Ryan Avery is a young skeptic tired of living in the peculiar town of Wrenoakey, where ghost stories are as common as the wind. Residing at the renowned Bramble Farm with his ghost-enthusiast Aunt Hattie, Ryan is convinced her ghost tours are just e...
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Town of Wrenoakey, New Hampshire
Ryan Avery woke to find himself inside the abandoned Cooper's Car Wash again. He felt the cold concrete against his back, and his eyes flew open. The unfinished, rusted pipes of the car wash came into focus above him, laced with spiderwebs and climbing vines, and he sat up with a start. The morning light was purple-gray, and the din of birds in the nearby woods filled his ears. As he pulled himself to his feet and surveyed the worn, white-washed brick walls on either side of him, he rubbed a nervous hand over his mouth.
He shivered with the chill of the early summer morning and a familiar sense of rising panic. Normal people did not wake up miles from home in abandoned car washes he thought as a shiver moved over him. The idea of not being normal made his breath catch in his chest.
He walked briskly toward one wall of the car wash and touched it, hoping it was a dream this time. He wanted his hand to move through that wall and the car wash to dissolve as he woke safely in his bed at the Bramble Farm.
That didn't happen.
He let out a disappointed huff as he felt the whitewashed bricks solid and cold under his fingers. He was here again. Miles from home. The jittery panic was trying to claw its way up from the deep place he kept it locked in. How could he have slept walked this far? What if people saw him? He ran a hand over his messy brown hair and began to pace as he told himself what he often did, "Panicking never helps. Get a grip."
He stood for a moment shivering in his thin tee shirt and sweatpants, when he suddenly realized he was wearing his old, tattered black sneakers. He stared at them for a long moment as he realized one was tied in too many loops and some tiny bit of root was wedged into the knots.
Did he put his sneakers on last night? Or did someone else?
His heart thumped behind his thin black tee shirt and his hands were sweating now. He squatted down and tugged the root from the laces and threw it away. He fought the urge to pull off his sneakers and chuck them into the nearby field, but he didn't relish the idea of walking the two-and-a-half-mile walk back home in his bare feet. He did that the last time.
The abandoned Cooper's Carwash was up the long, muddy, pothole-riddled road that sliced between a thick forest of pine trees. This unpleasant road had been named 'Go Away Road' by the people in town due to the many unfriendly signs that Old Man Cooper had nailed to the trees. The signs were hardly needed. It was a narrow, dark, muddy car-rattling nightmare to drive on, so it was rarely used, even though the fork to the right provided a shortcut to homes on Corlisston Street.
No one ever took the fork to the left. It was a dead end to this decaying single-stall car wash huddled next to the rubble of a collapsed barn. Everyone believed it was cursed. It stood in a small clearing of overgrown grass surrounded by woods. It belonged to Old Man Cooper, an antisocial chicken farmer who'd died ten years ago. The shell of his old farmhouse was cleaved down the middle by a huge oak that had fallen in a violent storm all those years back. The tree had not hit Old Man Cooper, but he was found dead in his bed with his funeral suit hanging nearby. The reason why he built a car wash died with him, but Ryan suspected it would not have been a story that made any sense. The town, however, had determined that in both life and death, he was a man to avoid.
