For Wren and Dez, who wanted a scary story … and a dog.
—JS
Contents
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
“A [kid], before [they] really grow up, is pretty much like a wild animal. [They] can get the wits scared clear out of [them] today and by tomorrow have forgotten all about it.”
—Fred Gibson, Old Yeller
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
—Martin Luther King Jr.
Breathe in, breathe out.
The boy with tousled brown hair huddled low behind a tree, trying hard to steady his rapid breathing. He leaned into the shadows as the bright moon cast a glow like a searchlight overhead. Forest sounds shuddered to life, and the leaves whispered a warning on their branches. This world was out to get him. The warm wind blew down his neck like a breath in the darkness as smaller animals scurried past in sudden bursts. He wasn’t alone anymore.
The boy stayed put and kept still with his fingers pushed into the soft, damp earth, like a sprinter waiting for the start signal in a race for his life.
Breathe in, breathe out.
The silence was deafening. There was no other noise than his own thin breath. Still, he clenched his jaw and waited, preparing for what came next.
And then, the signal. A lone howl cracked through the empty forest, scaring everything away, even the wind. The horrible sound was like a monster breathing through a dead animal’s bones. When the boy heard it, his insides froze. He had no idea what made that terrifying sound. He hoped he never would.
Breathe in, breathe out.
As the cry went silent, the boy sprinted. He ran violently. He didn’t care about what was in his way. Trees, rocks, cliffs, snakes, he darted past everything to keep away from the howl at his back. His knees hurt from running over the uneven ground, but the boy kept moving forward. It was the only way he might be safe.
The forest behind him erupted. The beast had found his scent. Steady, unsettling gasps chugged like a hungry train chasing him. The boy’s breath sped up to match the beast’s wild rhythm.
Breathe in, breathe out.
Breathe in, breathe out.
Breathe in breathe out breathe in breathe out breathe in breathe out breathe in breathe out breathe in breathe out breathe breathe breathe breathe breathe breathe breathe.
A sharp pain tore across his shoulders, shoving the boy face-first to the ground. Dirt flew into his eyes as a heavy weight stepped onto his back and legs.
“Please, please,” the boy pleaded as he spit earth from his mouth. “What do you want?! What are you?!”
But there was no answer. There was only the wet smack of a tongue licking its chops followed by a low growl that resonated through the boy. The race was over.
Even though he was filled with fear, the boy opened his eyes. The forest was illuminated by a light cast from behind him. He could see the trees and bushes, but they seemed to look away somehow, as if nature itself did not want to witness what was about to happen. But the light … maybe someone had come to stop this from happening again?
“Anyone? Please! Someone! HELP!” he screamed.
That’s when the beast took its first bite.
Lucas Trainer woke up in his bed for the last time.
It was dark, but the city streetlights gave his room a twilight glow through the closed venetian blinds. He hated those blinds. They always let in too much light. But after Lucky, the family cat, shredded the curtains Lucas had picked out, he was left with the blinds that had been installed when they first moved into their New York City apartment. And now they were moving out.
But the streetlight wasn’t what woke him. It was the dream again. A strange nightmare for a kid who lived in the city, but when were nightmares ever supposed to make sense?
Outside, a sound rang out—most likely an animal scrounging the trash for food. Lucas had learned to tune out most of the neighborhood sounds in the city. People on their phones loved to stop in front of his window to have their deepest, most personal conversations. Dog walkers, kids singing at the top of their lungs, skateboarders, police sirens, fire engines … they were basically white noise to him. There was even a guy who collected cans from the building’s recycling bin under his window. He always whistled a creepy tune while he foraged through the clinking glass bottles and crinkling soda cans. Lucas had asked his mom one time why the guy whistled.
“Probably to announce himself,” she had told him. “That way we know he’s not a stranger or a thief.”
But he was a stranger, thought Lucas. And he could be a thief, right? He was stealing their recycling, wasn’t he? Of course, Lucas never said that to his mother. She would have gone off on how society forgets people on its march into the future, and how it’s our responsibility to remember and help all those left behind. She was a social worker, after all. With an emphasis on the was. But it wouldn’t matter in the morning: Everything in their lives was about to change. This was his last night at home.
The sound in his dreams, though … that was a different story. It was a mixture between a howl and demented laughter— a guttural and haunting sound that tugged him out of a deep sleep like a claw reaching into his dreams.
Wiping the sweat off his brow, Lucas sat up. He removed the face mask that covered his nose and mouth, the hiss of air from the oxygen tank filling the room. Rubbing the bridge of his nose and around his chin, Lucas tugged on his necklace, which was suddenly tight. He still wasn’t used to it. The small key attached to the necklace flipped out from his collar. He traced it, then reached over and shut off the machine. The hiss stopped. Lucas took a breath of the night air for the first time and shifted to the lip of his loft bed.
His father built the bed into the wall seven years ago.
“Are you sure it will hold me and all my stuff?” Lucas had asked.
