MONDAY, 8:52 A.M.
In the morning, Dad announced he was heading out to talk to the real estate agent about the house.
“Can I come?” Xander asked.
“You’re not ready, are you?”
“He hasn’t even brushed his teeth,” Mom said. She was sitting on the rollaway, brushing Toria’s hair.
Dad rolled his eyes at Xander. He gestured toward the door with his head. He tiptoed to the door and opened it quietly—as if anything could happen secretly in a twenty-by-twenty motel room, never mind the flood of sunlight that opening the door brought in.
Grinning, Xander grabbed his T-shirt, socks, and sneakers and hurried out. As he pulled the door shut, Mom called, “At least get some gum.”
In the car, Xander asked, “You didn’t notice anything strange about the house?”
Dad took his time to answer. “I think it’s a special house, Xander. We wouldn’t buy it if it weren’t.”
Xander bristled. Now he knew how it felt to be like Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers—a person who knew something was wrong but was chalked up as crazy because he couldn’t prove it. He couldn’t even count the number of movies featuring that character. If it happened so often on film, it must be pretty common in real life, right? He had the brief image of himself in a white padded room, arms bound by sleeves that tied in the back, yelling through a little window in the door. “I’m not insane, really!” Nurse Ratched would slam the window shut and his cell mate, Jack Nicholson, would tell him to shut up.
He said, “No, I mean—”
“You mean the sounds?” his father asked.
Hope flared in Xander’s gut, feeling a little like when a roller coaster reaches the peak of a tall climb. “Yeah! The sounds.”
“I think all that creaking and groaning was just the house settling, or getting used to having people in it again.”
The roller coaster stalled. “Yeah, settling.”
Dad cleared his throat. Xander noticed the skin on his forehead and around his eyes wrinkle in thought. Dad said, “And the way the sounds seem to trick you.”
Back on the coaster. Xander smiled. “You noticed that?”
His dad threw him a glance. “Of course. I mean, how many footsteps could Toria have taken to get from one end of the house to the other? It’s big, but with all that noise, you’d have thought she was running in place.”
Xander hadn’t considered that. If that had been the only trick of sound, he might have been able to accept that explanation. He could tell his dad didn’t buy it either. “What about . . . other things? Like noises coming from a different direction than they should have?”
For a moment, Dad was unreadable. Xander waited like a man for a verdict. Finally, Dad nodded. “That too,” he said quietly.
Xander felt tension fall away from his chest like a bandage that had been constricting his lungs. The way his dad had said it was all he needed to know: there was something weird about the house. Something that had made his father uneasy as well. And if the house’s strangeness revealed itself through sound, then why not visually too? How Dad had appeared to move instantly from one side of the house to the other, the silhouette that had looked like David in the doorway upstairs. Weren’t these just the eyeball equivalent of the tricks on his ears?
“Why is it like that?” he asked.
“I don’t know, Son. I really don’t.”
“But . . . doesn’t it bother you?” Obviously not, since they were heading to a real estate agent to buy the place.
Dad smiled at Xander. “Not yet.”