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  A Place So Wicked

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any way by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the author except as provided by USA copyright law.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, descriptions, entities, and incidents included in the story are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, events, and entities is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Christian Bentulan

  All rights reserved. Copyright © 2021 Patrick Reuman

  All rights reserved.

  1

  Up ahead stood a sign, strung up over the center of the highway by a metal arch, white letters reading against a green background: Black Falls, New York one mile. Toby let out a deep sigh of relief, feeling the pain in his buttocks pulse with the hours of sitting they had done in the car.

  He didn’t understand why they had to move so far away to begin with. His dad had received tons of job offers closer to home, some close enough even that they may not have needed to move at all. Yet there they were, in the middle of nowhere New York, five hours into driving, and nearly three hundred fifty miles away from all the friends it took him years of awkwardness to acquire.

  Toby wasn’t tall, he wasn’t strong, he wasn’t handsome, and he definitely wasn’t cool. But after years of blending in and working to find his place in the puzzle, he had finally found a small group of friends to be a part of. And it only took him until the tenth grade.

  Then POOF. It was all gone.

  Something happened to his dad at work, something that he refused to be specific about, which forced him to look for a new job. As a top software engineer, the search didn’t take long. He had offers from all across the state, even some in other states. They poured in like his father was the last software engineer on earth.

  But he picked this one, at some company Toby had never even heard of, and he liked to think of himself as mildly above-average in terms of tech-knowhow. He recalled his dad bursting in through the door one night, calling everyone into the living room together, and announcing the newly acquired job like he had just won the lottery. They would be moving to Black Falls, a town that took him at least ten minutes to search for on the map before he finally gave in and used an internet map instead, which almost seemed to have troubles of its own locating the tiny dot. The town’s title on the map was in such small letters, dwarfed by many of the other towns in the area, signifying the minute size of Black Falls.

  And Black Falls? What kind of dumb name was that? Toby wondered if whoever gave the town that name had simply thought it was a cool name or if there were actually Black Falls somewhere in the area. He doubted it.

  His father noticed Toby’s sigh and offered a smile through the rear-view mirror. “You’re gonna love this place,” he said.

  “Am I?” Toby replied.

  His dad nodded. “Yep. It’s beautiful up here. Quiet. Pretty small school.”

  Toby had already looked the school part up. The entire high school consisted of 534 students, about one-third of what his old school had. This was not good news in Toby’s opinion. Fewer students meant it would be harder to blend in. Fewer students meant their showing up would be noticed. They would be the new kids in town.

  For his siblings, Trevor and Paisley, who were twins and thirteen years old, that probably wouldn’t make much of a difference. Whatever genes they had acquired had skipped over him completely. Both of them were popular back home. Both, as weird as it sounded, looked good, way better than him. They had no problems. Unlike Toby and his freckles and glasses. His father used to joke that Toby must have been the child of the milkman. To Toby, that reality didn’t seem all that unlikely.

  “Did you know that Black Falls was actually rated in USA Today as one of the quickest up-and-coming towns in New York? Its local economy trumps pretty much every other surrounding city,” his dad said. “I looked it up.”

  Toby rolled his eyes. “Nice.”

  “And, not to brag, but we got one of the biggest houses there. I practically robbed the property owners. They didn’t seem to care too much, though.”

  “I call dibs on whatever bedroom I want,” Trevor said.

  Paisley started to interject, but their dad cut her off. “I’ll decide who gets what room. We’re not going to fight about stupid things.”

  Trevor groaned. “Easy for you to say when you’ll give yourself the biggest room.”

  Their mother turned in her seat, looking back at them crammed in the backseat of the car. “You can decide who gets the biggest bedroom when you pay for the house.”

  They turned off the highway and glided toward a stoplight. His dad wasn’t wrong. The place was beautiful. He couldn’t quite put his finger on exactly what it was about it that made it this way. The greens: the grass, the leaves in the trees, all of it looked greener somehow, the sky bluer. Everything was just…more.

  After they rounded the corner, the town itself came into view quite quickly. A whole crowd of people stood just to the left, out in front of a large church. The building had three tall pillars with crosses at the upper point of each. They were all waving and smiling at them, a mix of older people and younger with a few children scattered here and there. They were all smiling and waving as they came to a stop at a stop sign. His dad rolled the window down, and in rushed a wave of scents, hamburgers, hotdogs, potato salad, and the likes. That’s when Toby noticed the smoke billowing up from a grill and the picnic tables behind the crowd of people.

  “How’re you folks doing?” his dad asked with a smile of his own, sounding almost as if he was about to sell the people timeshares.

  “We’re good!” one man called out.

  “Welcome to town!” a woman said from somewhere in the mass of people.

  “Thank you, we’re glad to be here.”

