“Let’s leave first thing in the morning,” Bess said. “That’s what I recommend.”
“We’ll have to spend at least two nights out.”
“We can do that. We’ll build really big fires. Nothing will bother us, if that’s what you’re worried about. The moose isn’t a threat.”
“If we can’t start a fire, we’ll be in real trouble.”
“So what’s your plan?” Bess asked.
“I don’t have a plan. Not really.”
“Look, we don’t know what’s happening to those other guys. To Tock’s group. And we don’t know what happened to Flash. So we can either sit around and hope someone comes — and deal with Maggie — or we can make a plan and stick to it. I vote we hike back to camp.”
“I wasn’t saying no,” Quincy said, feeling a little under attack. “I was just pointing things out.”
“I’d leave right now if we could. If it weren’t dark.”
Then, suddenly, Quincy heard a wolf howl. At least he thought it was a wolf howl. It came low and mournful, rising slowly as though it had seeped out of the ground. It was an amazing sound, one that tickled his ears. Then another howl met the first one and he realized, yes, these really were wolves and he really was hearing them.
“Are those …” Bess started in a low voice, but Simon cut her off.
“Wolves,” Simon said.
Simon stood and cocked his head in the wolves’ direction. It was the most engaged Quincy had ever seen Simon. He was on those wolves.
“And you’re sure they’re not coyotes?” Bess asked.
But Quincy was sure. And he was sure Bess was sure. And Simon was definitely, positively sure. You couldn’t mistake that sound if you tried.
“Wolves,” Simon said.
“I think so, too,” Quincy said.
“There are wolves in Minnesota,” Bess said, her voice quiet and firm. “We have a good population of wolves in Minnesota.”
“Coyotes have a higher pitch,” Quincy said. “They sound like they’re gargling. Wolves sound lonely and like the forest would sound if it could speak.”
Then no one said anything for a while. The wolves howled again, this time with four or five voices blended. It was beautiful, Quincy thought, but also terrifying. He knew a little bit about wolves from Mr. Fitzsimmons’s biology class, knew they didn’t randomly attack humans, knew they were social animals that used cooperation to hunt. They hunted elk and deer and moose, not humans, but the sound of them went down into his bones somewhere. It was an old sound, he decided. A really old sound.
“You like the wolves, Simon?” Bess asked her brother when the wolves finished. “You’ve never heard one, have you?”
Simon shook his head. He slowly lowered himself next to the fire again. Quincy didn’t know how, but he could feel the wolves weren’t going to howl again. They had moved away. The woods around them felt empty again. Simon seemed to sense it, too.
“As long as we keep a fire going, we’ll be okay,” Bess said as she put more wood onto the fire. “Walking back to camp, I mean.”
“How many matches do we have left?”
“The other guys took fifteen,” Bess said. “That left us twelve. I used seven for this fire.”
“So we have five matches left?”
“If you can do better, then go ahead,” Bess said. “Be my guest.”
“I didn’t say that,” Quincy said, seeing for a second how touchy Bess could be. “I’m just trying to understand everything. I want to know what we have.”
“If we’re careful, we can do better.”
“If it rains, though, we’d be in trouble.”
“We’ll bring a lot of paper,” Bess said. “We can do it.”
Quincy nodded. It felt hard to make decisions without all the information. You had to consider a million different factors. Part of him liked it, though. It was like a word problem you got in math, only this word problem was real. If Simon and Bess and Quincy left a stranded camp van in the Minnesota woods with five matches left, and they had not eaten anything solid in X days, then what was the likely outcome of their adventure?
It was better than any math problem he could remember.
“Let’s go for it,” he said. “First thing in the morning. First light.”
“Simon, you in?” Bess asked her brother.
Simon didn’t do anything but look at the fire.
“Mashed potatoes,” Quincy said, knowing it was lame even as he said it. “If we get back, we get mashed potatoes.”
Then the fog rolled over the road, and he tasted moisture on his tongue and felt it on his hands and in his hair.
Preston didn’t like the house.
He also felt it didn’t like him.
And that was purely strange. As he walked up the first two steps — the third was rotted, and he could look down at the ground beneath it — he wondered why they were going to investigate it. The road clearly went the other direction. That had been easily established after all, and they had come back quickly, double-timing it, to get Olivia and tell her what they had discovered.
But she had discovered something of her own. She had discovered the house.
“This is freaky,” Preston said, pronouncing each word separately and distinctly so there could be no mistaking the weirdness.
“Guys …” Olivia said, but she didn’t finish her thought.
“It’s awesome,” Tock said, stepping high to pass over the third step. He poked at the open space with his tire iron. “This is where the hand shoots up and grabs the first kid and drags him down to the basement.”
“Or her,” Olivia said.
“Or her,” Preston agreed.
“This house is horrible,” Olivia said. “I swear, it’s grinning at me.”
“It feels like that, doesn’t it?” Preston asked. “What’s a house doing out here, anyway? I thought the camp owned all the land for miles around.”
“This was probably here when they bought it,” Tock said. “It was probably in bad shape even then.”
