It all started with a dare.
We were crammed into the old clubhouse behind Elijah’s garage, sitting on old furniture we cobbled together from all our parent’s houses. The clubhouse was our Fortress of Solitude, our battle bunker. Elijah’s dad was a carpenter for Owlette’s Family Furniture store in town and we were the envy of all the kids in school.
It was built in an old oak tree, with deep strong roots that gripped the land like a clenched fist, and even though it had a ladder, we always used the fireman’s pole to get down. It was a boyhood place, filled with boyhood thoughts, bittersweet as September, built on solid wood planks, on bullfrog catchings, on mason jars filled with dead fireflies, on hoarded Halloween candy, hidden stashes of lingerie catalogues, and spiral-bound notebooks filled with yellowing pages of all of our innermost secrets.
Me and Elijah were the first two in our club and we had a strict no-girls rule in place until we met Ace in the summer of ‘84. She came into class like a wrecking ball. Fiery, bold, short in stature and an even shorter temper. We were in 5th grade and she’d been held back a year for behavioral reasons. One day at lunch, she saw the 6th graders picking on a nerdy kid In our class with glasses and she beat the brakes off that older kid with a heavy history book.
We didn’t invite her to The Fortress, she just followed us home one day and never left. By the time we all graduated to the sixth grade, Ace had become an indispensable member of our growing team of misfits and outsiders.
Katie was different. She had a natural knack for technology and came to us mid-year in 6th when her family abruptly moved into town to work at some top-secret military project at Fort Savannah. We were struggling with a science project, building a HAM radio, when she waltzed over, told us how wrong we were and proceeded to fix a whole summer’s worth of mistakes in five minutes.
We threw out the no-girls sign that summer and replaced it with a no-normies sign. At that point in all of our lives, we embraced the weirdness that others rejected.
And Elijah? Elijah Carruthers was the strange one, but not in the bad way. He saw things differently. He heard rhythms we couldn’t, noticed patterns in silence. Some kids thought he was creepy, but they didn’t get it. Elijah listened in ways that made you feel like your words actually mattered.
I’m Benjy Cartwright. The narrator, I guess. The one with the notebook and the bad habit of noticing too much. The one who tries to write things down before they slip away.
Anthony Freeborn was the last to join our band of heathens, and when he disappeared the weekend before summer break it changed all our lives forever.
Ace was the first, of course, to volunteer to accept the double-dog-dare of Jimmy Carlisle, staying one night in The Letter House, but it was Tony who was fool enough to actually do it.
We asked our parents to report Tony missing, we asked the sheriff and the principal, but nobody seemed to remember or even acknowledge the house on Slumber Street. No adults anyway.
Ace had just finished telling her version of the story that the adults were somehow brainwashed by a secret radio signal from the Monolith Power Station that broadcasts The Garden news.
“You really think he went in?” she asked, chin propped on the back of an old wooden chair she insisted on sitting backwards on. “Or do you think he just ditched his bag and skipped town to freak us out?”
Elijah didn’t answer right away. He leaned back, chewing on the edge of a popsicle stick like it held secrets. “He went in,” he said eventually. “I just don’t think he came out.”
That shut everyone up for a second.
I sat cross-legged in the corner, notebook open, half-scribbled. A breeze drifted through the cracked window, carrying in the scent of honeysuckle and heat. It had been a sticky kind of day, the kind where shadows stretched long and slow and nothing quite felt real.
Ace snorted. “That’s dramatic, even for you.”
Elijah didn’t blink. “It’s not dramatic if it’s true.”
Katie, sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, adjusted her glasses and flipped a switch on her handheld EMF reader. It gave a faint beep and settled to a low hum. “Okay, but let’s not act like the Letter House is an actual portal to hell. Maybe Tony just got caught somewhere and doesn’t want to admit it.”
Ace leaned forward, eyes sharp. “Or maybe the place took him.”
Nobody laughed.
That was the thing about Ace. She could say stuff like that and somehow make it sound more like a challenge than a warning.
“So, let’s go get him back.” She said.
“Go into the Letter House?” Katie said, looking up from her EMF reader.
“You’re not chicken are you?” Ace said with a sneer.
That was a red line for us kids back then.
God forbid someone call you chicken.
Didn’t matter how dumb, how dangerous, or how obviously cursed something was,
the second someone flapped their arms and went “Bok. Bok. Bok”,
you were in.
I can’t recall a single thing we wouldn’t do just to not hear that sound.
