“Wait,” said Terry, “what?”
Crow nodded. “I heard that, too. It’s an old Scottish legend. The people who don’t see ghosts are the ones who are afraid to believe in them.”
“And the people who do see a ghost,” Stick continued, “see the ghost of their own future.”
“That’s stupid,” said Val. “How can you see your own ghost if you’re alive?”
“Yeah,” laughed Terry. “That’s stupid, even for you.”
“No, really,” said Crow. “I read that in my books. Settlers used to believe that.”
Stick nodded. “My gran’s mom came over from Scotland. She said that there are a lot of ghosts over there, and that sometimes people saw their own. Not themselves as dead people, not like that. Gran said that people saw their own spirits. She said that there were places where the walls between the worlds were so thin that past, present, and future were like different rooms in a house with no doors. That’s how she put it. Sometimes you could stand in one room and see different parts of your life in another.”
“That would scare the crap out of me,” said Terry.
A sudden breeze caused the shutters on one of the windows to bang as loud as a gunshot. They all jumped.
“Jeeeeee-zus!” gasped Stick. “Nearly gave me a heart attack!”
They laughed at their own nerves, but the laughs died away as one by one they turned back to look at the Croft house.
“You really want me to go in there?” asked Val, her words cracking the fragile silence.
Terry said, sliding his comb back into his pocket, “Sure.”
“No!” yelped Crow.
Everyone suddenly looked at him: Val in surprise, Stick with a grin forming on his lips, Terry with a frown.
The moment held for three or four awkward seconds, and then Val pushed her kickstand down and got off of her bike.
“Fine then.”
She took three decisive steps toward the house. Crow and the others stayed exactly where they were. When Val realized she was alone, she turned and gave them her best ninja death stare. Crow knew this stare all too well; his buttocks clenched and his balls tried to climb up into his chest cavity. Not even that creep Vic Wingate gave her crap when Val had that look in her eyes.
“What I ought to do,” she said coldly, “is make you three sissies go in with me.”
“No way,” laughed Terry, as if it was the most absurd idea anyone had ever said aloud.
“Okay!” blurted Crow.
Terry and Stick looked at him with a Nice going, Judas look in their eyes.
Val smiled. Crow wasn’t sure if she was smiling at him or smiling in triumph. Either way, he put it in the win category. He was one smile up on the day’s average.
Crow’s bike had no kickstand so he got off and leaned it against a maple, considered, then picked it up and turned it around so that it pointed the way they’d come. Just in case.
“You coming?” he asked Stick and Terry.
“If I’m going in,” said Val acidly, “then we’re all going in. It’s only fair and I don’t want to hear any different or so help me God, Terry…”
She left the rest to hang. When she was mad, Val not only spoke like an adult, she sounded like her mother.
Stick winced and punched Terry on the arm. “Come on, numb-nuts.”
-4-
The four of them clustered together on the lawn, knee deep in weeds. Bees and blowflies swarmed in the air around them. No one moved for over a minute. Crow could feel the spit in his mouth drying to paste.
I want to do this, he thought, but that lie sounded exactly like what it was.
The house glowered down at him.
The windows, even the shuttered ones, were like eyes. The ones with broken panes were like the empty eye-sockets of old skulls, like the ones in the science class in school. Crow spent hours staring into those dark eye-holes, wondering if there was anything of the original owner’s personality in there. Not once did he feel anything. Now, just looking at those black and empty windows, made Crow shudder, because he was getting the itchy feeling that there was something looking back.
The shuttered windows somehow bothered him more than the open ones. They seemed…he fished for the word.
Sneaky?
No, that wasn’t right. That was too cliché, and Crow had read every ghost story he could find. Sneaky wasn’t right. He dug through his vocabulary and came up short. The closest thing that seemed to fit—and Crow had no idea how it fit—was hungry.
He almost laughed. How could shuttered windows look hungry?
“That’s stupid.”
It wasn’t until Stick turned to him and asked what he was talking about that Crow realized he’d spoken the words aloud.
He looked at the others and all of them, even Val, were stiff with apprehension. The Croft house scared them. Really scared them.
Because they believed there was something in there.
They all paused there in the yard, closer to their bikes and the road than they were to that porch.
They believed.
Crow wanted to shout and he wanted to laugh.
“Well,” said Val, “let’s go.”
The Four Horseman, unhorsed, approached the porch.
-5-
The steps creaked.
Of course they did. Crow would have been disappointed if they hadn’t. He suppressed a smile. The front door was going to creak, too; those old hinges were going to screech like a cat. It was how it was all supposed to be.
It’s real, he told himself. There’s a ghost in there. There’s something in there.
It was the second of those two thoughts that felt correct. Not right exactly—but correct. There was something in that house. If they went inside, they’d find it.
No, whispered a voice from deeper inside his mind, if we go inside it will find us.
“Good,” murmured Crow. This time he said it so softly that none of the others heard him.
He wanted it to find them.
Please let it find them.
