R.L. Stine meets Urban Legend in the next twisty horror novel by New York Times bestselling author Vincent Ralph.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and the first two chapters from Vincent Ralph’s One House Left, which is out August 27th 2024.
“Ready or not. Whatever you do. The Hiding Boy is coming for you.”
Sixteen-year-old Nate Campbell grew up in the shadow of Murder Road – a street cursed by the vengeful spirit of the Hiding Boy.
Every few years, for nearly six decades, a different house on that street has been the scene of a tragedy.
Nate and his family move to a new town as they try to outrun the curse once and for all. But, when he is pulled into his new friends’ urban legend club, new ghost stories merge with old until there is nowhere left to run.
1
Every town has ghost stories.
Usually, they are urban legends whispered around a campfire or tales to make kids behave. But my town was different.
We only had one story, and few people laughed when they told it. It sat in the corners of conversations, a shadow we fought hard to ignore. It hung over Belleview and everyone who lived there, and when we left, we took it with us.
When letters arrive, they go to Cherry Tree Lane, but when we told the story, we called it Murder Road.
The first murder—like most murders—took everyone by surprise.
It was a calm spring night in 1963 when the little girl walked into the street and screamed.
That noise made a tear so deep that it has never been repaired, its echo lingering even now.
Porch lights flashed on, painting a warm glow over the blood. Then people came running, pulling the girl into tardy embraces, like handing shields to dying soldiers.
“What happened?” they asked.
“Are you okay?”
“Whose blood is this?”
She only answered the last question.
“It’s Mommy’s.”
The pitch-black doorway sent shivers down everyone’s spines. And then, one by one, they walked through it, calling, praying, but knowing, deep down, that they were too late.
They found the woman in the bathtub, lying in a shallow red lake.
They found the man in the garage, swaying softly back and forth.
They never found the boy.
Until I knew the whole story, that’s what haunted me the most. It wasn’t what was left that terrified six-year-old me. It’s what was taken.
That was my bogeyman story, the tale my brother gleefully sent me to bed with. My nightmares were all about a boy stolen by a monster forty-six years before I was born.
He’d sit at the end of my bed—a nine-year-old with a sadist’s smile—and tell me that the boy wasn’t taken. He’d say that he ran to the house at the end of the road, escaping a father who had finally snapped and a mother broken beyond repair.
Legend has it that the boy found something—in a building no one had lived in for decades—and together they cursed the whole street.
Every household that had turned a blind eye to his family’s suffering down the years was unknowingly and irreversibly cursed. All the cuts and bruises ignored on the sidewalk; all the radios turned up to drown out his father’s rage—they would pay for that.
At some point, “tragedy” became “pattern” and then, most horribly, “tradition.”
Every few years, on the same spring night, another house on that cursed street was targeted … and no one came out alive.
When people started moving, and the killings continued regardless, the story morphed from one of heartless neighbors getting their comeuppance to one of innocents paying for the sins of strangers.
But a child’s rage is rarely well planned. It is messy, and the Hiding Boy’s was messier than most. He saw those houses, with their windows like portals into impossible worlds, and he hated them.
My parents weren’t born when the bloodstained girl and her vengeful brother changed everything. But I can tell you about every single death that followed, because when you move so close to a place they call Murder Road, you do your research.
You watch every ancient news story and read every rumor—cringing as they switch between ignorance and denial.
They should have known that a curse is a curse, no matter how you spin it. But the deaths were far enough apart, and dissimilar enough (barring the obvious), to be written off as a twisted coincidence.
I never knew our dad’s parents. They were faces in boxed-up photographs, minor characters in moments rarely mentioned. His father died first and then, less than a year later, his mother followed, leaving us a house on the edge of a horror story.
It had enough bedrooms for us to have one each, plus an office for Mom and a backyard twice the size of ours. So, we moved. And we stayed there longer than we should have.
If you are selling a house, you must disclose it if someone was killed there. That doesn’t put off as many people as you might think. But it’s a lot harder to sell a place on a road full of crime scenes.
Eventually, the buildings on the road next to ours looked as old as the people inside, and when those people died, their families had an inheritance they didn’t want.
Some rent them out to scare-chasers, others reluctantly moved in but always make sure they’re away on the same night every year, and some block their lawyer’s number.
When we first moved away, we drove past Murder Road and shivered. At the exact same moment, as we passed those houses for the very last time, Rowan, Hazel, our parents, and I all silently swallowed our fear.
No one spoke because that’s the thing about real scary stories—whatever you say only makes them worse.
Sometimes it came out in the gaps between our words, in the tiny tears in our daily scripts that we rushed past before it could burst right through.
Sometimes I saw it in a flash behind the eyes; a memory wrestled back into its cage.
And sometimes I saw it in the mirror. Because Murder Road scarred everyone. Even those it didn’t kill.
2
“We move too much,” Rowan says, and Mom sighs and replies, “We move as often as necessary.”
“What’s the formula for that?” my brother asks, and Dad glares at him.
“Don’t be a smart-ass. You know why we’re moving.”
A shudder transfers from Hazel’s shoulder to mine in the cramped backseat. My sister’s long blond hair hides the stare I imagine burning holes into the stained mats beneath our feet, and I lean even closer to the window.
I catch Dad’s eye in the rearview, but he looks away before I can fake a smile.
“This time will be different,” Mom mumbles, as though she’s talking to herself.
No one replies, because no one agrees. The only way to outrun your past is to keep running, and we tire easily.
Our new home looks a lot like our last one … and the one before that. When we arrive, it’s not quite big enough for the five of us, but we squeeze in and keep our complaints to a minimum.
The front garden is overgrown, the window frames are stained green, and the driveway is covered in clumps of moss. When he opens the door for the first time, Dad treads dirt into the hall and that’s us in a nutshell. We stain things because we are stained.
“It’s nice,” Hazel says, her eyes refusing to focus on the grimy carpets or the peeling plaster.
“Thank you,” Mom replies.
Something silent and subtle passes between them, the briefest moment when they look almost identical. Then Rowan barges past with a huge box. “You should know by now, little brother. Don’t come in without your arms full.”
I go back to the car, where Dad is staring up at our new home.
When he sees me, he sighs and says, “It’s a fixer-upper, right?”
“Something like that.”
We used to live in a beautiful house. It was an expectation—for the streets surrounding Murder Road—as though perfectly tended flower beds and freshly painted fences could hide the stench of our neighbors’ dirty secrets.
“Nate?”
Dad’s hopeful face slowly comes back into focus before I say, “Sorry. I just want it to be different this time.”
“It will be,” he says. “I promise.”
Parents do that a lot—make vows they can’t possibly keep.
It won’t be different. It will be exactly the same because, eventually, someone in the town we now call “home” will realize where we came from.
They will go looking for the place we’re running from, no matter how much we tell them not to. And they will end up dead.
From One House Left by Vincent Ralph. Copyright © 2024 by the author, and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
