The House Next Door

by P. J. Night

  Alyssa strained her eyes, trying to peer through the darkness. But without another flash of lightning, it was no use. She couldn’t make out the house.

  “Are you sure, Jenna?” Anne asked, grabbing her friend’s hand. “That house has been locked up tight for years—maybe it was just a trick of the light?”

  “No,” Jenna replied, standing up and talking a little too loudly. “You know better than anyone that strange things go on at that house. You told me. Your sisters think that the house next door is haunted!” Everyone turned around as she said these words. And then it was silent. All that could be heard was the hollow thump, thump, thumping of Paul’s dropped basketball, bouncing on the porch floor.

  “Haunted?” Paul asked, pushing his hair out of his eyes. “So the rumors are true. Why did you deny it earlier?”

  “Because it’s not haunted,” Alyssa said defensively. “It’s just an old house. Decaying and decrepit, nothing more.”

  “Come on,” Steve countered. “Don’t keep the truth a secret. I didn’t grow up here like you guys. Remember? Fill me in!”

  And that’s when a light bulb went off in Alyssa’s head. If the guests at the party wanted ghost stories, she could give them ghost stories—just as long as they didn’t involve that stupid house.

  “This whole thing just gave me an idea,” she told the group. “Who wants to tell scary stories?” She looked pleadingly at Carrie, hoping she would agree.

  “I’ve got about a hundred famous Glory ghost stories!” Carrie added.

  “Excellent,” Paul said. He turned to pound fists with Steve.

  Alyssa smiled at her friend. Finally, something was going the way she wanted it to. She locked arms with Carrie as they began to walk toward the sliding glass doors. Carrie smiled back and looked from Alyssa to Amanda conspiratorially. “This could be a good idea,” she said to Amanda. “There’s nothing like being scared half to death to make you feel like grabbing on to someone.” She gave Amanda a knowing look.

  “W-what?” Amanda stammered. She felt her cheeks burn.

  “You know, you could grab on to Paul,” Carrie suggested in a whisper. “Everyone knows you like him.”

  Alyssa giggled as Amanda scoffed. Alyssa walked to the door and slid it open. “Let’s go,” she told the guests. “Everybody, inside.”

  Their friends left the porch and followed Amanda and Anne into the house. Alyssa hung back and looked around at the clutter her friends had left behind.

  “I’ll be right in,” she announced to the crowd. “I’m just going to quickly clean up out here.”

  The night had been fairly warm, but the impending storm was ushering in a chill. Alyssa hugged herself and thought about just leaving the mess for the morning. She didn’t want to miss any of the fun, but she changed her mind when she considered her parents finding the mess before the girls were able to clean up. This was their chance to impress them—to show that they could be trusted with their own party.

  So, with a heavy sigh, Alyssa started to collect the plastic cups and cupcake wrappers that had been thrown on the ground. She was just about finished when she noticed the tray of veggies and ranch dip turned completely upside down on the table. Grabbing a handful of napkins, she wiped up the sticky pools of goop and threw them into a trash bag. Alyssa took a final look around for any stray cups or hidden veggies that she may have missed.

  Suddenly, the fields around the house were illuminated again. Another series of lightning flashes streaked across the sky, and three shattering claps of thunder followed. Alyssa jumped, her heart beating triple time. She concentrated on tying together the trash bag with clumsy, trembling hands. Her head jerked up when she heard pounding. She looked around, not knowing if she was confusing the sound with thunder or if it were something else entirely. The pounding continued. She spun around, wanting to search for the source of the noise, but also afraid of what she might find in the darkness. Her eyes fell upon the old house across the fields. Another lightning burst pierced the sky, and Alyssa watched the front door swing open and close. Open and close, pounding heavily and angrily against the doorjamb.

  Dropping the trash bag, Alyssa ran inside. Her heart thumped in her chest. She closed the sliding glass door behind her and locked it, yanking it twice to make sure it was secure. From inside the safety of her basement, she stared in the direction of the old house, waiting for lightning to illuminate the sky and the fields, but all remained dark.

