The Smashed Man of Dread End

  Dedication

  To Esme and Hazel, the real Noe and Len.

  And to Olive. I’ll have to find another monster for you to fight.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  “That’s ominous,” Noe said from the back seat of the SUV.

  “Om-eee-nus,” repeated Len.

  Noelle Wiley glanced at her three-year-old sister. Lenore was squeezing a stuffed anteater to her chest and straining against the straps of a car seat covered in dried yogurt glops and apple juice stains. Noe wrinkled her nose and scrunched closer to the SUV door. “Quiet, Len,” she said.

  “Don’t talk to your sister like that,” said Mom from the driver’s seat.

  “And don’t freak out. It’s not ominous. That’s just another name for a cul-de-sac.” Dad was in the front passenger seat, poking at his phone like he was trying to get it to pay attention to him.

  The topic of conversation was a diamond-shaped yellow sign on the side of the road. On it, in blocky black letters, were two words: DEAD END.

  But Noe wasn’t talking about the sign. She was talking about what was spray-painted on the sign. Squeezed between the first two letters of “DEAD” was an R in sparkly black paint, turning the phrase into DREAD END. The R was deformed, with the hump at the top longer and thinner than it should have been.

  As the SUV slowly passed the sign and turned the corner, Dad continued. “You’re going to love living at the end of a cul-de-sac, Noe. The street is your own private blacktop. You can bike on it or play basketball on it or cover it in chalk drawings or lie in the middle of it without worrying that cars are going to run you over.”

  “She can’t lie in the middle of it,” said Mom.

  “She can if we put out one of those signs that say Slow Children. Our children are pretty slow.” Noe’s phone vibrated in her pocket, and she fished it out to see that Dad had sent her a wink emoji.

  Her parents had been handling her like an egg carton full of tiny time bombs since they had told her they were moving. They had lived in the old house for all of Noe’s life. And now, at thirteen, she would be facing the terrors of a new place.

  What her parents didn’t know was that she didn’t care that they were moving. It wasn’t like they were moving to another state. Or even to another town. They were staying in Osshua, just moving to the north end of it. That meant a new house and a new school district, but that was fine. Noe was done with her old school, anyway. The jerk-to-friend ratio there was pretty high, and her best friend had stopped being one.

  Len, sensing that her sister’s thoughts had gone to unpleasant places, shifted the anteater and peeled a mummified french fry off the lining of her car seat. She offered it to her sister. Noe scrunched tighter against the door, pressing her cheek against the window, which was cool despite the summer outside. Len gave up and pretended to feed the fry to her anteater.

  As the car rounded the curve, passing a less ominous green sign labeled TOTTER COURT, the entire dead end—Noe hated the phrase “cul-de-sac,” it sounded like a bad word—appeared through the front window of the SUV.

  The neighborhood sat at the bottom of a ravine like it was pressed into the ground by a giant thumb. The ravine wall rose about thirty feet behind the houses on one side of the block, but then gradually lowered around the curve of the dead end until the wall disappeared behind the houses on the other side of the road. Between the backyards of the neighborhood and the base of the ravine grew a thin forest of trees.

  Their new house was near the dead end of the dead end street, on the side of the road where the ravine was tallest. The house was a red saltbox with black shutters and a black door. On top of the roof was a metal weather vane, shaped like a walking Pilgrim, that had aged into a pale green. The house looked like it dated to colonial times, but it had been built only a few decades ago. Most of the houses in the neighborhood were like that, built to reflect an older New England. On one side of their new house was a gray house similar to their own, and on the other side was a forested lot that had never been cleared. The closest house on that side was a white one at the very tip of the dead end. It was set halfway up the ravine, which was a gentle slope at that point.

  Noe’s new school was somewhere behind that white house, on the other side of the forested slope. She could walk there in minutes. That meant no bus, no parents dropping her off—and sleeping in until the last possible moment. Another reason to be happy with this move. But summer was no time for school thoughts.

  What Noe wasn’t happy with was helping Dad carry in all the moving boxes from the rental truck that was parked in their driveway. The furniture had been carried into the house yesterday by the movers Dad had hired, but he wanted to save money on the boxes and smaller items. Len was too young to help, so that left her and Mom and Dad to lug boxes. Which they started doing immediately after they arrived.

  The house was larger than their old house. Two floors and a basement, four bedrooms, two bathrooms. The first floor was laid out in a circle, so you could run around forever without hitting a wall. The bedrooms were all on the second floor.

  Noe dropped a box full of clothes onto the wide pine planks of her bedroom floor, wiped her forehead, and looked around. Blank walls and a bare floor and two windows. Soon her dog posters would cover the walls and her furniture would cover the floor. She stared out one of the windows. A large backyard—perfect for a dog—stretched flat and green and almost featureless except for a large stone-ringed firepit to one side. The yard ended at that thin strip of forest at the base of the ravine. Behind their house, the forest thickened and continued through a gap in the ravine wall and into a large forest preserve. Even though they were still in town, only a mile from the nearest grocery store, in fact, it felt like they were in the middle of nowhere. When Noe looked out the windows in the back of the house, it looked like they lived in a forest. When she looked out the windows at the front of the house, it looked like they lived in a neighborhood. It had to be the strangest street in town.

