CHAPTER 1

For the record, I never wanted to move. I was perfectly fine with our little house on Holly Avenue in Pine Valley. Okay, it had become a little more crowded over the summer with Dad being home so much, but no teenager should have to pack up her things, say goodbye to her friends and move to a whole new town for her last year of high school. I was excited to graduate with my friends next year, to go to prom with people I knew, even see the same old teachers at Pine Valley High School. Stick with the evil you know.

But as the summer was beginning to wind down, I found myself in the back our stuffy Plymouth Voyager headed northeast to the town of Dark Falls. The back row of seats was folded down to make room for a few more boxes, which put Josh and the dog, right next to me for the entire ride. Josh is my brother, younger by six years, and attached at the hip to our overly energetic eight year old Jack Russell terrier mix. PD, or Petey, as his name often came out sounding like, was little more than a mutt. But Josh would be sure to correct you if you ever said otherwise.

"He is a Jack Russell mix," he would always chime in, though he had no other suggestion as to what the dog was mixed with. Most of the time, I would say he was part squirrel for how much time he spent zipping around like some bat out of hell. Josh named the dog shortly after we brought him home.

"We are getting a new pet dog today," my father said to Josh, only three years old at the time.

"Pet dog?" he replied quizzically.

My parents both assured him, that yes it was a pet dog. And even after the yipping little puppy, barely large enough to carry around in a coffee mug, came home with us, Josh would still point and ask, "Pet dog?"

At first we weren't sure if he was asking whether it was a pet dog, or if he was asking for permission to pet the dog. But after the hundredth time of hearing the little guy point and say, "Pet dog", the name sort of stuck. Yes, my family owns a dog whose name is literally, Pet Dog. I was rather happy when we just began calling him PD for short, and soon enough that started to sound more like a real name, but my parents found it a funny enough anecdote that it would get dragged out at more than one social gathering.

We passed another sign counting down the miles to Dark Falls as PD hopped back and forth over Josh or my lap, racing between the van's windows to ensure he didn't miss a single view. He wasn't always so insufferable on long car rides, but you would have thought we were moving to the vet. I guess it just goes to show that a few of us in the van that day were not too happy about having to move away.

"We're almost there," my dad said for the third time in the past two hours. I wasn't sure if he was saying it to reassure us, the dog, or just remind us of our impending doom. Heaven forbid we actually forget that we left everything behind to move to some shit-hole town none of us had even heard of three months ago.

"Why can't we go back home?" Josh asked, also for the third time in recent memory. If there was one thing my brother had learned to excel at by the age of eleven, it was the art of complaining. That kid could complain about anything. And to be honest, I don't know how my parents put up with it most of the time, but in the last few months, he was pulling at the last few straws.

"That's enough, Joshua!" my mother half-turned in her seat. Ouch, you knew she was ticked when you were getting the full name treatment.

Usually at this point, Josh would only ramp up his whining, but he just zipped it. He knew Mom meant business. The stress of the summer was starting to show on both of my parents by that point, and we had already both been on the tail end of a few harsh words to know not to push back too hard. My father shifted in the driver's seat. Hopefully he was right about almost being there. We were all tired of being cooped up in the van all day. I looked at my father as he glanced back at us in the rearview mirror. Before that summer, I wouldn't have thought of him as being middle aged, but it was certainly starting to show. Lines raked across his face that had never noticed before, stretching across a furrowed brow and from the corner of his eyes to the growing patch of grey at his temples. His hair had receded more in the last year and it was becoming rarer to see him without a baseball cap on his head. I found myself wondering if he and mom had the same insecurities about their appearance that I often felt. If our chin was too sharp, our noses too big, or too much weight around our hips. I tried my best to keep active. I had played on the varsity softball team at school, even went jogging with some of the girls in track. No one mentioned it, but I had certainly noticed that my hips were a bit wider than a lot of the other girls, my ass was bigger. But unlike Jenny Ambrose, I was far from developing an hourglass figure. When her breasts were practically bursting out of her top in ninth grade gym, here I was at seventeen seriously contemplating stuffing my bra before starting at a new school.

