I hate the summer house. That's a weird thing to say, I know, but it's true. We would

stay there for at least a week every year, and sometimes we would even go up there for

holidays. One year we spent Christmas up at the cabin, and that was a miserable time indeed.

The cabin, my family summer home, sat on the edge of Lake Erie and was a modest two-bedroom

cabin with a loft up in the eaves. It had a little kitchen, a nice living room with a fireplace,

and two bedrooms downstairs, one for my two sisters and one for me. Mom and dad always

slept in the loft, so they never saw any of the weirdness that I saw

from my bed and the smaller of the two bedrooms. The floor of the cabin had these wide gaps

beneath the floorboards, and it let you see the underside of the cabin. That always promised that he would replace the floorboards, but he never did.

They were old wood, smooth, not prone to splinters, and I guess Dad thought it was worth the occasional spider or bug coming up to the floorboards.

His socks didn't get hung up on poking wood.

Bugs, spiders, other kinds of pests, they were the least of my concerns.

I didn't notice it right away, of course.

First time we stayed there, I was just amazed by the cabin.

It was so cool, you know, having a cabin all to ourselves,

and I explored every room and every inch before going outside. We swam in the lake. We took our

canoes out. I climbed trees, played pretend for hours, and after dinner, well, I fell into

deep sleep. Not even sure that I dreamed that first night, and I couldn't wait to do it

all again the next day. As that first week went on, however, I started to notice the strange

noises that wafted up from beneath the floorboards. It sounded like something moving

under there, a scuffling sound that made me think of small animals or bugs. I could sometimes catch glimpses of them between the gaps and the floorboards, but they were,

they were always too quick for me to see.

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