Brad and Caroline Evans lived in a nice little cozy apartment on the East Side of Central Park in New York City which was a better neighborhood than the West Side with their two children 12 year old Laurie and 10 year old Ryan. Brad had been telling Caroline lately that he felt like he was being watched and followed whenever he went out. She thought he was just paranoid, until the night he went running late in Central Park. He never came back. He had been murdered, his neck snapped from behind.
After Brad's death Caroline was skeptical of the park but when the kids insisted that they go and play with their friends, she relented, going with them. Ryan ran to the baseball diamond and she and Laurie sat on a bench to watch. Suddenly an old woman and a handsome young man sat down with them and started talking to them. They seemed very nice. She unwittingly told them all about herself and the next day the old woman showed up at the antique shop where Caroline worked. She bought a large vase and asked Caroline to deliver it to her at her home which is the huge old spooky mansion called the Rockwell at the edge of the park not far from where Caroline lived with her children. When she arrived and entered the building she was greeted by the doorman, who seemed like the butler in the haunted mansion at Disney World. He spoke in monotones. Suddenly the handsome man was there introducing himself as Anthony Fleming and told her that the old woman was up to her old tricks, trying to find him a wife. He made her promise to have dinner with him and they decided to play along with the old woman's game.
That was the beginning of the whole nightmare. Caroline and Anthony married a few months later and she and her children moved into the Rockwell. Ryan didn't like it from the start recalling ghost and witch stories he had heard from his schoolmates. They had told him that Rodney, the doorman, was a troll who lived under the bridge in the park. He also didn't like Anthony Fleming or any of the other tenants in the Rockwell.
Soon after moving in, both of the children start hearing noises and voices in the night. Then people were coming into their rooms at night, particularly Laurie's room and hovering over her, poking her, whispering. The people in her room were the neighbors, even a creepy doctor who lived in the building, started appearing in her room, crooning over her, touching her. All three of them, Caroline, Laurie and Ryan, were being drugged through the food the neighbors so generously brought them. But they didn't realize it at the time. They shrugged it off as fatigue and nightmares.
Laurie began being strapped to a gurney and taken out of her room every night at midnight, she was inserted with needles and tubes in every part of her body. These people, the people that lived in the Rockwell, where hooked to the other ends of the tubes and needles, draining her youth out of her body and into theirs. Then, one day all the old ladies where missing. In their places where young ladies, who coincidently looked exactly like the older ladies. Caroline was also being heavily sedated so that all this could take place without her intervening. She eventually was taken to some creepy old hospital where she would be out of the way, and locked up there. But Ryan had sensed something wrong about the neighbors from the start. Locked in his room, he found a hidden door in his closet and found his way out of the house. He went and found his mother and freed her, then the two went back to the Rockwell and saved Laurie, whose was close to death.
While I was reading this book one day, in the middle of the afternoon, mind you, my son knocked on my bedroom door, and I just about jumped out of my skin. I also chewed my nails, which I haven't done in a long time. Very scary. An action packed page turner. It was published in 2002 by Ballantine Books.
Also see ----->Black Creek Crossing by the same author.