They crossed the yard in silence. The weeds were high and brown as if they could draw no moisture at all from the hard ground. Crow saw bits of debris there, half-hidden by the weeds. A baseball whose hide had turned a sickly yellow and whose seams had split like torn surgical sutures. Beyond that was a woman’s dress shoe; just the one. There was a Triple-A road map of Pennsylvania, but the wind and rain had faded the details so that the whole state appeared to be under a heavy fog. Beyond that was an orange plastic pill-bottle with its label peeled halfway back. Crow picked it up and read the label and was surprised to see that the pharmacy where this prescription had been filled was in Poland. The drug was called Klozapol, but Crow had no idea what that was or what it was used for. The bottle was empty but it looked pretty new. Crow let it drop and he touched the lucky stone in his pocket to reassure himself that it was still safe.
Still his.
The yard was filled with junk. An empty wallet, a ring of rusted keys, a soiled diaper, the buckle from a seat belt, a full box of graham crackers that was completely covered with ants. Stuff like that. Disconnected things. Like junk washed up on a beach.
Val knelt and picked up something that flashed silver in the sunlight.
“What’s that?” asked Terry.
She held it up. It was an old Morgan silver dollar. Val spit on her thumb and rubbed the dirt away to reveal the profile of Lady Liberty. She squinted to read the date.
“Eighteen-ninety-five,” she said.
“Are you kidding me?” demanded Terry, bending close to study it. He was the only one of them who collected coins. “Dang, Val…that’s worth a lot of money.”
“Really?” asked Val, Crow, and Stick at the same time.
“Yeah. A lot of money. I got some books at home we can look it up in. I’ll bet it’s worth a couple of thousand bucks.”
Crow goggled at him. Unlike the other three, Crow’s family was dirt poor. Even Stick, whose parents ow
ned a tiny TV repair shop in town, had more money. Crow’s mom was dead and his father worked part-time at Shanahan’s Garage then drank most of what he earned. Crow was wearing the same jeans this year that he wore all last season. Same sneakers, too. He and his brother Billy had learned how to sew well enough to keep their clothes from falling apart.
So he stared at the coin that might be worth a few thousand dollars.
Val turned the coin over. The other side had a carving of an eagle with its wings outstretched. The words UNITED STATES OF AMERICA arched over it and ONE DOLLAR looped below it. But above the eagle where IN GOD WE TRUST should have been, someone had gouged deep into the metal, totally obscuring the phrase.
Terry gasped as if he was in actual physical pain.
“Bet it ain’t worth as much like that,” said Stick with a nasty grin.
Val shrugged and shoved the coin into her jeans pocket. “Whatever. Come on.”
It was a high porch and they climbed four steep steps to the deck, and each step was littered with dried leaves and withered locust husks. Crow wondered where the leaves had come from; it was the height of summer. Except for the willows, everything everywhere was alive, and those willows looked like they’d been dead for years. Besides, these were dogwood leaves. He looked around for the source of the leaves, but there were no dogwoods in the yard. None anywhere he could see.
He grunted.
“What?” asked Val, but Crow didn’t reply. It wasn’t the sort of observation that was going to encourage anyone.
“The door’s probably locked,” said Terry. “This is a waste of time.”
“Don’t even,” warned Val.
The floorboards creaked, each with a different note of agonized wood.
As they passed one of the big shuttered windows, Stick paused and frowned at it. Terry and Val kept walking, but Crow slowed and lingered a few paces away. As he watched, the frown on Stick’s mouth melted away and his friend stood there with no expression at all on his face.
“Stick…?”
Stick didn’t answer. He didn’t even twitch.
“Yo…Stick.”
This time Stick jumped as if Crow had pinched him. He whirled and looked at Crow with eyes that were wide but unfocused.
“What did you say?” he asked, his voice a little slurred. Like Dad’s when he was starting to tie one on.
“I didn’t say anything. I just called your name.”
“No,” said Stick, shaking his head. “You called me ‘daddy.’ What’s that supposed to mean?”
Crow laughed. “You’re hearing things, man.”
Stick whipped his ball-cap off his head and slapped Crow’s shoulder. “Hey…I heard you.”
Terry heard this and he gave Stick a quizzical smile, waiting for the punch-line. “What’s up?”
Stick wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and stared down as if expecting there to be something other than a faint sheen of spit. He touched the corner of his mouth and looked at his fingers. His hands were shaking as he pulled his ball-cap on and snugged it down low.
“What are you doing?” asked Terry, his smile flickering.
Stick froze. “Why? Do I have something on my face?”
“Yeah,” said Terry.
Stick’s face blanched white and he jabbed at his skin. The look in his eyes was so wild and desperate that it made Crow’s heart hurt. He’d seen a look like that once when a rabbit was tangled up in some barbed wire by the Carby place. The little animal was covered in blood and its eyes were huge, filled with so much terror that it couldn’t even blink. Even as Crow and Val tried to free it, the rabbit shuddered and died.
Scared to death.
For just a moment, Stick looked like that, and the sight of that expression drove a cold sliver of ice into Crow’s stomach. He could feel his scrotum contract into a wrinkled little walnut.
