In the Dark of the Night by John Saul

the Newells? “Hi,” he finally said, “I’m Eric Brewster.”
    “Who cares?” the shorter boy replied.
    The uncertainty on Eric’s face dissolved into a frown. “Is something wrong?”
    The taller one shrugged. “Dunno yet.”
    Moxie, no longer squatting, was crouched at Marci’s feet, a low warning growl rumbling in his throat.
    “C’mon, Marce,” Eric said. “Let’s—”
    Before he could finish, the bigger of the two boys spoke. “Aren’t you going to pick up after your dog?” he demanded, his eyes narrowing as they fixed on Eric.
    Eric saw Marci looking up at him, and was sure she was about to burst into tears. “We’re going to pick it up,” he said. “I’ve just got to get a bag.”
    “Yeah, right,” the other one said. “If you were gonna pick it up, you’d’ve brought a bag.”
    “We just got here—” Eric began.
    “Who even wants you here at all?” the boy interrupted. “So pick up after you’re damn dog, okay?”
    A knot of anger forming in his belly, Eric took his handkerchief out of his back pocket and picked up Moxie’s droppings. As the two boys watched, he looked around, spotted a trash barrel, and dropped them in. Not wanting to put the handkerchief back in his pocket, he dropped that into the barrel, too, and turned back toward the two boys.
    They were already halfway down the block, laughing loudly. As Eric watched, one of them wheeled around and raised a hand, middle finger erect. “Asshole!” he yelled. “Who needs you? Why don’t you go back wherever you came from?”
    Eric’s jaw clenched but he said nothing. Still he knew he wouldn’t forget. The faces of those two boys—and their words—were burned into his memory. And if they wanted to start something—
    He cut the thought off, telling himself they weren’t going to start anything. Yet even as he tried to reassure himself, he knew he was wrong.
    They
had
started something, and if they pushed it, Eric knew what would happen. Kent would want to finish it, and in the end, he and Tad—neither of whom had ever been much for fighting—would back him up.
    And the two boys, whoever they were, would be sorry.
                      
    A HALF HOUR LATER the Brewsters drove around the last bend in the freshly graveled drive and found themselves staring at the dark stone facade of Pinecrest.
    Merrill gasped in spite of herself. “Good lord,” she breathed. “Are you sure this is it?” But even as she asked, she knew this was, indeed, the house they’d rented, though it looked much larger than it had in the e-mail attachment.
    “Of course this is it,” Eric said from the backseat. In fact, he’d seen it before, if only briefly, and only from down at the lake, last summer. “Pretty great house, huh?”
    “It looks like a witch’s house,” Marci declared, her voice quavering and her words echoing what Merrill had been thinking as she’d gazed at the house at the end of the drive. Her first impression when she saw it on Ellen Newell’s computer was that the house looked haunted. As she gazed at it now, nothing she saw changed that impression; in fact, it looked even more like a haunted house.
    “Don’t be an idiot, Marci,” Eric said, glaring at his sister. “It’s cool. In fact, this might be the coolest house on the lake.”
    “Either way, it’s ours for the summer,” Dan Brewster said as he braked the car to a stop at the foot of the front steps. “Let’s unload the car, unpack everything, and then go exploring.”
    He popped the hatch and turned off the engine. Eric was out of the car before the engine even died, but Merrill was still gazing through the window.
    “This is way too much house for the rent,” she said, still making no move to get out of the car. “Something’s wrong.”
    “Nothing’s wrong,” Dan assured her. “We got a good deal is all.”
    Merrill wasn’t convinced of that, and as Dan and Marci got out of the car, she sat where she was, staring at the big