Wildwood Road Read Online Free PDF

to feel queasy. Michael was determined now, though. He was practically at their doorstep. There was no way he was going home without finding out exactly what was going on here. What kind of people were they?
    Only when he reached the porch did he pause to really look at the house again. He gazed up at it, craning his head so far back that he nearly tumbled down the hill. It was even more dilapidated than he had thought. Several windows were cracked. On the porch there was a swing; it rocked gently, set in motion by the wind, emitting a steady creak that sent icy fingers of dread dancing up his spine.
    The front door was not entirely closed. Even from the base of the stairs he could see that it hung open several inches, only darkness inside.
    He wanted to turn around. To go straight to the car, to his blissfully unconscious wife, and get out of there. To forget about the little girl, and this entire night.
    “Scooter?” he called, and immediately felt an utter fool. The name was so silly that saying it out loud was like nails on a blackboard.
    “Hello?” he ventured. The only response was the creaking of the porch swing and the silence from the dark interior of the house.
    Michael hesitated, glancing back down at the car. The face of that little lost girl was etched deeply in his mind.
    Find me if you can. Will you?
    What the hell had that meant?
    He started up the steps, agonizingly aware of the moldering house. The paint was peeling, flaking. And as he climbed the stairs he caught a scent on the breeze, the smell of old newspaper and of decay.
    “Hello?” he tried again.
    Someone's got to be here. The girl went right in the front door. The place might feel empty, but it isn't. It can't be.
    There was no doorbell.
    Fuck it.
Someone
is here.
    Michael knocked on the door three times in quick succession. The sound echoed down the hill and inside the house. The force of his knocking swung the door inward, until it hung half open.
    “Hello,” he said again. Or perhaps this time he only thought it.
    With one final glance down at the car, he took a breath, nodded determinedly, and went inside.

CHAPTER THREE
    The house creaked with age and the wind. Michael had expected dust to fill his nose, had expected the place to be empty, save for dirt and broken furniture and cobwebs. But the house was not at all what he expected. What he found instead was worse, in a way.
    Moonlight streamed in through the windows, casting a yellow gleam of illumination, though the corners were lost in shadow. It seemed odd, that luminescence. The moon had not seemed quite so bright when he was outside—not nearly bright enough to provide him so much light.
    The house was clean. That was the thing that really surprised him. Not a single dust mote floated in the splashes of moonlight that dappled the foyer. Something struck him as odd about the wallpaper, and the paintings on the walls. As he ventured deeper into the house and peered into the moon-washed parlor to the right, Michael realized what it was.
    The house was a relic out of time, as if it had been decorated in the 1940s and had remained untouched since then. It reminded him of his childhood, and of old Mrs. Standish, who had been born in the house across the street and had lived there until she died. Whenever Michael had to sell chocolate bars or raffle tickets as school fund-raisers, Mrs. Standish was always generous with her time and her money. By then she had lived in the house nearly eighty years, and even the knickknacks on her shelves had yellowed.
    This place was like that. Blanched. Yellowed, and not just by the moonlight. The sofa and the carpet and the divan in the parlor were all faded. Michael stood in the foyer, looking in, and then his gaze drifted toward the grand staircase ahead of him, and the corridor that ran alongside it into the heart of the house.
    It was like stepping into an old sepia-toned photograph.
    Despite the cracked windows and the disrepair of the exterior,