When he reached his house, he glanced across the road at Addy’s, straight up to her window. There was no sign of movement there. He wanted to go over there then and ask her why she told Robert what they had done. But most of all, he wanted to know if she really didn’t like him, if what they had done meant nothing to her. He knew it was childish to even consider such things when he had just been told his family’s life was on the line, but he couldn’t help it.
When he hurried through the door, he found Paisley on the couch. The house was just as silent as he had left it. He stared at Paisley, who was staring back at him, her eyes wide with concern.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I—” He felt frozen. “I don’t know.”
He looked up the stairs, wondering if he should go get his parents. They were sick and he didn’t want to disturb them. But if they were all going to die…
“Toby!”
He turned to Paisley, who had stood. “What’s wrong? You’re scaring me.”
He ran his fingers through his hair, trying to calm himself. He wasn’t sure he was thinking or acting rational. After all, Robert had just told him they were sacrifices. What part of that was rational? He walked over to the couch and took a seat. Paisley sat back down beside him.
He wasn’t sure where to start. He was afraid he would just sit there in silence again, staring off into the distance, but when he looked into Paisley’s eyes, words just blurted out.
“Robert said we’re sacrifices!”
He explained everything Robert had said, trying his best to leave out the stuff about him having sex with Addy. She didn’t need to hear about that. He watched her eyes widen as he explained how they were all supposed to die, and soon.
“I know it sounds crazy,” Toby said. “I think he might have only been saying it because he’s jealous that Addy likes me. She told me as much yesterday.”
“I don’t know…I don’t think he was lying.”
Paisley’s words caught Toby off-guard. He looked up at her quizzically, trying to make out if she was being sarcastic or if she was serious.
“You have to admit it, some of it makes sense. Everyone is sick except us. People are leaving food at our doorstep for what seemed like no reason at all.”
“But sacrifices?” Toby said. “Sacrifices to what?”
“You’d said that Robert said the house was going to hurt us.”
“So the house, then? We’re sacrifices to the house?”
The conversation went dead as they both contemplated what they were saying.
“He knew that everyone was sick,” Paisley said. “How would he have known that?”
One thought was that maybe Addy had told him, but he didn’t recall telling her in the first place.
“Whatever is going on, maybe we should get out of this house,” Paisley continued. “Maybe we should tell Mom and Dad and get everybody out of the house. Trevor had started getting better as soon as he left. Then when he got back, he got sick again.”
Toby nodded, considering it. That much made sense. If they could get everybody out of the house, that would be a start.
Together, they headed upstairs to tell their parents. They had decided, just before leaving the living room, that they needed to tell their parents the truth together, otherwise they wouldn’t believe them. But it was just as likely they still wouldn’t believe them even after the story was told because the story in itself was insane. There was no clear path.
They stood outside their parents’ bedroom door. Toby felt like he was in one of those old sick houses where they would throw the sick patients during deadly pandemics. His little brother was behind him in one room, his uncle in another, and his parents ahead of them. He took in a deep breath and tapped on the door lightly, giving them a moment to ensure they were decent before pushing it open slowly.
His parents were conscious and alert, both of them averting their gaze to Toby and Paisley as they entered.
“Hey, you two,” their mom said. “What’s up?”
Toby wanted to get straight to the point. “I—” He looked at Paisley for strength then back to his parents. “I think we should all leave. I think we should get away from this house.”
“What do you mean?” his mother asked.
His dad looked a little dazed a second prior but looked a little more attentive now. Toby started telling them the story. He spoke quickly so he could get it all out before one of them interrupted. He told them all about how Robert knew that they were all sick and how he said the house would hurt them. When he finally stopped, he was a little out of breath. His dad’s eyes had widened part way through the story. Toby had thought it was because his father shared the same surprise he had when hearing it all first-hand.
It wasn’t.
“What are you trying to say? That there’s ghosts in the house?” The words came from his father with mocking venom. Toby was caught by surprise and unsure of what to say because he wasn’t even sure what it really was that he thought was in the house. His father continued. “So, what? You want us to up and leave because some kid, that by the sounds of it doesn’t like you very much, tried to scare you and said that the house is going to eat us or something?”
Toby suddenly felt small and foolish. He wanted to take a step back, but the only place back he could go was out of the room completely. His dad’s face had reddened.
“How did he know you’re all sick?” Paisley blurted out. “He knew you were sick and he thought it was funny.”
“Because fuck HIPAA and doctor-patient confidentiality,” their dad said. “Someone from the doctor’s office obviously blurted our business to someone. There are no secrets in small towns. They need something to entertain themselves with.”
His father sounded so confident. His face had lightened a little, his anger temporarily redirected at the town rather than them.
But Paisley wasn’t ready to back down. “Why did Trevor get better when you guys left to go to the doctor and then got sick again as soon as he got back here?”
“I don’t know, hunny.” His mother leaned forward in bed a little. “Infections can relapse. Or sometimes you just feel better but you really aren’t. It happens all the time.”
