Oliver

  Do not call up that which you cannot put down.

  His nose was bleeding black again, but Oliver had his hands full of lockpicks, so he let the fluid run down his upper lip and into his mouth. It tasted bad, like blood and tooth decay and swamp water all mixed together, but swallowing it was better than getting his shirt dirty. He fiddled with the slim metal picks, trying to get the right angle like the book had said, but this lock was nothing like the diagrams. He was pretty sure he had the upper tool in the right spot, but he was just poking blindly with the thinner, bent one, and he had no clue if he was even hitting any of the pins.

  “Stupid,” he grumbled, withdrawing them. He stowed the lockpicks in a jeans pocket and pulled a used tissue from another, wiping the last trickle of black from his face. Thirty bucks and a week of intercepting the mail, all wasted. He wondered if the librarian would get weird if he requested another lockpicking book through the interlibrary loan system. She already gave him strange looks.

  He got to his feet, slinging his backpack into one hand and looking around. Not a soul in sight. He’d probably spent more time than anyone in town lamenting the fact that no one lived on Gambon Street anymore, but for the moment it suited his purposes. Even the old steel factory across the street was mostly shut down, only running two shifts a week. There was nobody to witness his pathetic attempt at breaking and entering except the mice and snakes hiding in the unmowed, weed-choked fall lawns.

  The door in front of him mocked him with its solidity despite peeling white paint and a sun-bleached frame. The Ambrose family had been the rich ones in this neighborhood, and when they’d left their little mansion, the street emptied quickly. They must have known they were on their way out before that, though. This place looks like it’s been rotting for twenty years. His mind flashed back to the question he’d had when he first walked by the house months ago. Why hasn’t anyone done something? Bare, greyed wood showed in lesions through the peeling white paint of a carved wreath surrounding a quartered family crest. The Ambroses thought a lot of themselves. Looking closely, Oliver saw tiny carven snakes twining through the keys and chevrons of the crest and a troupe of little fish-headed men holding pikes below it. I should have studied heraldry. It probably stands for courage or something. Weirdos.

  “Sorry about this,” he said to the absent Ambroses, pulling the crowbar from his bag and jamming it into the door frame. He’d suspected it would come to this, and he wasn’t going to let a hardware-store doorknob stop him. He had an important job to do here, and by the time he was done, there wouldn’t be enough left for anyone to know the lock had been forced.

  The door was solid, but the weathered frame around it splintered easily, and the top of the door gapped open around the crowbar’s steel. He pushed, but the latch held. Withdrawing the tool, he rammed it in right by the oversized brass handle, the abused wood screeching in protest. Oliver put his shoulder into it and the latch popped free, brass screws pinging onto marble tiles and bouncing away into the darkness beyond. The door groaned open without him pushing, a maw gaping into shadowed nothing. Olly shuffled on the leaf-strewn stoop. Now that he was in, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be in.

  “Grow up,” he whispered, jamming the iron bar back into his bag. He felt around in his ancient Jansport, once blue but now of no real color at all, making sure he had the rest of his supplies. Everything was there, sloshing and rattling just like it should. He took a deep breath, shook the fear out through his fingertips, and stepped into the abandoned house.

  He shut the door behind him both to disguise his entry from anyone who drove by and to let his eyes get used to the dark. It was a grand old foyer in the Victorian-era style that was actually a mishmash of Gothic Revival, Italianate, and Queen Anne: all white marble, wooden accents, and brass fittings. If someone told Olly that Samuel Newson had been yanked from his grave to design the place, he might have believed it. A sweeping staircase dominated the space, and a few pale beams of light sneaking past gapped shutters up above kept him from complete blackness. A misshapen mass hung from the ceiling in the center of the room, and it took him a moment of careful peering to realize it was a chandelier draped with a massive dustcloth.

  Oliver crept around the perimeter of the room, feeling at the wall panels for a light switch. There’s no way they’re still paying the power bill, but hey, they left all the furniture behind; maybe they never bothered to cancel their accounts. His questing fingers found a cool brass panel with hefty, oversized switches, and he flicked the first one, and then the next, and then the next. Nothing. Nuts. I knew it.