  Noe could barely make out the face of the ravine through all the foliage and couldn’t at all make out the houses perched atop the ravine, which faced the opposite direction. Dad said that during winter, when the trees were bare, they’d have a clear view of the backs of those houses. And that hopefully everybody up there used curtains. Noe herself couldn’t wait for fall, when the maple and oak and birch trees would burn into bright reds and oranges and yellows around them. At the old house, they’d only had a few scraggly bushes and an ugly telephone pole in their yard.

  As she walked back downstairs and into the living room, she passed Mom, who was pushing a hand truck stacked with three boxes, each labeled DINING ROOM. “Looks like you have a welcoming committee outside,” said Mo
m, stopping in front of Noe.

  “What?”

  “There are kids out there. Looks like they’re waiting to meet you. Go be neighborly.” She angled the handcart to let Noe pass. “Don’t worry. I’ll save you some boxes to carry.”

  Noe walked over to one of the windows that overlooked the front lawn. The house was set far enough back from the street that it felt separated from the rest of the neighborhood.

  At the edge of the lawn, like they were afraid of trampling the grass, stood three girls. They weren’t moving or talking or looking around. They just stared at the house. “Creepy,” Noe said to herself.

  “I bet their eyeballs are completely black,” said Dad, making Noe jump. He laughed. “Go say hi. Find out if any of their parents are accountants. I need one who’ll give me a good neighbor discount.”

  Noe did go outside, but not to meet the girls. They seemed too strange to her. Instead, she grabbed another box off the moving truck. As she turned to walk inside, she saw movement in the group. One of the girls broke away and started walking up the driveway to her. Noe held the box like a shield in front of her. It said BATHROOM on it.

  The girl’s dark hair was woven into tight braids tipped with red and white plastic beads and then gathered into a loose ponytail. Around her neck was a piece of twine holding a smooth stone with a hole in it. She stood there and didn’t say anything, acting like Noe had walked up to her.

  “Hi,” Noe finally said. “I’m Noelle.”

  The girl stared at the dark asphalt under her feet. “Don’t go in the basement of your house at night.” She said it really fast, as if she had been holding it in for hours. “Your little sister either.” The girl nodded at Len, who had followed Noe outside and was peeking shyly around Noe’s leg at the new girl like she’d fallen in love with her.

  “What?” asked Noe.

  “Don’t go in the basement at night.” The girl turned around and ran back to the group, who immediately dispersed in different directions like they were a rack of pool balls.

  “That’s ominous,” said Noe.

  “Om-eee-nus,” repeated Len.

  Two

  Noe’s bed was a pile of wood and metal leaning against the far wall of her new room. She lay on a mattress on the floor. Dad hadn’t put the beds together yet, so the whole family was roughing it. The air seemed dusty close to the floor, and she felt as if somebody was about to step on her at any moment.

  The quiet in the house was more bothersome than sleeping on the floor. The road in front of her old house had been busy. There were always cars driving by and people outside talking. But at this house, nothing. Between the lack of sound and the heat, it was suffocating. She got up and cracked a window. More than a stray breeze, she needed something to break the bubble of silence that was pushing at her ears. But out there, it was still and quiet. Wait. Not quiet. It took her a few moments of concentration, but she finally heard bugs chirping in a strange, unending cadence, like the forest was full of static. But that was hardly real noise. Car engines and ambulance sirens were real noise.

  Noe wasn’t trying to fall asleep, though. She looked at her phone. It sat angled in its charging stand, beaming the time at her in glowing white characters: 11:15 p.m. Her parents were more than likely deep asleep after the manual labor of moving boxes all day. People with desk jobs shouldn’t try to move an entire house by themselves.

  Noe got up and stuck her feet into fuzzy green slippers, threw on a purple robe, and tiptoed down the hallway. She peeked into Len’s room. A decapitated unicorn nightlight showed Len asleep, her arms wrapped around a stuffed lemur. On the other end of the hallway, her parents’ door was open, but the room was completely dark inside. She could hear Dad snoring loudly and wondered how Mom slept next to him.

  She felt her way down the stairs to the first floor. It was difficult going. The unfamiliar space was filled with boxes, and she had no clue where all the light switches were. She walked around the rooms, banging her shins a few times, and then finally heard the slap of vinyl against her slippers that told her she was in the kitchen. She found a switch near the sink and flipped it.

  A loud metal roar made Noe’s insides go cold in terror.

  Then she realized that she had hit the garbage disposal switch. She hit the switch again and waited a few seconds in the darkness to see if the noise had woken anybody up. Apparently Dad’s snores beat the noise of the garbage disposal, because she didn’t hear any movement upstairs. She flipped a second switch beside the sink, and the kitchen appeared.