  “I’m going crazy,” she mumbled to herself. She rubbed her eyes and turned her back to the glass doors.

  “Alyssa! We’re almost ready,” Carrie called.

  Alyssa glanced back over her shoulder just once before joining her friends. She saw nothing but her reflection in the glass.

  On the other side of the room, Anne cut the music and dimmed the lights. There were a few nervous giggles as everyone’s eyes adjusted to the darkness. Amanda grabbed a flashlight from the utility cupboard and handed it to Carrie. Alyssa crouched down next to her best friend.

  “Give us your best shot,” Alyssa whispered to Carrie. “Just please no stories about the house next door.”

  “You got it,” Carrie agreed.

  Alyssa darted her eyes around the room, straining them in the darkness, to make sure all their guests were accounted for and no one had gone back outside. She found Amanda sitting next to Paul and Steve, and she sat down near them. She held her breath so she wouldn’t giggle when she saw Paul whispering to Amanda.

  “Don’t worry,” Paul told Amanda. “I’m here if you get scared.” Amanda tried not to notice that they were sitting so close their knees touched.

  “All right,” said Steve loudly. “Please, please, please, please can we hear just a little bit more about the house next door? Everyone is clearly spooked by it.”

  “Just one story wouldn’t hurt,” Anne added. “I’ve got some. I’ve been over there tons of times—”

  “No, you haven’t,” Alyssa interrupted.

  “At least I’m not scared of it!” Anne replied defensively.

  Amanda clenched her jaw and glowered at Anne. Anne looked back innocently, pretending not to be hurt by her older sister’s scowl.

  “Now you have to tell us!” Steve continued. His mouth curled into a grin.

  “Okay, just one story about the house,” Amanda told Carrie.

  “Amanda!” Alyssa scolded.

  “I don’t know,” Carrie said hesitantly. “I guess just one couldn’t hurt? Then we can just drop the whole thing.” She looked at Alyssa. Alyssa let out a big sigh and reluctantly nodded.

  Steve and Paul high-fived each other. They’d won. Carrie would tell the story everyone wanted to hear.

  “It’s a good one,” Carrie began, “but it’s not really a ghost story. It’s a true story—a very spooky true story.”

  Alyssa turned to her sister with a raised eyebrow. She watched Amanda silently mouth a single word: Relax! Alyssa rolled her eyes and turned her attention back to Carrie.

  “Like most everyone here, I was born and raised in Glory,” Carrie began. “And so were my parents. But unlike a lot of people living here today, my grandparents and even great-grandparents were born here too. There have been Hernándezes living in this town since it was founded more than one hundred years ago. We’re like Glory royalty.”

  Carrie’s audience was captivated. She has a way of owning a room, Alyssa thought.

  “My family knows everything that is anything about this town,” Carrie said. “According to my grandfather, that spooky house next door was the very first house built in Glory. Before then, this area had just been a military outpost with a few stores and cemeteries—”

  “That’s not so weird,” Anne interrupted.

  Carrie went on. “The house was really monumental for its time. A young family traveled here from back east and built it themselves. The mother and father had three small children. Their last name was Goodwin. After a couple of years, other settlers followed, and they built houses a few
miles away. One of those families was mine. Pretty soon, a little town had sprung up, and everyone was calling it Glory. My great-grandmother met the Goodwins several times. She told her son, my grandfather, that they were always polite and kind when they were in town, but they mostly kept to themselves and spent a lot of time working on the house—fixing it up and renovating small sections of it.

  “The house always had a lot of bizarre problems. And as soon as Mr. Goodwin would fix something, it would break again. It took all the family’s time and energy to keep it in order. . . . It was almost like the house never wanted them to leave. To the other townspeople, it looked like the Goodwins had become obsessed with making it perfect, but the more they tried, the more things went wrong with the house. Then, one year, a few days after the new year, people in Glory began to notice that they hadn’t seen the Goodwins in a while. When they went out to the house to check on them, the Goodwins were nowhere to be found. The family had simply disappeared without a trace.”

