The Dead End (3 page)

Casey’s mother had said they were driving to town, but Stillness turned out to be nothing more than a T in the road. There wasn’t even a stoplight. On one corner, there was a two-pump gas station attached to a small diner. Across the road sat a trailer that seemed to serve fast food, although it was closed
when they drove by. Scattered along the road were a few other storefronts, including a taxidermist, a hardware store, and a hair salon named Sandee’s Snip ‘n’ Clip.

Casey’s mother seemed blissfully unaware of her dismal surroundings. “I can’t wait to get some local vegetables,” she said cheerily. “Maybe some eggs, too. Just wait until you taste eggs that have come straight off a farm, Casey. You’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven.”

They reached the end of Main Street. Beyond that, there were a few houses and fields, then more forest.

“The real estate agent said there was a grocery store right in town. Did you see it?” Mrs. Slater asked. Casey shook her head.

They drove up and down the street a few more times. “I guess we could try in there,” Casey said at last. She pointed to a small building next to the gas station. A hand-lettered sign in the window advertised SODA. ICE. WORMS.

Casey’s mother parked in front, and they went inside. At the cash register, a teenage girl sat with her chin in her hand, reading a magazine.

“Excuse me,” said Mrs. Slater. “Can you tell me where I can find a grocery store around here?”

“You’re in it,” the girl said. “Unless you mean the Food Mart. That’s about twenty minutes down the road.”

“Oh … er, that’s all right. I’m sure we can find something here.” Mrs. Slater gazed around at the shelves of dusty-looking canned goods. “Do you have any
fresh
vegetables?”

“Right over there.” The girl pointed her chin toward a cooler, where an old man stood examining the expiration date on a carton of milk. Inside the cooler, on a small shelf, there was a wilted head of lettuce, a few pale tomatoes, and some withered apples.

“Wow, Mom. You were right. The local vegetables look
great,”
Casey muttered.

Mrs. Slater pursed her lips and frowned. “Casey, go get us some bottled water. I’m going to find something for dinner.”

Casey rolled her eyes and shuffled over to the cooler. The old man was still standing in front of it, looking down at the carton in his wrinkled hand.

“Excuse me,” Casey said, trying to move past him.

As the man slowly turned his head, his blue eyes widened. He stared at Casey, his mouth open in surprise.

Casey wondered if he was hard of hearing. “Excuse me,” she said a little louder. “I just want to get some water.” She gestured at the cooler.

At last the man seemed to understand. Slowly, he shuffled out of the way.

“Thanks.” Quickly, Casey grabbed three bottles of water and hurried back over to her mom.

“What do you think? Pork and beans or spaghetti and meatballs?” Mrs. Slater asked, holding up two family-sized cans.

“I don’t care, Mom. Let’s just go,” Casey said, tugging at her sleeve. There had been something weird about the way the man had looked at her.
Like he was afraid,
Casey thought.

“Pork and beans it is,” said her mother. She picked out a loaf of bread and a couple cans of tuna fish and took them over to the register.

“You know, tuna is on sale. Five cans for four dollars,” the girl said.

“I think two is enough,” Mrs. Slater said.

“You sure? That’s a real good price.” She gave
Casey’s mother a pointed look. Mrs. Slater sighed, and went to get three more cans.

“You folks headed to the lake?” the girl asked as she rang up their purchases.

“No, we’re new in town,” Mrs. Slater said. “We just bought the house at the end of Drury Road.”

“That place?” The girl stopped ringing up the groceries for a moment to gape at her. “But that house is —”

Smack!
A wet splat interrupted her. Everyone turned. The old man had dropped the milk carton he was holding. Milk pooled around his feet, but he didn’t seem to notice. He was looking right at Casey. His hands were visibly trembling.

“Oh, Mr. Anderson. You should be more careful,” the cashier groaned. She rolled her eyes at Casey’s mother and handed over the bag of groceries. “I’d better get a mop. You folks have a good night.”

As they walked out of the store, Casey glanced back over her shoulder. The old man was still staring at her.

Outside, the sky had deepened to a bruised purple. “We’re going to be eating tuna till it comes out our ears,” Casey’s mother said as they walked to the
car. “Don’t worry, sweetie. I’m sure we can find a farm stand somewhere around here.”

“What do you think that girl was going to say?” Casey asked. “About the house?”

Her mother shifted the groceries to one hip and dug her keys out of her purse. “Who knows?” she said. “That place has been empty for a while. Maybe she was surprised to hear that someone bought it.”

