Ashley didn’t mention the other missing kids or the warning Mr. Wolf had given his students the day before.
Through the living room window, Ashley spotted Sid walking up the driveway.
She hurried out to meet him.
“Did you hear about Melanie?” Ashley asked, rushing down the driveway.
Sid nodded. “My mom’s having a cow.”
“Mine too,” Ashley said, looking back and waving at her mother who watched them from the living room window.
“Hi, Ms. Shepherd,” Sid called.
Rebecca waved at the kids and then stepped from the window, letting the curtain fall back into place.
“Do you think he got her?” Sid asked, polishing an apple on his t-shirt and taking a bite.
Ashley considered the day before when she’d almost walked into the woods herself. What was the significance of the birds?
“The night I saw the monster,” Ashley said, “or Warren, whatever it was, there were birds in the sky. Big buzzards. I’ve never seen buzzards at night.”
“Me either,” Sid said.
“And I saw them again when Warren walked in the woods.”
“Probably because Simon’s body was in the woods,” Sid offered.
“Yeah, but then I saw them again yesterday on my way home from the bike shop. They were flying over our woods, the woods Melanie walked into yesterday.”
Sid chewed his apple thoughtfully. “But what does that mean?”
“I think it’s a warning,” Ashley said, growing excited. “It’s a way for us to know where the monster is at.”
Sid looked at her skeptically. “I get that Warren stinks and all, but buzzards following him around?” He laughed, waiting for Ashley to do the same.
Ashley sighed and shook her head. “We really need to work on your jokes, Sid.”
16
Max saw Ashley and Sid sitting at a picnic table outside the Swirly Cone. He pulled his motorcycle to the curb and climbed off, hanging his helmet on the handlebar.
“Hi guys,” he called, waving at the kids.
“Mind if I join you?”
Sid grinned and nodded. “Sure, yeah.”
A man standing at the window, turned and waved at Max. He knew the man from the martial arts studio he practiced at several times a week.
“See ya on Friday, Wolf?” the man called as he walked backward, holding a chocolate ice cream cone.
“Yeah, I’ll be there,” Max told him.
“Did he call you Wolf?” Sid asked, impressed.
Max grinned and nodded. “Yep, beats Wolfenstein that’s for sure.”
“Your real name is Wolfenstein?” Ashley asked, picking a peanut off her ice cream sundae and flicking it to a seagull that had landed nearby. “Why does the school call you Mr. Wolf?”
“I asked them to shorten it when I started. For the kids’ sakes. But yeah, my full name is Maximilian Wolfenstein,” Max admitted with a laugh. “People started calling me Wolf in high school. It stuck.”
“People call me Butterball,” Sid complained, arranging his spoon with equal parts ice cream and hot fudge. “I sure hope it doesn’t stick.”
“How about you Ashley? Any nicknames other than Ash?” Max asked.
Ashley shrugged. “I like Ash. Seems fitting. I’m what's left after the fire.”
Max lifted an eyebrow, but Ashley didn’t elaborate.
“How’s summer vacation going?” Max asked. “I heard the sheriff is kicking around the idea of a curfew on account of the missing kids. I’ve always wondered if kids actually abide by those.”
Sid’s head shot up and a significant look passed between him and Ashley. Neither of them responded until Ash kicked Sid beneath the table.
Sid grunted. “It’s good.”
“Curfews are a joke,” Ashley said. “Whatever’s snatching kids is not likely to stop just because they’re indoors.”
“You mean whoever is snatching kids?” Max corrected.
“Yeah, sure.” Ashley directed her gaze at the table where a glob of ice cream, likely from the patron before them, melted into a blue puddle.
Max steepled his hands on the table and then, seeing how adult-ish it looked, he pulled them back down.
“Anything interesting going on?” Max asked.
Ashley’s eyes bored into Sid’s as if commanding his silence. “Nope,” she said, taking a bite of her sundae.
