “And nobody knows what happened to them?”

  “Some say they high-tailed it to Europe.” She raised her eyebrows at him. “Most believe he took them somewhere and killed them. Then took his own life.”

  Dad forced a smile. “Just old rumors,” he said. “Thank you for looking into this for us. I’ll be back.” He strode for the door.

  Xander’s feet felt like cement. He didn’t like that a house he already thought had problems also had a gruesome history. He knew it shouldn’t have surprised him. Every haunted house in every movie he had ever seen got that way by some tragic event in the past. He wanted to ask the woman what else she knew, but his dad had already pushed through the door. He nodded at her inquisitive look and hustled to catch up.

  CHAPTER

  twelve

  MONDAY, 11:27 P.M.

  “It is haunted.”

  Night again. The same swath of lamplight stole through the curtains. The same parental breathing. That tick tick tick lip sound.

  “What do you mean?” David squirmed under the covers.

  “That toy you found? The lightsaber? It belonged to a little boy. His father killed the whole family.”

  David’s eyes got huge, then flickered as he thought about that.

  “It’s like The Shining,” Xander continued. “The hotel drove the dad crazy.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw the movie.”

  “No. How do you know about the family, the dad who killed them?”

  “The real estate lady told us. They never found any of them.”

  “And it’s haunted ?”

  “Has to be. Look, weird things were happening there and—”

  “What weird things?”

  Xander hadn’t told David everything. “Just some stuff.

  But I told you I got a bad feeling about it, then we find out about this murder.” He emphasized it: “A triple murder and suicide. A guy slaughtered his own family. How awful is that?”

  “Slaughtered? What’d he do?”

  “I’m sure it was something bloody and grotesque. You don’t go out of your mind and keep it neat.”

  Xander could almost see the vivid images bouncing around David’s head.

  “What do we do?” David asked.

  Good question.

  “Do you still want to move into that house?”

  “Not if it’s haunted!”

  “Shhhh.” Against reason, Xander still felt the thrill he had experienced at the house. That sense of adventure, that he was privy to some kind of secret knowledge. He imagined finding another house, one without a history or ghosts. Yeah, he’d sleep better at night, but he’d b
e bored out of his mind during the day. Especially in Pinedale.

  “Look,” Xander said. “Let’s just keep our eyes open, be really watchful. If it gets dangerous, we’ll go nuts—you know, scream and throw a fit or something—to get everybody out.”

  “I can do that.” David smiled, but his eyes said he was still worried. 9

  The next day, they looked at more properties, but their hearts weren’t in the search, and they saw nothing they liked.

  The following day, Wednesday, Mr. King pulled to the curb in front of Tall Pines Park. The boys, Toria, and Mom had staked a claim at one of the picnic tables. They’d walked from the motel to the park, stopping at a burger joint on the way. Xander and David had already devoured their fries, but Mom had made them wait for their cheeseburgers until Dad showed up.

  Their father did a sort of half-skip across the grass. His smile showed where Toria and David got their dimples; Mom and Xander had radiant smiles without them—at least that’s what Mom said.

  Dad stopped at the head of the table. “Well,” he said, “it’s ours.”

  “The house?” David squealed. “I mean the house?”

  “We haven’t closed, of course, but the trust that owns it has agreed to a price and said we can move in right away, if we want.”

  Mom nodded. Xander realized she had known all along, but she’d kept it a surprise.

  Dad leaned down to give her a big kiss. Xander and David exchanged a look, one with equal parts happiness and fear.

  Xander thought if you took a picture of them during a really

  scary part of a really good movie, they would look like they did now. He hoped he was right about the house being more frightening than dangerous, and he wondered, if he was wrong, if they would realize it before someone got hurt.

  “So what do you say?” Dad clapped his hands. “Want to go to our new home?”

  “Now?” Toria said.

  “Sure.” He saw Xander and David eyeing their burgers.

  “Bring ’em; we’ll have a picnic there.”