  He reached back into his bag and pulled out a flashlight. The Maglite was reassuringly heavy in his hand, and its lamp cut the darkness effortlessly. It had cost him $18 at the Army Navy two years before and he never went anywhere without it. A sweep of the room showed more dust-cover-shrouded chairs and chaises in once-artful arcs in both nooks created by the grand staircase. The red carpeting on the treads looked rat-chewed and moldy. A stale smell permeated the place, and it had an undercurrent of the same decay that he tasted whenever his nose bled.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  Creaks and groans sounded at odd intervals, and there was a scratching somewhere in the walls that told him, yes, rats had been at the carpet. A formless anxiety pulsed at the base of his skull, and he had to focus on his breathing to keep it from climbing up into his throat and choking him. I just need to find the right spot. The foyer won’t work. His Maglite beam swept from side to side, and a flash of color on the floor pulled it back like a magnet. There, in the center of the marble tile, was a green and purple mosaic styled in the shape of an octopus. That’s not Victorian style. Looks more like something out of an old comic book. Pretty sure the Ambroses didn’t belong to Hydra. He imagined stately, proper Mrs. Ambrose as a supervillain with an eyepatch and a cigarette holder and couldn’t help chuckling.

  The dark foyer swallowed the sound, and his laughter died. Time to get on with it. This house doesn’t want me here. It knows what I’m up to. There’d likely be more clutter and stuff lying around upstairs, and that was good for his purposes, but he hoped to find a good spot somewhere on the ground floor, maybe a kitchen or a library. If the place had a basement full of storage boxes and old clothes, that’d be best.

  A large archway to the left led into a spacious sitting room, and a quick push at the swinging door to the right showed a filthy kitchen with long-decayed plates of food still on the counter and a roasting dish holding the yellowed bones of a turkey. It looked as if the family had up and left in the middle of a meal and never come home. Somebody covered the furniture and chandelier – why is food left out? Did some squatter come and make Thanksgiving dinner for themselves? Could someone still be squatting here? Some kind of thick black slime glistened on half the surface of the small round table off to one side, covering the moldy plates and dripped onto the chairs and floor. He heard a skittering in the dark corner, and his light landed on a quivering ball of fur by the steel cabinets. Feral eyes glinted in the beam, and Olly realized it was a rat nearly the size of a cat. Its mouth was dripping blood, and the mangled remains of a mouse was held in its front paws. It looked at him and hissed.

  He backed out instantly, his heart hammering. That’s a nope on the kitchen. He held the swinging door shut in case the beast came for him, and after a moment’s panicked thought he pulled a heavy chair from its place and put its back against the door. It’d have to gnaw through the wood to get to him now, and he’d be long gone before then. The rat would be too, if it had any sense. He shook his head, trying to dislodge the sight of the glistening strand of red guts that dangled from the mouse’s body.

  Back in the foyer he spied a door set into the wood paneling beneath the stairs. “That’s my guy,” he said quietly, as much to assure himself of the sound of his own voice as anything else. He hurried over, listening briefly at the door for more rats, but all he heard was the creak and settle of the house. The brass knob wouldn’t turn when he twisted it, but a tiny key protruded from the old-style lock beneath it, and when he turned the key, the knob worked. Steep, narrow wooden stairs descended into pitch black. The decay smell was stronger here.

  He shined his light down the stairs, but the flight turned the corner at an old-style stone and mortar wall, and the paneling on both sides of the stairs was solid. He couldn’t see what was down there. That uneasiness he’d felt before rose again, like, like… Like something here hates me.

  Oliver rapped his own forehead hard with the butt of his Maglite. It’s a house, stupid. Wood and brick and stone. It has no mind. You don’t believe in that garbage. Still, it took real effort to put a foot on the top stair, and just as much to put another on the next. He felt like a guitar string wound too tight. He kept his light on the space below, but the stairs remained motionless, solid, dead.

  “There’s nothing here,” he said as loudly as he could. “It’s just the basement.”

  A squelching, rubbery sound came up from below in response, like a footstep in a swamp.

  Oliver was up the stairs and slammed the door before he could even think about it. He backed away, thought better, went back, and turned the key, taking it out of the lock. There he stood, perfectly silent, waiting to hear the sound again, trying very hard not to think about what might have made it.

  “Hi,” said someone from the front door.

  Oliver spun around, heart in his throat, Maglite raised like a club.

  A tall, dark-skinned girl stood right where he’d first come in, hands jammed into the pockets of her hoodie, jeans ripped at the knee, combat boots unlaced, long black braid over one shoulder. His flashlight beam danced unsteadily as he pointed it at her. She had an eyebrow raised and a little smirk playing about her mouth despite a split lip. He thought he knew her from somewhere.

  “Can I help you burn the place down?”