~ Chapter 3 ~

<> Peek-a-Boo, I See You <>

Junsu trailed after his father as they entered the general store. The shop was for the most part an air conditioned wooden box with as much merchandise that could be considered physically possible crammed into slim aisles. It had all the necessities one might possibly need as well as an abundant supply of local produce.

Junsu drifted through the aisles as he waited for his father to collect the necessary goods. He wandered up to the front of the store when it came time to pay.

“Are you new around here?” asked the cashier. The girl couldn't have been older than twenty.

“Yes we moved in just east of here.” said his father.

The girl froze mid way between putting the carrots in a bag. She shook her head quickly before regaining her composure. “You aren't by any chance living in that old farmhouse are you?”

Junsu's father looked slightly taken aback. “Yes we are-”

“But we aren't staying.” Junsu muttered under his breath.

His father sighed. “Sorry, my wife and I are just here to fix it up to sell again.”

The cashier nodded in understanding. “Well in that case, I wish you all the best of luck.” and she handed them their bags.

Junsu's father went ahead and took the heaviest bags, leaving the rest for his son to carry. “You're going to need all the luck you can get.” She muttered. “Stay safe, kid.” She whispered to Junsu once his father was out of earshot. He did a double take but when he looked back, she had already returned to her work of sorting out change.

“Junsu , are you coming?” His father's impatient voice wafted from the direction of the car. “I don't have all day and if we want to finish all of this before next winter, we can't afford to slack off too much.” Junsu sighed, feeling his throat tighten with frustration and quickened his pace.

“I'm coming!”

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Once they had packed all of the groceries into the car, they walked around the town, looking for a spot to have lunch. The town was modest in its own respect; all of the obviously aged buildings had been maintained diligently and the town seemed to hold a slight amount of pride in preserving their history in farming.

They settled for a small cafe just off the main street, enjoying fresh garden salads and sandwiches, courtesy of all the hardworking local farmers. After their lunch, they drove home with their groceries and his father wasted no time in getting right back to work on the deck.

As soon as they got home, his father and mother were back at work and Junsu was back to being invisible.

He wandered about upstairs, pacing up and down the hallway, occasionally glancing at whichever room he happened to pass by before looking back down at his feet. He observed the depth of each knot and swirl in the floorboards, admiring the dull smoothness that years of use had reduced them to.

After what seemed like at least one hundred to and fro's up and down the hallway, he came to stop in front of the room with the sprawling bookshelves. His eyes glossed over the titles in idle search for a book worth reading. His finger skimmed along the dusty spines as he looked and stopped when his finger caught on an empty space. His hand falling through the gap where a book should have been. Had been.

With one eyes, he peeked through the empty space, not entirely sure of his actions, but he felt that he should check anyways. As should have been expected, he found nothing, not even the common dust blanket.

“Not even a key or secret note.” He huffed with disappointment. He picked out a book from the shelf and blew of a cloud powdery dust from the navy blue cover. After confirming it was the right one, he slogged down the stairs, beginning to feel lazy in the afternoon heat.

He left out the kitchen door but rounded back around to the front of the house to check on his parents' progress.

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“How's the porch coming along?” He asked, shifting from side to side in order to see over his father's back.

“It's coming along well,” his mother said and she stopped her work to take a sip from a water bottle lying near by.

Junsu nodded in a half attempt at encouragement. “That's good to hear.”

“Junsu, I need you to run to the barn for me and grab those spare nails we got earlier. I left them in plain sight, so they shouldn't be hard to find.” Junsu translated the encoded message in his head: Make that snappy.

Junsu suppressed a sigh and set down his book in the grass and trudged off.

The barn wasn't a great distance away, it was settled in the middle of the tree-dense thicket that used to have be a thicker-than-normal wind barrier but had become so overgrown that it now practically consumed the left half of the property and the side of the house. It would come in handy, his mother had said to him awhile ago, that the trees would give both house and barn good cool shade in the summer and out of the wind in the winter.

He continued around to the back of the house where the path that led to the barn was located. The path was really more of a lane way, carpeted in emerald grass—most likely grown due to the lack of use. The lane was completely straight, so even though he was still a small distance away, the barn was in clear view.

The paint on the large doors were peeling off in some places, revealing the multicoloured brown of the wood skeleton beneath that gaped like open wounds. It appeared that the house really needed them more than they needed it, and it was true in some ways. He had no idea what thoughts had spun through his parents' heads when they chose to restore this house, over of all the others around the country they could have worked on instead.

