LOT'S MOUNTAIN

CHAPTER ONE: 210 Carver Street

Every town has a murder house.

Some cities make a big deal about places where someone loses it and kills people. They turn it into a tourist trap and make you pay to come look at it. I think there's one a few counties over where this girl went nuts and hacked up her family one night with an ax. There's another one where some guy poisoned his relatives at a picnic by slipping cyanide in their cups. Yeah, don't drink the lemonade in Rockbridge County.

Sometimes you have to look pretty hard to find the really scary places, even in Virginia. In the Shenandoah Valley we have some Civil War stuff and a few battlefields, but those places will only give you a shiver here and there. There are darker places, though, ones that make your blood go cold just looking at them. I know a place like that. You go down Main Street, and then take a left on Delphine Avenue. After that, make another left. You want the eighth house on the right, the one with the broken fence and the big backyard. That's 210 Carver Street.

A lot of bad things happened in this house, things I can't forget.

A year ago, a guy lured my older brother Bill Caid down into the basement and murdered him. When the cops finally caught the killer, he fessed up real quick and talked about how my brother lasted a week while he cut on him. I tried not to watch the news on that freak after he was locked up, but one time I saw a picture of him. He looked like a normal guy.

In the daytime, 210 Carver Street doesn't look weird either. Not until the sun sets, like it is now. Then, it's almost like a strange sort of magic happens. I know it's only my imagination, but the house seems to change.

The warped fence pickets that surround the house now look a whole lot like a row of curvy rib bones. Surrounded by shadows, the place looks even colder than it did before. It looks hungry. It's hard to explain, but it looks like it's just waiting for someone to walk through the door and go down the steps, into the basement.

Everything's got a hunger to it, my Granddad Sam used to say. Looking at 210 Carver Street, I know he's right.

As the sky slowly goes from blue to black and everything around me starts to get dark, I get to thinking about all the different places somebody could hide in the house and be watching me right now.

The wind picks up some, making the trees sway back and forth, like they're dancing real slow. Everybody knows that vampires and ghosts aren't real. Zombies, werewolves, and other weird monsters are just things in movies and books. A night like tonight, in a place like this, makes you wonder if there's something out there worse than what happens in fiction. And maybe there are worse things than killers.

Man, I should just go home.

Home. That word makes me laugh a little. I've bounced around to a lot of foster places, but my real house ... I mean, the trailer I used to live in, always looked rundown when I was a kid and had a lawn that was just a bunch of knee-high weeds with some rusty bikes piled on top. The place on Carver Street's a dump, too, all boarded up and nearly swallowed by vines and too-tall grass.

Bill shouldn't have died here. He was smart and funny. He didn't do great in school, but he did better than I ever will.

Everything should be different. Bill should be alive and nagging me to stop dyeing red streaks in my hair. And I'd tell him that since I'm listening and not growing it out too long I can make it whatever color I want. I bet what he'd really get on me for is that I'm still wearing the same worn-out army jacket I found at a thrift store when I was twelve. Hey, once you break something in, why get rid of it, especially when it finally fits? But he'd only mess with me a little bit about all that junk before he'd tell me to enjoy my senior year of high school and then take me out on a hike. We'd go to the National Forest and see the waterfalls or take a ride down the Blue Ridge Parkway and find a trail out there. That's how things are supposed to be. But that's not how they are.