  The room was dead silent.

  “Rumors spread like wildfire,” Carrie told them. “Some people said that the family had simply left one night, but others believed that something more sinister happened. That the house was evil. That it had trapped them inside, but then why couldn’t anyone see them? Perhaps the house was somehow haunted and that the demons that lived there lured people in to trap them. Some even believed that the house fed on the people.”

  Everyone hung on Carrie’s words. “Of course, these are just rumors.”

  A few of the guests exhaled in relief. Amanda realized she’d been holding her shoulders tensed up toward her ears. She let them relax and fall.

  “But,” Carrie continued, “don’t forget that the house has been abandoned ever since—for one hundred years. And my grandparents and their friends have always believed that someone—or something—has occupied it. Strange things have happened around that house, just ask Elena.”

  Alyssa slumped. She peered out of the corner of her eyes and saw all her friends turn toward Elena Sandhu, waiting expectantly for her to tell them what she knew about the house. Alyssa noticed two of Anne’s friends clutching each other so closely that they were practically sitting on each other’s laps. She knew that the kids at the party—especially the younger ones—were starting to get scared. She couldn’t see little Jenna in the crowd, but she was hoping that she wasn’t too shocked. Alyssa jumped up, ready to turn the lights back on.

  “It’s true,” replied Elena.

  Sighing, Alyssa sat back down on the floor. Her efforts to avoid this story would be useless.

  “So what exactly has happened at that house?” Anne asked pointedly.

  Elena shifted uncomfortably. She had a habit of tugging her sleeves over her hands when she was nervous. And now everyone could sense that her nerves were on edge.

  Sensible Elena, who had spoken in front of the entire school as student-body president of Glory Middle School, was shaken.

  “I don’t really like talking about it,” Elena admitted. No one had ever heard her speak so softly.

  “Maybe it’s time to stop,” suggested Alyssa.

  “No. I’d like to tell it,” said Elena. “It’s a story about my grandmom. She grew up in Glory too, as you all know. If you get her started, she’ll talk for hours about how great Glory was back in the day. She goes on and on about how everybody knew everybody. People never locked their doors. You could really depend on your neighbors—that sort of thing. She would play in the streets without a care in the world. Glory has always been a bit sheltered from the rest of the world—especially back then—when everyone looked out for one another.

  “But if you’ve met my grandmom, you know that she’s not exactly . . . friendly. She’s always been the strict one in our family. According to my great-uncle, she didn’t used to be that way. He says that I remind him of her when she was young, but something happened to her that changed her. She built a wall around herself and stopped trusting people.

  “He only told me the story of what happened once. And when I asked my grandmom about it, she just stared at me coldly and touched her bony finger to my heart. It was the only time I ever saw her hand tremble. And then she told me never to ask her about it again.”

  “What was it?” Anne asked. “What happened to her? What did your great-uncle tell you?”

  “Great-Uncle Walt said that my grandmom’s best friend when she was a girl was a boy who lived down the street. His name was John. They did everything together. If he went fishing, so did she. They would take long walks and pretend to be explorers discovering a foreign land. One day, on one of their adventures, they stumbled upon the old Goodwin house.”

  Elena turned and looked at each of the Peterson girls. “Your house hadn’t been built yet,” she said, and then she went on. “My grandmom refused to go inside. Her parents had always forbidden it. John teased her and went inside alone while she stayed outside on the lookout. My grandmom was so happy when he came back out a few minutes later.”

  “So what’s the big deal?” one of the boys in the back called out.

  Elena looked down. “The big deal is that he must have loved exploring that house and went back a few more times without her. And then, one day, he and his brother just disappeared.”

  “What does that have to do with the house?” Amanda asked.

  “Great-Uncle Walt told me that my grandmom is convinced to this very day that something happened in that house. Something that caused her very best friend in the world to vanish forever, and she thinks that maybe, after all these years, he and his brother might still be in there.”

  “I don’t believe in ghost stories,” Anne whispered.

