- Teenagers Amanda and Josh move to a run-down industrial town where a dark secret about the local chemical factory is concealed by the creepy neighbors.
- Thirteen-year-old Amanda has to leave her friends and home behind to live in a gloomy industrial town. Unknown to her a sinister accident years ago at the Dark Falls chemical factory poisoned all the workers and turned them into mutated entities, and she has to prove to her family that something is going on before it's too late.—GasmaskProductionsBooks
- Teenage girl Amanda Benson moves into the gloomy industrial town of Dark Falls with her parents, her younger brother (Josh Benson) and the family dog (Petey). As they drive through the town to their new house, several decaying industrial buildings are shown, including a factory, which has a plywood sign in front of it reading, "Dark Falls Chemicals: CLOSED! DANGER!" Mr. Benson tells Josh that the town had recently lost its chemical industry.
When they arrive at their house, Amanda and Josh are really disappointed; it's a huge house but it's old and gray and looks as decayed as the rest of Dark Falls. Petey starts barking at the window so Amanda looks up, only to see a face staring back at her. Mrs. Benson tells her that it was just the wind. Mrs. Benson goes inside and flips the light switch but finds that the power is completely out in the whole place. Josh sulks and sits in the family van while Mr. Benson tells him to stop making things difficult. When Petey runs upstairs, Amanda follows him and looks out the window of one of the upstairs rooms, but a man comes out of nowhere and scares her. She screams, but the man apologizes for startling her and turns on the fuse box, thus letting all the lights come on. Mrs. Benson rushes in worriedly but then tells Amanda that the man is just Compton Dawes, the real-estate agent who sold them the place. Mr. Dawes is unusually pale and dressed in out-of-style faded clothing, but he's well-mannered and nice and the family all like him immediately. Mrs. Benson invites him to join the family while she hangs up a crusty old wreath above the fireplace, but he gets nervous of the wreath and abruptly has the contracts signed, then he leaves. "I hate this place", is Josh's conclusion on the house. Mr. and Mrs. Benson look frustrated.
That night, Amanda sits on an old mattress on the floor writing a letter to her best friend, Jennifer. She writes that Josh is acting bratty so it's up to her to make the best of things. Mrs. Benson tells her to go to sleep and turns of the lights. Just as Amanda is about to go to sleep, she hears noises at the window, and when she looks out the window she is startled by a very pale-looking man clad in factory work clothing, watching her from the next-door house. He glares at her and closes the shutters as lightning strikes in the sky. Amanda is further frightened when she sees the shadow of a boy in her doorway but her parents and brother check the whole house and don't believe her at all. She's sent back to bed but can't get to sleep because of the strange noises coming from her bedroom closet, whispering voices repeating the word "danger" over and over again.
The next morning, the movers are bringing all the family's possessions into the house while Mrs. Benson directs them. It's pouring rain outside, a nasty thunderstorm, and Amanda tells her mother that it was hard to get to sleep. Suddenly a lady from next-door, Agnes Thurston, comes in after meeting Mr. Benson outside. She's brought some home-made muffin cookie things. She looks really pale, keeps bursting out laughing for no reason and is dressed in an outdated, faded old house dress. Mrs. Benson learns from her that her husband used to work at the Dark Falls Chemical Factory before it was closed and she gets nervous of the wreath hanging above the door. Mrs. Benson sends Amanda and Josh outside to walk Petey and explore the neighborhood, and Mrs. Thurston says that they'll both love Dark Falls.
As Amanda and Josh wander through the town, they notice that all the other houses in Dark Falls look decayed, in fact many of them have been boarded up. Josh asks why anyone would want to live in Dark Falls and Amanda tells him that the other townspeople probably got cheap houses just as their family did. As they walk by, they both notice a pale-looking man dressed in factory clothes - the same man Amanda saw in the next-door neighbors' window across from her own the previous night - and he quickly draws the blinds shut on his house, but his eyes continue to watch them from a slant between the blinds as they both walk away. Amanda also notices a Dark Falls Realty sign tipped over on someone's lawn, and the sign is very similar to the one outside their own house. They walk past a man, presumably Mrs. Thurston's husband, and notice that he's pale like the other Dark Falls residents and dressed in faded factory clothing to boot. They say hi to him but he just glares at Petey so they quietly leave him alone and head for the woods. After some wandering, they arrive at the rusty old bridge at the entrance to the town and Amanda hears a snapping noise. Josh tells her that "she's losing it" but then a gang of pale looking kids dressed in faded clothing and wielding baseball bats circle around them. Suddenly somebody whistles and Petey stops barking; it's an older boy, pale and dressed in faded clothes like all the other kids, but Amanda recognizes him as the shadow of the boy she saw in her bedroom doorway the previous night. He tells her that his name is Ray and that he used to live in the house when he first moved to town but that he hasn't been in there in years. When Amanda asks him where he currently lives, he doesn't reply. Their conversation is interrupted by one of the kids, a girl with a bowler hat, red hair and a shirt with a G-Crown symbol on it. She introduces herself as Karen Thurston, Agnes Thurston's daughter. One of the kids asks Josh if he plays baseball, but Ray says it's not a good time to play baseball. He offers to play ball with them tomorrow.
That night, Amanda is asleep and her closet door starts creaking open. A pale girl dressed in a decaying purple and black dress creeps into the room and stands above Amanda's bed. When Amanda wakes up she sees the girl and screams; the girl tells her to "get away, get out while you can! Get away..." The rest of the Benson family and Petey all rush to Amanda's room at the sound of her screaming, but the girl is gone. Amanda says the girl looked dead, but not like a ghost, and that her face was horrible (the girl has completely white eyes and rotten holes in her face during her presence). Josh says that the house smells bad and Mr. Benson goes to the closet, finding a very large hole in the wall. "The wind whistles right through here," he says, and offers to patch it the next day. Mrs. Benson stays with her until she falls asleep.
The next day, Mr. Benson bolts a piece of wood to the wall to cover the hole, and tries joking with Amanda, but she doesn't laugh. She tells him that something is wrong with the house and that the whole town is weird, that none of the townsfolk are normal people. Mr. Benson tells her that most of them are out of work since the town chemical factory closed and that some people aren't as fortunate as she is. She promises to consider that from now on. Mr. Benson tries to close the closet door but finds that it just drifts open on its own. He tells her it'll need shimmed out and as they both walk out of the room, Amanda leans against the door and is able to get it closed - after they're both away from the room, the door drifts open again, creaking loudly.
That afternoon Amanda and Josh are playing with the bubble wrap from their moving boxes in the backyard. Josh is complaining about the house and town as usual, so Amanda brings up the girl she saw in her closet. He tells her that the girl was a nightmare but she insists that the girl was real. She also tells him that it's really strange that supposedly Ray is just her imaginary friend but then they met him in the woods. Josh, getting freaked out by her talk of dead-looking people, is about to go inside but he drops his moving box. Money falls out of the box and rolls down into the cracks in the porch. Josh notices a large hole in the porch where some of the boards have been pushed forward, and he blames Petey. He sticks his hand inside and fishes out a quarter. Suddenly Petey starts barking at an unknown stranger on the other side of the fence and Amanda and Josh call out, "who's there?" to no avail. Petey backs away, visibly frightened and making whimpering noises, and while Amanda and Josh aren't looking a rotten hand covered in mold spots rises from the porch and slides the boards back to make the hole larger.
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