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

Paisley?

He had to double take at the paper sitting atop a pile on the desk. He doubted what he had thought he had seen. Scanning quickly, he spotted what he feared, Paisley’s name. All their names were there, Paisley’s entire family, one who he had met, Toby, and the others whom he had not. The paper had all sorts of information on them. Where they were from, where her parents worked. Financial information. Everything, it seemed. Paisley’s family was an insect trapped in a massive web. It was as if these people owned their lives.

There was a row of drawers below the papers. He opened the top one, and his soul nearly leapt from his body. There, sitting up against one side of the drawer, was an old, scraped-up golden key. Its ridges looked worn, its color almost completely faded, as if it were hundreds of years old.

He wasted no time, grabbing the key from its place. There was a groan on the other side of the door, like the shifting weight of human bearing down on old floorboards, reminding him in an instant of when he used to sneak downstairs for a forbidden midnight snack. He paused, expecting the door to swing open, to have to either rush through the person in front of him or break through the window in the back of the office, neither of which sounded like a solid plan.

But after a minute passed, still, nobody had come in. The groan did not repeat itself. The person on the other side of the door was either standing very, very still or didn’t exist. And time was running thin.

He hurried across the room, grabbed the handle, and gave it a swift turn. The other side was empty. He let out a sigh of relief. But it wasn’t over. He saw down to the end of the hall, where churchgoers still conversed loudly on the other side like a storm brewing in the distance.

Turning, he charged for the door, sliding the key in before even coming to a complete stop. It went in rough, sticking for a moment before the lock allowed the key to pass all the way inside. He questioned in the sticky moment if the key would snap in its age, but it didn’t. He held strong. And with a twist, he heard the quiet sound of the lock clicking.

The door opened, and a musty smell wafted out. He recoiled by instinct, but it was nothing compared to the stench he had inhaled at Paisley’s house. The door whined as he opened it the rest of the way, like the hinges were ancient machines whose gears had not been touched by oil in a millennium. Beyond was unbridled darkness. He reached for a light switch but found none.

That left his phone and the flashlight app, which didn’t give him a mountain of confidence. He pulled it out and lit the room with a wide beam of dull light. It barely reached the back wall of the small, surprisingly empty room. There were portraits in there, too, but it was too dark for him to make out what was framed within them. Dust floated about in front of the light’s beam as he walked toward the back of the room.

There was a lone, short wooden stand, with a glass front, the light from his phone reflecting off its dirty surface. He crouched in front of it and aimed the light inward, but the weak beams struggled to pass through. Eli flashed the light around the room. It appeared that this stand was the room’s sole inhabitant.

He grabbed the small circular knob. The door stuck for a moment but released its grip with a strong tug. A small cloud of dusted wafted out at him, clearing quickly. He flashed the light inside.

Inside, sat a lone box upon a lone shelf within the lone stand in the otherwise empty room. He grabbed it and pulled it into the light. It had carvings all over it depicting a scene that he couldn’t make out because the images were long faded. His stomach sank at the sight of yet another lock, this one on the outside of the box. He quickly tried the key, but it did not fit. He thought back to the desk and didn’t recall seeing another key within the drawer.

He was screwed. No, he couldn’t be. He needed to succeed. Fuck the key. He set the small wooden box on the floor, lifted his leg, and crashed his foot down as hard as he could. The box exploded on impact, sending wooden shards scattering across the floor.

On the floor, glaring with bright intensity, rested a key that looked no older than the day. It was clean despite the dirt, shining despite the dust. If someone had told him it was some ancient key, he would have laughed, because it looked so perfectly clean and impossibly new. Eli knew nothing of magic, nothing about spells or incantations, but what he did know was that this key was the right key, the one they were looking for, the one that would open the spellbound door in Paisley’s basement.

36

Toby had been gone for a while, heading out to meet up with Eli and find the key to the basement door. Now Paisley was there alone, waiting for her parents to wake up so they could go see the doctor. She had peeked in on Trevor, who was out cold, as well as Uncle Robbie, who was asleep also. She was sitting at the top of the stairs, her phone out, afraid to be alone downstairs by herself. She scrolled through the internet, looking for more information on the town but was coming up with next to nothing.

Whatever was going on in this town was a well-kept secret. A long-kept one