It's always about money, he concluded to himself.

The doors were already open a crack, giving Junsu a preview of the inside. He peered in to see small splashes of light filtering in from the ceiling. From what he could tell, the inside was a cozy warm brown, blanketed with gold clots of hay. Junsu squinted at a fraction of what looked like a staircase that led up to a smaller loft above.

His gaze drifted up to the solid leafy canopy overhead. The thick branches above tangled together to create a make-shift bridge that extended from the roof of the house behind him to the roof of the barn before him. With the right amount of accuracy, Junsu figured the bridge could possibly be used by a medium sized child. Junsu craned his neck to see where on the roof the bridge connected to. It was near the top of the roof just above a moderately sized window. He caught himself grinning in anticipation. How convenient.

A dash of movement pulled his eye back to the barn door. He raced the last few steps and with one hand poised to either slam the door shut or yank it open, he cautiously peeked an eye through the open gap made by the door.

There, seated on the railing of the loft, was a boy with sandy hair that cascaded down his neck and pooled at his shoulders. He had his back to Junsu and appeared to be peering out the window that was carved out just above the loft,. His legs were crossed and his hands were in his lap. He looked at ease, and appeared to not have noticed Junsu standing there.

Without thinking he called out to Yoochun. “There you are! I've been looking for you!” He had meant to speak in a normal indoor tone, but his voice echoed through the hollow building and the sound tore through the silence as if he had shouted.

The boy whipped around faster than Junsu could blink. The distance between them was too much for Junsu to get a proper look at the boy's face, but at a single glance, he could tell that the face was not Yoochun's, but of someone else's he had never seen before.

Junsu shrieked and jumped back in surprise, while the other, also greatly startled, froze into a perfect statue.

Junsu stood, mouth gaping as he waited for the other boy to speak or make the first move.

It was as if a deathly silence had fallen over the barn, as the two neither boy dared not move. In a heartbeat, as if suddenly released from an invisible imprisonment, the other boy unfroze and slid off the railing in one fluid movement and leaped out the window.

Junsu yelped and charged after the boy, tearing up the stairs and ing his head out the window, wildly searching for a body of some kind, or any indication there had been an impact, but instead, he found nothing.

His heart raced and the blood roared in his ears and he slid down the wall beside the window until he was sitting on the floor of the loft. What had he just seen? That boy was there one minute, then he disappeared... out the window. There's no way he could have survived a fall like that, he thought wildly. But what if he didn't fall?- No, he cut off his train of thought. There's no way- he must have fallen. He was so scared he wanted to cry but the tears just wouldn't come.

Instead he dug the heels of his hands into his eyes and just stayed like that until bright lights flashed beneath his eyelids. A bubbling sound rolled off the walls and he sent his bleary eyes in search of a source but was unsuccessful. He curled up into a tight ball when he realized the sound he was hearing was laughter.

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“What took you so long? They were just in plain sight.” His father exclaimed with exasperation as he accepted the nails from his son.

You're welcome.

“I just got distracted,” Junsu said, his eyes downcast, suddenly haven taken great interest in the small pebbles that littered the ground.

“Su, can you look at me for a moment?” His mother said, making her way closer to him. When he didn't comply, she cupped his chin in her hands and forced him to look up at her. She drew back in surprise.

“Your eyes are all red- have you been crying? And your face is so pale...What happened?”

Junsu batted her hand away, refusing to meet her worried face. It's not like you would believe me, anyways. He snarled in his head. So why even bother trying?

“Nothing.” He snapped and made to walk away, but his mother refused to let him off that easily. Junsu rarely cried, but when he did, something was always very wrong.

“Are you sure, Junsu? What took all that time? Did you fall and hurt yourself?” Hurt coloured her words, she was obviously upset that her son wouldn't tell her what was the matter.

His annoyance fizzled out at her genuine concern.

I wasn't the one that fell.

“I told you nothing was wrong,” he whispered. “I just got some dust in my eyes—from all the hay in there. I got distracted and decided to explore around a little and I ended up stirring up a lot of dust, that's all.”

He left out the fact he saw a stranger boy in the barn and accidentally startled him, then watched as he threw himself out the window, quite possibly to his death. To top it all off, a sourceless mocking laughter had simply driven him over the edge.

