The House Next Door

by Joel A. Sutherland

  ***

  Luckily, the Russo brothers were home, bored and only too happy to talk to us about our creepy neighbours.

  Chris answered the door and led us to the family room, where Nick was watching an episode of Screamers, the show based on the books. It was the one where Zoë Winter, one of the recurring actors on the show, played a girl who thought she had been admitted to a modern hospital, only to discover late in the episode that she’s suffering from hallucinations and the hospital is not only abandoned, but haunted.

  “I love this episode,” I said, sitting down on the couch and momentarily forgetting why we were there.

  “Matt, we didn’t come over to watch … whatever show this is,” Sophie said.

  I cringed at my sister’s ignorance but nodded — she wasn’t wrong — and turned to face Nick and Chris. “We just met the old woman who lives in the farmhouse, and, well … Sophie, why don’t you just show them the picture?”

  Sophie unlocked her phone, pulled up the picture and handed it over to Nick. He looked at the screen and then passed it to his younger brother with a shrug and a blank look.

  “Who’s the old guy?” Chris asked.

  “He lives in the house,” Sophie said. “I think it’s just him and his wife.”

  “Sophie took that picture while we were talking to her at the front door. She implied that he’s never around during the day — I assumed she meant he works long hours or something — but then he appeared behind her in the shadows. You’ve never seen him before?”

  “No, never,” Nick said. “We’ve never seen anyone there. Literally not a soul. Just that horse.”

  “Shade,” Sophie said.

  “Huh?”

  “The horse’s name is Shade.”

  “You had quite the long talk with the woman, didn’t you?” said Nick.

  “Well,” Sophie said, drawing the word out like an elastic band, “that’s not all we did. I maybe-kinda-sorta hopped the fence last night and tried to feed the horse.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Chris exclaimed with a look of shock painted across his face.

  “Nope,” Sophie said with a sheepish shrug.

  “Epic,” Nick said. “You’re brave!”

  Sophie’s guilty look quickly transformed into one of pride.

  “He looks freaky,” Chris said. He couldn’t take his eyes off Sophie’s phone.

  “He acts freaky, too,” I said. “He totally lost it and threatened to kill us.”

  “Well, that lines up with the story of the kids who died on your property,” Nick said. After seeing the uneasy look on my face, he added, “If you believe in the urban legend, that is.”

  I fidgeted in my seat and cleared my throat but didn’t say anything.

  “What are you thinking?” Sophie asked. She knew me well.

  “It’s weird,” I said. “We’ve all seen the horse, but you two” — I pointed at Nick and Chris — “have never seen the people. That means they rarely leave the house, but horses need lots of attention. Right, Sophie?”

  She nodded. “They need to be fed, brushed, they need exercise, medical care …”

  I continued. “The old couple are shut-ins. You’ve never even seen them in the field or near the stable! So who’s taking care of Shade? Unless, of course, Shade doesn’t need to be taken care of. No food, no brushing, no nothing.”

  “Because Shade is the same horse that those kids killed in the woods behind the school,” Nick said, nodding in agreement. “And he’s come back for revenge.”

  “If that’s true,” Sophie said, “and that’s a big if, because we’re talking about a ghost horse and we live in the real world, not a fairy tale — the horse might have a grudge against all children. Or at least kids who live beside it.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. But just to be safe, no more jumping over the fence, okay?”

  Chris, who was still studying Sophie’s phone as if there was going to be a quiz and he was trying to commit every detail to memory, opened his mouth to say something. But just then a man walked into the family room. He looked like an older version of the boys. It was obviously Mr. Russo.

  “Hey, kids,” he said. “I didn’t know you had friends over.”

  “Yeah, this is Matt and Sophie. They just moved in across the street,” Nick said.

  Mr. Russo grabbed Chris’s shoulders and squeezed them in a fatherly way. He looked at the phone in his son’s hand. His expression soured immediately. “Where’d you find that picture?”

