Rain pattered like rattling drums against the roof of a small car and a boy let his forehead stick to the glass of the backseat window. His eyes trailed along the bleak and foggy landscape of Ireland. Occasional trees dashed by the window, nothing more than black silhouettes that formed a wall along the abandoned country road, and rain stuck to the window like ocean spray, despite the consistent thwack-thwack of the windshield wipers attempting to disperse it. What on earth was he going to do with himself? The road turned to mud in the deluge, filling the entire stretch of it with potholes. Every time the car went down into one, the boy rocked back, and his forehead returned to the window with a weighty thud.

The rain here was wet. Much wetter than in Colorado. In Colorado, the rain came down in screams and shouts, but only for a moment. Here, the rain went on, and on, and on. Brenden wondered what it was like to be Ireland’s kind of drenched. He rolled down the window, letting rain seep all over the sticky leather seats of the car. Pitter pat, pitter pat went the rain. He stuck his hand out into the drizzle, soaking his sleeve, and something smacked him on the arm. He spun to find his sister nervously running her hand down her braids, goose bumps crawling their way up her arms. She shouted, “Roll the window back up! You’re getting me soaked!”

Brenden scowled, a displeased sneer pulling at the corners of his mouth, but he obeyed. The window squeaked as it returned to its closed position, and he resorted to staring at his shoe where an interesting mark had been scuffed into the toe. The shape was almost like a duck, but not quite a duck.

Clicking rattled throughout the cab as his sister’s fingers flew across the buttons of her phone, hammering out a message to someone important as she shifted uncomfortably in her seat, the skin of her thigh ripping loudly from the leather. Brenden wished desperately that someone would turn on the radio. He yawned and rolled his head back to rest on the window. “Lettie?” he asked. “Do you think living here will be nice?”

“One sec…” she replied, her fingertips dancing across the buttons. She snapped her phone closed and looked back to her brother. “Sorry. Maggie just told me that Justin broke up with Lindsay over the phone. What a jerk.”

Brenden sighed in disinterest. Quite frankly, he didn’t care.

Lettie huffed, forced optimism in her eyes. “I do think that it’ll be good living with Mr. O’Brien. He sounds like a nice man.”

“How are we related to him, again?”

“Oh, I don’t remember… he’s like, mother’s brother’s brother-in-law, I think.” Buzz buzz. Lettie flipped her phone open again and replied with unmatched speed.

Brenden sighed as if held down by a weight. “Which makes us… not related…”

“Lighten up, Brenden. If you’re going to just be nasty the whole time, we can pack you up and leave you on the side of the road. We’re going to be here for the rest of our childhoods, so you might as well just get used to it. Mom and Dad are gone, and they’re not coming back. We just… we just have to be grownups and take it.”

Brenden thumped his forehead against the window again, looking out at the ruins of abandoned houses and barns. The car lurched into another pothole. Ahead, a tunnel approached, and his throat tightened. Already, the sky was a suffocating gray as it pressed down like a sheet upon the green hills around them and everything else upon it. And the tunnel was dark. Darker than dark. It wasn’t the sort of day to try and think happy thoughts. The fog left no room for them.

He and his sister had just endured two hours in the car from Dublin to Ballymoe, and almost seven hours in a plane before that. Now, they were travelling in a car southwest to a house that they had never visited. It was a place that their family friend, Mr. Adler, said sat in a secluded part of Ireland. The more Brenden looked at the landscape, the more he just wanted to go home. He wiped his eyes, swiping away tears that didn’t look like grownup behavior at all, and wondered if his sister was as disappointed and heartbroken as he was. She said they should grow up, but he didn’t want to grow up. He didn’t want his parents to be gone, and, most of all, he didn’t want to go live with “Mr. O’Brien.”

Brenden’s legs creaked like an old boat on the sea from stiffness. The children were told that O’Brien was a wealthy Irishman who didn’t have any children and didn’t plan on it but had plenty of room in his house. His mansion – supposedly and according to Mr. Adler, who had a tendency to overexaggerate – was so huge with so many rooms that you could get lost and never find your way out. No one lived near him for miles, which was fine, but that also meant that there were no other children to play with for the rest of the summer.

