Instead, he said, “Vanessa only got hurt because she was allergic to whatever bit her. You're not allergic, are you?”
“Yeah,” I said, “to rabies.”
Nick shrugged. “Fine. You can stay here, but I'm going. You remember how Jenny Williams got killed at the playground? I bet we find the missing head, or some blood and clues and stuff. Maybe we could even solve the case and get a reward!”
My imagination lit up at the thought of reward money. I could finally buy that low-cut red dress I'd had my eye on—the one that would make Nick see me as something more than his friend…
We stopped at my house to get some supplies: a flashlight and a couple cans of soda. Dinner wasn't until eight because my father was working overtime. I wouldn't be missed 'til then.
I made Nick wait outside with the supplies while I went to the laundry room. I didn't want her to see Nick, to guess what we were up to, or how I really felt about him.
Mom looked up from folding towels. “You're home early.”
“Yeah, but not for long. Nick and I are going to hang out 'til dinner.”
“Oh?” Mom raised an eyebrow. “Where are you two going?”
I didn't like the way she said it, as if she didn't trust me. Frankly, I was beginning not to trust myself—at least where Nick was concerned. But I didn't want to admit that to her anymore than I wanted to admit it to myself, so I shuffled my feet and looked at the floor. “Nowhere. We, uh, want to go to the mall.”
“Well, be careful,” Mom said. “It's the anniversary of all those deaths. The Playground Killer could be out there—”
“Yeah, I know. And the Boogeyman too. Nick will be with me the whole time, OK? I'll be safe, I promise.”
“I suppose the killer wouldn't hit the same town twice,” Mom said. “What are the odds?”
I rolled my eyes and walked away. I had bigger things to worry about, like how I was going to get Nick to be my boyfriend…
Chapter 2: DANGER ZONE
The sun was setting by the time we arrived at the playground. It was even more desolate than I'd imagined. An old gravel road led to it, surrounded by a rickety wooden fence. The fence was broken in spots and sagging in others, but not damaged enough for us to squeeze through. There was a lock on the gate. A weather-beaten sign hung across it. In tall red letters, it warned us the property was condemned:
NO TRESPASSING!
Nick scrambled over the gate and dropped out of sight. He always made everything look easy, but I didn't want to take the chance of hurting myself. I was still deciding how much of a running start I needed when Nick screamed. It tapered to a low, rattling gurgle.
My breath caught. I knew Nick was hurt, and it was up to me to save him. Maybe then he'd take me in his arms and see how much I loved him…
I clambered up the fence. When I got to the top, I stayed there, watching to make sure I wasn't leaping into whatever danger had gotten Nick. I didn't see anyone but him. He was lying face down in the weeds.
“Nick!” I called. “Nick, you all right?”
No answer. I looked around the playground suspiciously: Nobody. No snakes or rabid dogs. Certainly no maniacs. But it was getting so dark I had to strain my eyes. What if something—or worse, someone—was hiding in the tall grass or behind the trees?
“Nick!” I called again. “Are you OK? This isn't funny! Get up.”
Nick didn't move. I pulled out the flashlight, snapping it on and letting it play across the nearby ground. I saw nothing, heard nothing, except the slow agony of my own tortured breath.
I dropped next to Nick. I bent low and rolled him over. Nick's eyes flew open and he bared his foam-flecked teeth, snarling and grabbing me like a wild animal! He pulled me down and rolled on top, pinning my wrists.
“Get off me!” I shrieked and fought. Every horror movie I'd ever seen came back to me. Oh, my God! What if Nick was psycho? What if he wanted to—
His animal sounds turned to hysterical laughter and he let my wrists go. “Sucker! I really scared you, huh?”
The way he was on top of me, his lips so close to mine, I couldn't resist. I grabbed his face and kissed him.
“Hey,” Nick said. “What are you—”
“Shut up.” I kissed him again, feeling love and hoping he felt the same way too. Only he didn't. He got off me and looked at me like I was crazy. “What'd you do that for?”