  “We didn’t find it,” Chris said. “Sophie took it this morning.”

  Their dad laughed in disbelief, a bitter sound that fought to reject what Chris had said. “She must be playing a prank on you. And frankly, it’s not funny.”

  Sophie shook her head, her eyes wide and surprised. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “She really did take the picture this morning,” I said, backing up my sister.

  Mr. Russo crossed his arms and took on a stern look. It was clear that he’d made up his mind and he wasn’t going to believe a word we said. “Impossible. That man — Ernest Creighton — and his wife used to live in the house beside yours.” He paused, then added, “They both died more than twenty years ago.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Needless to say, a stunned silence filled the Russos’ family room.

  We’d been so focused on the possibility of Shade being a ghost that we hadn’t stopped to consider that the old couple were ghosts too. But now that I thought about it, I couldn’t believe I’d missed the warning signs. They both looked dead — Mr. Creighton’s pale, glowing skin and how thin his wife was.

  I asked Mr. Russo how he recognized Ernest Creighton since he’d died so long ago.

  “I grew up in Courtice, in a house not too far from here. My friends and I all thought Briar Patch Farm was a creepy place back then, same as kids think now. There was an obituary in the local paper when Mr. Creighton died — said he died of a heart attack or something. But rumours quickly spread that there’d been some sort of foul play involved.”

  “What sort of foul play?” I asked.

  “Don’t you worry about that. Like I said, it was just a rumour, kids trying to scare other kids. I guess times don’t change much.” He shook his head and left the room.

  “I thought the old man looked like a ghost,” Chris said. “I was just about to say so when Dad came in and saw the phone.”

  “Don’t worry about our dad,” Nick said. “We believe you. The question is, what do we do now?”

  No one had any idea.

  ***

  It was late and Sophie and I sat in our family room, talking quietly. Our parents were in the other room.

  “But she ate two cookies,” Sophie said. “Ghosts don’t eat, do they?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” I racked my brain for an answer. “Wait, Slimer eats. A lot.”

  “Who’s Slimer?”

  “Ghostbusters. Round green guy with no legs.”

  “Oh yeah, right.” Sophie scrunched up her face. “He’s not exactly realistic though, is he?”

  “Before yesterday, would you have said a ghost horse is realistic? Or ghosts at all, for that matter?”

  “Good point.” Sophie looked out the window at the farmhouse. “So, what do we do now? Do we tell Mom and Dad?”

  “They wouldn’t believe us. Plus, we told them we were going across the street this morning, remember? I don’t think they’d be too happy to find out we lied to them.”

  “Then what?”

  “I think the best thing to do is avoid the Creightons’ house for a while. Scratch that: forever. If we don’t bug them, maybe they won’t bug us. And hopefully they’re, like, tied to their house or something and can’t wander off the property. Ernest didn’t chase us over the fence last night.”

  Sophie nodded but then frowned and pursed her lips. “But the story claims they came over here and killed the two kids in their beds.”
>
  I sighed. “I didn’t think of that.”

  “What are you two talking about?”

  My stomach dropped. It was Mom, standing in the doorway to the family room. I didn’t know how much she’d overheard.

  Neither Sophie nor I could think of an appropriate response.

  “Kids being killed in their beds?” Mom said. She looked from me to Sophie. “Has he gotten you into those horror books and movies he likes?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Sophie said. “A little, I guess. We watched an episode of, um, Shivers earlier today.”

  Luckily Mom wasn’t too familiar with horror — if it had been Dad, he would have known the show was called Screamers and we would’ve been busted for sure.

  Mom pointed at Sophie. “Well, if you have nightmares tonight you’re too big to sleep in my bed. You’re on your own.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  ***

  Later that night, after we’d put on our pyjamas, brushed our teeth, gone to our separate rooms, turned off our bedroom lights and waited to hear the telltale snores coming from Mom and Dad’s room, Sophie snuck into my room. We’d decided to meet once our parents were asleep. I had something I wanted to show Sophie.

