House of Dark Shadows (2 page)

“Mom!” Toria yelled again, reaching for the bear.

Xander squeezed closer to the door, away from her. He must have put pressure on the bear in the wrong place: it began chanting in Toria's whiny voice: “Mom! Mom! Mom!”

He frantically squeezed Wuzzy's paws, but could not make it stop.

“Mom! Mom! Mom!”

The controls in the bear's arms weren't working. Frustrated by its continuous one-word poking at his brain—and a little concerned he had broken it and would have to buy her a new one—he looked to his sister for help.

She wasn't grabbing for it anymore. Just grinning. One of those see-what-happens-when-you-mess-with-me smiles.

“Mom! Mom! Mom!”

Xander was about to show her what happened when you messed with
him
—the possibilities ranged from a display of his superior vocal volume to ripping Wuzzy's arms right off— when the absurdity of it struck him. He cracked up.

“I mean it,” he laughed. “This thing is driving me crazy.” He shook the bear at her. It continued yelling for their mother.

His brother, David, who was sitting on the other side of Toria and who had been doing a good job of staying out of the fight, started laughing too. He mimicked the bear, who was mimicking their sister: “Mom! Mom! Mom!”

Mrs. King shifted around in the front passenger seat. She was smiling, but her eyes were curious.

“Xander broke Wuzzy!” Toria whined. “He won't turn off.” She pulled the bear out of Xander's hands.

The furry beast stopped talking: “Mo—” Then, blessed silence.

Toria looked from brother to brother, and they laughed again.

Xander shrugged. “I guess he just doesn't like me.”

“He only likes
me
,” Toria said, hugging it.

“Oh brother,” David said. He went back to the PSP game that had kept him occupied most of the drive.

Mom raised her eyebrows at Xander and said, “Be nice.”

Xander rolled his eyes. He adjusted his shoulders and wiggled his behind, nudging Toria. “It's too cramped back here. It may be an SU V, but it isn't big enough for us anymore.”

“Don't start that,” his father warned from behind the wheel. He angled the rearview mirror to see his son.

“What?” Xander said, acting innocent.

“I did the same thing with my father,” Dad said. “The car's too small . . . it uses too much gas . . . it's too run down . . .”

Xander smiled. “Well, it is.”

“And if we get a new car, what should we do with this one?”

“Well . . .” Xander said. “You know. It'd be a safe car for me.” A ten-year-old Toyota 4Runner wasn't his idea of cool wheels, but it
was
transportation.

Dad nodded. “Getting you a car is something we can talk about, okay? Let's see how you do.”

“I have my driver's permit. You
know
I'm a good driver.”

“He is,” Toria chimed in.

David added, “And then he can drive us to school.”

“I didn't mean just the driving,” Dad said. He paused, catching Xander's eyes in the mirror. “I mean with all of this, the move and everything.”

Xander stared out the window again. He mumbled, “Guess I'll never get a car, then.”

“Xander?” Dad said. “I didn't hear that.”

“Nothing.”

“He said he'll never get a car,” Toria said.

Silence. David's thumbs clicked furiously over the PSP buttons. Xander was aware of his mom watching him. If he looked, her eyes would be all sad-like, and she would be frowning in sympathy for him. He thought maybe his dad was looking too, but only for an opportunity to explain himself again. Xander didn't want to hear it. Nothing his old man said would make this okay, would make ripping him out of his world less awful than it was.

“Dad, is the school's soccer team good? Did they place?” David asked. Xander knew his brother wasn't happy about the move either, but jumping right into the sport he was so obsessed about went a long way toward making the change something he could handle. Maybe Xander was like that three years ago, just rolling with the punches. He couldn't remember. But now he had things in his life David didn't: friends who truly mattered, ones he thought he'd spend the rest of his life with. Little kids didn't think that way. Friends could come and go, and they adjusted. True, Xander had known his current friends for years, but they hadn't become like
blood
until the last year or so.