  So did the basement door.

  The portal to the place she wasn’t supposed to go into after dark.

  The door to the basement looked . . . absolutely ordinary. Well, not absolutely. It was black with a black doorknob and an old-fashioned keyhole, so by itself maybe a little eerie, but all the doors in the house were black, just like the shutters on the outside of the house. But it was still just a door. A slab of black-painted wood beside the pantry.

  Noe looked behind her out the large kitchen window above the sink. During the day, its view was of the forest at the bottom of the ravine. Now, at night, the window was a black square set above the kitchen sink, a dark mirror that she saw herself reflected in. Herself and the door.

  The house had darkened inside long before the sun set. Dad said it was because the ravine and all the trees blocked the light when the sun was low. Whatever the reason, the house felt like it was in permanent dusk most of the day. Like they were in a cabin in the woods. Mom was already planning on buying about twenty lamps for the house. She had the spots for each one marked on the floor with masking-tape X’s even before the movers had carried in the furniture.

  Noe looked at herself one more time in the black mirror of the window and then turned the knob on the basement door, which felt colder than it should have in the summer heat. The latch clicked, and she swung open the door. It didn’t even creak.

  She could see the first few rough wooden steps, and then the rest of the stairway was swallowed by void. This would be her first time in the basement. She hadn’t had time to check it out all day, and she had only been in the house one other time, during the house inspection. She had spent almost the entire time running around the yard making sure it was a dog yard. Dad had promised to get them a dog once they lived in a house with a big enough yard, and she was going to hold him to that. Besides, when Dad had gone downstairs with the inspector, he had returned with stories about furnaces and laundry machines. Boring stuff.

  She turned on the light and slowly descended the stairs, knowing she was giving whatever was supposed to be hiding down there the advantage of getting ready for her. She wasn’t scared. Well, she was scared, but there were different types of scared. Noe knew a lot of the types. The type she was feeling right now was something like uncertainty and anticipation. It was an adventurous scared. She needed to show those girls who were trying to prank her that she wasn’t an easy target. No random girl with a rock around her neck was going to tell Noe what she couldn’t do in her own house.

  As soon as she hit the floor of the basement, the temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees. Being underground and insulated by thick walls meant it was always cool down there. Stranger than the temperature, though, was that there wasn’t any basement floor.

  Her fuzzy green slippers were standing on dirt.

  It wasn’t like outside dirt. Nothing grew in it. Not a single dandelion or blade of grass. It hadn’t seen rain or sunshine since the house had been built atop it. And it was packed hard. Like concrete. She could probably bounce a Super Ball on it easily. Noe doubted that she could even dig up the dirt with her fingernails. She cringed at the thought of the dirt bending back her nails. She wondered what was in the dirt under the house. Worms? Groundhogs? An old cemetery?

  The basement was a single large room that ran the entire footprint of the house. It had four windows, but they were mere slivers of glass stuck against the ceiling of the basement. They were shiny black rectangles
right now, and during the day probably weren’t much better. Since they were at ground level outside, they must always be blocked by grass. It was probably worse in the winter, when they would be whited out by snow. All the light in the room came from the three bare bulbs screwed into the wooden rafters that were low enough that her father probably had to duck under them. But the light bulbs did little to dispel the murkiness.

  Looking around, she didn’t see any movement. Not a mouse. Not a bug. In a corner of the basement, in a small alcove below the steps, were the washer and dryer, set atop a concrete slab. Against the wall to her right were stacks of boxes, each one marked with sloppily written words in black marker. Her name appeared on a couple of them. Probably stuff from when she was a kid that had been stored in the basement at the old house. The only other things in the basement were the boxy furnace and the tall water heater, which stood in the middle of the floor on their own concrete slab. The metal cylinder of the water heater tank was about five feet tall and surrounded by piping and valves and meters the purposes of which were a mystery to her, a mystery she didn’t ever care to solve. As long as she was able to have a hot shower every day.

  But it was the walls of the basement that really creeped her out.

  They were built of giant rough slabs of rock, each one almost as big as Len. It reminded her of Egyptian pyramid stones, except gray, with rough contours that looked like they’d been shaped with ancient tools. A thin line of cement kept them all together, although alarming cracks wended their way through the rocks and mortar like rivers on a map.

  The place looked like a castle dungeon. It only needed iron manacles dangling from the rocks, and maybe a skeleton in the corner.

  She circled the water heater to see what was on the other side. Nothing but more packed dirt. More slabs of rocks. More cracks in the wall, including a vicious-looking one that started at the top, near the rafters, and then zigzagged all the way to the bottom. It looked like earthquake damage, but this area didn’t have earthquakes. Not that she knew of.

  The basement was empty and musty, without a single hiding place for anything. But it did feel different down here. Like the molecules in the air were thickly packed. The atmosphere of the basement pressed the sides of her head like headphones that were too tight.