Holly Horror #1

Book 1: Holly Horror

by Michelle Jabès Corpora

Genres: YA Action & Adventure

Synopsis

"Playmate, come and play with me..."

A beloved classic reimagined with a dark twist.

After her parents' painful divorce, Evie Archer hopes that moving to Ravenglass, Massachusetts, is the fresh start that her family needs. But Evie quickly realizes that her new home—known by locals as the Horror House—carries its own dark past after learning about Holly Hobbie, who mysteriously vanished in her bedroom one night.

But traces of Holly linger in the Horror House and slowly begin to take over Evie's life. A strange shadow follows her everywhere she goes, and Evie starts to lose sight of what's real and what isn't the more she learns about The Lost Girl.

Can Evie find out what happened the night of Holly's disappearance? Or is history doomed to repeat itself in the Horror House?

Release date: August 15, 2023

Publisher: Penguin Workshop

Print pages: 320

Sample

1
The little silver car darted down the country roads like a minnow, cresting the hills and dipping low into the valleys, carrying three new souls into western Massachusetts. Evie Archer sat in the passenger seat, watching the first few rust- and honey-​colored leaves begin to fall. Beyond, the sun was low on the horizon, setting the mountaintops ablaze with golden light. Evie knew she should have appreciated the sight of a sky unbroken by apartment buildings and skyscrapers, but all it did was make her feel small.

She fingered the cream-​colored lace of her favorite shirt—​an old maroon cotton tee that she’d found thrifting and upcycled into something more fashionable. She’d cut off the sleeves and snipped the bottom into a wavy asymmetrical line, then sewed about a foot of vintage lace to the bottom to create a dramatic hem. A bit more lace around the neckline completed the look. She’d laid it out on her bed with a pair of comfortable jeans last night as her traveling outfit.

“So listen,” her mother, Lynne, was saying as she took another tight turn. “You guys know that Hobbie House needs a lot of work, and I can’t afford to have the whole place professionally cleaned right now, so we should start by fixing up the rooms we’ll need right away.”

“Sure, Mom,” Evie said, wondering what her friends back home in New York were doing right now. Were they thinking about her? She checked her phone for messages, but there were none. She reasoned that it was still a school day; they were probably just busy. She put the phone facedown on her lap and tried not to think about it.

In the back seat, huddled among the duffel bags and suitcases, her younger brother, Stan, said nothing. Evie glanced back to see him hidden deep inside his black hoodie, playing some stupid game on his phone.

“Stan, honey, are you listening?” Mom said.

Stan grunted, just loud enough to be audible by human ears.

“Anyway,” her mother continued as they approached another hairpin curve, “we’ll tackle the bedrooms first, then the kitchen—​oh, probably a bathroom we can all share, and—”
There was something in the road. Some lumbering, dark thing. Mom didn’t see it because she was too busy talking about the house, but Evie saw it.

“Mom! Watch out!” Evie shouted.

“What?” her mother gasped, wrenching the steering wheel and slamming on the brakes. The little silver car swerved wildly, skidding to the side of the road. Evie shrieked as a rock was thrown up and hit the windshield like a bullet. The car came to a stop, and for a moment there was no sound inside except ragged breaths.

“What’s wrong?” Mom exclaimed.

Evie turned to look behind them, certain she would see a small, bloodied corpse.

But there was nothing.

“I saw an animal in the road,” Evie said, suddenly uncertain. “Like a small dog, or a cat or something. I thought we were going to hit it.”

Mom eyed the tiny crack in the windshield where the rock had hit and sighed heavily. Evie noticed that despite the hours of packing, loading, traffic, and nearly crashing the car just now, her mother’s wavy, caramel-​colored hair still looked perfect. “Evie, I was watching the road. I didn’t see any animal. You’re lucky we didn’t hit a tree or something. That wouldn’t be a great way to start our new life here, now, would it?” She put the car back into gear and started driving again without another word.

“Sorry,” Evie said after a moment. She ran her fingers through her hair. It was a little greasy.