“Oh,” Casey said. She got into the car and fastened her seat belt, trying to brush away the thought that was troubling her.

She was almost certain the girl had been about to say that the house was haunted.

By the time they got back to Drury Road, most of the light had drained from the sky. The house loomed in the twilight, a deeper blackness in the gathering gloom. The thought of spending the night there made Casey feel uneasy. She wondered why there weren’t any lights on.

Her father was standing out on the porch. He had unloaded most of the van; bags and boxes were strewn around the porch. But Mr. Slater wasn’t moving anything. He just leaned against the porch railing, his face tilted up to the sky.

“What are you looking at?” Casey’s mother asked him as they got out of the car.

He pointed at a pair of dark shapes swooping through the air.

“Swallows?” asked Casey’s mom.

Mr. Slater shook his head. “Bats.”

“Bats?” squealed Casey. Suddenly, the dark house seemed a lot more inviting. “I’m going inside!”

“I’m right behind you,” said her mother.

“They’re probably harmless,” Casey’s father said, but he ducked and waved his arms when one flew too close to his head.

Inside the house, Mrs. Slater flipped the light switch in the front hallway. Nothing happened.

“I already tried that,” Casey’s father said, coming behind them. He had a flashlight in his hand. “It doesn’t work. The electricity probably hasn’t been turned on in ages.”

As Casey’s father led the way down the hall, the flashlight beam picked up glimpses of the house: the foot of the stairs. A cobwebbed corner. The molding around a doorway. Beyond the small circle of light, the darkness seemed vast. Casey walked so close behind her mother that she stepped on her heels.

“Ow. Casey!” Mrs. Slater snapped.

“Sorry,” Casey mumbled. But as the circle of light moved ahead she hurried to follow it.

In the kitchen, they discovered that the electricity wasn’t the only problem. The old gas stove didn’t work either.

“Well, it’s too hot to cook, anyway,” Casey’s mother said with a sigh, looking down at the can of pork and beans she’d been planning to heat. “I’ll make some tuna sandwiches, too.”

They ate dinner on a blanket spread out in front of the fireplace. “Isn’t this fun?” Mrs. Slater said as she lit some candles she’d dug out of a box. “Just like a picnic!”

Casey poked at the cold pork and beans on her plate.
Fun
wasn’t exactly the word that sprang to mind.

As she scooped up a spoonful of beans, the candles abruptly went out.

“Oh!” Mrs. Slater exclaimed as the room plunged into darkness. She fumbled for the box of matches and relit them.

But a moment later, the same thing happened. Both candle flames sputtered and suddenly went
out. This time one of the candles even toppled and rolled across the floor.

“There must be a draft,” Casey’s mother said, reaching for the matches again.

“Leave it, Dez,” Casey’s father replied. “Tomorrow when I drive into town I’ll see about the electricity.”

They ate in the dark in silence. The cold pork and beans and warm tuna fish made Casey gag. After a few more bites, she pushed her plate away.

“I guess I’m not so hungry,” she said. “I think I’ll just go to bed….” She broke off, realizing that she didn’t know where to sleep.

Suddenly, Casey remembered the message she’d seen on the mirror upstairs. She’d forgotten about it in all the commotion. “I think someone’s been in the house,” she said.

Both her parents stopped eating. “What do you mean?” asked her mother.

“Earlier this afternoon, when I was upstairs, I saw something written on a mirror in one of the bedrooms.”

“You mean graffiti?”

“Not exactly. It was written in the dust.”

“What did it say?” her father asked.

Casey swallowed. “‘Get out.’”

“It was probably just kids fooling around. The agent said this place was broken into a while back,” Casey’s dad said. “I’ll take a look.”

He switched on the flashlight and headed up the stairs. Casey and her mother followed closely behind him.

“It was the last room. At the end of the hall,” Casey said.

When they got to the room, Mr. Slater trained the flashlight on the mirror. “You said it was written here?”

“In the dust,” Casey told him. She took the flashlight from him, holding it at an angle to the mirror.

“I don’t see anything,” said her father. “Maybe you imagined it, Casey. It could have been a trick of the light.”

“I didn’t imagine it,” she insisted.

She swept the beam of light over the mirror again, but her dad was right. There was nothing there. The surface had been wiped clean.

