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

them all. The others were too busy fighting the air, resisting their very need to breath, to inhale whatever lingered in the space between the walls.

Richard had been close to storming down into the basement and ripping the door off its hinges. Only he knew it wouldn’t be that easy. And if he did do that, if he opened the door leading down into that pit, doing so would release the built-up air within into the rest of the house. He recalled how terrible the smell had been when he opened the basement door the last time. He didn’t dare open the other door.

Plus, he would have to go alone if he did. Robbie was upstairs sick, reminding Richard of his own pains. He didn’t want to go down there by himself. It was childish, he knew, but something about the place gave him an uneasy feeling. Anyway, he had already planned to visit the realtor’s place the next day. He would demand the key or they would be moving out. He wasn’t sure if that was even an option due to their finances, but he had to do something. In the worst case, he hoped Robbie would be feeling better tomorrow and could go down there with him if they had to. He hoped.

They had tried to watch a movie for a little while, but they all gave up in near unison. The smell was rather terrible downstairs, and only getting worse, but they all knew it was slightly less bad upstairs, and even better behind the closed doors of their bedrooms.

Upon a relieving suggestion made by Lisa, they turned the television off. She had said she wanted to go upstairs and do some reading, which was a lie, but something she really did do quite often prior to them moving there. It was a good excuse. She didn’t know then that everyone else wanted to flee to their own bedrooms, but they did.

Trevor was quick up the stairs, his stomach pains crawling back rapidly. Whereas he had felt better earlier, even amazing when he was next door creeping in the windows, he felt brittle again, ready to lay his body down on the bed where it could find rest.

Paisley, even though she dreaded the thought, wanted to put distance between her and Trevor and whatever he had. She was beginning to feel ill, not having been attracted to the pizza in the least bit even though she had hardly eaten that day. She saw what had happened to their uncle Robbie when she peeked into his room to invite him downstairs to eat. He looked terrible, and she didn’t want to feel how he looked, even though it was probably too late, given how she was beginning to feel now.

Toby was feeling a little off as well, only not bad enough that it was plaguing his mind like it was the others. His thoughts were elsewhere. Had he really seen all those faces in the window earlier when he was standing across the street or had it been a trick of the light, the rain and darkness mangling his vision, causing him to see things that weren’t truly there? They seemed so real yet, in an instant, they were gone.

Once in his bedroom, Toby allowed his mind to wander. First, his thoughts sought shelter in comfort, in the day’s earlier events. His first kiss. Well, almost his first kiss. He had kissed two other girls in his life, one being Shelly Rosenski, a girl he knew back in the fifth grade. It had been a dare from her friends. He wasn’t sure why he had been chosen for the dare and didn’t really care. It had been his first kiss, and he was proud of it because Shelly was very pretty. The second kiss came four years later, in the ninth grade. Kelly Brickey was the girl’s name. She was a cheerleader. She had long, red hair. Her eyes were so blue you could get lost in them like a diver in the ocean. But most importantly, depending on how you looked at it, the kiss had been accidental, or at least, him being a part of it was.

The kiss in itself hadn’t been accidental, he didn’t think. It was he, the recipient, who had been the accident. Josh Armstrong, a new kid at his old school, who he hardly knew but for some reason wanted to be his friend for a short while until he made the football team and found more valuable friends, dragged him out one Saturday night to a party. He was not familiar with parties nor did he usually attend them. For that matter, he wasn’t usually invited to them, either. But there he was, standing around a bunch of kids that he only knew slightly, mostly from one of his crowded classes or another. Beers were in hands and everyone was talking loudly and joking around.

Kelly had just downed a beer, one of many, he was willing to wager, and just out of fate, he was standing right next to her. Toby hadn’t been talking to anyone, not since Josh had disappeared into the crowd ages before. He had a beer in his hand but hadn’t taken more than a sip out of it and hadn’t even enjoyed the one he did.

He was facing Kelly, out of coincidence as well. The party had been crowded, and two other people were engaged in a conversation on the other side of him. It was either stare at them while they talked, looking even weirder than he felt, or face Kelly, who wasn’t paying the least bit of attention to him or anyone in the room.

That was when it happened.

She turned to him, swinging around the empty solo cup in one hand, and said something to him that to this day he was unsure of, and then dove at him for a