That got him thinking about Danielle. He pulled his mobile phone from his shirt pocket and checked it. No text messages from her. No calls. She hadn't replied to the last text he'd sent. He keyed in another: “Forget me already? JK.”

But he wasn't Just Kidding. He knew the score: out of sight, out of mind. She had said all the right things, like
We'll talk
on the phone all the time
;
You come down and see me and I'll come up to
see you, okay?
and
I'll wait for you
.

Yeah, sure you will
, he thought. Even during the past week, he'd sensed a coldness in her, an emotional distancing. When he'd told his best friend, Dean had shrugged. Trying to sound world-wise, he'd said, “Forget her, dude. She's hot. She's gotta move on. You too. Not like you're married, right?” Dean had never liked Danielle.

Xander tried to convince himself she was just another friend he was forced to leave behind. But there was a dif- ferent kind of ache in his chest when he thought about her. A heavy weight in his stomach.

Stop it!
he told himself. He flipped his phone closed.

On his mental list of the reasons to hate the move to Pine-dale, he moved on to the one titled “career.” He had just started making short films with his buddies and was pretty sure it was something he would eventually do for a living. They weren't much, just short skits he and his friends acted out. He and Dean wrote the scripts, did the filming, used computer software to edit an hour of video into five-minute films, and laid music over them. They had six already on You-Tube—with an average rating of four and a half stars and a boatload of praise. Xander had dreams of getting a short film into the festival circuit, which, of course, would lead to offers to do music videos and commercials, then on to feature movies starring the next Russell Crowe and Jim Carrey, and probably an Oscar. Pasadena was right next to Hollywood, a twenty-minute drive. You couldn't ask for a better place to live if you were the next Steven Spielberg. What on earth would he find to film in Pinedale?
Trees
, he thought glumly, watching them fly past his window.

Dad, addressing David's soccer concern, said, “We'll talk about it later.”

Mom reached through the seat backs to shake Xander's knee. “It'll work out,” she whispered.

“Wait a minute,” David said, understanding Dad-talk as well as Xander did. “Are you saying they suck—or that they don't
have
a soccer team? You told me they did!”

“I said ‘later,' Dae.” His nickname came from Toria's inability as a toddler to say David. She had also called Xander
Xan
, but it hadn't stuck.

David slumped down in his seat.

Xander let the full extent of his misery show on his face for his mother.

She gave his knee a shake, sharing his misery. She was good that way. “Give it some time,” she whispered. “You'll make new friends and find new things to do. Wait and see.”

CHAPTER
two

SATURDAY 6:18 P.M.

Their motel room was decorated like a six-year-old boy's bedroom. Athletes doing their thing illustrated the wallpaper, bedspreads, hand towels, shower curtain. The bedside lamp was a cartoon-faced baseball player, whose bat held up the bulb and shade. A throw rug between the beds was supposed to look like a giant basketball, but time and lots of feet had worn it into something more like a squashed pumpkin.

“Who do they think stays here?” Xander said, noticing someone had painted red stitching on the globe of the ceiling light in an effort to make it resemble a baseball. When he pointed it out to David, his brother thought it was supposed to be a bloodshot eye. They were sitting on the bed that, unbelievably, they would have to share until his parents arranged for something more permanent. Xander was going to make darned sure no one fed the kid beans before then.

“The décor is . . .
interesting
,” Mrs. King said. Usually she found something charming or at least educational about everything. That she didn't this time validated Xander's suspicion that the motel owners were totally clueless.

“I like the soccer players,” David said.

“No, really?” Xander pushed him hard enough to send him flying off the bed and onto the road-kill pumpkin.

One thing Xander appreciated about David was his determination to stand up for himself. Instead of crying for Mommy every time Xander did something he didn't like, he either turned a cold shoulder or fought back. This time he fought back. Smiling, he sprung off the floor and tackled Xander back onto the bed.

