Hauntings Read Online Free Page A

Lane and up Water, getting home just as the final pink glow in the west died.
    â€œThere.” Milo finished tying a double bow in the boy’s shoelaces. “Now they won’t come undone.”
    The boy frowned at his feet critically. “How’m I gonna get ’em off?”
    â€œLike this.” Milo demonstrated for him. “See?” He retied the bow. “It’s easy when you get the hang of it.”
    â€œMaybe I’ll just leave ’em on when I go to bed.”
    â€œAnd when you take a bath, too?” Milo laughed. “Sneakers in the tub’ll go over real well with your mom.”
    â€œI won’t take baths. Just wipe off with a washcloth.”
    Milo restrained himself from looking behind the kid’s ears. Instead, he stood up and began walking again. The boy stayed beside him, trying to whistle between his teeth and only making a rhythmic hissing noise. Milo could have sympathized. He’d never learned to whistle very well himself. Even today his whistle had more air than tune in it. Sammy had been a pretty good whistler. He’d even been able to whistle between his fingers like the bigger boys. Stevie hadn’t been able to, but Sammy hadn’t made fun of him the way he’d made fun of Milo.
    Milo half-expected to see Sammy and Stevie as he and the boy approached the spot where the garbage shed had been. Now there was a modern dumpster there, but Milo imagined that the rats could get into that easily enough if any cared to leave the river. Aunt Syl had written his mother that environmentalists had forced the city to clean up the pollution, making it more livable for the rats under the bridge.
    But the dumpster was big enough for someone Sammy’s size to hide behind. Or in. Milo shook his head. Sammy’s size? Sammy was all grown up now, just like he was. All of them were all grown up now. Except Angie. Angie was still the same age she’d been on that last day, he knew that for a fact. Because she’d never stopped chasing him.
    It took her a long, long time to find him because he had broken the rule about leaving the neighborhood. You weren’t supposed to leave the neighborhood to hide. You weren’t supposed to go home, either, and he had done that, too.
    But then he’d thought the game was really over. He’d thought it had ended at the bottom of the stairs in the vacant house with the daylight’s going and the streetlights’ coming on. Rhonda had been the last one found, the only one found, so she should have been IT, not Milo. The next game should have gone on without him. Without him and Angie, of course. He thought it had. All through the long, dull ride to the airport and the longer, duller flight from New England to the Midwest, through the settling in at the first of the new apartments and the settling down to passable if lackluster years in the new school, he thought the game had continued without him and Angie.
    But the night came when he found himself back in that darkening empty house, halfway up the stairs to the second floor. He froze in the act of reaching for the next step, feeling the dirt and fear and approach of IT.
    When the floor creaked, he screamed and woke himself up before he could hear the sound of her childish, taunting voice. He was flat on his back in bed, gripping the covers in a stranglehold. After a few moments he sat up and wiped his hands over his face.
    The room was quiet and dark, much darker than the house had been that last day. He got up without turning on the light and went to the only window. This was the fourth apartment they’d had since coming to the Midwest, but they’d all been the same. Small, much smaller than the one in the tenement, done in plaster ticky-tacky with too few windows. Modern housing in old buildings remodeled for modern living with the woodwork painted white. At least the apartment was on the eighth floor. Milo preferred living high up. You could