Took Read Free

your eyes were playing tricks on you.”
    I moved a little closer to her. Maybe she was right. She must be right. Monsters didn’t roam the woods anywhere but in fairy tales. I closed my eyes and practiced breathing slowly and deeply, but it was almost daylight by the time I fell asleep.
    When I woke up, sunlight filled the living room. Just as Mom had said, whatever I’d heard and seen in the dark had a natural explanation—night noises most likely, animals going about their nocturnal business, embellished with my imagination. Moonlight and shadows play tricks on you.
    The moving truck arrived before we’d finished breakfast, and Mom put us all to work. We picked our bedrooms first. Mine overlooked the woods, which were not quite as close to the house as I’d thought the night before, but close enough for me to see a deer pause at the edge of the trees and then vanish into the shadows. The lawns in Connecticut were overrun with deer, but this was a wild deer and therefore more noble than the ones who ate our shrubbery and our flowers and the vegetables Mom tried to grow.
    Erica’s room was across the hall from mine, at the front of the house. Mom and Dad were next to her. The bedroom beside mine was reserved for Dad—his office, he called it. At the end of the hall was a small room, probably a sewing room, Mom said, or a nursery. She claimed it for her weaving. “The loom will fit just right under the windows,” she said.
    The moving men spent most of the day tramping around the house, upstairs and down, putting furniture where Mom told them to. When they finally drove away, Mom gave us our next tasks. Unpack our clothes and belongings and put them away.
    I finished first and stopped in Erica’s room to see how she was doing. Her clothes lay in a heap on her unmade bed. Her boxes of toys and books sat in the middle of the floor, where the moving men had left them, still taped shut. Erica sat on a window seat, her back to me. She held Little Erica.
    â€œWe don’t like it here,” Erica whispered to the doll. “It’s a bad, scary place, no matter what they say. You and I know, but nobody believes us.”
    Little Erica had nothing to say that I could hear, but my sister bent her head close to the doll as if she were listening to her. “Yes,” she murmured. “Yes.”
    I hated to interrupt the weird conversation, but I stepped into the room and said, “Mom told you to put your stuff away, but you haven’t even started.”
    Erica whirled around. Her red hair swung like a flag. And so did the doll’s. “I’m never going to put anything away until we go home.”
    â€œ
This
is home now.” I picked up a box labeled SOCKS AND UNDERWEAR and pried off the tape. “I’ll help you.”
    â€œLeave my things alone!” Erica laid the doll down and snatched the box away. “Get out of my room, Daniel. We don’t want you here.”
    â€œWhat’s going on?” Mom stood in the doorway.
    â€œI was just trying to help her unpack.”
    â€œI don’t want him to help,” Erica said. “I’m leaving everything just like this until we go home.”
    â€œHoney, we
are
home.” Mom tried to hug her, but she pulled away.
    â€œHome is Connecticut,” Erica whispered. “Not
here
.”
    Mom made a gesture toward the door. “Leave this to me, Daniel.”
    As I left the room, Mom shut the door. I lingered in the hall for a moment. Mom was talking softly. Erica was crying.
    Â 
    I found Dad in the basement in front of a huge furnace that looked like something you’d find on the
Nautilus
, all dials and levers and doors and pipes. A submarine engine only Captain Nemo understood. Steampunk in every way.
    â€œLet me see,” Dad mused. “It’s September. Hopefully, I’ll have time to figure out how this monster works before we need it.”
    I pictured a long, cold