Free-writing from opening sentences

“Me and my brother Loftis came in by the old lady’s window.”

She always left her window half open, even on the coolest nights. We tried to keep quiet but Loftis went and fell when he was half in, half out, his big clunky shoes making a clatter enough to raise the dead. She slept through it, though, seemed dead to the world. I thought old people were supposed to sleep lighter. There was a thread of spit spooling out of her mouth and pooling on her white, starched, lace-trimmed pillowcase. Kind of made me sick, actually.

Anyways, me and Loftis tiptoed out of there as fast as we could in case of a delayed reaction. Best not to tempt fate. Not knowing the house, we had to move pretty slow, kind of feeling our ways around the furniture and the occasional surprise wall. We finally found the stairs. The smooth wood banister felt hefty in my hand and the wood floor under my bare feet like it was still holding some of the day’s heat. Or maybe it just seemed that way after the cold ground outside and chill in the old lady’s bedroom.

We found the front room and from there the “drawing room (what the hell’s a drawing room?).” We’d heard her grandson, Tobe, refer to it that way. His real name’s Tobias or something like that but everybody calls him Tobe. He’d mentioned to Loftis she kept her coins in the sideboard. Course, he never would’ve told me that. Little did he know, Loftis tells me everything. I figured a sideboard had to be a piece of furniture big enough to keep things in. The three-quarter moon sliced through the window on our left and I saw a big, black monstrosity of a hutch, hulking at the back of the room, so black it was more like a dark, fathomless hole in the wall. The hairs on the back of my neck started to lift up and I got this weird feeling if I got too close it would suck me in and pull me down somewhere I’d never be able to get out of.