“Who cares?” Adam whined, looking back at the house. “I don’t like the way it smells here.”
“What are you talking about? It smells better than car exhaust and dumpsters.”
“You don’t smell it?”
I took a deep breath through my nose. “All I smell is bleach and window cleaner. I think I may have accidentally chlorine-gassed the entire house.”
Adam shook his head. “It’s not a scent I can describe. I don’t know. I’ve been noticing weird shit like that lately. Nothing seems to smell good or bad, but it’s different. Like information being shoved into my head that I can’t understand.”
I took in another whiff of air and shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t smell it.”
We stopped at the edge of the woods.
“Austin’s being weird again,” Adam said, shifting the subject.
“Now what?”
“He’s just weird.”
“He seems to be his same unpleasant self to me.”
“That’s the weird thing. He’s not. Last night, he was rough, but he wasn’t mean about it. And he hasn’t argued with me all day.”
I shot the half-turn another confused look. “Why is this a bad thing?”
He ran his fingers through his dreadlocks, scratching the back of his head. “When he’s quiet, it makes me more nervous than when he’s angry. It usually means he’ll be extra mean later.”
“Roscoe and I will put a stop to it.”
“How? You think Roscoe’s gonna be able to take Austin?” Adam laughed. “The guy can’t even fight his own appetite.”
“He pretends to be stupid and passive, but he’s pretty good at diffusing bad situations.” I thought back to our unfortunate interaction with the police a couple of weeks ago. “Sometimes.”
Adam turned toward the house. “We should probably finish cleaning this dump.”
“It’s notthatbad.”
“Fine. Let’s finish cleaning this—how do real estate agents make shitty houses seem appealing in advertisements?”
“Adam.”
“Oh yeah. Let’s finish cleaning this quaint little bungalow with a lot of investment potential.”
I opened the door, and we stepped inside, the sound of a disc sander whirring in the living room.
“I didn’t know Austin had tools,” Adam said, keeping his voice low. “I didn’t even know he knew how to do anything other than lie around the house scratching his balls all day.”
“Did you see him smile when he saw the garage?”
Adam muttered something I couldn’t hear before speaking up. “Yeah. We’ll see if it lasts.”
Chapter 10
Halloween Town
It was around two when Roscoe and I left the house to pick up supplies, leaving Austin and Adam behind to finish unpacking. Downtown Norwich was within walking distance of our new place, and Roscoe was like a dog eager to go to the park.
Every house we passed looked like it had been built over a century ago, and just about every yard had pieces of occult symbolism hanging from trees. They weren’t the cheesy decorations from department store clearance aisles, either. They were much creepier—Blair Witch creepy. Despite the seemingly hostile facade, the humans that were out in their yards seemed genuinely happy to see us, often waving or coming up to say hi. Even the children we encountered seemed more entertained by Roscoe’s appearance than afraid.