The car entered the tunnel and Brenden shuddered. He didn’t like the dark. He never had, and never would. It was too unpredictable, and shapes played at the corners of his mind. His mother had told him he had a vivid imagination, that there was nothing there that could hurt him, but something in his gut told him otherwise. A child’s fear, perhaps, or maybe a legitimate one. Only the blue light of his sister’s phone, which wasn’t at all bright, and the dim old headlights of Mr. Adler’s rental car radiated in the black.

His sister must have sensed his fear and nudged him on the shoulder. “It’s okay, Brenden. Don’t you see the light at the end of the tunnel?”

“A kid in my class told me that if you see a light at the end of the tunnel, you’re supposed to run because it’s a train coming to splatter your brains all over the road.”

Lettie crossed her arms and they emerged from the blackness. The gray, comparatively, wasn’t so bad after all. “Nick said that to you, didn’t he?”

Brenden nodded. Nick had been bullying him for the last year, relentlessly. Brenden knew he was a jumpy kid, he had been since he was little, and Nick had it out for him, for whatever reason. Nick’s favorite thing to do was make loud noises unexpectedly, sending Brenden out of his skin during quiet moments in class. Scary stories, too, were also on the top of his list.

“I told you to not listen to him! That brat gets more detentions in a day than anyone normal can get in a year. He’s a jerk and I don’t want you to talk to him ever again, all right?”

“I don’t try to talk to him! He just… comes up and talks to me, is all. Besides, if we’re living here, I’ll never see him again.” Him, or any of my other actual friends, Brenden thought to himself. His breath fogged the glass, and he drew a frowny face in it. When its eye started to drip, he smudged it out. “I don’t like him either, you know.”

For a moment, the car was silent until Lettie impatiently smacked the side of her phone. “Rats… no service. Mr. Adler, is there a phone tower near here? I know we switched service plans to something local, but I can’t even get a bar of signal, now.”

Mr. Adler was a broad, fat man with a thick mustache. Brenden had nicknamed him Mr. Cheese because every time he went out into the sun, he sweat like a slice of Swiss left outside for too long. A straw hat that didn’t suit him at all covered his bald head and his plain, old suit frayed around the edges. “I don’t believe so, my dear. From what I’ve heard from Stanley, this whole area is a cellphone desert. You’ll have to use his land line. I’m sure he’ll sort all that out.”

“But you can’t use a land line to text!”

“Sacrifice, is a virtue, child.”

Lettie muttered, “I don’t think that’s the right saying, but whatever.”

The rain came down harder now than ever before and hailstones started to beat rhythmically against the roof of the car. Fortunately, the hail was not loud enough to startle Brenden. It sounded better than listening to Mr. Adler and Lettie talk about his “new home.” He had stayed out of the conversations that they had shared with each other, and he figured that Stanley was Mr. O’Brien’s name. Stanley O’Brien. What a boring name.

More abandoned, rotted houses darted by as they flew down the road but soon the car shot into a thick group of trees. The forest glowed an eerie green and the vegetation packed so thickly together that Brenden could hardly see beyond the first few rows. The leaves blocked the hail, but the rain still tapped down on the tin of the car. When Brenden rolled down the window again, his sister didn’t yell at him this time, and he swore he heard an unfamiliar bird call in the distance. Everything here looked so alien. He had come from urban housing; a people-crowded place where trees didn’t grow anywhere except in planters and parks.

The forest seemed to go on forever and Brenden started to doze. The woodland finally broke and they emerged onto an enormous property in a clearing. A gray gravel driveway led through a courtyard, through a garden with carved topiaries, and past a bubbling fountain. A few fish swam in it, and, when Mr. Adler parked the car, Brenden and Lettie stumbled up the stairs to the front door.

It was big, foreboding, and guarded by a huge gargoyle knocker. Brenden and Lettie stood for a while, staring at the intimidating iron face that glared at them. The boom and crackle of sudden thunder and lightning resounded behind them and Brenden jumped so far out of his skin he thought it was the end. He scrambled inside the house without his sister, startled by the loud noise. When he regained himself, he found he stood in a grand hall with marbled floors and a sweeping staircase. Busts adorned every wall of the room, gawking at the two with cold, stone eyes. Footsteps echoed from somewhere in the house, and the sound grew as someone walked across the balcony above them with confident steps.