That night, Casey had trouble sleeping. Her room was stiflingly hot. Casey’s parents had given her the small cozy bedroom over the kitchen. With the electricity out, the ceiling fan didn’t work, and the single window over Casey’s bed was painted shut.

Worse than the heat was the silence. Unlike their Manhattan apartment, where the hum of Second Avenue traffic was a soothing reminder of life outside, the house in Stillness seemed eerily quiet. Every tiny noise was amplified and embellished by Casey’s imagination. A rustling in the leaves was an escaped convict. A dog barking in the distance definitely sounded rabid. A thump at the window
sent Casey racing to wake up her dad. (An investigation with the flashlight revealed the culprit to be a moth.)

And then there was the wallpaper. During the day, the leafy fern design had seemed soothing and pleasant. But now, in the moonlight, the fronds seemed to twist and writhe, like shriveled hands. A dripping faucet down the hall provided a sinister tempo for Casey’s fearful imaginings.

Finally, in the early hours of the morning, she fell into an uneasy sleep.

She dreamed she was playing hide-and-seek in the house. There were other children, too, but Casey couldn’t see them from her hiding place. She heard the sound of footsteps coming toward her. And suddenly a voice cried out,
“Ready or not, here I come….”

Casey started awake. For a moment, she didn’t know where she was. Slowly, the darkness around her became the shapes of the curtains, the dresser, the chair. The singsong voice from her dream still rang in Casey’s ears, and for a second she wondered if she’d really heard it.

No,
Casey thought, coming more awake.
Of course I didn’t hear it.
It was the middle of the night. The only people around were her parents, asleep down the hall. She could hear her father snoring.

Casey lay awake for a long time, troubled by something she couldn’t name. The sky was starting to turn gray by the time she fell asleep again.

When Casey opened her eyes, her room was bright with sunlight. Outside in the trees, birds trilled and squawked. She guessed it was late morning.

Casey climbed out of bed. She put on the shorts she’d been wearing the day before and a clean T-shirt.

In the kitchen, she found her mother unpacking a box of dishes. Mrs. Slater was wearing a pair of old jeans, and her thick black hair was tied back with a blue bandanna. She looked different than she did in the city, Casey thought. She looked young and happy.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” said her mother. “You’re sure up late.”

“I didn’t sleep very well last night,” Casey admitted.

Her mother wiped off a dish and set it in a cupboard. “Well, a new house can take some getting used to. Want some breakfast? A tuna sandwich, maybe?” she joked.

Casey made a face.

“Well, have a slice of bread, then. I’d offer you some butter but I haven’t found the butter knives yet.” She looked in dismay at the boxes that surrounded her feet.

Casey took a slice of bread from the wrapped loaf. She leaned against the sink, chewing. “Where’s Dad?” she asked.

“Getting the last few boxes out of the rental truck. He’s going to take it back into town this morning and run a few errands. I’ll pick him up in the car later this afternoon.”

Casey’s dad came striding purposefully into the room. He stopped in the middle of the kitchen and looked around, running his hands through his hair. “Has anyone seen the keys to the van?”

“Where did you leave them?” Casey’s mother asked.

“I
thought
I left them on the fireplace mantel. But they’re not there. I’ve looked everywhere.”

“Haven’t seen them,” Casey said.

Mrs. Slater shook her head.

“Hmph,” Casey’s dad grunted. He strode back out of the room. They could hear him rifling through boxes in the living room.

A few moments later, he reappeared in the doorway of the kitchen, dangling the keys from his fingers. “Found ‘em! You’ll never believe where they were.”

“In your pocket?” Mrs. Slater guessed wryly.

“Nope. Behind the toilet in the bathroom.”

“How on earth did they get there?” she asked in surprise.

“I have no idea,” Mr. Slater replied, shifting his gaze to Casey.

“Don’t look at me!” she said. “What would I want with the van keys?”

“I have no idea,” her father replied. “Well, I’m off.”

He kissed Casey’s mom on the cheek. “See you this afternoon.”

After he left, Casey’s mom turned to her. “I don’t feel like unpacking any more this morning.
I thought you and I could have some fun exploring the attic.”

“There’s an attic?” Casey asked.

“Yep, and it’s full of stuff. The last owners didn’t bother to clean it out. Who knows what we’ll find up there?” Mrs. Slater’s eyes gleamed.

Casey’s mother was a flea-market fanatic. She could spend hours at tag sales and antique shops, sifting through other people’s old belongings. Casey knew an attic full of undiscovered junk was like her dream come true.

