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First published in the USA by Random House Children’s Books 2022 is edition published in Great Britain 2025 001
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PENGUIN BOOK S
11:58 P.M.
Midnight was rapidly approaching. ey needed to get to Steve and Robin before it was too late.
“Step on it, will ya? Time’s a-wastin’!” Dustin shouted.
“Don’t shout at me,” Nancy shot back. “I’m going the speed limit. We have children in the car!”
Erica poked her head into the front seat. “Are you talking about me?”
“Yes. I’m talking about all of you,” Nancy said, eyes in the rearview mirror. She scanned the faces of Lucas, Erica,
Max, and Dustin. ey all looked back at her—a lineup of impatient faces crammed into the backseat. “You guys are acting like this is a life-and-death situation.”
Like a chorus, they replied in unison: “It is.”
“It is,” Mike added, dgeting in the passenger seat next to her. He tapped the clock on the car’s dashboard. “We’ve only got two minutes! Here’s the turn!”
“I know where it is!” Nancy said, cutting the wheel hard.
With the squeal of rubber, the Wheeler family car came careening out of the darkness. It nearly clipped the curb veering into the parking lot of the Hawkins strip mall. During the day, this place was buzzing with shoppers, skaters, and hellraisers of all ages, but the car’s headlights told a di erent story right now.
At midnight, everything looked like it was covered by a blanket of inky shadows. Even the revolving sign for the Palace Arcade had gone dark. e streetlights ickered weakly until they suddenly died, succumbing to a massive power outage that was wreaking havoc across all of Hawkins.
It was a total blackout for miles. And it had happened in
a matter of seconds. e kids were so focused on speeding to the video store, they hadn’t noticed the shadowscape that awaited them.
Nancy turned in and stopped next to the only other car in the desolate parking lot: a purple BMW. Harrington’s.
Dustin had his face wedged against the backseat window, but he could still see the familiar ride through the condensation on the glass. “ ank Christ, they’re still here! Let’s go!”
e kids stumbled out of the car even before the engine could wheeze to a stop. One by one they lined up, knocking on the glass doors of their secret meeting place: the epicenter of culture and entertainment for miles around, a sanctuary for outcasts, and a place of salvation from a weekend doomed to boredom.
FAMILY VIDEO
Within moments, the silhouette of someone perfectly coi ed came to the door and unlocked it.
“What have I told you savages about banging on the windows?” Steve asked, suddenly illuminating his face with a ashlight.
ey all gave him the obligatory apology before dropping the courtesy and pushing their way past him into the video store.
“Why’s it all dark? Did the lights just go out?” Nancy asked, locking the car.
Steve held the door for her. “Literally just happened like ve minutes ago. Robin and I were about to bail.”
“What about the midnight movie?”
“ at’s the thing about VCRs, Nance. ey don’t turn on when there’s no power. Crazy, huh?”
“Someone got up on the wrong side of the hair spray today.”
“Someone has been restocking while someone else has been pretending to restock.”
He meant Robin, who was currently sitting on the frontdesk countertop, a ashlight in one hand and a package of red rope licorice in the other. She gave Nancy a wave as she entered the shadowy video store.
“Welcome to the video store . . . ,” Robin said in a spooky, deep voice, “AT THE END OF THE WORLD!” en she dropped the voice and perked up, all bubbly. “Candy?”
“Red licorice?” Nancy asked.
“I couldn’t pry the popcorn machine open,” Robin replied. “It doesn’t just open when the power goes out,” Steve said.
“It’s not a safe. And this isn’t a heist movie.”
Dustin pulled out a tiny ashlight on his key chain. “Speaking of movies, what’s the plan for tonight?”
“Ghostbusters?” Lucas asked, hopeful.
“No! Not again,” Max piped up. “I was gonna see if you guys had gotten Cat’s Eye yet?”
“A kitty-cat movie,” Erica said, dismissive. “I was hoping for something Rated R. You promised Rated R.”
“Sorry,” Lucas said to the group. “Mom and Dad are out of town. I had to bring her, and certain promises were made.”
Max laughed. “It’s not a kids’ movie about cats. It’s a horror anthology of di erent Stephen King stories. It’s supposed to be wild!”
“Well, that hardly matters now. Hello? We have no power,” Steve reminded them.
“We could still do the scary-story thing,” Mike suggested. “Might not be Stephen King level, and Drew Barrymore’s not involved. But we can still get good and scared. Besides, what
the hell else are we gonna do till the lights come back on?”
“We could clean up,” Robin suggested. A moment later, she added: “Kidding, guys. Sheesh. Tough room.”
“All right, let’s have it: anyone got a good scary story?” Steve asked.
Erica couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Now you want us to tell scary stories? I come to the video store to be entertained, not the other way around,” she said.
“What are you more afraid of, Erica? at we’re telling scary stories?” Steve asked, turning o his ashlight for e ect. “Or that we’re telling them . . . in the dark?”
Silence. ey all looked at one another for the next few moments, almost afraid to make a sound. ough no one could quite put it into words, there was something terrifying, on a deeply human level, about saying what you feared out loud when there was barely a beam of light to cut through. It was as if the darkness could somehow make those fears real.
“I’ve got one,” Nancy nally said from behind one of the shelves. “I’ve been researching Pennhurst lately, for a piece I’m doing for the paper, and the stu that happens there would make your skin crawl.”
at got Robin’s attention. “Pennhurst? e place up the road?”
“Oh, it’s not just some place up the road. It’s a hospital for the criminally insane. About ve or so minutes away from here. It’s been around for decades. e most violent inmates in Hawkins, all under one roof.”
