I only went because Danielle kept texting me about it for like three weeks straight, and honestly I just wanted her to stop.

The club met at this place called Ferman’s, which isn’t even a real coffee shop, more like a bookstore that sells bad coffee on the side. Six of us usually, sometimes five if Mark had a shift.

That month we were doing horror ghost novels, picked by this new guy Ren, who I’d maybe heard say four words total before that night.

He talked a lot that night though. Went on about how some of the stories in the book were pulled from legends that are true, real families, changed names, the usual thing people say to sound interesting.

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t even really listening at first. I was still annoyed about a work email I’d gotten right before leaving the house, some scheduling thing with my manager that had nothing to do with any of this.

But then he mentioned a house out past some town in upstate New York, said his own grandmother used to talk about it, some family that kept disappearing generation after generation, and something in how flat he said it made me actually put my phone down.

He said he drove out there once. Just to look.

I don’t remember exactly what I said back, something dumb probably, and the meeting just moved on to talking about the actual assigned chapters like nothing weird had happened.

Ren stopped showing up after that. Two meetings, then three, then Danielle mentioned nobody even had his number saved, which is a weird thing to realize about someone you sat across from for an hour every other Friday.

I looked the town up later that week, mostly out of boredom during a slow shift at work. Found some old local news stuff, missing persons, nothing recent, nothing that really confirmed anything.

I probably would’ve forgotten about the whole thing honestly, except my cousin was getting married nearby in September and I ended up with a free Saturday and a rental car nobody was using.

So I drove out. Which, writing it now, sounds like a much bigger decision than it felt like at the time. It was just a Saturday.

Took me almost two hours longer than the GPS said, because apparently that whole area just doesn’t match any map properly, half the roads aren’t even named.

Found the house anyway. Or a house. I still don’t actually know if it was the right one, that’s the part that bugs me most now.

It wasn’t dramatic. Old, gray, front yard overgrown, nothing special. I didn’t even get out of the car for the first ten minutes, just sat there eating a sandwich I’d bought at a gas station an hour back.

Eventually I walked up, mostly just to say I did. Windows were too dirty to see much of anything inside, just shapes, furniture maybe.

I left after maybe five minutes total. Didn’t take pictures, didn’t try the door, nothing you’d expect from one of these stories.

Drove straight to my cousin’s thing, actually made it just in time for the toast, which my aunt still gives me grief about because I looked, in her words, “like I’d seen a ghost.” Her joke, not mine.

I never did find Ren again. Danielle says he probably just moved, people do that, especially ones who show up out of nowhere to a random book club and only stay a month.

I still think about that house sometimes, not in a scary way exactly, more like an unfinished thought that never got closed properly. I never went back, never looked up the address again, never told anyone the full version until now.

Honestly the whole thing might just be a weird afternoon that got stuck in my head for no real reason. I’ve had those before. Probably will again.