“Sure,” she told her mother with a shrug. “It beats unpacking boxes, anyway.”

On her way upstairs, Casey tried to call Jillian, but she still couldn’t get a signal. Casey hoped that one of her dad’s errands in town was seeing about a phone line for the house.

The stairs to the attic turned out to be at the end of the upstairs hallway, behind a door Casey had mistaken for a closet. As they climbed, the air seemed to get closer with each step. Casey passed the back of her hand across her damp forehead.
This place sure could use some A/C,
she thought.

The stairs led straight up through a hole in the attic floor. “Wow!” Casey said as she climbed into the room. It was nearly as long as the house, and crammed end to end with junk.

Mrs. Slater’s face lit up like she’d just won the jackpot. “There must be some real treasures in here!”

“It’s stuffy,” Casey remarked, fanning herself with a hand. “And hot. I feel like I can’t breathe.”

“We’ll let some air in,” Mrs. Slater said. She went to the small, grimy window at one end of the room and tugged it open.

As her mother began sifting through boxes, Casey poked around in an old bureau. The top drawer was filled with handkerchiefs. They all had the letter
H
embroidered in the corner.

Casey plucked one between her fingertips. It was stained and yellowed with age. Quickly, she tossed it back in the drawer, and rubbed her hand against her shorts to get off any germs.

In the next drawer, Casey found a stack of black-and-white photographs. She quickly flipped through them. Most were of the same unsmiling man and
woman, taken in different places. Next to an old-fashioned car. At the beach in funny-looking swimsuits. In front of a house, holding the hands of a little girl. Casey looked more closely and realized the house in the background was the farmhouse. It looked different with a fresh coat of white paint and bushes growing out front. “Casey, look at these.”

Her mother was holding out a wooden crate full of books. Casey took it from her and glanced through the titles. They were children’s novels for the most part:
Peter Pan, The Jungle Book, Treasure Island,
as well as some stories she’d never heard of.

Casey picked up one of the books and flipped through it. It had pretty illustrations of fat bluebirds and pink-cheeked boys and girls.

“Now you’ll have plenty to read this summer,” her mother said, moving off to another corner of the attic.

Casey set the books aside and lifted her hair off the back of her neck. The open window hadn’t done much to cool things down, and the heat was oppressive. But that wasn’t the only thing that
was bothering her. There was something about the attic that made Casey feel nervous and trapped.

“Oh!” Mrs. Slater suddenly exclaimed. “Isn’t this a beauty!”

Casey went over to her. In a corner of the attic, her mother had unearthed a huge trunk with a tarnished brass lock and leather handles.

“What is it?” Casey asked.

“An old steamer trunk,” her mother replied. “People used them to carry their belongings on long trips, before they had suitcases.” She studied the trunk with a practiced eye. “It’s unusual to find one in such good condition. I wonder what’s in it.”

She tried the lid but it didn’t budge. “It’s stuck.

Or locked.” Mrs. Slater looked around for something to open it. “I don’t see a key.”

As Casey looked at the trunk, a wave of apprehension swept over her. “If there’s no key, then we can’t open it, right? We should just forget it.”

“Just a minute. I want to try. There might be something good inside.” Mrs. Slater rummaged around and came back with a rusted letter opener.

Casey’s terrible feeling grew stronger. As her mother jiggled the opener in the lock, Casey started to panic.

“Don’t open it!” she screamed.

Mrs. Slater looked at her, startled. “Casey! What on earth is wrong?”

“I … don’t know.” Casey couldn’t explain why she found the trunk so horrifying.

Her mother nudged the lid one last time. “Well, it’s not going to budge.” She gave Casey a curious look. “You’re a little pale. Why don’t you take a break, and get some fresh air? I’ll finish up and be down soon.”

Casey nodded, relieved to get out of the room. As she descended the stairs, she still felt shaky.
What happened in there?
she wondered. She wished she could call Jillian. Her best friend would probably have some funny explanation, and the two of them could laugh about it together.

Despite the hot day, it was cool on the first floor. As Casey stepped into the front hallway, the hairs on her neck prickled. She had a feeling she was being watched.

Casey glanced back over her shoulder. The
stairway was empty. She looked into the living and dining rooms. They were empty, too.

I’m imagining things,
Casey thought.
Mom is right. I do probably need some fresh air.

She started toward the front door, and froze. There was a face in the glass window. A pale face, staring right at her.

Casey screamed.