The grocery store that Jesse and his mom frequented opened at exactly 6:00 A.M. every day, yet she always insisted on arriving ten minutes early in order to beat the Saturday morning rush. If there was one thing Carmen Grahame hated more than grocery shopping, it was grocery shopping in a crowded store, and years ago, she had worked out the optimal time to make the weekly trip (that fit her busy schedule). And she always brought Jesse along to help make the whole ordeal go even faster.

  He didn’t mind. It had become a little tradition for them to wake up early to head to the store, Jesse rushing down the fluorescent-lit aisles, grabbing whatever they needed from the shelves as his mom pushed the cart along. When he was younger, he would try to sneak treats into the cart under her nose; a box of candy here, a bag of chips there. Now that he was twelve, he would still try, he just got a lot better about hiding them.

  But still not good enough to get past his mom.

  “Jesse, where did this chocolate bar come from?” she asked, one eyebrow raised, pulling the offending bar in question out from the cart where it had been lodged between two boxes of Hamburger Helper.

  He shrugged. “Dunno. Must have grabbed it by accident.”

  “It’s only been a week since Halloween, how can you still want more candy?”

  “You can never have too much candy,” he said nonchalantly, hoping she didn’t notice the way he tensed at the mention of the holiday.

  He hadn’t told his mom any of what had happened on Halloween night; how he and Siobhan ended up trapped in a monster infested neighborhood, how they’d had to run around searching for the ingredients for a witch to make a potion for them to escape, and how they’d had several close calls while coming face-to-face with vampires, werewolves, and all sorts of other terrifying creatures. After all of that, he hadn’t been left with much time to indulge in candy.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her or anything, but there were plenty of reasons why he didn’t want to explain to his mom that monsters were real and were living in a secret neighborhood in their town, and at the top of that list was the fact that he was trying to put the whole experience behind him. Forget the monsters, forget the magic, forget everything. As far as he was concerned, he never had to step foot back in Gravewood ever again.

  “You’re so lucky I went into veterinary science instead of dentistry,” his mom said with a sigh. “Alright, fine, you can have this, but you have to go get one for me too.”

  “Deal!” He immediately took off, his mom calling after him not to run.

  He passed aisle after aisle until he found himself back in the joint candy/baking section. It was still early enough in the morning that the only other person he saw was an old woman, hunched over and slowly making her way through the aisle with a cane. In record time, he grabbed a second of the chocolate bar he had gotten earlier and was just about to race back to his mom when he noticed the old woman reaching for a bag of flour on the top shelf. It was just slightly out of her range, her fingers barely brushing the edge of the bag.

  “Here, let me,” Jesse said, reaching up past her to grab the flour.

  “My, what a nice young man,” the old lady said as he handed the bag over. He couldn’t tell exactly how old she was, only that she was probably older than his own grandma, with wrinkled pale skin and brittle-looking grey hair. If her back hadn’t been hunched, she would have been as tall as Jesse. “I didn’t know there were still gentlemen in this generation.”

  “Some of us are keeping the art alive.”

  “Thank you very much, dearie.”

  “It’s no problem.” He flashed her a grin.

  The woman returned the smile with one of her own, and Jesse had to bite the inside of his mouth to keep from screaming. Her lips had peeled back far further along her face than should have been possible, revealing row upon row of sharp, pointed incisors, like that of a shark.

  “Excuse me,” he said, trying his best not to look like he was running away, but that was exactly what he was doing as he walked as fast as possible back to where his mom was waiting, each footstep pounding against the linoleum tiles in tandem with his heartbeat.

  Forget all the monsters, forget all the magic, forget everything. How was he supposed to do that when they followed him home?

  A few more incidents like the one at the grocery store happened over the next couple of days. While out for a walk, he saw the ghost of a gymnast doing front flips in the yard of what must have been the house she once lived in. And on the way to school Monday morning, he heard strange noises coming from a sewage drain, a scaly arm darting out for a split moment to grab a piece of litter off the street before disappearing abruptly.

  And every time, he pretended like he didn’t see anything, quickly looking away and trying not to draw attention to himself.

  Where did all of these monsters come from? He’d lived in Oak Hollow his entire life and never once saw anything like this. That is, until Halloween. It was like attending the block party on Moonset Drive somehow opened up the flood gates, allowing the paranormal into his life.

  Fortunately, nothing happened at school, which is where he confided with Siobhan during lunch break.