A man with hair much redder than Lettie’s flew down the stairs with assured, wide steps, tying a magenta bowtie as he went. The bright colors of his mismatched vest almost made Brenden’s eyes hurt. Half of the garment glittered blue and gold and the other pink and orange, something that no one, Brenden thought, should ever be allowed to wear in public. Mr. Adler had been right when he had said Mr. O’Brien was young. The youthfulness in his face betrayed him, and Brenden wondered how he was ever supposed to replace his parents.

When he saw the two rain-soaked children standing in the doorway, Mr. O’Brien’s face shifted into a look of frustration, his thick, Irish accent ringing through the hall. “Janey Mack, Miss Mirandy! Who in the name of the East Wind let these ragamuffins into my house?”

Miss Mirandy shuffled from somewhere else in the house, emerging onto the floor in a maid’s uniform, with a long sweeping skirt and an apron smudged with flour. She glanced around the foyer in confusion before seeing the children. “Sir,” she began with an unplaceable accent, “I suspect those are the children you’ve offered to take care of.”

“I—” Mr. O’Brien, who had been nudging the two children out the front door, stopped and crossed his arms. “Oh. I see.”

Mr. O’Brien began inspecting every part of the children, lifting their arms and even looking closely at Lettie’s braids. After he finished looking the two over, he smiled, a quirky, bright smile that made an equally sized grin spill across Brenden’s face. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all.

“So,” he said, placing his hands on his hips, “You’re Collette.” He pointed to Brenden, who tried incredibly hard to keep a chuckle to himself. “And you’re Brenden, yes?” He smiled, knowing in his eyes, as he pointed to Lettie.

Lettie crossed her arms and Brenden laughed, “No! No. I’m Brenden and she’s Lettie.”

“Oh!” Mr. O’Brien gasped as though he had no clue. “I’m sorry I made the mistake! Is Lettie a nickname for you, my dear?”

“Yes, sir, it is.” Lettie still seemed shy of Mr. O’Brien. Brenden wondered if her confidence earlier in the car had been faked. “You don’t have to call me that if you don’t want to. Most adults don’t.”

A sly, magickal smile played at the corners of Mr. O’Brien’s mouth at the comment. “My dear, this is not a matter of adults and children. It’s a question of comfort. You’ll find that out very quickly. Hopefully, this house will be the least grownup place you’ve ever been.”

“I beg your pardon, sir,” Miss Mirandy crossed her arms and sighed. “I’m afraid I have to disagree. There are ru—”

“Aye, disagree, disagree…” Mr. O’Brien laughed, a laugh that lit up the whole room like a sparkler. “You’re quite good at that, aren’t you, Miss Mirandy? Don’t you have chores to do? Maybe a bed to make or a room to clean?”

Miss Mirandy huffed up the stairs and Mr. O’Brien turned back to the front door. “You’ll find that Miss M can be a little stubborn and a bit of a stickler, but she’s also one of the finest maids I’ve ever had the pleasure of employing. She will be your governess while you stay here with me and will be responsible for your schooling.”

“Speaking of that, Mr. O’Brien,” Lettie muttered. She was normally quite the chatterbox, and Brenden wondered what happened. “Will we get the chance to go back to normal school? What will our schedule be like? Where will we be staying?”

“Oh.” Mr. O’Brien stepped to a bookshelf, pulling two rolled up pieces of parchment off the shelves, handing one to each of the two children. “You may search the entire house for your rooms. The maps are on those pieces of paper. There are, however, two rooms that are off limits. The first is my study, which is just down the hall to the left. You are not to go in there unless I give you permission. Don’t like being disturbed while I’m working. The other room is the one on the far west wing, at the end of the hall. That room is personal to me, and I would prefer it remain undisturbed. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.” Lettie nudged Brenden in the ribs and joked, “You know, you tell Brenden he can’t go places and it just makes him want to explore even more.”

Mr. O’Brien winked at the two. “Well, you better be running along, now. Your rooms are waiting.”