I felt like a slut. I stood up, hating myself for being humiliated, but couldn't quite hate him. “I don't know. I just wanted to, that's all. I thought you were dead!”
“Yeah, well, I'm not.”
“No?” I punched him as hard as I could in the shoulder. “How 'bout now?”
“Ow!” He grimaced, rubbing the spot where I'd socked him. “What the hell, Laura? That hurt.”
“Good!”
“I'm sorry, all right? Jeez. Here, have a soda.” He handed me a can and pulled the top on his, chugging it like he was trying to get the taste of me out of his mouth.
I put the can in my coat pocket. “You're such a jerk, Nick.”
He crushed the empty can and tossed it into the bushes. “C'mon, let's search for clues. I'll be Sherlock, you be Watson.”
“More like Shaggy and Scooby,” I muttered.
Nick smirked and motioned me to follow.
It was getting dark. I kept my eyes on the ground, in case there were any snakes or spiders waiting to pounce on my ankles. There weren't many poisonous critters native to Washington state, but that didn't mean some weirdo hadn't imported some and let them escape.
Nick stopped and held out his arm, causing me to bump into it. “There it is! The merry-go-round where that nut chopped off Jenny's head.”
“Great,” I said. “Fantastic.”
Nick ignored my sarcasm. “I heard Jenny was spinning around and around with the maniac standing beside her, and the next time Jenny passed, the creep cut off her head with an axe!”
“Gross,” I said.
“Gross isn't the word, Laura. Ghastly is more like it. The force of the merry-go-round did most of the killer's work. Jenny was going so fast, all the freak had to do was stand there with his axe held level with her pretty white throat…”
“And she just ran into the blade?” The idea horrified me. How could you kill someone like that? It's not like Jenny or the other victims had ever done anything to him. Maybe he just hated his life and had to work his anger out on girls the same way I'd worked out mine on frogs.
An impulse. Reckless, selfish. Something you do to ease the pain, to seize power and control. Like what I'd just done to Nick… I shivered, thinking of him lying on top of me in grass. I hadn't been able to stop myself. I just had to do it. To see what it was like, and then I'd wanted to do it again. And again. That must be how girls become sluts and men become killers.
I looked at Nick, trying to get inside his head. Did he hate me now? Had I ruined everything? He wasn't acting like I had, that was for sure. “Nick,” I began, “listen. I think you should know how I—”
“Hang on.” He turned on the flashlight, playing the beam over the aging merry-go-round, then gave the wheel a hard push. It let out a metallic shriek that seemed to echo for miles. As it spun, Nick held the flashlight on it, searching for clues. He yelped with delight and brought the wheel to a halt. “There! See that? That's her blood!” He pointed at a large, rust-red stain on the merry-go-round's surface.
“Seriously? That's not blood, dummy. It's rust! The police or somebody would have cleaned the murder blood, and it's been what? A year since it happened?”
Nick kicked at loose gravel. “Aw, you've got no imagination.”
I was about to tell him I had a great imagination—and a very active one where he was concerned—when I saw a masked man with an axe slip from the shadows. The Playground Killer! He wore a dark pair of mechanic's coveralls and black executioner's hood.
Nick had his back to the killer and didn't see. I tried to scream a warning, but no sound came, just a pitiful squeak.
&n
bsp; The Playground Killer stalked forward, his heavy blade glittering in the dark.
Nick frowned. “Laura, what's the matter with you? You see a ghost?”
All I could do was point. Nick turned and saw what had frozen me to the spot. Death was coming. I could almost feel the sharp, shining steel bite through my flesh, chopping me apart! Would my head be taken away as a trophy too?
I finally managed to get one word out: “Run!” I pivoted at the same time and ran for the fence. When I scrambled to the top, I threw one leg over and looked back.
Nick was still ten feet away. He wasn't going to make it. I was sure of that. Then I remembered the soda can in my pocket. I pulled it out, aimed at the Playground Killer's head, and scored my second bullseye of the night. The can struck the killer's forehead with a crunching sound. He fell to one knee and dropped the axe, clutching at his head through the hood.