“Oh, definitely,” Dad told him. “This bed is a monument. It won’t break even if your room is invaded by an enemy army. Heck, I don’t think I could get it down again if I tried! If we ever move from here, we’ll have to leave this bed behind.”
Lucas stared down at the floor as his feet dangled over the edge. The bed had seemed so much taller when he was five years old. Now it felt like a little kid’s bed. His feet almost touched the ground, for crying out loud! He was kind of happy never to sleep in it again.
He jumped and landed with a thud. The entire room shook under his weight. He winced at the sharp pain in his knees. His parents had warned him about jumping down from bed in his condition. Not that anyone really knew what his condition was. But still, he had a long list of things that doctors said he couldn’t do. Lucas interpreted that as things he shouldn’t do. So every now an
d then he broke the rules.
Lucas made his way to the window through the shadows of packed moving boxes. He flicked the shade open with two fingers to search the street. No one was there.
“Just a dream,” he mumbled to himself. “What’d you expect? A werewolf? Come on. With your luck, maybe you’d spot a vampire rat. Maybe.”
Whatever Lucas had heard before was gone. His alarm clock was perched on boxes filled with his books; 5:30 a.m. glowed green and stared back at him. He’d meant to wake up early before the move, but not this early. Usually a room looked bigger when it was cleaned and packed up, but his room looked tiny now. The bookshelves were empty and so was his dresser, but they all jutted out from the wall and cluttered the space.
It also didn’t help that his life was crammed into ten boxes in the middle of the floor. Ten boxes. That’s literally everything he owned. Books, clothes, video games, baseball mitt, and collectible Star Wars Legos. Those Star Wars Legos were never going to make the trip south without breaking, who was he fooling? Still, he packed them like his parents asked. They told him to pack everything, so he did. Well, not his alarm clock. Or his iPad. Or his headphones. Or the Haunted History book his parents gave him during his last hospital visit. Or his CPAP mask. Or the clothes he was going to wear tomorrow, which he was technically sleeping in—or not sleeping in—at that moment.
Another rumble came from outside. Lucas tugged on the chord to the blinds and they zizzed up quickly. A newer, fancier building had gone up across the street from their house last year. The entire exterior was made of glass like one giant, building-sized window that reflected everything like a mirror. Lucas studied his building’s trash cans in the reflection. They seemed undisturbed.
Then he saw a set of eyes flash in the darkness.
“What the crow?” he said aloud.
The sudden glare pulled him forward as he tried to look directly down into the front of his building, but he couldn’t quite see it from his sixth-floor window. Whatever had been there was tucked away and hidden, but the sounds always reached him.
When his family moved into the apartment, they were thrilled to be on the sixth floor.
“Lucas, you can have the front bedroom. The air will be better up here,” Mom had said. “Plus, I guarantee you’ll never hear anything this high up.”
But he heard everything. The sounds from the street rose and converged like hot air, collecting in his room every night. Sometimes he wondered if the noise actually clouded the breathable oxygen, too, because he still coughed and wheezed in his room at the top of their six-story building. So Dad built the bed to make getting his weirdo CPAP mask cooler, Lucas supposed. It didn’t change the fact that he still had to walk up and down six flights of stairs each time he wanted to leave the building or come back home. Dad thought it would be good for his stamina. Mom thought the distance from the road would cure him. Lucas just wondered why groups of stairs were called flights if he had to walk up and down them all the time. But all that was going to change in a few hours.
Lucas surveyed the well-lit street again. No one was out there. The eyes he’d seen were probably from a stray animal anyway, if that. He could be imagining things again.
“You win, mysterious noise,” Lucas said to himself. “If I’m up, I’m up.”
The trip to the kitchen was a maze of more stacked boxes and furniture that also had boxes sitting on top of them. It was less of a home now and more like a museum for boxes. Tall boxes, small boxes, fragile boxes … there was a box for everything in their life.
Lucas stepped on a loose floorboard that creaked, a reminder that even their rugs were rolled up and ready to go. From somewhere in the boxed darkness, a sharp and frantic scattering of claws scraped across the wood floor at his sudden intrusion.
“Sorry, Lucky, it’s just me,” he whispered, as if their family cat could understand him. But, in a deep-down way, he wasn’t sorry. He actually felt silly. Who apologizes to their cat for walking through their own apartment? Lucas was glad no one else was around to see him.
Past the den, there was a skinny hallway that led to the kitchen. Lucky stood at the end of the hallway, tucked deep into the shadows. Lucas waved and knelt down, holding out his hand. Lucky was still spooked, though, and retreated toward the back of the apartment.
In the kitchen, the refrigerator was completely bare. Dad had made good on his promise to measure out exactly what food they needed until the day of the big move.
Still, Lucas instinctually reached inside. It wasn’t even cold anymore. He shut the door and saw the pulled plug curled up on the counter. Dad had thought of everything. He’d even started to thaw out the fridge.
There were three cups on the kitchen table, which was the only bare surface in the apartment. Lucas grabbed one, filled it with water from the tap, and drank it down. The cold water tasted crisp. He held the last gulp in his cheeks and swizzled the water around as he walked to their tiny bathroom. Then he spit the water out in the sink.