I remember when Ace climbed the water tower in town when Elijah clucked at her. She was a rockstar until the descent. Her foot caught on a rung and she fell, breaking her throwing arm, but solidifying herself as 100% Grade A badass Human Being. Not a single feather on Ace.
“No!” Katie said. “I’m not chicken. I’m not suicidal either.”
“Fine, I’ll go get him myself,” Ace said and stood up. “Ya’ll can sit back and pluck your feathers.”
“Listen,” I said. “If we’re gonna do this, let’s at least get some supplies.”
That stopped her. Ace didn’t turn around, but she paused. That was her way of saying I’m listening.
“I’m serious,” I went on. “Flashlights. Rope. Batteries. Katie’s EMF thing. Maybe even a walkie or two.”
“Salt,” Elijah said quietly, still chewing his popsicle stick. “We should bring salt.”
Katie glanced at him. “Like, for spirits?”
He nodded. “Or slugs.”
No one laughed.
Ace finally turned, silhouetted in the warm light spilling from the clubhouse door. “Alright then, Cartwright,” she said, “you’re on prep duty.”
I spent the next few hours riding around town, gathering supplies from each of our houses. Nobody cared back then. In fact, I don’t recall seeing any of our parents that day, even as night started to fall. The streetlights were not on, so we weren’t supposed to be home anyway.
What can I say? Eighties.
I still remember what I packed:
- Two flashlights from our junk drawer, one already flickering.
- A roll of duct tape.
- Elijah’s mom’s garden twine, which I told myself was basically rope.
- Salt, like he asked for. Morton’s, the girl with the umbrella.
- A walkie-talkie I’d never tested.
- Katie’s EMF reader, handed off in a brown lunch bag like contraband.
- And a Zippo lighter Ace had stolen from her uncle three summers ago, the one with the skull and dice on the side.
I put everything in my dad’s old army ruck, the one with the busted zipper and the patch that said CARTWRIGHT like it made me a soldier.
By the time I got back to the clubhouse, the sun was just a memory and the air had that weird, in-between temperature where you’re not sure if it’s sweat or fear on your back.
They were already waiting.
Elijah raided his parent’s kitchen for what we were calling rations: Big League Chew, Fruit Rollups, and Pop Tarts. Everything we needed to survive a high level extraction mission from a haunted house that nobody could remember.
He even brought a can of Surge, like it was some kind of holy relic.
Katie added a folded town map and a compass that might’ve come from a cereal box, but she swore it worked.
Ace brought a baseball bat. No explanation, no questions asked.
“This isn’t a sleepover,” she said. “It’s a retrieval op.”
We all laughed. Not because it was funny, but because laughing felt easier than thinking about what we were about to do.
The Letter House wasn’t far. Three blocks west of the elementary school, just past the town line where the pavement started to crack and the street signs grew rust like moss. You didn’t see it unless you were looking for it. And even then, it didn’t always let itself be seen.
But tonight, it would be there.
We packed up our bags, mounted our bikes, and didn’t say much.
The streets were too quiet. We rode through town to the sound of our rubber tires on the asphalt and not much else. An old owl hooted from the large willow that sat in the center of a round-a-bout that nobody really knew how to drive on, but some city planner saw one in Europe and said we needed one.
We didn’t.
It was like the whole town was holding its breath.
At one point, Katie reached down and turned on the EMF reader. It gave a soft click and started to whine, just a hair above silence. None of us looked at it. We didn’t need to. The feeling was already there.
The closer we got to Slumber Street, the more the world felt… thinner.
Like a layer of saran wrap between us and something bigger. Something watching.
The streetlights never turned on.
But the house?
It was lit.
Not bright. Not welcoming. Just… on.
Like it had been waiting.
Elijah skidded to a stop before crossing from Main onto Slumber. It was the point of no return for us. We all knew it, but nobody said it out loud.
Even Ace stopped and looked back down the street. Back home. Back to safety.
For a second, none of us moved. The tires on our bikes ticked gently as they spun to stillness. Somewhere far off, a dog barked once and then didn’t bark again.
“Feels different,” Elijah said.
Katie checked the EMF. It was humming now, steady and low, like it was waiting for a signal it already understood.
“Still think this is just a prank?” Ace asked, not turning around.
“No,” Katie said. “But I still think we should go back.”
I gripped the handlebars tighter. My palms were sweating. “Tony went in.”
“That doesn’t mean we have to,” she said.
“But we already did,” Elijah whispered. “The second we came looking.”
Ace took a breath. Just one. Then she rolled forward, crossing onto Slumber without another word.
One by one, we followed.
And the world behind us fell quiet.