Dark Shadows Within

The stairs in the old house on Larkin Street creak. Every one of them. Thirteen voices of old wood. And at night, when the Whitaker family is asleep, something climbs them — slowly, patiently, one step at a time — and stops outside eight-year-old Mike's bedroom door.

It is autumn 1987, and Gary and Grace Whitaker have just moved their three children into a rambling two-story farmhouse in Cedar Hollow, Ohio. It has a wraparound porch, a basement nobody wants to go into, and a narrow walk-up attic right beside Mike's room. It also has a history the realtor didn't mention.

First there are the sounds on the stairs. Then the cold hands in the dark, lifting Mike from his bed. Then the shadow on the wall — tall, faceless, crawling across the ceiling to watch him sleep. Soon his sister Becky sees it too. Their little brother Eric starts talking to a new friend. The bruises come next, and the voices that whisper in the children's own voices, urging them to break things. To hurt people. And the grown-ups who should help them — teachers, doctors, social workers — begin to suspect the worst of the only people trying to keep them safe.

Two years earlier, a lonely teenager named Peter Holloway found something hidden in that attic. He opened a door. He made a promise. And whatever he let in has been waiting ever since for someone new to sleep nearest the door.

Dark Shadows Within is a chilling story of a family under siege, of children no one believes, and of a debt that doesn't die with the one who made it.