I FLUFFED UP MY pillow for the twentieth time. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep. We’d eaten dinner with Aunt Lyssa, and then Roger and I had played my new video game which is loosely based on a movie that is loosely based on a character out of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. We’d gotten bored fast. It was all monsters and explosions and was way over the top. The really scary stuff isn’t like Star Wars with werewolves and vampires who look like the Incredible Hulk with fangs and claws. Real horror creeps up on you.

We ended up turning off the PlayStation and just talking about normal stuff like other kids at school and our teachers and running. We’d talked a lot about Bootsie at dinner, how weird it was the way she was hurt. We were no longer worried about how she was recovering. Dr. Fox had left a message that she was doing great. He was just keeping her for a day or two to make sure she didn’t have an infection or something. Aunt Lyssa acted like everything was all cool, but she must have known I was still freaked out about Bootsie because she was the one who suggested calling Roger’s parents to see if he could sleep over in the spare bedroom. I wondered if he was sleeping now. I sure wasn’t. My mind kept going back, not just to Bootsie getting hurt but to those phone calls. None of it made sense.

Think about something else, I told myself. So I tried focusing on how safe and secure I was here in my bed, here in my room in this house that had become my home.

Then I began thinking about this house, about how old it is, from its gabled roof on down to its fieldstone foundation. That made me think about the cellar. It’s a real cellar, not one of those neatly sealed basements that can be turned into a rec room or a den with windows that open to the outside like you see in modern houses. Our cellar was dug into the ground, into the old stones of the hills of Providence. It’s always cool and even a little damp in the cellar, and although it lacks windows, it does have doors, three of them.

Those doors are the first things you see when you come down the creaky wooden stairs. The door to the right of the stairs leads to a small, square root cellar, just about the size of one of the prison cells in The Count of Monte Cristo. The door in front opens to the furnace room and the storage bin where the coal used to be shoveled in from outside. The door to the left is the one that is never opened.