  After Sophie quietly shut my door, I turned on the bedside lamp. She looked dejected.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, expecting her to be scared or upset at the thought of living next door to a couple of dead people and their dead horse.

  “I have to watch horror movies with you now,” she said, “and read horror books, or else Mom will get suspicious.”

  I laughed quietly. “Come on, they’re not that bad. You might actually like them.”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t like them before all this, and now … now I’m living in a horror story.”

  “You know Mom: her head’s always so full of numbers and lists that she’ll probably forget all about what you said in a day or two.”

  “I hope so.” Sophie sighed. “What did you want to show me?”

  I handed her the Batman comic book I had found the night before. Sophie sat on the bed beside me and gazed down at Gentleman Ghost in his cape, top hat and monocle, riding on his phantom horse. “Does that horse look familiar?”

  “It looks just like Shade,” Sophie said. “But white and a bit more healthy. And, um, glowy.”

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  “Why are you showing it to me? It’s just a comic.”

  “WWBD? Maybe there’s something in the storyline that could help us deal with Shade and the Creightons. Some clue or something.”

  “I didn’t think we were going to go anywhere near them again.”

  “Well, yeah, that’s the best plan. But what if they’re able to come over here? What if they can enter our house? What if they actually did kill those kids?” I was about to add We need to be prepared, when I was interrupted by the sound of something falling.

  Sophie and I spun around and stared at the source of the sound. It had come from inside my closet.

  “What was that?” Sophie whispered urgently. The door was closed so we couldn’t see inside.

  I shook my head and shrugged, unable to answer. In the stillness that followed, my skin began to crawl.

  “Do you hear that?” Sophie said, her panic rising.

  I nodded. From behind the closet door, I could definitely hear whispering.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The whispering suddenly stopped, as if whoever was in the closet knew they had been heard.

  Sophie and I stared at each other. We couldn’t do anything other than breathe, and even that was proving to be a minor challenge. Long ago I had outgrown the fear that there were monsters in my closet, but now one of my worst childhood nightmares appeared to be coming to life.

  We waited.

  Nothing happened. Nothing jumped out of the closet. There was no more noise from within.

  I couldn’t take the silence any longer.

  “H-h-hello?” I said shakily. “Is there anyone in there?”

  There was no answer.

  Sophie looked at me like I was crazy. Like I shouldn’t have made our presence known. But I was filled with curiosity and I couldn’t keep quiet.

  “We know there’s somebody in there. This is my room, so you better come out now, or else.” Or else what, I had no idea. My focus was on trying to sound confident and strong, but I feared I had failed on both counts.

  Maybe my command worked. Or maybe the things in my closet weren’t intimidated by me at all. Whatever the case, the handle turned, the closet door creaked open and something came out.

  A hand — small, bony and pale white. It gripped the edge of the door. The darkness of the closet obscured the person who had cracked open the door.

  I was consumed by two opposite but equally powerful forces: the desire to run out of the room and the paralyzing fear that rooted me to the ground. I looked at Sophie and she seemed to have the same problem. Her eyes were wide, her mouth was drawn tight and her head was pulled back as if she was trying to get as far away from the closet as possible.

  And then a voice from the closet broke the silence with three words, repeated three times, that started as a quiet hiss and grew louder with each word.

  “You’re both dead, you’re both dead, you’re both dead.”

  “Who are you?” I blurted out. “What do you want with us?” I sounded desperate and terrified and I no longer cared. I was desperate and terrified.

  “You don’t scare us. So come out or go away,” Sophie said. Her eyes were wet with tears and her cheeks were flushed. Her clenched fists hit my bed when she said the word away.

  The door creaked open a little more.

  “Well,” the voice said, “if you’re not scared, you should be.”