“It’s fine,” Mom replied, in a tone that clearly said it wasn’t. “Look! We’re almost there.” She pointed to a green road sign that read Ravenglass, 2 miles. “Are you excited?”

Evie nodded, pasting on a smile. In the back seat, Stan hadn’t moved. Incredible . . . she thought.

“Sometimes your eyes can play tricks on you, you know,” Mom said, her voice softer now.

“Sometimes we think we see things that aren’t really there. Like a mirage in the desert.”

“I guess so,” Evie said, not wanting an argument.

But I did see it, she thought. She had seen it walk, seen its fur, seen its flashing eyes as it looked up at the car speeding toward it.

Didn’t I?

Her mouth was dry, so she grabbed the Big Gulp of Coke that they’d picked up at a gas station and took a long drink. Something was stuck to the sweaty bottom of the plastic cup. Evie peeled it off and peered at it. A small yellow sticky note with four words written in pen: KEYS, CELL PHONE, WALLET. It was her father’s handwriting. It must have been inside the cup holder when she’d set the Big Gulp down. He was always forgetting things—​his lunch, his wallet, his children’s birthdays—​so he’d often write them down to remind himself. Artists were forgetful like that, he’d always said. Like that made up for everything.

Evie stared at the note for a moment before crumpling it up in her hand, opening the window, and throwing it out.

As they crested the next hill, an old wooden sign with gold letters came into view.

WELCOME TO RAVENGLASS, MASSACHUSETTS
EST. 1856

The local road they were on dropped them right at the center of Main Street, in the middle of a town that looked like the cover of an old Saturday Evening Post come to life—​pure Americana, stars and stripes, and apple pie. A neat line of colonial-​style buildings—cream and pale yellow with shutters painted in red and green—​nestled under the far-​reaching boughs of black oak trees, resplendent in their autumn colors. There were a few little shops and cafés, a redbrick church with a real bell in its belfry, an inn, a fancy restaurant, and a little place right at the edge of town called Birdie’s Diner.

Evie sniffed the air, which smelled like a combination of fried chicken and something spicy. Her stomach growled. They hadn’t eaten since leaving the city. “I’m hungry,” she said.
“Have a granola bar,” her mother said. “We’ll pick something up after we get everything inside and settle in. Isn’t the town lovely? It’s just so . . .”

Evie went ahead and supplied the correct word. “Quaint.”

She pulled a couple of bars from their snack bag and tossed one into the back seat, feeling a little bit satisfied when it bounced off Stan’s head. It must have momentarily roused him from his phone coma, because a moment later, she could hear him munching.

“We’re going to live here?” Stan asked, pressing his face against the window. “In the Land That Time Forgot? If they don’t have Wi­Fi, I’m hitching a ride back home. Seriously.”

“They have Wi­Fi, Stan,” Mom replied smoothly. “And you can’t hitchhike back home. This is our home now.”

Evie swallowed a lump of granola and chocolate as the full impact of those words hit her. Everything she knew—​her entire loud, crowded, messy life back in New York—​was gone. Divorce had snuck up on her life last year and swallowed it whole, like a snake, leaving nothing behind but pain and memory.

After the settlement, her mother realized that they had a big problem. Mom’s old job at the Hyatt didn’t pay anywhere near enough for their three-​bedroom apartment, not even with the child support payments, and especially not after all the legal fees. She had about two months’ rent left in her savings, and then they were going to be living hand-to-mouth. Things looked grim until the night Evie overheard Mom call her sister, Martha Hobbie, and ask her a question that changed everything.

“Martha, do you think we could move to Hobbie House?”

Hobbie House.

Those words had been spoken in hushed tones throughout Evie’s life, like a curse. The house, a place that had been in her mother’s family for about fifty years, was up in a small town in the Berkshires called Ravenglass. Aunt Martha lived in an apartment in town there—​and was the official caretaker for the house. Evie always wondered why her aunt didn’t just live at Hobbie House. After having spent her whole life in cramped apartments, Evie could hardly imagine what it would be like to have all that space. Why would anyone choose some tiny apartment over an entire house?

Then again, Aunt Martha was a superstitious sort of person, and Hobbie House did have a certain . . . reputation.

