The Memory Giver (#Wattys2014)

Chapter 6

                                                        Chapter six

        He gave the room a quick once over before tumbling his books down onto the bed.  Then he gave it a more careful examination, like something Sherlock Holmes might have done.  He didn’t close his door when he came in, sidetracked by the thought that his mother had been up to something.  If he’d closed it, he wouldn’t have heard the sound.  He was coming to the end of his examination when he heard it—the soft ticking.

        At first, he attributed the sound to voices on the TV down the hall.  Yet after a while, he realized the sound wasn’t coming from down the hall, it was coming from across the hall, from A.D.’s room.  It was a faint sound, coming every few minutes or so.  He strained to listen, but couldn’t make out exactly what it was.  A chill snaked down his back as he remembered the strangeness he’d encountered in A.D.’s room the day before, the feeling of being watched.

        Tic, tic, tic.

        There it was again, a soft ticking, like dice.  No.  Like pencils knocking together on his brother’s desk.  No, that wasn’t quite right either.  The sound didn’t matter, what mattered was someone was in A.D’s room. 

        Dad.  Dad’s home early and he’s messin’ around with somethin’ in there. 

        That was the comforting thought Turtle settled on. He stepped out into the corridor and began moving toward the closed door.  With each step he noticed the temperature dropping.  It was as if he was approaching an open freezer. 

        The idea that it could be something ghostly flared in his mind.  That was the thought he didn’t allow to enter yesterday.  Yesterday when he was putting the model back, he held it at bay, yet today, he had no choice.  There were too many things pointing in that direction, and as much as he wanted it to be Dad, he knew, sure as rain, it wasn’t.

        The summer that Turtle turned nine, some of the older kids in the neighborhood had started rumoring that the abandoned apartment building on Union Avenue was haunted.  The building had been abandoned for less than a year and few of them said they’d even seen the ghost.  A.D. insisted they go down to the vacant building and investigate.  He said it would be a fun Goonies adventure, but Turtle didn’t want to go. 

        Turtle was afraid of ghosts.  He was afraid of most things, but ghosts and monsters and darkened basements were in the top three.  A.D. told him there was no such thing as ghosts.  He said if the building was haunted by mean ghosts, they’d’ve hurt someone already. A.D. assured him the real reason the big kids were saying the building was haunted is they were hiding something in there, and A.D. wanted to know what it was.

        Turtle admired his brother’s fearlessness, but he wasn’t born that way.  Turtle was a scaredy-cat. Whenever A.D. brought up the subject of going down Union Avenue and exploring the house, by the time he’d finished his nagging, Turtle was near tears.  After a few days, A. D. stopped pestering his little brother about going down there, and soon after that, the haunted house rumor ran out of steam and died.  The boys never found out what, if anything, was really hidden in the abandoned building, although Turtle always believed it was a ghost.

        Turtle put his ear as close to A.D.’s bedroom door as he felt safe doing.  The cold was coming off the door in waves, his heart strumming in his chest like a bass fiddle.  As his ear neared the door, the ticking stopped.  He stood motionless, holding his breath, waiting for the sound to start up again, yet praying that it wouldn’t.