A Place So Wicked Read online

  As he pulled open the door the rest of the way, the two of them turned to face him.

  “Hey,” Trevor said.

  Paisley just waved.

  Toby looked back down the hall, in the direction of the stairs, then back at the other two.

  “Did you guys walk by just now?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?” Paisley answered, her eyebrow lifting just slightly.

  “Like, did you guys walk down the hall just now, to this room?”

  “No,” she said. “We’ve been in here for a bit debating who should get this room. The answer is me, by the way.”

  Toby took in the room for the first time. It was pretty big but smaller than the room next door, the room that was going to be his. As if reading his mind, she explained herself.

  “The closet is huge. It would be perfect for me,” she said.

  “You don’t need a big, stupid closet,” Trevor said.

  “You can have the next room over,” she demanded.

  “No,” Toby cut in. “That’s going to be my room.”

  They both looked at him like he was insane. He didn’t back down, though, allowing the room to remain in silence for another long minute.

  “So, neither of you were in the rooms in the other hall.” He pointed in that direction, just to make sure they knew exactly what he was asking.

  They took a few seconds to reply, as if remembering that there were in fact two other rooms to look at.

  “No,” Trevor said. “Haven’t been over there yet, now that you mention it.”

  Toby left the room and closed the door without saying goodbye. His mind was too lost within itself. He was sure he had heard a voice coming from that other room. For a moment, he wondered if maybe it was Uncle Robbie, but then he remembered that it was a girl’s voice, not a man’s, that he heard. Robbie must have been downstairs moving things around with his parents. Maybe, he thought, he truly was just crazy.

  As he walked past the door that led to the attic, he stopped. Perhaps the attic was worth a quick look after all. If it was nice, maybe it would save him the argument later when they went to war over who got what bedroom.

  He pulled open the door and looked up the narrow stairway. The light switch was on the wall to the right. He gave it a flick, lighting up the stairway in some underground-feeling way. Like he had just lit the tunnel in some coalmine a mile underneath the earth’s surface.

  There was a second door at the top, leading into the attic itself. A few steps up, the door squeaked behind him. He glanced back as it shut but only a little bit. It didn’t slam shut sinisterly like in some horror film, just moved slightly like a decent breeze nudged it. He ignored it and continued to the top, where he opened the next door and stepped into the attic.

  There were two windows up there, both creepy and tall, letting in ample lighting from the outside. But he could swear he had seen three when he was outside. His whole body gave a sudden spastic shiver as if it just then realized how chilly it was up there, which was weird since heat was supposed to rise and the rest of the house felt just fine. That’s when he noticed a door. Even though light shone into the room, the door seemed to be shrouded in a shadow, masking it from the rest of the room.

  The wooden frame stood centerpiece in a wall that stretched horizontally across the attic, splitting it into what looked like two separate rooms. He opened the door into another empty space where one window, the third he had originally seen from outside, lit the way. He smiled to himself as the idea that the attic could be a decent bedroom became more and more likely. He scanned the space quickly and noticed something that turned the smile into a frown and thus essentially eliminated its chance at becoming his bedroom. There were no plug outlets. Not even one.

  He closed the door, his shoulders sagging with disappointment, and turned to face the windows. As if standing atop a watch tower, he could see straight over some of the houses, all the way to the next street over where he could just barely make out roofs. It felt almost as though he was a king sitting on his high throne, watching down over his disciples from a place in the clouds.

  He noticed a girl just standing there, staring up at him from across the street. His cheeks flushed, embarrassed, remembering the childish fantasy he had been in as though she knew exactly what he had been imagining. He stared back, but she did not flinch or look away as he, for some reason, expected her to. Finally, he lifted his hand and waved. She smiled, or at least that was what it looked like from there, and waved back.

  3

  He could hardly believe what he was doing even as he reached the bottom of the attic stairs. But he couldn’t just run and hide, not after she had clearly seen him there, not after that wave which seemed so much like an invitation. He reached the second set of stairs and started down them, hearing his brother and sister talking from somewhere on the second floor as he descended.

  But he didn’t stop, because if he did, he was afraid he wouldn’t start walking again. Women never talked to him at his old school, not intentionally at least. But here, in this new place, nobody knew him yet. Nobody knew he was a loser. He was just some new kid in a big, fancy house. He wondered if maybe he might even seem mysterious, a new family showing up and taking over the fanciest house in town. It sounded mysterious enough to him.

  As he passed through the front door, stepping out into the fading light of the approaching dusk, he did so in a way he felt was cool. He walked with a sort of swagger. But it vanished the moment he saw the girl’s deep blue eyes staring at him as he approached. His legs went weak and wobbly, and he thought for a second that his stomach may have liquified within him. She was short, maybe five foot two or something like that, and had long, beautiful blond hair that reached down to her waist.

  “Hello, stranger,” she said, her smile wide, her teeth gleaming against the fading light.

  “Hello,” he said, trying to return the smile.

  “You watching me from up there?” she asked.

