J.W. Ocker - The Smashed Man of Dread End

To Esme and Hazel, the real Noe and Len.

And to Olive. Ill have to find another monster for you to fight.

Thats ominous, Noe said from the back seat of the SUV.

Om-eee-nus, repeated Len.

Noelle Wiley glanced at her three-year-old sister. Lenore was squeezing a stuffed anteater to her chest and straining against the straps of a car seat covered in dried yogurt glops and apple juice stains. Noe wrinkled her nose and scrunched closer to the SUV door. Quiet, Len, she said.

Dont talk to your sister like that, said Mom from the drivers seat.

And dont freak out. Its not ominous. Thats just another name for a cul-de-sac. Dad was in the front passenger seat, poking at his phone like he was trying to get it to pay attention to him.

The topic of conversation was a diamond-shaped yellow sign on the side of the road. On it, in blocky black letters, were two words: DEAD END.

But Noe wasnt talking about the sign. She was talking about what was spray-painted on the sign. Squeezed between the first two letters of DEAD was an R in sparkly black paint, turning the phrase into DREAD END. The R was deformed, with the hump at the top longer and thinner than it should have been.

As the SUV slowly passed the sign and turned the corner, Dad continued. Youre going to love living at the end of a cul-de-sac, Noe. The street is your own private blacktop. You can bike on it or play basketball on it or cover it in chalk drawings or lie in the middle of it without worrying that cars are going to run you over.

She cant lie in the middle of it, said Mom.

She can if we put out one of those signs that say Slow Children. Our children are pretty slow. Noes phone vibrated in her pocket, and she fished it out to see that Dad had sent her a wink emoji.

Her parents had been handling her like an egg carton full of tiny time bombs since they had told her they were moving. They had lived in the old house for all of Noes life. And now, at thirteen, she would be facing the terrors of a new place.

What her parents didnt know was that she didnt care that they were moving. It wasnt like they were moving to another state. Or even to another town. They were staying in Osshua, just moving to the north end of it. That meant a new house and a new school district, but that was fine. Noe was done with her old school, anyway. The jerk-to-friend ratio there was pretty high, and her best friend had stopped being one.

Len, sensing that her sisters thoughts had gone to unpleasant places, shifted the anteater and peeled a mummified french fry off the lining of her car seat. She offered it to her sister. Noe scrunched tighter against the door, pressing her cheek against the window, which was cool despite the summer outside. Len gave up and pretended to feed the fry to her anteater.

As the car rounded the curve, passing a less ominous green sign labeled TOTTER COURT, the entire dead endNoe hated the phrase cul-de-sac, it sounded like a bad wordappeared through the front window of the SUV.

The neighborhood sat at the bottom of a ravine like it was pressed into the ground by a giant thumb. The ravine wall rose about thirty feet behind the houses on one side of the block, but then gradually lowered around the curve of the dead end until the wall disappeared behind the houses on the other side of the road. Between the backyards of the neighborhood and the base of the ravine grew a thin forest of trees.

Their new house was near the dead end of the dead end street, on the side of the road where the ravine was tallest. The house was a red saltbox with black shutters and a black door. On top of the roof was a metal weather vane, shaped like a walking Pilgrim, that had aged into a pale green. The house looked like it dated to colonial times, but it had been built only a few decades ago. Most of the houses in the neighborhood were like that, built to reflect an older New England. On one side of their new house was a gray house similar to their own, and on the other side was a forested lot that had never been cleared. The closest house on that side was a white one at the very tip of the dead end. It was set halfway up the ravine, which was a gentle slope at that point.

Noes new school was somewhere behind that white house, on the other side of the forested slope. She could walk there in minutes. That meant no bus, no parents dropping her offand sleeping in until the last possible moment. Another reason to be happy with this move. But summer was no time for school thoughts.

What Noe wasnt happy with was helping Dad carry in all the moving boxes from the rental truck that was parked in their driveway. The furniture had been carried into the house yesterday by the movers Dad had hired, but he wanted to save money on the boxes and smaller items. Len was too young to help, so that left her and Mom and Dad to lug boxes. Which they started doing immediately after they arrived.

The house was larger than their old house. Two floors and a basement, four bedrooms, two bathrooms. The first floor was laid out in a circle, so you could run around forever without hitting a wall. The bedrooms were all on the second floor.

Noe dropped a box full of clothes onto the wide pine planks of her bedroom floor, wiped her forehead, and looked around. Blank walls and a bare floor and two windows. Soon her dog posters would cover the walls and her furniture would cover the floor. She stared out one of the windows. A large backyardperfect for a dogstretched flat and green and almost featureless except for a large stone-ringed firepit to one side. The yard ended at that thin strip of forest at the base of the ravine. Behind their house, the forest thickened and continued through a gap in the ravine wall and into a large forest preserve. Even though they were still in town, only a mile from the nearest grocery store, in fact, it felt like they were in the middle of nowhere. When Noe looked out the windows in the back of the house, it looked like they lived in a forest. When she looked out the windows at the front of the house, it looked like they lived in a neighborhood. It had to be the strangest street in town.

Noe could barely make out the face of the ravine through all the foliage and couldnt at all make out the houses perched atop the ravine, which faced the opposite direction. Dad said that during winter, when the trees were bare, theyd have a clear view of the backs of those houses. And that hopefully everybody up there used curtains. Noe herself couldnt wait for fall, when the maple and oak and birch trees would burn into bright reds and oranges and yellows around them. At the old house, theyd only had a few scraggly bushes and an ugly telephone pole in their yard.

As she walked back downstairs and into the living room, she passed Mom, who was pushing a hand truck stacked with three boxes, each labeled DINING ROOM. Looks like you have a welcoming committee outside, said Mom, stopping in front of Noe.

What?

There are kids out there. Looks like theyre waiting to meet you. Go be neighborly. She angled the handcart to let Noe pass. Dont worry. Ill save you some boxes to carry.

Noe walked over to one of the windows that overlooked the front lawn. The house was set far enough back from the street that it felt separated from the rest of the neighborhood.

At the edge of the lawn, like they were afraid of trampling the grass, stood three girls. They werent moving or talking or looking around. They just stared at the house. Creepy, Noe said to herself.