by Brett McKay
I saw the new girl and Morgan at the end of the street, next to a tree, watching the great water fight and laughing. I puffed out my chest, ran some cool sneak-attack moves to impress the girls, and acted silly at times to get a laugh. It’d worked, I was sure.
The water fight was epic. It went on for hours and escalated to water balloons. Parents who were home helped fill up balloons, and we carried them back to our stations in big plastic tubs and wheelbarrows. Water bombs filled the air, but most missed their targets. Some of the older kids were talented enough to catch them without breaking them and throw them back at us.
It all ended when the big kids brought out the garden hoses with spray nozzles attached. We couldn’t get close to them when they had a weapon of that magnitude. It was cheating, and I reminded them several times the rest of the night.
The water fight accomplished our goal: we didn’t think about the Crooked House or the ghost all day. At least I know I didn’t... until I went to bed and rolled onto my side facing the door. It was cracked open. Footsteps squeaked down the hall. It was normal, but now it reminded me of that night. Is it her? I wondered, trying not to picture the ghost in the black dress peering in through the crack, her eyes wild, clutching my pillow.
I switched images in my head to the new girl and felt dreamy. I pictured us talking and laughing while she tossed her hair from side to side in slow motion like girls in the movies. It was a better picture to have in my head than thoughts of the ghost.
CHAPTER FIVE
The New Guest
Matt Griffin knocked on my door the next morning. It was just him, no Wes. The sun blared in and blinded me when I opened the door.
“Hey, Ret. You doing anything?”
“No.”
“Do you wanna hang out?”
Hang out? He’d graduated to asking people to hang out, while I was still using the childish line “Do you wanna play?” How cool is that?
“Yeah. Sure.”
Matt nodded, looking around awkwardly at the pictures on our wall, as if he didn’t know what to say next. I didn’t either for that matter. Talking with Gary or Jax was easy, but the last conversation I’d had with Matt, he was picking on me and my friends.
“What do you wanna do?” he finally asked me.
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “The Colemans got a new trampoline. Said we could use it.”
“Oh yeah. I saw them putting it in. It’s one of those buried-in-the-ground trampolines.”
“Yeah. It’s pretty cool.”
“Let’s do it.”
Matt was fourteen, so I felt pretty special because he’d come to ask me to hang out, but when I realized Wes was gone for the day, it was clear I was second-string. That didn’t matter, though. We still had fun. The Colemans were good to let us play on their trampoline as long as their son, Chad, jumped with us. He was a year younger than me, and occasionally, we crossed paths. He’d fought on my team during the Great Water Fight.
Chad was full of energy, couldn’t sit still, and didn’t listen well. He asked tons of dumb questions and became annoying quickly. That was why people didn’t play with him for long, but he’d become more popular once his parents bought the trampoline.
After we spent an hour jumping and trying out new tricks, Chad’s mother called him in for lunch. She said we could keep playing while he ate, and his absense gave us a nice break.
We sat along the edge of the trampoline to catch our breaths and talked.
“I can’t believe you guys did it,” Matt said out of the blue.
“What? The Crooked House?” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.
“Yeah! I can’t believe you stayed the night. That place is so haunted.”
“Well, actually... we cut out about three in the morning.”
“I know. We saw you guys tear out of there. We’d dozed off, but we heard Jax screaming. I can’t believe he didn’t wake up the whole neighborhood.”
We laughed. “Yeah, he’s not the most quiet person.”
“You still did it, though.”
“Not like you guys. We didn’t stay the whole night.”
“Well...” He looked down at the ground shamefully. “I might have stretched the truth a little.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve never stayed the night in that creepy old place. I’ve barely stepped foot in it during the day, and no one else has slept the night, either, as far as I know. No one’s dumb enough.”
I raised my hand. “I am.”
We chuckled.
I felt really proud. I couldn’t wait to tell my friends. We’d done what no one else had.
“You oughta sleep over tonight. Do you think you can?”
