Dedication
To Mom, Dad, and Sis.
For an amazing childhood.
To my dear wife, Rebekah.
None of my books would exist without you.
And to my little darlings, Lily Belle and Poet Eve.
You give meaning to everything.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
1. No Service
2. Cabin in the Woods
3. Follow the Rules
4. Pumpkin Secrets
5. The People Who Disappeared
6. I Don’t Eat Meat
7. Missing
8. Into the Woods
9. House of the Beast
10. Old Enough to Know
11. Sharpshooter
12. The Boy Who Lied
13. Cellar Secrets
14. Meet Me at Midnight
15. Trapped
16. Max Meets the Beast
17. Telling the Truth
18. Home Invasion
19. No Turning Back
20. Once and for All
21. Not Afraid Anymore
22. The Patch
23. The Boy Who Cried Werewolf
24. The Truth
25. A Perfect Costume
Acknowledgments
Excerpt from Monsterstreet #2: The Halloweeners
1. The House at the End of Maple Street
2. Secret Hideout
About the Author
Back Ad
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
No Service
The dirt road twisted through the forest like a snake, but the scrawny boy in the passenger seat didn’t notice. His shaggy hair and brown eyes were veiled by a red hoodie as he stared down at his iPad, annihilating monsters on some faraway planet.
Suddenly, the cell bars at the top of the screen vanished, and the game froze.
“No service?” The boy shook the device, trying to wake the dead.
“You’ll survive for a couple of days, Max,” his mother said, driving their blue minivan deeper into the woods. “When I was twelve, we didn’t have all those distractions—we played outside. It will just take some time to get used to being away from the city.”
Max sank into his seat and sighed.
He looked out his window, and saw the tall, prickly pine trees for the first time. On the side of the road, he glimpsed a rusted metal sign that read, Now Entering Wolf County. Population 781. Oddly, the number “781” had been crossed out with red spray paint, and “634” had been written in its place.
“Creepyville,” Max mumbled, then turned to his mom. “Do I really have to stay out here the whole weekend?”
It was more of a plea than a question.
“We’ve already been over this, honey,” his mother replied. “I swear, you’re just like your father—always questioning things. That’s what made him a good scientist, I suppose.”
“But I’ve never even met these people. And now you want me to stay with them by myself for three days?”
“You’ve met them before. You just don’t remember,” she said. “In fact, we lived out here for a while when you were a baby. Before—”
She paused, and there was an awkward moment of silence. Max knew she was about to refer to his father’s accidental death, but it was something she rarely said aloud. He had asked her about it more times than he could count, but she always found a way to change the subject before he could get any real answers. In fact, he hardly knew anything about his father.
“Believe me, Max, this is the last place on earth I want to be,” his mother said, tapping the steering wheel. She had been acting strangely toward him the past few days. “If you want to know the truth, your gramps and grammy wrote me a letter on your birthday asking for you to come stay with them this weekend. They seemed rather urgent about it. Said they have some things of your father’s that they want to pass down to you. It was supposed to be a surprise.”
Max still wasn’t convinced.
“Why haven’t they ever come to our house? And why is this the first time we’ve gone to see them?”
His mother took a deep breath.
“You’re getting older now, and I think it’s important for you to spend some time with your father’s side of the family. After he died out here, I swore never to come back. But—”
“Wait,” Max interrupted. “Dad’s accident happened here? At the place you’re taking me?”
His mother nodded.
Max sat back in his seat and gazed forward. It was the only clue she had ever given him about his father’s death.
“Mom?” he began.
“Yes, honey?”
“When are you going to tell me what really happened to Dad?”
The question was simple, but it ran deep and wide inside of him, like a story with no ending.
Max had no memories of his father. When other kids’ dads visited them at school, he pretended not to care that his own dad could never come. When other kids played catch with their dads at the park or in the yard, he turned his head so that he wouldn’t have to feel the pain of missing his own father. And yet, he had never known why his dad wasn’t there. The only thing he possessed that had once belonged to his father was the faded red hoodie he was wearing now—the hoodie his grandparents had sent to him a few days before on his twelfth birthday.
Max played with the zipper as he watched the shadows of trees creep over his mom’s face. She glanced over at him and opened her mouth to speak. Max was sure that he was finally about to get some answers. But her eyes dimmed. Her lips sealed. And her gaze turned forward.
“I’ve already told you. Your father died in a hunting accident when you were a baby,” she said.
But Max sensed there was more she wasn’t telling him. And he wanted to know the truth. He wanted to know why his father wasn’t there and why he had felt so lonely all his life.
Even so, he regretted asking her the question. He could see the pain in her eyes, and he promised himself he would never ask her again. But what he didn’t know was that the answer to his question lay just up ahead, at the end of the slithering road.
