I had a feeling that what the old couple had said was important. These were adventurous kids. They’d been walking home from school together when they’d disappeared. If they were the kind of kids always looking for an adventure, it might help to know what their current adventure of choice was. I had no proof, of course, but my gut told me it was the key.
But I wasn’t a detective, so they’d likely take me in as a suspect if I started conducting interviews of the family.
I grinned at Riley. “I’ve got an idea.” I pulled out my phone and sent a quick text to Maurice.
1501 and 1503 Brenner Ave. Can you sneak into each of the kids’ rooms and look around? Books. Movies. Games. Find out what they love. Careful of police.
I hit send and had an immediate response.
On it.
We stayed where we were while we waited. If Maurice got caught, we’d know it from the number of police who would likely swarm into the house.
But they didn’t make any sudden moves outside, and Maurice got back to me within a few minutes.
Miles: Huge LEGO collection, Pixar movies, fish. Ashley: Dinosaurs, Hello Kitty, Nickelodeon shows. Both have a pile of Goosebumps books by their beds. Does any of that help?
It didn’t help, really. But at least we found out what they’d been reading. Scary stories. I’d read Goosebumps when I was a kid. Good to know kids were still reading them.
I texted him back.
Not sure what it means yet, but it might help. Thanks. Be home when we can.
I slipped the phone in my pocket and eyed the houses. Nothing new was happening.
“Walk with me.” I took Riley’s hand, and we meandered up the street, away from the commotion.
“You look like you have an idea.”
“Only a vague one.” I led us in the direction of the bus stop where the kids were last seen. “Let’s try to look at things from their perspective.”
Riley reached up and yanked on my hair. “You have cooties.”
I pinched him. “I’m serious.”
He made a contrite face. “Sorry.”
I winked.
We walked another block, and the warmth of our exchange leaked away with each step, leaving me twitchy and with what felt like a rock in my stomach. Every minute that went by potentially put the kids in more danger.
When we got to the bus stop, I glanced around for clues. “Okay. We know they got off the bus.” I checked the time on my phone. “It’s a seven-minute walk at the most. What happened in that short amount of time?”
Riley cocked his head to the side. “Maybe somebody called to them.”
“Miles and Ashley weren’t the only kids who got off the bus, though. Nobody else said they heard anything, and our kids were spotted walking toward home.”
“Okay. I see where you’re going with this. He couldn’t have nabbed them right off the bus.”
“Right. And he probably couldn’t have taken them from the street. Somebody could’ve seen it through their window.”
“So, you’re thinking they stopped off somewhere on the way.”
“Somewhere scary. Because that’s what they’re currently into.”
We turned back the way we came to retrace our steps, casting left and right for anything that might appeal to a couple of pint-sized ghost chasers. We were nearly to where we’d started when it struck me.
I’d grown up there. I knew the area. I knew the stories.
“There’s an old house in the woods north of here.” I turned on my heel and took off into the brush. “It’s supposed to be haunted by the ghosts of a hundred convicts or mental patients, depending on which story you hear.” I hopped over a bush, picking up speed.
“Zoey, slow down, you’re going to break an ankle.” Riley followed behind me, dodging the branches I brushed past so they didn’t whap him in the crotch.
“They say a lady jumped to her death when her baby died of the pox.” I picked up my pace, sure I was right about where the kids were. “A sea captain bled to death from a bear trap. The house burned down and was rebuilt three times.” I was getting out of breath, but I kept moving. The deeper into the woods we traveled, the darker it grew, and the already cool temperature dropped.
“How can all that be true?” Riley’s voice came from right behind me. He kept up fine.
“That’s just it. None of it is true. We all made up stories to add to it. It’s a tradition around here. Kind of like Shadow Man himself.”
We came to a halt in a clearing not too far into the woods. Pine needles crunched underfoot, and a neglected three-story house stared at us through its broken windows. One side of the house was black from some past fire. The front door was completely obstructed by a dead tree that had been struck by lightning and fallen over. The porch sagged, and a shingle dropped to the ground as if on cue.
I shuddered, remembering how terrifying the place had been when I was a kid. And that was when the worst thing that could happen was getting tetanus from an ancient soup can or a cut from a broken window. Now there were far more dangerous and frightening things that might be lurking behind a tree or watching through the slats of a boarded-up window. I tried not to think about it. If Shadow Man was here, I’d deal with him. He wasn’t going to kill any kids on my watch.
Riley whistled. “That is a safety hazard, my friends.”
I held out my hand with a flourish. “May I present to you, the Old Corning House.”
Riley shook his head so hard he looked like a bobblehead. “You are not going in there.”
“I have to. I know how to get in. You don’t.”
“You can just tell me.” He squinted in the dusk. “I can go in through one of the windows. They’re already broken anyway.”
I snorted. “Rookie mistake. The windows are all blockaded.” I grabbed his hand and dragged him around to the back of the house. A smallish hole at the bottom of the back door spewed darkness out at us. I pointed at it. “You get in that way.”
“I can’t fit in there.”
I nodded. “Exactly.”
