Property Condemned

-4-

The four of them clustered together on the lawn, knee-deep in weeds. Bees and blowflies swarmed in the air around them. No one moved for more than a minute. Crow could feel the spit in his mouth drying to paste.

I want to do this, he thought, but that lie sounded exactly like what it was.

The house glowered down at him.

The windows, even the shuttered ones, were like eyes. The ones with broken panes were like the empty eye-sockets of old skulls, like the ones in the science class in school. Crow spent hours staring into those dark eye-holes, wondering if there was anything of the original owner’s personality in there. Not once did he feel anything. Now, just looking at those black and empty windows made Crow shudder, because he was getting the itchy feeling that there was something looking back.

The shuttered windows somehow bothered him more than the open ones. They seemed… he fished for the word.

Sneaky?

No, that wasn’t right. That was too cliché, and Crow had read every ghost story he could find. Sneaky wasn’t right. He dug through his vocabulary and came up short. The closest thing that seemed to fit — and Crow had no idea how it fit — was hungry.

He almost laughed. How could shuttered windows look hungry?

“That’s stupid.”

It wasn’t until Stick turned to him and asked what he was talking about that Crow realized he’d spoken the words aloud.

He looked at the others and all of them, even Val, were stiff with apprehension. The Croft house scared them. Really scared them.

Because they believed there was something in there.

They all paused there in the yard, closer to their bikes and the road than they were to that porch.

They believed.

Crow wanted to shout and he wanted to laugh.

“Well,” said Val, “let’s go.”

The Four Horseman, unhorsed, approached the porch.