One house left, p.9
One House Left, page 9
Her laugh stops short when she sees his face. Then her eyes narrow as she studies me.
“Do you know each other?”
“Kind of,” I say, stepping into the crowd before she can ask anything else.
I thought I could avoid the adults here by being me. In my experience, they don’t have the time or the desire to bond with the quiet kid. But Miss Kittle is different.
Maybe Seb and I are more similar than I first thought.
I walk quickly to my locker then stop dead.
Nothing is out of the ordinary and yet I know, somehow, that there is another warning inside. The hair on my arms bristles and sweat seeps from my pores as I work out my next move.
What happens if I never use my locker again? Will it eventually burst open under the weight of a stranger’s torment?
A tiny part of me wants to know if we’re still in the middle of a horrible game, so I step forward, my legs like concrete blocks, and carefully open the door.
When nothing falls to the floor, I gently breathe out. Then panic surges up my spine as I see it lying in the darkness.
They haven’t forgotten me. Not yet.
The clipping feels brittle, like a layer of sliced-off skin.
I check to be sure no one is watching, then lean in to read the headline.
MOTHER’S HEARTBREAK AFTER NANNY SMOTHERS TWINS
The paper is dated 1985, but I already knew that. Out of all the Murder Road stories, this is the one that lingered longest when I read about it more than thirty years later.
The mother of murdered twins Eloise and Tammy Witchell has spoken of her anguish after their trusted nanny of five years smothered them while they slept.
The killings—the latest in an increasingly long line of tragedies to befall the residents of Cherry Tree Lane—rocked the entire country earlier this month.
Martha Harkness had worked for the Witchell family since their children were born. With a career spanning forty years, and numerous glowing references, she was the last person most would suspect of murder.
Speaking after the coroner ruled two cases of asphyxiation, Mrs. Witchell said, “Our lives ended the moment our beautiful angels were taken from us. The person we trusted the most with our children stole them. The only minuscule blessing we can take from this is that Tammy and Eloise remain together.”
Who the hell is doing this to me? At every other school I’ve been to since leaving Belleview, I have been ignored.
I press the article between my thumb and finger, gently rubbing until the ancient paper begins to crumble. Then I slide it carefully into my math textbook.
This is an ancient artifact, a collectors’ item. These things aren’t left lying around the house or conveniently found at yard sales. They are kept. On purpose.
My hands start to tremble and I slip as far into the corner as I can, a few kids casting puzzled looks as they pass, but most ignoring me altogether.
I need to think, so I hurry through the shrinking crowd to the only place that feels safe right now.
No way am I going back to those stalls. Instead, I look through the closed lunchroom doors, then creep inside, the sound of chattering cooks sneaking through the metal shutters.
I march toward the Hell Hole without looking back. If Max is right, and everyone else ignores it, this is the only place in school where I can get my shit together.
I slump against the bare-brick wall, slowing my breathing as everything I know about the Witchell twins rustles through my head like pages caught in the wind.
Theirs was the eleventh house on Murder Road—targeted more than two decades after the Hiding Boy’s curse.
Two five-year-old girls were smothered in their sleep, someone forcing their favorite teddies over their faces until four thin arms went limp.
During the autopsy, they found traces of artificial fur lodged in the victims’ throats. The same type they pulled from the fingernails of the woman entrusted to look after them.
At first, the police assumed the nanny took her own life, but, like Tyler said, the Hiding Boy kills everyone, including the host.
If you believe the legend, he possessed the nanny, killed the kids, then finished the job. Another house ticked off the list.
I freeze as footsteps echo in the corridor linking the cafeteria to the Hell Hole.
No one comes down here, I tell myself. Nobody except us.
The sound grows louder, then stops.
I wait for a teacher to clear their throat, or pull me out of the shadows with a gotcha grin, but there is only an expanding silence that squeezes the air from my lungs.
It’s your imagination. You’re safe here.
Even when the whistling starts, vibrating off the high ceilings and swarming through my ears, I don’t believe it.
I’ve had them before—waking dreams, lucid lies. I’m alone and I am safe. That’s all that matters.
The footsteps start again, stopping after a few seconds before a metallic bang! rings out.
My head jolts back in shock, crashing against the cold wall.
As pain fills my skull, someone steps slightly closer, then bang!
I picture the busted lockers lining the unlit corridor like scolded children.
Another door smashes against rusted metal, squeaking on its hinges before it finally comes to a halt.
I slink further into the gloom, edging along the wall until my fingers find something wet. I flinch, holding my hand to my nose but smelling nothing.
When I listen closer, I hear water dripping from one of the pipes zigzagging across the ceiling.
Another locker door crashes against its frame. Then another.
Nowhere is safe in a new school, in an unfamiliar town. Everything is a potential trap and I should know better.
“Who’s there?” I stutter, but no one answers.
They edge closer to me, the whistle ringing in my ears.
“I said, ‘Who’s there?’”
I pull my knees into my chest, waiting for the inevitable. At least I’ll know soon—who it is. And why.
Bang!