  He almost stopped in his tracks. The wave hadn’t been an invitation to come say hello, but rather, an awkward gesture from a girl who thought she was being watched. But then she smiled again.

  “Kidding,” she giggled.

  “I actually thought you were the one watching me,” he said.

  “Nope.” She gestured to her left. “Just checking the mail. Forgot to earlier.”

  He couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed the mailbox there, but then again, he could believe it. He had been stunned by her beauty, even from afar, the moment his eyes locked on to hers, that he wouldn’t be surprised if he had missed the mailbox being on fire if it had been. He tried his best not to blush.

  “Right. Right. Of course. I was kidding, too.” He felt himself turning red, a heat flushing over his entire body. Soon, the sweat would come. Did he have deodorant on? Of course he did. But suddenly, he couldn’t really remember having put it on.

  “New to town, huh?” she said.

  “Yeah, moving in right now, actually. Well, we just finished for the most part.”

  She nodded her head like she understood something. Then she smiled again. “You pick your room yet?”

  “No. Well, sort of. Nothing official, though.”

  She pointed past Toby’s head. “That one?”

  He turned to see where she was pointing. His blood ran cold when he saw that she was pointing up at the room where he had thought he had seen his sister a short while ago.

  He shook his head. “No, I don’t think I’ll be in that one.”

  “Too bad,” she said.

  His raised his eyebrow. “Too bad?”

  She was still staring up at that window but snapped out of it when she noticed Toby was staring at her. “I just mean, it looks like a nice bedroom, on the corner of the house like that.”

  He wasn’t sure what part of being in the corner of a house made a room particularly special, but he didn’t feel the need to press it. He was just happy a girl was talking to him, and this one, well, she
was absolutely gorgeous. No need to ruin it already by being weird and fixating.

  “Well,” she pushed her hair back behind her ear, “I guess I better be getting back inside.”

  She stuck her hand out, and he moved in with his own. Their hands locked. They held hands. It wasn’t quite like that, or at all like that. It was just a handshake.

  “It was nice meeting you…”

  “Toby.”

  “Well, Toby, it was nice meeting you. I’m Addison, by the way. You can call me Addy, though.”

  She released his hand and turned around, heading back toward her house. He couldn’t help but allow his eyes to linger shamefully for a moment on her butt as she walked away. It looked absolutely amazing.

  He snapped himself out of it. He wasn’t going to be like that. He wasn’t a perverted pig. He turned back toward his own house and, before he could stop himself, looked back up toward that room, toward the window where he had thought he had seen someone but apparently hadn’t.

  When he got back inside, the living room was mostly set up already, looking then almost like an actual living room. The couch was in place; so was the television stand along with the television sitting atop it. His parents weren’t in the room, and neither was his uncle Robbie.

  He walked past the living room entrance, peeking into rooms as he went. Across from the living room was some sort of large room that he was willing to wager would end up a dining room. That room opened up into the kitchen, which also had a door leading out into the hallway. He passed that doorway and rounded to the right where a short hall began. The first door led back into the living room.

  The next door, on the left, led into a pantry that had almost no food in it yet aside from some boxed noodles and cans of vegetables that they brought from the old house. Everything around him seemed a little too quiet. Where had everybody gone?

  He checked the next door, which turned out to be the basement. It led straight down into a darkness that seemed the absolute opposite of how the rest of the house felt. A wave of cold air swathed up the narrow passageway. He slammed the door shut harder than he meant to, startling himself like a child. The smack echoed through the still mostly empty first floor. He waited a moment, wondering if that would draw his parents out from hiding.

  The sun was beginning to take shelter behind the distant hills, leaving the house in only half-light. An orange glow covered what little he could see like he was wearing some sort of play glasses. He looked back at the basement for a moment, felt another chill, like an aftershock of the ice cold from before, and hurried away from the site.

  When he made it back to where he started, the base of the stairs outside the living room, he heard voices coming from upstairs. He wondered then why that hadn’t been the first place he checked. It was beginning to get late, so everybody would be up there picking out their rooms. And now he was missing it.

  Before even reaching the top, he heard a voice coming from the furthest room to the left of the stair’s summit. He paused, not quite at the top, and looked off to the door. It was closed, fully closed. He heard the voice again and listened, trying to tell if there were two voices, his sister and his brother, or only one. But the voices were just a mumble, and he couldn’t distinguish who they were coming from.

  He wasn’t sure why he felt a strange electric moving through his body. He knew what the feeling was; it was fear. Because that’s the room he thought he heard a voice from earlier. But it made no sense. What was he afraid of? Not ghosts. Those didn’t exist. But then what else was keeping him just two steps from the top, standing there like an idiot?

  He walked up the two steps quickly, telling himself he was being ignorant and childish. He headed toward the room for no reason at all other than to do it. He was going to open that door and see who was on the other side, to prove to himself that he was being ridiculous.

  He twisted the handle and gave it a nudge. There were his two siblings, standing there by one of the windows talking, or had been talking until he came in.

