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Eric’s skin prickled with freezing gooseflesh. He stopped at the foot of the steps. The house had probably been white or tan but it now radiated in splashes of red, yellow, and orange. The colors swirled across the wood like drops of paint in a bowl of water. Heavy gashes in the screen door made it sag like a limp body about to fall over dead. Someone had spray painted an upside-down star on the storm door behind the screen. Why were the windows boarded and not the door?

It won’t be open. There’s no way it’ll be open. And then we can all go home. He’d sleep with his Ghostbusters nightlight on—he would not tell that to Tommy.

“If you don’t get in the house before dark, it doesn’t count,” Tommy yelled.

He was making this up as they went along. In any trio of friends, there’s always a leader and theirs was Tommy. He was probably hoping for a really good laugh, one that would make him fall down with cramps in his sides and tears bursting from his eyes. For that to happen, someone usually had to get hurt. Eric would have to play his part for Tommy’s amusement and then they could get back to playing with action figures.

“This isn’t so bad,” Eric whispered.

The first step squeaked beneath his foot. Shadows from the fractured spindles in the porch railing stretched up the house like mangled fangs.

The moan of the next step screamed for Eric to run back to the sidewalk and beg Tommy not to do this to him. Tommy would only send him back to the house and up the steps again.

Eric took the next two steps rapidly and stood on the porch with the backs of his sneakers hanging off. If he fell backwards, he’d descend into endless darkness. He would fall forever or maybe into hell.

He shivered, rubbed the sleeves of his jacket. He immediately felt stupid. It wasn’t the middle of January. He was being a baby about this. He just had to enter the house, grab something, and leave. Yes, it was stupid, pointless even, but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t have the guts to do it.

He stepped toward the door. A fist-sized hole lay between him and the door like someone had dropped a heavy rock through the wood. Or something had tried to break free from beneath. Inside the hole, light glinted off the cat-shaped eye of a troll.

He stumbled back a few steps to the edge of the porch again—fall off into the darkness—and stopped. There hadn’t been a troll or anything else demonic. He had caught the reflection of a beer can left by a teenager; that was all.

The flashlight beam focused on the curved metal handle of the screen door and Eric went to it. He was mindful to spread his legs wide over the hole without looking at it. Then he was at the door and all out of space.

The screen door handle froze his fingers. The door opened with a squeal. Eric’s heart thudded into his throat and his hands numbed; undigested hotdog from lunch roiled in his stomach. He wanted to vomit and cry and run away and never look at this house again but he knew he couldn’t do that—running away would label him a coward forever and, even worse, he’d have to admit it was true.

The screen door bounced off his shoulder when he reached for the knob of the storm door. The spray-painted star (a “pentagram,” it was called) grew larger, stretching across the door in all directions to become a mammoth star, the upside-down legs now gnarled horns. A face emerged inside the star. Eyes blinked open. Eric closed his own. Just my imagination. He opened his eyes—the image was a spray-painted star once more.

He grabbed the doorknob and turned—be locked, please be locked—and the bolt slipped easily back into the door. He instructed his arm to push forward but it refused. He had gone this far and yet his body wouldn’t allow him to go the next few steps needed to prove his bravery.

“Sun’s almost gone,” Tommy yelled.

The quicker he did this, the quicker he could be back in his room, away from this house. He willed his arm forward again and this time the muscles cooperated to nudge the door open a sliver with a sucking ooofff sound—the sound of a sealed coffin breaking wide. Stale air teased his nostrils; it reminded Eric of the way the boxes of Christmas supplies smelled every year when his father brought them down from the attic.

When the door opened all the way with a faint rusted squeak, red sunlight broke through the opening and turned the floating motes of dust into levitating drops of blood.

Eric gripped the flashlight with both hands and scanned for something to grab; anything would do, anything to appease Tommy. To his right, just past a boarded window, a staircase ascended half a dozen steps to a landing and more stairs continued upward at a right angle. He would never go upstairs. No matter what Tommy might call him or how he might threaten him, Eric wasn’t going to search the second floor—that was one floor closer to the dead girl.

Just find something and grab it.

Straight ahead, a narrow hallway ended at a shut door that led, presumably, into a room, maybe the kitchen. To his left lay a large empty room which Eric could only partially see because of the jutting wall. The stale smell floated all around him like invisible mold.

Somewhere something creaked like a really large finger cracking its knuckle. Nowhere did Eric see anything he could grab as proof of his visit to Hudson House.

CHAPTER 2

The floor moaned beneath Eric’s next step and he paused. He glanced at the stairs and then up, to the ceiling. Was she swinging up there now or lying on the floor? The hair on the back of his neck stood up as a cold chill coursed over his body.

Eric turned his back on the stairs and entered the large room. He immediately knew something was behind him; it had jumped toward him the moment he moved. Right now it stood in the crimson sunlight, hulking over him with blood-soaked arms from wrists that never stopped bleeding, a makeshift noose of ties slung around its neck.

Eric swung the flashlight behind him. The thing had moved back into the shadows where his light could not reach.

A pair of boarded windows divided the far wall of the room. Flakes of paint had peeled off of the wall in large strips like claw marks. Eric imagined the girl in a panic ripping at the wall, tearing at it until her fingertips bled, desperate to scrape her way out of the house that had become her eternal residence. Those same mutilated fingers could seize his neck and break his spine the way the noose of ties had broken hers.

Another boarded window—the front window—was to Eric’s left and a large opening into another boxy room was to the right. Three more windows sectioned the walls in that room in a mirror image of this one. Eric had expected old, moldy furniture with decades of spider webs sagging across them. He had at least imagined there would be beer cans and fast food wrappers from teenagers strewn across the place, but he found three completely empty rooms. The musty smell faded and intensified in waves.

The floor moaned with each step and Eric paused after every cry. He kept the flashlight steady while squeezing his other hand into a painfully tight fist that started to numb.

He stopped in the middle of the room and carefully scanned the floor as far into the next room as he could. Bare floors in bare rooms in a bare house. Should he keep searching? He faced the next room. The sunlight was fading rapidly from the front door like a retreating dream.

He could leave the house now, run out slamming the door before the thing leaped onto his back and dragged him even deeper inside. He’d tell Tommy that he searched and scoured but couldn’t find anything to grab but that didn’t matter since he and Ed had seen him enter the house. Tommy would smile that stupid, proud grin and call Eric a fag.