My body reverberates from the force, my heart beating so fast that I imagine it bursting from my chest. Then I dash into the only space I can see, a janitor’s closet filling my vision moments before I squeeze inside, gently closing the door as the cold metal scrapes my lips.
The feet move again, two steps—click … clack—calm and patient.
My fingers search for a weapon in the darkness, wrapping around a thick wooden stick attached to something that softly clanks against the mess all around me.
I’m not particularly strong. Not compared to Rowan, anyway. But sometimes you only need to be strong enough.
I wait. For the door to spring open. For whoever is tormenting me to show themselves. But no one comes.
Instead, as someone whistles the last line of the Hiding Boy’s song, footsteps head back down the corridor until all I can hear is my frantic panting.
I charge into the Hell Hole, tools crashing to the hard ground behind me, and then I burst through the black and stare into the empty cafeteria.
The door opens with a hiss, before I’m staring into the classrooms on either side of the main corridor.
Am I in one of those rooms? Sleeping through another pointless lesson? Is any of this real?
I try to pinch myself, then slam my palm against the side of my head.
“Am I dreaming?!” I yell.
The kids in the nearest class stare at me as their teacher steps out.
“Where should you be now?”
“I don’t know.”
His eyes grow warmer as he says, “Are you okay, son?”
I nod. “English. With Ms. Hewitt. That’s where I should be.”
“Best be off then.”
The teacher watches me pass, killing his students’ giggles with a single word. “Enough.”
I’m scared. Like always. Yet, this time, it’s so much worse.
25
That evening, I put the article about the murdered twins with the other clipping and the notes.
He’s coming for you!
I know that. It’s inevitable. But those warnings usually lurk in my nightmares, not in my locker or empty bathroom stalls.
Rowan strides in without knocking and I quickly smooth my pillow while trying to look as calm as possible.
The brother he used to be would have listened. He would take those four sheets of paper seriously. But now it’s not only his battered face I struggle to recognize, it’s also his heart, grown cold and indifferent.
He lies on his back, tossing balled-up socks into the air, until I ask, “When did you start fighting for money?”
He sits up, broken veins painting his right eye a watery pink. “Last year.”
“And when did Mom find out?”
Rowan chuckles. “Almost immediately.”
We’re good at keeping each other’s secrets, and I wonder if our mother knows more of mine than she’s letting on. Does she know about Max and the Hell Chasers? Has she found what I’ve hidden in the bedding she usually leaves us to strip?
“Is it worth it?” I ask. “You look awful.”
My brother fixes me with an unblinking stare. “There are different types of pain, Nate. I prefer this one.”
“Does it get easier?”
He pauses for a moment, then sighs. “No.”
I don’t follow him downstairs. Instead, I think of Max, wondering if she’s my way of coping, just like Rowan and Hazel have theirs.
I used to think my way was keeping quiet, remaining small. But Max is the only thing that makes sense to me right now. Even after that night in the woods, when something dragged its claws along Seb’s car, my strongest memory is her hand in mine.
“Dinner!” Mom yells.
I silently take my place at the table, all the ways I could say what I’m feeling jumbled into a thick ball of twine with no obvious ends.
“I hate this,” I mumble, and Mom’s fork pauses halfway to her mouth.
“What did you say?”
“I said, ‘I hate this.’”
Only Rowan is still eating now, his cutlery scraping loudly against his plate. Between mouthfuls, he smirks, because, for once, he’s not the cause of an explosion.
“You hate what, exactly?” Mom asks.
“This,” I say. “Sitting here. Pretending everything is okay. Ignoring all the horrible moments that, let’s face it, are basically all the fucking time.”
“Nathaniel!” Mom yells.
Dad’s hands rise then fall, his eyes fixed firmly on his newspaper.
“What’s this about?” Mom asks. “Is it Rowan’s bruises? Or have you seen something out there … on one of your walks?”
She makes it sound like when the old folks at Grandma’s nursing home took an afternoon stroll.
“It’s this place. It’s suffocating. And school…”
It feels like I’m back cowering in the Hell Hole while something nasty crawled toward me.
“Do you ever think what would have happened if we’d stayed in Belleview?”
“No more!” Dad shouts, every plate on the table clinking with the force of his fist.
When I glance up, tears creep down Hazel’s cheeks, while Rowan’s broken face is blank.
“I’m glad you’ve all got your ways of coping,” I say as I leave. “It’s time that I focused on mine.”
His dreams were holes of varying sizes—some shallow enough for him to clamber out of unaided, others so deep that he never stopped falling.
Sometimes his fingers found respite in the darkness, his nails peeling from his skin as he clung to a crumbling ledge.
Blood trickled down his quivering arms, tickling, teasing, until he fell once more—a never-ending cycle of tumbling terror and brittle hope.
He hated those dreams. He despised that sensation, the moment before he was finally dragged back to the waking world, when he was falling so quickly that his soul came away from his body.
In those moments, right before he landed, he saw the bloodstained girl, her arm outstretched.