  “I know,” she said, when he finished relaying (or, more accurately, venting) his experiences to her. “Just this morning, I swear I saw a dude mistake a werewolf for a dog.”

  He frowned. “How’d he do that?”

  She shrugged. “Must have thought he was one big dog. The werewolf looked pretty happy at being called a ‘good boy’, though.”

  “And the weird thing is, nobody else seems to see the monsters.”

  “We couldn’t see monsters either until we ate those candied apples,” she reminded him. “It probably has something to do with that.”

  “But I thought things were supposed to go back to normal after we drank that potion.”

  “Maybe it's having some side effects.”

  “Do you know if Noah and Alicia have seen any monsters around?”

  Siobhan scowled, poking at the food on her lunch tray with her fork. “No. Alicia’s back to hanging out with my sister, completely ignoring me. You’d think after a life-or-death experience like what we went through, she’d at least say ‘hi’ every once in a while.”

  Jesse cast a glance over at the popular kid’s table, on the opposite side of the cafeteria from where they were eating alone. Alicia sat with her back to them, tossing her long, black hair over her shoulder as she laughed at something another girl at the table had said. She looked natural there; the kind of pretty, popular girl who would never give him and Siobhan the time of day. He’d had a sneaking suspicion and Siobhan’s complaint only proved it; the cheerleader had been avoiding them ever since Halloween. Even though he shared a chemistry class with her, she hadn’t once talked to him since that night.

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  As for Noah, he occasionally acknowledged their presence when they passed by each other in the hall, so Jesse supposed that was a step up, but still. It was hard not to feel a little hurt.

  “I guess we’re on our own, then.”

  Just me and Siobhan, he thought. Just like it used to be.

  He didn’t know why the idea stung so much. After all, he was used to it being just the two of them. But a small part of him missed being in a larger group. They had worked well together on Halloween.

  “It’s not so bad, seeing all this supernatural stuff,” Siobhan said, taking a reluctant bite of her steamed broccoli. The cafeteria was out of her usual favorite French fries and had been for several days. “It’s kind of like we’re part of a secret world or something.”

  “You say that now, but just wait until one of those monsters gets hungry,” Jesse said seriously.

  “If it bothers you that much, why don’t we ask Bella for help?”

  His fork fell to his tray with a clatter. “You want to go back to Gravewood? Are you nuts?”

  “It’s not like there’s anyone else we can turn to!” she defended.

  “You’re right, but...” he struggled to put the words together. “We almost died there, like several times. We were lucky to get out alive like we did. Doesn’t that scare you?”

  She was quiet for a moment before admitting, “I mean, it’s not like I’m not scared. It’s just also... thrilling. I used to dream about magic and witchcraft, and now I found out it actually exists! You’ve got to admit, it’s pretty cool.”

  He remembered something Bella had told them on Halloween, how the monster world was wonderous but also full of danger, and he could sort of see where she was coming from. He didn’t have the soft spot for the occult like Siobhan did, but even he had to admit, learning vampires and werewolves and all sorts of other creatures were real was cool. Now that they weren’t immediately threatening to tear his face off, of course.

  But it was precisely that threat that held him back, from fully embracing their new reality. The memories of that night were still burned into his brain in a way that would always crop up when he least expected it, never letting him fully relax. Memories of vampire fangs and stitched scarecrow smiles. Of misty haunted house hallways and cold dunk tank water.

  The fact that Siobhan could seemingly disregard all of that was baffling to him.

  “Let’s talk about this tomorrow,” he decided. He could only handle so much of this nonsense in a single day.

  Siobhan shrugged. “Alright, but you’re going to have to make a decision sooner or later if we want to figure out what’s going on.”

  It turned out to be sooner rather than later.

  Jesse was still agonizing over what to do late into the night, math homework sitting in front of him on his desk without a single problem solved. The whole situation made it difficult for him to focus. Funny how that works; you have one little life or death experience that shifts your entire knowledge of reality and suddenly algebraic equations don’t seem so important anymore.

  He was just debating the pros and cons of putting his homework off for tomorrow morning before school, when a large crash from outside startled him so bad, the pencil he had been hovering over the paper left a long streak across the first three questions. Casting aside all thoughts of schoolwork, he rushed downstairs to see what the heck that was.

  He found his mom in her pajamas, hair tucked up under a silk bonnet, peering through the blinds in the kitchen.

  “What was that?” he asked her.

  “I think it was the garbage can. Something must have knocked it over; probably raccoons. I’ll go out and check.”

