So excited for you to get your hands on this Halloween anthology featuring some extremely talented authors. My contribution is titled "The House Down the Street" and the ending will surprise you ;-)
Here's a teaser just to whet your appetites!
Diane perked right up, “Her name is Siobhan and she’s real pretty. She says she lives around here but she couldn’t remember her address. And she rides my bus so I’m guessing she lives in this neighborhood somewhere. Anyway she was telling me this really interesting story about that creepy old house up the street. You know the one? The one on 1515 Estate Avenue?”
Rose cringed inwardly. She knew it was only a matter of time before her daughter started hearing the stories about that house but she hadn’t thought it would be so soon.
“What about the house on 1515 Estate Avenue, monkey? It’s just an empty, creepy old house,” she answered, trying to deter the inevitable for another day.
She should have known better because her daughter was very much like her, “Apparently that house has been in this neighborhood for a very long time. In fact, it’s been said that it’s the first house built in this neighborhood like 115 years ago, maybe longer! But for some reason in the last eighteen years or so it’s been empty. No one has lived in it for longer than a month since the year 1997. The place hasn’t had anyone in it at all for the last thirteen years or so. Siobhan was saying it’s because the house is haunted. She says that when she walks by it every morning to catch the bus to school she can hear voices calling her name; telling her to come in and explore. Isn’t that creepy?”
Diane looked at her mother and shuddered, waiting for Rose’s reaction. She seemed disappointed when the older woman didn’t seem freaked.
“Is that so?” Rose asked, lost in a memory.
Rose remembered the last Halloween she would ever go trick or treating, back in 1997. She and a bunch of her teenage friends had been making bets as to when Mr. Crispin, the man who lived in the house on 1515 Estate Avenue at that time, would finally lose it and walk out on his wife and daughter. They were completely taken by surprise by what he did instead. None of them had been expecting him to kill his wife. Rose could still hear the police telling Crispin’s five year old daughter that everything was going to be alright; that they had called her grandparents on her mother’s side to come look after her. She also remembered wondering where the little rag doll that seemed to be a part of that little girl had been when the police had tucked her into one of their cruisers.
©House Down the Street by DJ Shaw
