Eddie, even though he was, a little bit. His fingertips tingled, and the crunch of the metal resonated somewhere deep inside him. He would have been worried even if they hadn’t just gotten into a car accident, but he figured it was normal to feel that way on the day you were moving to a new town. Everything was uncertain. After his mother had lost her office job in Heaverhill, she wanted a change of scenery. At the end of the previous school year, Eddie had said goodbye to his old classmates without knowing he might not see them again for a while. His parents had made the decision to move quite quickly. He had no idea what his new house would look like, or what his new classmates would be like. Eddie had been feeling pretty overwhelmed all day—all month, in fact—and so on the car ride down from Heaverhill, he’d been rereading one of his favorite books, The Revenge of the Nightmarys. Reading familiar stories was comforting, even stories as scary as the ones Nathaniel Olmstead had written. “Do you really think it’s dead? Because … it looked like …”

“Like what?” said Mom.

“Like … a monster,” said Eddie, “or … or something.”

“A monster?” Mom laughed. “I wish my imagination were half as wild as yours, Edgar. I’d be a bestselling novelist by now.”

“Didn’t you see its face?” “I didn’t get a good look.”

“Hey,” called Eddie’s father, “the cops are on their way with a tow truck. The officer I spoke with said we should probably wait inside the car.”

“Why?” said Mom.

“I told him I hit a bear.”

“What did you tell him that for?”

“Because it’s true!”

“It wasn’t a bear. It didn’t look anything like a bear,” she said, stepping back toward the car. “Edgar seems to think it was a monster. I swear, the two of you are such a pair.”

Eddie was about to follow her back to the car, when something in the distance down the road caught his eye, freezing him where he stood. Across the dip of the next valley, where the road descended, Eddie noticed a simple box of a house sitting on top of a grass-covered hill. A patchwork of tall trees, the leaves of which were turning in the wind, surrounded the nearby hills. The smoky peaks of the Black Hood Mountains were visible on the horizon. He knew he’d seen this place before, but where? A postcard? A book? A dream? The familiarity of the sight was surreal enough to knock away the image of the creature his father had struck with the car. He wandered to the faded yellow line on the road for a better view.

A fat stone chimney, like an enormous gravestone, sprouted from the center of the house’s pitched slate roof. Five small windows spread across the top floor. On the bottom were four windows framing a broken door twisting away from its hinges. Unpainted gray shingles peeled away from the sides of the house. Brush and bushes and weeds obscured the rest of the building.

His mouth went dry as he gasped. “No way,” he whispered to himself, suddenly realizing where he’d seen the house.

“Edgar, you are going to get hit by a truck!” his mother called out the window from the passenger seat.

Eddie pointed at the hill. “But—”

“Come on,” said his father, leaning out the driver’s-side door. “Get in the car, bud.”

Eddie stumbled to the car and climbed into the backseat.

“What were you looking at?” Mom asked. “Did you hear something in the woods? That thing’s not still alive, is it?”

He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he bent down and searched the floor for the book he’d been reading during the ride from Heaverhill. The Revenge of the Nightmarys. It was underneath his mother’s seat.

“Edgar, what’s wrong?” Mom said, peering at him from behind the blue vinyl headrest.

He opened the book’s back cover and showed his parents the picture printed there. The man on the inside flap of the book jacket stood in front of a country house on top of a grassy hill. The windows were not broken. The weeds had not yet grown. The shingles were gray, and though they were not in perfect condition, they were in much better shape than the shingles on the house on the hill up the road. The fat stone chimney looked more like a monument than a gravestone, but still the resemblance was unmistakable. The man’s face was serious, but his ruffled brown hair and short beard gave