“Oh, come on. Nothing? You guys haven’t been sneaking into the gravel pit out on Marsh Road to swim? No scamming Paulie Goldman for free tokens at the arcade? I can’t remember a summer I didn’t do those things.”
Both the kids’ faces brightened as if his revelations put them at ease, but Ashley remained tight-lipped.
“I scored a hundred and two thousand on Donkey Kong last week,” Sid offered, holding up his hands as if he were manning the controls and mashing buttons.
Max whistled. “Impressive. Never did much Donkey Kong, but I used to kill it on Death Race. I held the highest score for two years. Finally got knocked off by my brother of all people.”
“That’s so cool,” Sid said.
“Your brother’s the insurance guy?” Ashley asked, and Max noticed a thoughtful look on her face.
“Yep. He and my dad are the Wolfensteins behind Wolfenstein and Son.”
“And they sell like insurance for houses, right?”
“Yeah,” Max confirmed, wondering where she was headed with her questions.
Sid looked equally confused.
“Do you know who owns The Crawford House?”
Max wrinkled his forehead. “The old funeral home?”
Ashley nodded, and Sid’s face lost some of its color, his mouth turning down at the corners.
“Not off-hand. The heir died in the house as I’m sure you both know. Ever been in it?” Max gave them a conspiratorial smile.
He shouldn’t condone them visiting the old abandoned house, but it was a rite of passage of sorts in their small town. All the kids did it despite their parents’ protestations that it was dangerous. And it was. The house was filled with rotted floorboards, old rusted embalming equipment, and whatever bacteria cropped up in a place like that after so many years in ruin. Still, if he took the high-handed approach, he’d never get a peep out of either of them.
Sid watched Ashley, but Ashley gazed at Max with unwavering, and somewhat unnerving, eyes. After a moment, she nodded.
“We’ve been out there a few times.”
“Ever been inside?”
Ashley glanced away and shrugged. “I ran into the foyer on a dare last year and grabbed a piece of peeling wallpaper. Scored a Kit Kat too, because Norm Phillips was too chicken to go in.”
Max nodded at her respectfully. “I went in once, all the way in,” he told them.
“All the way?” Sid gasped. “Like to where the coffins are?”
Max nodded as a shudder crept up his spine. He bit his teeth together to keep from making it visible. He hadn’t thought of that day in years, and now as he spoke of it, the terror that had gripped him slipped back in like an old unwelcome friend.
He laughed and glanced at the ice cream window, empty for the first time since he’d arrived.
“Let me grab a cone. Scary stories are better with a little sweetness. My mom used to tell me that.”
Both kids nodded, and the moment he stepped away, Max saw their heads move together and their lips start moving.
“Chocolate and vanilla twist,” he told the girl behind the counter.
As he waited for his cone, he remembered more than a decade before when he’d gone into The Crawford House. He’d been camping in his backyard with his two best friends, Andy Hayes and Jerry Cavanaugh. They’d been sitting around their little bonfire, built fastidiously by Herman Wolfenstein, who’d given them a veritable Boy Scout lesson before he allowed Max to handle the matches.
As they sat and told spooky stories, Max’s older brother Jake showed up. As the oldest amongst them and one o
f the coolest guys in the tenth grade, they’d listened raptly as he’d told them the story of the man who’d died in The Crawford House, the only son of the man who’d built it.
“Blane Crawford was your typical rich kid,” Jake had started. Daddy owned the local funeral parlor, and in those days with plagues and farm accidents and a million other ways to die, business was good, real good. And in true rich kid form, Blane moved off and squandered his daddy’s money on booze and women. He came home penniless just weeks before his old man keeled over on the john. Course, he could have been just fine - kept the funeral home going and had a nice little life. Except Blane didn’t just like to drink. He loved to drink, and he didn’t like to work. Instead, he threw big parties at the house.
Partygoers used coffins for tables, slamming shot glasses onto the polished lids. They slopped beer onto the plush carpet and ashed cigarettes into the sterling silver urns that Blane’s daddy had bought for future clients.
