Jonathan Maberry
Property Condemned
-1-
The house was occupied, but no one lived there.
That’s how Malcolm Crow thought about it. Houses like the Croft place were never really empty.
Like most of the kids in Pine Deep, Crow knew that there were ghosts. Even the tourists knew about the ghosts. It was that kind of town.
All of the tourist brochures had pictures of ghosts on them. Happy, smiling, Casper the Friendly Ghost sorts of ghosts. Every store in town had a rack of books about the ghosts of Pine Deep. Crow had every one of those books. He couldn’t braille his way through a basic geometry test or recite the U.S. Presidents in any reliable order, but he knew about shades and crisis apparitions, church grims and banshees, crossroads ghosts and poltergeists. He read every story and historical account; saw every movie he could afford to see. Every once in a while, Crow would even risk one of his father’s frequent beatings to sneak out of bed and tiptoe down to the basement to watch Double Chiller Theater on the flickering old Emerson. If his dad caught him and took a belt to him, it was okay as long as Crow managed to see at least one good spook flick.
Besides, beatings were nothing to Crow. At nine years old he’d had so many that they’d lost a lot of their novelty.
It was the ghosts that mattered. Crow would give a lot — maybe everything he had in this world — to actually meet a ghost. That would be… well, Crow didn’t know what it would be. Not exactly. Fun didn’t seem to be the right word. Maybe what he really wanted was proof. He worried about that. About wanting proof that something existed beyond the world he knew.
He believed that he believed, but he wasn’t sure that he was right about it. That he was aware of this inconsistency only tightened the knots. And fueled his need.
His hunger.
Ghosts mattered to Malcolm Crow because whatever they were, they clearly outlasted whatever had killed them. Disease, murder, suicide, war, brutality… abuse. The causes of their deaths were over, but they had survived. That’s why Crow wasn’t scared of ghosts. What frightened him — deep down on a level where feelings had no specific structure — was the possibility that they might not exist. That this world was all that there was.
And the Croft house? That place was different. Crow had never worked up the nerve to go there. Almost nobody ever went out there. Nobody really talked about it, though everyone knew about it.
Crow made a point of visiting the other well-known haunted spots — the tourist spots — hoping to see a ghost. All he wanted was a glimpse. In one of his favorite books on hauntings, the writer said that a glimpse was what most people usually got. “Ghosts are elusive,” the author had written. “You don’t form a relationship with one, you’re lucky if you catch a glimpse out of the corner of your eye; but if you do, you’ll know it for what it is. One glimpse can last you a lifetime.”
So far, Crow had not seen or even heard a single ghost. Not one cold spot, not a single whisper of old breath, not a hint of something darting away out of the corner of his eye. Nothing, zilch. Nada.
However, he had never gone into the Croft place.
Until today.
Crow touched the front pocket of his jeans to feel the outline of his lucky stone. Still there. It made him smile.
Maybe now he’d finally get to see a ghost.
-2-
They pedaled through dappled sunlight, sometimes four abreast, sometimes single file when the trail dwindled down to a crooked deer path. Crow knew the way to the Croft place and he was always out front, though he liked it best when Val Guthrie rode beside him. As they bumped over hard-packed dirt and whispered through uncut summer grass, Crow cut frequent, covert looks at Val.
Val was amazing. Beautiful. She rode straight and alert on her pink Huffy, pumping the pedals with her purple sneakers. Hair as glossy black as crow feathers, tied in a bouncing ponytail. Dark blue eyes and a serious mouth. Crow made it his life’s work to coax a smile out of her at least once a day. It was hard work, but worth it.
The deer path spilled out onto an old forestry service road that allowed them once more to fan out into a line. Val caught up and fell in beside Crow on the left, and almost at once Terry and Stick raced each other to be first on the right. Terry and Stick were always racing, always daring each other, always trying to prove who was best, fastest, smartest, strongest. Terry always won the strongest part.
“The Four Horsemen ride!” bellowed Stick, his voice breaking so loudly that they all cracked up. Stick didn’t mind his voice cracking. There was a fifty-cent bet that he’d have his grown-up voice before Terry. Crow privately agreed. Despite his size, Terry had a high voice that always sounded like his nose was full of snot.
Up ahead, the road forked, splitting off toward the ranger station on the right and a weedy path on the left. On the left-hand side, a sign leaned drunkenly toward them.
PRIVATE PROPERTY
NO ADMITTANCE
TRESPASSERS WILL BE
That was all of it. The rest of the sign had been pinged off by bullet holes over the years. It was a thing to do. You shot the sign to the Croft place to show that you weren’t afraid. Crow tried to make sense of that, but there wasn’t any end to the string of logic.
He turned to Val with a grin. “Almost there.”
“Oooo, spooky!” said Stick, lowering the bill of his Phillies ball-cap to cast his face in shadows.
Val nodded. No smile. No flash of panic. Only a nod. Crow wondered if Val was bored, interested, skeptical, or scared. With her, you couldn’t tell. She had enough Lenape blood to give her that stone face. Her mom was like that, too. Not her dad, though. Mr. Guthrie was always laughing, and Crow suspected that he, too, had a lifelong mission that involved putting smiles on the faces of the Guthrie women.
Crow said, “It won’t be too bad.”
Val shrugged. “It’s just a house.” She leaned a little heavier on the word “just” every time she said that, and she’d been doing that ever since Crow suggested they come out here. Just a house.
Crow fumbled for a comeback that would chip some of the ice off of those words, but, as he so often did, he failed.
It was Terry Wolfe who came to his aid. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, Val, you keep saying that but I’ll bet you’ll chicken out before we even get onto the porch.”
Terry liked Val, too, but he spent a lot of time putting her down and making fun of whatever she said. Though, if any of that actually hurt Val, Crow couldn’t see it. Val was like that. She didn’t show a thing. Even when that jerk Vic Wingate pushed her and knocked her down in the schoolyard last April, Val hadn’t yelled, hadn’t cried. All she did was get up, walk over to Vic and wipe the blood from her scraped palms on his shirt. Then, as Vic started calling her words that Crow had only heard his dad ever use when he was really hammered, Val turned and walked away like it was a normal spring day.
So Terry’s sarcasm didn’t make a dent.
Terry and Stick immediately launched into the Addams Family theme song loud enough to scare the birds from the trees.
A startled doe dashed in blind panic across their path and Stick tracked it with his index finger and dropped his thumb like a hammer.
“Pow!”
Val gave him a withering look, but she didn’t say anything.
They rounded the corner and skidded to a stop, one, two, three, four. Dust plumes rose behind them like ghosts and drifted away on a breeze as if fleeing from this place. The rest of the song dwindled to dust on their tongues.