The Black Cellar — Raymond Towers

Seventeen year old Jason Moore had enough problems to deal with. His parents had just moved from the city to the country, shortly before his high school graduation. Now, he’s discovering some very sinister, macabre secrets in the house his parents watch over. While looking for clues, he will follow a darkening path that will lead him to the most diabolical evil of all. Rating: HIGH controversy.Starting Over Really SucksJason Moore cast a longing glance at the wall clock. In his thoughts, he cursed it for being so slow. Every second felt like a minute, every minute like an hour, every hour like an eternity.Jason was in a prison for teenagers. He was sitting in a textured, bright orange plastic chair, with a wire basket soldered under the seat, and at waist level, a small wood-laminate surface that fit either a book or a sheet of line paper, but not both items at the same time. Benton High School was so much different than Jason’s old high school in San Diego, he lamented. Even the chairs sucked here.Jason hated Benton. He hated the way the other students treated him; the way the girls would glance at him and whisper to themselves, the way the boys shouldered their way past him in the hallways, or merely ignored him as if he wasn’t even there. Jason hated that he was an outcast, because of how late in the school year he’d transferred, because he didn’t dress or talk like any of the other kids.Jason hated most of all hearing students bragging about their prom dates or the upcoming graduation ceremony. He didn’t belong in Benton High; he didn’t want to belong in Benton High. He wanted to be back in San Diego, making his own plans to go to the prom with his buddies, and goofing around while rehearsing for the big day of graduation. That’s all his buddies kept talking about in their emails.If Jason could change the world and return things to how they used to be, he’d make it so that his mom and dad never lost their house to the bank. That way, they would have never left his hometown and moved up to… to this crappy place.Benton really blows, Jason thought. When that Melville guy said, ‘Thar she blows!’ the teen mused, he was probably talking about Benton. He grinned at his little joke.Somebody snickered to his left. Jason turned to see the girl in the next row watching him. She looked over to whisper to the girl beside her, loud enough for Jason to hear.“He is so stupid!”Jason was stupid, he thought. He should never have come to this little town, where nobody paid any attention to him, and where everybody was making fun of him behind his back.But at least there was the big house to look forward to, once he finished his classes for the day and headed back home. It had been built way back in the nineteen-forties, and it had once catered to the Hollywood elite back in the day. Now, Jason’s dad was in charge of taking care of the place. The house even had its own name; it was known as the Grant House. How many houses had their own name?And lastly, there was that persistent rumor that the Grant House was haunted… but that couldn’t be true, could it?