My mother seemed to be aging gracefully, rocking the curves of her Latina ancestry that didn't seem to get passed on to me. She was actually older than my dad, and while I knew she dyed the grey out of her full dark hair, she had significantly less wrinkles. And before you go thinking that my mother had less stress than my hard working father, or some other misogynistic bullshit, let me tell you that my mother was a badass lawyer in Pine Valley. It was actually her job that brought us to Dark Falls.

Three short months ago my mother and father announced that we were going to move. At first I thought they were kidding. Even Josh felt no reason to complain. But as reality began to sink in, our attitudes changed. The previous winter, Jack Benson, my father, was laid off from his job at the plastics where he had worked since before I was even born. His heart hadn't been in it over the last few years, and when they needed to shut down a few manufacturing lines, it wasn't hard for them to let him go. It was a bit harder on my father. Though not at first, I think it caught up with him a few months later, about the time we started seeing he and Mom fighting a lot more. Money was getting tighter. My mother tried her best to be supportive of Dad, even after he gave up on the job search to focus more on his real passion, writing. He was a pretty good writer, what little I have actually seen. But he has never sold a single thing he has written and when Mom got passed over for another promotion at her firm, she was getting tired of it all. So when the prospect of starting her own practice in Dark Falls just fell in her lap, they would have been idiots not to take it. I, of course, see all this now. Not so much three months ago.

Dad turned the wheel and we felt the weight of the van shift from what seemed a never ending stretch of straight highway onto an exit ramp. Another sign flew past: Dark Falls County. A second sign attempted to list attractions and services ahead but it seemed the sign-maker forgot to fill in the empty boxes at the bottom of the green sign. It didn't surprise me that there would be little to list on the sign as I couldn't even recall a gas station on our last visit.

A sudden chill went up my spine. I checked the air vent to make sure the AC wasn't blowing on my arm where goosebumps spread across my skin. The air was off. I looked out the window at the fallen leaves under bare trees scratching and reaching over the narrowing road. Clouds gathered overhead, casting the landscape into a dismal grey rather than the vibrant autumn colors of a New England fall. Perhaps it was getting colder out, or I was just remembering how much I didn't like Dark Falls.

The quaint town looked like it hadn't changed much in a hundred years. It had a small town center with glass fronted shops and even a white-steepled church overlooking a bricked town square. A gazebo, white paint flaking off ancient wood, marked the very center of town. From there a few small streets snaked off into the hills, where the town was surrounded by a spattering of neighborhoods. When all the world was growing, it didn't look like the population of Dark Falls had risen in decades.

We drove down Main Street, passing the office that Mom would take over with her new practice. We passed an honest-to-God general store! How many towns had general stores anymore? Near the town square, across from that hideous gazebo was the realtor agent's office. The plain sign out front stating simply, Dark Falls Realty. I shivered again, a knot twisting in my stomach.

The road narrowed between the old buildings before we suddenly left the town behind, the van climbing a hill into our neighborhood. Everyone in the van jumped when suddenly PD barked, the sound nearly deafening in the enclosed vehicle. The dog stood on Josh's lap as he stared out the window. Josh and I followed his gaze toward the town's cemetery. An ancient graveyard enveloped by old rotting trees that looked like something out of a Halloween decoration. Josh held the dog close to his body, looking over at me with concerned eyes.

We practically sighed with relief as Dad turned the van, moving the graveyard out of view. Josh and the dog visibly relaxed, but I didn't. The van eased to a stop in front of a massive house set back in the lot with a cracked walkway leading up to its red door.

It looked like a mansion compared to our old house. Tall dark brick seemed to jut out of the gentle slope of the graying lawn. Looking at it again, I still felt unease. Like there was something wrong with the old building. Unsquared angles, roof slopping angrily over rows of black shuttered windows. But whenever I would stare at some detail that seemed off, it was as if it righted itself before my eyes could fully focus on it. The walls were straight, the roof was no more sharply angled than any other house. Perhaps I was just seeing things. Or perhaps I was just letting things get to me. I really didn't want to move.

"I forgot how dark it was," I muttered, staring up at the gnarled pair of trees that bent over the front of the house, framing it with twisting bare branches. It was August, so I shouldn't have been surprised by the naked trees, their brown leaves crunching under our feet as we exited the car and made our way up the walk.