Xander rolled, so he was sitting on his brother. He grabbed David's wrists and tried to pin him. David jerked his arms free and landed a blow to Xander's stomach. Xander jabbed David in the ribs and got a solid grip on his wrists. He pinned his hands to the bed, one next to each of David's ears. He made a noise in his throat that implied the gathering of something worth spitting onto his brother's face. David began to squirm, tighten his face, and thrash his head from side to side.

“Boys!” Mom said.

“Ah, let 'em be,” Dad told her. “They just spent nine hours in the car.”

David heaved his legs up behind Xander and drove a knee into his back.

“Ahh!” Xander yelled.

David pulled an arm free, reached up, and grabbed a handful of Xander's hair.

Xander squeezed his eyes shut. “David . . . let go!”

“Get off me.”

“
Let go
.”

Somewhere in the room, Mom pleaded to Dad. “Ed?”

“G, they're fine.”

It hadn't been until Xander was in kindergarten, when the other kids had laughed, that he realized G—as in “gee whiz”— was a funny name for a mom . . . for anybody. His mother had explained that she simply did not feel like a Gertrude, and even at that young age, Xander had agreed that G was much better. In fact, the family had developed a saying whenever Mom did something bold or crazy—like getting in the face of the linebacker-sized neighbor who'd yelled at David to get off his yard or parasailing behind a speedboat in Baja:
definitely not a Gertrude
.

“Okay, okay,” Xander said. Slowly, he slid off his brother. David held on until Xander had shifted his entire weight from David's belly to the bed. David pulled his knees up to his chest, preventing Xander from jumping on again. Then he cautiously released his grip on Xander's hair. Before David could spin away, Xander spat, nailing his brother's cheek.

Xander howled in laughter and bolted for the door. He yanked it open and darted into the parking lot.

“Alexander!” his mother yelled after him. “You get back here right now!”

But Dad called to them, “Not too far, guys!” giving him permission to continue on.

The door slammed. Heading for a big field beyond the parking lot, Xander looked back to see David sprinting after him. He was still wiping his face.

CHAPTER
three

The man in the house lumbered through the corridor. He could tell right away nothing had changed. It was the same dark, empty place it had been time after time. But it was his duty to check. So with a deep sigh, he moved through a threshold into the next room. His shoulders scraped both sides of the door frame. The weight of each footstep rattled the windows and caused the floor to groan under him. His eyes were accustomed to darkness, but still he squinted at the shadows gathered in each room. He grunted at them, and when he was satisfied they were only shadows after all, he moved on.

A spider dropped from the ceiling, landing on his shoulder. He swiped at it, smearing the grime and sweat already there. It darted to his chest, where he flattened it with a palm the size of a Ping-Pong paddle. Having made his usual circuit through hallways, stairways, and rooms, he heaved his heavy shoulders in a deep, sad breath and headed for the door that would take him home.

Something stopped him. A sound. He turned and retraced his steps to the front rooms. He looked out a leaded glass window.

Through a patina of filth, he saw a man approaching. He was ambling through the trees slowly, cautiously. He did not move directly to the door, but cut diagonally to the side of the house.

The man inside moved with him, from window to window. The outsider returned to the front. He went toward the door but did not come close. He seemed satisfied and began walking away, his gait more confident. At the window, the man inside shifted his considerable weight from one foot to the other. A floorboard creaked.

The other man stopped to look. He appeared to stare directly at the man inside. But it was dark in the house, and if the other saw him, he gave no clue. He walked on, glancing back only once more.

For a while, the man watched his breath condense and evaporate on the window. Then he turned and went home.

CHAPTER
four

SATURDAY, 6:58 P.M.

Halfway through the field, almost back to the hotel, Xander reached out and brushed the most obvious grass out of his brother's hair.

David smiled. “Thanks.”

Xander shrugged. “Don't want to get in trouble for pounding on you.”

David appraised him. “Who pounded on who?”

Xander pushed him. “Look at you.”

“
You're
the one limping.”

“Yeah, right,” Xander said, trying to ignore the pain in his ankle.

“If the cops stop us, I'll tell them you're a mugger.”