“Okay, I changed my mind. is sounds good,” Erica said, taking some red rope licorice and sitting back against the shelves. She was ready to be entertained. “Terrify me.”
Everyone in the group got comfortable, as Nancy had the oor. She borrowed Dustin’s ashlight and illuminated her face from underneath for e ect.
“What I’m about to tell you is one hundred percent real. It’s a matter of county record. It’s been documented by serious journalists and investigated by state and local authorities, yet still remains unsolved. It happened one night, on a night just like this, back in 1969. A patient complained about hearing . . .”
A Little Voice
What do you think of when you hear the words Pennhurst Asylum?
A home for the criminally insane?
A dark prison for someone like Jimmy Ray Cutts?
A er Cutts killed seven innocent people, he told the police he had no memory of committing the crimes. He swore that someone else—something else—had been pulling his strings that night. Like everyone else nearby, Christina had heard
the stories and mostly ignored them. She didn’t believe in ghosts and demons, but she did believe in monsters—just not the kind you see in rubber masks, in the movies. e monsters she saw were simply broken human beings in need of serious mental care. ey could look as normal as your neighbors, your coworkers, even your boss.
Christina was surrounded by so-called maniacs six days a week—it was her job. She was a nurse-in-training. Sometimes, when she rode the bus to work, she’d hear kids scaring each other about the asylum up the road where she spent most of her time. ey’d whisper, “Monsters live in Pennhurst.”
Well, she knew people like Ricky Dobbs also lived there.
Ricky was just a nineteen-year-old kid. Boyishly handsome, with his winning smile and athletic frame, he looked like one of those quarterbacks who were always surrounded by reporters on TV. His laugh was contagious, and like a child, he found the simplest things funny, like someone dropping their clipboard, or the way certain words, like lickety-split, sounded when they were slowly pronounced out loud.
Lick-et-eeee-split, he’d say repeatedy, stretching the word
out more each time. Liiiiick-etttt-eeeeee-spliiiiiit. Fits of laughter followed.
Ricky wasn’t a monster. He kept his hands to himself and never tried to grab Christina’s hair. And he didn’t have to be as heavily medicated as some of the more extreme cases on his block. Which meant he could speak, unlike the zombies. at was what Christina called the tranquilized group—the ones who needed a sedative just to function day-to-day in the asylum.
Ricky was no zombie, and he didn’t seem crazy. He was just immature and shy.
And Christina would know. She’d been looking in on him for six months straight now, six nights a week, like clockwork, on the graveyard shi .
Christina was twenty-two years old. Pennhurst was her rst job a er college, and she was determined to do her best. Her responsibilities included patrolling the hallways at night. She had to look in on each patient on her list and make sure they were okay. She’d check each patient o , wait two hours, and do it again.
Rinse. Repeat.
Clean the nurse’s o ce. Restock meds. Take her nightly stroll.
Observe. Check. Report. Check.
Watch the clock. Dream of sleeping in on Sunday morning. Sneak a candy bar.
Walk. Check. No one hurt. Check. No danger. Check. is was Christina’s life—until she nished her probationary period and became a full- edged Pennhurst nurse. en she’d get a raise, a locker, and the coveted right to choose her own shi hours.
One morning, as the rst rays of sun sliced through the clouds, the senior sta started appearing in the hallways in a sea of white coats. It was time for them to take the reins from the night crew.
“All patients are healthy and accounted for,” Christina told the head hurse. en she packed up her things and headed for the exit.
But not before stopping to look in on Ricky Dobbs one more time.
She peeked through the bars of his door but saw only an empty bed. Her eyes searched the room, but there was no sign of Ricky. She was about to call for one of the senior
nurses, when she heard a whimpering voice.
“Okay, okay, I promise. I’ll do it—”
It was Ricky’s voice.
Christina unlocked his room and slowly opened the door.
“Shhh!” she heard Ricky say as he jumped up, startled. He was tall and muscular but acted like a little boy who’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t have been doing.
Christina saw that he had been in the corner, against the wall. A perfect spot for hiding from the sta ’s two-inch-bytwo-inch view of his room.
“You’re up early,” Christina said in a friendly manner.
“I don’t have a watch.” Ricky smiled. “I don’t really know what time it is.”
“Were you talking to someone just now?”
“What’s the problem here?” a white coat asked, storming in. It was a doctor, one of the stu y ones. Christina always forgot his name. Fortunately, he was wearing a name tag: spears.
“And why are you not in restraints?” Dr. Spears observed, shoving his way past Christina. He called for support and two beefy orderlies led in, instantly grabbing Ricky’s arms, forcing them to his sides. Ricky protested a bit as they moved
him back toward the bed, which was bolted to the wall.
“Ow, you’re hurting me!” Ricky cried.
“No, wait, there’s no problem at all, Dr. Spears,” Christina said. “I was just—”
“Why was this patient not restrained?” Dr. Spears interrupted accusingly. He motioned for Christina to follow him out into the hall. Crestfallen, she looked at Ricky, trying to ght back from the orderlies’ grip. is was all her fault. If only she’d kept going, he wouldn’t be straining underneath the weight of a pair of three-hundred-pound men. She’d merely wanted to make sure he was okay.
“Dobbs hasn’t been in restraints since I started here,” she protested. “He’s a trusted patient who never causes any trouble. Please—”
“So there were no special instructions given to you last night?”
“No, sir.”
“ en someone else is in trouble. Because I le explicit instructions for senior sta to let night crew know that starting now, all patients are to be restrained at night. No matter their threat.”