SUNDAY, 11:43 A.M.
The road simply ended. No cul-de-sac. No sign like the ones they had seen before: “Private property. No trespassing.” Or “No motorized vehicles beyond this point.” Just road . . . then trees.
Dad pulled to a stop and looked around. He rolled down the window and listened, as though the house would some- how make itself known. Wind in the trees, nothing more.
He picked up the listing page and studied it.
Mom leaned forward to squint through the windshield.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” she asked.
Dad nodded.
She reached for the paper, but he was already crunching it into a ball. He tossed it out the window.
She said, “Maybe it’s out of sight. With all these trees . . .”
“Nah.” He shifted into reverse and backed up. Shifting again, he drove sharply toward the side of the road, then reversed again.
“Three-point turn,” he told Xander.
“I know. We covered that in—” Xander stopped. He was gazing into the woods and saw a line too straight, something too flat to be natural. “Wait. I think I see it.”
“What?” Mom said. “The house?” She looked back at him, then to where he was staring. David and Toria clicked out of their seatbelts and crowded up against him to look.
“I . . . think so,” he said. He opened the door and stepped out. Toria nearly tumbled out after him. Dad killed the engine, and they gathered at the end of the road.
“I see it!” David said. He ran into the woods.
“Hey!” Dad called. Too late: David was already gone. All of them plunged in, crunching over pine needles and dead branches.
Twenty paces in, Xander saw it and wondered how they had missed it from the road. It was two stories high, and it was capped by a steeply pitched roof, from which two dormer windows protruded. A covered porch ran the length of the front, casting the entry door and entire lower level in shadows. The supports were ornately carved columns. Occupying the left front corner was a round tower that rose slightly higher than the rest of the house. It wasn’t really round, though. It was an octagon, with only five sides showing. At the tip of its tall spire was a black weathervane. As Xander watched, an unfelt breeze made it turn; it squeaked like a mouse caught in an eagle’s talons. The exterior paint—whatever color it had once been—had been washed gray by years of weather and neglect. It seemed to Xander to be as much a part of the surrounding forest as the trees themselves.
“Oh, Ed!” Mom exclaimed. “It’s a Victorian.”
“Pure Queen Anne,” Dad agreed.
Tendrils of mist slithered over the forest floor, around the base of trees. Xander noticed that some of it had climbed the porch pillars and drifted, almost invisibly, over the shingles of the porch roof. It reminded him of an old TV series Dean’s dad had bought on DVD: Dark Shadows. It was about a creepy old house and a vampire who lived there. Barnabas, Xander remembered.
David was standing farther in, halfway to the house. His head was bent back as he took in the tower, tall as a silo.
Mom said, “I think it used to be green, with darker trim.”
“Makes sense,” Dad suggested. “One of the original tenets of Victorian architecture was that homes blend in with their surroundings.”
Xander hung back as his family moved forward as one.
Something on the ground caught his eye and he stepped over to it. Off to the side, away from where they had walked, shoe prints were pushed into an area of soft dirt. The prints approached the house at an angle. Xander scanned back toward the road, where they came from, then toward the house, but did not see any other prints. He wondered how long ago they had been made. They seemed fresh, undamaged by rain or wind or scampering animals.
The back of his neck tingled and he knew—knew!—he was being watched. He spun toward his family, but their attention was on the house. He scanned the windows, expecting to see someone looking out or a curtain falling back in place. But he saw nothing like that: no faces, no moving curtains. The feeling of being watched stayed with him. He thought of Barnabas again and a shiver ran up his spine, like a spider with cold feet.
His family had reached the steps leading up to the porch and double front doors. The wood creaked as they climbed, and Xander half-expected one of them to crash through the rotting boards.
“Is anyone home?” Toria asked.
“I don’t think anyone lives here, honey,” Mom said.
“Why not?” David said. “It’s cool.”
Wind blew through the treetops, and the weathervane squeeeeeeaked. Xander looked up at it, and it rotated slowly to point at him.
Without knocking, Dad pushed open the door and walked in. Mom followed, then David and Toria. To Xander, it looked like the house was eating them, just popping them in, one at a time.
“Hey!” he called to the open doorway. He felt uneasy but didn’t know why. It was just an old house in the woods. And the footprints could have been left by the real estate people or someone else looking for a house. He walked toward the front steps. A breeze blew past him. It was cold, and it came from the house. He looked up at the eaves, where the roof hung over the sides of the house. It looked taller, this close. He had the sense that he had not walked up to the house, but it had walked up to him, a monster sizing him up.
David’s voice drifted out to him, saying something was cool. He ascended the steps. They groaned and creaked. At the open doorway, he stopped. A curved staircase followed the wall to the second floor high above the first. To his right, a wide doorway serviced a dining room. He could see two chairs, part of a table, a buffet, and cabinets on the far wall. The doors pushed straight into the walls—pocket doors, Xander knew they were called. They were what David had thought was cool.
To his left another archway led to a study or library. Its walls were lined in shelves that were packed with dusty books. Straight ahead, beyond the foyer, a hallway led to a room where the family was gathered. From their words, he assumed they were in the kitchen: “Here’s a pantry.” “Beautiful cabinets . . .” “There are dirty dishes in the sink!” “Gross!”
Furniture, books, dishes in the sink. If the items themselves suggested someone still lived there, the setting quickly corrected that misconception. Cobwebs clung to the corners where the walls and ceiling met. Dust coated the floors, showing where his family had walked as clearly as if they had traipsed over the smooth beach sand. Wallpaper curled off the walls like peels from a banana. Several banister spindles were broken or missing. Grime lined the fancy carvings in the wood on the banister, around the doors, the doors themselves. Gaps wide enough to stick a finger into had formed between several planks in the hardwood floor.
“Xander!” Dad called from the kitchen. He beckoned to him. “Come on! Check this out!”
He stepped fully into the house. The air inside was cool on his skin. He turned, expecting the front door to close on its own. But it stayed open, as it was supposed to. He shook his head, chiding himself for letting an old house spook him.
He walked toward the kitchen.
Behind him, the front door slammed shut.