And that was the end of the apartment tour. Almost. He peeked into his parents’ bedroom at the back of the building. They were both asleep in bed. Part of Lucas wanted them to wake up, too, as if they were supposed to have a sixth sense that warned them when he was feeling what his mom called “the feels” and just wanted another person around.
The other part of him wanted them to oversleep, because maybe if they slept late, the movers wouldn’t be able to make it upstairs and then he simply wouldn’t have to leave this life behind. Then he’d wake his parents up and tell them that he’d overslept, too. And those movers, well, you know, they have a lot of other people to move and a schedule to keep, so you snooze, you lose.
But neither of those things were going to happen. His parents were deep sleepers at night, but prompt waker-uppers in the morning. It was like a superpower … the lamest superpower ever, but it impressed him nevertheless. Lucas always had trouble sleeping at night and had trouble waking up in the morning. He was like their exact opposite, which maybe explained his condition, too.
Lucas did have his own superpower, though he didn’t tell anyone about it. He had a great sense of timing. Like right now, he knew that the app set to track his CPAP machine was about five minutes away from sending its alarm to his mom’s phone announcing that the machine had been switched off. It was designed to give him just enough time to go the bathroom.
Lucas was about to go back to his room when something furry brushed against his leg.
Mmrrow.
Lucky wound between his feet like a fluffy snake. Lucas knelt down and petted the cat on his head. The poor thing was blind in one eye and had a snaggletooth that stuck out all wonky, but the cat didn’t seem to care. Lucky nudged his head harder against Lucas’s palm and started to purr.
“You’re right, I can’t just sleep through this,” whispered Lucas.
Lucky stared at him and then, like all cats, flicked his tail without warning and scrambled away into the den for no good reason at all.
Back in his room, Lucas flipped the machine back on and plopped onto the oversized beanbag underneath his loft bed. Turning on the reading lamp, he let the mask dangle down with the oxygen hissing gently.
Lucas held up the small key that he wore around his neck. He’d stared at it every night since his parents had received the special delivery. There’d been two envelopes in the package. The first was addressed to his mom—the deed to a house that belonged to some uncle no one had ever heard of in some tiny town called Hounds Hollow. The second envelope was for Lucas, which contained a tiny key on a ball-chain necklace. It was so small that he had no idea what it could possibly open. There’d been no letter, no explanation, not anything except the lightweight necklace sliding around in the sealed envelope. Lucas studied it again, as he did every night since the package arrived. Tomorrow the tiny key mystery would finally be solved.
Lucky trotted over to the window and pawed at the glass.
“I heard it, too, but nothing’s out there,”
Lucas told the cat.
Lucky ignored him. The cat was scanning the street below and the trees outside. Lucas listened for the familiar clicking sound that Lucky made whenever he spotted a bird. His mom had told him that cats made that sound because deep in their DNA coding, they have an instinct to be ruthless hunters. Even the cutest little kittens know in their cute little kitten bones that if they were ever to pounce on a bird, the first step in the hunt would be to grind their kitten teeth together in a saw motion, which makes that clicking noise. Then the kitten would bite into the back of the bird’s neck to sever the spinal chord. This way the bird couldn’t fly away or hurt the cat with its wings. Lucas had almost thrown up when his mom was done with that particular biology lesson. He definitely never looked at Lucky the same way after that.
But Lucky didn’t click tonight. He hissed.
Lucas meant to get up and check out whatever was bothering Lucky, but his beanbag was suddenly too comfortable. He picked up the Haunted History book and flipped through the pages, but his eyes became heavy again, and before long, he fell back asleep.
It was true, and Lucas had definitive proof. Moving sucked.
He hadn’t expected the day to be easy, but he didn’t think that it would hurt as much as it did. His eyes burned and his throat was still sore from trying to hold back that weird lump feeling when he was saying goodbye to his home. Even his forehead hurt from leaning against the window as his parents drove away. And that was just during the first five minutes.
Lucas spent the rest of the eight-hour trip playing on his iPad in the crowded back seat while his parents listened to their audiobooks or talk radio. Lucas wasn’t sure which because he was wearing headphones and trying to exist only in the digital world. Minecraft, Five Nights at Freddy’s, YouTube, those worlds lived online and streamed everywhere at once. He wished he could move to one of those worlds instead of Hounds Hollow, but real life didn’t work that way.
The car drove past cities, mountains, factories, and farms, but Lucas kept his head down, eyes glued to the screen. The only time he resurfaced was when they stopped for gas, a bathroom break, or to eat. His parents planned their trip carefully with him in mind, because they stopped at nine Dunkin’ Donuts on the way down. Normally they never let him have Dunkin’ Donuts, but there seemed to be one at every stop. By the fifth time, Lucas noticed that they didn’t even need gas, but his father still topped off the car while his mother ran into the store to buy him another chocolate glazed donut. By the ninth stop, he barely wanted another one. Barely.
The Haunting of Hounds Hollow Page 1