2
Cabin in the Woods
The minivan pulled up in front of a log cabin that had been built far back in the woods. Max looked out the window and saw ivy crawling across the shingled roof and up the stone chimney. Several stones and shingles were missing, and the downstairs windows were boarded up. He thought the house looked abandoned. Or even haunted.
This is the kind of place where ax murderers hide dead bodies, he thought.
He put his iPad in his backpack, climbed out of the van, and followed his mom up the stone pathway to the front door, lingering a few steps behind her. The air smelled like chimney smoke mixed with fresh pine. Red and brown leaves crunched beneath his feet, and a cool breeze tickled his face, reminding him that it was late October.
When he stepped onto the front porch, it creaked, and he thought he might fall straight through the floorboards. Thick cobwebs hung in every corner. The sign above the door read, Welcome to the Bloodnights’.
His mom knocked, and he sensed that she was nervous or afraid. She had always been protective of him because he was her only child. But this felt different.
“Let’s see—today’s Saturday. I’ll pick you up on Tuesday, so you’ll only miss a couple days of school.” She turned to him. “You’ll be back just in time for Halloween. Have you decided on a costume yet?”
“Mom, I already told you—I’m getting too old to go trick-or-treating. I’ll just help you hand out candy this year and scare the kids that come to the door.”
“You’re never too old for trick-or-treating,”
she said.
Then she knocked on the front door again. Harder this time.
“Don’t forget—it’s very important that you listen to everything your gramps and grammy tell you while you’re here. Understand?”
Max nodded, and his mom knocked one last time.
Still, no one answered.
She cupped her hand above her eyes and peered through the nearby window. The inside of the house was dark.
“That’s strange. Their letter said to come this afternoon.”
“Why don’t you just call them?” Max asked.
“Ha!” His mom laughed. “Your gramps and grammy with a phone? That’d be the day. You’ll soon learn that things out here are . . . different. Why don’t you go check around back and see if anyone’s there?”
“But this place gives me the creeps,” Max argued, his heart pounding at the thought of going anywhere on the property alone.
“Don’t be silly. It’s just an old house,” his mother said.
Reluctantly, Max walked off the porch and around the corner toward the back of the house. As soon as he was out of his mom’s sight, grim visions invaded his thoughts.
He imagined scenes from all the scary movies he had watched by himself late at night when other kids his age were attending birthday parties and sleepovers. Killer clowns and lagoon monsters, possessed dolls and ghost cannibals.
“Don’t be silly,” he told himself, echoing his mother’s words.
He arrived at a screened-in porch. It was so dark that he could barely make out the hoard of clutter resting on the other side of the screen: rusted lanterns, cobwebbed shelves, and framed photographs of family members Max had never seen before.
He knocked on the door.
But no one answered.
He knocked again.
Still, nothing.
Just then, a tall shadow crept over him.
He turned around.
And froze.
There, looming above him, was a stranger.
Holding a bloody ax.
3
Follow the Rules
“No!” Max shouted, cowering beneath his backpack.
Trembling, he waited for the pain of being cut in half. He had always wondered what murder victims’ final moments felt like. And now he was about to find out.
But the pain never came.
“Max, what are you doing?” he heard his mother’s voice call out.
Max opened his eyes and saw the ax hanging at the tall stranger’s side. The old man wore faded overalls and muddy work boots. The crow’s feet in the squints of his eyes told the story of his years, and the smoke from his corncob pipe matched the color of what little hair he had left.
“This is your gramps,” Max’s mom said.
Max stood on the porch steps, feeling foolish for mistaking his own grandfather for an ax murderer.
“Let me get a good look at you, boy,” Gramps said warmly, setting down the ax and holding Max’s shoulders square to him. “Just as I thought. You’re the spitting image of your father when he was your age. Especially in that red hoodie. He used to wear that thing all the time.”
Gramps hugged him, and Max felt the cold metal buttons of the old man’s overalls against his cheek.
“And this,” Max’s mom continued, “is your grammy.”
Max watched as an old woman walked up beside his mother, dragging a slaughtered hog by its hoof. She wore a bloodstained apron over a denim dress, and her silver hair was tied up in a bun.
“We’ve dreamed about this day for so long,” Grammy said, and leaned down to kiss Max’s cheek. “It will be good to have some young blood around here to help with the chores.”
“Chores?” Max asked. His mom shot him a disapproving look. “I mean, thank you for having me.”
Grammy heaved the dead hog onto a butcher’s slab near the porch, then turned to Max’s mom. “Won’t you stay for dinner, dear? It’s been so long since we had a good chat.”
Max’s mom hesitated and glanced out at the surrounding woods. She seemed anxious about something.
“Thanks, but I—I’d like to get back to the city before nightfall,” she said. She knelt down in front of Max. “I’ll pick you up in a few days. Don’t forget to listen to your gramps and grammy. Okay?”
She leaned forward and kissed his forehead. Then she whispered something to Grammy that Max had the feeling he wasn’t supposed to hear: “Please keep him safe.”