  They looked at him, waiting for him to say something, but he didn’t really have anything to say. He had already accomplished what he had come there for, to prove to himself that it was humans on the other side of the door not…whatever his imagination was trying to conjure up against his will.

  “Whose room is this?” Toby asked, just to say something.

  “Not sure yet,” Trevor answered.

  “His,” Paisley said, smiling at her twin brother.

  Trevor shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “Kids!” his dad shouted from down the other hall.

  Trevor and Paisley headed for the door. Toby moved out of the way to let them pass. When they were gone, he turned back to face the room, its space empty, its walls barren. He stepped further inside and gave the room a once-over. It didn’t look any different from any other room. It had four walls, a couple windows on one side, and another window on another. It would have plenty of lighting during the day and was rather large, not unlike most of the other rooms.

  But he didn’t want it, not this room. He pushed the excuses back from the forefront of his mind, ignoring his own mental debate as to why he did not want the room. When he took another few steps forward, he found himself standing in front of one of the windows, staring down into the front yard, the driveway, and across the street to where he had stood not long ago with that beautiful blond girl whose name was Addison.

  The hair on his arms jumped to attention when he realized where it was that he was standing. Where he stood now was the exact same place he had thought he had seen someone standing earlier that day when he really hadn’t, when the only people upstairs were in a totally different room at the other end of the house. But now the truth was clear, his mind no longer willing to make excuses and push back what he knew to be reality even if it didn’t make any sense at all. He had seen a girl standing there, and it was not his sister.

  4

  The whole family, including his uncle, were already huddled at the end of the hall, just past the attic. They all looked at him as he approached.

  “So, I have good news for you kids,” his dad said. “We’ve already seen all the bedrooms and don’t really care which one we get. So, it’s up to you three to figure it out.”

  “I want this one!” Paisley shouted quickly, pointing at the room with the big closet at the end of the hall.

  “Shit,” Trevor mumbled.

  Their dad nodded. “And you two?”

  The cold returned. Toby felt it caressing the skin on the back of his neck. He looked back and saw nothing but the attic door and wondered why he felt so on edge. This wasn’t like him. He wasn’t afraid of doors or cold air. The house had good air flow, so what?

  “So?” his dad continued.

  “I don’t care,” Trevor said. “Toby can pick, I guess.”

  Their dad was surprised, and so was Toby. It wasn’t like Trevor to put the ball in Toby’s court. Toby was ready to choose the one he had preferred earlier, the one they were actually standing right in front of right then, when he suddenly stopped.

  Even though the cold was still there, he wasn’t going to turn and face it. He would clutch his sanity right then and wrestle it into submission, force it to do as he demanded it do.

  “I’ll take the one at the end down there.” He pointed down the hall, to the room he had been in a few minutes prior, still unsure of what he was doing or why he was making this decision. Hadn’t he been unnerved by that bedroom just a moment ago, or at least by what he had thought he had seen in it?

  “I’ll take this one then,” Trevor said of the room Toby just passed on, the one right next to his sister’s.

  “I guess that leaves us the room next to Toby,” their mother said.

  When they finally split up, Toby was relieved to get away from where they had been standing. He had to shake it off, whatever this was. It helped when his dad announced that they would be ordering pizza for dinner. They played it off like it was some sort of
new house celebration, but Toby could tell their parents were just tired and didn’t feel like cooking, which was okay with him. Pizza it was.

  They sat, spread about the living room eating pizza, as a movie began. It was a rental that his dad brought back when he went to get the pizza. The movie was new, a film fresh out of the theaters starring the legend himself, Keanu Reeves.

  “What’s wrong, Richard?” Lisa whispered under the sound of the television.

  He broke from his trance and looked down at his wife, Lisa, whose head was buried in his chest.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I’ll talk to you about it later.”

  She just nodded, unsure of whether or not he really would, wondering if she should push the matter despite knowing how unlikely it was that she would get anywhere. Richard wasn’t stone cold or anything like that, but he also wasn’t an open book, always reluctant to share anything too close to his heart. Though he had softened up a bit over his years with her, his thick layers peeling back to reveal someone that so very few knew, and Lisa was happy to be one of them.

  The movie ended. The room went dark as the screen turned black and the credits began to roll. Lisa sat up slowly, stretching her arms as she did so. She looked over at the others. Toby was awake, though, barely by the look of it. She couldn’t say the same for her youngest, Trevor, who was tilted over the edge of the couch a little, quiet snores emanating from his direction. The older twin, Paisley, was awake and alive, staring into the screen of her phone. She was older by mere minutes, but she relished in this fact whenever it became useful. Robbie, her husband’s little brother, was across the room in an armchair, his eyes closed.

  “All right, guys, it’s time for bed,” she said.

  Yawns and stretches moved through the room like a tidal wave. Trevor looked around like he wasn’t completely sure where he was. Toby sat up quickly, like he regretted having come so close to falling asleep. Richard was happy then that he was able to talk the others into getting everyone’s beds into the house before he went to get pizza because, just as he had expected, they were all far too tired to do it now that their stomachs were full so they would have been sleeping on the floor.