Free Lost Boy Lost Girl by Peter Straub

like the Munster house. It’s just like all the other houses in this neighborhood. Especially yours.”
    It was true, Mark saw. Except for the narrowness of the porch and the beetle-browed look of the roofline, the building greatly resembled the Underhill house.
    “How long do you think it’s been empty?”
    “A long time,” Jimbo said.
    Tiles had blown off the roof, and paint was flaking off the window frames. Despite the sunlight, the windows looked dark, even opaque. A hesitation, some delicacy of feeling, kept Mark from going up the walkway, jumping the steps onto the porch, and peering through those blank windows. Whatever lay beyond the unwelcoming windows had earned its peace. He did not want to set his feet upon those stones or to stand on that porch. How strange; it worked both ways. All at once, Mark felt that the house’s very emptiness and abandonment made up a force field that extended to the edge of the sidewalk. The air itself would reject his presence and push him back.
    And yet . . .
    “I don’t get it. How could I miss seeing this place before today?” He thought the house looked like a clenched fist.
    Jimbo and Mark spent the next two hours rolling down Michigan Street, sweeping into curved arcs, leaping from the street onto the sidewalk, jumping off the curb back into the street. They made nearly as much noise as a pair of motorcyclists, but no one stepped outside to complain. Whenever Mark eyed the empty house, he half-expected it to have dissolved again back into its old opacity, but it kept presenting itself with the same surprising clarity it had shown when he’d first rolled around the corner. The house at 3323 North Michigan had declared itself, and now it was here to stay. His obsession, which in the manner of obsessions would change everything in his life, had taken hold.
    During dinner that evening, Mark noticed that his mother seemed a bit more distracted than usual. She had prepared meat loaf, which both he and his father considered a gourmet treat. After asking the customary perfunctory questions about how his day had gone and receiving his customary perfunctory evasions, Philip was free to concentrate on impersonal matters. Instead of recounting tales of intrigue and heroism from the front line of the gas company’s customer relations office, his mother seemed to be attending to an offstage conversation only she could hear. Mark’s thoughts returned again and again to the house on Michigan Street.
    Now he wished that he had after all walked up to the place, climbed onto the porch, and looked in the window. What he remembered of the feelings he had experienced in front of the house boiled down to a weird kind of politeness, as if his approach would have been a violation. A violation of what? Its privacy? Abandoned buildings had no sense of privacy. Yet . . . he remembered feeling that the building had
wanted to keep him away
and erected a shield to hold him back. So
the building
had kept him from going up the stone walkway? That was ridiculous.
Mark
had kept Mark from leaving the sidewalk. He knew why, too, though he did not want to admit it. The house had spooked him.
    “Pretty quiet tonight, Mark,” said his father.
    “Don’t pick on him. Mark’s fine,” his mother said in a lifeless voice.
    “Am I picking on him? Am I picking on you?”
    “I don’t know. Are you?” He watched his mother shaving tiny slices off her meat loaf and sliding them to the side of her plate.
    His father was getting ready to call him on his insubordination. Mark rushed through the verbal formula for exiting the dining room and said, “Jimbo’s waiting for me.”
    “God forbid you should keep Jimbo waiting. What are you going to do that’s so important?”
    “Nothing.”
    “When it begins to get dark, I don’t want to hear the sounds of those skateboards. Hear me?”
    “Sure, fine,” he said, and carried his plate into the kitchen before his father remembered that his irritation had a