Evie shivered, the breeze suddenly chilling her. She closed the window and pulled her dusky pink cardigan close around her shoulders. Regardless of the house’s history, her mother saw it as their salvation. “A fresh start, a big bedroom for each of us, and best of all: It’s free!” Mom had announced this to Evie and Stan after hanging up with Aunt Martha. Stan had immediately made it clear how much he hated this idea by going on a hunger strike and slamming doors, but Evie had just nodded and smiled. “That’s great, Mom,” she’d said.

“Isn’t it?” Mom had replied. “Just what we needed. Some good news.”

That night was the first time Evie let herself cry.

But now, surrounded by the stunning beauty and tranquility of Ravenglass, a tiny ray of hope pierced through her inner gloom.

Maybe life will be good here, she allowed herself to think. Maybe it will be okay.

The GPS on her mother’s phone started to act funny once they left the town behind and went in search of Hobbie House. Because it was nearly two hundred years old, the house wasn’t on Main Street, and it wasn’t part of either of the two planned communities built in Ravenglass over the past sixty years. They followed the GPS down a one​­lane street called Knickerbocker Road that dead­ended at an overgrown field, where a single, tumbledown shack stood, its broken windows glinting in the setting sun like jagged teeth.

“Well,” Mom said, putting the car in reverse. “It’s been forty years since I’ve been here, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t the house.”

“God, I hope not,” Stan said, peeking through the space between the front seats to stare at the shack.

“We passed a mailbox a little while back,” Evie said. “It was kind of hidden by some bushes. Maybe that was it?”

Once Mom turned the car around, she went along the little road slowly, and all three of them peered through the thick trees on both sides, looking for an opening.

“There!” Evie exclaimed, pointing. Sure enough, there was a rusty white mailbox, almost completely engulfed by creeper vines, next to a clearing in the trees and a narrow lane, leading up.

Mom rolled the car to a stop next to the mailbox, and Evie stuck her head out of the window to study it. Along the side, written in cracked black paint, were the letters HH. There was something else, too, something scribbled in faded red ink above the two letters. It looked like someone had tried to wash it off, with little success. Evie squinted. What did it say? After a moment, the words became clear.

HORROR HOUSE.

“This is it,” she said, her voice dry. “We’re here.”

Her mother pulled the car into the narrow, winding lane and started to climb. A row of elm trees stood like sentinels alongside them, and once or twice Evie could have sworn she saw the flash of a white­tailed deer darting away at the sound of their approach. It wasn’t until they’d reached the top of the hill that the trees cleared and they got their first glimpse of the house.

The house had two faces. One faced them, and the other looked away, as if staring into the distance back toward town. It had been white once, but time had erased all that, leaving most of it gray and rutted. Burgundy shutters framed the windows, which covered both faces and all sides of the octagonal tower that made up the left part of the house. Both sides boasted a wide porch, leading to doors painted blue. The place looked untouched by any living thing, aside from the bittersweet vines that grew everywhere, strangling porch posts and creeping like spiderwebs up as far as the two brickwork chimneys. Next to the house, a large apple tree stood alone, its trunk thick and twisted, its branches heavy with fruit.

“Look at that,” Mom breathed. She glanced over at Evie. “What do you think?”

Evie stared at the house. For some reason, she was reminded of the scene where Pinocchio went deep into the ocean to save his father and was swallowed by the whale. A huge, ancient thing that had lived for centuries past, and would live on centuries more.

“Everything comes in,” said Geppetto. “Nothing goes out.”

“Evie?”

She was being ridiculous. It was just an old house that needed a few coats of paint and some pruning shears. Nothing more.

“It’s amazing,” she finally said. “I wonder what it looks like inside.”

“Probably wall­-to-­wall rats,” Stan said. “Black mold, definitely ghosts—”

“Shut up, Stan,” Evie muttered, elbowing him in the chest.

“Ow! Mommm, she’s hurting me!” He poked Evie in the ribs.

“Stan, stop annoying your sister. Oh! Look, there’s Martha.”