Preston noted that Tock paused before stepping onto the porch. Big, brave Tock still got the jimjams just like anyone else. It made Preston smile to see it, though he suspected his smile looked more like a grimace. He stepped over the big gap in the stairs and scrambled up next to Tock. Olivia stood on the downslope side of the opening.
“There’s something down there,” she said, pointing. “Down where the step should be.”
“You’re flipping,” Tock said.
“I swear,” Olivia said. “Something white. It looks like bones. I’m not kidding.”
“That’s just freaky,” Preston said.
He leaned away from the top stair to see into the space. Olivia pointed a little to the left, and he saw what she had seen. It looked like a rib cage, a cat’s rib cage maybe, or a squirrel’s. He didn’t see a skull, but he saw what looked like arms extended forward, almost as though the animal had died mid-stride. Maybe someone threw a cat’s bones down there. Or some animals had dragged it there. It was hard to guess.
“Let’s get inside,” Tock said, pulling back from where he had been looking down through the stairs, too. “They’re just some old bones.”
“You don’t find it a little creepy that we have to cross over some old bones just to get in the house?” Olivia asked.
“Whatever,” Tock said. “Things happen.”
Olivia took the big step over the open area. She climbed up onto the porch and turned around to look at them. “This is a bad idea,” she said.
Tock wiggled his eyebrows. He slapped his tire iron against his hand. Then he took a few steps and tapped the tire iron on the door. It made a loud, hollow sound. He whacked it hard.
“Hello!” Tock called in a singsong voice. “We’re here! You have visitors!”
“You’d freak fast enough if someone opened the door,” Olivia said. “I guarantee it.”
“We all would,” Preston said.
He felt like his nerves w
anted to jangle through his skin. To add to the creepiness of the house, the sun had disappeared. They were in twilight. Maybe post-twilight. It was going to be dark inside the house in no time. He tried to remember the phase of the moon, but he couldn’t make himself think clearly. Usually he knew something like that.
Tock pushed the door. It fell open without any protest. It didn’t make a groaning sound or squeal on its hinges, Preston realized. It opened happily, almost too easily. That simple fact bothered him more than anything else that had happened so far regarding the house.
It welcomed us inside, he thought.
Olivia had been correct about that.
“Awesome,” Tock said again, and crossed the threshold.
Inside, it looked like a birthday cake that had been left out in the rain and had started to melt. That’s what Preston thought. The room directly beyond the door was not a room at all, really, but a hallway. Down the hallway, a set of dark stairs ran up to the second floor. The stairs looked to be in reasonable shape; no broken steps that he could see, no broken banisters. Off the hallway on the left was some sort of sitting room. A fireplace had collapsed on itself and broken into bricks and stones that had crushed the mantel and taken part of the wall with it. Preston saw the last of the twilight through a large crack in the wall. It wasn’t a room anyone wanted to enter.
On the other side of the hallway, he saw what must have been the dining room back in the day. A built-in china cabinet had taken up one side of the room toward the back of the house, but it had been partially demolished by someone years before. Glass and wood lay scattered across the floor. Kids had come in and written their initials with spray paint. The remnants of an inner tube — the kind you’d float in on a hot day — lay shredded in the corner.
All the windows were broken. Every last one.
“Okay, we went in the house, and it is in horrible shape,” Olivia said. “We’ve proven we’re big and brave. Now can we leave?”
“We need to check the kitchen,” Tock said. “We need to check for food.”
“You don’t want to eat anything from this house,” Olivia said.
“You never know until you know,” Tock answered.
“Yes, you do. I know right now that I won’t eat anything from this house. Preston? What do you think?”
“We’re here. We might as well check. And I’m hungry. We need to eat soon no matter what we do.”
But it was getting dark. The house felt heavy. It felt heavier and heavier as the darkness moved inside. Preston hated looking at the staircase in front of them. Maybe it tapped into a nightmare — he couldn’t quite say — but something about the stairs, the darkness of the wood, the fact that it was still in good condition, made him queasy.
Like it wants us to come upstairs, he thought. Like it’s holding out a hand.
“The kitchen has to be back there,” Tock said, pushing his chin in the direction of the rear of the house. “Down the hallway.”
“I hate what we’re doing,” Olivia said. “Can’t you feel it’s not right?”
“Let’s do it and get going,” Preston said. “Let’s check and keep moving.”
“We could camp in here tonight,” Tock said. “It would be drier than outside.”
“I am not sleeping in here,” Olivia said. “This is not a good place to be.”
“You’re free to leave,” Tock said. “No one said you had to come inside.”
Which was, Preston conceded, technically true. Olivia’s personality was strong enough to resist anything. But it wasn’t realistic to expect her to hang around outside the house while they explored inside. No one wanted to be alone. Not after what happened to Maggie. Not on One Hundred Mile Road.
Tock held out his tire iron and started down the hallway. Little by little, Preston understood that to go into the area that was most likely the kitchen meant they had to pass by the staircase. Had to brush past it and look up the stairs. They had to see the darkness above the steps and see whatever it was that wanted to come down the stairs toward them. He had trouble swallowing thinking about the darkness on the second floor.
