clipped lawn. A neat little orange wreath was hung on the doorway for the season. Theo and I knelt behind the shrubs next to his mailbox.
"Alright, we're here. Now what?" I asked her. She was the one with the veritable degree in espionage.
Theo squinted, looking at the house through the gaps of the shrub. There was no car in the driveway, or any sign that anyone was home. I wondered if he was in a meeting or something at school. We hid our bikes behind another nearby row of bushes.
"Let's go up to the house," she insisted. We crept around the back, parallel to a line of neatly clipped, ugly crabapple trees. Theo boldly strode over to the back windows, and peered inside.
"Now I know I'm doing too much trespassing," I muttered. Theo looked back at me quizzically.
"What?" she asked. I shook my head and joined her at the window.
Inside was sparse, plain furniture: a white couch, a few tables and a TV. It almost looked like he had just moved there, as there were no photos, no decorative touches whatsoever, really. He seemed like a very organized person at first glance. But there was nothing so suspicious about that.
"We should probably get going," I said. "He's bound to come back any minute."
"What about over there?" Theo asked, gesturing towards a little shed set apart from the house.
We walked over to the shed and Theo tried pulling at the handles. It was locked.
"Do you smell that?" she asked, wrinkling her nose. I did; it was a stale, moldy smell, like something rotten had been there for a while. Theo and I frowned at each other. It didn't seem to fit with the picture of the spotless showroom house.
The sound of a car pulling up made us move. We ducked behind the bushes as McPherson arrived and pulled into his garage. After a moment, he came out and pushed the button for his garage door to lower, then stormed into his house. The front door slammed.
Quickly, we ran down the driveway and retrieved our bikes. Without a word to one another, we jumped on them and pedaled towards home.
"Wasn't the plan that we were going to spy on him?" I asked breathlessly as we slowed down, having put distance between ourselves and McPherson.
"Didn't you see him? He was not in the best mood," Theo replied, a little short of breath herself, taking her hand of the handlebars to push up her glasses. "If he had caught us snooping, he probably would have tied us up and stuck us in a box."
"What do you think was in the shed?" I asked as we pulled up into her driveway, safe and sound. "It smelled disgusting."
"I don't know," she replied. "But whatever it was, it didn't belong there."
On Sunday, I was doing homework in my room as usual. Theo and I had decided there wasn't much we could do about McPherson's mysterious shed, since we had been trespassing when we made the discovery. Still, the unknown made me nervous. McPherson had always thrown me a vibe that screamed wrong, and there had been something I couldn't put my finger on about his house that underscored the sentiment.
The letters in my biology textbook began to run together like broken eggs. I rubbed my eyes, yawning, ready for bed.
THUD.
I looked up above my head at the wall.
"Not again," I said to myself. I stood up and turned around, fully ready to go get one of my parents this time, no matter how immature that might make me seem. The lamp and the overhead light flickered for a moment, then disappeared, leaving me in total darkness.
THUD.
Fear pulsed through my veins with the beating of my heart. I was not alone in the room. Something was there with me. The dark was deeper than just having the lights off; something brought on the inky, thick air.
As I tried to make my way across the space to the door in the pitch blackness, it felt like something was pushing at me. Pushing me away from the exit. I waved my hands out uselessly in front of me.
I turned back, and for the shortest of seconds, I thought I saw Jenna's face flash before me. The image disappeared before I could fully process it. I thought I heard whispering again, from the vicinity of my closet. I felt along the wall and found the light switch, which was still in the up position. I flipped it several times, but the