“Are you sure, Su?” His mother was still not entirely buying into his lies.

“Yes.” Junsu decided to end the conversation as quickly as he could, before he melted into a puddle of tears in his mother's arms. With that, he picked up his book and left without another word.

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He had set out with no destination in mind, but somehow ended up at the apple tree again.

On the walk there, he tried to drown himself in the contents of the book, pushing the memory of the boy in the barn as far away from his conscious thoughts as could. He wanted to just forget about it. With his eyes preoccupied with the book his nose buried in, he felt, rather than saw, the ground slant upwards.

“Hello, again.” The bright voice startled Junsu just as he was about to take a seat on the swing. He had been so involved in his book that he hadn't noticed Yoochun sitting there at all. But he was indeed there, with the same smirk he had been wearing the other day when he had first met. He flushed with embarrassment.

“Y-Yoochun! You're here!” He squeaked.

“Well, considering I'm sitting here in this swing right in front of you, I do suppose I'm here.” His smirk grew.

Junsu stuck out his tongue. “You don't have to be so mean about it, it was an accident.”

Yoochun rolled his eyes. “Poor princess, so hard done by.”

Junsu let out an inflated sigh and fluttered his eye lashes at Yoochun, trying to look as girly as possible.

Yoochun made a gagging sound and tossed a browning apple core at him, missing the target widely.

Junsu sat down in between the moss upholstered roots. “Nice to see you missed me, Yoochun, I missed you too.” He sent him a halfhearted glare. “I looked for you yesterday, but you didn't show. Where were you?”

Yoochun scoffed. “Well it's not like I live in this tree. I have to go home and eat lunch too, you know. I also had some other things to do as well.” He paused. “Sorry.”

Junsu didn't reply and instead leafed through the pages of his book. But absorbed none of the words. He didn't want to come across as desperate for company, but it was no secret how much he valued his time away from his parents.

“So what do you do in your free time?” He asked, hoping to kick-start a conversation.

Yoochun shrugged. “Just hang around, I guess. I help around the house quite a bit, but I mostly just keep to myself. I like to read a lot too.” He turned to Junsu who was shredding a blade of grass.

“You?”

“I'm not really wanted at home so I'm on my own a lot.”

“Don't you have friends you can be with?”

“I can't really keep any.” At Yoochun's questioning look, he continued. “We move around a lot, so it gets hard to keep in touch. My parents take old homes that no one wants to buy and fix them up so they look like new. Then they sell them again. They must be good at what they do because we've been all over the place.”

“That sounds like a lot of fun...” Yoochun trailed off with an expression of longing written on his face. “I wish I could travel around like that. It gets so boring around here.”

Junsu shrugged. “I guess. After awhile you just get sick of it—or at least I do.” He smiled ruefully. “I wonder where we're going to end up next.”

“How long are you going to stay here?”

Junsu shook his head. “I have no idea. My parents call all the shots and they don't tell me anything until the last minute. It could be a year or it could be a month.” He shot a look at the house. “But looking at this place, we're probably going to be here awhile.”

“This house has a lot of history, you know.” Yoochun said quietly.

“And dust.” Junsu added.

“Even so, that house may be old, but it certainly has endured its fair share of wear and tear—loads of people have come and gone in this house, they say that each person left a little bit of themselves behind. There was even a fire once. But that was ages ago. They fixed it up so it looks like nothing ever happened.”

“You would know this...how?” Junsu asked, genuinely curious.

“It's such a small town, everyone pretty much knows everyone so rumour gets around fast here. Like I said, everything here is ancient, so every building has its own history.”

“I guess that would make sense.” Junsu said slowly. “Do you live around here? According to my mom, the couple we bought the house from said that there weren't any kids around here.”

“They probably wouldn't have seen me around much, but I do live in the area.” He pointed to the right. “There's the empty field there, and then-” He pointed to another wall of trees that marked the end of that field. “-I live beyond that.”

“I thought they had a kid too though. Didn't you ever talk to him?”

Yoochun stiffened, and Junsu felt a twinge of guilt for prying, but he was curious, there was something Yoochun wasn't telling him; he just knew it.

“Yeah, there was a kid there, but I never got to know him well. There was a long time before they moved in that the house had gone unoccupied, so the property became a public playground. People said it was haunted, but that was because it was old and there was no real evidence that it was. I used to come here a lot to read and enjoy the peace and quiet and help myself to the apples.”