Stick pawed at his face. “What is it?”
“Don’t worry,” said Terry, “it’s just a dose of the uglies, but you had that when you woke up this morning.”
Terry laughed like a donkey.
No one else did.
Stick glared at him and his nervous fingers tightened into fists. Crow was sure that he was going to smash Terry in the mouth. But then Val joined them.
“What’s going on?” she demanded.
Her stern tone broke the spell of the moment.
“Nothing,” said Stick as he abruptly pushed past Terry and stalked across the porch, his balled fists at his sides. The others gaped at him.
“What—?” began Terry, but he had nowhere to go with it. After a moment he followed Stick.
Val and Crow lingered for a moment.
“Did they have a fight or something?” Val asked quietly.
“I don’t know what that was,” admitted Crow. He told her exactly what happened. Val snorted.
“Boys,” she said, leaving it there. She walked across the porch and stood in front of the door.
Crow lingered for a moment, trying to understand what just happened. Part of him wanted to believe that Stick just saw a ghost. He wanted that very badly. The rest of him—most of him—suddenly wanted to turn around, jump on the bike that was nicely positioned for a quick escape, and never come back here. The look in Stick’s eyes had torn all the fun out of this.
“Let’s get this over with,” said Val, and that trapped all of them in the moment. The three boys looked at her, but none of them looked at each other. Not for a whole handful of brittle seconds. Val, however, studied each of them. “Boys,” she said again.
Under the lash of her scorn, they followed her.
The doors were shut, but even before Val touched the handle, Crow knew that these doors wouldn’t be locked.
It wants us to come in.
Terry licked his lips and said, “What do you suppose is in there?”
Val shook her head, and Crow noted that she was no longer saying that this was just a house.
Terry nudged Crow with his elbow. “You ever talk to anybody’s been in here?”
“No.”
“You ever know anyone who knows anyone who’s been in here?”
Crow thought about it. “Not really.”
“Then how do you know it’s even haunted?” asked Val.
“I don’t.”
It was a lie and Crow knew that everyone read it that way. No one called him on it, though. Maybe they would have when they were still in the yard, but not now. There was a line somewhere and Crow knew—they all knew—they’d crossed it.
Maybe it was when Stick looked at the shuttered windows and freaked out.
Maybe it was when they came up on the porch.
Maybe, maybe…
Val took a breath, set her jaw, gripped the rusted and pitted brass knob, and turned it.
The lock clicked open.
A soft sound. Not at all threatening.
It wants us to come in, Crow thought again, knowing it to be true.
Then there was another sound, and Crow was sure only he heard it. Not the lock, not the hinges; it was like the small intake of breath you hear around the dinner table when the knife is poised to make the first cut into a Thanksgiving turkey. The blade gleams, the turkey steams, mouths water, and each of the ravenous diners takes in a small hiss of breath as the naked reality of hunger is undisguised.
Val gave the door a little push and let go of the knob.
The hinges creaked like they were supposed to. It was a real creak, too. Not another hungry hiss. If the other sound had been one of expectation then the creak was the plunge of the knife.
Crow knew this even if he wasn’t old enough yet to form the thoughts as cogently as he would in later years. Right now those impressions floated in his brain, more like colors or smells than structured thoughts. Even so, he understood them on a visceral level.
As the door swung open, Crow understood something else, too; two things, really.
The first was that after today he would never again need proof of any
thing in the unseen world.
And the second was that going into the Croft house was a mistake.
-6-
They went in anyway.
-7-
The door opened into a vestibule that was paneled in rotting oak. The broken globe light fixture on the ceiling above them was filled with dead bugs. There were no cobwebs, though, and no rat droppings on the floor.
In the back of Crow’s mind he knew that he should have been worried about that. By the time the thought came to the front of his mind, it was too late.
The air inside was curiously moist, and it stank. It wasn’t the smell of dust, or the stench of rotting meat. That’s what Crow had expected; this was different. It was a stale, acidic smell that reminded him more of his father’s breath after he came home from the bar. Crow knew that smell from all of the times his father bent over him, shouting at him while he whipped his belt up and down, up and down. The words his father shouted seldom made any sense. The stink of his breath was what Crow remembered. It was what he forced his mind to concentrate on so that he didn’t feel the burning slap of the belt. Crow had gotten good at that over the years. He still felt the pain—in the moment and in the days following each beating—but he was able to pull his mind out of his body with greater ease each time as long as he focused on something else. How or why that distraction had become his father’s pickled breath was something Crow never understood.
And now, as they moved from the vestibule into the living room, Crow felt as if the house itself was breathing at him with that same stink.
Crow never told his friends about the beatings. They all knew—Crow was almost always bruised somewhere—but this was small town Pennsylvania in 1974 and nobody ever talked about stuff like that. Not even his teachers. Just as Stick never talked about the fact that both of his sisters had haunted looks in their eyes and never—ever—let themselves be alone with their father. Not if they could avoid it. Janie and Kim had run away a couple of times each, but they never said why. You just didn’t talk about some things. Nobody did.