It stood there.
The Croft house.
-3-
The place even looked haunted.
Three stories tall, with all sorts of angles jutting out for no particular reason. Gray shingles hung crookedly from their nails. The windows were dark and grimed. Some were broken out. Most of the storm shutters were closed, but a few hung open and one lay half-buried in a dead rosebush. Missing slats in the porch railing gave it a gap-toothed grin. Like a jack-o’-lantern. Like a skull.
On any other house, Crow would have loved that. He would have appreciated the attention to detail.
But his dry lips did not want to smile.
Four massive willows, old and twisted by rot and disease, towered over the place, their long fingers bare of leaves even in the flush of summer. The rest of the forest stood back from the house as if unwilling to draw any nearer. Like people standing around a coffin, Crow thought.
His fingers traced the outline of the lucky stone in his jeans pocket.
“Jeeeez,” said Stick softly.
“Holy moley,” agreed Terry.
Val said, “It’s just a house.”
Without turning to her, Terry said, “You keep saying that, Val, but I don’t see you running up onto the porch.”
Val’s head swiveled around like a praying mantis’s and she skewered Terry with her blue eyes. “And when exactly was the last time you had the guts to even come here, Terrence Henry Wolfe? Oh, what was that? Never? What about you, George Stickler?”
“Crow hasn’t been here either,” said Stick defensively.
“I know. Apparently three of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are sissies.”
“Whoa, now!” growled Terry, swinging his leg off his bike. “There’s a lot of places we haven’t been. You haven’t been here, either — does that make you a sissy, too?”
“I don’t need to come to a crappy old house to try and prove anything,” she fired back. “I thought we were out riding bikes.”
“Yeah, but we’re here now,” persisted Terry, “so why don’t you show everyone how tough you are and go up on the porch?”
Val sat astride her pink Huffy, feet on the ground, hands on the rubber grips. “You’re the one trying to prove something. Let’s see you go first.”
Terry’s ice-blue eyes slid away from hers. “I never said I wanted to go in.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“I’m just saying that you’re the one who’s always saying there’s no such thing as haunted houses, but you’re still scared to go up there.”
“Who said I was scared?” Val snapped.
“You’re saying you’re not?” asked Terry.
Crow and Stick watched this exchange like spectators at a tennis match. They both kept all expression off their faces, well aware of how far Val could be pushed. Terry was getting really close to that line.
“Everyone’s too scared to go in there,” Terry said, “and—”
“And what?” she demanded.
“And… I guess nobody should.”
“Oh, chicken poop. It’s just a stupid old house.”
Terry folded his arms. “Yeah, but I still don’t see you on that porch.”
Val made a face, but didn’t reply. They all looked at the house. The old willows looked like withered trolls, bent with age and liable to do something nasty. The Croft house stood, half in shadows and half in sunlight.
Waiting.
It wants us to come in, thought Crow, and he shivered.
“How do you know the place is really haunted?” asked Stick.
Terry punched him on the arm. “Everybody knows it’s haunted.”
“Yeah, okay, but… how?”
“Ask Mr. Halloween,” said Val. “He knows everything about this crap.”
They all looked at Crow.
“It’s not crap,” he insisted. “C’mon, guys, this is Pine Deep. Everybody knows there are ghosts everywhere here.”
“You ever see one?” asked Stick, and for once there was no mockery in his voice. If anything, he looked a little spooked.
“No,” admitted Crow, “but a lot of people have. Jim Polk’s mom sees one all the time.”
They nodded. Mrs. Polk swore that she saw a partially formed figure of a woman in Colonial dress walking through the backyard. A few of the neighbors said they saw it, too.
“And Val’s dad said that Gus Bernhardt’s uncle Kurt was so scared by a poltergeist in his basement that he took to drinking.”
Kurt Bernhardt was a notorious drunk — worse than Crow’s father — and he used to be a town deputy until one day he got so drunk that he threw up on a town selectman while trying to write him a parking ticket.
“Dad used to go over to the Bernhardt place a lot,” said Val, “but he never saw any ghosts.”
“I heard that not everybody sees ghosts,” said Terry. He took a plastic comb out of his pocket and ran it through his hair, trying to look cool and casual, like there was no haunted house forty feet away.
“Yeah,” agreed Stick, “and I heard that people sometimes see different ghosts.”
“What do you mean ‘different ghosts’?” asked Val.
Stick shrugged. “Something my gran told me. She said that a hundred people can walk through the same haunted place, and most people won’t see a ghost because they can’t, and those who do will see their own ghost.”
“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 part 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.