Up ahead, in a circular paved area in front of the house, a woman in a deep purple shawl stood watching them pull in. Next to her, a rickety hatchback sat idling, its engine burbling with effort.

Mom parked the car in front of the house and jumped out. “Sis,” she said, opening her arms. “It’s good to see you.”

Evie hadn’t seen her aunt in years, not since the last time she’d come to visit them in New York. She was like a Wonderland version of her mother. Instead of Mom’s neat, wavy bob, Aunt Martha wore her hair long and silver gray. They were both thin, but Aunt Martha was gaunt, whereas Mom was slender. Next to her mother in her tan capris and tasteful turquoise blouse, Aunt Martha looked like a fairy-​tale witch in her shawl, long black skirt, and tall leather boots. Mom wore only simple silver hoop earrings, but Aunt Martha looked as if she were wearing every piece of jewelry she owned. Gold bangles jingled on both wrists, rings studded with semiprecious stones adorned every finger, and around her neck hung a glass blue amulet of the evil eye. Despite the past year of trouble, Mom still looked vibrant, whereas Aunt Martha looked as if she had seen things she would rather not repeat. She had a certain feral wildness about her that was as different from her mother as Evie could imagine.

Aunt Martha smiled and embraced Mom, but Evie noticed that the smile did not reach her eyes. “Have a good trip?” she asked.

“Getting out of the city was a nightmare, obviously—​but other than that, smooth sailing,” Mom replied.

Aunt Martha turned her eyes to Evie and Stan, who had gotten out of the car and stood a little distance away. “Hey, kids,” she said. Stan offered an awkward, one-​armed hug. Evie, on the other hand, wrapped both her arms around her aunt and squeezed. She smelled like a smoky mixture of sandalwood and clove, and when she pulled away, Aunt Martha looked at her with a mixture of affection and something else that Evie couldn’t decipher. “Well, I’m sure you’re all tired from your journey and have a lot to do,” she said, pulling away. She rummaged in the brown leather purse at her side and handed Mom a set of keys she found there. “Here you go. Those should open both front doors and the shed in the back. If you need anything, you can just—”

Mom blinked down at the keys that Aunt Martha had given her. She laughed. “You—​you’re not thinking of leaving, are you?”

Aunt Martha stood as rigid as the elm trees that surrounded them. She took one step back toward her rumbling car. “Well, yes. I have some clients coming in this afternoon, and I thought you’d want your space—”

Mom’s nostrils flared. “Oh, I see. You have clients.”

“Yes, I do.”

Evie looked away. She knew that her mother’s relationship with Aunt Martha was tense, at best, but Evie had hoped that things would be different now that they were moving to Ravenglass.

“I thought you’d at least come inside, catch up—”

Aunt Martha’s face turned to stone. “I don’t go inside, Lynne.”

Mom stared at her. “What do you mean, you don’t go inside? You’ve been the caretaker for this place for years.”

“I hire people to keep up the place, just basic stuff. I don’t go in there.”

“But—​why?” Mom sputtered.

“You know why.”

Mom laughed, a harsh, humorless laugh. “Are you serious?”

Aunt Martha said nothing.

Mom shook her head. “You are unbelievable. You know that?”

Aunt Martha turned back to her car and stopped with her hand on the door. “I’m sorry, kids,” she said to Evie and Stan. “Come and visit me in town after you get settled, okay? My door is always open.”

Evie nodded and raised a hand in farewell as the old hatchback struggled back down the narrow lane.

“Unbelievable,” Mom muttered, shaking her head with a sigh as she walked back to the car and popped the trunk open.

“Which way is the front?” Stan asked, staring at the two faces.

“I don’t think it matters,” Mom replied. “Looks like the movers used the north entrance, so we will, too. Here, honey.” She tossed the keys to Evie. “Go ahead and open the door. Stan and I will start bringing things in.”

Evie nodded and turned to the house. The western face was bright with sunlight, while the north face that she approached was in deep shadow. The porch groaned under her feet as she tried a couple of keys until one slid into the lock smoothly.

When she opened the door, the house seemed to exhale, as if it had been holding its breath, waiting for them to come.