I leaned down and held my hand toward Nick for him to grab. Just as he was halfway up the wall, the killer seemed to recover. He charged, axe swung high, ready to strike!
I pulled Nick toward me, but the strain was too much and we both went screaming over the side onto the gravel road below.
A terrific crash came from the other side of the fence. The axe smashed through the flimsy wood, pulled out, then struck again.
We got up and ran.
Chapter 3: ALIVE
Blocks later, we were back in a well-lit neighborhood: Cars drove by. A man walked his dog. Everything was normal, but nothing would ever be the same.
“You do realize you almost got us killed?” I blurted.
Nick shrugged. The smirk was back on his face, and something else. Something behind the eyes. “So? Don't you get it, Laura? We just had the most epic experience of our lives! I dare you to say you don't feel more alive than you did before. Go on, I dare you!”
The more I thought about it, the more I realized Nick was right. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess I do feel pretty good, but shouldn't we tell someone? Our parents? The police?”
Nick scoffed. “You know how much trouble we'd be in? They'd ground us for a year! Let's just keep this our secret, OK? It's not like we got hurt.”
When I tried to argue, Nick kissed me. I was so stunned, so happy, I agreed not to tell anyone. “Our secret,” I promised.
Nick hesitated, almost like he had to psych himself up to get the words out. “I can't believe it. I might never have realized how I felt if…”
“We hadn't almost died?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Weird, huh?”
“Totally.”
We kissed again, then Nick walked me home. We held hands the whole way.
THE HOUSE THAT DARKNESS BUILT
The house that darkness built,
it sits upon the hill,
and whispers to me every night
to kill… and kill… and kill.
THE HAUNTING OF HEX HOUSE
Can a house be evil? Can it have seen so much tragedy, so much horror, that it soaks up the raw emotions—the psychic energy—of its inhabitants, and becomes a living thing? Can such a house haunt itself? Some paranormal researchers think so.
Chapter 1: THE HOUSE
Hex House had stood alone and unloved for as long as it could remember. It was a mansion made of stone, of imported, intricately carved oak, and had been home to the finest family in Grays Harbor upon its completion in 1872. Some say old Hezekiah Hex, the patriarch of the Hex shipping dynasty, had made his fortune smuggling for the South in the Civil War and parlayed that wealth into the most successful shipping company on the western seaboard.
Regardless of how he'd amassed his fortune, Hezekiah had Hex House built as much to display his power as to please his strange young wife, Mary—she of the burning eyes and witchly whispers who never left the grounds. In 1882, Mary went insane and stabbed her husband to death, then slit her throat with the same blade. Her blood seeped into the floorboards and became one with the house. Something happened then, a transformation. Hex House became aware.
It lived.
The house brooded in the dark and slumbered in the light. Watching, waiting, wanting. A rotting mausoleum, a monument to greed, to hunger, to hate. The house had had another name once, many names, and it had walked and danced and laughed on two legs. It even dimly remembered leaving the hill on which it stood, of wandering the world outside—a world of horse-drawn carriages and ballrooms blazing with light—but these images were no more than ghosts, flickering phantoms that came to torment it as it slumbered.
The house remembered fear and pain much more easily. It knew loneliness, betrayal, rage. But it also knew love, a twisted kind of love, the only kind something like it could ever know: the love of possession and of being possessed, of being owned and owning another—a living, breathing, bleeding other. It needed to renew itself from time to time. It needed blood and souls, flesh and bone to fill it with new life, the life that can only spring from death.
Hex House was mad, driven insane by its terrible transition from two legs to four walls. It creaked and groaned and shuddered in the night, its wooden beams and crumbling stone pulsing with fearsome hunger…
Chapter 2: THE VICTIM
Ann Gordon knew none of this as she climbed the cracked stone steps of Hex House in her tweed power suit and matching pumps. A realtor with Prime Harbor Properties, Ann had just been assigned to sell Hex House after the previous agent had unexpectedly left the firm.