Grammy gazed back at her solemnly.
Then Max watched his mom climb back into the minivan and disappear down the winding dirt road, desperately wishing he could go with her.
“Well,” Gramps said, patting Max’s back. “How ’bout we show you to your room?”
Max nodded, and the three of them walked inside the cabin.
He was surprised to find that it was more spacious than it looked from the outside. The ceilings were high, and everything in the house had an old-fashioned appearance, as if it had been teleported from some other time. There were antique lamps and rocking chairs, moth-eaten couches and cast-iron pots and pans. And the hallways were lined with shelves full of glass jars, each marked with a piece of masking tape labeled with strange herbal names.
But the most unusual thing of all was that every wall in the cabin was covered with taxidermied animal heads.
Everywhere Max looked, there were stuffed and mounted deer, bobcats, turkeys, mountain lions, and buffalo staring back at him. From the look of it, his father’s family were serious hunters.
“Your father used to be the best hunter in Wolf County, you know,” Gramps said.
“I thought he was a scientist,” Max replied.
“Being a scientist is what made him a good hunter. He could read the signs of nature better than any of us, and he was always coming up with new contraptions and experiments.”
Max continued examining the animal heads. “If it’s called ‘Wolf County,’ then why aren’t there any wolves on your walls?”
The old man spoke with regret in his voice. “There used to be quite a few wolves in these parts, but they haven’t been around in years.”
Gramps and Grammy turned the corner and led Max up a creaking staircase. Each step groaned beneath their feet, like creatures waking from an ancient sleep. When they arrived at the top of the stairs, Grammy opened the first door in the hallway.
“This was your father’s room,” she said. “You and your parents stayed here when you were a baby. It’s not much, but it’s cozy. Why don’t you get settled, then take a look around the farm before supper.”
Max glanced around at the wood-planked walls. A strange map or calendar hung on the wall next to the bed, displaying the phases of the moon. Beside the nightstand was an antique telescope looming over a stack of astronomy magazines. It was aimed out the window to a dozen rows of pumpkins speckling out into the distance toward the neighbors’ two-story house, which sat on a hill.
And there on the nightstand was a shiny silver dagger. Max couldn’t take his eyes off it.
“It was your father’s knife,” Gramps said. “We keep it there in remembrance. He rarely went anywhere without it.”
Max walked over and looked down at it, thinking of all the times his father’s hands had held that same knife.
“Is there a place where I can charge my iPad?” Max asked, looking around for an electrical outlet.
“I’m afraid there ain’t a lick of electricity in this house,” Gramps replied.
“But . . . how do you do anything without electricity?” Max asked, just now realizing that he hadn’t seen a single light bulb in the house. Only lanterns and candles.
“We prefer a simpler life than most,” Gramps continued. “Self-reliance is the key to our survival.”
At Gramps’s words, Grammy cleared her throat. “And you’ll survive just fine too. As long as you follow the rules,” she said. She sounded far more serious than she had only a moment before.
“What rules?” Max questioned.
If there was anything he despised more than the absence of electricity, it was rules. He had never been good at following them at school, at home, or even at the arcade.
“Really, there’s just one,” Grammy corrected him. “Your father always had a hard time with it, and, well—”
Gramps and Grammy exchanged a knowing look.
Then Gramps leaned forward.
“Listen closely, boy. No matter what you do while you’re here, don’t cross the barbed-wire fence into the eastern forest.”
“Why? What’s in the forest?” Max asked.
Gramps’s voice grew deeper and more grave.
“Monsters,” he whispered.
Max started to laugh, but then saw that Gramps’s eyes were dead serious.
He gulped.
“Monsters?” Max said with a shaky voice. He loved monsters in movies and in his games, but the prospect of real monsters, well, that was something else.
“Oh, Gramps, you don’t have to be so dramatic,” Grammy said, swatting the old man’s arm. “The boy just got here. No need to overwhelm him with such talk.”
But Max could tell there was some truth to what Gramps was saying.
Gramps grunted, perturbed that Grammy had interrupted him. He looked at Max and continued, “You’ll be safe as long as you don’t go into that forest. And be sure you wear that hoodie zipped up wherever you go. It’ll protect you. Especially during the next three nights. Oh, and it’s very important that you don’t trust anyone while you’re here—not even the neighbors.”
“How come? What happens during the next three nights?” Max asked.
Gramps put his hand on Max’s shoulder.
“The full moon,” he warned.
Gramps’s eyes—those big, hollowed eyes—seemed plagued with fear. From the look on his and Grammy’s faces, Max sensed that his family was petrified of the full moon.
The only question was: Why?
4
Pumpkin Secrets
Max wandered along the edge of the neighbors’ pumpkin patch, wishing he was back home playing his Xbox. He already missed the electric pulse of the city—the noises, the movement, the surprises at every turn. Out here in the middle of nowhere, everything was too still, too quiet, and too boring.
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