You Can't Come in Here! (8 page)

Satisfied with their party planning, Emily, Hannah, and Ethan left the lake, heading their separate ways. Hannah hurried home to watch her little brother, and Ethan ran off to the school for soccer practice.

As Emily rode her bike home she began to get excited, but also nervous, about her plan to barge in and introduce herself to Drew and Vicky's parents. In the months she'd been hanging out at Drew and Vicky's, she'd called up to them a bunch of times, but she'd never actually met them face-to-face. What was she going to say to them?

“Hi, Mr. and Mrs. Strig. I'm Emily Hunter,” she rehearsed aloud as she pedaled toward home. “I'm your neighbor, you know, from across the street. The house with the green shutters and white—”

Emily smiled to herself.
They don't need a detailed description of your house. They'll know who you are. You've been hanging out there, like, every day for the past few months.

She tried again. “Hi, Mr. and Mrs. Strig. I'm Emily Hunter, you know, Drew and Vicky's friend? You've probably heard me playing guitar with them? I hang out at your house sometimes?”
Jeez, Em, just get to the point!

“Mr. and Mrs. Strig, I would like to invite you and Drew and Vicky to my house so you can meet my parents. And I would also like Vicky and Drew to come to my sleepover party on Saturday. Well, Vicky will actually be the one sleeping over. All the boys will be leaving at eleven and—”

Emily sighed.
Forget it. You'll figure out what to say when you get there.

A few minutes later she turned into her driveway and slowed to a stop. Leaning her bike against the garage door, she took a deep breath and walked quickly across the street.

Emily climbed the lopsided steps leading onto the Strigs' porch and walked across the creaky floorboards to the front door. Then she knocked on the door.

No reply.

Again she knocked. Again, no sound from within.

“Maybe they're in the back of the house. Of course, if they had a doorbell . . .”

Emily thought about turning around and going home, but she knew she would regret it. She'd gotten herself psyched to do this and she would not get another chance before the sleepover.

She grabbed the ancient doorknob and turned it. The door squeaked open with a pitiful groan.

“Drew, Vicky? Is that you?” a woman's voice said.

“We're upstairs,” added a man's voice.

Why aren't Drew and Vicky home being homeschooled?
Emily thought.

“Mr. Strig! Mrs. Strig! It's Emily Hunter from across the street. Drew and Vicky's friend. May I come in and talk with you?”

The Strigs remained silent.

What is with these people?

Emily backed up onto the porch and closed the front door.
Should I just go home?
she wondered.
But I can't chicken out now. I just need to go upstairs and talk to these people. After all, they're just people, right? What can they do, bite my head off?

Emily opened the door again.

“Drew, Vicky? Is that you?”

“We're upstairs.”

Now Emily was really confused. Wasn't that the same thing they'd called out when she came in the first time? And why hadn't they answered her when she called up to them? And that's when it hit her. She'd heard Mr. and Mrs. Strig say the same thing each time Drew or Vicky opened the front door. She closed the door, then opened it again.

“Drew, Vicky? Is that you?”

“We're upstairs.”

“Okay,” Emily muttered. “What's going on here?”

She opened the door fully and stepped inside.

Instead of walking straight down the hallway, as she always did to go to Drew and Vicky's rec room, Emily turned left. She followed the narrow hallway around a curve and came to a large wooden staircase. It had obviously once been a grand stairway fit for a mansion. She could picture a bride walking down its long sweeping stairs, trailing the train of her wedding gown behind her.

But, like everything in this house, the staircase had fallen into terrible disrepair. Emily carefully adjusted her weight as she took every step, making sure that each stair
would support her before she committed fully to moving up onto the next one. Every stair moaned as if it resented being used after so many years.

Reaching the landing, Emily found another hallway, similar to the one on the first floor. This hallway also looked as if it had been thrown together quickly using some unpainted Sheetrock that someone had just found sitting around. At the end of the hallway, a single door stood closed.

“Mrs. Strig?” Emily called out in the direction of the closed door. “Mr. Strig?”

No answer.

Reaching the door, she knocked, her raps echoing into the room beyond.

Emily psyched herself up. “Just do it, Em. Open the door.”

She nodded to herself, then opened the door and stepped into the room.

Somehow the fact that the room was practically empty did not surprise Emily. The walls had long ago crumbled. Pieces of plaster lay scattered on the floor, exposing the beams that held what was left of the house together. A single piece of furniture, a small table, sat in
the corner. But what was that on the table?

Crossing the room carefully to avoid falling into one of the many holes in the floor, Emily reached the table. Inspecting the small, square device on it, she realized that it was an old-fashioned telephone answering machine, the kind people used before voice mail.

A cassette tape sat inside the answering machine. Emily had seen these types of answering machines in movies from the 1980s. She pressed a button labeled
OUTGOING MESSAGE
. The cassette tape rolled, and two voices came out of the machine's tiny speaker.

“Drew, Vicky? Is that you?”

“We're upstairs.”

When the message finished, Emily saw the tape rewind so it was ready to play again when the next phone call came in—or in this case, the next time someone opened the front door.

