A Place So Wicked by Patrick Reuman (life books to read txt) 📕

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