Hide and Seek

There was a moment's pause and then she laughed and called me a

bastard.

"Could be a rattlesnake. They grow 'em big around here. So watch your

step."

"Could be one of those cockroaches," said Steven. "The big ones. The

kind that carry off babies."

"We had them back in Boston," said Kim.

Then they were giggling back there for a while. There was a little

tussle going on. I turned around and saw him tickling her. She

started squealing. I looked at Casey.

"I don't think we've scared 'em yet. Do you?"

"Just wait."

We turned a bend in the road and then just ahead you could see where

the trees stopped and the clearing began, the long grass, weeds and

brambles. Framed in the last arch of birch trees you could see the

Crouch house, a single black mass against the starry sky.

I'd never approached the house this way at night before. So it was

sort of shocking. If ever a house looked haunted, it was the Crouch

place. Suddenly all the stories we'd told about it as kids came back

to me all at once, and looking at it, you had to wonder if there wasn't

a grain of truth in them, as though maybe we'd all had some instinct

about the place, some knowledge in the blood and marrow.

How do you credit the creature under the bed? The monster in the

closet?

you oo uui you oon l.

It was black, solid black, and because there was nothing but the sea

behind it, it seemed to drop right off into nowhere. Like the end of

something.

The house at the end of the world.

It was bad enough remembering the real things, the things I knew to be

true about the place. The dogs. Starved and eaten. The smell of

animal waste and bodies bloated with heat and death. The stacks and

stacks of newspapers- in a house where nobody could read. The smeared,

discolored walls inside.

But there was all the other stuff too. Ideas I'd grown up with,

shuddered over, laughed at, scared myself with over and over again.

The vampires and the evil and the dead. All that came back too, like