“Yeah. My parents are pretty cool. I’m sure they will let me.”
It was a Saturday night, and I could sleep over as long as I came straight home in the morning and got ready in time to go to church. The same went for Matt. His family went to the same church as mine.
We had a Boy Scout meeting that afternoon before our sleepover. Todd Harrison was our Scoutmaster, and Matt and I went over to his house together. As we approached his house, Todd and his wife were in the front yard with a group of boys, a mess of camping gear sprawled across the grass around them. Gary was among them, and he smiled, but the expression dissappeared as soon as he noticed Matt alongside me.
I knew what he must be thinking. Why are you hanging out with him? He’s the one who bullied us into sleeping over at the haunted house.
“Where’s Jax?” I asked Gary.
Without looking at me, he shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Gary walked away and began talking to Billy, who had just turned twelve and graduated from Webelos to Boy Scouts.
“All right, boys,” Todd Harrison called to us, but everyone continued with their own chatter.
Todd was a tall, slender man with a black crew cut. He was always sharp and clean, except for an occasional scruff on his face. He stood straight, in full Scout uniform, and everything he did was orderly, like a soldier. He was a military man.
“Boys! Attention!”
“Yes, drill sergeant!” we all answered, laughing. We turned and stood in our imitation of military attention.
A smile crept up Todd’s face. “At ease, soldiers. All right now, we’re gonna prepare for our Scout camp tonight,” his deep, Southern drawl rolled out. “I wanna see if you boys can set up yer tents. Did everyone bring their tents?” He looked around.
Gary raised his hand. “I brought my two-man tent.”
Billy’s hand popped up excitedly. “I did! I brought my six-man tent.”
“Good, Billy.”
Peter raised his hand, as well. Peter and Billy hung out a lot together, and I didn’t see them much unless we were at Scouts.
“Sorry, we didn’t bring ours,” Matt spoke for both of us.
“No problem. You two help Billy out with his monster tent.”
We commenced building our tents, and I shifted from helping Matt and Billy to helping Gary. After I explained to Gary how my day with Matt had all transpired, he was cool with it.
After the tents were constructed, we played a game of tag. Todd and his wife played with us, along with their three little ones, and then she made us root beer floats.
Afterward, Gary walked home with Matt and me, until we separated to our homes. I grabbed my stuff and headed back to Matt’s for our sleepover. I brought my sleeping bag and pillow, along with a bag of licorice for snacks. We made homemade popcorn, which he poured into a brown paper bag with butter and salt then shook it up. I’d never done popcorn like that before. My mom always popped popcorn in an air popper, put it in a large bowl, and slowly drizzled butter over it, but I liked Matt’s method.
We took the brown bag, which was now splotched with butter grease, and sat down to watch Nightmare Theater on TV. His parents had gone to bed. Otherwise, they never would have allowed Matt and me to watch Nightmare Theater. It was too violent, too scary.
<
br /> The program came on every Friday night. It was hosted by a man dressed as a vampire. He would rise from his coffin and introduce the low-budget horror flick they were about to play.
Most of the kids in the neighborhood weren’t allowed to watch the show, but that only drew us to the program more. The only way to catch it was to stay up really late, because it didn’t air until around one or two in the morning. That made it easier to sneak into the living room while everyone was asleep.
I was glued to the show that night. The story followed a teenage boy who was bullied at school for being different, but he was brilliant at science. One night, he broke into the school lab and cooked up an experiment, which turned him into a raging monster. He made the bullies, and one innocent janitor, pay. They found the janitor’s head bobbing in a vat of acid the next day. That bloody and horrific image of the eyes staring out of the slime stuck with me. Matt dozed off and slept through most of the movie. I had to wake him up to turn off the TV and go to bed.
The movie was my first real horror flick, and it had scared me, like the real-life ghost had. Maybe I found the movie so scary because I knew if ghosts could be real, then monsters in the movie could be real too.