Her mother was murdered. Her father was gone. Her brother had vanished. So, he went to help her, because that was what he had been taught to do.
As his fingers touched hers, he felt the sticky warmth of someone else’s blood. Then she gripped his wrist and dragged him toward the house that started it all.
His heels left tracks in the dirt as she pulled, the dust he kicked up landing sharply in his eyes.
“I’m here to help you,” he said, and she stopped dragging.
Red splatters fell at her feet as she shook her head and whispered, “It’s too late for that.”
When he awoke, he looked for her—in all the usual places and all the less obvious ones. He searched until his parents stumbled in, wiping sleepy confusion from their eyes.
They stared at the ruins of his bedroom—the upturned furniture and strewn clothes, the computer table pushed clean over.
Then they stroked his hair until his eyes cleared and he asked, “What happened?”
“You had a bad dream,” his mother said. “You’re safe now.”
He nodded, staring at the ghost hiding under his bed, then whispered, “I hope so.”
26
The following Tuesday, Max lies on one of the benches dotted around the school’s huge courtyard, her hands behind her head as she sighs at the sky.
“After you’ve come face-to-face with an actual urban legend,” she says, “the next few days are a bit anticlimactic.”
For her, maybe. But I’m still studying every classmate who passes by and eavesdropping on every whispered conversation. Someone here is reminding me of Murder Road’s horrors, and I’m scared of what comes next.
I haven’t found anything in my locker for a few days. And I’ve managed to avoid the main bathrooms, sneaking into the forgotten stalls behind the science block whenever necessary.
For a few nasty nights, the Face in the Glass made cameos in my dreams. But whatever was out there, it hasn’t come for us … yet.
“What is it?”
Max waves a hand in front of my face until I realize I’m staring at her.
“Sorry. I zoned out.”
What I want to say … what I’ll never say … is that being with her is the only thing that stops me being afraid.
That has its own problems, but for now I ignore them and hope for the best.
Max has barely mentioned the Hell Chasers since it happened and she suddenly jumps up and starts pacing.
“You want to do another one, don’t you?” I ask, and she laughs.
“You think I don’t have a life? You think I literally spend every minute waiting for it to get dark?”
“It seems like that.”
Max leans toward me, tilts her head, and whispers, “Appearances can be deceiving.”
“So, what else do you do?”
I want more of the Max that she was that night—before we drew the faces; before whatever that thing was begged us to be let in. That Max is the closest I’ve had to a genuine friend.
Am I being foolish? Have I mistaken one moment of honesty for something else? Maybe she would have told anyone about her father that night. Or perhaps she really does see something special in me.
“You want to know what I do?”
I wait, think, then nod.
“What are you doing on Saturday?”
“Haven’t we been down this road?” I ask.
Max smiles and says, “Not this one. This is a daytime activity. Are you free?”
“I can be.”
“Okay. I’ll show you what else I do then.”
Her grin stirs something in my stomach—not butterflies, because they can’t survive inside me, but excitement.
Two girls walk past, their fake laughs shrill enough to break a dog’s eardrums as they stare at Max then scuttle away. In response, she lets out a low growl.
“What was that?” I ask.
“That’s what bad blood sounds like.”
“Friends of yours?”
“Never in a million years.”
Max watches them for a few more seconds, all the while picking tiny patches of black nail varnish from her thumb. Then she nods and says, “Do you have enemies?”
That’s hard to define.
“I have people I hate.”
“Close enough. That’s Demon in Chief Helen Keane and her minion Stephanie.”
“Okay.”
“They made my life a living hell in middle school.”
“What did they do?”
“What all mean girls do: enough to make you feel this small but not enough to get caught. She leaves me alone now. Tyler thinks she’s scared of me. I think she’s scared of Tyler.”
“School can be shit,” I say.
Max laughs into the sky. “It really can.”
“If you ever want to talk again, about your family, I’d like to listen.”
Max nods, stares at me until I look away, then says, “I will.”
I wish I could tell her something in return. Instead, we sit in silence. In my head an entire conversation plays out. I tell her where I lived before, why we left, who didn’t get that chance. I tell her all the things that cling to my insides like leeches.
27
The woman’s weak breaths fill the stale air, rattling, crackling, nothing like normal breathing at all.
“How old is she?” I whisper, and Max says, “Eighty-two.”
Max’s neighbor is in bed, her eyes frantic, like she’s woken up in the wrong place. But it’s not the room she’s uncertain about, it’s me.
“It’s all right,” Max says. “This is the friend I was telling you about. Nate, come say hi.”
My legs stiffen, then submit, as I slowly step toward the woman and mutter, “Hello.”
It sounds like a question, and Max smiles, touches my arm, and says, “It’s okay.”
I love how calm I now feel in her company; how calm everyone feels.
The woman’s bed sits in the center of a large living room—her fingers gripping one of the metallic rails and her tiny body lost beneath the sheets.
I look at the television, the photo frames, the cabinet full of well-read books, and the half-finished sudoku puzzle on the arm of a chair. In the corner, I notice another seat. One that almost belongs in a waiting room but not quite.
