In Sheltered Shadows and Other Short Stories

By Katherine Dempster

In Sheltered Shadows

Fifteen-year-old Erica thinks her life is over and dreads the changes ahead when her family is forced to move into a rundown inherited home after her parents lose their jobs. Little does she know, the flickering lights within i

• Language: English
• Publisher: Katherine Dempster
• Release date: Apr 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781738199112

Book preview

In Sheltered Shadows

I didn't want to move. I didn't want to leave the only house, the only school, and the only friends I had ever known. I didn't want to live in a podunk town with nothing to do, nowhere to go, and I especially did not want to start a brand new high school in the tenth grade.

I also knew it wasn't my parents' fault that the plant they had been employed with since they were first married closed its doors. They put on happy faces for my sister and me, but I heard them up late at night—the hushed, frustrated arguments followed by the soft tears of my mother being consoled by my dad. The town and the house that we lived in were nothing glamorous, but they were ours. The average suburban life that was perfect to me.

Our small house was tight, with only two bedrooms and one bathroom, but it was all I had ever known from the moment I was born. Every memory I had was under that roof. My mother thought that finally having my own room would be a great selling point to uprooting my entire life, thanks to the fact I had shared a bedroom with my sister from the moment she came home from the hospital in my mother's arms. The four-year age gap made sure that it did not take long to outgrow anything Hannah and I had in common, so our bedroom grew smaller by the day.

Erica, do you have any gum? she asked, smiling her shiny metal grin and batting her lashes at me as if that worked on anyone other than our mom. We were crammed in the back seat of our family's car. The only car we had now, as my mom's had been sold off, just like our house. Bags and boxes of our belongings were packed in all around us, with the rest of our lives packed neatly in a moving truck that would arrive the next day. Hannah pushed a stack of coats between us out of the way to grab my bag.

I snatched it away from between us and sneered at her, You're not allowed to chew gum, Brace Face.

Hannah pouted her lips while rage burned in her eyes, Mom! You told her she's not allowed to call me Brace Face anymore!

Erica’s right, little miss. No gum until those braces come off. God knows we can't afford to have more issues with those damn things right now, Mom replied, exhaling a long, tense breath as she opened the passenger side window.

In protest, Hannah slammed her palms on her legs, Mom, it's not even fair! I can't….

I swear, Hannah, one more word, Mom tried to cut her off before the tangent of whining could set in.

I knew calling her brace-face hurt her feelings. Unfortunately for her, it didn't bother me so much to hurt her feelings since her explosive mood changes had started. The insufferable screaming fits, throwing anything she could get her hands on, the tattle-tailing. The only good thing to come of it was when she would hide away and sulk. It was the only peace I had under the same roof with her. Before her hormones had taken over about a year ago, we had been reasonably close as sisters. Instead of Brace Face, I called her Bug. I teased her that it was because she bugged me, but it was really short for ladybug, named for the cute little freckles on her face.

My friends liked to call me Ricky. I liked that better than Erica. I always thought Erica was plain. The nickname made me feel unique, and even though I wouldn't admit it out loud, it made me feel cooler. When Hannah was younger, she couldn't pronounce her r's, so she called me Micky. Even after she conquered all of the letters, Micky stuck.

Although now, with her newly found hormones, she usually just doubled down on the syllables of my name: Air-eh-kaaaah!

She called me Micky about as much as I called her Bug lately.

I don't remember having meltdowns to the degree that she did when I was a tween. Certainly nothing as loud or incessant. Her fits gave me headaches and made me want to lash out right back at her. I tried to remind myself that my body and mind didn't change at the same time that my entire life was being uprooted and moved. To keep the peace, I tried to avoid her as much as possible when she got into one of her moods. Being stuck in the back seat with her gave me nowhere to go for this latest eruption.