  Toby wondered how these people knew they were new to town, but he supposed it must just be a small-town thing. A honk rang out from behind them. Toby glanced back. It was his uncle Robbie in the moving truck. He had almost forgotten Robbie was back there, and now the man wanted them to get going. Toby noticed the other car waiting behind Robbie. His dad was looking back, too.

  His dad bid the congregation farewell and rolled up his window. “He could be a little patient,” his father grumbled. “These people are going to be our neighbors.”

  In Toby’s head, he sided with his uncle. He wanted to get to this house, get some of his things arranged, and take a nap. Even though he doubted the nap would happen with all the things they had to bring into the house, it was still nice to think about. The road had been long, not hard, but definitely boring, which had its toll on him. He was tired.

  It was a few streets later before they passed anyone else. A middle-aged couple riding their bikes together came to a halt as they passed. The couple put their hands up in the air and waved. Only their father waved back this time.

  “Here we are,” his dad said as they turned onto Ripley Avenue.

  They slowed in front of a house. Toby wondered why his dad was driving so slowly until the car came to a near stop as it rounded into the driveway. Even then, Toby couldn’t believe what was happening. What stood in front of them was not merely a house, Toby thought. The word that came to mind was manor; this was a manor.

  2

  Having a house like this would definitely score him some points at his new school. With a smile, Toby looked around at the neighboring houses as he got out of the car. None of the other houses looked nearly as grand as the one he stood in front of. He hated himself for caring so much, but he would definitely be thought of at school as the kid whose family lives in the big fancy hous
e, and that was a good thing.

  Clouds passed over, leaving Toby and the house in a pool of dark shade. The house was tall in height but even more significant in its width. Its two stories spread wide like the shoulders of the world’s strongest man, which he had seen on the television earlier that year, some Icelandic man whose name he couldn’t even begin to remember. It intimidated even Toby as he stepped closer to its entrance, which was flanked by two broad pillars holding up a small outside roof. Above it was an attic, which stretched from one end of the goliath house to the other and had tall, thin windows, sort of like glassed eyes that stared down at him and the surrounding neighborhood. An involuntary shiver reverberated through his spine.

  “If you’re gonna stand there,” his dad said, “then make yourself useful and get the house unlocked.”

  Just as Toby turned around, his dad flung the keys to him. He barely caught them, almost losing his grip on the plastic keychain. He looked down at the key resting in the palm of his hand. It was bronze and looked decrepit. He wondered if it was actually ancient or just made to look that way, adding to the mysterious vibe that the house already gave off.

  The key slid in easily. He twisted the knob and pushed the door open. It glided back and tapped softly against the wall. The opening was wide and empty. He expected it to be empty, of course, but something about the sheer size of the space made it feel so much emptier. Up ahead was a wide set of wooden stairs, which went up ten to fifteen steps and then turned to the left for the last five or so.

  “Watch out,” Robbie said as he almost plowed Toby over, carrying a stack of boxes.

  Toby jumped to the side, leaving plenty of space to spare. He found himself then in the entrance to a massive room, the potential living room, he guessed. There were two more sizable windows there, almost connecting into one single massive window, allowing the entirety of the outside world’s sunshine to rain in its daylight across the entire room.

  “Crazy, huh?” his dad said. “Not even sure what we’re going to do with all this space, but I’m sure we can figure something out.” He walked past Toby and set some boxes down along the living room wall. “It’s a colonial. We have a house with a name, kind of cool. Apparently, it’s one of the oldest houses in town.”

  For whatever reason, that news didn’t surprise Toby in the least. The house looked oddly new, but there was an old smell, or atmosphere, about the place that didn’t quite match the paint on the walls and the gleam of the glass.

  “Wow, it’s even more beautiful than I remember,” his mom said as she joined them. “I can’t believe this.”

  She set her boxes next to the others and then twirled, soaking in the room in its entirety. Her smile glowed, which spread to Toby, forcing him to crack the smallest of smiles himself.

  “It is pretty nice,” Toby conceded.

  His dad rounded past him, back toward the front door. “Well, let’s get everything in the house and we can finishing marveling later.”

  It took them about two hours to get everything inside. It would have taken them much longer had his parents not decided at the get-go to only bring the essentials to their new home. Leading up to the move, they held multiple garage sales, pawning off well more than half of their belongs. Pretty much all they brought were beds, a couch, some dressers, an old bookcase their mother had received from their grandmother after her passing, and a handful of other pieces of furniture. Outside of that, he and his siblings were told to pack what they could into two or three boxes and prepare the rest for resale.

  This didn’t bother him as much as he had expected it to. Turned out, he didn’t really care all that much about most of what he owned. He remembered taking down his band posters and staring at them, wondering if he was ready to say goodbye, and realized then that he really was. So many of the things that he loved changed along with him.

  As he exited the house in search of the final load, his brother and sister were entering with boxes of their own. They were squabbling about something Toby didn’t catch much of and didn’t really care about. The two of them seemed distant to him most of the time. They seemed to have their own thing going on, as twins, with their own inside stories and what-not.