“What do you guys expect us to do?” his dad asked. “Just up and leave? And with what money? I haven’t even started working yet. We’re living off money we had before the move, what was left over after putting a down payment on this house. We can’t just get up and leave even if we wanted to. We don’t have the money right now. If this haunting,” he said sarcastically, “would have waited a couple months, that would be fine. We’d have money, but right now, we just don’t.”
Toby was feeling defeated. He wasn’t sure how he expected this to go, but it hadn’t gone their way at all. He just wished his parents had a little more faith in them. But Paisley had one more trick up her sleeve.
“What about the food people keep leaving outside then?” Paisley said the words staring straight into her mom’s eyes.
“We’re not going anywhere, and that’s final!” his dad shouted, clearly aware of the dig Paisley had attempted, angry at the buttons she was trying to push. “And I don’t want you telling these things to Robbie or Trevor. They’re both sick enough as it is. They need to get their rest, not worry about ghost stories.”
“What do we do now?” Paisley asked once the door was closed and they were walking back down the hall.
Toby shrugged. “I don’t know. We need more information.” When they reached the bottom of the stairs, he walked over to the window, looking out to the front of the house. “Maybe Addy would know what Robert was talking about.”
He felt Paisley’s stare, and he knew what she was likely thinking. Of course she would know what Robert had been talking about; they were best friends. But if she already knew…
He shook the thought away. Addy was good. There had to be an explanation to all this.
“We could try Addy,” he said.
Before Paisley could object or voice his own worries, he hurried out the door. He didn’t even look both ways before crossing the road, knowing full well that their road was never more than a ghost town. He was moving with determination, eager to find a resolution to all this insanity. He wanted his parents to be right, for Robert to have been just trying to scare him because he was jealous of his relationship with Addy.
But the sick feeling that overtook his stomach as he reached Addy’s door told him he wasn’t so sure about any of it. For the first minute, he just stared at the door, afraid of what truths could be on the other side. He pounded three hard knocks on the door. Silence ensued. He glanced behind him, at Paisley standing on the sidewalk at the other side of the road. She looked strange, there, solitary and alone.
He turned, thinking he heard a shuffling sound, quiet, but there, behind the door. Pausing, he held his breath, hoping to hear more. There was only silence again, like whoever was there was also remaining as still and silent as possible, trying to listen to him. He knocked again. When nothing happened, he steeled himself and called out.
“I heard you! Addy, please!”
He thought his efforts were going to be in vain, but then he heard a sound, and the door handle turned with a click. The door opened. But it wasn’t Addy. Instead, it was a taller version of the girl he knew, an older, sterner-looking one. He imagined this woman as a drill sergeant or the principal of some difficult-to-get-into private school where they secretly plotted world domination.
She stared down at him. In his mind, he wanted to ask where Addy was, but for some reason, he was suddenly afraid to speak. The woman looked up, at Paisley across the street. Toby was too nervous to turn around and follow her gaze.
“Are you here for Addison?”
He shook his head.
“She’s not here. She’s out with some friends. She won’t be back for a while.”
She smiled. Or that’s what it looked like she was trying to do. It came out cringy and fake, he thought. Like she was struggling to keep the smile going long enough for him to walk away.
“Thank you.” He turned quickly and headed back across the street, feeling the woman’s gaze on his back.
The two retreated inside, partially to form a new plan, but mostly to get away from the scarecrow woman that must have been Addy’s mother. Toby plopped down on the couch, defeated. That was the extent of his plan. He didn’t know what to do now. He wasn’t some hero. He was just a kid. His sister was just a kid.
Standing in front of him, his sister looked down at him. She looked nervous because she was nervous. Toby wasn’t the only one with a friend she was suddenly unsure of, a friend that had been acting strange.
Toby looked at her quizzically.
She took in a deep breath and tried to smile. “I might know someone we could talk to.”
29
“So, you met this kid at the park? He was just sitting there on a swing?” Toby asked.
“Yes.”
They were nearing the end of the road. The conversation was quick back at the house, both of them eager to get out there and do something, anything to try to help their family. There didn’t seem to be much of anything they could do, not without knowing what parts of Robert’s story were true. The only way to find that out was by acquiring an insider, someone from Black Falls that might have some clue as to what was going on.
When the park came into view, Toby felt it looked desolate, like the remnants of a nuked town, except everything was still intact, rusty and aged, but intact, nonetheless. Behind the iron graveyard was an open field, its grass well-kept and short, and even further beyond that was a row of houses all facing away from them.
Paisley pointed into the distance as they stepped off the sidewalk onto the grass. “He lives in that house over there.”
He could only see the back of the building, but it looked normal enough. In the open, as they crossed the field, he felt exposed, like everybody was hiding behind their curtains, peering through the cracks at them, watching. They were the sacrifices. The words rang repeatedly through his mind like a deathly melody.