He gestured up to the tree.

“So when they moved in, I cleared out—obviously I couldn't risk being caught trespassing and stealing all of their apples, so I mostly stayed away.” He seemed to have conveniently decided to leave out the reason why Junsu living here was any different than the other couple, but Junsu didn't mind, in fact he was grateful for the company of another kid around his age.

“Well don't worry about coming here now.” Junsu smiled, trying to lift the somber mood of the conversation. “We don't bite and considering who was here first, I think you probably have more right to be here than me.”

Yoochun laughed and Junsu decided he liked the sound. It wasn't a bubbly or obnoxious sound, but deep and slightly rough, though not unpleasant.

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That night, Junsu's mind roiled with another nightmare; very much like the other he had experienced the night before. Every single detail was scorched into his eyes with pristine clarity.

He found himself surrounded by fire, but this time he was given no chance to run. He was already on the loft with the roaring flames drowning out his desperate pleas for help. When the structure finally buckled, he was thrown into the darkness with the scalding fire lapping at his skin.

He jerked awake to darkness and for an agonizing moment, he thought he was still trapped in his nightmare before the surroundings of his bedroom swam into focus and assured him otherwise.

He didn't try to go back to sleep after that, too terrified of the mere possibility of having another dream like that. Instead, he lay awake and listened to the chirps of the crickets and the slight rustling of the trees.

He let himself be lulled and was finally beginning to calm down when he was overcome with a horrible sense of unease. Every muscle in his body tensed and he dared not even breathe. He kept his eyes squeezed shut and relied on his other senses to dictate the danger.

It felt like something in the atmosphere around him was shifting and he was positive something just moved beside his bed.

He flinched when he heard the straining creak in the floorboards in the doorway of his room. The first creak receded but was followed by another and then another. Footsteps.

They were too light to be his parents' but too heavy to be just the natural creaks around the house that came with age. Whatever was making the sound, seemed to be changing locations. He hears the footsteps fade down the hallway, followed by the whine of hinges on a door being opened. A spilt second later, there was a loud crash as the door was slammed shut with such violence that made Junsu flinch under his covers.

The hall fell silent once more.

So this is the new and improved version. I think I know what's been causing the formatting weirdnes... and I hope I'm right so I can avoid it next time and prevent the re-typing of a whole chapter. That's right, I re-typed the whole chapter, every. Single. Word.

Anyways, I highly recommend re-reading this chapter, and now since it's easier to look at, fewer excuses. But anyways, a little has changed in the chapter (nothing major, don't panic) so I suggest reading that. 

TiaraL: That's good to hear. I wanted to go for a story that is a little off the beaten track, pounded in by fanfiction writers. ^^ Hope you keep reading!

-the-badguy-or-hero-: You will see~ it will all be revealed in time. *grins evilly*

jlambxd: the concept of ghosts are freaky... I creep myself out when I write at night. As to how he/she got in? Let's just say there's a lot you don't see when it's dark out. >:D/ sorry I couldn't resist. I'm getting around to answering that question. XD

iscreamout: the ghost... Chun seems pretty solid to me, don't you think? And the evil part? That's all a matter of perspective. Eating all of those innocent apples; do you think that poor apple wanted to get torn to pieces by Chun's razor sharp teeth?

haewon2012: good to hear that the pace of the story is good. I'm so confused though, I have all these events floating around and I'm torn as to which should come first. I'm getting there. I will work on typing out the pretty-much-complete chapter 4 which is sort of useless because it's still on paper. =(

*smacks head on keyboard*

yoosulover4ever: m'gettin there just hang on

babygirldaddy: I'm happy to hear that you love the story. ^^ Always makes me happy to hear that. If I can help it, I'll make sure you don't need to worry about the highlighting... *glares at ugly format glitches* I am honoured that you went to all of that trouble to read it.  

Update Question (Because this counts as a seperate update to me because I had to completely re-type it): 

Who or What do you think was in Junsu's house that night? 

In an unfamiliar environment, the mind can play some pretty cruel tricks. Or was what he experienced real?

There are no wrong answers, I just love to hear from you guys,  but I might point my nose in the direction of whoever's guess is the closest. :3

See you next update (which hopefully won't be too far away)

Rainy ☆