  “Wait!” He rushed to put himself between her and the back door. “Let me handle it.”

  She raised an eyebrow at his strange behavior, expecting an explanation.

  “I am the man of the house after all.” Wow that sounded lame, even to him. But his paranoia was starting to creep in and every part of him was screaming not to let her leave the house, that there was a monster out there. He didn’t actually know for certain, but he thought he was starting to develop some sort of sixth sense for monsters and he wasn’t about to let his mom just get attacked by a werewolf or whatever when he could have done something.

  She didn’t look impressed. “Uh-huh. And can you tell me, mister man, between the two of us, who has the most experience dealing with wild animals?”

  She got him there.

  “You’re in your pajamas,” he pointed out. The only thing covering her nightgown was a robe that it looked like she had hastily thrown on, and she wasn’t even wearing shoes. Jesse was still fully dressed because he had told himself that he would only get ready for bed after he had finished his homework, and he had told himself that about two hours ago.

  “Alright, tough guy, you can go. But I’ll be watching you the whole time. And I want you to take this.”

  She rummaged around in the hallway closet before handing him a tennis racket from her high school days. He was pretty sure it hadn’t left the closet since she put it in there when they first moved into this house.

  “For scaring off only,” she told him firmly before relinquishing her hold on the handle.

  “Got it.”

  He went out the back door normally used for taking the garbage out. He didn’t need a flashlight, since this side of the house had a few lights that cast a warm, albeit dim, glow in the surrounding area.

  A rumble from the nearby garbage can caught his attention, and he saw that the recycling bin next to it had been knocked over, its contents already rummaged through and left to spill out onto the pavement. Whatever was in there apparently hadn’t found anything of value in the recycling and moved on to the regular garbage.

  It could just be a raccoon looking for food, he thought to himself. Or…

  He approached the still upright can as quietly as he could, grip tightening around the handle of the tennis racket. The can shuddered again, with a lot more force than he thought a raccoon could muster.

  His attention was so focused on the garbage bin, that he didn’t notice the aluminum can that had rolled over until his foot was stepping down on it with a loud CRUNCH.

  All at once the shuddering stopped, and Jesse readied his tennis racket, trying his best to ignore the hair standing up on the back of his neck.

  There was a moment where it felt almost as if time had stopped, before the lid to the garbage can suddenly flew open and something lunged out at him.

  It was more luck than reflex that he managed to swing the rack just as the creature reached him, sending it skittering across the pavement with the sound of stone scratching on stone. Only when it was a good few feet away from him did he finally register what he was looking at.

  With its gnarled face and clawed hands, he recognized it instantly as a gargoyle, an honest-to-god gargoyle, just like the ones he’s seen on the sides of the particularly old buildings in town. It didn’t have any wings like he might have expected, instead scurrying across the pavement on all fours. In a blink, it had disappeared into the night.

  “Jesse!” The door flung open behind him and a second later his mom was enveloping him in a crushing hug. “That was hands down the biggest raccoon I’ve ever seen. Are you okay? Did it scratch you?”

  That thing was definitely NOT a raccoon, but he guessed just like all the other times before where he was the only one who noticed the monsters, she couldn’t see it.

  “I’m fine,” he managed to say as he struggled out of her grip. He held up the tennis racket. “Sorry, I used it for more than scaring off.”

  “That’s fine, it didn’t even look hurt. That thing must have been made out of rocks or something.”

  “Ahaha…” he tried to make his laugh sound as unforced as possible, but wasn’t sure how well he succeeded. If only you knew.

  “It was a bad idea to let you come out here by yourself,” she said.

  “I’m fine,” he repeated, willing it to be true. “You were right there the whole time.”

  “Still…”

  “Let’s just go back inside.”

  As soon as they were back in the house, he wished his mom a quick goodnight and rushed back up the stairs to his bedroom, adrenaline finally catching up to him as he processed what just happened.

  He was fine this time, but what about the next time a gargoyle or who knows what else decides to get its next meal from their garbage can? Or what about if some monster decided to make him its next meal? And what if it had been his mom who had gone out to investigate instead? She would have no way of knowing what she was even looking at, not really. If he was going to protect himself and his mom, he needed to know more about what was going on, and there was only one place that held the answers.

  He flopped onto his bed, the homework left on his desk entirely forgotten. Not caring how late it was, he sent a text to Siobhan.

  Jesse: fine. we’ll go to gravewood tomorrow after school. don’t forget your costume.