  As he reached the back of the moving truck, he heard a quiet shuffle behind him. He turned to see a grey cat standing about five feet away on the sidewalk. It stared at him with its yellow eyes, its tail wagging around like it wasn’t sure where to go. Toby stepped toward it, kneeling slightly. He fish-puckered his lips and made a cat-call. The feline stepped back apprehensively. Toby wasn’t surprised. If anything, he was surprised it hadn’t taken off already. He took another step toward it. Only, this time, it didn’t back away. Instead, its claws sprung from within its paws like retractable blades and the creature showed its yellow teeth. It hissed at him and then meowed loudly and wildly. Toby noticed its eyes move to the side like it was looking at something beside him or behind him. He turned and looked, but there was nothing there. When he turned back, the cat darted off, its legs moving so quickly it lost balance momentarily before catching itself and vanishing like a lightning bolt.

  He felt that chill again, the one he had when he first stared up at the house, or maybe, he thought, when it stared at him. He looked to his side again and saw nothing then shifted his attention toward the colonial, as his dad had called it, behind him. He startled when he noticed movement on the other side of one of the windows, but when a cloud passed and light shone directly down onto the window, he noticed it was only his sister exploring what he assumed was one of the bedrooms.

  When he reentered the house with the final box, his parents were already teaming up on the furniture, moving the couch into its final location against one of the room’s far walls. But, knowing his mother, it wouldn’t be the couch’s final resting place for long. She loved to redecorate.

  He set the box down along with the others and ducked out of the room before his parents could have the chance to notice him and request his assistance with moving things. He’d already noticed the absence of his siblings and thought they had the right idea.

  The stairs were creaky, as they should be if the house was truly as old as he had been told. But they were also tall and long, unlike the narrow tripping hazards that led from the first to the second floor of their old house. At the top, the hall wrapped openly around each side of the stairs, going left, and also right, toward multiple bedrooms. In one direction, to the right, he saw five doors, two on the right side of the hall, two on the left, and a final door at the very end. To the left of the stairs were only two doors and then the hall ended with a window.

  He heard a sound coming from his left, from within one of the rooms, beyond a closed door. He heard what sounded like only one voice but figured it was probably his brother and sister talking quietly about God only knew what. If one of them had already chosen one of those bedrooms, he would hurry off to the right and find his own before they were all taken.

  The walls were a bright eggshell white. He wasn’t entirely sure, but he thought he could still smell the paint’s scent and wondered if this was part of the remodeling his dad had mentioned on their way there. The ceiling above was made from some sort of unpainted wood, a tan color with patches of black throughout, some knots still lodged in the wood from when it was a tree.

  The first door he opened turned out not to be a bedroom at all, but instead a bathroom complete with a shower, a sink, and, unsurprisingly, more space than he imagined someone needing in a bathroom. There were feet of space between the sink, the toilet, and the shower. Across from the sink and toilet were multiple shelves where he was willing to bet towels would go. But the extra space was offsetting. There was just so much of it, like someone expected ten people to be in the bathroom at one time. He hoped to God this was never the case.

  The next room, this one almost directly across from the bathroom, turned out to be indeed a bedroom, but it was small, about the same size as the bathroom, which, now that he thought of it, wasn’t all
that much smaller than his bedroom back at the old house. He closed the door quickly, not willing to accept that one as his room. He had to move before his brother and sister decided they would venture this way and try to lay claim to everything else.

  The next door, this one back on the other side with the bathroom, led to stairs, which went upward to what he assumed was the attic. He considered going up to look, wondering if maybe that would make for a good bedroom, remembering how the attic appeared to stretch across the entire length of the house. He decided against it. The attic at their old house got so hot in the summer months and then equally as cold in the winter due to a lack of insulation. With this attic’s significant increase in size, he could only imagine how difficult it would be to heat and cool. Not only that but having so much space would be a little weird, and when he thought about it a little longer, a little creepy as well. He may not even be able to see across to the other end of the room at night. He wasn’t sure why that mattered, but it suddenly did.

  He closed the door and ventured on to the next door. This one led into a room significantly larger than the last. At one end was what looked like a closet. There were two windows, but they weren’t big and creepy like some of the others, nor were they stretching across the whole room like in the living room. He counted four plug outlets at first glance. Plug outlets galore.

  He decided right then that this was going to be his bedroom, even if he had to go to war for it. He had to have some pull as the oldest child, and he would use it without hesitation.

  He heard a noise in the next room over and turned to face that door. It sounded like Paisley and Trevor talking, but he hadn’t noticed either of them walk by, which was strange. He was sure he would have heard them. How couldn’t he? He had hardly even entered any of the rooms. But as he walked toward the final room, the voices became clear, definitely the sound of his brother and sister talking coming out through the partially opened door.