Mind you, half the town had said their final goodbyes to the people they loved in that funeral parlor. There was an outcry, for sure, but it was Blane’s house. If he wanted to run it down, there wasn’t a thing they could do about it.
One day in mid-summer, somebody called up the sheriff and reported Blane missing. We ain’t seen him in weeks, they said. A couple day bender was one thing, but weeks? The sheriff went out there and knocked on the door, but nobody answered. Eventually, they busted in.
Later, the sheriff said his guts felt twisted like barbed wire going into that house. He knew something was wrong, but in he went with his deputy, and the smell hit ‘em the minute they walked through the door. A rancid, rotted smell, and the flies were so loud they thought Blane had left some piece of embalming equipment turned on.
They covered their noses and walked in. They searched the first floor, disgusted by broken bottles and dishes of molded food everywhere. Both the sheriff and the deputy had been to that house, see. The sheriff’s own mother had died not two years before and had her final service there at The Crawford House.
It was the most beautiful house in Roscommon in those days. Edwin Crawford had spared no expense when he’d built it because he had believed in honoring the dead. He called the house his gift to God. But his son, Blane, had practically destroyed it in the year he’d owned it since his father had passed.
Anyway, they searched and searched and couldn’t find Blane. It was the deputy who’d said to follow the buzzing sound. They’d been thinking the whole time it was a fan or some other machine they were hearing. They went down the stairs. That’s where the embalming room was, in the basement. There were coffins down there too. A room full of them.
They walked into that room full of coffins. At first, the sheriff thought he was staring at a black coffin. He even started to tell his deputy how morbid that seemed, a black coffin. But as he looked, he realized it was moving. The coffin wasn’t black at all. It was covered with buzzing, writhing flies.
He and the deputy started waving the flies away. Shoo- shoo. And finally, they got close to it. The smell was so bad, the deputy retched before they even opened the coffin. The sheriff flung up the lid and…
Jake had paused at this moment, moving closer to the fire so his face glowed orange
Blane Crawford’s dead, decomposed body was lying inside, but it was so rotted, you could barely make out his face. The skin had slid away, leaving meat and bones, and worst of all were the maggots. Maggots the size of pickles crawling in and out of his eye sockets. Those men turned and ran from that house. They ran like the devil was gonna’ crawl outta that coffin and pull them inside.
“You don’t know that! How could you know that?” Jerry had demanded, but Max remembered the look on Jerry’s face, the terror outlined in the deep groove between his eyebrows. He’d felt a similar expression on his own face.
“Swear it on my life,” Jake had said, tapping a finger on his chest. “Mr. Ketchum told me. And he knew. He was alive back then. So anyway,” Jake continued, shooting an irritated glance at Jerry for the interruption.
They sent some poor black kid in there to get the body. Nobody else would touch it, but they paid, and he said he’d do it. It was so rotten, he had to carry it out in buckets.
The sheriff started looking into Blane’s death. They did an autopsy, but couldn’t find anything wrong with him. So, he started asking around town. Maybe someone killed him. He had more than a few enemies for sure. Guys he’d scammed out of money, women he’d screwed and never called - that kind of thing.
They never figured out what happened. The final theory was that Blane crawled in there himself and got stuck. Maybe he was fixing to scare someone who was coming over. One of his friends said he’d been complaining about headaches, so the sheriff though he might have tried to sleep in there because it was dark and quiet. And then there were the vampire theories. Nobody loves coffins like a vampire, but nothing ever came of that.
“Mister, Mister!”
Max looked up to find the girl holding out his ice cream cone. From the look on her face, she’d been trying to get his attention for a minute.
“Sorry,” he said, taking the cone and quickly licking the ice cream that had already dripped down the side. “Mind lapse.”
She smiled and turned back to the soft serve machine.
Max returned to Ashley and Sid, wishing he hadn’t thought of The Crawford House at all, wishing he’d never offered to tell the tale that followed.
But at the expectant looks on their faces, he knew he couldn’t back out.
