Crossing Over

Prologue

The house had stood abandoned for over two decades. It sat alone, the last house on the street at the end of Pinewood Drive. A dead-end road at the edge of town. Years ago it had been a beautiful property but with no one around to attend to the day-to-day upkeep it had quickly fallen into disrepair.

The woods that had once served as a border to the well-manicured yard had taken over, now beginning to encroach on the house itself. Large portions of what had once been a gravel drive were starting to sprout saplings and small scruffy bushes that left no room for a vehicle to pass. Along the side of the house, poison ivy ran in long vines and curled around the edges of the large concrete front porch. Roses that had once grown in a little bed in front of the house now sprouted pink blooms from halfway up one of the wooden porch railings. The grass in the front yard had grown wild and now stood almost waist-high in places with large flowering weeds sprouting up from every available crevice.

The long white porch railing was beginning to sag and the paint had long ago begun to chip and peel. Around the two-story structure, broken windows gaped like yawning mouths, and pieces of jagged glass stuck up angrily from the remaining window frames. In several sections of the dark roof shingles were missing ripped free during the last big storm.

People in town had mostly forgotten about the old house, but sometimes at night when a particularly bad storm would roll through a few of the older Inglewood residents would find themselves anxiously pacing by their windows staring out into the rain remembering a night just like this one. A night years ago where a storm just like this had brought death to their small town and as the thunder roared overhead something inside the house on Pinewood Drive stirred, moving restlessly through the empty rooms. Silently it walked alone and its secrets stayed well hidden.