It was just a house. Just a weathered old house in a hidden grove, shuttered and still under the shadowed reach of pale moonlight through listless clouds. It shouldn’t beckon him so, prying him from the truck and that wrinkled magazine page from his pocket. The one with the white creases from his folding and unfolding and folding and . . .
Marshall Hawkins took a frayed breath, inhaling the musty scent of damp soil, exhaling memories that never quite dissolved, and, fingers numb, unfolded the paper. Not that he had to look to know what he'd see. Two stories, gaping windows, gleaming siding, and a towering elm tree out front. All under splashy letters advertising some construction company. He slid his thumb over the Victorian’s deep-blue door at the center of the faded ad.
Just a house.
Except the image on the gloss-print now stared at him in real life too. An aged version, to be sure, with peeling wood and a sagging porch, naked, gnarled vines climbing one side. And this front door was brown. Still. It was uncanny. Like looking at a decades-old photograph of a woman in her youth and then lifting your gaze to see the grandmother she’d become. It could almost be the same house.
And he could almost hear Laney's voice.
"It's perfect, Dad. It just needs a swing."
A sharp wind snagged the page and his grip tightened. A raindrop, or maybe a lone tear, landed on the paper. And the thudding in his head—the reason he'd pulled off the highway in the first place, followed a winding rural road until he came upon this copse and the house it secreted—turned to thunder.
This wasn’t like the other headaches. And even if it were, he’d surrendered every last prescription bottle to his sister this morning. He’d swallowed a few measly aspirin earlier, probably right around the time he’d crossed the border into Iowa. But the throbbing had only worsened.
The pain squeezed until Marshall’s knees landed in soggy grass and his vision fogged, Laney’s house blurring in front of him.
But it’s not. It’s not Laney’s house. Because Laney’s not . . .
The page between his loosening fingers whipped in the wind as the house faded from view. The last thing he saw before he gave in to the darkness was a metal sign staked to the ground underneath a bowing tree, letters stenciled—The Everwood.