No one had told Ann of the house's history or the alarming number of realtors who had gone missing or insane after taking it on. Ann was so happy to have been chosen to sell the property, she didn't think twice. All she thought about was the generosity of her new boss, Arthur Royce, and how much faith he must have in her, especially after she'd turned him down for a date.
“Ann,” Arthur said, withdrawing his hand from her exposed knee, “I respect your decision to keep our relationship professional. I wasn't sure you were going to work out given your lack of experience, but any gal that's got the guts to turn her boss down ought to have no problem handling even the toughest customers.” He sat back in his leather chair and rested his hands behind his head. “Tell you what I'm going to do—there's this special property I think would be perfect for you, just perfect. It's a real gem, and I'm going to personally see to it you get a six-percent commission which, in today's market, is nothing to sneeze at…”
Everything else in Ann's meager portfolio were low-end vacant lots, mold-infested duplexes, and crumbling, hundred-year-old rat traps that wouldn't fetch much in the Harbor's depressed real estate market. But Hex House, with its million dollar price tag, would net her a cool sixty grand. That was more money than Ann had ever seen in her life.
She needed that money to pay off the mountain of her debt her husband, Frank, had left after getting drunk and driving off a cliff last winter. Sometimes, Ann wondered if he'd done it on purpose. She'd had no idea how deep Frank's financial trouble was, how badly his construction business was failing, and had been forced to go back to work. She'd completed her training and gotten her real estate license quick enough, but jobs were scarce in the county.
When the offer to join Prime Harbor Properties had come, Ann jumped at the chance. If she could sell Hex House, all her troubles would be over. She could pay off the mortgage and credit cards, and still have a little left over to provide for her teenage daughter Deb's college fund.
“But first I have to sell this monster,” Ann said. She wasn't sure why she'd said it out loud, only that the air here on Hex Hill was too thick with fog, too quiet. Nothing moved, and the only sound was the far-off cry of a gull winging its way over the Pacific. Long and mournful, the sound made Ann uneasy, as did the damp, clinging fog, and the brooding way the house's windows watched her.
“Ugly old place,” Ann murmured, gazing up at it. “Hope you sell quick.”
She'd already placed a FOR SALE at the bottom of the winding drive, easily seen by
anyone driving by on State Route 109. Now she fumbled with the lock box. The key wouldn't work at first, but eventually, she got the front door open. A strange breeze sprang from somewhere inside, blowing the blonde hair back from her face. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the breeze was gone.
“Spooky,” she said. “I'd better get this over with.” Yet something about the place would not let her enter, almost like a warning bell going off in her head.
Ann had begged her boss to come with her to help familiarize her with the property, but Arthur had declined, insisting he had more important matters to attend to. Ann had then asked one of the more experienced agents, Rebecca North, if she would show her around. Rebecca had been friendly at first, but as soon as Ann had mentioned Hex House, the middle-aged realtor had grown tense.
“I'm sorry, hon,” Rebecca told Ann, “but I'm never going in that house again, and if you were smart, you wouldn't either.”
“It's only a house,” Ann countered. “Why won't anyone come with me? First Arthur, now you. It's like you're all afraid of it.”
Rebecca looked away, not answering.
“It's not haunted, is it?” Ann thought she was making a joke, but Rebecca's heavily made-up face paled.
At that moment, Ann's sixteen-year-old daughter, Deb, had called, letting Rebecca off the hook. The older realtor made good her escape into Arthur's office, where she shut the door and pulled the blinds. Ann thought she could hear angry whispering, but then Debra was talking, telling her all about her first day at her new high school, and Ann was glad. Not only for the normalcy of the moment, but the fact her daughter still felt comfortable sharing things with her. Other moms weren't so lucky, and they didn't have a husband who'd driven off a cliff to make things worse.
“So anyway,” Deb said, “My new friend, Polly Mitchell and I are going to South Shore Mall. Can you come get me in a couple hours?”
Ann chewed her lip. Hex House was a good twenty-minute drive from Aberdeen, and although there wasn't much traffic, she wasn't that familiar with the area and might get lost. She also might need a lot of time to explore the old house so she'd be ready to sell it.
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