  “Well, I don’t either,” replied Elena. “But the look in my grandmom’s eyes that time I asked her about it convinced me that she was scared of something. And it scared me, too.”

  Elena was finished speaking, but no one said anything to fill the silence.

  Suddenly a slow, drawn-out screech—much like fingernails being dragged across a chalkboard—broke the silence. Alyssa noticed a change in the room’s temperature, as if the air conditioner had been turned on full blast. Next to her, Elena shivered in the cool air.

  Alyssa jumped up to turn on the lights. Her fingers fumbled along the wall until she found the switch and flicked it on.

  In the light, Alyssa gasped in horror.

  There were two large gaps in the room were Paul and Steve had been sitting, and the sliding glass door stood wide open.

  They were gone.

  CHAPTER 6

  Anne jumped up and ran to the sliding door. Amanda followed her. They peered out into the darkness, but they couldn’t see anything beyond the porch. Paul and Steve were definitely not within their range of vision.

  “Where are Paul and Steve?” Carrie shrieked. “Amanda, Paul was sitting right next to you!”

  “I know,” she replied. “I guess I got so wrapped up in Elena’s story that I didn’t notice them sneak away. I don’t know where they went!”

  Amanda suddenly felt very guilty. Her friends had disappeared, and they had been sitting right next to her.

  “I know where they went,” Alyssa said slowly. “They went to the house next door.”

  “Try their cell phones,” suggested Carrie. “Maybe you can convince them to come back before they go in there.”

  Alyssa picked up the cordless house phone and dialed Paul’s number. She heard a faint buzzing sound coming from a pile of jackets on the couch. When she felt the pocket of Paul’s jacket vibrate, she turned the phone off and looked at her friends.

  “Try Steve’s,” suggested Amanda.

  Once again, Alyssa made a call from the phone. When she heard a familiar jingle of chimes also coming from the pile of jackets, she hung up, feeling defeated. Paul and Steve were gone, and they hadn’t even bothered to bring their phones.

  “Even though the game of Truth or Dare is over, Steve must have accepted Paul’s dare,” said Carrie.
<
br />   “This is crazy,” Alyssa told Amanda. “We specifically told them not to go over there.”

  “Paul’s probably loving that they will scare us by sneaking off,” Amanda added.

  The three sisters exchanged a quick worried glance and then looked away, trying to shake off their fear. Anne, Alyssa, and Amanda were sensible. They weren’t expecting any creatures of the dark to swoop in and hurt Paul and Steve—they were more concerned about the boys walking through an abandoned house at night. There were bound to be loose boards and rusty nails that couldn’t easily be spotted in the dark. At least that’s what their parents told them time and time again. And that’s just what they would say tonight if they found out the boys had left the house.

  The house was dangerous. After all, it was more than one hundred years old and had been left to rot for most of those years. If Mr. and Mrs. Peterson found out that two of the girls’ friends went over there this late at night, it would be the last New Year’s Eve party hosted by the Peterson sisters.

  “Someone’s got to go and get them,” said Carrie.

  “I will,” Anne volunteered. After all, she was definitely the bravest of the three sisters. Everyone knew that.

  But she was also the youngest, and Alyssa shook her head. Anne was not going over to the house.

  “Why not?” Anne demanded. “I’m the only one here who’s never been afraid of that house. If anyone goes, it should be me.”

  Alyssa grabbed Anne by the sleeve and guided her away from their friends. She admired Anne’s fearlessness, but Anne was just too young to wander into the night by herself. Alyssa was determined that her little sister would stay safely inside.

  “Anne,” Alyssa said. “We need you to stay here with our guests. Make sure nobody else leaves this basement. Think of a game or something to take everyone’s mind off of the scary stories. Can you do that?”

  Anne crossed her arms and huffed. This was a classic Alyssa move. She was always reminding Anne that she was too young. Once again, she would be left behind while Alyssa had all the fun. Anne had been looking for an excuse to explore that house for ages, and this was her chance. It just wasn’t fair.