We laid out our sleeping bags on his back porch, the same raised porch Matt and Wes watched us from. I looked beyond the field and saw the haunted house in the distance. Matt was right. He had a perfect view of it.
“You know the history of that house, don’t ya?” Matt asked.
“Yes... sorta. Not really, I guess.” I’d thought I knew, but instantly, I realized all I’d heard were rumors. I was eager to see if Matt knew the truth of the house.
He chawed on a stick of licorice as we stared at the dark house, and he told me the tale.
“A couple lived in that house a long time ago. They were nice folks at first, but something was off. They weren’t like everybody else. They talked about children all the time, yet no one ever saw them with kids. It was just the two of them, or so people thought. It was like they had a secret. People started to disappear. One at a time. It wasn’t very often at first, but it increased. People said they saw lights on in their home throughout the night, then you wouldn’t see them in the day. They wouldn’t come out until much later.”
“Vampires?” I said, skeptical the story was leaning closer to the unrealistic ones I’d heard.
“No, not vampires. Something much worse. Monsters, vampires, or werewolves... Those things aren’t scary... It’s people that are scary. People like you and me, but do awful things.”
Most stories told about the Crooked House involved ghosts or something supernatural, but his was grounded in something I could believe. He had me hooked.
“They had an axe. The man cut wood all the time in back of the house. He’d go out at night, and people could hear him chopping for hours, and there was always smoke coming from the chimney. A local boy came screaming home to his parents one day. Said he saw something in the basement window. Like another child. It’d screamed and pounded its hands on the glass, wild eyed and crazed. But that’s not all he saw. He saw the bloody axe in the basement. Embedded in a log of wood, still dripping blood.
“It was enough to bring the police, and they searched the house inside and out. They arrested the couple. Put them in a squad car.”
Matt stopped talking. Seconds rolled by, and I worried he wouldn’t finish the story. The suspense was killing me.
“What?” I asked. “What was in the basement? What was that couple doing?”
“They were killing people. They’d lure people into their home. One at a time. They’d kill them, chop them up into pieces, and feed them to the children in the basement.”
“Children!” I exclaimed. “So they had children?”
“Yeah, they had children all right. They kept them sheltered and locked in the basement and fed human remains to them. Like I said, it was so long ago. But on some nights, when it’s real quiet, you can hear the children. They cry, beg, and scream for someone to help them. For someone to let them out.”
We stared at the house in the distance. A sliver of moonlight outlined the south side of the home. It sat quietly. A cool breeze blew through my hair.
I turned to Matt, who sat in a stupor. Staring into the night, unblinking, he was in his own world. As if he’d locked gazes with something invisible, his eyes glazed over.
“Matt?” I called his name two more times, but he never answered.
Like he was in a trance, he lay down and pulled the bag up to his chin. As soon as his eyes closed, he was out, as if instructed to go to sleep by some unseen form. For several minutes, I wondered if he’d been talking in his sleep or if he was tricking me. I waited for him to roll over, laughing at his trick, but instead, he started to snore.
I sat awake, with nothing but me and the chilled breeze. I was too wound up to sleep. I wasn’t sure whether I could believe Matt’s story or not. I’d never heard anything like it before, yet on the other hand, it followed all the same scenarios of a campfire ghost story. He could’ve been pulling my leg. Either way, he was a good storyteller. If I’d heard the story a few weeks ago, real or not, I would not have stayed in that house.
I’d thought I would be up the whole night, but to my surprise, once I lay down, I fell asleep quickly.
A clang startled me awake. My eyes popped open into a wide-eyed stare. The wind had picked up through the night and become chillier. I realized it had blown something over beneath the porch.
I sat up and looked around for the source. All I could see of Matt was the tuft of his hair poking through the top of his sleeping bag. Another strong gust of wind blew past me, carrying the scent of lavender from nearby bushes.
I turned to the Crooked House, and my heart stopped. The upper-floor bedroom light was on, burning yellow in the darkness.
