“What I ought to do,” she said coldly, “is make you three sissies go in with me.”
“No way,” laughed Terry, as if it was the most absurd idea anyone had ever said aloud.
“Okay!” blurted Crow.
Terry and Stick looked at him with a Nice going, Judas look in their eyes.
Val smiled. Crow wasn’t sure if she was smiling at him or smiling in triumph. Either way, he put it in the win category. He was one smile up on the day’s average.
Crow’s bike had no kickstand so he got off and leaned it against a maple, considered, then picked it up and turned it around so that it pointed the way they’d come. Just in case.
“You coming?” he asked Stick and Terry.
“If I’m going in,” said Val acidly, “then we’re all going in. It’s only fair and I don’t want to hear any different or so help me God, Terry…”
She left the rest to hang. When she was mad, Val not only spoke like an adult, she sounded like her mother.
Stick winced and punched Terry on the arm. “Come on, numb-nuts.”
-4-
The four of them clustered together on the lawn, knee-deep in weeds. Bees and blowflies swarmed in the air around them. No one moved for more than a minute. Crow could feel the spit in his mouth drying to paste.
I want to do this, he thought, but that lie sounded exactly like what it was.
The house glowered down at him.
The windows, even the shuttered ones, were like eyes. The ones with broken panes were like the empty eye-sockets of old skulls, like the ones in the science class in school. Crow spent hours staring into those dark eye-holes, wondering if there was anything of the original owner’s personality in there. Not once did he feel anything. Now, just looking at those black and empty windows made Crow shudder, because he was getting the itchy feeling that there was something looking back.
The shuttered windows somehow bothered him more than the open ones. They seemed… he fished for the word.
Sneaky?
No, that wasn’t right. That was too cliché, and Crow had read every ghost story he could find. Sneaky wasn’t right. He dug through his vocabulary and came up short. The closest thing that seemed to fit — and Crow had no idea how it fit — was hungry.
He almost laughed. How could shuttered windows look hungry?
“That’s stupid.”
It wasn’t until Stick turned to him and asked what he was talking about that Crow realized he’d spoken the words aloud.
He looked at the others and all of them, even Val, were stiff with apprehension. The Croft house scared them. Really scared them.
Because they believed there was something in there.
They all paused there in the yard, closer to their bikes and the road than they were to that porch.
They believed.
Crow wanted to shout and he wanted to laugh.
“Well,” said Val, “let’s go.”
The Four Horseman, unhorsed, approached the porch.
-5-
The steps creaked.
Of course they did. Crow would have been disappointed if they hadn’t. He suppressed a smile. The front door was going to creak, too; those old hinges were going to screech like a cat. It was how it was all supposed to be.
It’s real, he told himself. There’s a ghost in there. There’s something in there.
It was the second of those two thoughts that felt correct. Not right exactly — but correct. There was something in that house. If they went inside, they’d find it.
No, whispered a voice from deeper inside his mind, if we go inside, it will find us.
“Good,” murmured Crow. This time he said it so softly that none of the others heard him.
He wanted it to find them.
Please let it find us.
They crossed the yard in silence. The weeds were high and brown, as if they could draw no moisture at all from the hard ground. Crow saw bits of debris there, half-hidden by the weeds. A baseball whose hide had turned a sickly yellow and whose seams had split like torn surgical sutures. Beyond that was a woman’s dress shoe; just the one. There was a Triple-A road map of Pennsylvania, but the wind and rain had faded the details so that the whole state appeared to be under a heavy fog. Beyond that was an orange plastic pill bottle with its label peeled halfway back. Crow picked it up and read the label and was surprised to see that the pharmacy where this prescription had been filled was in Poland. The drug was called Klozapol, but Crow had no idea what that was or what it was used for. The bottle was empty but it looked pretty new. Crow let it drop and he touched the lucky stone in his pocket to reassure himself that it was still safe.
Still his.
The yard was filled with junk. An empty wallet, a ring of rusted keys, a soiled diaper, the buckle from a seat belt, a full box of graham crackers that was completely covered with ants. Stuff like that. Disconnected things. Like junk washed up on a beach.
Val knelt and picked up something that flashed silver in the sunlight.
“What’s that?” asked Terry.
She held it up. It was an old Morgan silver dollar. Val spit on her thumb and rubbed the dirt away to reveal the profile of Lady Liberty. She squinted to read the date.
“Eighteen-ninety-five,” she said.
“Are you kidding me?” demanded Terry, bending close to study it. He was the only one of them who collected coins. “Dang, Val… that’s worth a lot of money.”
“Really?” asked Val, Crow and Stick at the same time.
“Yeah. A lot of money. I got some books at home we can look it up in. I’ll bet it’s worth a couple of thousand bucks.”
Crow goggled at him. Unlike the other three, Crow’s family was dirt poor. Even Stick, whose parents owned a tiny TV repair shop in town, had more money. Crow’s mom was dead and his father worked part-time at Shanahan’s Garage, then drank most of what he earned. Crow was wearing the same jeans this year that he wore all last season. Same sneakers, too. He and his brother Billy had learned how to sew well enough to keep their clothes from falling apart.
So he stared at the coin that might be worth a few thousand dollars.
Val turned the coin over. The other side had a carving of an eagle with its wings outstretched. The words UNITED STATES OF AMERICA arched over it and ONE DOLLAR looped below it. But above the eagle where IN GOD WE TRUST should have been, someone had gouged deep into the metal, totally obscuring the phrase.
Terry gasped as if he was in actual physical pain.
“Bet it ain’t worth as much like that,” said Stick with a nasty grin.
Val shrugged and shoved the coin into her jeans pocket. “Whatever. Come on.”
It was a high porch, and they climbed four steep steps to the deck. Each step was littered with dried leaves and withered locust husks. Crow wondered where the leaves had come from; it was the height of summer. Except for the willows, everything everywhere was alive, and those willows looked like they’d been dead for years. Besides, these were dogwood leaves. He looked around for the source of the leaves, but there were no dogwoods in the yard. None anywhere he could see.
He grunted.
“What?” asked Val, but Crow didn’t reply. It wasn’t the sort of observation that was going to encourage anyone.
“The door’s probably locked,” said Terry. “This is a waste of time.”
“Don’t even,” warned Val.
The floorboards creaked, each with a different note of agonized wood.