Moving On: Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE

I sling my backpack over my shoulder as I slamm the passenger door to my mother’s SUV. I turn around to get a look at my new house.

My jaw almost hit the sidewalk at the sight of the house. The fence surrounding the front yard was covered in vines and practically falling over. The white paint on the house was chipped in numerous places. The window shutters were falling off and one shutter sat in the overgrown bushes below. It was far from being “the most beautiful house ever” as my mother had put it on the way over here.

“So, what do you think?” my mother asks, popping up next to me, Bella- my baby sister- napping away against her shoulder.

I thought carefully. “It needs some work,” I said pushing the rusted front gate forward. It fell to the ground with a loud bang, waking Bella. She gave a startled cry. My mother shushes her back to sleep.

“Well, son, looks like you got yourself a summer project,” my mother says, carefully stepping around the rusted gate and into the new front yard. I follow her.

What my mother meant by “summer project” is I like to fix things up and do things with my hands. I don’t like sitting around playing video games or reading books locked away in my room. I’m more of a hand-ons kind of guy.

“Where in the world did you find this place, mom?” I ask, looking around the yard. The grass was over grown and old toys littered the yard.

“Remember that weekend you watched Bella and I was gone all weekend? Well, I was down here looking for houses. And this one was so beautiful it caught my eye,”

“Oh, not because it was dirt-cheap?”

“That too,” she says with a smile as she took a brass key from her left jacket pocket and stuck it into the key hole. She jiggles it a few times before the bolts unlocks. The door swings open with a creak.

“Hmm, needs oil,” she says stepping inside. I linger outside on the porch, peering into the dark house. Lights startto flicker on, casting an eerie glow in the house. “Come on inside. It’s beautiful on the inside. You’re going to love it. I promise.”

I step into the house, closing the door behind me with a soft click. It was dead silent in the house. My eyes wonder up the stairs into pitch blackness. I took a step toward the stairs and another until I was standing on the bottom step, my hand resting on the railing and my eyes upward.

My mother’s voice came from a different room. “Honey, why don’t you go pick out your room,”

“Alright. I’m going upstairs,” I say taking the steps two at a time. At the top of the stairs I feel around the wall looking for a switch and when my hand came around it I flipp it on. Light floods the upstairs hallway.

There were five doors. One at the far left, three in front of me, and one on the very far right. After jiggling the doorknob a few times I learn that the door on the very far left was locked and that the door closest to it was the bathroom. The middle door led up to the attic. I shut the door immediately. No way in hell am I going up there. Attics are creepy and meant for storage. I twisted the lock on the outside of the middle door just to be safe. I tried the door to the far right, it was a closet.

“That just leaves you,” I said, turning the knob to the last door. It creaked opened to reveal an empty room, aside from the bed in the middle of the room covered in a white sheet and the dresser pushed against the wall.

I stepped into the room, looking around. The room was at the corner of the house. One window showed side of the house and the neighbor’s house, and another window showed the view of the backyard. There was an old wooden swing set and a treehouse.

“Bella’s going to love that,”

Beyond the backyard was a patch of woods. And at the very edge of the woods stood a girl in a white dress with a pale face and piercing blue eyes.

I'm not sure why, but I took off out of the room and down the stairs, taking them two at a time. I almost smash into my mom in the living room, but I dart to the left  barely missing her.

“Where’s the fire?”

I found the backdoor after going through the dining hall and kitchen. I throw open the back door to find that she was no longer there. She was gone.