Chapter Two

I slowed a bit, not so sure if I wanted this wax relic to notice me. Something wasn’t right. His hair was weird, wispy and thin like stretched bits of cotton, and he hunched over, sort of like his spine had been cracked in two and he learned to walk without it.

Maybe the House seeped into my brain a little too much. Maybe I was already missing my friends. The Hollow was cell phone black hole for sure; I lost service as soon as Dad steered around the final curve in our approach to town. The clouds hadn’t helped—not the best omen on moving day, especially in the usually dry midsummer heat.

“Nick,” Mom said, smiling her best though exhausted. “This is Mr. Sanderson, one of our new neighbors.”

The relic poked his hand at me, and I mean relic. I thought at first he’d lost his hand in the war, whatever war he could have been young enough to fight. Then I noticed fingers unfold from the splotchy thing he offered me. When I touched it though, my heart eased into a cruising speed. Not the clammy paw I’d expected.

“Nick,” I said.

“Hello Nicholas. I’m Jeb Sanderson. I had a son like you, once.” His voice eeked out, small and quiet. I almost had to ask him to repeat himself. Then his grip tightened on my hand, and he leaned closer, looking me over with his eyes, two wet marbles with too much white. He smelled a little like black licorice. “Welcome to the Hollow, or Evergreen Estates as it stands now.”

Jeb Sanderson was the first person to call the place “the Hollow”, and for me at least, the name stuck. He looked hollow, especially his eyes—like something was missing.

“Jeb was telling us a bit about the new development. Says one other couple has moved in.”

“Great.” I slowly retrieved my hand from Sanderson’s grip. “I’m going to head in, see about sorting my clothes or something.”

“Nice to meet you, Nicholas.”

I nodded quickly, trying to smile at least a little, and then brushed past Mom on the way inside. Sanderson watched me the whole time, burning me with those wet marble eyes.

__________

My sister, Tabby—although she insisted on being called Tabitha as soon as she turned thirteen—was in her room going obsessive-compulsive on her closet. She pushed her face into the hallway as I walked by.

“Did you see the old guy?” She smashed her eyebrows down with disgust.

Tabby and I could have been twins, except for the gender difference and three years separation and all. Sure, she was a little on the short side and I topped out just over six feet, but we both had naturally curly hair—dark brown—and pale blue eyes set in slender faces. Naturally curly hair is “darling” on a girl, but a major pain for me, thus I kept mine cropped low.

Our bodies were thin, like Dad. Thin and pale with too many freckles to count. Needless to say, Tabby and I spent our lives as one of two colors: Elmer’s glue or Elmo. Mom wasn’t a slouch, either—we inherited her baby blues. She was just shorter, stockier and more athletic than the lot of us. She used to work as a corporate fitness trainer before the big heave-ho.

Of course, Mom and Tabby had these lips, too. On any other girl, I’d have thought Angelina Jolie. On my family members, I tried to envision Mick Jagger.

“Yeah. I shook his hand.”

Tabby wrinkled her nose. “He creeped me out.”

I smiled. “I told him you’d like to water his houseplants.”

“Not funny, Nick.” She glared at me. Despite the freckles and pasty skin, Tabby could glare just like Mom. “He really gave me the creeps. I got this vibe, like I could tell he wasn’t telling the truth just by looking at him. A feeling I have, I guess.”

“What, you’re psychic now?”

“You don’t have to be a jerk all the time.” She slammed the door and cranked her boy-band tunes.

Once in my room, I shut my own door. After the car ride and everything, I had enough of the family. Even so, I felt kind of lonely. Tabby and I were never close, not really anyway. But she was the only person I would know in school, and that had to count for something.

Flopping onto the bed, I stared at the ceiling, trying to imagine ways in which I could survive the year. Some clouds sailed across the sky, and my room filled with morphing shadows. I wasn’t used to the house, of course, but I didn’t expect so much midday darkness.

