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1
SPRING IN EAST EVANSBURG, and the rain poured down like someone had turned on a hose in the sky. High in the Green Mountains, the rain turned snow into slush and turned earth into mud. It washed ruts into roads and set creeks to roaring. It sluiced down the roof of a small inn perched on a hillside above town.
The rain had begun at dawn, but now it was that long blue springtime twilight, getting close to dark, and the inn looked cozy in the soft light. The walls of the inn were white wooden clapboards, neatly painted. The roof was red metal. The sign said moose lodge, and it swung, creaking, in the spring wind.
The inn’s parking lot was empty. Everything was quiet.
Brian Battersby lived in the inn with his parents. The inn had started off as a day spa, inherited from his great-uncle. But slowly, Brian’s parents had turned it into a proper inn, with ten rooms. It was a Tuesday in late April, and the lodge was empty. The skiers had all left for the year. The bikers and hikers hadn’t come yet. There was no one in the lodge at all except for Brian and his two friends. His parents had gone down into East Evansburg.
“We’ll be back in a few hours, with dinner,” they had told him. “Don’t burn the place down.”
“Sure,” Brian had said. “No problem.” But he’d gulped a little as he watched his parents drive away. He and his friends hadn’t been alone in months. They’d been careful not to be alone.
They felt safer when they weren’t alone.
Brian and his friends were in the main room of Moose Lodge. It was extremely cozy. There were paperbacks on shelves, magazines on tables, and a huge stone fireplace with a fire crackling.
The door was locked. They felt safe. Well. Sort of safe. They hadn’t felt completely safe in months.
“Spring rain is way worse than fall rain,” said Brian, shoving aside his disquiet. He’d been sitting cross-legged on the sofa opposite the fireplace, but now he dumped his book to go stand by the front window. He peered past the curtain at the big sweep of parking lot and the muddy, washed-out track of the dirt road beyond. Everything was veiled in rain, water falling like ropes and raising a mist where it smashed into the ground. He added, “Because in fall you’re not even hoping for it to get warm and sunny. But in spring . . .” He squinted out into the twilight. Was that something moving? No, just a trick of the light.
“You’re tired of winter,” finished his friend Olivia Adler from another sofa, where she lounged on pillows, wrapped in a wool blanket, a book in her lap. Ollie was taller than Brian. She had big dark eyes and corkscrewing curls that stood out all over her head. She took a sip from a mug of hot chocolate, trying to nab a marshmallow with her teeth. He heard her swallow before she asked uneasily, “See anything out there?”
Brian kept watching the streaming window. “No,” he said.
“I don’t mind the rain,” chimed in Coco Zintner. Coco always looked on the bright side. She was sitting on the floor nearest the fireplace. She was practically in the fireplace. She was the smallest person in the sixth grade, and she got cold easily. A stack of books teetered at her side, and she sipped at her own mug, a knitted blanket around her shoulders. Her hair, which was pinkish, was braided down her back. “It’s cozy in here.”
“Yeah,” said Brian, a little doubtfully. They’d spent a lot of that winter holed up in cozy places. Long afternoons in the Egg, Ollie’s old farmhouse. Weekend mornings in the small, neat house Coco shared with her mom in downtown East Evansburg. And plenty of time in Moose Lodge, where Brian and his parents lived.
But Brian was tired of being cozy. When you couldn’t go out, places stopped being cozy and started being small. He was tired of peering out of windows and into mirrors, looking for anything out of place. Looking for danger.
The main room at Moose Lodge had white walls and old pine floors and piles of pillows on each sofa. The radiator clanked; the walls were covered with pressed flowers and dried leaves and bugs behind glass. Snug, woolly blankets draped the furniture and them. It smelled like orange oil and pine.
The only not-quite-right thing was the blanket that Ollie had used to drape the mirror opposite the fireplace. The second Brian’s parents had left, she’d covered up the mirror and wrapped it in bungee cords, all without saying a word.
Mirrors, all three of them knew, could be dangerous. None of them trusted mirrors, especially
not Ollie.
While she covered the mirrors, Brian had bolted the doors.
They were fine, Brian told himself. They were safe. Turning away from the wet window, he tripped on a pile of books.
“Ouch!” Brian hopped, clutching his stubbed toe.
“Book monster strikes again!” cackled Ollie just as Coco said, “Are you okay, Brian?” Their voices echoed in the empty lodge.
“Yes,” he said, dropping with a grimace back onto the sofa. “No thanks to this stuff.” He glared around at the books. Twenty or so books, divided into three heaps, one for each of them. Brian pulled the top book off his stack and scowled at it. The title was Hauntings and Horrors in the Green Mountain State.
“I think I read this one already,” he said. “They’re all blurring together.”
Ollie’s book was called Giggles in the Dark: True Stories of Truly Awful Hauntings. “I know what you mean,” she said. She pulled a blanket tighter around her shoulders. “Anyway, I dunno if any of it is helpful. Like—listen to this.” She read aloud:
Long ago, the Green Axe Man lived alone on South Hero Island. He used to steal other people’s milk, but his neighbors were so afraid of him that no one ever said a word about it. Once, by accident, he cut his hand off with his own axe, but he was so tough that he didn’t care. He just stuck the axe where his hand should be. Ever after, he had an axe instead of a hand, and whenever he went out, you could hear the chopping from far away as he swung his arm back and forth . . .
“Weird,” commented Brian.
“Not what we’re looking for, though,” said Coco.
Actually, Brian thought, none of them knew exactly what they were looking for. All they knew was that they were desperate to find it, and they really hoped they’d know when they found it.
Coco’s book was called True Tales to Make You Scream. Slowly, she said, “Maybe no book has what we’re looking for. I mean—we’ve been doing all this research since December, and we haven’t found anything. Not even a clue.”
“There’s something,” said Brian fiercely. “Somewhere. We just have to keep looking.”
He picked up Hauntings and Horrors in the Green Mountain State and flipped a page. Both girls fell silent. The rain wrapped them in its roar, like another blanket. If something tried to creep up on them, there was no chance they’d hear it through the sound of the rain.