Paisley approached the door this time. She looked nearly as nervous as he had. She rapped her knuckles on the door. Unlike at Addy’s, they didn’t have to wait long. A woman came to the door just a minute later. She answered with a smile initially, but it seemed to fade when she spotted Paisley standing there at the door.
“Why are you knocking at this door?” she asked.
That’s when she noticed Toby standing off to the side. That didn’t seem to help. Her face filled with suspicion.
“I don’t know,” Paisley said. That had just been the door she had been at before when she was there. “I was wondering if Eli was around.”
“No. He’s about to eat.”
“What about after? I just want to talk to him really quick.”
“About what?”
She wished she hadn’t said that. Rather, said she wanted to hang out or something. Now there was curiosity in Eli’s mother’s eyes.
“Nothing. Nothing important.”
The woman looked like she was about to push the subject further, but right then, Eli came up from behind her.
“Who is it?” Eli asked a second before spotting Paisley standing in the grass outside the side door. “Oh, hi, Paisley!” He noticed his mom looking off to the side and peeked his head out, seeing a boy standing there who he had never seen before. “Uhm. What’s up?”
“I told them you’re about to eat and can’t come out to play,” his mom said before anybody could answer.
Eli looked from his mom to Paisley, disappointed. “I guess we could hang out tomorrow.”
A high-pitched alarm went off somewhere in the house. “Shoot,” she said. “Have to check the food.”
She turned and quickly disappeared into the house. “Well, I guess I’ll see you guys.”
“Wait!” Paisley said. “We need to talk to you about something.”
“What’s that?” Eli asked.
Eli’s mom shouted for him to get inside. He looked into the house and then back at them, exasperation in his eyes.
“It’s very important,” Paisley said.
Eli heard his mom coming. “I’ll come by your house later tonight, all right?”
“When?” Paisley asked.
But Eli never had the chance to answer. His mother came up behind him. She huffed, “Eli, I said to get inside. Dinner is ready.”
Eli said goodbye and closed the door, leaving Paisley and Toby standing there, no closer to answers than before.
“Well, now what?” Paisley asked.
Toby was looking around the field, waiting for some sort of epiphany. One didn’t seem to be in a hurry to show up. There was one thing, but even thinking of it made him feel sick to his stomach. They could go back to the source. They could go ask Robert.
Their third destination would be their last. After this, neither of them had any other ideas. If Robert’s house yielded no results, they would just have to wait until later when Eli came over.
Toby spotted Robert’s house based on the one and only thing he knew about it, the Steelers flag fluttering in the breeze out front. It was yellow and black, and even though he knew nearly nothing about football, he did know who the Steelers were because of the area they lived in.
As they approached, Toby heard voices, more like shouts, coming from inside the house. He hesitated, standing at the base of the porch steps, wondering to himself if it was too late to turn back. For his family’s sake, he could not. He walked up to the door and knocked.
When he knocked, he didn’t think the lack of response had anything to do with someone creeping silently behind the door, as it were with Addison’s house, but rather, a literal inability to hear his knock. From where he stood, all he could hear from the other side of the door was screaming and crying. Despite the argument being very loud, he couldn’t make out anything the participants were saying. The two opposing voices were go
ing at each other so intensely and the crying was so frequent that the words themselves were drowned out.
He knocked again, this time more of a pound. The arguing came to a sudden halt. Toby’s breathing suddenly sounded like loud booms, his chest heaving up and down, his heart pounding. He heard what he thought was the sound of a floorboard bending under weight behind the door. Then he heard what he thought—no, what he knew—were indistinct whispers.
The door swung open. A woman stood before him. Short and pudgy, she stared into his eyes, her own bloodshot and glossed over. He knew then where the crying had been coming from. Her lips perched and her teeth peeked out from between them like an angry wild animal.
Instinctively, he took a step back from the scathing woman. She acted as though she was going to step forward after him but stopped at the fringe of the door as if something unseen was forbidding her from exiting. A tear formed at the base of her eye and started moving downward, ready to break free and fall onto her already socked cheeks.
“You!” she hissed.
“I—I—was wondering if I could talk to Robert really quick. I’m a friend, Toby.”
“You are no friend!”
Her face had suddenly taken on the same red as her eyes, and she suddenly looked almost like a ripe tomato ready to explode.
“They took Robert because of you! You bastard!”
A man came rushing up behind her. He grabbed the woman by the shoulder and whirled her around. He whispered to her, quickly and quietly, almost as though he were reciting some ritual.
“But our baby!” she called out, a painful sob escaping with the words.
“Honey!” he said.
His next words were quiet, but Toby thought they were, “We can’t.” He stepped to the side and guided the woman briefly away before turning back toward Toby. Unlike the woman, this man looked completely okay other than his disheveled clothes, which could have meant any number of things. He saw Paisley on the sidewalk but focused on Toby.
“You’re looking for Robert? He’s upstairs.”
A Place So Wicked Page 18