When we moved in to our new house and Mom said it was actually an old house we got sort of excited - we thought it might hav ehidden treasures or secret passages or something. But she said it wasn't 'old' old - it was built in the 1950s, which was even before Grandma was born, but still new enough to be boring. She said she got it cheap because the people who lived there before just ran away without paying the money they owed to the bank. So it was nice and big. Me and my putrid brother each got our own rooms, and Mom even got to have an office of her own.

It was a great house but we had given up on "interesting". At least until the strange man came to the door.

He was strange as in we didn't know him, but he was also strange as in <i>strange</i>. He had long, curly, gray-white hair that flowed all around his head and a huge beard that looked like he'd never shaved at all, and he an on old, beat-up clothes like a hobo in an old movie - they might have been built in the 1950s too.

When I opened the door, just a crack, to talk to him, he frowned and stepped back. 