As they passed one of the big shuttered windows, Stick paused and frowned at it. Terry and Val kept walking, but Crow slowed and lingered a few paces away. As he watched, the frown on Stick’s mouth melted away and his friend stood there with no expression at all on his face.
“Stick…?”
Stick didn’t answer. He didn’t even twitch.
“Yo… Stick.”
This time Stick jumped as if Crow had pinched him. He whirled and looked at Crow with eyes that were wide but unfocused.
“What did you say?” he asked, his voice a little slurred. Like Dad’s when he was starting to tie one on.
“I didn’t say anything. I just called your name.”
“No,” said Stick, shaking his head. “You called me ‘daddy.’ What’s that supposed to mean?”
Crow laughed. “You’re hearing things, man.”
Stick whipped his ball-cap off his head and slapped Crow’s shoulder. “Hey… I heard you.”
Terry heard this and he gave Stick a quizzical smile, waiting for the punch-line. “What’s up?”
Stick wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and stared down as if expecting there to be something other than a faint sheen of spit. He touched the corner of his mouth and looked at his fingers. His hands were shaking as he pulled his ball-cap on and snugged it down low.
“What are you doing?” asked Terry, his smile flickering.
Stick froze. “Why? Do I have something on my face?”
“Yeah,” said Terry.
Stick’s face blanched white and he jabbed at his skin. The look in his eyes was so wild and desperate that it made Crow’s heart hurt. He’d seen a look like that once when a rabbit was tangled up in some barbed wire by the Carby place. The little animal was covered in blood and its eyes were huge, filled with so much terror that it couldn’t even blink. Even as Crow and Val tried to free it, the rabbit shuddered and died.
Scared to death.
For just a moment, Stick looked like that, and the sight of that expression drove a cold sliver of ice into Crow’s stomach. He could feel his scrotum contract into a wrinkled little walnut.
Stick pawed at his face. “What is it?”
“Don’t worry,” said Terry, “it’s just a dose of the uglies, but you had that when you woke up this morning.”
Terry laughed like a donkey.
No one else did.
Stick glared at him and his nervous fingers tightened into fists. Crow was sure that he was going to smash Terry in the mouth. But then Val joined them.
“What’s going on?” she demanded.
Her stern tone broke the spell of the moment.
“Nothing,” said Stick as he abruptly pushed past Terry and stalked across the porch, his balled fists at his sides. The others gaped at him.
“What—?” began Terry, but he had nowhere to go with it. After a moment he followed Stick.
Val and Crow lingered for a moment.
“Did they have a fight or something?” Val asked quietly.
“I don’t know what that was,” admitted Crow. He told her exactly what happened. Val snorted.
“Boys,” she said, leaving it there. She walked across the porch and stood in front of the door.
Crow lingered for a moment, trying to understand what just happened. Part of him wanted to believe that Stick just saw a ghost. He wanted that very badly. The rest of him—most of him — suddenly wanted to turn around, jump on the bike that was nicely positioned for a quick escape, and never come back here. The look in Stick’s eyes had torn all the fun out of this.
“Let’s get this over with,” said Val, and that trapped all of them in the moment. The three boys looked at her, but none of them looked at each other. Not for a whole handful of brittle seconds. Val, however, studied each of them. “Boys,” she said again.
Under the lash of her scorn, they followed her.
The doors were shut, but even before Val touched the handle, Crow knew that these doors wouldn’t be locked.
It wants us to come in.
Terry licked his lips and said, “What do you suppose is in there?”
Val shook her head, and Crow noted that she was no longer saying that this was just a house.
Terry nudged Crow with his elbow. “You ever talk to anybody’s been in here?”
“No.”
“You ever know anyone who knows anyone who’s been in here?”
Crow thought about it. “Not really.”
“Then how do you know it’s even haunted?” asked Val.
“I don’t.”
It was a lie and Crow knew that everyone read it that way. No one called him on it, though. Maybe they would have when they were still in the yard, but not now. There was a line somewhere and Crow knew — they all knew — they’d crossed it.
Maybe it was when Stick looked at the shuttered windows and freaked out.
Maybe it was when they came up on the porch.
Maybe, maybe…
Val took a breath, set her jaw, gripped the rusted and pitted brass knob, and turned it.
The lock clicked open.
A soft sound. Not at all threatening.
It wants us to come in, Crow thought again, knowing it to be true.
Then there was another sound, and Crow was sure only he heard it. Not the lock, not the hinges; it was like the small intake of breath you hear around the dinner table when the knife is poised to make the first cut into a Thanksgiving turkey. The blade gleams, the turkey steams, mouths water, and each of the ravenous diners takes in a small hiss of breath as the naked reality of hunger is undisguised.
Val gave the door a little push and let go of the knob.
The hinges creaked like they were supposed to. It was a real creak, too. Not another hungry hiss. If the other sound had been one of expectation then the creak was the plunge of the knife.
Crow knew this even if he wasn’t old enough yet to form the thoughts as cogently as he would in later years. Right now those impressions floated in his brain, more like colors or smells than structured thoughts. Even so, he understood them on a visceral level.
As the door swung open, Crow understood something else, too; two things, really.
The first was that, after today, he would never again need proof of anything in the unseen world.
And the second was that going into the Croft house was a mistake.
-6-
They went in anyway.
-7-
The door opened into a vestibule that was paneled in rotting oak. The broken globe light fixture on the ceiling above them was filled with dead bugs. There were no cobwebs, though, and no rat droppings on the floor.
In the back of Crow’s mind he knew that he should have been worried about that. By the time the thought came to the front of his mind, it was too late.
The air inside was curiously moist, and it stank. It wasn’t the smell of dust, or the stench of rotting meat. That’s what Crow had expected; this was different. It was a stale, acidic smell that reminded him more of his father’s breath after he came home from the bar. Crow knew that smell from all of the times his father bent over him, shouting at him while he whipped his belt up and down, up and down. The words his father shouted seldom made any sense. The stink of his breath was what Crow remembered. It was what he forced his mind to concentrate on so that he didn’t feel the burning slap of the belt. Crow had gotten good at that over the years. He still felt the pain — in the moment and in the days following each beating — but he was able to pull his mind out of his body with greater ease each time as long as he focused on something else. How or why that distraction had become his father’s pickled breath was something Crow never understood.