If Riley didn’t stop shaking his head so hard, it was going to break off at the neck and launch into space. “Oh, hell no. You’re not going in by yourself. Shadow Man aside, I can’t let you climb into an abandoned house that’s about to collapse. Especially since we have no proof that the kids are even in there. And it’s nearly dark.”
“Call for backup.” I tried to sound nonchalant, like standing there waiting for Kam and Darius to show wouldn’t make me a twitchy, nervous mess.
Riley tapped his phone display to place a call. “Kam.” He turned his back for a moment while he spoke to her, and I took advantage of his lapse of attention.
I tapped my phone to activate the flashlight—something I’d learned from Kam some time ago—and ducked into the hole leading into the house. I heard Riley call my name once before the house swallowed me up.
What I hadn’t told Riley was that I could feel the kids in here. I felt their fear and it was ripping me apart. The poor things were terrified. That terror seeped through the walls of the house like blood and pooled at my feet. I broke out in a sweat. I couldn’t tell if they’d gotten lost in the dark, winding hallways or if Shadow Man had locked them in here. Either way, I knew they were in trouble.
One of them was hurt, too. I felt the kid’s pain, and whichever one of them was injured was getting weaker every second.
I hadn’t told Riley this because he wouldn’t have taken his eyes off me even for a second. He’d know I wouldn’t be able to wait.
I hadn’t been in the Old Corning House in over twenty years. And I’d never been brave enough to be there at night. I shone my light around the empty kitchen. Empty beer bottles littered the floor, and broken furniture lay piled in the corner. Wax drippings from old candles poo
led on the cracked counters.
The whole place smelled of mildew, charred wood and pee.
I picked my way through the debris, then climbed a precarious stack of old chairs that blocked my exit from the kitchen into the next room—a living room, maybe, or a parlor.
I rubbed the goosebumps on my arms. The house was chilly and damp, but the atmosphere probably had as much to do with the bumps on my skin. Every step I took caused the warped wooden floors to creak. My flashlight app was a poor match for the thick darkness.
At the bottom of the stairs, I stopped and reached out to feel for the children. There was no mistaking the fear pouring down the steps. They were up there. But I had to hurry, because the emotions of one of them were getting almost too weak for me to sense.
Something moved to my left, and I spun around to flash the light at it. A creature with red eyes stared back at me, chittered, then scurried away. I swallowed the scream in my throat and followed the raccoon’s progress until it disappeared through a hole in the wall.
The stairs didn’t look sturdy. I touched the bannister and felt how loose it was. My hand came away sticky with cobwebs and dust. I wiped my hand on my jeans and moved to the inside of the staircase.
I considered calling up to the kids, but shouting seemed ill advised. If Shadow Man was around somewhere lying in wait for me, he probably already knew I was here. But there might also be animals other than the lone raccoon. Shouting would probably upset them and cause a stampede or an attack.
Riley never would have fit through the entrance to the house. That much was true. But alone in the dark of the dilapidated and possibly deadly house, I regretted not waiting to see if we could find another way. I’d let emotion direct me instead of good sense. It wasn’t the first time I’d made a dumbass move like this.
Understanding this on an intellectual level wasn’t enough to make me turn around and go back for help. The emotional cries of two kids pulled me far harder than good sense or self-preservation. I had to keep going forward.
My phone vibrated in my hand, startling me. I didn’t answer the call. Riley would only yell at me and try to get me to go back outside to wait for help. The call went to voicemail.
I tried whispering up the stairs. “Ashley! Miles! Are you here?” My foot settled on the first step close to the wall. I tested the strength of the wood, then moved up. The kids didn’t respond to my whispers, so I kept moving. “Anybody up there?” Each step was a careful measurement of my weight against the rotten wood. Twice I skipped a step for fear it would disintegrate beneath me.
Halfway, I thought I heard someone moving from above and increased my speed. Speed was not my friend. A loud crunch shattered the silence, and my foot plunged ankle deep through the step I was on. A sharp pain shot up my leg as the splintered wood dug into my skin. I hissed between my teeth and pulled myself free, then leaped to the step above. My heart fluttered at dangerous speeds.
Come on, Zoey. Simple physics. Focus.
I took several deep breaths to calm my heart and control a mad case of the shakes. When I was as calm as I was going to get, I concentrated hard and made a slow, steady assault on the last of the stairs until I arrived at the top.
Shuffling sounds disturbed the quiet, and I followed the noises down the hall to a dead end with two closed doors. “Ashley? Miles?” I raised my voice to a conversational level, still unwilling to alert Shadow Man or alarm any resident vermin by yelling or even speaking too loud. There was no response.
I opened the door on my left and shone the light inside. The room had once belonged to a child, judging by the small bed missing its mattress, the headless dolly and the burned train set in the corner. In fact, the far wall was blackened with soot, and everything near it was destroyed. I gagged at the stale smell of burned plastic and charred wood. My friends and I had made up stories about this place when I was younger. Whatever had happened here was far more haunting and disturbing than anything a bunch of kids could imagine.
