Hide and Seek by Jack Ketchum Page A

studded with holes, more weathered than I'd thought it would be. If somebody twisted an ankle, it was going to be a very short evening. So I went slowly. For the first couple of yards all you could hear was the four of us scraping along. Then the road got a little better and our walking that much quieter.
     
    It was eerie. Walking in front of everybody, I had the feeling of great aloneness-we four in the empty night. And even we seemed insubstantial. Just sounds of motion like the sea and the raspings of insects. Kim stumbled and cursed and Casey laughed, but aside from that nobody spoke a word. We were made of shoe leather and silence out there, and that was all.
     
    The road got bad again. But the trees broke apart overhead, so you could see a little better. There was a dead branch ahead, and I kicked it out of our way. It made a rustling, crackling sound in the bushes, like a fire burning. Pebbles rolled along with it. On the dry road they were hollow-sounding. The air was heavy with the scent of evergreen.
     
    Off to the left something moved in the brush. I stopped. The footsteps behind me stopped too. A moment later I saw cattails waving a few feet further on. We'd startled something. A raccoon, maybe.
    Something roughly that size.
     
    "What was that?" You could hear the thrill in Kim's voice.
     
    "Coon. Possum. Grizzly maybe. It's hard to tell."
     

There was a moment's pause and then she laughed and called me a bastard.
     
    "Could be a rattlesnake. They grow 'em big around here. So watch your step."
     
    "Could be one of those cockroaches," said Steven. "The big ones. The kind that carry off babies."
     
    "We had them back in Boston," said Kim.
     
    Then they were giggling back there for a while. There was a little tussle going on. I turned around and saw him tickling her. She started squealing. I looked at Casey.
     
    "I don't think we've scared 'em yet. Do you?"
     
    "Just wait."
     
    We turned a bend in the road and then just ahead you could see where the trees stopped and the clearing began, the long grass, weeds and brambles. Framed in the last arch of birch trees you could see the Crouch house, a single black mass against the starry sky.
     
    I'd never approached the house this way at night before. So it was sort of shocking. If ever a house looked haunted, it was the Crouch place. Suddenly all the stories we'd told about it as kids came back to me all at once, and looking at it, you had to wonder if there wasn't a grain of truth in them, as though maybe we'd all had some instinct about the place, some knowledge in the blood and marrow.
     
    How do you credit the creature under the bed? The monster in the closet?
     
    you oo uui you oon l.
     
    It was black, solid black, and because there was nothing but the sea behind it, it seemed to drop right off into nowhere. Like the end of something.
     
    The house at the end of the world.
     
    It was bad enough remembering the real things, the things I knew to be true about the place. The dogs. Starved and eaten. The smell of animal waste and bodies bloated with heat and death. The stacks and stacks of newspapers-in a house where nobody could read. The smeared, discolored walls inside.
     
    But there was all the other stuff too. Ideas I'd grown up with, shuddered over, laughed at, scared myself with over and over again.
    The vampires and the evil and the dead. All that came back too, like

a sudden childish vision of madness and cruelty. As we moved through the last stands of trees, as the sky grew bigger overhead, I thought of those things and wondered what I was doing here, like a vulture visiting old corpses.
     
    And I thought about Ben and Mary.
     
    Of idiocy taken to its very extremity. And, in that extremity, made evil.
     
    We broke through to open clearing. Once it had been a pasture. All at once the night sounds seemed to shift and alter around us. Steps were softer. The sea was louder. We were in tall grass now. The crickets screeched us a jib bering