It took them about two hours to get everything inside. It would have taken them much longer had his parents not decided at the get-go to only bring the essentials to their new home. Leading up to the move, they held multiple garage sales, pawning off well more than half of their belongs. Pretty much all they brought were beds, a couch, some dressers, an old bookcase their mother had received from their grandmother after her passing, and a handful of other pieces of furniture. Outside of that, he and his siblings were told to pack what they could into two or three boxes and prepare the rest for resale.
This didn’t bother him as much as he had expected it to. Turned out, he didn’t really care all that much about most of what he owned. He remembered taking down his band posters and staring at them, wondering if he was ready to say goodbye, and realized then that he really was. So many of the things that he loved changed along with him.
As he exited the house in search of the final load, his brother and sister were entering with boxes of their own. They were squabbling about something Toby didn’t catch much of and didn’t really care about. The two of them seemed distant to him most of the time. They seemed to have their own thing going on, as twins, with their own inside stories and what-not.
As he reached the back of the moving truck, he heard a quiet shuffle behind him. He turned to see a grey cat standing about five feet away on the sidewalk. It stared at him with its yellow eyes, its tail wagging around like it wasn’t sure where to go. Toby stepped toward it, kneeling slightly. He fish-puckered his lips and made a cat-call. The feline stepped back apprehensively. Toby wasn’t surprised. If anything, he was surprised it hadn’t taken off already. He took another step toward it. Only, this time, it didn’t back away. Instead, its claws sprung from within its paws like retractable blades and the creature showed its yellow teeth. It hissed at him and then meowed loudly and wildly. Toby noticed its eyes move to the side like it was looking at something beside him or behind him. He turned and looked, but there was nothing there. When he turned back, the cat darted off, its legs moving so quickly it lost balance momentarily before catching itself and vanishing like a lightning bolt.
He felt that chill again, the one he had when he first stared up at the house, or maybe, he thought, when it stared at him. He looked to his side again and saw nothing then shifted his attention toward the colonial, as his dad had called it, behind him. He startled when he noticed movement on the other side of one of the windows, but when a cloud passed and light shone directly down onto the window, he noticed it was only his sister exploring what he assumed was one of the bedrooms.
When he reentered the house with the final box, his parents were already teaming up on the furniture, moving the couch into its final location against one of the room’s far walls. But, knowing his mother, it wouldn’t be the couch’s final resting place for long. She loved to redecorate.
He set the box down along with the others and ducked out of the room before his parents could have the chance to notice him and request his assistance with moving things. He’d already noticed the absence of his siblings and thought they had the right idea.
The stairs were creaky, as they should be if the house was truly as old as he had been told. But they were also tall and long, unlike the narrow tripping hazards that led from the first to the second floor of their old house. At the top, the hall wrapped openly around each side of the stairs, going left, and also right, toward multiple bedrooms. In one direction, to the right, he saw five doors, two on the right side of the hall, two on the left, and a final door at the very end. To the left of the stairs were only two doors and then the hall ended with a window.
He heard a sound coming from his left, from within one of the rooms, beyond a closed door. He heard what sounded like only one voice but figured it was probably his brother and sister talking quietly about God only knew what. If one of them had already chosen one of those bedrooms, he would hurry off to the right and find his own before they were all taken.
The walls were a bright eggshell white. He wasn’t entirely sure, but he thought he could still smell the paint’s scent and wondered if this was part of the remodeling his dad had mentioned on their way there. The ceiling above was made from some sort of unpainted wood, a tan color with patches of black throughout, some knots still lodged in the wood from when it was a tree.
The first door he opened turned out not to be a bedroom at all, but instead a bathroom complete with a shower, a sink, and, unsurprisingly, more space than he imagined someone needing in a bathroom. There were feet of space between the sink, the toilet, and the shower. Across from the sink and toilet were multiple shelves where he was willing to bet towels would go. But the extra space was offsetting. There was just so much of it, like someone expected ten people to be in the bathroom at one time. He hoped to God this was never the case.
The next room, this one almost directly across from the bathroom, turned out to be indeed a bedroom, but it was small, about
