Stick rode away.
That was the last time he went anywhere with Crow, Val, or Terry. During the rest of that summer and well into the fall, Stick went deep inside of himself. Eight years later, Crow read in the papers that George Stickler had swallowed an entire bottle of sleeping pills, though he was not yet as old as he had been in the vision. Crow was heartbroken but he was not surprised, and he wondered what the line was between the cowardice of suicide and an act of bravery.
For five long minutes Crow and Val sat on their bikes, one foot each braced on the ground. Val looked at the cornfields in the distance and Crow looked at her. Then, without saying a word, Val got off her bike and walked it down the lane toward her house. Crow sat there for almost half an hour before he could work up the courage to go home.
None of them ever spoke about that day. They never mentioned the Croft house. They never asked what the others had seen.
Not once.
The only thing that ever came up was the Morgan silver dollar. One evening Crow and Terry looked it up in a coin collector’s book. In mint condition it was valued at forty-eight thousand dollars. In poor condition it was still worth twenty thousand.
That coin probably still lay on the Croft house living room floor.
Crow and Terry looked at each other for a long time. Crow knew that they were both thinking about that coin. Twenty thousand dollars, just lying there. Right there.
It might as well have been on the dark side of the moon.
Terry closed his coin book and set it aside. As far as Crow knew, Terry never collected coins after that summer. He also knew that neither of them would ever go back for that silver dollar. Not for ten thousand dollars. Not for ten million. Like everything else they’d seen there — the wallet, the pill bottle, the diaper, all of it — the coin belonged to the house. Like Terry’s pocket comb. Like Stick’s ball-cap. And Crow’s lucky stone.
And what belonged to the house would stay there.
The house kept its trophies.
Crow went to the library and looked through the back issues of newspapers, through obituaries, but try as he might he found no records at all of anyone ever having died there.
Somehow, it didn’t surprise him.
There weren’t ghosts in the Croft house. It wasn’t that kind of thing.
He remembered what he’d thought when he first saw the old place.
The house is hungry.
-9-
Later, after Crow came home from Terry’s house, he sat in his room long into the night, watching the moon and stars rise from behind the trees and carve their scars across the sky. He sat with his window open, arms wrapped around his shins, shivering despite a hot breeze.
It was ten days since they’d gone running from the house.
Ten days and ten nights. Crow was exhausted. He’d barely slept, and when he did there were nightmares. Never — not once in any of those dreams — was there a monster or a ghoul chasing him. They weren’t those kinds of dreams. Instead he saw the image that he’d seen in the mirror. The older him.
The drunk.
The fool.
Crow wept for that man.
For the man he knew that he was going to become.
He wept and he did not sleep. He tried, but even though his eyes burned with fatigue, sleep simply would not come. Crow knew that it wouldn’t come. Not tonight, and maybe not any night. Not as long as he could remember that house.
And he knew he could never forget it.
Around three in the morning, when his father’s snores banged off the walls and rattled his bedroom door, Crow got up and, silent as a ghost, went into the hall and downstairs. Down to the kitchen, to the cupboard. The bottles stood in a row. Canadian Club. Mogen David 20/20. Thunderbird. And a bottle of vodka without a label. Cheap stuff, but a lot of it.
Crow stood staring at the bottles for a long time. Maybe half an hour.
“No,” he told himself.
No, agreed his inner voice.
No, screamed the drunken man in his memory.
No.
Crow reached up and took down the vodka bottle. He poured some into a Dixie cup.
“No,” he said.
And drank it.
About the Author
Jonathan Maberry is a NY Times bestselling author, multiple Bram Stoker Award winner, and Marvel Comics writer. He’s the author of many novels including Assassin’s Code, Flesh & Bone Dead of Night, Patient Zero and Rot & Ruin; and the editor of V-Wars: A Chronicle of the Vampire Wars. His nonfiction books on topics ranging from martial arts to zombie pop-culture. Since 1978 he has sold more than 1200 magazine feature articles, 3000 columns, two plays, greeting cards, song lyrics, poetry, and textbooks. Jonathan continues to teach the celebrated Experimental Writing for Teens class, which he created. He founded the Writers Coffeehouse and co-founded The Liars Club; and is a frequent speaker at schools and libraries, as well as a keynote speaker and guest of honor at major writers and genre conferences.