  That’s when I noticed something odd about the hand. The fingernails were wet and the liquid was dark, almost black. The hand slid down the door five or six centimetres, smearing the wood — not black but red.

  It was blood. My stomach flipped at the sight of it. Then I noticed something else. The fingers were oddly disjointed, as if every knuckle had been dislocated and every bone had been cracked.

  Sophie gave me a what-do-we-do? look. I shrugged.

  “All right,” the voice said. “I’ll come out so we can … talk. But Jack will probably stay in the closet, if you don’t mind. He’s easily startled.”

  Jack? I thought. Who’s Jack? How many people are in my closet?

  I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. Mom always said silence is golden, but I’m not sure this was what she had in mind.

  After a brief, hesitant pause, the door opened all the way. A boy stepped out of the closet and into the light of my room.

  To say that he didn’t look good would be the understatement of my life.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Sophie and I jumped to our feet and raced to the other side of the bed. My heart pounded in my ears with every painful beat and I felt dizzy with fear and revulsion. Sophie opened her mouth to scream. I quickly covered her mouth with my hand and hugged her to me, partly to keep her quiet, partly to comfort myself. I’d never been so scared in my life.

  The boy didn’t walk out of the closet. At least, not in the way I or Sophie or the Russo brothers would have. He staggered out of the closet. Like a kid who still managed to walk despite having two broken knees. And ankles. And feet. He was dressed in pyjamas, the pants bloody and the left pant leg torn. A jagged piece of shin bone protruded through the rip. I couldn’t believe that he was standing, let alone walking.

  It wasn’t just his legs that were badly injured, but his arms too. And like his pants, his shirt was soaked in blood.

  Amazingly, the boy’s face was unharmed. It wasn’t even bruised. But his skin was pale white and dark circles hung beneath his eyes, making his sockets look larger than they were. Those eyes widened as he watched us from across the room, as if he’d just realized something. He looked down at his broken, b
loodied body and then back at us.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I sometimes forget how I look. I haven’t talked to anyone in … a long time. Well, other than Jack.” He pointed back at my closet.

  And then I watched — half-amazed, half-horrified — the craziest thing I’d ever seen, and that list was getting longer by the minute. The boy hunched over, raised his right hand in the air above his skull, and then slowly passed it down over his body from head to toe. His hand somehow healed all his wounds, erasing bruises and mending bones, but it did more than that — it even cleaned the blood off his skin and repaired his clothes. He stood up straight and tall, looking every inch like a brand new boy.

  “How did you do that?” I whispered.

  He shrugged and looked at the ground as if he’d suddenly grown shy.

  “You’re one of the brothers who used to live here, aren’t you?” Sophie asked, and I immediately knew she was right. It explained why he was here and why he’d been in such rough shape. Part of me had a hard time believing it, but it appeared as if the urban legend was true.

  The boy nodded.

  “What’s your name?” Sophie asked. I was impressed her voice was so even and calm. I couldn’t talk at all at that moment.

  “Daniel,” he said. “Everyone calls me Danny.”

  “What happened to you?”

  After a few false starts, Danny finally told us his story. He and his twin brother, Jack, had lived in an old country house that used to be on our land, as the Russos had said, and they had stolen Shade and ridden him late one night. But they hadn’t slit Shade’s throat. The horse had slipped on a sheet of ice at the top of the tobogganing hill and fallen awkwardly on one of its legs. The boys had jumped off the horse as Shade rolled down the hill and crashed into the trunk of a thick maple tree. A loud crack had split the air, and Shade had fallen limp.

  “But we didn’t mean to kill the horse, I swear!” Danny said. “We just wanted to go for a quick ride. The Creightons were always so mean and never let us go anywhere near Shade. The fall … it was an accident.”

  I felt sorry for Danny and his brother. They had done something they shouldn’t have but Danny clearly felt awful. I knew what that was like. I’d made plenty of mistakes that could’ve ended badly, but luckily hadn’t. Bad things can happen to anyone.