Not wanting to be a part of another family fight, I tugged my phone from my bag, unwound the headphones, and jammed them in my ears. I called it a phone because that's what it used to be. Now it just played the music I had downloaded on it. No access to calls, or text, or the internet. Just a clunky little music box. Dad promised to get it hooked up with a cell company when we settled in the new place, making excuses about new numbers and area codes, so it was best to just cancel it for now, but I knew the truth. We couldn't afford it. The list of things that we couldn't afford grew every day.

I flipped through the songs until I found one loud enough to drown out Erica's latest outburst. I stared out the window at the passing signs announcing us leaving one small town and entering the next. There were going to be a lot of those signs before we finally arrived at what my mom insisted on calling our fresh start.

The house that we were moving to was actually something in our budget. It was free. It had originally belonged to my great-grandfather, my mother's grandfather. He was the only one on that side of the family left in that town after everyone had moved on and away from the insignificant little blip on the map. He had lived there until he died. I think that’s the point of little towns like that. The sad, boring land got its hooks on you and fed on you until you dropped dead, probably from boredom.

What a great fresh start.

I had never met her grandfather, only knowing of him by a few cracked and worn black and white photographs my mom had tucked in a photo album. He seemed nice enough, with the same small smile my mother and little sister shared, and his eyes had a sparkle that made him look kind—standing in front of a beach or the farm store he was employed with. Quick moments in time of someone I never knew. Mom didn't like talking about her childhood or her time in that town. It didn't seem like anything bad had happened to her or any sort of dark secret. She just had bigger aspirations than small-town life. She was smart enough to know she would have a very small and dull life if she stayed. Now that the universe had tossed her back into it, she had to sell me on her hometown. I could tell she regretted the dreary stories she had told me about what I expect will be a crap hole.

Her grandfather's house had been offered to each member of the family after he died, and each turned it down, not wanting to put the time and money into fixing it up. My Uncle Paul eventually decided to take it on as a rental house when it wouldn't sell after a couple of years.

Uncle Paul's daughters, Ava and Ella (aka the Terror Twins), said they had traveled through during a family road trip so their father could show them where he grew up. The stories they told painted the picture of a house on the brink of collapse with shadowy figures drifting behind tattered curtains and cracked windows. Everything they said was bullshit, and I told them as much. When they found out that Uncle Paul had given us the house to live in until we got back on our feet, the stories only grew worse from those creepy brats. They insisted that it was true and that it was a well-known fact that our great-grandfather had died in his bed. Their dad had trouble keeping tenants because his ghost would roam the halls, stealing the souls of children and pets. They told tales of how everyone in the neighborhood would avoid the house, even crossing the street to avoid walking in front of it—an actual haunted house straight out of the movies that smelled of old man.

I had heard my parents talking about the issues Uncle Paul had with keeping renters. There were problems with the house. I knew they meant wiring, cracked walls, and the like. I was well aware it wasn't a kid-eating, old man ghost. Those girls were more annoying than Hannah and twice as dumb.

When it came down to it, even if it was haunted, it was a place to live. Not where I wanted to live, but it was something. I hated seeing my parents so stressed and upset. The only thing that mattered to them was that we were all together. As mushy as they could get about how important our family was to them, I knew I was lucky to have parents that loved us so much.

I peered between my mom's seat and the door to the small plastic cage on her lap that held our Boston terrier, Dash. I couldn't see him. He was probably curled up and snoring. Car rides were his favorite times to nap. My dad had insisted on getting a boy dog since he was so outnumbered by the three of us, so he was not pleased when Dash took an instant shining to Hannah and never left her side by choice. I pushed my arm through the space beside the seat to feel inside the front of the cage and felt the warm fur on top of his head.

I won't let Grandpa Ghostie get you, little dude, I thought with a small laugh.

My attention snapped to Hannah when she poked me in the side - hard.

What the hell, brat? I tugged off my headphones and turned to her. My eyes widened, and I froze when I saw she had been digging in my bag and was now holding my crumpled pack of cigarettes. My super-secret pack of cigarettes.

'Put them back!' I mouthed to her. If they saw them, I would be dead before I even made it to our new haunted hell house. My parents would pull the car over