Evie stepped into the gloom of a large farmhouse kitchen. A heavy wooden table dominated the middle of the room, which was lined with open shelving weighed down with piles of plates and bowls. A large, old-​fashioned stove skulked in the corner, and everything in view was covered in a thick layer of dust. Against one wall, and trailing out into the hallway beyond, were neat piles of moving boxes, left behind along with a pink invoice by the moving company. A yellowing plastic telephone sat on the countertop next to her, its coiled cord sagging limply by its side like a sleeping snake.

“Hey!” Evie looked up to see her mother stumbling through the door, carrying two bulging duffel bags. “What are you doing standing around? Come outside and help!”

Nodding, Evie went back out to the car to grab whatever was left in the trunk. After three more trips, they had brought everything into the house. Mom stood in the center of the kitchen, hands on hips, surveying her new home. “Well,” she said crisply. “The place needs a lot of work, but it’s got good bones. Don’t you think?”

“It sure is big enough,” Stan said, pulling off his hoodie to look around. His dark hair was messy and hung over his eyes. “Our entire apartment could fit in this kitchen.” He glanced down the hallway. “Looks like the other door leads into a living room. There’s stairs over here going up.”

Evie had an odd sense that the house had gotten stuck in time—​not once, but twice. Remnants of the 1980s—​thick yellow phone books, copies of the TV Guide, and a grimy radio-​cassette player with a bent antenna—​were strewn throughout a room that looked like it had been designed in the 1800s. In one corner, hanging over a wooden butter churn, Evie saw a framed needlework sampler dated 1851. Colorful flowers and trees surrounded a quote stitched in careful lettering:

The year rolls round, and steals away
The breath that first it gave;
What e’er we do, where e’er we be,
We’re trav’ling to the grave.

Evie felt her mother behind her, also reading. “Not exactly my taste,” she said. “But it is very authentic.” She coughed. “Whoo! I’d better start airing this place out and cleaning up so we can unpack. Why don’t you kids go up and pick your rooms?”

Stan was pounding up the stairs before Evie could even pick up her duffel. “I call first dibs!” he shouted.

“Stan! Wait!” Evie shouted back, grinding her teeth in annoyance. She shouldered her bag and went through the hallway into the living room. Rays of sunlight pouring through the windows illuminated legions of dust motes floating through the air in Stan’s wake. With only a cursory glance at the squashy armchairs and fireplace that dominated the room, Evie climbed the staircase to reach the second-​floor landing. Stan poked his head out of one of the doorways to look at her.

“This one’s mine,” he said. “It’s the biggest. Mom’s going to want the one at the end of the hall that has its own bathroom.”

“And why do you get—?”

“Bye now,” he said, and slammed the door in her face.

Evie stifled the hot rush of irritation rising inside her. “Fine,” she said through gritted teeth. She continued down the hallway to the last door and pushed it open.

If Stan got the biggest bedroom, it must be huge, Evie thought. Because the room she was looking at was anything but small. Two large windows dominated the back wall, and a double bed with a delicate gold frame sat between them. The floor, like the rest of the house, was hardwood, except for a dingy Oriental rug that must once have been green. The furniture was painted cream, with gold scalloped edges. A few pictures in tiny frames hung on the walls, but mostly they were papered over with pages from Seventeen magazine and Tiger Beat. Advertisements for Maybelline Kissing Potions, and photos of teenaged heartthrobs with mop haircuts, so sun faded that their faces were ghostly white.

Evie touched the bloom of a mummified rose on the dresser, felt it crumble under her fingertips. Next to it lay an old photograph, its corners brown and curling. It was a picture of a girl she’d seen many times before, with a serious face and long, ginger hair. She was sitting in this very room, gazing out one of the windows to the woods beyond.

Evie felt a strange tingling in her stomach as she realized:

This was Holly’s room.

The bedroom of a lost girl.

2

Holly Hobbie. The Lost Girl of Ravenglass.

Evie had first heard the story when she was a little girl, just old enough to be curious about the things her mother talked about behind closed doors. Holly was Mom’s and Aunt Martha’s cousin—​her mother, Elizabeth Hobbie, was their aunt, and Holly her only child. When they were young, Martha and Lynne had sometimes come to Ravenglass for Christmas. Aunt Martha was older by five years, but Lynne and Holly had been close in age.