“Matt!” I whispered urgently and pushed his body with my hand. “Matt!”
“Whaaat?” He rolled over, groggy.
“There’s someone in that house! Look! A light is on!”
A low snore rose from his sleeping bag. He was out again. I was on my own.
I stared at the house, looking for clues. There was a car parked in front of it, but I couldn’t discern the make or model. A sillhouette crept through the light in the window. A person had walked into the house and turned on a light. He must be insane! The ghost was sure to appear and frighten the person.
I watched the house for the next hour, until the light turned off and there was no sign of activity. I stared at the stars for what seemed like hours, occasionally glancing at the house, but it remained dark. Eventually, I found my way back to sleep.
I woke up freezing in the morning. It was daylight, and dew was frozen on the grass and slick on my bag. Matt was still sleeping soundly. I looked at the house across the field and saw no movement, but the car was still there. It was black and looked like a Chrysler or Buick.
I put on my socks and shoes, rolled up my bag, and said goodbye to Matt, who mumbled something incoherent. I headed home to get ready for church, then I had to speak to Gary and Jax. There was a lot to go over with them, and we had spying to do.
CHAPTER SIX
Lester
I immediately jumped in the shower and got ready for church. I was in a daze from lack of sleep and unsettled at the thought of someone staying in that house.
“Is it a bad thing?” I asked myself. “So what if somebody moves into the house of ghosts? No sweat off my back. Don’t bother me, and I won’t bother you.”
But a feeling bubbled up from the deep, acidic pool in my belly and told me something wasn’t right.
Before Sunday school class, I gathered Gary and Jax in the corner. “You’ll never believe it, guys. I saw someone go into the house last night.”
“What? Who would be crazy enough to go in there?” Jax asked. He knew exactly which house I’d meant. I didn’t need to clarify.
Gary rolled his eyes. “You mean besides us?”
“This
was an adult, and he spent the night. Maybe he bought the place and is moving in.”
“Who is it?” Gary asked.
“I don’t know. Matt and I were sleeping out on his porch, and I woke up in the middle of the night. I saw a light on over there and a car parked out front. I saw someone in the window too. It looked like a guy.”
“Ooh.” Gary shivered, no doubt revisiting the night we’d stayed. “With that ghost lady?”
“Not just her. There’s more ghosts, for sure,” Jax said anxiously. “I’ve had nightmares ever since, and I think there’s more to that house than what we saw. I’m sure of it.”
“Me too,” Gary agreed. “Nightmares every night.”
“Whoever he is, he won’t last long in that house,” Jax said.
“Maybe he’ll get rid of the ghosts and clean the place up,” I said. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m curious to know who this guy is. We should go check him out.”
“Why?” Gary asked.
“I don’t know. I just have a weird feeling.”
“So you want to spy on him?” Jax said.
“I wouldn’t say ‘spy.’” I paused and thought about it. “Yes... yes—I do mean I want to spy on him.”
“I can’t. My parents won’t let me play on Sunday,” Gary said.
“Mine will, but I gotta go to my grandma’s for dinner.”
“I don’t mean today,” I said. “But first thing tomorrow.”
“No, Ret, I’m not going back there,” Gary said quietly. “I just... I can’t.”
I saw in Gary’s eyes how much trauma that night had left behind.
Our teacher walked in and asked everyone to settle down as he set his books on the table and prepared to give the lesson.
“We don’t have to go to the house,” I whispered. “We’ll watch from a distance. Completely safe. You can do that, right?”
Gary nodded reluctantly, and Jax gave a firm nod.
LESTER KILBORN WAS close to six feet tall and on the heavy side. His tiny eyes were like black pinheads stuck into his pudgy face. He had a full head of dark hair, and his bangs fell down over his face. He swiped them back constantly, but they never stayed. He dressed casually: simple striped T-shirts and blue jeans. He drove a black Chrysler and appeared to live alone.