There were no children in the room. Not anymore. My hand shook as I closed the door and turned to the one on the opposite side of the hall.
The knob was gone from the door, so I pressed my fingertips against the wood and gave it a push. The door swung open, creaking as it went. The room was a mirror image of the other, down to the blackened wall and charred train. The only difference was that here was a bodiless dolly head, one cracked blue eye staring at me, the other in a frozen wink.
This room also held no missing children that I could see.
Twice the tragedy. Twice as disturbing. I pulled the door closed. The space between my shoulder blades itched, as if eyes were staring at me from behind. I spun around, expecting to see a pair of anemic twin blondes in old-fashioned dresses holding hands and watching me.
The hallway was empty. I shook my head to clear it. Stop freaking yourself out, Zoey. It’s just an old house. Don’t make this worse than it already is.
I waited, listening for the shuffling sounds, and was rewarded. The noises came from above me. I glanced up, shining my light, and found the outline of a small attic door in the ceiling. A cord hung loose, ready to be grabbed if I dared.
You’ve got to be kidding me. Oh, sure. The attic. Of course. It was either that or the basement for maximum panic inducement. Why the hell not?
The cord looked brand new with none of the decrepitude and neglect of everything else in the house. Did Shadow Man add it so he could carry the kids up there? Was it a recent addition by a squatter who really wanted to get into the attic?
Was it there for me?
That last thought threatened to undo my nerves and send me running down the stairs with no regard for the deathtrap on each rickety step. I took a deep breath and tugged.
The door opened and stairs unfolded, leaving me with the terrifying need to climb up and stick my head through the opening.
This is probably a stupid idea. I’m going to get beheaded, I just know it.
I held my breath as I climbed, fighting the urge to make a run for it before I had to pop my head through the opening.
Riley was going to kill me if I lived through this.
As if he’d heard my thoughts, my phone vibrated again. I ignored it.
At the last, I charged all the way through rather than stand there with my face vulnerable to attack rats or vampire bats. I stood with my feet planted on the attic floor, panting and aiming my pitiful light at every corner.
When my heart stopped pounding in my ears and my breath returned to normal, I slowed my search and looked around.
For the most part, the attic was empty. A few trunks were parked against the walls, and the obligatory dress mannequin stood in the corner, but most of the floor was bare of the mass of boxes and junk I expected.
And huddled under the window were two little lumps, one lying motionless, the other curled protectively around the first, wide eyes catching the light from my phone.
“Miles? Ashley?”
“Please don’t hurt us,” the girl whispered.
“Ashley?”
She nodded. “Miles is sick.”
I rushed over, the floorboards squealing beneath my feet. I dropped to my knees in front of them. “It’s going to be all right, sweetheart. You’re safe now. What’s wrong with Miles?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice was tight, like she was fighting a bout of tears. “He’s not breathing right. He keeps fainting.”
“Does he have asthma?” I felt his head and neck. He was burning up, and his heart rate was crazy fast. I slid my light over him to check him over.
She shook her head. “No. Is he going to die?”
“No, honey. I won’t let that happen.” I stopped the light on his right arm. A large welt, hot to the touch, had risen above his elbow. “Have you seen this? Did he have it when you came in?”
&n
bsp; Her eyes grew even wider. “I don’t think so. Did something bite him?”
“I believe so.” I considered how to get him safely out of here down the attic ladder and then down the ridiculously fragile staircase, over the pile of chairs and out through the hole in the kitchen door. I couldn’t do it. Not with the dead weight of a passed-out kid and a second kid I would also be responsible for. “How did you guys get in here?”
I hoped they had a new way in that hadn’t been available twenty years ago.
She didn’t answer at first, probably worried about getting in trouble. “Through the kitchen,” she finally said.
Well, that was no help. I tapped Riley’s number on my phone.
It barely finished the first ring. “I am going to kill you.” The relief in his voice said otherwise.
“I know.”
“Are you all right? Did you find them?”
“I did. I’m fine, but Miles isn’t. He might be in anaphylactic shock from a spider bite, and we’re all the way up in the attic. I don’t think he’s got much time.” I racked my brains for a solution and could only come up with one.
“Can you get them out?”
“Not on my own. We’ll need to fly them out of here.”
Chapter Nine
The operation took nearly the whole team of us, and required a little talk with Ashley first.
“Honey, I’m going to get you out of here, but I need you to trust me, okay?”
She gave me a cynical look but nodded. “Okay.”
“Can you tell me what happened here? Why did you come up here?”
“We heard it was haunted, so we came to see.” She looked like she was going to cry for a moment but pulled herself together. “When we got here, it was so pretty. Like a gingerbread house in the stories, you know.”
I raised an eyebrow at that and leaned forward, trying hard not to be obvious that I was sniffing her. There was no trace of the gingerbread scent reported on the last batch of kidnapped kids. The gingerbread quality of the illusion on the house might have been a coincidence—but the fact that the house had an illusion on it at all made it obvious this wasn’t some random bad guy kidnapping kids. I knew exactly who it had been.
Phoenix in My Fortune (A Monster Haven Story Book 6) Page 9