In fact, everything about the place felt wrong—the House, my mood, and of course the freak-show neighbor, Jeb Sanderson. My brain kept replaying the image of the old guy and his talon-like hands. “I had a son like you, once.” The blank look in his eyes sort of echoed the empty windows in the House.

Chapter One

I found the half-devoured house on our first afternoon in Broughton’s Hollow.

Dad and Mom were busy unpacking, Tabby was in her room being a moody fourteen-year-old, and I was bored. It was day one in Nowhere, Kansas, and my skull had already started to ache. Okay, the place was officially called Evergreen Estates, and it was a new development, one of those places where people come in and smash old houses or bulldoze nature to make room for new construction. But Dad called the place Broughton’s Hollow because that was the name of the town when he was a kid. He grew up in nearby Springdale, the little town where I’d be a senior in the fall.

I figured the initials B.H. fit the place pretty well. B.H. as in black hole. As in goodbye social life, sorry to see you go, but Nick is stuck in Kansas and no tornado is going to ferry his sorry ass to Oz.
Officially, we moved because of Mom. Not because she wanted to; she was a city girl, St. Louis born and raised. No, we moved because Mom lost her job with Sprint. Dad was an English teacher, and they couldn’t afford our place in Kansas City. Tabby’s hospital bills still hung over the family, and the ‘rents even had not-so-secret conversations about how a move might help her. I overheard them talking about it on more than one occasion even though it was hush-hush. Besides, the new house was cheap. “A steal,” Dad said.

Broughton’s Hollow—Evergreen Estates. Whatever. It was nothing like K.C.

So while everyone was unpacking, I decided to go for a run. It had been a long day, I was stiff, and I figured that I could work in a few laps before dinner. Hitting a pool would have been nicer—more my style, but then again anything would have been nicer than moving two weeks before my senior year. Who knew if there was a decent lap pool within fifty miles? Evergreen was a new development, just about ten houses—all on a couple of newly paved streets. I counted when we pulled in that morning. I wasn’t really paying too much attention of course. I also had the whole “teenage resistance” thing going on, or so said Mom.

The streets were paved with varying degrees of success. The new streets, like ours, were smooth and black. The county roads, and streets that held remnants of older houses surviving from Dad’s childhood, lay in cracked stretches with weeds and grass poking thorough the gashes. I ran down one of those roads, away from the development, following the county highway around low hills that sort of sheltered the Hollow. My long legs took the broken road in easy strides while I scanned the horizon. Kansas is flat, but mostly out west. In the northeast, little towns like Broughton’s Hollow were tucked away between hills and stands of cottonwood trees, lost amongst green smudges that marked rivers or streams.

I rounded a turn and something hit me, landed in my gut with the force of a ball of ice. Even though it was July, I shivered. The sun had been in hiding all day, resting behind a healthy layer of rain clouds, so it was colder than usual. But that wasn’t it.

I didn’t shiver because of the cold. There, in front of me, burrowed in the side of one of these low hills, rested the ruins of an old house, almost twice the size of our new place. A monster lurking in the shadows. It was a predator, an abomination—the outside walls were mostly smashed, almost peeled off, from a little tower that rose in the middle to the sprawling foundation. The roof was intact, but splinters of graying wood from the torn up siding jutted toward me like broken teeth. The sun peeked out just enough to ignite the front of the House before vanishing into the granite sky, and bits of glass glinted like flickering eyes.

For a moment, the House was alive.

I’d been distracted while running, trying to ignore the stiffness in my legs and thinking about how much suckage I’d have to contend with at Springdale High, but then the House leapt out of nowhere, kind of like it had been waiting in the shadows of the hill. With a quick glance to either side, I noticed I was a couple hundred yards from the edge of the development. My brain overcrowded with the feeling that the House was watching me.

I hurried back home. My feet pounded against the ground, and my heart clanged away inside chest as I ran as fast as I could for the first hundred yards. My paced slowed, and I was almost fully thawed by the time I rounded the last of the highway and saw the old man standing on our porch, talking to Mom.

Instant freeze again.