Mom's sedan was parked on the gravel driveway next to the house, left there after one of the many trips her and my father made in the last few weeks. Clumps of weeds poked up from the gravel driveway and between the cracked stones of the front walk. An overgrown flowerbed poured out weeds onto patchy brown lawn. Standing right in front of the house again I could feel the unease in my stomach. I thought I was going to throw up. This house was creepy. Like something out of a V.C. Andrews novel. I hated it from the first time I had seen it, and I wasn't feeling any better about it then.

"Welcome home Benson family!"

The voice made me jump, and recognizing it didn't make me feel any better.

"Mr. Dawes," my father said moving across the driveway to shake the hand of a man who seemed far too good at popping up out of nowhere, "so good to see you again."

My mother joined my dad in shaking the man's hand, Josh stood idly by, his attention sharply kept on PD as the dog sniffed around the weeds at the end of his leash.

"Everything okay?" Mr. Dawes asked. I looked up to see the man staring at me, realizing he was talking to me. God, why does this creep always have to talk to me. I felt his eyes on me, and it wasn't because of the long car ride that I immediately felt like I needed a long shower. A shit-eating grin creased his face under a pencil mustache that he probably thought made him look like Clark Gable, but really just made him look like some skeeze hanging around the mall food court.

"Josh and Amanda aren't happy about moving," Dad answered for me, tucking in his shirt. Dad had put on a bit of weight and he always seemed to have trouble keeping his shirt tucked in. I told him to not even bother, no one was tucking their shirt in anymore, but he only muttered something about looking unprofessional. On a bad day I might have let slip that you needed to have a profession to worry about that.

"Moving can be difficult," Mr. Dawes replied, taking a quick moment to smile in the direction of my mother and father before grinning at me. Then I really wanted to puke. "Leaving all your friends behind, moving to a strange new town."

Full of strange old dudes, I wanted to say.

"Moving to strange new houses that no one wants to live in," Josh stated from across the lawn where PD was digging in the leaves.

"It's an old house, that's for sure," laughed the old man, peaking up at gray sky over the house from under his broad brimmed hat. His veined hands reached for the hat as if to take it off before thinking better of it.

"Ah, it just needs some work." My dad said, there was a look of pleasure on his face, as if he was anticipating the satisfaction of fixing the old place. "And you can help me make it look great again, Josh."

Josh didn't reply but his posture slumped as if he was just told to take out the trash every night for the next month. It was a classic inaudible complaint, so much said with that stick thin little body.

"Like a lot of this town," Mr. Dawes continued, moving a bit closer to everyone, but more noticeably, closer to me, "it takes a lot of work to keep up with these old buildings. But that's where all the charm is in a house like this. A lot of beauty comes with age."

I shuddered, feeling those crinkled blue eyes on me and took the opportunity to join Josh on the lawn where PD was methodically marking every clump of weeds.

"Look how big it is Am," my mother said as I passed her. She was the only one who ever called me that. My father, brother, and everyone at school called me Mandy. "We'll have so much more room than the old house. A rec room, and a den."

I shrugged with disinterest, but it turned into a shiver as a cold breeze seemed to cut through fabric of my clothes. The clouds darkened in the sky. It didn't feel enough like fall to need a jacket. I was sweating in the stuffy van all day, but now I was freezing. I wrapped my arms around my chest, suddenly terrified if that old creep caught a glimpse of just how cold I was. Maybe it was warmer in the house, surprised by my own thought, the first time I had almost wanted to go inside. This was supposed to be home now, but up to that moment, I was desperately hoping for anything else.

"Well, here are the keys." It was a relief to not feel Mr. Dawes looking at me. I glanced over at the old man to see him handing a set of keys and a folder of papers to my mother. "It's all yours. Feel free to pop by my office any time if you have any concerns."

"Thank you so much," my father said, shaking the man's hand again.

"Jack," he turned to my mother, "Elysia, I will see you both at the Business Association party." He looked up at me. "And I hope to see you both again real soon. Welcome to Dark Falls."

I was all too happy to see that grin fade from his thin lips and watch that creep walk away.

We followed Mom up the front walk, the wooden steps of the front porch creaking under each of our feet. She slid the key into the lock on the red door and we walked into our new home. That familiar terror at the pit of my stomach returned as soon as I stepped over the threshold. Mind undecided, my body did not want to be in that house again. Not after the last time.