That’s where whatever lives here is hiding, he thought. Upstairs, waiting.
And that’s when they heard the footsteps.
What was that?” Olivia asked, her voice like a hiss. “What exactly was that?”
Tock didn’t know. His mind had suddenly flushed white and empty. He lifted the tire iron in front of him like a samurai sword and stood ready to combat whatever came at them.
“That sounded like …” Preston whispered.
Tock cut him off. “Those were human steps,” he said.
Because they were. He would have bet money on it.
“Okay, we’re going to go into the kitchen to check for food and then we’ll go straight out. Everyone on board with that?” Tock asked.
No one answered, so he figured they were.
He turned and went quickly down the remainder of the hallway. His ears strained to hear whatever had made the footsteps, but they had stopped. For now. They had been quick and soft, like someone moving without wanting to be heard. It was a little freaky, Tock admitted to himself.
“Let’s go,” he said when they arrived at what he took to be the kitchen door. “Ready?”
“You first,” Olivia said.
He kicked open the door.
And something ran at him.
It happened so fast that he didn’t have a chance to react. It was on him, just like that, just like nothing. He swung his tire iron at whatever it was, but the tire iron bounced on the doorjamb and clanged out of his hand. He screamed, and it was a timid, babyish scream that immediately embarrassed him. But whatever it was — it was too dark to make out anything clearly — kept whining and hissing and sputtering down by his legs.
“Get it off me!” he yelled. “Get it off me!”
He felt Olivia slide next to him and kick at something with all her might.
“Run!” she yelled. “Close the door on it and run!”
Tock fell outside the door and came up onto his feet as fast as he could. He saw Preston scrambling down the hallway, running like a spider monkey, all wild and apish. Tock took off after him. He heard Olivia behind him.
And he heard it, the thing in the kitchen, coming after them all.
“Go, go, go, go,” he said.
He felt crazy scared. He felt as though he could run through a wall.
But when he came through the front door onto the porch and began to run down the steps, he realized in that last instant that he had forgotten about the missing step.
First he felt air under his foot. Under his left foot. His right foot pushed off from the porch, and he had gone down so many stairs — had leaped down a million of them — that he had entirely forgotten that this set of steps lacked a single riser. So his right foot went down, and the rest of his body weight surged awkwardly to that side. His left foot found nothing to support it, so he fell and careered to port, and he felt himself going down. He heard a snap and realized something had broken, some part of him had broken, and he screamed again, for the second time, he realized. What a baby, he thought, even though the pain that surged through his body felt like an electric bolt. Something jabbed into his palm and he felt bewildered to realize he had gone down, lost height, and now stood up to his waist in the middle of the staircase.
Olivia jumped past him. Her knee clipped the side of his head and made her spin and fall, but she landed down at the bottom of the steps. He heard her give a soft ompph as air went out of her.
“It was a raccoon!” Preston yelled, his voice mixed up with laughter and fright and a dozen other things Tock couldn’t recognize. Preston jumped up and down, giddy, Tock understood, because Preston had gotten away from the danger and felt good about it.
“My leg,” Tock said.
He didn’t know what else to say about the leg. He didn’t want to look down at it. This was bad, he knew. This was really bad.
Olivia sto
od up. She had had the wind knocked out of her. She bent over and put her hands on her knees.
“It was a raccoon,” she said between breaths. “In the kitchen. It came at you.”
“Tock?” Preston asked.
“My leg,” Tock said. “I think it’s broken.”
“A freaking raccoon,” Olivia said.
She stood straight up slowly. Tock watched her. He didn’t know why, but it almost felt as though she had won something and he had lost. He didn’t like thinking about it.
“Let’s get you out of there before something pulls you down into the basement,” she said. “Preston, give me a hand.”
“Let’s go. I can’t sleep, anyway. Let’s just get going,” Quincy said.
He felt clammy. And uncomfortable. And antsy. He knew Bess hadn’t slept much. He had listened to her through the night turning around trying to find a way to sleep, getting up and adding more wood to the fire. He couldn’t tell about Simon, but once during the night, when an owl had begun calling nearby — who cooks for you, who cooks for you, the owl asked — Simon had sat up and looked a long time in the owl’s direction. Who knew what that meant? Quincy had once heard that if an owl called your name, you were doomed, but he doubted Simon had that on his mind.
“It’s not even light yet,” Bess said.
“It’s going to be soon. You can see it getting pale over in the east.”
“Suddenly you’re a Boy Scout?” Bess asked.
“I’ve camped,” Quincy said. “I just don’t make a big deal out of it like some people.”
“You go, Quincy,” Bess said.
She sat up and stretched. She chucked a few pieces of wood on the fire. It didn’t catch right away, but she fanned a flip-flop at it and that helped. Pretty soon the fire ticked along just fine. Quincy moved closer. It felt like his muscles had frozen from stiffness during the night. His hands felt sticky from all the pine pitch.
“Once we leave, there’s no turning back,” Bess said.
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