Slowly, as if every step could cause another earthquake, he walked up a street that once was called Pleasant, but here someone had changed the sign to read Unpleasant Street.
Finally, he found fresh boot prints that had to have been Jeremy’s. He followed them over a bridge. He knew exactly where Jeremy was headed. His old house. This was the way to Park Street.
Whatever disaster had befallen downtown, Park Street had been mostly spared. But even though the grand old houses still stood, and the brick streets were mostly unbroken, an air of calamity hung heavy over the neighborhood like radioactive fallout.
The colors of the houses, once white or blue or yellow or green, had all faded to a sickly gray. Something had eaten a large hole in the side of the big white house on the corner. Rafe watched, mesmerized, horrified, as a brown snake, fat as a barrel, long as a school bus, pushed into the hole.
If Rafe had been more scared in his life, he couldn’t remember when.
He ran off toward Jeremy’s old house. There it was, the Big Blue Monster. Still blue in places.
The screen door hung open and clack-clacked against the frame. Instinct told him to go in the back door. If this was a trap—and it felt like a trap—he wouldn’t walk straight into it.
He went around to the back and crept carefully in through the kitchen door. He avoided looking at anything too closely. Things were in the sink that shouldn’t have been in the sink, and before he turned corners, he heard the scuttling sounds of creatures scurrying away to hide.
No Jeremy on the main floor or in the abandoned rooms on the second floor. By the time Rafe was on the narrow staircase to the third floor, he was shaking. The third floor, Jeremy’s floor. The bedroom, the full bath, the sitting room. Jeremy’s own private kingdom.
The old steps creaked dully under his feet, and that sound made him forget for one single second this wasn’t Jeremy’s real house.
“Jay?” he called out.
“We’re in here.”
We?
Rafe swallowed, nocked his arrow again, and pushed the door open with his elbow.
He stepped into the past, into Jeremy’s old room just like he remembered it. The same elegant wainscoting along the walls, the old brick fireplace painted bright white, the print of Franz Marc’s The Foxes still hanging over the mantel. Except someone had broken the glass in the print’s frame and sliced the picture up with some kind of knife or razor. Spatters of brown on the white brick made it appear as if the painted foxes had bled on the walls.
Rafe kept moving, clutching his bow tight in his sweating hands. There it was just like he remembered it—the king-sized bed tucked under the eaves, the antique Amish double-wedding ring quilt still on top.
He moved into the room carefully as a soldier crossing no-man’s-land.
“I’m here,” Jeremy said quietly.
Rafe found him sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed, his sword on the rug next to him.
And on his lap lay a small white poodle, seemingly asleep.
“Jay?”
“I saw my father,” Jeremy said. He wouldn’t look at him. Jeremy’s eyes stared blankly out the window.
“Your father? Your dead father?”
“I thought it was him. He looked like him. He wanted to tell me why he—”
“What?”
“Why he killed himself two months before I was born.”
Jeremy stroked the dog’s fur mindlessly. It looked just like Martha, the Coxes’ toy poodle, the dog who had been dead for fifteen years.
“He told me he killed himself because he saw the future, saw that I would run away from Mum and break her heart. He couldn’t stand the thought of being a father to a son who would do that, so that’s why he left us. I could tell he was a Bright Boy, but you know the crazy thing? That didn’t make it any easier to kill him.”
“Jay.”
Jeremy glanced over at the sword. “Nice of them to make me do it in my old room.”
“Where are your apples?” Rafe asked.
“My father wanted one.”
“You had two.”
“I ate one. I had to so I could kill it.”
“Look at me.” Rafe knelt in front of Jeremy, snapped his fingers, and met him eye to eye. “This is the Ghost Town. Granny told us there’d be temptations here. Lies. Monsters. We can’t let it get to us.”
Jeremy gave a little laugh. “At least Martha’s here. Aren’t you, my sweet girl?”
He scratched the dog under her chin, and she raised her head and gave a little whine of pleasure.
“God, I missed this stupid dog,” Jeremy said. “She loved you. She worshipped the ground you walked on. She always slept with Mum unless you were spending the night, then she had to sleep with us. Remember?”
Rafe did want to remember, and he did want to pet her, but he didn’t do it.
“Jay, Martha was a good dog. That’s what I remember about her. Why would a good dog be here in this awful place?” He touched Jeremy’s face. His skin felt clammy and cold to the touch. His hazel eyes had darkened to the dull brown of dead leaves. “That’s not Martha.”