Emily walked completely around the table and discovered a wire coming out of the back of the answering machine. She followed the wire down to where the wall met the floor. From there it ran toward the door.

Tracing the wire, she followed it out of the room, along the hall, and down the stairs. At the bottom of the
staircase, the wire crossed the floor and ran up to the door hinge, where it disappeared into a small plastic box. Emily pulled the cover off the box and found two batteries inside. The answering machine's wire was wrapped around a metal post. A second wire led from the box to a small speaker mounted on the wall at the top of the stairs. This was obviously where the message came out when the door was opened.

Emily sat down on the bottom step, trying to make sense of what she had just seen. For some reason, Mr. and Mrs. Strig had set up a phone answering machine to play their voices whenever anyone opened the door. But why? And where were they? They were supposed to be here, homeschooling Drew and Vicky.

Drew and Vicky. Where were
they
?

Emily got up and walked down the hall. Reaching the rec room door, she paused, then knocked.

“Drew? Vicky? It's Emily. I'm off from school today.”

Silence.

She opened the door and stepped into the rec room. She saw the usual array of guitars and amplifiers, the foosball and Ping-Pong tables, but no Drew or Vicky. Again she called out. “Drew? Vicky?”

Again, no reply.

Emily had always known that there was something different about the Strigs. She knew that Drew and Vicky were not like her other friends. She wondered why Mr. and Mrs. Strig were being so weird about a simple thing like letting their kids hang out at a neighbor's house.

But this—this was more than she could make sense of. What about the whole homeschooling thing? If Drew and Vicky were not here getting lessons, then where were they? And what was the deal with the answering machine? Why were Mr. and Mrs. Strig trying to fool people into thinking they were home when they weren't?

WHERE WAS EVERYBODY?

Emily's mind raced in frustration. Then she spied the bathroom on the far side of the rec room—the door that Vicky had thrown a fit about when Emily had tried to open it. Her confusion and concern quickly gave way to a rush of curiosity. She crossed the room, grabbed the doorknob, and opened the door.

What Emily saw when she stepped through the doorway was almost more than her brain could comprehend. This was no bathroom. It wasn't even a room. It was an open expanse with a dirt floor, raw beams,
and crumbling walls. The rest of the house, beyond the rec room, barely existed as anything more than a shell. Giant cobwebs filled every corner. Mice scurried along the dirt floor, pausing and sniffing, then resuming their search for food. A mass of insects crawled slowly, making the floor appear to be alive and moving.

Before Emily's mind could wrap itself around this sight, and just when she thought this whole thing couldn't get any weirder, it did. Sitting on the dirt floor were three long wooden boxes. As she moved closer, Emily's eyes widened in fright.

“C-coffins!” she stammered. “Three coffins!”

Emily backed away from the coffins and stumbled, landing hard on the dirt floor, her face just inches away from a line of crawling bugs.

“Ah!” she screamed, scrambling to her feet. She ran back into the rec room, through the hallway, and out the front door. As she hurried across the street, she wondered for a second if she had remembered to close the front door and the door leading from the rec room to the room with the coffins.

The room with the coffins.

Nothing unusual about that
, Emily thought.
Just a typical suburban room with a dirt floor, cobwebs as big as SUVs, and the usual three coffins. It's all the rage this year. “What! You only have two coffins in your dirt room? Please. Everyone is going for
the three-coffin look this season. I saw it on the cover of
Better Homes and Coffins
magazine.”

“Calm down, Emily,” she said aloud. “If you are going to completely lose your mind, the least you can do is have the courtesy to wait until you are in your own home.”

Emily threw open her front door and ran inside.

Good thing her parents were not home. Emily knew that there was no way she could hold it together and keep what had just happened from them. She slammed the front door shut, locked it, scooped up the cat for comfort, and then ran up to her room. She sat on her bed, then immediately got up and started pacing. Franklin watched her as she moved back and forth.

“How could I have been such a fool? Was I just impressed by how good those two were at everything? I thought Drew and Vicky were a little weird, but not
that
weird. There's a big difference between being a little weird and living in a house that's not really a house, having a coffin or three in a secret room that they were freaked out about me possibly discovering, with parents who only exist on a recording, and—”

Emily stopped pacing, lost in her thoughts.
Could it be that there is no Mr. and Mrs. Strig? That they died, and for
some reason Drew and Vicky don't want anyone to know, so they set up this complicated hoax? Do the coffins belong to Mr. and Mrs. Strig?

Emily started to turn green—this wasn't just creepy, it was downright gross.
Why? Why? Why? Why would you hide the fact that your parents are dead? And why
three
coffins?

She sat back down on her bed and forced herself to take a deep breath. She really didn't know what was going on. She felt duped, taken, lied to. Whatever the deal was with Drew and Vicky, they were not who they appeared to be. Hannah had seen that there was something creepy about Drew and Vicky, but until now Emily couldn't see it. Or maybe she just hadn't wanted to.

Well, that was about to change. She was through with them. She didn't ever want to go back into that freak show of a house, and she certainly didn't want them in her house. It went without saying that Drew and Vicky would most definitely
not
be coming to her sleepover.