A Place So Wicked Patrick Reuman (children's ebooks free online TXT) 📖

car, and the two clueless lovers in the backseat. She said he pulled the door open and started hacking the two of them up with an axe, which mysteriously changed to a machete part way through the hacking scene. When he was done brutalizing them, after they had been reduced to nothing but a pile of meat chunks, the legend said, was when the trail gained its name. The killer took some of the blood from the girl’s wounds and painted their faces, the only parts of them left recognizable, to look like monkeys.

Addy laughed. “But I’m not sure if that is really where the name came from. Now that I’m thinking about it, how does one paint someone to look like a monkey?”

Toby laughed as well, relieved that an ounce of humor was added to the story. They had reached the entrance to the trail, or one of many entrances, Addy said. They stood at the path’s dark mouth, the trees on both sides of the trail arching upward and linking at the top like a tunnel, in a way that seemed to block out most of the light that would attempt to enter Monkey Hill.

Toby asked as they walked where the trail came from, if it used to be a road or something. She agreed that it definitely seemed like it may have been a road at one point, especially if the story was true and the killer found the lovers in a car, but conceded that she wasn’t really sure.

The further along they got, the denser the woods on both sides became. At times, he even lost sight of the houses beyond the foliage, and it felt like he was truly walking down a woodland trail, digging further away from civilization. He felt like he was walking through an underground tunnel lined with vines, decades after the world had already come to its untimely end.

Addy asked Toby about his life and how they ended up in Black Falls. He told her about how his dad had gotten a new, better job, and so they moved. He told her all about Paisley and Trevor and even Robbie and how his uncle was going to be staying with them for a while. All that time, Robert hardly said a word. The boy trailed behind them most of the time, making Toby a little nervous but not enough to care. Most of the time, he forgot the strange kid was even back there.

Once Toby finished telling her about himself, she told him a bit about her. That only took a few minutes, though, because there apparently wasn’t a whole lot to tell. Like she had said back at Toby’s house, she had lived there in Black Falls her entire life. She went to school there, dated boys there, and figured she would probably end up living there the rest of her life until she eventually died there at Mercy hospital. From what Toby could tell, she could hardly imagine a life outside of Black Falls. The way she spoke about it, this town was the greatest place in the world and provided anything a person could want.

Addy finally came to a stop. They were deep into Monkey Hill, having walked for quite a bit longer than it had taken them to arrive at the trail in the first place. Toby stopped behind Addy and Robert stopped behind him, just as silently as he had been that whole way. It was dark there, a shadowy abyss that felt completely removed from the rest of the world, perhaps even an entirely different world altogether, as if they had entered a portal at some point and came out in a foreign land.

He looked at Addy, who was already staring at him, that smile back on her face, the same one she had been wearing when telling him the trail’s creepy origin story. She turned her head and looked off into the woods. His gaze followed hers. That’s when he spotted it, an old, rusted-out car, sitting off in the woods, completely overtaken by the foliage that engulfed it on all sides. It was barely more than a metal frame now, an outline of a car, a memory from a time long forgotten, to most, but not to Addy. That didn’t stop him from imagining two chopped-up corpses in the back seat, their heads removed and painted like monkeys.

He saw where the tires were sunken into the dirt from years of rain and the weight of the car. It had to be at least six inches deep. If they hadn’t stopped, Toby doubted he would have even noticed the artifact hidden among the trees.

He swallowed hard and then looked back at Addy, who still wore that smile that suddenly seemed more sinister than beautiful. He heard Robert moving behind him and turned to face him, but the boy didn’t seem to be moving much, let alone toward him, which was what he had feared.

As soon as he turned back around to face Addy, she moved in on him. She was fast, too fast for Toby to even react. She grabbed him, pulled him up against her, and locked her lips against his, her tongue grazing his lips before moving into his mouth.

14

Paisley tapped her knuckles on Trevor’s door three times. She waited for nearly a minute, but there still was no response. She was almost certain Trevor was in there, though. She was bored and wanted to go do something, and she wanted her brother to join her. She felt like the two of them had hardly spent any time together since arriving at the new house, and she didn’t like it.

She sighed. “Trevor, I know you’re in there.”

After that girl and Toby had left, Trevor finished picking at his food and headed straight back upstairs, right back to where he seemed to always be now, his