Hide and Seek

withered ancients, you know and married. The evil old man and his

witchy wife. Not so.

"But here's the important part. They'd been raised, b< them, in the

bughouse. Literally. At Augusta Mental. Till they w< in their teens.

The schizo son and daughter of a crazy Boston combat-zone stripper,

alky too I guess. So you have to wonder what kind of shape they were

in to worry about a pack of dogs, you know

"Geez."

"Good story," said Casey.

And it was. Good enough, certainly, to wile away an hour o\ sodas at

Harmon's. But it still left us with nothing to do. Workt had stripped

the Crouch place and refinished it, and for a coupl< years a retired

doctor and his wife had lived there, civilize presumably, tamed it. So

that now, even though the old man was longer there and the house lay

empty, it was just another house the woods. Nothing you'd want to

visit.

It had amused us, though, back then when we were kids, the next few

years Dead River had its very own haunted hoi Somewhere to go to scare

yourself on Halloween. That was befc the doctor came in.

Teenage folklore being what it is, our stories about Ben and Mary

They were really dead, for one thing. Their ghosts had frightened

workmen cleaning up the basement. They could be heard calling dogs on

foggy, rainy nights. Some of these yarns I started myself, before I

outgrew them.

My favorite turned on the disappearance itself.

According to this one the eviction never happened. The truth was that

the dogs had turned on Ben and Mary and eaten them. Every scrap.

Bones and all. I liked that story. I think Rafferty made it up. I

kept remembering all those lost, dazed eyes.

I thought the dogs deserved their revenge.