RL Stine meets Urban legend in the next twisted horror novel by New York Times Bestselling author Vincent Ralph.
Curious? Then read on to find out the summary and the first two chapters of Vincent Ralph’s One house leftwhich will be released on August 27, 2024.
“Whether you’re ready or not. Whatever you do. The hidden boy is coming to get you.”
Sixteen-year-old Nate Campbell grew up in the shadow of Murder Road – a road cursed by the vengeful spirit of the Hiding Boy.
Every few years, for nearly sixty years, a different house on this street has been the scene of a tragedy.
Nate and his family move to a new town to escape the curse once and for all. But when he gets drawn into his new friends’ Urban Legend Club, new ghost stories mix with old ones until there’s no way out.
1
Every city has its own ghost stories.
Usually they’re urban legends whispered around the campfire or stories meant to teach children something. But in my town it was different.
We had only one story, and few people laughed when they told it. It remained in the corners of conversation, a shadow we struggled to ignore. It hung over Belleview and everyone who lived there, and when we left, we took it with us.
When letters arrive, they go to Cherry Tree Lane, but when we told the story we called it Murder Road.
The first murder – like most murders – surprised everyone.
It was a quiet spring night in 1963 when the little girl screamed and ran into the street.
The sound left a crack so deep that it could never be healed and its echo still resonates today.
The porch light came on, casting a warm glow on the blood. Then people ran up and slowly pulled the girl into their arms, as if they were handing their shields to dying soldiers.
“What happened?” they asked.
“Are you all right?”
“Whose blood is this?”
She only answered the last question.
“It’s mom’s.”
The pitch-black door sent shivers down everyone’s spine. And then, one by one, they walked through, calling and praying, but deep down they knew they were too late.
They found the woman in the bathtub, lying in a shallow red lake.
They found the man in the garage, swaying gently back and forth.
They never found the boy.
Until I knew the full story, that was what haunted me the most. It wasn’t what was left that terrified me as a six-year-old. It was what was taken from me.
That was My The story of the black man that my brother happily sent to me in bed. My nightmares always involved a boy who was kidnapped by a monster 46 years before I was born.
He sat at the foot of my bed – a nine-year-old with a sadistic smile – and told me that the boy had not been kidnapped. He said he had run to the house down the street to escape his father, who had gone completely mad, and his mother, who was broken beyond repair.
According to legend, the boy found something – in a building where no one had lived for decades – and together they cursed the entire street.
Every household that had ignored his family’s suffering over the years was unwittingly and irrevocably cursed. All the cuts and bruises on the sidewalk that were ignored; all the radios that were turned up to drown out his father’s anger – they would pay for that.
At some point the “tragedy” became a “pattern” and then – worst of all – a “tradition”.
Every few years, on the same spring night, a different house on that cursed street would be attacked… and no one would come out alive.
As people began to move away and the killings continued, the story changed from that of a heartless neighbor receiving just punishment to that of an innocent man paying for the sins of strangers.
But a child’s anger is rarely well planned. It is chaotic, and the hidden boy’s anger was more chaotic than most. He saw these houses with their windows as portals to impossible worlds, and he hated them.
My parents weren’t even born when the bloodied girl and her vengeful brother changed everything. But I can tell you about every single death that followed, because when you move so close to a place they call Murder Road, you do your research.
They follow every ancient news story and read every rumor – and cringe when people vacillate between ignorance and denial.
They should have known that a curse is a curse no matter how you look at it. But the deaths were far enough apart and different enough (aside from the obvious differences) to be dismissed as a strange coincidence.
I never met our father’s parents. They were faces in boxed-up photographs, supporting characters in moments rarely mentioned. First his father died and then, less than a year later, his mother followed, leaving us with a house on the edge of a horror story.
There were enough bedrooms for each of us, plus a study for Mom and a garden twice the size of ours. So we moved. And we stayed there longer than we should have.
When you sell a house, you have to disclose whether someone was killed there. This doesn’t deter as many people as you might think. But it’s much harder to sell a house on a road. full from crime scenes.
At some point, the buildings on the street next to ours looked as old as the people in them, and when those people died, their families received an inheritance they didn’t want.
Some rent them to scary people, others move in reluctantly but make sure they leave on the same night every year, and some block their lawyer’s number.
When we first moved away, we drove past Murder Road and trembled. In that same moment, as we passed those houses for the very last time, Rowan, Hazel, our parents, and I silently swallowed our fear.
Nobody said a word, because that’s the problem with real horror stories: whatever you say only makes them worse.
Sometimes it emerged in the gaps between our words, in the tiny cracks in our daily journals that we skimmed over before it could break through.
Sometimes I saw it in a flash behind my eyes; a memory that had been pushed back into its cage.
And sometimes I saw it in the mirror. Because Murder Road left a scar on everyone. Even those who weren’t killed.
2
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“We move too much,” says Rowan, and Mom sighs and replies, “We move as often as we need to.”
“What’s the formula for that?” my brother asks and Dad glares at him angrily.
“Don’t be a smartass. You know why we’re moving.”
In the cramped back seat, a shiver runs from Hazel’s shoulder to me. My sister’s long blonde hair hides the look that I imagine burning holes in the stained mats beneath our feet, and I lean even closer to the window.
I catch my father’s eye in the rearview mirror, but he looks away before I can fake a smile.
“This time it will be different,” Mom murmurs, as if talking to herself.
No one answers because no one agrees. The only way to escape the past is to keep running, and we quickly get tired.
Our new home looks a lot like our last one… and the one before that. When we arrive, it’s not quite big enough for the five of us, but we squeeze in and keep our discomfort to a minimum.
The front garden is overgrown, the window frames are green and the driveway is covered in clumps of moss. When Dad opens the door for the first time, he kicks dirt into the hallway and that’s us in a nutshell. We make stains because we have stains.
“It’s beautiful,” says Hazel, her eyes refusing to look at the dirty carpets or the peeling plaster.
“Thank you,” Mom replies.
Something quiet and subtle passes between them, the briefest moment in which they look almost identical. Then Rowan storms past with a huge box. “You should know by now, little brother. Don’t come in without your arms full.”
I walk back to the car where Dad is looking up at our new home.
When he sees me, he sighs and says, “This is a house in need of renovation, isn’t it?”
“Something like that.”
We lived in a beautiful house. That was an expectation—for the streets surrounding Murder Road—as if perfectly manicured flowerbeds and freshly painted fences could hide the stench of our neighbors’ dirty secrets.
“Nate?”
Dad’s hopeful face slowly comes back to the forefront before I say, “I’m sorry. I just want it to be different this time.”
“It will,” he says. “I promise.”
This often happens to parents: They make vows that they cannot possibly keep.
It will not be different. It will be exactly the same because at some point in time, someone in the city we now call home will realize where we come from.
They will seek out the place we flee from, no matter how many times we tell them not to. And in the end, they will be dead.
Out of One house left by Vincent Ralph. Copyright © 2024 by the author, reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