But that all ended forty years ago, when Holly was just fifteen years old.

Since then, Mom had never returned to this place. Not once.

Eventually, after Great-​Aunt Elizabeth and Great-​Uncle Dan moved away, Aunt Martha came and never left.

Evie looked at the room with new eyes.

In all the years of her life, the few times Holly had come up in conversation between Aunt Martha and her mother, or anyone else, no one ever referred to Holly in the past tense. Since she was never found, and a body never recovered, Holly seemed to exist in a nebulous place between life and death.

Like Schrödinger’s cat, she thought. It was something that her science teacher had told her about once—​a thought experiment about a cat inside a box that is simultaneously alive and dead.

She set her duffel down on the bed and was about to head back downstairs when she heard something.

A soft, rhythmic sound.

It was coming from the closet.

Evie’s heart thrummed, but she moved toward the door. It was already ajar. She pulled it open with a jerk and stepped back. A pair of flashing eyes looked out at her from the darkness within.
Evie sighed with relief. It was just a cat.

“Hello, you. Come on out now. Oh, what have you got there?”

After a moment, the cat padded out of the closet. It was an orange tabby, its long fur matted in parts, a notch missing from one ear. When it saw Evie, it dropped something small and wet at her feet.

It was a dead mole, eyeless and torn almost in two. The cat, its mouth covered in blood, sat with its tail curled primly, and began to bathe itself with its neat pink tongue.

Evie drew back, repulsed. But the cat only purred, winding around her ankles. “Gross,” she said, looking around for something to pick up the bloody bundle. But all the cleaning supplies were still packed. “Don’t go anywhere,” she told the cat.

Downstairs, Mom had finished wiping down the table and countertops and had started to separate the boxes into piles for each room. “These are yours,” she told Evie, pointing to a small mountain. “You can start taking them up.”

Evie opened her mouth to say that there was a stray cat living in her room but decided against it. Her mother had never let them have pets in New York, and Evie wasn’t about to let her kick this one out on day one. “Okay,” Evie said, reaching for a roll of paper towels. “I just need to—”

“On second thought, don’t worry about the boxes right now. The sun’s going down and none of us have eaten dinner yet. Can you pick something up for us from that little place down the street? I think it’s only, like, half a mile away or so.”

Evie shrugged. “Sure,” she said. The best thing about growing up in New York was that parents got used to the idea of sending their kids out into the world without supervision. Evie had started riding the subway alone when she was only twelve. Walking down the street in a small town was nothing compared with downtown Manhattan during rush hour.

“Take your phone with you,” her mother said, pressing two twenty-​dollar bills into her hand. “And don’t get me anything spicy.”
 
The neon sign for Birdie’s Diner glowed like a beacon at the edge of town. Above the name, written in curling red letters, the outline of a yellow bird flicked back and forth—​first at rest, and then with its wings outstretched, ready to fly.

The diner reminded Evie of a boxcar, abandoned by some old freight train, left to sink its wheels into the earth and never move again. The golden stripes above and below its windows were freshly painted, but its silver roof was tarnished like an old spoon. Half a dozen cars were parked in front, and Evie was greeted by a wave of heat and friendly noise as she walked inside.

Above the red vinyl booths brimming with customers, a froth of multicolored paper lanterns hung, illuminating the diner with a warm, muted light. A long white counter dominated the place, with little silver-​and-​red stools lined up in front of it. Alongside the chatter, an oldies radio station played on unseen speakers, adding to the sense of bygone nostalgia. Behind the counter, a stout, pink-​cheeked woman in a sauce-​spattered apron bustled about, calling out orders to the cooks in the kitchen and the waitresses flitting from table to table in canary-​yellow uniforms. Her raven-​black hair was pulled into a bun at the nape of her neck with a pencil stuck in it. The little name tag pinned to her apron said BIRDIE.

“Order up!” Birdie called, slinging two bowls of steaming food onto a tray. &