“That’s one of my favorites too,” Sid said, nodding at Max’s ice cream as he scraped the last of his sundae from the bottom of the plastic bowl. Ashley still had half of hers left.
“The perfect combo,” Max agreed, forcing a smile and half-considering an excuse to leave.
He dreaded telling the story, though he didn’t quite know why.
Whatever it was, reliving that night in The Crawford House felt like opening a door, a secret door tucked deep in the cellar where strange black light leaked around the crevices. Where the thing inside wanted you to open the door, but once you opened it, you couldn’t close it again. Once you’d seen what was inside, you couldn’t unsee it.
“Tell us about going into The Crawford House,” Ashley said, handing the rest of her ice cream to Sid.
His eyes lit up. “Thanks, Ash!” Sid took the ice cream and ate it in two bites.
Max sighed and licked his own ice cream.
“I was thirteen,” Max started.
“We’re both going to be thirteen in the fall,” Sid told him, bobbing his head happily.
Ashley shot him a silencing look, and he clamped his mouth shut.
“I’d been camping out with my two buddies,” Max continued, “and my brother came out to our bonfire. He told us the story of The Crawford House and of Blane Crawford, who had died there.”
From the looks on Ashley and Sid’s faces, Max knew they too had heard the story of Blane Crawford’s gruesome demise.
“I’d been to the house a few times, but I’d never gone in. Well, that night, Jake started razzing me about being scared. He’d gone in, he’d told us. He’d gone into the embalming room and taken a scalpel. He’d given it to Margo Reeves, and she’d kissed him.”
“Margo Reeves?” Sid exclaimed. “She’s my next-door neighbor. She has twin girls. They’re like this big.” He held up his index finger and thumb.
“They’re a little bigger than that,” Ashley told him, rolling her eyes. “Go on,” she said.
Max laughed, realizing he shouldn’t have used Margo’s name. The last thing he needed was an angry phone call over a kiss that happened a lifetime before.
“I got fed up with Jake’s pestering, and I wanted to one-up him. That’s the problem with being a younger brother. You do everything second. It starts to piss you off.”
“Tell me about it,” Sid grumbled.
“I told Jake I wasn’t scared. I said I’d go into The Crawfor
d House and spend a half hour and that only a yellow-belly turned and ran out with a scalpel. I boasted that I’d hang out in there – maybe even have a chat with Blane Crawford.” Max sighed and rolled his head back. “Man, I regretted that big talk the second we stepped into the woods with our flashlights. I spent the entire walk, and it took us a good twenty minutes, thinking I might puke.
“When we got there, Jake had this look, this laughing, mocking look, and it made me so mad. It was the only thing that got me into that house. Otherwise, I tell you, I’d already come up with a half a dozen excuses for why I wasn’t going in. I knew I’d lose face in front of my buddies if I backed out. I could have lived with that, but Jake was my brother. I’d have to deal with his taunting twenty-four hours a day until forever. At least that’s what it seemed like at the time. I mustered every ounce of courage in my body and went in.”
17
Max paused, wishing he could tell the story without the memory that went with it, but it arrived, unbidden from the darkness of his memories.
“It smelled,” he shook his head trying to remember, “like the forest, but it was also dank, and I could smell chemicals. I realized later it was from the embalming stuff that had never been removed. And there was a smell of something dead. I tried not to think of Blane Crawford, but that was next to impossible. I told myself it was just a raccoon stuck in the old chimney or something. I could have stayed on the first floor. I wanted to. But I knew Jake would grill me about the basement. I had to go down there, or they’d know I’d wimped out.”
“So, you went?” Ashley asked, her eyes big in her tanned face.
“I went,” Max agreed. “I walked down the stairs on legs like Jell-O.”
“I love the cherry kind,” Sid announced.
Ashley cast him an incredulous look, and he blushed red.
“Me too,” Max offered. “But that night I didn’t want to think of anything red or jiggly. It was so dark. I had this weak little flashlight that barely lit the path in front of my feet.”
“What did you see?” Ashley asked.
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